A KILLING JOKE: EALING COMEDIES AND BRITISHNESS
John Dougill
10 B
1949~ip I? 1955~0)IMH;: 1- 1) ';/ 7" • A?' :::/ ;:tiJ~~~l:fj l., td&k O):§jIJfF&b O)tjJt;:~;t, ~OO~OOiO))d~tl) A r1:f3Lt;:~~f3L1tlT.QfF&biJ~1t'~
"1§.*¥=~~ - 215 - The Ealing ethos
Between 1947-57 Ealing Studios near London produced nearly one hundred films in all, but it is for their comedies that they are best remembered. Cosy and affectionate, they take a light-hearted look at the British. The guiding hand belonged to the head of the studios, Michael Bakon (1896-1977). The son of Jewish immigrants, he had a strong sense of gratitude to the country that had sheltered his parents. His patriotic instincts expressed themselves in the urge to make 'films from right (I) down in the soil, rooted in the soi1.' When the studios were sold off in 1955, he put up a plaque saying: 'Here during a quarter of a century many films were made projecting Britain and the British character.'
Bakon acted as a benevolent school master over the productions. Though he was liberal in politics, he was prudish about sex and strict in moral matters. This affected the films he favoured, which portray a consensual society where neighbours greet each other, people are mild mannered, and authority is respected. Not all is calm and orderly, how ever, for there is a strong sense of individual rights. In Best of British (1999) Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards describe the ethos as (2) follows:
It is a world that is essentially quaint, cosy, whimsical and backward-looking ... It is a world that enshrines what are seen as quintessentially English qualities: a stubborn individualism that is heroic to the point of eccentricity; a hatred of authoritarianism and bureaucracy coupled with a belief in tolerance and consensus; a phi losophy that can be summed up by the slogan 'Small is beautiful, old is good.'
The conservatism suited a society fast recovering from the war. During the 1950s the austerity of the immediate postwar period was forgotten as
- 216 - A KILLING JOKE(DougilI) affluence and hire purchase fuelled a rise in consumerism. The statistics speak for themselves: from 1951 to 1963 wages rose by 72% but prices by just 45%. Televisions, refrigerators and washing-machines became house hold items, freeing housewives from domestic drudgery. There was an increased sense of well-being. 'The first half of the 1950s was an era of peace, prosperity and order,' write Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richar ds:
The crime rate was faIling. There was full employment and rising productivity. The greater availability of consumer durables blunted class antagonisms. The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 was seen as ushering in a 'new Elizabethan age', as the Empire was trans- (3) muted into the Commonwealth, a worldwide brotherhood of nations...
In this way continuity was established with the prewar era, the values of which had been seemingly validated by the victory over Germany. Tradi tion, moderation and social harmony were said to characterise the nation, and the virtues of the British were linked to the Victorian heri tage and the code of the gentleman. For writers like George Orwell little had changed, for 'The essential structure of England is still almost (4) what it was in the nineteenth century.'
The sense of the past was reflected in the smash Hollywood hit, Around the World in 80 Days (1956). Based on the 1873 novel by Jules Verne, it is set at the height of the British Empire and portrays Phileas Fogg as he travels round the world dispensing justice, fairness and com mon sense in foreign parts. There is gentle satire at the expense of the overdressed and overly correct Fogg, but the humour is sympathetic and he is rewarded with a beautiful woman and by winning his bet. The film thus underwrites the connection with the age of the Victorian gentleman while looking back fondly on the imperial era.
Here, as in other films, social criticism is conspicuous by its absence. The complacency was summed up by Edward Shils in a 1955 edition of the Encounter when he wondered, 'Who criticises Britain now in any fundamental sense... There are complaints here and there and on many specific issues, but in the main scarcely anyone in Great Britain seems any longer to feel there is anything fundamentally wrong... Never has an intellectual class found its society and its culture so much to its (5) satisfaction.' The mood was encapsulated in a celebrated phrase used by prime minister Harold Macmillan in 1957 when he announced that 'most of our people have never had it so good'. Murder most foul
The British have long had a fondness for murder mysteries. One thinks of Jack the Ripper and Sweeney Todd, for example. One thinks too of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marples. For an ear lier generation the murder puzzle was such a delicious entertainment that fictional assassination came to rival fox-hunting as the nation's favourite blood sport. It's no wonder that Hitchcock turned so readily to murder; Chaplin also in Monsieur Verdoux (1947). It's notable too that one of the few great British films of the 1970s, Sleuth (1972) starring Laurence (6) Olivier and Michael Caine, revolved around murder as a type of game.
It comes as no surprise then that two of Ealing's most famous com edies also centre around murder. The first, Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), came on the cusp of the fifties and was directed by Robert Hamer (1911-63). A homosexual in an age when this was regarded as abnormal, he married to mask his inclinations and turned to alcohol for compensa tion, which eventually killed him. He held a cynical view of society, and when he came across a minor Edwardian novel called Israel Rank (1907) he related to its attack on family values. In adapting it for the screen he aimed at 'using this English language, which I love, in a more varied and (7) interesting way'. The result was a script with wit and sparkle.
The story concerns Louis Mancini (Dennis Price), whose aristocratic
- 218 - A KILLING JOKE(Dougill) mother was cut off by her family after she married an Italian singer. Louis is resentful of the impoverishment this brings, and when his mother dies and is refused burial in the family vault, he decides to kill off his relatives and inherit the title of which he has been deprived. In one of cinema's great tours de jorce, all eight of his victims are played by Alec Guinness. Audiences had already seen the versatility of the actor as Herbert Pockett in Great Expectations and the Jewish Fagin in Oliver Twist. Here he covers the whole range of upper-class types in Edwar dian England, from dotty vicar to campaigning suffragette.
This was the film which made a star of Guinness, and his chameleon like ability is uncanny. Film critic David Thomson writes of a 'remote (S) reflective personality' that allowed him to inhabit different types. The actor himself described how an unhappy childhood drew him into imagi nary worlds, and how he gained inspiration for his characters from zoo animals as if literally getting inside their skin. It speaks of a remark able ability to disguise his own nature and merge with others, leading fellow actor Peter Ustinov to dub him 'the outstanding poet of anonym ity'.
Guinness disliked reading scripts, but he claimed that Kind Hearts and Coronets was one of only two in his whole life that he had actually enjoyed. It was unusually literary, with references to Chaucer and Tenny son, and it dealt with those two great British preoccupations - class and sex. Much of the film's humour comes through the deadpan manner of the narration, as Louis recalls his misdeeds from his prison cell. 'It is so difficult to make a neat job of killing people with whom one is not on friendly terms,' he notes drily. In murdering his cousin, he unfortunately kills the innocent mistress with him. 'I was sorry about the girl,' he says, 'but found some relief in the reflection that she had presumably during the weekend already undergone a fate worse than death.'
The film parodies the emotional repression of Edwardian times as people mask their feelings beneath meaningless politenesses. By contrast Louis is disarmingly open about his thoughts, evoking sympathy for his cause like Shakespeare's Richard III. The film ends ambiguously, with Louis judged innocent of a murder he has been charged with but inadver tently leaving his confessions behind in the prison cell as he departs. Though it leaves open the possibility of a future conviction, it is far from the conventional Ealing ending in which the guilty are punished for their sins. One has rather a sense of directorial sympathy with the unre pentant murderer. In killing his relatives, he was killing off the old order. Rule Britannia
The Ladykillers (1955) is considered the last of the great Ealing com edies. It was directed by Alexander Mackendrick (1912-93), who already had a high reputation for such films as Whisky Galore! (1949) and The Man in the White Suit (1951). Shortly after making The Ladykillers, he left for America to teach film studies. The film was his valedictory, a humorous farewell to the 'old country' in contrast to the 'new continent' to which he was headed.
The central character is Mrs. Louisa Wilberforce (Katie Johnson), an aging widow who lives alone in London and rents out a room in her house. This is taken by a 'Professor Marcus' (Alec Guiness) and his quintet of 'musicians' who in reality are a gang of criminals planning a train robbery at Kings Cross. When Mrs. Wilberforce discovers who they really are, the gang decide to murder her but their plan goes awry as they turn on each other instead. Mrs. Wilberforce is left at the end literally holding the money.
The comedy has been interpreted as an allegory of life in the 1950s. The old house at the end of a cul-de-sac is past its prime but full of character. Just like the country as a whole, you could say. Mrs. Wilber force is Britannia personified, representative of the national spirit. Her
- 220 - A KILLING JOKE(DougiIl) memories - like her house - stretch back to Victorian times and the legacy of the British Empire is all too clear. Her parrot is named Gen eral Gordon after the nineteenth-century imperialist, and her late husband was a captain who drowned in the South China Seas. An eccentric old lady, she is a throw-back to an older world of decorum and good man ners, though she has a forceful personality and a strong sense of fairness. When she sees a man mistreating a donkey, she is quick to intervene and chide him.
As in My Fair Lady, an afternoon tea party plays a crucial role. It comes just at the moment that she discovers the criminal nature of her lodgers, but to save face she insists on them joining her guests. 'Try to behave like gentlemen, for once,' she tells them. While the ladies chat and play the piano, the robbers are forced to stand around drinking tea and eating cucumber sandwiches. It's an amusing display of the civilis ing nature of tea.
In Eating Studios (1977) Charles Barr makes the suggestion that the gang of robbers represents society's rebellious forces, motivated by (9) money rather than the traditional values of decency and restraint. They range from the intellectual Alec Guinness to the working-class Danny Green, from the hardened criminal of Herbert Lorn to the representative youth played by 'teddy-boy' Peter Sellers.
The ending of the film, with Mrs. Wilberforce the last person stand ing, represents a triumph of tradition over modernity. Britain thus emerges as a land of conservatism which is dominated by the old order. In hindsight it is possible to see the film as marking the end of an era, and in Best of British (1999) Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards write that 'Mrs. Wilberforce's world is an apt metaphor for mid-1950s England, (10) a cul·de-sac slumbering peacefully but shortly to be violently awakened.'
The year after the film came out, the Suez crisis showed that the age of the British Empire was at an end while the play Look Back in Anger by John Osborne marked the arrival of the 'Angry Young Man' frustrated with the old order. It meant that in future guests at the mild-mannered tea party held by Mrs. Wilberforce would be more asser tive than the deferential 'Professor Marcus' and his gang. Ealing's cosy Britain was about to be swamped by a wave of disaffection, and in the process many of its most cherished notions would be swept away. With the cultural revolution of the 1960s, traditional notions of Britishness were effectively killed off. Seen in retrospect, Mackendrick's criminal caper turns out to have a prophetic force that makes it something more than a light-hearted comedy for it is imbued with an elegiac sense of a passing social order.
Notes (1) BBC Omnibus documentary in 1986 produced by Roland Keating, includ ed on the Criterion DVD of Kind Hearts and Coronets. (2) Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards Best of British: Crime and Society from 1930 to the Present London: Tauris, 1999, p. 165 (3) ibid. (4) George Orwell Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, vol. 3, p. 39 (5) Edward Shils 'The Intellectuals - Great Britain' in Encounter vol. 4 no. 4, April 1955, p. 6 (6) See George Orwell 'Decline of the English Murder', an essay first publi shed on February 15, 1946 in Tribune, London (7) Quoted in Philip Kemp 'Ealing's Shadow Side' in the booklet accompany ing the Criterion DVD of Kind Hearts and Coronets, 2006, p. 9. Hamer collaborated on the script with John Dighton. (8) David Thomson A Biographical Dictionary of Film rev.ed. London: Andre Deutsch, 1975, p. 308 (9) Charles Barr Ealing Studios: A Movie Book California: Univ. of Califor nia, 1999 aO) Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards Best of British: Crime and Society from 1930 to the Present London: Tauris, 1999, p. 165
"'" - ? - I-' Britain, Film, Culture, Gentleman
- 222 - A KILLING JOKE(Dougill)