Film noir has always been a mutating, elusive, even fugitive category, at once a central body of films from American cinema that includes Double Indemnity (dir. Wilder, 1944), Out of the Past (dir. Tourneur, 1947), Kiss Me Deadly (dir. Aldrich, 1955) and Touch of Evil (dir. Welles, 1958), and a shaping discourse that constantly redefines the meaning of those films and the mode of filmmaking of which they form part. Film noir can be quite tightly defined and periodised, or understood as a much more diffuse phenomenon that stretches across different art forms (encompassing advertising, comics, graphic novels, short stories and novels, painting, photography, radio drama, television and music), different periods and different countries. If we abandon attempts to define (and thereby delimit) its essential characteristics and accept noir as a mode of attention, a sensibility, a particular approach to understanding the world, then I think we are open to understanding the full range of its seductive appeal and its pervasiveness.

When the label film noir first emerged – conventionally attributed to Nino Frank in an article published in L’Écran français in August 1946 – it served to designate a group of American crime films that had both an arresting visual style and a sombre, bleak view of American life. During the six-year absence of American films during the Occupation, it seemed to French critics that American cinema had come of age, and was capable of engaging with ‘difficult’ subjects: sexuality, corruption, betrayal, trauma, psychological breakdown – a raft of social, political and historical problems that had rarely found their way into films in the pre-war period. Of course, as always, it was a case of which films were given attention rather than an objective categorisation (the films discussed were not the ones that were most popular at the box office) but that attention served to identify films noirs as a critical, oppositional mode of filmmaking, films that were ‘autopsies’ of society, to invoke the term used by director Mike Hodges to describe his British neo-noir Get Carter (1971).

That founding moment confined how film noir was understood as a seemingly uniquely American form of cinema for the next forty years. Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton's Panorama du film noir américain (1955) delineated ‘a group of nationally identifiable films’ whose common features of style, subject matter and ‘atmosphere’ gave them ‘an inimitable quality’ ([1955] 2002: 1), and dismissed other European claimants.

In 1963, Clive Barnes, a London correspondent for the New York Times, profiled ‘Britain's new actors – rougher, tougher, angrier’, identifying a “‘new wave” of naturalistic players [who] are anti-heroes – on stage and off’ who were undermining the ‘old-school-tie traditions of London's theatrical Establishment’. A ‘new type of Englishman’, rebellious and anti-authoritarian, had emerged, achieving international prominence. The object of Barnes's attention was a group of working-class male actors – Alan Bates, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Tom Courtenay, Albert Finney, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole and Terence Stamp – which, at the time and subsequently, actively promoted themselves as a new, uninhibited and irreverent generation. Harris contended that they embodied ‘a fine madness. We weren't afraid to be different. So we were always dangerous; dangerous to meet in the street, in a restaurant, and dangerous to see on stage or in a film’, which, characteristically, conflates on- and off-screen image.

Although at root the product of the 1944 Education Act that provided universal secondary education which afforded working-class children the opportunities denied to their parents’ generation, these actors were shaped by and helped shape two separate but interconnected cultural myths: ‘in the 1950s it was the aggressive ambition of the Angry Young Man; in the 1960s it was Swinging London’. In cinematic terms, it was the British New Wave (1959–63) films that depicted the Angry Young Man, extending the reach of that myth into the early 1960s. By contrast, Swinging London (1963–7) was a more diffuse phenomenon that traded on lifestyle rather than particular cinematic representations. Caine, and especially Stamp, became iconic Swinging London figures, featured in David Bailey's Box of Pin-Ups (May 1965), which incorporated male actors into a wider grouping of pop stars, fashion designers, models and photographers that formed a new classless meritocracy. Although the New Wave films depicted the north and Swinging London the metropolis, both emphasised changing social structures, new opportunities and the rise of the young working class that was not prepared to accept its allotted place.

This chapter analyses in what ways this generation of male stars – there were pronounced differences as well as commonalities – represented these transformations and how they changed perceptions of screen acting, masculinity and stardom. My approach to stardom follows Paul McDonald's lead by emphasising its industrial context, the importance of attending to business practices and stars’ value as capital assets that can be marketed and monetised.

An horrible story: one that causes sickening knots of dread to tighten in the pit of any loving parent's stomach. The events unfold simply, inexorably, as if the chill hand of the Erlkönig guided the tragedy. A family is on holiday in Gloucestershire when the youngest child, a bright, resolute, and charming little boy, falls ill. A local doctor is summoned, makes an accurate diagnosis and urges the family to return to London as quickly as possible. On the ride to the train station and on the train hurtling through the darkening countryside, the gasping child, held by his powerless father, struggles to breathe, turning blue and black from lack of oxygen, a sure sign of bulbar poliomyelitis. On arrival in London, an ambulance rushes the little boy to a nursing home; as the doctors debate about what to do – an iron lung, perhaps? – the child proves their irrelevance by dying. The boy, named Michael, left behind a father immured in a grief that time did not assuage; a mother whose feelings were doubtless keen but went virtually unnoticed; and an older sister whose secondary place in her father's affections would be felt again and ever again in the decades to come.

The music of Herbert Howells is inseparable from counterpoint: indeed, he considered himself to belong to the Tudor period ‘not only musically but in every way’. That was an intensely polyphonic era, and he himself normally thought in counterpoint (a trait he shared with Vaughan Williams). Thus the underlying feeling of ‘H. H. His Fancy’ (written in 1927) is of a meditative and dreamy fugue, the word ‘Fancy’ standing both for the Tudor idea of ‘imitative fantasia’ and for ‘the kind of music most admired by H. H.’ As it happens, ‘Foss's Dump’ (no. 6 in the same collection) is also a fugue, but it is perhaps surprising that the piece written for H. K. Andrews (no. 6 in Book 1 of Howells' Clavichord – HH 237) – that expert on all things pertaining to Palestrina and Byrd – eschews imitative counterpoint in favour of a melodic line with clear roots in Tudor keyboard dances, though with flowing contrapuntal accompaniment. Indeed, Howells's interest in Tudor music appears to have veered more towards the dance and air than towards the imitative fantasia or motet: ‘Master Tallis's Testament’ (from the Six Pieces for Organ of 1939–45 – HH 226) provides a modal tune with modally inflected supporting harmony, but does not use imitative counterpoint (even though Tallis was an expert at writing it); and when Bartök had tea with him in London, Howells demonstrated Tudor keyboard music by playing Farnaby's ‘His Rest’ and ‘Tower Hill’, and two pieces by Byrd (a pavane and ‘The Carman's Whistle’) – but not any of the Tudor imitative fantasias.

There is a characteristic rhythm that occurs persistently throughout Howells's works. In slow, triple metre, it emanates from his apparent obsession with the sarabande and appears to be associated with elegiac thoughts, both personal and religious. It almost always appears in conjunction with intense, chromatic harmony. What are the origins and characteristics of this manner and mood? Why does Howells keep returning to the sarabande as a vehicle for expression, especially when in melancholy spirits? What is the relationship between instrumental and sung sarabande? And what other, subliminal effects does this modus operandi have on his music? These are the questions I shall attempt to answer in this chapter.

While some early works contain the seeds of Howells's fixation, from 1940 he wrote a steady flow of stylised dances in sarabande form, spanning more than thirty years:

1. (a) ‘Saraband (for the Morning of Easter)’ (HH 226ii – 1940)

2. (b) ‘Saraband (in modo elegiaco)’ (HH 226v – 1945)

3. (c) ‘Dart's Saraband’ (HH 237iv – 1956)

4. (d) ‘Malcolm's Vision’ (Quasi alla sarabanda) (HH 237xvi – 1956)

5. (e) ‘Eia mater’ (Espressivo: alla sarabanda), from Stabat mater (HH 309 – 1959–61)

6. (f) ‘Ile's Interlude’ (Poco lento, quasi come Sarabanda, molto serioso), from Three Figures (1960 – HH 297ii)

7. (g) II (Quasi adagio: serioso ma teneramente), from Sonatina (HH 333 – 1971)

8. (h) Sarabande, from Partita (HH 334 – 1971)

The compositional style of Herbert Howells, the essence of which is admittedly difficult to articulate, seems to generate scholarly descriptions that fall into two categories. The first may be illustrated by some phrases of Christopher Palmer, taken from his discussion of Howells's impressionistic tendencies: ‘… the lines indeterminate and soft-drawn, the sum-total of texture a complex seen mistily through a haze of water or light … effortless interweaving of myriad coloured strands, fluid, self-generating, kaleidoscopic …’. Such lofty and picturesque language, with an emphasis on visual metaphor, is common in attempts to describe a sound-world that can be mystifying even to the most astute listener. Then there is the contrasting clinical assessment, exemplified by a report of Howells's ‘basic style’ as ‘tonal … but with modal incursions, diatonic dissonance, cross-relations, pedal points and suspensions, as well as asymmetrical phrases, rhythmic vitality, and confident melodies’. Assured that the devil is in the details, proponents of this perspective dissect and parse the music note by note, chord by chord, phrase by phrase, anticipating an epiphany. But neither the ‘laundry list’ of techniques nor Palmer's abstract portrait fully succeeds in capturing Howells's stylistic identity or explicating his achievements. A synthesis of these contrasting methodologies is necessary, and collections like the Six Pieces for Organ (HH 226) provide fertile ground for study of Howells's own integration of macrocosmic and microcosmic approaches to composition. These pieces offer an excellent window into Howells's style, with all the complexity that such a style embraces, yet without the intimidating vastness of a larger-scale work.