Robert Hamer was not a prolific director; only around a dozen films are credited to him, and because of his serious alcohol problem there is some doubt as to the extent to which he was responsible for some of those, especially his final film, "School for Scoundrels". His career has been described as "the most serious miscarriage of talent in the postwar British cinema", yet during that relatively brief career he was responsible for some of the best British films of the forties and fifties. He is today best remembered for that brilliant Ealing comedy, "Kind Hearts and Coronets", but was capable of producing serious movies as well as comedies; his "It Always Rains on Sunday", for example, is a crime thriller showing the influence of the film noir style.
With "The Long Memory" from 1952, Hamer moves even closer in the direction of noir. The plot, based on a novel by Howard Clewes, owes something to Dumas' "The Count of Monte Cristo". A young man is sentenced to imprisonment for a crime he did not commit. Upon his release, he sets out to get revenge upon those responsible for his wrongful conviction, including his treacherous fiancée. The hero, Philip Davidson spends 12 years in prison after being wrongly convicted for murder, a conviction procured by perjured evidence given by his fiancée Fay, her father Captain Driver and a man named Tim Pewsey. Fay's motive for perjuring herself was to protect her elderly father, who had become mixed up in a criminal enterprise with Pewsey and another man named Boyd, the actual murderer.
Some purists maintain that film noir was an exclusively American genre, but I have never concurred with that opinion, as there were also a number of British films (and indeed French ones such as "Les Diaboliques") which share the characteristics of noir, and this is one of them. One of the classic noir features is the morally ambiguous lone male hero, and John Mills' Davidson is certainly a character of that type; had this been a Hollywood film he could have been played by Bogart or Mitchum. Although he has been the victim of a grave injustice, and in that sense has a claim on our sympathy, his experiences have made him, in many ways, an unsympathetic character, vindictive and unsociable. After his release he goes to live in a disused barge on the marshes, a dwelling reminiscent of Richard Widmark's wooden shack by the riverside in a great American noir, "Pickup on South Street". Davidson's closest friend is another of life's victims, wartime refugee named Ilse, and he has other allies in his fight to clear his name, including Craig, a journalist, and Superintendent Bob Lowther, a policeman who believes that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred. Lowther's position, however, is made difficult by the fact that he is married to Fay, the woman whose lies were responsible for Davidson's conviction.
Other noir characteristics present in this film include dramatic, expressionistic black-and-white photography and a gritty urban setting, with the dingy backstreets of Gravesend (a riverside port east of London and not normally regarded as an important cinematic location) here fulfilling the role which in an American noir would played by Los Angeles or New York. The setting is not, however, exclusively urban; many scenes were shot on the North Kent Marshes, the area around Gravesend and Rochester immortalised by Dickens in "Great Expectations". This marshland landscape around the Thames and Medway Estuaries, an area which I know well, is not conventionally beautiful in the way in which, say, the Lake District or the Cotswolds are beautiful. Indeed, it can often be bleak and forbidding, but it is also powerfully atmospheric. It makes a fitting setting for this tale of crime and revenge and gives the film has a strong sense of place. The film ends with justice being done, but here too there is a note of doubt and uncertainty; it is not, for example, clear whether Lowther's marriage to Fay can survive the revelations about her past.
The most famous British noir is probably "The Third Man", a British-made film even though it is set in Vienna. "The Long Memory" is less well-known, but with a strong performance from Mills in the leading role, its powerful storyline and Hamer's atmospheric direction I would place it in the same class as Carol Reed's masterpiece. 9/10
