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Jack Hawkins was born on 14 September 1910 and trained at the Italia Conti Academy. Cinema was secondary to Hawkins’s stage work for many years, and he was 42 when he became a film star with Mandy (Alexander Mackendrick 1952). His subsequent image as the square-jawed bastion of all that was decent and British belied a considerable acting range and a gift for dry comedy. Hawkins was awarded the CBE in 1958, and although he lost his entire larynx to throat cancer in 1966, he refused to allow this to halt his career. He died on 18 July 1973. Figure 1 Jack
This book offers a startling re-evaluation of what has until now been seen as the most critically lacklustre period of the British film history. It includes fresh assessment of maverick directors; Pat Jackson, Robert Hamer and Joseph Losey, and even of a maverick critic Raymond Durgnat. The book features personal insights from those inidividually implicated in 1950s cinema; Corin Redgrave on Michael Redgrave, Isabel Quigly on film reviewing, and Bryony Dixon of the BFI on archiving and preservation. A classic image from 1950s British cinema would be Jack Hawkins in The Cruel Sea, the epitome of quiet English integrity. Raymond Durgnat's A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, which deals extensively with British films of the 1950s, was written in the mid-1960s and was published in 1970. In a 1947 article called '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 . 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 book also talks about the Festival of Britain, White Corridors, and four Hamer's post-Ealing films: The Spider and the Fly, The Long Memory, Father Brown and The Scapegoat. A number of factors have contributed to the relative neglect of the 1950s as a decade in British cinema history.
. What home audiences might have been responding to in these films was a proud but restrained Englishness that made a welcome contrast to American brashness. (There is a separate book to be written about the depiction of Americans in British films of that time: some way from a special relationship.) In any case, is it not an oversimplifiation to recall the service portrayal of, say, Jack Hawkins, Richard Todd and Kenneth More
The volume encompasses seventeen chapters, each devoted to an individual actor
who represents a diverse aspect of post-war British cinematic stardom. The
approach is one of a cinephile academic and although the time frame ranges from
the 1940s to the 1980s, the focal point is the 1950s. It was in this decade that
the film industry faced increasing competition from television and the
involvement of Hollywood monies in UK-based pictures. By the end of that period,
the ‘star system’ maintained by the Rank Organisation and Associated British
Picture Corporation (ABPC) was being succeeded by independent productions using
Pinewood and Elstree Studios and censorship was being relaxed. Many actors took
the opportunity to escape, or even transcend, their previous casting limitations
or stereotyping.
Of the subject matter, Jack Hawkins, John Mills, Kenneth
More are ‘senior leads’, Laurence Harvey and Stanley Baker are ‘younger leads’
and the ‘leading ladies’ section contains chapters on Sylvia Syms and Diana
Dors. ‘The comics’ details the work of Norman Wisdom, Terry-Thomas and Leslie
Phillips. The careers of Sidney James, James Robertson Justice, Margaret
Rutherford and Hattie Jacques are considered in terms of the art of the leading
character actor and the work concludes with tributes to Peter Finch and Peter
Sellers.
creation of a mood or evoking a given moment. The fleeting look of complete terror of Lionel Mandrake in Dr. Strangelove , Jack Hawkins’s reaction to being referred to as ‘old darling’ by Nigel Patrick in The League of Gentlemen or Sylvia Syms regarding Laurence Harvey’s jiving in Expresso Bongo with weary resignation. It is such ‘tiny, mysterious interactions’ (Farber 1971 : 145) that demonstrate why such performances can never be merely dismissed as relics of a lost era. Edgar Morin believed that cinema was a work that was ‘aesthetic, that is, destined for a
scheme.34 However, according to Attenborough, it was Jack Hawkins who instigated the idea in collaboration with Dearden who wanted to direct The League of Gentlemen.35 Similar information is also given in Jack Hawkins’s autobiography.36 There is also contradictory evidence regarding the composition of the organisation and its division into partnerships. Walker asserts that five partnerships were originally planned, but Box’s departure reduced this to four. ‘Attenborough and Forbes; Relph and Dearden; Jack Hawkins; and Hawkins’s [unnamed] brother. Guy Green later joined
debut in the war-time film In Which We Serve (Noël Coward and David Lean, 1942), Attenborough’s cinema career developed through acting and later through producing and directing to become one of the industry’s most renowned figures: often regarded as the ‘grand old man’ and ‘the voice’ of British cinema. Attenborough’s entry into production stemmed from a desire to make films that had purpose and social relevance. His teaming with Bryan Forbes in 1959 to form Beaver Films and his later collaboration with Forbes, Basil Dearden, Michael Relph, Jack Hawkins and Guy Green
reasonably ask, is there to say about the likes of Jet Storm (Cy Endfield 1959), in which Baker’s BOAC pilot manages to remain stoic even when confronted with an over-acting Richard Attenborough as a mad bomber? But, aside from the quite incredible cast 1 and a narrative that positively revels in its clichés, the film is significant for the casting of Baker as the captain of a jetliner. He was neither a Dirk Bogarde-style romantic lead or a Jack Hawkins-style father figure, but a ‘tough guy’ who might typically use methods reserved for the villain but put them to a
The Divided Heart because it dealt with some of the human consequences of Auschwitz and might upset audiences, noting that “ The Dam Busters had very adverse comments in the German press”.’ 13 By the time Crichton returned to make his thirteenth and last film for Ealing eighteen months later, the studio had been sold to the BBC, and Balcon, the company and its leafy logo relocated from West London to MGM British Studios, Borehamwood, due north of the capital. The Man in the Sky (1957) The ‘man’ in question was Jack Hawkins, playing test pilot John Mitchell
respect, until at last the treaty was dissolved by Mrs Thatcher’s short, murderous and victorious class war. The Cruel Sea (1952) stands as one eponymous masterpiece at the head of all these films. What is striking about the film is the deliberately prosaic nature of its epic poetry. As the two senior officers on the little ship, so unobtrusively played by Jack Hawkins and Donald Sinden, close in