ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the lodger as the slippery protagonist of a series of British crime films, mostly comedies, produced at Ealing Studios from the late 1940s to 1955. It argues that, while influenced by contemporary films from the USA and France, in the British context crime roots itself in fractured domesticities. The post-war housing shortage and a shift in the image of the ideal property relation provide the immediate context for these various comedies of crime. The literary context similarly manifests a sense of the lodger’s dubious place. Elizabeth Taylor’s novel At Mrs Lippincote’s sets out the social awkwardness of being a tenant at all. Mackendrick’s structural coup was to combine the blueprint of the heist movie with the downbeat comedy of lodging. Mackendrick had an ambition to make a film noir, and in a sense he fulfilled that yearning with Sweet Smell of Success.
