Ealing and after
After celebrating East End boy Alfred Hitchcock through the summer, the BFI is now looking to the west of London – to Ealing Studios.
As you can see from the trailer, this month and next there is a compendious (and tremendous) ‘Light and Dark’ retrospective at BFI Southbank along with a display of posters, pressbooks and the like. The noir-ish and engagingly nasty It Always Rains on Sunday, directed by Robert Hamer in 1947, is back in (a few) cinemas and a group of rarely-seen Ealing wartime shorts now features in the Mediatheque playlists. Plus, Palgrave Macmillan/BFI have published a very good new book, Ealing Revisited, edited by Mark Duguid, Lee Freeman, Keith Johnston and Melanie Williams, which is the focus of this post. And like almost all of the twenty-one authors in this collection, I also want to tip my hat to Charles Barr’s great and glorious book Ealing Studios, first published in 1977.
Although Basil Dean made films at Ealing in the 1930s and the BBC bought the buildings and started producing there in 1955, ‘Ealing films’ – and most often people say ‘Ealing comedies’ – are regarded as those made under producer Michael Balcon between 1938 and 1959. (There is a handful of ‘Ealing’ credits at the end when he was working with MGM). These seventy or so features – which include Passport to Pimlico (1949), Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and The Ladykillers (1951) are understood to be in some sense quintessentially British – or perhaps that should be English. These are also films that encapsulate much of what we think about the war and about the post-conflict world and its utopian aspirations.
Writing in 1945, Michael Balcon was clear about what he wanted from Ealing:
[T]he need is great for a projection of the true Britain to the rest of the world… Fiction films which portray contemporary life in Britain in different sections of our society, films with an outdoor background of the British scene, screen biographies of our great, screen adaptations of literary classics, films reflecting the post-war aspirations not of governments or parties, but of individuals.
Certain of the Ealing films have long been loved by audiences and critics alike, but the broader sweep of the studio’s output has also proved to be one of the most fruitful areas for scholars looking in depth at British cinema. Ealing Revisited productively explores the full range of the films, including many far less familiar films:
[T]here is much more diversity even in Ealing’s comedies than seems to be widely recognised, and a great deal more to Ealing than comedy alone. One of the primary intentions of this book is to push aside simplistic stereotypes of ‘classic’ Ealing, to reassess those films that have been unfairly passed over in the creation of a narrow Ealing canon and to make a case for revisiting even the most humble of the studio’s output. (Introduction, p.2)
So… They Came to a City (1944), anyone? Or Cage of Gold (1950)? The writing here makes you want to track down these and many others.
One of the other strengths of the book is that it works almost like an accessible primer for critical approaches to British film – there are essays on women at Ealing, an auteur study (of the promising Pen Tennyson, killed during the war), a consideration of Ealing films in colour, and of Ealing and noir, queer Ealing, an engagement with performance, discussions of ‘the national’, and the music of Ealing films.
This last-mentioned, by Geoff Brown, is one of the highlights of the volume. Brown considers the Ealing scores of modernist composer Georges Auric, the youngest member of the 1920s Parisian group of composers known as Les Six. Auric composed the music for nine Ealing films, including Dead of Night (1947), Passport to Pimlico and The Lavender Hill Mob, and the essay makes a convincing case that a studio which aimed (in Balcon’s phrase) at ‘projecting Britain and the British character’ was also, as Brown suggests, ‘enriched by a European perspective’.
In ‘Dark Shadows Around Ealing’ the ever-readable Robert Murphy also usefully enhances the revisionist drive. He acknowledges the noir in films directed by Robert Hamer (including the anthology horror flic Dead of Night and Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945)) and Alberto Cavalcanti (Went the Day Well? (1942) and Dead of Night as well) but he is surprisingly convincing about the dark realism of features directed by Charles Frend and Charles Crichton. He makes the latter’s real-time drama The Man in the Sky (1957), with Jack Hawkins piloting a doomed aeroplane, sound especially enticing.
The publishing partnership between Palgrave Macmillan and the BFI has over the past three years or so produced a shelf-full of exceptional books – of which this is unquestionably another – contributing in all sorts of stimulating ways to the rethinking of British cinema. I have blogged here about Shadows of Progress: Documentary Films in Post-war Britain and here about The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit; other notable titles include Empire and Film and Film and the End of Empire, both edited by Colin MacCabe and Lee Grieveson, as well as Sarah Street’s new Colour Films in Britain (look out for a post on this soon).
Now while it is something of an exaggeration to say, as Robert Murphy does here, that thirty-five years ago ‘British cinema was still despised, neglected and under-explored’, there is no doubt that the engagement with, respect for and excitement (both intellectual and aesthetic) about films from this old country has exploded. Not for many years has anyone really agreed with Francois Truffaut’s (in)famous dismissal that British cinema is ‘a contradiction in terms’.
The reason for this shift has a good deal to do with another book about Ealing, Charles Barr’s pioneering study Ealing Studios, initially published in a handsome volume (one of the treasures of my library) by Cameron & Taylor in 1977. Barr’s book appeared as the journal Screen was introducing the rigours of continental theory, of Marxism and psychoanalysis, Saussure and Lacan, into academic approaches to film. But Ealing Studios is a wonderfully accessible industrial history and cultural analysis that is rigorous in a different way.
Barr’s book remains among one of the few entirely essential volumes about post-war Britain – and I don’t just mean about the British cinema in these years. And perhaps the clearest evidence for this is the fact that fully fifteen of twenty chapters in Ealing Revisited reference Barr’s book and many of them frame their central thesis as a direct response to its ideas.
Charles Barr also contributed a short chapter to this new volume, ‘Against the grain: Kenneth Tynan at Ealing’, which is a typically elegant and original study of the time that the critic spent working for Balcon as a script editor. His conclusion is as follows:
[I]t is altogether too facile to construct a narrative of Kenneth Tynan’s two years at Ealing that positions him him as a dynamic incomer who challenges, exposes and is ultimately blocked by the dogged conservatism of Michael Balcon. The reality is indeed more complex and interesting.
Let’s recognise, as we watch Kind Hearts and Coronets today, or indeed The Man in the Sky, that it is to a significant degree thanks to Charles Barr that our understanding and appreciation of British cinema as a whole is so, so much ‘complex and interesting’ now than it was back before 1977.
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