The young Dirk Bogarde as a fleeing murderer in Charles Crichton’s 1952 noir Hunted . Photo via TCD/ Prod.db I once asked a survivor from the British cinema of the late 1940s and 1950s what the film industry then was like, and she replied: “There wasn’t one.” That was an exaggeration, as a new season at BFI Southbank, “Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema 1945-1960”, to an extent proves. Through May, a selection of films from British studios in that period will show not only that there was an active industry, but that it made quite a few excellent films. The great boon of the season is that some of its films will be virtually unknown to all but hardcore aficionados, often unjustly because they are so good. From the end of the period, there is Never Let Go (1960), directed by John Guillermin. He would later direct The Towering Inferno (1974), Death on the Nile (1978) and other Hollywood adventures, but this picture from his British period is tense and profound.…