They Drive by Night Movie Review

In 1987, the late film historian William K. Everson contributed an important new article on British film noir to Films in Review, hoping that it might lead to a pioneering book on the subject. That it has not (so far) is every film noir fan's loss. In a later interview, Everson admitted that to most publishers, noir means American noir, period; ironic, considering that the roots of film noir are in France. Moreover, British noir directors were far more influenced by French films than were American directors (who often looked to German films for their inspiration). Leave it to Sinister Cinema to fill an important gap in film scholarship by releasing They Drive by Night, the film that Everson considers the first ever British noir. Released by Warner Bros. in December 1938 for British home consumption only, They Drive by Night stars Emlyn Williams, then 35, as Shorty Matthews, an ex-convict wrongly accused of murdering a former lover upon his release from prison. With the help of Molly O'Neill, a friend of the deceased (played by the little-known Anna Konstam), Shorty tries to prove his innocence, an exercise in frustration until they bump into Mr. Walter Hoover, an erudite sex maniac played by that magnificent ham, Ernest Thesiger (loved by all as the immortal Dr. Pretorius in The Bride of Frankenstein). Directed in no-nonsense style by Arthur Woods from a script by Derek Twist, They Drive by Night scrupulously avoids what Alfred Hitchcock was so fond of doing: depicting the lower social orders of Britain with sly and often patronizing humor. For there is no humor in the life of Shorty Matthews; his life is played out against a grimy background of pubs, back roads, and dance halls. They Drive by Night may not have the reputation of Renoir's La Bete Humaine, also made in 1938, but it is an altogether worthy addition to the noir canon. They Drive by Night may also have been an important influence on the future screenplays of Graham Greene; he praised the virtues of this realistic quota quickie as a young movie reviewer the same day that he panned the falseness of mighty MGM's overproduced version of Idiot's Delight by Pulitzer Prize–winner Robert Sherwood. Sinister Cinema admits that their print of the extremely rare They Drive by Night is soft in comparison with their normally crisp video transfers, but we are lucky to have the film at all; many of the movies released by British Warner Bros. in the ‘30s and ‘40s no longer exist.

1938 84m/B Emlyn Williams, Ernest Thesiger, Anna Konstam, Allan Jeayes, Antony Holles, Ronald Shiner, Yolande Terrell, Julie Barrie, Kitty De Legh; D: Arthur Woods; W: Derek Twist; C: Basil Emmott. VHS