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THEY MADE ME A FUGITIVE
(Alberto Cavalcanti, 1947)
Release date: 23 September 2019
Limited Edition Blu-ray (UK Blu-ray premiere)

Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti (Went the Day Well?, Dead of Night), They Made Me a Fugitive is a prime example of British film noir.

Trevor Howard (Who?, The Missionary) plays Clem Morgan, an RAF officer during the war, now unemployed since demobilisation. Turning to the black market, he finds himself embroiled in a life of crime that will lead to prison, a daring escape, and a deadly manhunt.

Boasting striking cinematography by Otto Heller, whose later credits would include Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom and classic Cold War thriller The Ipcress File, this UK Blu-ray premiere of They Made Me a Fugitive is accompanied by two rare short films, made during Howard’s own time in the RAF during WWII, featuring his earliest known on-screen appearances.

INDICATOR LIMITED EDITION BLU-RAY SPECIAL FEATURES:

• High Definition remaster
• Original mono audio
• The John Player Lecture with Alberto Cavalcanti (1970): archival audio recording of the celebrated director in conversation at London’s National Film Theatre
• Neil Sinyard on ‘They Made Me a Fugitive’ (2019): new appreciation by the author and film historian
• Squaring the Circle (1941): dramatised Royal Air Force training film, starring Trevor Howard in his earliest known film role
• The Aircraft Rocket (1944): extract from a multi-part RAF technical film, featuring Howard
• Image gallery: promotional and publicity material
• New and improved English subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing
• Limited edition exclusive booklet with a new essay by Nathalie Morris, an overview of contemporary critical responses, and film credits
• UK premiere on Blu-ray
• Limited edition of 3,000
All extras subject to change
#PHILTD151
BBFC cert: PG
REGION FREE
EAN: 5037899071991

This is an astounding film, and hopefully will advance the cause of Cavalcanti’s recognition as one of the major directors of British cinema a little further. It’s the blackest of noirs, with that detour into the uncanny that regularly features in his work.

My rave from the grave-

I managed to get to 'They made me a fugitive' which has been rightly praised by Shreck and others already having alluded to the french poetic realist influences (Trevor Howard taking the Gabinesque fugitive role) . A quick note should be made for Gaillard's score here too with its strong echoes of Kosma.
There are also heavy doses of 'Greeneland' and Lang , not least in the poster image in the funeral parlour which whistles you straight back to the grieving mothers of 'M'. But for me what made this particular cocktail most intoxicating was the script by Noel Langley. For all its archness, mixing screen cockney-isms - 'Have a cuppa ducks, that's the ticket' with a flowery prose that wouldn't go amiss in Sweet Smell of Success - Gang leader , 'Narcissus' no less, berating a recalcitrant underling who refuses to bear arms with.."Don't be so reactionary this is the century of the common man."
Narcy, a sneering effete proto-Peter Mandelson, all swirling paisley and colliding checks might also contend for an early incarnation of Harry Flowers in 'Performance' (without the Kray twins make-over) as well as the film itself sharing the latter's hallucinatory setting of man on the lam.
Its cut glass accented gangster's molls, stiff upper clit chorus girls and mordant humour (black market cigarettes smuggled in coffins) might make for a camp hoot but there is also a motherlode of cinematic edge and a wonderful portrait of a pallid post war Britain dissolute and dissipated by corruption.

Full specs confirmed:

Beaver.

Beaver doesn't mention this problem with the Kino, which was noticed by someone that presumably had a hand in producing the Indicator release! In any case, this is a no-brainer of an upgrade

CineOutsider.

CineSavant.