River Beat (1954)

River Beat (1954) starring Phyllis Kirk and directed by Guy Green, is a 1954 Limey Noir about a young woman who winds up embroiled in a smuggling operation on The Thames.

As a working example of British film noir, River Beat features some period pub going, some post-war London and some boat chases up and down the river Thames, as well as some slum-dwelling characters trying to get by with petty crime among the petty grime.

From its opening powerful drumbeats River Beat is a spritely energetic British medley of themes around love, crime and the big bad worlds of London docklands and having a job on the open seas. Young radio operator Judy Roberts is on shore leave in London, heading for a quaint pub in Wapping.

Even nearly ten years on from the end of the conflict, River Beat feels peculiarly post-war in its style. On the thrumming waters of The Thames, river cops cruise the talent likening ladies to ships and ships to ladies. It's a quiet day on the waters and it's the way the River Beat likes it.

In fact the real event that's taking place in the country at large is the coronation of Britain's new monarch Queen Elizabeth, celebrated in graffiti at an early point in the streets around the old docklands area.

We meet our villain early on, he's like something rescued from Joseph Conrad with proto-Bond villain tendencies, running the operation from an armchair.

The film noir output of the world outside the United States is a mixed bag and varies form nation to nation.

Phyllis Kirk in River Beat (1954)

The French did film noir to perfection, and kept the style alive long after it had expired in the United States. The French in fact appear to have been making film noir before the United States had fully formed the characteristic methods and full narrative groove that made film noir the epic American experience it became.

More essentially, the French above any other movie-people distilled and maintained everything that was intrinsic to film noir, from the existential storylines to the bleak narratives about killers, thieves and others facing social and criminal downfalls — in the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville, Jacques Becker, François Truffaut and even Robert Bresson.

Quaint pub in Wapping in River Beat (1954)

Japanese cinema also shows a strong understanding of and interpretation of the form, at least in the work of Akira Kurosawa who directed several films which are instantly recognisable as films noir, including Drunken Angel (1948), Stray Dog (1949), The Bad Sleep Well (1960), and High and Low (1963).

In the case of the British, there is less going on, but more to say, and certainly there are many films which the devotees like to classify as British Film Noir.

There are two immediate observations which can be made about British Noir — also known as Limey Noir — and the first is that because Great Britain did not exit World War II feeling entirely triumphant, largely because of the terrible cost the conflict inflicted, there is a feeling of unease about noir subjects, even crime, and the most memorable and most popular productions of the Post War years tended in Great Britain to be uplifting — the Ealing comedies being the keenest examples.

What is odd about a lot of Limey Noir is that even when the subject matter is presented as dark or pessimistic, films often appear with cheery title music, reminding us of the post-war British spirit, which was all about picking oneself up and making do. Bear in mind that this was still a country where extreme rationing was still in place.

Phyllis Kirk in River Beat (1954)

The other factor common to most examples of British Film Noir in the post-war period was that because it compared itself to American cinema, it often appeared as a weaker version of Hollywood, never able to compete on the same scale and never able to tell the same stories, because the cultures were so entirely different.

It is usually understood that film noir is an explicitly American form, and one reason why film noir grew so fast and flourished, was that the currents of American society which it reflected were real and present, but only in the US.

London in River Beat (1954)

One example might be the trend of psychiatry and Freudian analysis which had not yet infected the British medical mind and was not so popular a form of treatment, while another might by the massive scale of organised and corporate crime which was certainly taking over the underworlds of America.

Perhaps Limey Noir also suffered from the full-scale paranoia that makes full fat US noir the immortal portal to cinematic pleasure that it is. The United States of America had by the late 1940s formed a government that was heading in a radically different direction from its people, was creating its military industrial complex and forming its intelligence agencies and from 1950 to 1953 engaged in a war in Korea.

The paranoia of the Red Scare was also thoroughly American and not an issue as such in Great Britain, and with its massive influence on the film industry, the paranoia of American film noir was as real as it got.

If you add to this the fact of North America's nuclear strikes on Japan and the conscious and subconscious effect this had on the culture, America becomes a place of manifest terror and nightmarish fantasy — a state of being expressed most clearly in film noir.

Phyllis Kirk in River Beat (1954)

British film noir evidences a greater debt to French poetic realism than to the expressionistic American mode of noir. Examples of British noir from the classic period include:

Brighton Rock (1947), directed by John Boulting
They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), directed by Alberto Cavalcanti
The Small Back Room (1948), directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
The October Man (1950), directed by Roy Ward Baker; and
Cast a Dark Shadow (1955), directed by Lewis Gilbert.

Terence Fisher directed several low-budget thrillers in a noir mode for Hammer Film Productions, including:

The Last Page (a.k.a. Man Bait; 1952)
Stolen Face (1952), and
Murder by Proxy (a.k.a. Blackout; 1954).

Before leaving for France, Jules Dassin had been obliged by political pressure to shoot his last English-language film of the classic noir period in Great Britain: Night and the City (1950).

Though this film noir classic was conceived in the United States and was directed by an American but also stars two American actors — Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney — it is technically a UK production, financed by 20th Century-Fox's British subsidiary. It is not in the mind of this reviewer considered a Limey Noir.

The real difference between British and US noir is in the knitwear. A British detective wears a knitted jumper that an American cop could not.

The most famous of classic British noirs is director Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949), from a screenplay by Graham Greene.

The total number of films released by all British major and minor production and distribution companies between 1940 and 1959 is 2033 (Gifford 7-17). The criteria, discussed by the authorities on film noir previously referenced, that define a film as film noir were strictly and scrupulously applied to the author's extensive personal collection of British films of this era and to his researches.
By this author's judgment, 331 of the total of 2033 films are clearly film noir. Percentagewise, 331/2033 = 16.3%, or about twice the percentage for American film noir.
Examination of these British films noirs reveals a point-by-point similarity with their American counterparts in terms of philosophy, theme and content, "noirish" titles, production values and techniques, and photography (flashbacks, dream sequences, voiceovers, camera angles, location filming, wet streets, shadows, night time filming etc. ).

Evidence for a British "Film Noir" Cycle

Laurence Miller

Film Criticism, Vol. 16, No. 1/2, Special Double Issue: British Cinema 1900-1975 (Fall/Winter, 1991-92), pp. 42-51 (10 pages)