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version of the Tough Guy has negotiated this era and found new ways of successfully mutating. Dyer’s approach occasionally tends towards the broad-brush and often uses Hollywood as a paradigm for its exemplars. Work by scholars within British cinema history such as Bruce Babington ( 2001 ) and Andrew Spicer ( 2001 ) has suggested that while the concept of a star typology is useful
features of the British cinema industry that resonate to this day. In 1913 the cinema industry established the British Board of Film Censors in response to concerted criticism of the cinema’s influence on public taste. The First World War and the associated conflicts in Europe saw the hegemony of US films established and consolidated in the post-war period through the establishment of the vertically integrated Hollywood studio
Introduction ‘It might reasonably be contended that Humphrey Jennings is the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced’, wrote Lindsay Anderson in the early 1950s.1 Jennings’ friend and colleague, the poet and socio logist Charles Madge, said that Jennings’ work had a ‘meteoric quality’.2 The cultural and media theorist Stuart Hall, who became professor of sociology at the University of Birmingham, a position earlier filled by Madge, called Jennings a ‘film-maker of extraordinary talent – one of the very few authentic exponents of cinematic language
Comfort might have established himself more firmly in the field of British cinema production if he had followed up his success with Hatter’s Castle by several more films in a similar vein. Instead, among its successors during the remaining war years, only the 1945 film, Great Day, a surprisingly abrasive drama of village life, in part recalls the melodramatic mode in which Comfort had made his
Peter Sellers was born in Southsea, Hampshire on 8 September 1925 and died in London on 24 July 1980. Sellers rose to fame in The Goon Show , achieved international stardom as Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther (Blake Edwards 1963) and was nominated for an Oscar for Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick 1964) and Being There (Hal Ashby 1980). His main legacy is his leading character performances, both comic and dramatic, for British cinema. Figure 16 Peter Sellers in Doctor Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964
Attenborough as producer: Beaver Films and Allied Film Makers 2 The start of Richard Attenborough’s career as a filmmaker began during the 1950s, a decade which was his most prolific as an actor but one in which the British cinema entered a period of stagnation. The sharing of his concerns with fellow actor Bryan Forbes resulted in their decision to take control over their films by forming their own production company, Beaver Films. Forbes explained: ‘The need to have a professional partnership stemmed from a growing and shared dissatisfaction with the state of
in the far background. I want to begin by asking: what are we meant to make of these images of urban scenery? One interpretation would be that the film’s opening uses real locations in exactly the kind of way that critics like Perkins so despised. The terraced houses, in particular, would appear to support this view and could easily be considered to be the kind of directorially ostentatious yet stylistically shallow use of location that was so vilified in ‘The British Cinema’. Andrew Higson later developed this idea further when he suggested that the problems
artists from using the halls as platforms for more subversive views – such an august institution as the BBC managed to accommodate the maverick talents of Tommy Handley, the Goons and Mort Sahl, not to mention punk rock. 5 In the late 1940s, the cinema’s debt to the music hall was evident in the Mancunian comedies and the Old Mother Riley series. Both were distinctive forms of British cinema, though their proletarian character
explore these more fully with a discussion of the authorial figure who is central to the film at all levels. Ken Loach, policy and the importing of national cinema Ken Loach occupies a singular place in the British film industry, where he is one of the last practitioners of overtly politically engaged social realism. He also occupies a distinct place in British cinema historiography, where his work has for some become associated with a certain ideal of national cinema production. Hill describes the director’s continuing importance in the 1990s (nearly thirty years after
A NUMBER OF factors have contributed to the relative neglect of the 1950s as a decade in British cinema history. It was a complex and unhappy decade in England and its films appear to have little contiguity or popular profile. The conventional back-of-a-postage-stamp view of British cinema history takes a strange skip and a jump when it comes to the 1950s. Much is made of the