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Contraband (1940) is a Powell and Pressburger British espionage wartime maritime female super hero nautical erotic romance thriller with shades of the early noir style, and shades too of what may be called 'camp expressionism' or 'expressionist camp', along with very early noir-style markers apparent in the blackout-Britain style approach which presents a wartime underworld London, in a time of real peril, when national identity becomes a matter of life and death, and where pluck and humour bob to the surface to provide the Limey noir feel that only the besieged Britain could provide, offering in fact what became the cementing of several clichés for all time including the female spy hero.
Without any shadow of a doubt it is time once more to turn to Dan Hodges and his studies on spy noir and its place in the origins of film noir in the UK and the US.
