★ 7 / 10
After WWII, "Clem Morgan" (Trevor Howard) returns to
CinemaSerf
After WWII, "Clem Morgan" (Trevor Howard) returns to little opportunity in wartorn Britain, so he hooks up with some hoodlums. When one of their robberies goes…
After WWII, "Clem Morgan" (Trevor Howard) returns to little opportunity in wartorn Britain, so he hooks up with some hoodlums. When one of their robberies goes wrong, his new "friends" frame him for the killing of a policeman and to prison he goes. He escapes, and bent on revenge the film follows his efforts to get back home and to settle the scores. Howard was never the most natural of actors, I always found him just a little too sterile, but he acquits himself well enough here with a couple of decent performances from Griffith Jones as his nemesis "Narcy" (as in Narcissist) and Sally Gray as the conflicted ("Sally") as well as a solid supporting cast with the aptly named heavy Peter Bull, a drunken Maurice Denham with his resentful wife Vida Hope and Ballard Berkeley. This story is tensely directed with plenty of mini-escapades en route to keep it interesting. The fight scenes are a little bit over-staged and the ending is really quite a stretch to the imagination - Howard's skill at weaponising milk bottles borders on the comical, but the rest of it is well paced and a good watch.
★ 8 / 10
Ripping Good
Piafredux
Fine cast, crackling dialogue, sure-handed direction, and some lovely camera work make 'They Made Me A Fugitive' a splendid viewing experience, but the film's…
Fine cast, crackling dialogue, sure-handed direction, and some lovely camera work make 'They Made Me A Fugitive' a splendid viewing experience, but the film's ripping, breathless pacing most impressed me. From the outset I just felt immersed into a cesspool of criminality, through which the pacing just dunked me again and again, deeper and deeper into the depravity of the characters. The police seem to exist in another England - the one of "bright, sunlit uplands" - while the film shoves you and binds you amid hoodlums, spivs, black marketeers, and sadistic enforcers who inhabit a claustrophobic, treacherous underworld in which violence to body and soul lurks in every shadow.
At the remove of six decades some of the dialogue and action seems clichéd (although - spoiler coming here - the sequence of the fall-from-power fate of the gang leader, Narcy, socked me in my gut: it's a clever, artful, uncompromising bit of camera work); but on the whole the film still punches and lands hard blows. And, oh boy, the one character, Narcy's chief muscle-enforcer, still chills me to the bone whenever, in deliberate or unbidden recall, he lurks in and lunges from the chiaroscuro brandishing his menacing, meaty bulk, punishment-keen fists, charmless, cold, piggish face, vicious, predatory eyes, and glinting knife blade. Gives me the creeps! See 'They Made Me A Fugitive' and be swept, panting, through ninety-six minutes that seem to be counted in thunderous heartbeats that, in the underworld of this tale, may - or may not - get to go on pounding behind the thin, warm, vulnerable flesh of your chest. This one's as good as noir ever got to be.
81%
AUDIENCE
· 100 ratings
7.2/10
2.3K
•••
Thank you YTS. Thank you for the 1080p. Thanks again YTS