On the Night of the Fire (1939)

On the Night of the Fire, released in the United States as The Fugitive, is a 1939 British thriller, directed by Brian Desmond Hurst and starring Ralph Richardson and Diana Wynyard. The film is based on the novel of the same name by F. L. Green. It was shot on location in Newcastle upon Tyne and was released shortly after the outbreak of World War II. It is regarded as an early example of British film noir, with the kind of subject matter and filming style which fell completely out of favour during the war years – when British studios felt that cinemagoers would want either light entertainment and escapism or topical patriotic propaganda pieces – and would not be taken up again until the later 1940s.

Film critic David Quinlan describes the film as "grim but gripping". Andrew Spicer, in his book European Film Noir, writes: "A riveting psychological study. With its sustained doom-laden atmosphere, Krampf’s expressive cinematography, its adroit mixture of location shooting and Gothic compositions and Richardson’s wonderful performance as a lower middle-class Everyman, On the Night of the Fire clearly shows that an achieved mastery of film noir existed in British cinema".

Synopsis

Struggling Tyneside barber Will Kobling (Richardson) is in financial trouble. One evening, opportunistically and on impulse, he steals £100 from a local factory where a window has been accidentally left open. He hopes the money will represent a new start for him and wife Kit (Wynyard). His hopes are soon dashed when Kit confesses to being heavily in debt to local draper Pilleger (Henry Oscar), who has been pressuring her to pay up. Most of the stolen cash has to go on settling Kit's debt.

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