British Film Noir

Film noir is not solely an indigenous American form. Other European cinemas have also created their own film noirs, notably France, Germany and Spain, where a cine negro which emerged in the 1950s continues to form a significant component within contemporary popular Spanish film-making (Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas, 1998, pp.86–96, 101–5). However, it is arguably British cinema that has produced the second most important corpus of films noirs outside Hollywood. British film noir was part of the same broad cultural interaction that gave rise to its American counterpart, the meeting of blood melodrama with European modernism, and shares many of its characteristics, occupying a similar but somewhat longer period, 1938–64. Though influenced by American noir, British film noir has its own energies and distinctiveness, providing a vehicle for the exploration of the social and sexual discontents that bubbled under the surface of British life. For a long period British noir was forgotten, undefined or ignored, part of the ‘lost continent’ of British film-making: vulgar, unruly and critically despised (Petley, 1986, pp.110–11). However, accounts by William Everson, Robert Murphy, Laurence Miller and Tony Williams have begun the process of mapping out the terrain, which this chapter tries to build on and extend. ¹