In 'Angles of Approach', Lindsay Anderson delivered a fierce attack on contemporary British film culture, outlining a model for a devoted politics of creation, well in line with what we would later understand as auteurism and art cinema aesthetics. Anderson was one of the editors of the journal Sequence, a continuation of the Oxford University Film Society magazine, along with, from time to time, for instance, Gavin Lambert, Penelope Houston and Karel Reisz. Auteurism and art cinema, for good and for bad, came to dominate the European cinema after the 1950s. For bad, it possibly caused, as Angus Finney claims in The State of European Cinema, disastrous financial decline in comparison to the American cinema. For good, it created some of the greatest cinematic masterpieces.

At the very end of Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg presents us with a screen-filling view of the Stars and Stripes. Michael Powell's and Emeric Pressburger's wonderful inauguration of a small cinematic epoch of war films is, of course, A Matter of Life and Death. The war films of the 1950s together constitute the assented-to record of the emotions and moral judgments called upon to set in order those disorderly events. The 1950s films, with remarkable grace and celerity, dramatised and taught the same lessons within the family frame of the English at war. From the vantage point not only of the victors but of human emancipation at large, the retelling of the defeat of fascism makes for stories with plot, point, moral grip and a powerful ending. Its constituents are to be found in the English war films of the 1950s.

Robert Hamer's episode, 'The Haunted Mirror', locates him on the shadow side of Ealing, in the maverick strain that included Alberto Cavalcanti and Alexander Mackendrick. This chapter focuses on four Hamer's post-Ealing films: The Spider and the Fly, The Long Memory, Father Brown and The Scapegoat. Kind Hearts and Coronets confirmed Hamer as one of the most individual of British directors, only four years after his directorial debut. For his next film, Hamer embarked on an adaptation of The Shadow and the Peak, a novel by Richard Mason. He was even willing to reconsider The Shadow and the Peak, scheduling it among Ealing's forthcoming projects, and meantime Hamer was assigned to a filmed play, His Excellency. Throughout Hamer's later films he explores the Jekyll-and-Hyde theme of a man pitted against his doppelgänger, a person whom he opposes but feels tempted to resemble.

The story of British film censorship is inextricably linked with the system of censorship operated by the Lord Chamberlain over stage productions and the theatre. Both the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) and the Lord Chamberlain's Office employed a process of censorship which depended as much on the application of pre-production scrutiny as it did on post-production review. Moreover, both regularly informed each other of their respective activities and followed a policy of 'keeping in step'. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of Terence Young's 1959 film, Serious Charge. The genesis of this film lay in Philip King's play of the same name which was first presented for consideration to the Lord Chamberlain's Office in March 1953 with an anticipated presentation date of November that year.

Ralph Thomas's A Tale of Two Cities of 1958 occupies a secure if modest place among that bunch of 1950s British releases based on novels by Charles Dickens, including Brian Desmond Hurst's Scrooge and Noel Langley's The Pickwick Papers. Ralph Thomas's film of A Tale of Two Cities was released in the tense atmosphere of the Cold War. The influence of A Tale of Two Cities on film-makers was clear and is very marked in D.W. Griffith's Orphans of the Storm of 1921. A Tale of Two Cities certainly has its weaknesses, including the notorious Dickensian melodrama, sentimentality and theatricality of dialogue. A Tale of Two Cities was filmed several times, in silent and talkie versions, and frequently serialised on BBC radio and television. Arthur Benjamin's opera A Tale of Two Cities was premièred in 1950 and broadcast by BBC television in 1958.