A consistent theme in Dearden and Relph's post-war films concerns male characters forced to confront painful adjustment to new circumstances and changing social norms and expectations; indeed, it is a preoccupation which informed the work of a number of other British filmmakers of the time. Within this broad classification, this chapter sets out to examine those films which observe a tragic dimension, whereby the narratives result either in the death of the main male protagonist or a significant subsidiary character, or in his imprisonment, or in some such seriously diminished ambition or circumstance. In these tragic melodramas, the films do not address recognised and accepted social problems, Dearden and Relph foreground and deal with these elsewhere (see Chapter 5). The films do, however, attend to significant postwar realignments in gender and the consequent anxieties and contradictions confronted by men in making their way in worlds of changed and changing social circumstances.

In exploring these issues, Dearden and Relph worked across a variety of genres and settings, including: the historical costume drama, the contemporary melodrama, the sports film, the crime film and the psychological thriller, demonstrating both their maturing flexibility as a filmmaking partnership and the centrality and consistency of the theme to their work together.