Changing places

Abstract

This article applies a revisionist analysis to the British crime film in the terms of the tourist imagination, examining such key films as the foundational They Made Me a Fugitive, (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1948), the transitional Get Carter, (Mike Hodges 1970), up to the present. Main themes have to do with the way in which the sense of place created by the films has as much to do with defining ‘Britishness’ against a mostly American ‘other’, while remaining in dialogue with it, as documentary influence. National and transnational identities are articulated through both character and the landscape: the regional and the national, and the national and the transnational, forming parallel, dynamics. The theme of the journey is revealed to be as much ‘psychic’, ‘the journey within’, as geographical, especially in regard to the city, a defining construct.