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British National Identity and the Postwar Cinema, 1946-1957

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British National Identity and the Postwar Cinema, 1946-1957 Imagining the War / Imagining the Nation: British National Identity and the Postwar Cinema, 1946-1957 Tracy McDiarmid, B.A. Hons This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The University of Western Australia. Discipline of History, School of Humanities. 2005 Abstract Many historical accounts acknowledge the ‘reverberations’ of the Second World War that are still with the British today, whether in terms of Britain’s relationships with Europe, the Commonwealth, or America; its myths of consensus politics and national unity; or its conceptions of national character. The term ‘reverberations’, however, implies a disruptive, unsettling influence whereas today’s popular accounts and public debates regarding national identity, more often than not concerned with ‘Englishness’ as a category distinctive from ‘Britishness’, instead view the Second World War as a time when the nation knew what it was and had a clear understanding of the national values it embodied – a time of stability and consensus. This thesis demonstrates that, in the postwar period, ‘British’ was not a homogeneous political category, ‘Britishness’ was not a uniformly adopted identity, and representations of the nation in popular cinema were not uncontested. British national identity in the postwar 1940s and 1950s was founded upon re-presentations of the war, and yet it was an identity transacted by class, gender, race and region. Understandings of national identity ‘mirrored’ by British films were influenced by the social and political context of their creation and reception, and were also a reflection of the cinema industry and its relationship to the state. Both ‘national cinema’ and ‘national identity’ are demonstrated to be fluctuating concepts – dominant myths of the war were undermined and reinforced in response to the demands of the postwar present. The first two chapters examine the respective discourses of British national identity and Britain’s national cinema, and thereby provide a theoretical and historiographical context for the analyses of A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Passport to Pimlico (1949), and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). These three case studies are an examination of the cultural construction of national identity and provide both a contextual ‘cinema history’ commentary on the films, and a ‘film studies’ interpretive analysis. British national identity is shown to privilege an English identity, embodied in its landscapes and cultural heritage, and yet it is an identity challenged by internal and external ‘others’: wartime stereotypes of class, gender, and community reveal a postwar ambivalence to the ideals of a New Jerusalem and Britain as a ‘third force’ in the world; representations of British masculinity and national character reflect a growing apprehension of America; and a ‘Little England’ ‘homefront’ identity is shown to vie with an Imperial identity. Postwar understandings of ‘Britishness’ conceived in terms of ii the recent past – in Britain’s experience of the Second World War – were both ‘ideologically active’ and inherently transitory. iii Table of Contents Abstract ii Contents iv Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 Chapter One Contested Identities: Definitions of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ in Postwar Britain 13 Chapter Two British Cinema: Building an Industry, Building a Nation? 57 Chapter Three ‘The Nation Everybody Hates’: British National Identity and A Matter of Life and Death (1946) 100 Chapter Four Paper Empire: British National Identity and Passport to Pimlico (1949) 145 Chapter Five ‘I Thought You Were the Enemy, Sir’: British National Identity and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) 183 Conclusion 235 Filmography 242 Bibliography 254 iv Acknowledgements Speaking of his time at a Prague technical college, Emeric Pressburger noted that he had previously ‘only thought about problems that were given to [him], but real thinking is when you choose the subject yourself.’ 1 Many people have assisted me in my own undertaking of original research. Special thanks must go to my supervisor, Rob Stuart, who has supported and challenged me during my postgraduate studies. His encouragement and patience have been unwavering. I would also like to thank Richard Bosworth for his assistance at the beginning of my research project, and Iain Brash who provided invaluable advice throughout. Bob White readily offered his support and shared with me his passion for postwar British films. The School of Humanities and the Discipline of History at the University of Western Australia generously provided a travel grant to enable me to conduct research in London and Sussex. Muriel Mahony provided unstinting encouragement and administrative assistance. Staff members of the Scholars’ Centre in the Reid Library of the University of Western Australia were always helpful, as were the library staff at the British Film Institute and the Imperial War Museum in London. Thanks must also go to the Trustees of the Mass-Observation Archive at the University of Sussex; the director of the Hell Fire Pass Memorial Museum in Thailand, Bill Slape; and the staff of the JEATH War Memorial, Thailand. The financial assistance of a University Postgraduate Award made possible full-time postgraduate study. Friends have given much support and I would particularly like to thank Judy Skene for her guidance, encouragement, and assistance in bringing the final draft to completion. I am indebted to Jean Chetkovich for her many acts of kindness and generosity. My fellow postgraduates in the editorial collective of Limina contributed greatly to the richness of my postgraduate experience. I must acknowledge the unwavering support that I received from my family, particularly my father, Doug McDiarmid. My partner, Laurence Salley, helped me in so many ways – he has my enduring gratitude and love. 1 Kevin Macdonald, Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter , Faber and Faber, London, 1994, p.24. v Introduction A character of George Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda , predicted that ‘with us in Europe the sentiment of nationality is destined to die out.’ 1 The death predicted in 1874 has yet to be realised. Few fields of historical inquiry were, during the late-twentieth century, the subjects of such protracted and heated debate as notions of the nation, nationalism and national identity. Views in nationalism studies have been so conflicted that they have resulted in the debate being deemed a ‘historiographical schism’. 2 And, as many recent examinations of the nation stress the role of nationality and nationalism in today’s world, the centrality of such issues – and the deepening of this schism – seems unlikely to lessen. 3 If the study of the United Kingdom is ‘a minefield of nomenclature’ from which ‘[f]ew return unscathed’, 4 the study of British national identity invites a descent into schizophrenia from which few emerge intact. British national identity is a site of constantly changing and competing cultural identities: alternative identities founded on class, race, gender and region, to name a few, inflect any national meta-identity. Englishness vies with Britishness; imperial vies with national. This thesis studies the construction, dissemination, and revision of British national identity in the period after the Second World War until the late 1950s. What myths 5 of national identity were dominant and why? And how did alternative imaginings of the nation undermine these myths? The key objective of this thesis, therefore, is to examine how popular films of the postwar period presented and re- presented the concept of ‘Britishness’, with a particular focus on representations of the Second World War. The extent to which the Second World War fundamentally altered the nature of British society and popular understandings of British nationalism remains a topic of great interest to today’s historian. The war is often considered a turning point in conceptions of British identity, and the cultural currency of its representation has been tendered 1 George Eliot, Daniel Deronda , Wordsworth Classics, Hertfordshire, 1996, originally published in eight independent parts between 1874-1876, p.435. 2 Term used by Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood. Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997, p.2. 3 See, for example, Geoffrey Cubitt, ‘Introduction’, in Geoffrey Cubitt (ed.), Imagining Nations , Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1998, pp.1-20; Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism. A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism , Routledge, London, 1998. 4 Neil Evans, ‘Introduction: Identity and Integration in the British Isles’, in Neil Evans (ed.), National Identity in the British Isles , (Coleg Occasional Papers in Welsh Studies No.3), Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, 1989, p.6. 5 In the words of Angus Calder, ‘myth’ ‘entails more than “untrue stories [and] legends”.’ Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz , Jonathan Cape, London, 1991, p.9. 1 many times during periods of national crisis. For example, national identity rhetoric employed during the 1982 South Atlantic War prompted academics to ‘return to the source of many of its dominant representations and discourses, World War II.’ 6 Malcolm Smith also observed that the ‘nostalgic glow’ of 1940 ‘is still with us in Britain, backlighting contemporary history, since representations of 1940 still constitute the foundation myth of a new Britain seen to have emerged from the war.’ 7 The trauma of the Second World War,
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