The British War Film, 1939-1980: Culture, History, and Genre

The British War Film, 1939-1980: Culture, History, and Genre by Kevin M. Flanagan B.A., College of William and Mary, 2006 M.A., North Carolina State University, 2009 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2015 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH KENNETH P. DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Kevin M. Flanagan It was defended on April 15, 2015 and approved by Colin MacCabe, Distinguished Professor, Department of English Adam Lowenstein, Associate Professor, Department of English David Pettersen, Assistant Professor, Department of French and Italian Dissertation Advisor: Lucy Fischer, Distinguished Professor, Department of English ii Copyright © by Kevin M. Flanagan 2015 iii THE BRITISH WAR FILM, 1939-1980: CULTURE, HISTORY, AND GENRE Kevin M. Flanagan, Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh, 2015 This dissertation argues that discussions of war representation that privilege the nationalistic, heroic, and redemptively sacrificial strand of storytelling that dominate popular memory in Britain ignore a whole counter-history of movies that view war as an occasion to critique through devices like humor, irony, and existential alienation. Instead of selling audiences on what Graham Dawson has called “the pleasure culture of war” (a nationally self-serving mode of talking about and profiting from war memory), many texts about war are motivated by other intellectual and ideological factors. Each chapter includes historical context and periodizing arguments about different moments in British cultural history, explores genre trends, and ends with a comparative analysis of representative examples. Chapter One traces competing representational modes between 1939 and 1945, arguing that films about war and wartime during this period trouble the traditional binarism in British film historiography between realism and fantasy. Chapter Two looks at historical intersections of comedy and war, arguing that the embrace of irony as a argumentative position allows war comedies to engage with the idea of failure, a notion all but missing from dominant strands of war representation. Chapter Three describes a post-1956 brand of war tragedy that embraces cynicism, tonal bleakness, and the cultural vogue for existentialism as another affront to triumphalist war narratives. Chapter Four shifts from bigger conceptual categories to a specific, historically embedded interest in technology and strategy that intensifies after 1945. This chapter argues that many films turn away from war as historically grounded fact, and towards a iv conception of war that is overtly simulated and virtual. Chapter Five examines the representational challenge of the nuclear bomb for British cinema, arguing that beyond similarities to international trends that align these weapons with panic and horror, the specter of atomic energy encapsulates a larger geopolitical visioning of the nation’s loss of control. A Conclusion examines the reception of many of the films analyzed and acknowledges the influence and legacy of these alternative approaches to war. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………vii Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1 Britain’s Finest Hour?: Troubling War Discourse through Film Propaganda…………………...35 Chapter 2 Traditions of War Comedy: Comic Alternatives to the “Pleasure Culture of War”……………..88 Chapter 3 “For Christ’s Sake, We’re Surrounded!”: Tragedy, Bleakness, Cynicism and Existentialism in British War Cinema, 1957-1977………………………………………………………………..158 Chapter 4: On Screen and at Arm’s Length: Social Class and the Simulation of Combat…………………207 Chapter 5: The Bomb and After: Britain’s Cold War, Apocalypse, and Fantasies of Lost Control……….277 Conclusion: The Legacy of Failure and Obscurity………………………………………………………..…327 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………...………….349 vi Acknowledgements No massive project is possible without help, support, guidance, and discussion. First, thanks to the University of Pittsburgh for the financial base from which all of this work was possible. This dissertation was written over two fellowship years. Thanks to the Department of English and the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences for a Barbara Nietzsche Tobias Fellowship for A.Y. 2013- 2014, and to the Dietrich School for an Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship for A.Y. 2014- 2015. The Department of English has been especially welcoming. A R&D Grant allowed me to do archival work in England in Spring 2014. This dissertation is the product of an enormous amount of research. Thanks, in the first instance, to the staff of the Hillman Library at the University of Pittsburgh for providing much of the material (as well as a series of desks from which to write). Thanks to Jonny Davies and BFI Special Collections for facilitating access to the Richard Lester and Joseph Losey collections, as well as for answering emails and pointing me to other resources. The staff of the Imperial War Museum was accommodating (despite noisy renovations) and provided me with a wealth of material. The Cambridge University Library provided access to the Cambridge Footlights archives, as well as to rare magazines. Used bookstores and library book sales provided untold inspiration. Many individuals outside of Pittsburgh provided good company, advice, material, and encouragement. Thanks to Paul Sutton and Kevin Jackson for sharing their knowledge and providing lodgings. Samuel J. Umland and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Kearney graciously flew me out to give a talk on material from Chapter 5. The students, faculty, and staff provided great conversation and were a fun audience. Laura Mulvey vii and Sarah Joshi at the Birkbeck Institute of the Moving Image helped coordinate my trip to London and put me in touch with interested film scholars. Christophe van Eecke, Dirk van Extergem, Karel Vanhaesebrouck, and Muriel Andrin organized the “Imagining the Past: Ken Russell, Biography, and the Art of Making History” conference (Brussels, BE, March 19-20, 2014) in conjunction with the Offscreen Film Festival and thereby provided a perfect venue for discussing many of the ideas pertinent to this project. My debts in Pittsburgh are innumerable. Lucy Fischer proved as gracious, pointed, practical, and intellectually sharp an advisor as a student could ask for. Adam Lowenstein, Colin MacCabe, and David Petterson were a fun committee who challenged me on some points, gave good advice (commenting on everything from style to suggestions for whole chapters), and furnished me with many opportunities. Marcia Landy and Jane Feuer’s scholarship has been especially influential to my work. Mark Lynn Anderson, Daniel Morgan, and Nancy Glazener were supportive throughout my time in graduate school. Joseph A. Gomez, my mentor in the M.A. English program at North Carolina State University, helped to inspire many of the threads of inquiry featured in this dissertation. Thanks to my fellow film graduate students at Pitt for the moral support, screenings, jokey conversations, and parties throughout the years. All my friends, from elementary school to today, have inspired me and listened to my film enthusiasms. Special thanks to Kay McLaughlin for her love, patience, and emotional grounding during my long process of writing this dissertation. This project is dedicated to my family, who encouraged my love of books and moving images. Parts of Chapter 4 are scheduled to be published in South Atlantic Review in 2015 as “Displacements and Diversions: Oh! What a Lovely War and the Adaptation of Trauma.” viii Introduction 1. War and Britain: The Mainstream Inheritance In the one hundred years between the late Victorian era and the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister—the decades that saw the meteoric rise of cinema around the world, as well as its gradual decline as a publicly exhibited entertainment in the West—Great Britain was in a state of continuous transition. During this time, the British Empire went from the most powerful supranational entity in the world to a junior player in a standoff between two colossal, ideologically opposed superpowers; went from being a geographically massive group of allied nations, one of the biggest Empires the world had ever seen, to wheezing into the 1980s as a lean parliamentary democracy under an economic pinch (a powerful nation, still, but with less direct influence on the world at large); and went from boasting a modern army and an unsurpassed navy in the 19th century to a small, all-volunteer army by 1980. These sweeping generalizations only give a broad outline of British military and political exploits during this century. From Queen Victoria’s “little wars” of Imperial maintenance (campaigns in India, Russia, and China) in the 19th century, Britain eventually found itself on the front line of The Great War (1914-1918), a stalemated struggle that brought previously unimagined loss of life to the public eye.1 After a period of worldwide economic depression and gradual arms accumulation, a Second World War followed, this time as a response to the conquering antagonisms of fascism (although David Edgerton has recently 1 See Byron Farwell, Queen Victoria’s Little Wars (New York: Norton, 1985). 1 argued that, despite the threat of Nazi aggression, Britain entered the war having spent the previous years enjoying material and mechanical strength relative

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