Studying The British Crime Film
Paul Elliott
ISBN: 978-1-906733-74-2 £18.99
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 1905 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.
Studying the British Crime Film looks closely at a variety films relating to different aspects of criminal behaviour, including gangland culture from Brighton Rock (1947) to Essex Boys (2000), the heist film from The League of Gentlemen (1960) to Sexy Beast (2000), from the post-war serial killer of 10 Rillington Place (1971) to the seedy underworld of contemporary Britain in London to Brighton (2006). Each chapter not only offers an in-depth reading of the films under discussion but also guides the reader through the processes of studying British cinema in terms of both genre and nationality, giving practical skills as well as theoretical knowledge.
Paul Elliott teaches Film and Film Theory at the University of Worcester. He has published on Hitchcock, embodied film theory and the French psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, as well as various elements of British cinema.