They Made Me a Fugitive, or I Became a Criminal—seriously, what is going on with that title change?—is a British film noir about the impossibility of making a British film noir. A film might be dark, brooding and mysterious, and this one is all three, but its Britishness can only be contained for so long before it drops in at the pub for a jolly knees up and rounds things off by chucking milk bottles at people.

The film is consistently entertaining, if occasionally baffling, as demobbed RAF officer, and black marketeer, Clem Morgan—played by a wonderfully aloof Trevor Morgan—escapes prison to pursue his revenge against those who framed him for murdering a policeman. A daring jailbreak would be the centrepiece of most films, but here it is so subtly handled that I almost missed it. Instead, the film focuses on a series of unbearably tense encounters on Clem’s journey to his milk-tossing showdown at the gloriously named Valhalla Undertaking with its portentous signage, “It’s later than you think.” These encounters, with the wife of a drunkard, with a suspicious lorry driver and with the jilted ex-girlfriend of the man who framed him, are absolutely riveting. The film has a natural pace without ever feeling hurried, and its constant sense of jeopardy never feels forced.

The most striking thing about the film is the delicate balance between its lively, wisecracking screenplay and its often grim tone. The main antagonist, Narcy—short for Narcissus, but sounding like “nazi” or “nasty”—is a memorably vile piece of work, who beats a woman so severely that it even sends the camera spinning, and the ending is bleak even by the standards of the time. 

Went the Day Well? is still my favourite film by Alberto Cavalcanti, but They Made Me a Fugitive shows what a gift he had for finding moments of laughter and light in the bleakest of stories. This fascinating noir-adjacent film is highly recommended for fans of the genre.