Class and Crime: Social Divisions

Abstract

There was a marked readjustment of class expectations in the postwar period, a syndrome that accelerated in the late 1950s and early 1960s with less of the emphasis by earlier films on establishment values. The notion of a disenchanted army officer reacting to his shabby treatment by organising a robbery (The League of Gentlemen), once almost unthinkable, was now the basis of a popular crime film. Films of this period also deal interestingly with the intersection of the classes in society. A new meritocracy of crime began to emerge, along with a carefully maintained, class-bound social order that was still maintained (even within the context of criminal enterprise).