Criminality in 20th-century film: The Third Man, The Ladykillers and Psycho

Film is a language made up of so many parts. It uses words, mise-en-scene and performance, as we expect from the theatre, but also cares about colour and light and composition in the way painting and photography do. And then its final trump card is the strange art of editing, the combining of different filmings of the same event. It pushes artists and technicians together to create the final product, a communal act of storytelling.

Or is it the vision of one figure, the ‘auteur’, the director? We will be studying three of these ‘visionaries’, all British, though one was born in America and another worked extensively in America. In the three films we will be discussing these directors who each turn their attention to criminals and questions of morality. In The Ladykillers Alexander Mackendrick uses comedy to observe 1950s Britain’s difficulties after the Second World War. What will change bring, what will be lost? Carol Reed in The Third Man also observes what the war has unleashed and how innocence is gone.

Hitchcock is showing the dawn of the sixties. His film opens with a couple in bed and the dreadful figure of Norman shows the horror with which change will be met. They use criminality as a metaphor for instability of the altering world. They are artists working with other artists to put the visionary onto celluloid and this artistry and the ideas enmeshed in it are what we will be studying in this course.