ABSTRACT
In post-war Britain non-heterosexual identities were fundamentally incompatible with the ideas and ideals of citizenship, which is reflected in the cinema of the period. This chapter looks at presentations of time and space in post-war films and relates temporality to the construction of ‘queer villains’ in Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and Gainsborough’s The Wicked Lady (1945). The chapter investigates how implications of sexual ‘deviancy’ were connected to non-futurity in post-war cultural imagination, and analyses portrayals of conflicted temporality in two Ealing films, Robert Hamer’s It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) and Dead of Night (1945), directed by Basil Dearden, Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, and Robert Hamer. The first half of this chapter analyses the sense of entrapment within a traumatic, queer temporality in Dead of Night, and the conflict between national and personal temporality in It Always Rains on Sunday (1947). The other half of the chapter focusses on the temporal structures and the framework of futurism in The Wicked Lady and A Matter of Life and Death.
