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Note: This article has been divided into three parts: Part1, Part 2, and Part 3 (Appendix and notes).

Copyright is retained by the author

Part 1

When any thought at all is given to the British film industry in the 50s then the tendency is to categorise it as a dull period between the gritty realism of the war years and the American backed 'Swinging London' films of the 60s. Ealing declined, the documentary movement disappeared and cinemas closed in their thousands as audiences turned away from the predominant fare of nostalgic war films and inane comedies to their television sets. Looked at more closely, this dismal picture of decline dissolves to reveal British cinema as surprisingly robust, fertile and adaptable.

Box-office admissions which had peaked at 1,635 million in 1946 had fallen to 1,396 million by 1950. This was still well above the pre-war figure (990 million) and could be seen as an inevitable adjustment to the ending of exceptional war-time conditions, but by 1960 the figure had fallen to 515 million and the number of cinemas fell from 4,583 in 1950 to 3,414 in 1959 (1). However the blow was softened by the public's willingness to pay more for their cinema visits and the government's willingness to cut entertainment tax. Until the mid 50s rises in seat prices compensated for the decline in attendance and though box-office receipts fell by 41 per cent between 1954 and 1960 cuts in entertainment tax meant that the net received by exhibitors fell by only 15 per cent (2).

Decline appeared to strengthen the position of the two major British companies Rank and ABPC.

Rank had lurched into draconian rationalization in 1958 with the merger of its Odeon and Gaumont circuits and dealt a bitter blow to independent distributors like British Lion which had hitherto had little difficulty getting their films released on one of the circuits. But the problem of getting a circuit release for independent product was not to become a serious problem until the 60s.

The 40s had been a golden age in terms of cinema admissions and the production of memorable British films but war-time restrictions and fierce American competition severely limited the number of films made - an average of 52 first features a year, with production reaching a peak of 66 in 1949 (3). The decade ended with the collapse of the Rank Organisation's attempt to change this pattern by carving out a share of the American market and using its power as a major exhibitor to restrict the number of Hollywood films shown in Britain. Massive losses led to the closure of Highbury, Shepherds Bush (sold to the BBC), Islington and Denham studios in 1949, and Rank's severely curtailed production activities were concentrated at Pinewood.

Though the 50s began gloomily a shortage of product caused by the contraction of the American film industry, pressure on resources in terms of studios and personnel from television, and an ability to make films genuinely popular at the box-office kept British film production relatively buoyant throughout the decade.

Television quickly became had become a :major force in America but in Britain its impact was much more gradual. In 1950 only 382,300 television licences had been issued. The Coronation of 1953 made people aware of television's potential but, though licences were up to two and a half million, this was as yet too small a number to bite into the cinemas audience and the Kinematograph Weekly gloated that, ‘the BBC recording furnished the finest and most widely distributed trailer in the annals of show business’ helping to make the Rank film A Queen is Crowned the box-office success of the year (4).

After 1955 when the BBC’s monopoly ended and commercial television was launched, television did begin to make serious inroads into the cinemas audience. But its effects on the film industry were by no means uniformly harmful. It provided new opportunities for film industry personnel - like cinema exhibitor Sidney Bernstein who won the huge Northern franchise for Granada, and the Woolf brothers, highly successful independent film producers, who set up Anglia. Many of the smaller studios - Brighton, Rusholme, Teddington, Bushey - discovered a new lease of life as television studios, and the BBC expanded from Shepherds Bush to Ealing, As early as 1952 the old British National Studios at Elstree were being used to produce American TV series and by 1957 all studios except Pinewood and Shepperton were sharing their facilities between television and feature film production.

Hollywood had to adapt earlier and more rapidly to television and with the studio system crumbling, American companies put an increasing proportion of their resources into overseas production, Fox took over Denham for a while and MGM had its own large modern studios at Boreham Wood. Warner Brothers, with almost a half share in ABPC occasionally made use of their Elstree studio. Columbia not only produced its own films in Britain but entered into co-production deals with independent production companies such as Romulus (the Woolf brothers), Warwick (Cubby Broccoli) and Anglo-Amalgamated (Nat Cohen). The resulting Anglo-American films - Siodmak's The Crimson Pirate, Houston's The African Queen, Moby Dick and Moulin Rouge, Mark Robson's The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, Jose Ferrer's Cockleshell Heroes - proved remarkably successful and for most of the 50s around a third of the films produced in Britain had some American involvement. Nonetheless, British producers were quite capable of making it on their own. In two fields they were outstandingly successful: comedy and war films

George Formby and Gracie Fields had been Britain's two major box-office stars of the 30s and Britain had a tradition of popular film comedy into which films like the Norman Wisdom cycle easily slotted. Betty Box’s Doctor in the House and its sequels, starring Dirk Bogarde as the shy, handsome, young hero, and Anglo-Amalgamated’s Carry-On series which proved unexpectedly popular from 1957 onwards, fitted well enough into the circuits’ 'family entertainment' policy. War films were rather more problematic: despite their reputation for stiff upper lip restraint 50s British war films could be violent and disturbing. Films like The Cruel Sea (d. Charles Frend, 1953) and Yesterday's Enemy (d. Val Guest, 1959) incline one to believe that this was one area where mainstream cinema allowed itself to deal with issues seriously.

It was with the war films of the early 40s that the British film industry had its first sustained taste of commercial and critical success. After 1943 though, a violent swing against realism carried British cinema away from the war to the exoticism of the Gainsborough costume films, the spiv cycle and the whimsical nostalgia of Ealing comedy. There were occasional returns to the war - Carol Reed's The Way Ahead (1944), Anthony Asquith's The Way to the Stars (1945), Dearden and Relph’s The Captive Heart(1945) and Powell and Pressburger’s The Small Back Room (1949) - but output declined to a trickle. A handful of post-war-adjustment problem films such as Frieda (1947) and Mine Own Executioner (l947), were made, and the war-deranged hero made sporadic appearances throughout the 50s - most dramatically in Roy Baker's Tiger in the Smoke (1956)). But it was not until 1950, when Jack Lee's POW camp drama The Wooden Horse and the Herbert Wilcox/Anna Neagle resistance bio-pic Odette were 4th and 6th most popular films of the year, that war films proper began to regain box-office favour.

The need for everybody to pull together to save Britain from the Nazis had instilled many of the best 40s war films with a fascinating if sometimes facile populism. The contribution of the ordinary serviceman was acknowledged and celebrated along with that of his superiors. In Which We Serve (d. David Lean and Noel Coward, 1943), commercially the most successful film of the war years, is structured from a series of flashbacks centred around three main characters, each representative of a different layer of society. Captain Noel Coward is definitively an officer and a gentleman; Bernard Miles, the petty officer, is the epitome of lower middle-class eccentricity; and John Mills represents the solid, stocky ordinary seaman. Similarly The Captive Heart devotes half its story to working class chums Jack Warner and Mervyn Johns and the officers are represented chiefly by a déclassé Czech played by Michael Redgrave.

The war in 50s films is much more of an officers war, concerned less with its effect on society than with the mechanics of escapes, campaigns, operations. Working class characters retain only a vestigial function, and suffering wives, mums, girlfriends are pushed firmly into the background. The Wooden Horse is typical in its concentration on the self-enclosed world of the POW camp, In contrast to The Captive Heart where the main plot device centres around the intriguing if improbable romantic problems Redgrave has in corresponding with the wife of a dead British officer whose identity he has assumed to avoid being shot as a partisan, The Wooden Horse, like the other POW camp movies of the decade - Albert RN (d. Lewis Gilbert, 1953), The Colditz Story (d. Guy Hamilton, 1954), Danger Within (d. Don Chaffey, 1958) - is concerned with escape.

Escaping from P0W camps was almost exclusively a middle-class activity. As Vincent Firth explains:

The facts are that under the Geneva Convention, officer prisoners cannot be put to manual work. They therefore had all the time in the world to dream up escape plans, while Other Ranks were kept far too busy at work to have any energy left for digging tunnels. (5)

Ironically the one important 50s POW camp film not centrally concerned with escape - The Bridge on the River Kwai (d. David Lean, 1958) - uses the Japanese camp commanders insistence that the officers should work alongside their men as the mainspring of its plot.

Though they now seem one-dimensional, films like The Wooden Horse and The Colditz Story based on autobiographical accounts by escaped prisoners, and films like Reach for the Sky, The Dam Busters, Odette, centered around the exploits of real people, were seen at the time as improvements on the openly propagandistic war films of the 40s. Thus Helen Fletcher on The Dam Busters:

The story itself is good enough and they have let it be. No sobbing WAAFs calling B for Baker, no merciless interjections of Other Rank badinage, no misty-eyed bar-maids at the station pub, no brave upward glances at throbbing skies. (6)

One gets the impression that in the 50s the critics, and presumably the film-makers and public, looked back with a degree of embarrassment at the portrayal of class harmony in the war years. The 50s saw a gradual rise in affluence through full employment, and the possibility, at least for the next generation, of class mobility through the extension of higher education. The period has to be considered one of fluidity and change for the working class and one might suspect an unease among film-makers about how to portray working class characters.

One of the breakthroughs of wartime realism was the fuller and more sympathetic representation of working class characters hitherto portrayed as comic caricatures. But it was very much the old self-enclosed working-class which was represented: the cocky but dependable cockney - John Mills in This Happy Breed (d. David Lean, 1944), In Which We Serve and Waterloo Road (d. Sidney Gilliat, 1945); the tough but good-hearted working class dad - Jack Warner in The Captive Heart and Holiday Camp (d. Ken Annakin, 1947); the sulky wide-boy with problems - Jimmy Hanley in The Way Ahead and It Always Rains on Sunday (d. Robert Hamer, 1947); the poor but honest Scots lad - Gordon Jackson in The Foreman Went to France (d. Charles Frend, 1942) and Millions Like Us (d. Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, 1943); and a superb array of battered, world-weary working class wives played by Irene Handl, Gladys Henson, Muriel George, Kathleen Harrison, Nancy Price. By the 50s these stereotypes didn't quite fit and were relegated to comedies and soap operas. It was not until the end of the decade that a new way of showing working class characters as young rebels poised between the dead-end claustrophobia of the working class ghetto and the stifling hypocrisy of middle class society emerged. Until then, war films, with their emphasis on stoical, individual bravery, were acceptable in ways that attempts to revive the populism of the war years would not have been.

Go to Part 2
Go to Appendix and notes

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