British Noir in Paris

It was a great pleasure last Friday to be able to talk about British film noir at a conference in Paris. The general feeling that participants seemed to have at the end of this three-day event was that they had even less idea about what British noir was than at the beginning. But as the term is so often associated with disillusionment, doubt and confusion, I found it paradoxically satisfying that we were not able to reach any neat answers.

The quote from Denis Diderot on the banner that hung above our coffee-break thermos flasks stated well the more important priority – to search for the truth rather than actually to find it.

Paris was the perfect venue for such an event not only because it was where the term “film noir” had originated, but also because its wartime past helped to inspire one of the greatest British film noirs of them all.

Made in 1947, They Made Me a Fugitive is a crime thriller that has for its setting the black market of post-war London, but contributing to its notably bleak vision was its director’s first-hand experience of Paris in the aftermath of the Nazi Occupation.

It was the first film that Cavalcanti – known to his British colleagues as “Cav” – had made away from Ealing Studios after the war. At first he had misgivings about the project because he thought that the book by Jackson Budd, on which the film was based, was too slight. But its very simplicity gave him the opportunity to make a special film as he turned to his own personal experience of a time when, as he put it in his unpublished memoirs, “around me so much seemed to be crumbling”.

At the beginning of September 1944, only days after the city’s liberation, the British Ministry of Information sent Cav to Paris. His brief was to report on the state of the French film industry – of which he had been an important member in the 1920s and early 1930s – and to make a documentary about the newly liberated city. Recalling a much admired film that he had made twenty years before, which had offered a day-in-the-life view of 1920s Paris, Cav imagined the documentary would be “a sort of Rien que les heures 1945”.

He found a city that was still in crisis. There were no taxis or buses and the Metro was still severely disrupted. So he had to walk around in heavy army boots and a khaki war correspondent’s uniform, which fitted him so badly that the first thing he did on his arrival in Paris was to seek out his old tailor.

After a few days at the Raphael Hotel near the Arc de Triomphe, he tried to move back into the flat in Montparnasse that he and his mother had rented before the war, but the German soldiers to whom his landlady had let the apartment trashed it when they were ordered to leave the city. “They must have been furious to depart in such a hurry,” wrote Cav, “and they hastily broke the very large and ancient Chinese vases that stood on the mantelpiece and ... slashed with their sabres every picture that was hanging on our walls”.  He remembered that his physical reaction on confronting “this incredible vandalism” was to vomit.

A few days later, with the help of an old friend he managed to get a gazogene, coal-powered car, which took him to his country house at Saint Bond near Sens, about sixty miles south-east of Paris. But the house had fared no better than the flat in Montparnasse. It was “nothing but a ruin and I found it hard to believe how a garden could disappear in so few years ... All my good books and lots of other precious possessions were gone, together with furniture, windows, doors and the lead of the roof. Having experienced only a few days before the wreckage of our Paris flat, I took it all in very quietly. The only decision I could reach was to hide all this from my mother.”

The fact that his mother died only a few months later can only have intensified Cav’s sense of his world crumbling. The mindless, malicious destruction and looting that he had witnessed in France had the impact of a psychological trauma that he carried with him into the making of They Made Me a Fugitive, which went into production at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith in November 1946.

Sally: “Well, if it isn't Superman!”

When the thuggish gang-leader, Narcy, beats up his girlfriend Sally at the theatre where she works as a chorus girl, Cav’s treatment of the episode is notable for showing not only the ugliness of the violence itself but also Sally’s traumatised behaviour as she struggles to recover from it.

Two of her friends from the theatre take her home in a taxi. She is at first numb and undemonstrative as, intent on her own thoughts, she works through what she has suffered, but then suddenly she breaks down into uncontrollable crying. Cav brings to his handling of the scene an empathy that owed much to his own memories of the “incredible vandalism” that he had witnessed during his trip to France.

Cav had not even been able to take any solace from the film that he had been commissioned to make. He began to supervise the shooting of some sequences by the French director Albert Guyot, but shortly afterwards “received a telegram, unmercifully cancelling the work”.

While nothing could match the sheer thuggery of the Nazis, Cav was dismayed by not only the failure of the British Ministry of Information to support Rien que les heures 1945, but also the seeming preference of the new authorities in the French film industry for settling scores over making films. An actor with whom he had worked in the 1920s, Pierre Blanchar, had become the president of the Comité de Libération du Cinéma Français, an organisation of film workers that had committed itself to resisting the Nazi occupation, but Cav found his old friend’s enthusiasm for purging perceived collaborators deeply disturbing: “His appearance had something of the inquisition figures painted by El Greco.”

On his return to Britain in late 1944, Cav wrote an article in the British trade journal Kinematograph Weekly, which described what he had seen in Paris:

Let me tell my English friends that to anyone who knows Paris – Paris is not the same. Paris is not a city of gay and beautiful women with chic clothes and fabulous hats. Paris is a city of pride and also a city of shame. Parisians have throughout the occupation presented a strange mixture of strength and weakness; heroism, cupidity, treachery, resistance, apathy.

The Paris I saw was not gay, though the war correspondents herded in one hotel may have felt it to be so. The Paris I saw was like an invalid convalescing after a long and painful illness which must leave its mark for years – like a sick-room being slowly cleansed after it had been infected.

When two years later, he began to work on They Made Me a Fugitive, the film became a vessel into which he poured all his despair. As much an allegory as a crime thriller, it was a dark film that depicted varying degrees of moral abandonment.

At one end of the scale is the vicious East End gang-leader Narcy, short for Narcissus, a deliberately ornate name that encourages an allegorical reading. Immaculately dressed in his monogrammed shirts, Narcy smokes through an ostentatious cigarette-holder and files his finger-nails in an obsession with style that suggests the evil allure of Nazism. Yet he cannot prevent the horrifying brutishness of his behaviour from eventually surfacing.

Decorating a wall of the funeral parlour that provides a front for Narcy’s black market activities are reproductions of not El Greco but the Fall by Masolino and Massacio. They provide a symbolic context in which the other characters seek to find redemption in a world that has badly lost its way. Clem Morgan (Trevor Howard) is an ex-serviceman whose experience of war has undermined his sense of right and wrong. When the audience first meets him, he is presented as a drunk who has lost any sense of purpose. Joining Narcy’s gang – on the toss of a coin – becomes just another way of drowing his sorrows.

But his discovery that Narcy is dealing in drugs awakens his conscience. When he is framed by Narcy for killing a policeman, he is sent to Dartmoor. His escape is the start of a quest to clear his name, but also a Candide-like journey through an England which is as fallen as the Paris Cav found in the autumn of 1944.

“People have got terrible dishonest since the war,” says the lorry driver from whom Clem hitches a lift. But then he tries to sell Clem black market petrol coupons. He goes on to tell Clem that he’s heard there’s an escaped convict on the run: “How would you feel if it turned out to be me? You never know who’s up to what these days.”

The sequence brings to mind the opening scene of Quai des Brumes (1938), when Jean Gabin, who is an army deserter, hitches a lift from a lorry on the way to Le Havre. It’s hard to believe that Cav wasn’t, with They Made Me a Fugitive, making a conscious nod to the earlier film, a classic example of pre-war French poetic realism feeding into post-war British noir.

As Gabin, still in his army clothes, speaks of the fog inside his head, I couldn’t help but think of the fog in Cav’s head as, in the autumn of 1944, he trudged around a broken Paris in his own ill-fitting uniform.

One evening he made it up to Montmartre to see a performance of Anouilh’s Antigone at the L’Atelier theatre. There was no electricity, so the stage was lit by a row of acetylene lamps, while the rest of the theatre was in darkness. Cav recalled how shocked his old friends were to see him materialise out of the gloom during the interval. “They might have thought that I was nothing but a poor macabre joke... ”

The idea of that macabre joke amused me as I trudged back to my hotel one autumn night more than eighty years later. How well, I thought, he then went on to draw on that Parisian darkness to make a great British noir in London.