I’m hoping that after seeing his best, (as well as his “just okay” movies), Trevor Howard‘s gruff charm and tellingly detailed character studies will make him more than the man who didn’t have an affair in Brief Encounter for cineastes of all stripes.

While I really appreciate the lineup today, I also would like to alert anyone interested in Howard‘s noirish work with the director Alberto Cavalcanti. The director, perhaps best remembered for the remarkable Dead of Night (1945), tells a gripping story in They Made Me A Fugitive (1947), in which Howard plays a de-mobbed RAF sort who is at a loose end, and finds himself drawn into a dark world dominated by some very violent black marketeers. Playing a character who tries to believe he’s “just slumming” for a time, ol’ Trevor explores a range of gifts he had for displaying romantic, heroic and increasingly bedevilled aspects of a flawed man, albeit one who learns to acknowledge his own complicity in his downfall. I thought it was on a par with Bogart‘s cynically self-aware anti-heroes of the same period in the U.S.