Alberto Cavalcanti, whose international career is one of the most impressive in film history, made another of his many leaps into new territories in the late 1940s, with two of the finest examples of film noir and its highly original British variation — They Made Me a Fugitive (1947) and For Them That Trespass (1949). The first film is a captivating study of a claustrophobic age, the mood spilling into every milieu – the street, the pub, a seedy home or prison. This feeling is somewhat relieved by caustic, dark humor, but the humor only opens more traps of manipulation, corruption. Indeed, Arthur Vesselo (writing in “Sight and Sound”) estimated that the film “might have come straight out of a German studio of the ‘twenties’.” And Raymond Durgnat writes about “…bizarre poetry distilled by its strange blendof humor, brutality and seedy studio realism.”
They Made Me a Fugitive is one of the “spiv” films of its time, adding a sinister figure called Narcy (Griffith Jones) to the characters played by Richard Attenborough, Stewart Granger or Dirk Bogarde in other films. Robert Murphy has seen Narcy as one of the great villains of British cinema, “a truly rotten working-class hero”. More central still is the ambivalent former RAF officer, now working in the black market, Trevor Howard. Raymond Durgnat described him “as a cynic fallen amongst racketeers, as caustic, explosive, reflexive as Bogart.” And he added: “This sleazy brew of meanness and sadism is Cavalcanti’s most poetic, gloomy mood
piece since his avant-garde years.” Commenting on the characters, Peter Wollen perceptively wrote that Cavalcanti’s film prepared ground for The Servant and Performance, “with their own images of the working-class rake and the charismatic man on the run”.
This emigrant vision (Austrian cinematographer Otto Heller worked along with the Brazilian Cavalcanti) is much more than a genre film. Deep irony permeates even the settings, converting all the familiar official notions of duty, decency and respectability into trash, with the supreme irony of the small-time gangsters calling their activities “free enterprise”.

Peter von Bagh