War Cinema– Or How British Films Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Affluent Society
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1 THE PROFESSIONAL OFFICER CLASS IN POST- WAR CINEMA– OR HOW BRITISH FILMS LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Andrew Roberts College of Business, Arts and Social Sciences of Brunel University 22nd September2014 2 ABSTRACT My central argument is that mainstream British cinema of the 1951 – 1965 period marked the end of the paternalism, as exemplified by a professional ‘officer class’, as consumerism gradually came to be perceived as the norm as opposed to a post-war enemy. The starting point is 1951, the year of the Conservative victory in the General Election and a time which most films were still locally funded. The closing point is 1965, by which point the vast majority of British films were funded by the USA and often featured a youthful and proudly affluent hero. Thus, this fourteen year describes how British cinema moved away from the People as Hero guided by middle class professionals in the face of consumerism. Over the course of this work, I will analyse the creation of the archetypes of post-war films and detail how the impact of consumerism and increased Hollywood involvement in the UK film industry affected their personae. However, parallel with this apparently linear process were those films that questioned or attacked the wartime consensus model. As memories of the war receded, and the Rank/ABPC studio model collapsed, there was an increasing sense of deracination across a variety of popular British cinematic genres. From the beginning of our period there is a number films that infer that the “Myth of the Blitz”, as developed in a cinematic sense, was just that and our period ends with films that convey a sense of a fragmenting society. 3 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Literature Review Methodology Structure of Chapters 4 CHAPTER 1: The British Studio System and Stardom18 CHAPTER 2: Historical Overview 1951 – 1965 CHAPTER 3 – ‘The Chap’: Father Figures 1951- 1965 CHAPTER 4 – ‘The Chap’: Decent Young Types 1951- 1965 CHAPTER 5: 1951 – Setting the scene CHAPTER 6: EMBRACING TINSEL 1953 - 1959 Ealing & Sub-Ealing Comedy – A Retreat into Nostalgia The Rise of the New Elizabethan – Facing the Future with Confidence The Rise of the New Elizabethan – Facing the Future with Confidence CHAPTER 7 BRITISH COMEDY AND THE ART OF SUBERVERSION Absolute Showers – St Trinain’s and Private’s Progress The 1960s and the Decline of ‘Traditional’ Comedy CHAPTER 8: CHAPS IN UNIFORM The War Film & the Professional Officer 5 Adjusting to the Peace - The Last Days of Pax Britannica CHAPTER 9 – Use the Bell, Sergeant – The Police in British Films CHAPTER 10: CAPTURING THE MOOD I’m All Right Jack Room at the Top CHAPTER 11 Social Problem Dramas 1960 - 1963 CHAPTER 12: From ‘Jiving, Drivelling Scum’ to Future Consumers – British Cinema and The Teenager CHAPTER 13: ENGLAND SWINGS? British Cinema and ‘The Scene’ 007 – For Cad and Country CODA – HEAVEN’S ABOVE! 6 CONCLUSION BIBLIOGRAPHY 7 Acknowledgements Without Professor Julian Petley and Dr Leon Hunt, this thesis would not have come to fruition. And without Alison, Maureen, Rhiannon and Sharon I would have neither started nor completed it. 8 INTRODUCTION John Mills, Richard Attenborough, John Gregson, Dirk Bogarde, Donald Sinden…are grown- up boys, trusting, vulnerable, decently worried and ready aye ready. (Durgnat 1970: 142) The genesis of this thesis was the idea that the period of between 1951 and 1965 marked a sea change in the image of the middle class male in British cinema. This work will chart the change from the paternally minded professional whose skills guide society - a legacy of the ‘People as Hero’ model of Second World War cinema - to an isolated, anachronistic or even criminal figure. At the beginning of the 1950s Roy Lewis and Angus Maude described the English middle classes as providing ‘most of the nation’s brains, leadership and organising ability’ (1950: 337). For much of the 1950s, a range of popular British cinematic genres – comedy, war and detective drama – were apparently dominated by well-spoken senior professional. These figures would often arrive in their black Wolseley1 - or who inspired their chaps to win the war. Their young subordinates would, in turn, willingly accept the verbal abuse issued by bearded curmudgeons. By the end of the 1950s in the face of consumer affluence ‘the high summer of a middle class cinema’ (Durgnat 1976:1) was coming to an end as seen in the mainstream of British films. In the planning and execution of this thesis I have borne in mind the wise words of Arthur Marwick - ‘we think readily in decades but that is only because we count the years as we would our fingers or our toes’ (1998: 5). Thus, a 14 year period bordered by the last year of the Attlee government – and the development of the ‘Swinging London myth’ has been chosen with some deliberation. This period encompassed a substantial growth of consumerism, the collapse of the country’s illusions in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis and the rise of ‘youth culture’, which I will detail in Chapter 12. I have concentrated on the genres that directly related to the topic in hand – war films, comedies, police drama and youth films - to describe how they moved from pictures constructed of ‘imaginary bonds which work to hold the peoples of a nation together’ (Higson 1984: 26), guided by senior professionals, to those films apparently celebrating youthful individualism. Throughout my work, I will be describing how various determinants shaped the 9 films discussed – government initiatives, censorship1 and financial pressures. The majority of these pictures were created under the auspices of an elaborate studio system but by the end of the 1950s, the decline in cinematic audiences had resulted in Rank and ABPC scaling down their roster of in-house actors and directors. As Roy Armes observed: Whereas in 1950 there were less than 400,000 licences, by 1959 this had grown to over 9m…During the same period, the cinema audience and the number of cinemas both fell sharply. In 1950 an audience measuring 1,396m visited 4,483 cinemas. By 1959 this had diminished to about 600m attendances and only 3,414 cinemas. (1978: 239) From the late 1950s, there were a number of films helmed by directors previously assumed as being from the mainstream of cinema that displayed a society that was becoming neither in need of nor beyond the control of paternal control. Figures of apparent probity were often perceived as more flawed than hitherto and by the 1960s, senior professionals seemed increasingly marginalised or even corrupt as memories of the war rescinded. The increased use of external production companies and sense of increased freedom from studio control coalesced with a more liberal regime at the British Board of Film Censors introduced in 1958. That is the major thrust of my thesis but it is first essential to define my terms, not least ‘mainstream’; I use this to describe films made for commercial release during our period. This may sound excessively pedantic but a major part of my thesis is how, even within the tightest of budgetary and creative restrictions, British films could and did question the status quo –even in the form of a seemingly innocuous comedy, such as Genevieve (Henry Cornelius 1953). It was also mainstream cinema of this period that produced Stanley Baker, British cinema’s first young working class leading man. The film critic Roger Manvell categorised cinema into three distinct strata. There was the ‘high film’ that enthused creative professionals and film critic alike, the ‘low film’ in the form of the ‘programme filler’ and ‘the middle film’ which was a box office staple and offered ‘sound entertainment without demanding too much or too little of the audience’s sensibilities’ (1947:10). It is the ‘middle film’, the type of picture associated with mainstream British cinema that will predominate in my thesis for, as Robert Murphy argued: 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 10 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. (1997:1) 1 The British Board of Film Censors came into being in 1913 as a self-regulating body without any formal legal status in order to prevent the imposition of censorship by central government. (Robertson 1989:1) 11 This is why the study of ABPC or Rank studio productions, the commercially popular MGM- British comedy-thrillers and certain long-running B-film series is as valuable as the study of Woodfall Films. Towards the end of the decade it was not Free Cinema but two long established commercial filmmakers who made the most scathing and angry pictures of our period in I’m All Right Jack (John Boulting 1959) and Room at the Top (Jack Clayton 1959). Part of the raison d’etre behind my work is a reappraisal of the genres that seemingly asserted solidity and the status quo in the first half of our period – war, police and comedy. Charles Barr referred the period 1952 – 1958 as ‘an extraordinary dead one’ (1993: 146) and Jeffrey Richards described mainstream cinema of this period in terms of: the war films that relived old glories, the Norman Wisdom comedies that trod in the footsteps of George Formby, the anemic 'international' epics which aimed futilely to break into the American market and which misused the sensitive talents of such stars as Dirk Bogarde and Peter Finch.