The Age of Austerity: Post-War Crime Films

Abstract

Any examination of the changes in post-war British society as reflected in the nation’s crime cinema must concentrate on the various social trends touched upon (sometimes obliquely) in the films: prostitution, black marketeering and the new questioning of the values of the professions and the establishment. It is possible to identify certain individual films as exemplars of this new awareness. Even in the late 1940s and early 1950s, signs could be detected of a loosening of conventional attitudes to sex, marriage, etc., despite the iron-clad moral codes of censors, local watch committees and important film producers such as the Presbyterian J. Arthur Rank, famous for insisting on outward rectitude. In light of these attitudes, the (hidden) subversive nature of some of the films is provocative.