Creativity and the "B" Feature: Terence Fisher's Crime Films (British Director‪)‬

Very little attention has been given to the postwar British "B" or second feature, despite its importance through to the end of the double bill in 1964, although Brian McFarlane began to map out the territory in an earlier volume of this journal (McFarlane 1996). The aim of this article is to extend McFarlane's arguments through a detailed consideration of the thirteen "B" feature crime films that Terence Fisher directed between 1951 and 1957 (see table at end), before the success of The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) ensured that he worked within the horror genre for the rest of his career. In choosing Fisher's films, my intention is threefold. First, to illuminate a neglected aspect of the work of one of British cinema's most important directors, but one who has been almost exclusively discussed in relation to his horror films; even the two book length studies of Fisher regard the crime films as an hors d'oeuvre to the main horror feast (Dixon, Hutchings). Second, to add to the slender literature about the evolution of the postwar British crime film. I shall argue that the "B" feature crime film was undergoing a significant change in this period, discarding the older murder mystery tradition and embracing film noir--of course, a retrospective discursive category and not used within the British film industry at this time--a change that enabled it to register the profound disruption that the Second World War had on the social fabric in Britain and on male psychology. Fisher's films, I contend, made an important contribution to this shift. Third, and most importantly, to explore the vexed question of the possibilities and limitations of creativity within the film industry (see Petrie, Spicer 2004). My argument here is that in order to appreciate Fisher's achievements (or those of any other director) it is necessary to understand what Vincent Porter has termed the "context of creativity," the ways in which the art or creativity of a film-maker must be situated within determinant cultural and commercial conditions (Porter, 179207). In the contested field of cultural production, to use the term coined by Pierre Bourdieu, that constituted the "B" feature--one dominated by producers working within very tight financial and time constraints--the possibilities for a director were tightly circumscribed. It was simply not possible, the controls were too severe, for a fully-fledged auteur to emerge within that field, one that had, as David Pirie discerned in relation to Fisher's horror films, a "recognizable and coherent Weltanschauung" (Pirie, 51). However, Fisher managed to stamp a distinctive stylistic imprint on most of his crime films through the skill and craftsmanship with which he "translated" (to use his term) script to screen, as this article seeks to demonstrate. Thus although it is important to discuss the whole body of his crime films in order to appreciate the particular constraints under which he was working, which did vary considerably between studios, I give more attention to those films where he was able, for various reasons, to stamp his visual signature.