The Great Ealing Film Challenge by Keith M. Johnston

A frame capture from Mandy (Alexander Mackendrick, 1952).
Read Keith M. Johnston's assessment of this film, and Pam Cook's

Today, a rather thrilled Film Studies For Free brings you news that Keith M. Johnston's truly 'Great Ealing Film Challenge' has reached its noble conclusion.

Johnston is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia. His research focuses on the interplay of technology, aesthetics and industry in British film of the 1940s and 1950s, with particular interests in issues of colour, widescreen and 3-D.

He is the author of Coming Soon: Film Trailers and the Selling of Hollywood Technology (McFarland 2009) and Science Fiction Fillm: A Critical Introduction (Berg 2011). He has also published on Ealing's colour aesthetic. You can follow him on Twitter and at the Huffington Post, as well as at his own website.

An ex-resident of Ealing, Keith has always been fascinated by Ealing Studios and its place in British cinema, both past and present. The 'Great Ealing Film Challenge' has been his attempt to better understand the films the studio produced, and what they can tell us about that period in British film history.

Just over a year ago, Keith wrote at his website about his (then) proposed experiment as follows:

[This blog has] decided to conduct its own obscure 80th anniversary celebration... and attempt to watch all of the Ealing Studios films.

Of course, there are some provisos - the list of 95 films I am working from comes from Charles Barr's Ealing Studios book, and is therefore focused entirely on the Michael Balcon years (1938-59). Given the difficulty of seeing much of the studio's output (either before 1938 or, in some cases, after), seeing all of those 95 is already something of a challenge (they're not all available on DVD ). [...]

The order in which I watch the films is largely going to be decided at whim [...] - the initial batch will include some of the well-known titles (commentary on Went the Day Well? and The Man in the White Suit will likely appear in the first week) and those lesser known titles that I realise I've never seen (the likes of The Love Lottery (1954), Nine Men (1943), The Feminine Touch (1954) and Train of Events (1950).

To celebrate the rather impressive achievement of blogging on all 95 films within a year, FSFF brings you not one, but two lists of links to Keith's highly informative and engaging entries! The first comes in the order in which Keith wrote them and the second has been organised alphabetically by year of release.

There will be much more forthcoming from Keith on Ealing Studios' films. He has also been working on co-editing Ealing Revisited with Mark Duguid, Lee Freeman, and Melanie Williams. This major collection will be published by BFI-Palgrave later in 2012, tying in with the BFI's major retrospective of Ealing Studios in November/December 2012.

Oh, and don't forget FSFF's earlier post on Ealing comedy films here.

Well done and thank you, Keith! Surely there should be a wee dram as a reward? At any rate, FSFF hopes you enjoy your readers' gratitude galore!

Prologue: The Great Ealing Film Challenge


Went the Day Well? (1943); Train of Events (1949); A Run for your Money (1949); Fiddlers Three (1944); The Love Lottery (1954); The Cruel Sea (1953); The Long Arm (1956); Nine Men (1943); Nicholas Nickleby (1947); Trouble Brewing (1939); The Magnet (1950); The Ship That Died of Shame (1955); Against the Wind (1948); Another Shore (1948); The Black Sheep of Whitehall (1942); The Ghost of St. Michael’s (1941); Dead of Night (1945); The Feminine Touch (1956); The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953); The Man in the White Suit (1951); The Gentle Gunman (1952); Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945); Saloon Bar (1940); The Next of Kin (1942); The Gaunt Stranger (1938); San Demetrio, London (1943); Where No Vultures Fly (1951); West of Zanzibar (1954); They Came to a City (1944); Return to Yesterday (1940); Lease of Life (1954); Johnny Frenchman (1945); Ships with Wings (1941); Davy (1957); Touch and Go (1955); Spare a Copper (1940); Turned Out Nice Again (1941); Come on George (1939); Whisky Galore! (1949); Let George Do It (1940); Dunkirk (1958); Who Done It? (1956); My Learned Friend (1943); The Captive Heart (1946); The Blue Lamp (1950); Sailor’s Three (1940); The Goose Steps Out (1942); The Halfway House (1944); The Square Ring (1953); The Foreman Went to France (1942); The Bells Went Down (1943); Champagne Charlie (1944); Bitter Springs (1950); The Overlanders (1946); Pool of London (1951); The Rainbow Jacket (1954); The Lavender Hill Mob (1951); The Shiralee (1957); For Those in Peril (1944); The Proud Valley (1940); The Ladykillers (1955); The Siege of Pinchgut (1959); Meet Mr Lucifer (1953); Secret People (1952); The Big Blockade (1942); Out of the Clouds (1955); Cheer Boys Cheer (1939); The Maggie (1953); Undercover (1943); The Four Just Men (1939); Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948); The Loves of Joanna Godden (1947); It Always Rains on Sunday (1947); Cage of Gold (1950); Frieda (1947); The Night My Number Came Up (1955); Hue [&] Cry (1947); Let’s Be Famous (1939); There Ain’t No Justice (1939); Eureka Stockade (1949); Painted Boats (1945); Barnacle Bill (1958); I Believe in You (1952); Dance Hall (1950); Convoy (1940); Scott of the Antarctic (1948); The Man in the Sky (1957); Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949; Young Man’s Fancy (1939); Mandy (1952); The Divided Heart (1954); His Excellency (1952); The Ware Case (1938); Nowhere to Go (1958); Passport to Pimlico (1949)

1938:
The Gaunt Stranger; The Ware Case

1939:
Cheer Boys Cheer; Come on George; Let’s Be Famous; The Four Just Men; There Ain’t No Justice ; Trouble Brewing; Young Man’s Fancy

1940:
Convoy; Let George Do It; Return to Yesterday ; Sailor’s Three ; Saloon Bar ; Spare a Copper; The Proud Valley

1941:
Ships with Wings; The Ghost of St. Michael’s; Turned Out Nice Again ;

1942:
The Big Blockade; The Black Sheep of Whitehall; The Foreman Went to France; The Goose Steps Out; The Next of Kin

1943:
My Learned Friend; Nine Men; San Demetrio, London; The Bells Went Down; Undercover; Went the Day Well? 

1944:
Champagne Charlie; Fiddlers Three; For Those in Peril; Fiddlers Three; The Halfway House; They Came to a City

1945:
Dead of Night; Johnny Frenchman; Painted Boats; Pink String and Sealing Wax 

1946:
The Captive Heart; The Overlanders

1947:
Frieda; Hue&Cry; It Always Rains on Sunday; Nicholas Nickleby; The Loves of Joanna Godden

1948:
Against the Wind; Another Shore; Saraband for Dead Lovers; Scott of the Antarctic

1949:
A Run for your Money; Eureka Stockade; Kind Hearts and Coronets; Passport to Pimlico; Train of Events; Whisky Galore!

1950:
Bitter Springs; Cage of Gold; Dance Hall; The Blue Lamp; The Magnet

1951:
Pool of London; The Lavender Hill Mob; The Man in the White Suit; Where No Vultures Fly

1952:
His Excellency; I Believe in You; Mandy; Secret People; The Gentle Gunman

1953:
Meet Mr Lucifer; The Cruel Sea; The Maggie; The Square Ring; The Titfield Thunderbolt

1954:
Lease of Life; The Divided Heart; The Love Lottery; The Rainbow Jacket; West of Zanzibar

1955:
Out of the Clouds; The Ladykillers; The Night My Number Came Up; The Ship That Died of Shame; Touch and Go

1956:
The Feminine Touch; The Long Arm; Who Done It?

1957:
Davy; The Man in the Sky; The Shiralee

1958:
Barnacle Bill; Dunkirk; Nowhere to Go

1959:
The Siege of Pinchgut

Laughing at Austerity Britain? Ealing Comedy Studies

The year 1949 was a pretty miserable time in Britain. Postwar austerity was at its height. Many city centres were still largely bomb sites. The cold war was getting chillier. The British film industry was in crisis after the Labour government had imposed a punitive tax on American films, which led to Hollywood studios withholding their product. Then suddenly, in the early summer, three pictures opened on consecutive weeks that together defined what we now know as "the Ealing comedy". The films got darker and Ealing Studios' reputation greater as the month wore on. [Philip French, 'Whisky Galore - Review', The Observer, July 31, 2011]

[Michael] Powell after A Matter of Life and Death gives us three intriguing variations on the trauma picture, in which, intertwined are the central landmarks of British life after 1945: the end of war, the end of empire and the birth of a new consumer age.
       Before that, however, we should note that Ealing comedy of the period inverts the trauma film completely.
       If Ealing Studios produced the keynote Dead of Night, it also produced a triple antithesis in the post-war years: anti-trauma comedy in the form of [Robert] Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and Alexander Mackendrick’s scintillating double act, Whisky Galore (1949) and The Ladykillers (1955). Indeed, the best of Ealing comedy is premised very precisely on this inversion, where what might well be traumatic turns out to be the exact opposite.
       Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets is biting social satire, in which the serial killer, Louis (Dennis Price), as outcast of the family and excluded by the vacuous rich, is more sympathetic than any of his eccentric aristo victims (all played by Alec Guinness). As they fall like ninepins one after the other, we can all have a good laugh and applaud Louis’ elegant cunning. A perfect picture, you could argue, for a new social democracy.
       The wartime Whisky Galore, set on the remote island of Todday (toddy?), also plays on inversion: this time on the fear of occupation – an anti-The Next of Kin (Thorold Dickinson, 1942) or Went the Day Well? In Mackendrick’s film, the fear of invasion is now past but the Scottish island is ‘occupied’ by an English Home Army captain, Waggert (Basil Radford), who has marshalled customs officials to try and prevent the looting of a wrecked cargo ship carrying whisky. It is a comic version of Anglo-Scots antagonism, with its famous montage sequence of the looted alcohol being hidden by the islanders in rain-butts, water tanks, hot-water bottles and under a baby’s cot before bemused officials arrive to discover absolutely nothing. The gradual social exclusion of Waggert from the island has an edge and a cruel streak that prevents any lapse into sentimentality.
       Sentimentality is equally absent from The Ladykillers, where Mackendrick completely inverts the trauma-effects of Gothic expressionism. A motley gang of train robbers posing as a musical ensemble takes lodgings near Kings Cross station to prepare the next heist. At the landlady’s door, the figure of Professor Marcus (Alec Guinness) casts a dark shadow – shades of the opening to The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (Alfred Hitchcock, 1927) – but thereafter the threat becomes internal as the eccentric old landlady ([Katie Johnson]), in her parody of a haunted house, has the gang tearing their hair out in annoyance and frustration at her blithe eccentricities. In Gothic melodrama, we expect villains to terrify, but here they are traumatised to the extent that, when found out, they are prepared to kill off each other rather than kill the ‘harmless’ old landlady. She who should be terrified is oblivious to the threat; those who should terrify show a collective failure of nerve and eliminate each other instead. Gothic melodrama morphs into dark comedy. And Ealing comedy runs happily on in a parallel world to David Lean and Michael Powell. [John Orr, 'The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009 ]

Ealing Studios, the oldest continuously working film studio in the world, is marking its 80th anniversary, according to a couple of enjoyable videos at the Channel 4 and BBC websites. A remarkable achievement, indeed, thinks Film Studies For Free, one of the finest in the history of British cinema.

Founded in economically austere and politically troubled times, the studios escaped relatively unscathed from the recent riots in London (Ealing was a particularly tragically affected area). They seem set to continue to produce their distinctly transnational brand of cinematic goods for the UK film industry well into the future. 

The current anniversary of the establishment of the sound stages at Ealing, and a number of other connected anniversaries coming up (e.g. 2012 marks the 100th anniversary of the Scottish-American director Alexander Mackendrick’s birth, one of Britain’s greatest, and most undervalued, filmmakers) have felicitously 'coincided' with the latest cinematic and DVD release of three of the greatest products of those studios: the Ealing comedies Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951), and Whisky Galore (Mackendrick, 1949).

FSFF loves a mildly subversive chuckle from time to time, and is particularly partial, thus, to a good Ealing comedy. So, in fond celebration of that wonderful cycle of movies, below is its little list of links to online studies of those films, as well as to other items of related, scholarly interest.

• Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, 'Cul-de-Sac England: The Ladykillers', From Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999)

• Charles Barr, 'Projecting Britain and the British Character': Ealing Studios, Part I ', originally Screen, 15(1) 1974

• Charles Barr, 'Projecting Britain and the British Character: Ealing Studios, Part II', originally Screen, 15(2), 1974

• BFI Screenonline Resources on Ealing Comedy

• Michael William Boyce, 'Re-imagining the War in British Film, 1945-1955', PhD Thesis, University of Manitoba, April 2007

• Susan Condor, 'Temporality and collectivity: Diversity, history and the rhetorical constructionof national entitativity', British Journal of Social Psychology, 45, 2006

• Paul Cronin, [Excellent Alexander Mackendrick Resources], The Sticking Place

• Ealing Studios Website

• John Ellis, 'Made in Ealing', originally Screen, 16(1), 1975

• Steven Fielding, 'A Mirror for England? Cinematic Representations of Politicians and Party Politics, circa 1944–1964', Journal of British Studies, 47:1 (2008)

• Murray Grigor, 'Whisky Galore!', From From Limelight to Satellite (BFI, 1991)

• Philip Kemp, The long shadow: Robert Hamer after Ealing', in Ian McKillop and Neil Sinyard (eds), British cinema of the 1950s: a celebration (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003)

• Anthony Lane, 'No Illusions', The New Yorker, 31 January 1994

• Ian McKillop and Neil Sinyard (eds), British cinema of the 1950s: a celebration (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003)

• Geoffrey O’Brien, 'Great Scot [on Alexander Mackendrick]'. Art Forum, September 2005

• John Orr, 'The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009 

• Dave Rolinson, ‘If they want culture, they pay’: consumerism and alienation in 1950s comedies', in Ian McKillop and Neil Sinyard (eds), British cinema of the 1950s: a celebration (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003)

• Routledge student resource website on Ealing Studios with downloadable chapter (PDF) on Ealing and on British film comedy

• Amy Sargeant, 'The Man in the White Suit: New Textiles and the Social Fabric', Visual Culture in Britain (June, 2008)

• Nora Sayre, 'This American Mastered British Humour', The New York Times, 6 January 1985

• Neil Sinyard, 'Mirth, Malevolence, Murder: The Ealing Comedies of Alexander Mackendrick', From Essays in Honour of Peter Davidson (1985)

• Gillian Skirrow,' Rediffusing Britain', Marxism Today, March 1983

• Paul Taylor, 'Making Waves', The Movie, 1980

• 'Vision of great Ealing power: Alexander Mackendrick', Obituary, The Guardian (1959-2003); Dec 27, 1993 

• John Wakeman, 'Alexander Mackendrick', World Film Directors, Volume II (1988), edited by John Wakeman

• Colin Waters, 'One More with Ealing', Sunday Herald, 20 June 1994

• Nigel Watson, 'Carry on Ealing', Talking Pictures, (date unknown)

• John West, 'Seasick on the Serpentine: Englishness, otherness and consensus in Passport to Pimlico', Screening the Past, March 2000

• Wicked Lady website on Ealing Studios

• Leila Wimmer, The French reception of British cinema, PhD Thesis,  University of Warwick, 2006 

vvv

Charles Barr, Ealing Studios (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)

On "England" and "Englishness" in British Cinema and Television

Updated July 27, 2010

Image from Went the Day Well? (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1942)

Film Studies For Free was recently very inspired by Nick James's wonderful overview of the career of Brazilian Alberto Cavalcanti for next month's Sight and Sound magazine. As a huge fan of Cavalcanti's work, and in particular of his (and Ealing's) Went the Day Well? (indeed, FSFF's author lives in a English village uncannily like that portrayed in this film), it immediately set about researching a list of links to online scholarly works on the Brazilian filmmaker, only to discover very few openly accessible ones in English (do check out, though, Kristin Thompson and David Cairn's essays on Went the Day Well?, and the latter's other postings on Cavalcanti here, here, here, here, and here).

FSFF's author's rage at this overall lack of anglophone material (see the photographic evidence above) was eventually sublimated in a different curatorial project, one still connected to themes at the heart of Cavalcanti's work, and also to some related topics explored in further August 2010 Sight and Sound articles (ones sadly not [yet] online: William Fowler's 'Absent authors: Folk in artist film', and Rob Young's 'The pattern under the plough').

Anyhow, below you will find the fruit of this inspiration and frustration: a list of links to thoughtful and thought-provoking international scholarship on expressions of "England" and (multifarious) "Englishness" in (mostly) British cinema and television.

• José Arroyo, 'The films of Isaac Julien: Look back and talk black', Jump Cut, no. 36, May 1991

• Victoria Ball, 'Female identity and the British female ensemble drama 1995-1998', PhD thesis. Queen Margaret University, 2007

• Charles Barr, 'Projecting Britain and the British Character: Ealing Studios, Part II', originally Screen, 15(2), 1974

• Alexandra Lynn Barron, 'Postcolonial Unions: The Queer National Romance in Film and Literature', PhD Thesis, University of Texas at Austin, May 2005

• Joe Brooker, 'England's Screening', Film-Philosophy, 3.10, 1999

• Stuart Duncan Brown, 'Uses of Laughter in the Cinematic Representation of the British Working-Class', PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, December 2007

• Charlotte Brunsdon, 'The Poignancy of Place: London and the Cinema', Visual Culture in Britain, Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2004 , pp. 59-73

• Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘A fine and private place’: the cinematic spaces of the London Underground' Screen 2006 47: 1-17

• Katherine Byrne, '“Such a fine, close weave”: Gender, Community and the Body in Cranford (2007)', Neo-Victorian Studies, 2.2, Winter 2009/2010

• Elizabeth de Cacqueray, 'New Slants on Gender and Power Relations in British Second World War Films', Miranda, No. 2, 2010

• Mónica Calvo Pascual, 'My Beautiful Laundrette: Hybrid "Identity", or the Paradox of Conflicting Identifications in "Third Space" Asian-British Cinema of the 1980s', Miscelánea: a journal of english and american studies 26 (2002): pp. 59-70

• E. Anna Claydon, ‘Nostalgia in the Post-National: Contemporary British Cinema and the South-Asian Diaspora’, South Asian Cultural Studies,Vol.2 No.1, 2008, pp 26 - 38

• Robin Cohen, ' Fuzzy Frontiers of Identity: The British Case', Social Identities Vol 1. No. 1 1995, 35−62

• Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy, 'Filmic Representations of the British Raj in the 1980s: Cultural Identity, Otherness and Hybridity', PhD Thesis, Universidad de Zaragoza, March 2009

• Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy, 'Everything You Always Hated about Thatcher's Britain: A Cultural Analysis of Mike Leigh's High Hopes', Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, 28, 2003

• Josephine Dolan, 'Englishness: Heroes, heroines and reciprocal encounters', Identity, Self and Symbolism, Volume 1.2 November 2006

• Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, ‘Seeing white: female whiteness and the purity of children in Australian, British and Chinese visual culture’, Social Semiotics, 10:2, 2000, 157-171

• Gillian Dow, 'Lady Bathurst’s Patriotic Ballroom, or “Reading Austen at a Distance”: The French Revolutionary Wars in Recent Adaptations ', Persuasions-Online, Vol. 28, No. 2, 2008

• Geoff Eley, 'Finding the People's War: Film, British Collective Memory and World War II', American Historical Review, 105, 5 (June 2001), 818-838

• Steven Fielding , 'A mirror for England? Cinematic representations of politicians and party politics during the ‘golden age’ of party, c. 1944-64', The First Annual International Conference on Minor Parties, Independent Politicians, Voter Associations and Political Associations in Politics, University of Birmingham, 2007

• Thaïs Flores Nogueira Diniz, 'Representation and Identity: Shakespeare in the Forties', Estudos Anglo Americanos 17-18 (1993-94)

• Andrew Higson, 'Transnational developments in European cinema in the 1920s',Transnational Cinemas Volume 1, Number 1, 2010

• Justin Hindmarsh, 'British Cinema - Style and Context: An Examination of British "New Wave" Films', Discussion Papers in Mass Communications, University of Leicester, January 1997

• Elena Von Kassel, 'An Image of Britain during the Second World War: The films of Humphrey Jennings (1939-1945)',  Revue LISA/LISA e-journal [Online], Vol. IV - n°3 | 2006

• Frank Leishman, 'From Dock Green to Life on Mars: Continuity and Change in TV Copland', University of Gloucestershire Inaugural Lecture No 1, 2008

• Melinda Lewis, 'Renegotiating Britishness through Comedy television', Master Thesis, Graduate College of Bowling Green State University, August 2009

• Chris Louttit, 'Cranford, Popular Culture, and the Politics of Adapting the Victorian Novel for Television', Adaptation, (2009) 2 (1): 34-48

• Robert Mayer, 'Not Adaptation by ‘Drifting’: Patrick Keiller, Daniel Defoe, and the Relationship between Film and Literature', Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Volume 16, Issue 4, 2004

• Michael McCluskey, 'Amateur Film and the Interwar English Countryside', Scope, Using Moving Image Archives, Edited by Nandana Bose and Lee Grieveson, Issue 17, June 2010

• José I. Prieto Arranz, 'Images of English purity: A comparative study of Elizabeth I and Diana, Princess of Wales', Identity, Self and Symbolism, Volume 1.2 November 2006 (scroll to p. 116)

• Cornelis Martin Renes, 'Whose New World? Derek Jarman’s Subversive Vision of The Tempest (1979)', BELLS, 17, 2008

• Josh Romphf , '“Invention in the Name of Community”: Workshops, the Avant-Garde and The Black Audio Film Collective', Kino: The Western Undergraduate Journal of Film Studies, Vol. 1 [2010], Iss. 1

• Pave Skopal, 'DVD marketing in U.S. of Working Title's British romantic comedies: Framing reception and strategies of cultural appropriation', Jump Cut, No. 48, winter 2006

• John C. Tibbetts, 'Between the Map and the Painted Landscape: Kevin Brownlow’s Historical Films',  PREPRINT at Kansas University Repository: Historical Journal of Film, Radio, Television, June 2000. 20(2): 227-251

• Rosie White, 'Englishness and espionage: Edith Cavell as the good spy', Identity, and Symbolism, Volume 1.2 November 2006 (scroll to p. 129)

• Jonathan Wright, 'Rereading the British Social Realist Film: Samantha Lay's British Social Realism', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 8 No. 4, January 2003