5 essential British film noirs

Centring on austerity housewife Googie Withers’s divided loyalties between a dull but decent husband and a fugitive ex-lover, Robert Hamer’s bustling but claustrophobically intense Ealing thriller is set in London’s East End. It represents a noirish halfway house between 1930s French poetic fatalism and 1960s British kitchen sink realism.

Graham Greene might have disapproved of the sentimental ending the Boulting brothers devised for this adaptation of his seething crime novel Brighton Rock, but he always eulogised about Richard Attenborough’s vicious performance in the lead. He plays a juvenile gangster in the seaside city of Brighton who marries a waitress to prevent her from testifying against him in a murder case.

Frequently voted the best British film, Carol Reed’s wittily sinister take on Graham Greene’s story about a penicillin racket in postwar Vienna is almost faultless, benefitting in equal measure from the performances of Orson Welles and the exceptional ensemble, Robert Krasker’s photography and Anton Karas’s famous zither score.

Fans of the BBC police series Dixon of Dock Green were taken aback when first witnessing the moment of murderous violence that made Dirk Bogarde a star and drives this Ealing procedural thriller. Celebrated screenwriter T.E.B. Clarke was himself an ex-copper, which is what helps makes The Blue Lamp so grittily compelling.

The British gangster movie came of age with this simmering study of the London underworld and it took Hollywood exile Joseph Losey to do it. Stanley Baker bristles with futile fury as he does time for a racetrack robbery knowing rival Sam Wanamaker will kill him for the buried loot.