Auteur
Ever since its inception, British cinema has been obsessed with crime and the criminal. One of the first narrative films to be produced in Britain, the 1915 short Rescued by Rover, was a fast paced tale of abduction and kidnap and the first British sound film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929), was concerned with murder and criminal guilt. Yet for a genre that is seemingly so important to the British cinematic character, there is little direct theoretical or historical work written upon it. The Britain of British cinema is often written about in terms of its national history, its ethnic diversity or its cultural tradition but very rarely in terms of its criminal tendencies and its darker underbelly. Studying the British Crime Film makes the assumption that, in order to know how British cinema truly works, it is necessary to pull back the veneer of the costume piece, the historical drama or the rom-com and take a glimpse at what hides beneath.
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