Film, Media and Music
This chapter explores the 'separate entities' that are Terence Rattigan's play and screenplay, by distinguishing the strength of the theatre Separate Tables, and by trying to locate the distinction and peculiarity of the film, which earned two Oscars in 1959. It shows how some interesting problems of censorship and homosexuality arose in Rattigan's time. The theatrical Separate Tables is a double-hander consisting of 'Table by the Window' and 'Table Number Seven'. 'Table Number Seven' is a play which represents a significant shift in Rattigan's dramaturgy. All Rattigan's success as writer in Separate Tables, the shift in the tectonic plates of British theatre after the Look Back in Anger watershed of 1956 swiftly cast him to the sidelines. The well-spring of Separate Tables is isolation from one's fellow human beings, and there are few plays that manage so effectively to convey the debilitating effects of loneliness.
A number of factors have contributed to the relative neglect of the 1950s as a decade in British cinema history. A major reason for this neglect of the 1950s is that there has been no authoritative, dedicated history of the period of the Rachael Low type. The 1950s is a particularly fascinating decade for the film archivist. Technically speaking there was a lot going on: the end of the nitrate era, the development of wide-screen and novelty formats, the increasing use of colour, advances in sound recording technology, lighter more portable 16mm camera equipment and the coming of television. This chapter focuses on the holdings of the British Film Institute's National Film and TV Archive (NFTVA). The NFTVA has specialised on restoring Technicolor, including some classics of the 1950s: Gone to Earth, The Importance of Being Earnest, Oh, Rosalinda! and The Tales of Hoffman.
Author's time in the film world spanned the crucial decade of change, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. A film critic would be expected to have years of experience, an education in the cinema, a knowledge far beyond the author had in those early days of ignorant enthusiasm. There was real excitement and pleasure over the best films, the surprises, the breakthroughs, the arrival of films from abroad, new trends, new expectations. With flagging attendances, cinemas closed all over the country; small towns no longer had them, so film going became more deliberate, more metropolitan, a treat. Film watching was no longer a communal experience, but something more intimate, whatever the original large subject. The American cinema continued to send us its daily diet, which, for all the developments in life and film-making, seemed more familiar than any other and still gave the screens a high percentage of their protein.
The Sixth Sense, an American film of 1999 from an Indian director, M. Night Shyamalan, with an all-American star, seems a very long way from British cinema of the 1950s. In The Sixth Sense there is an unashamed example of the sensitive relationship between males, adult and child, that figures as so strong a motif in British post-war cinema. This chapter focuses on Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol, Anthony Pélissier's The Rocking Horse Winner, Philip Leacock's The Spanish Gardener, Anthony Asquith's The Winslow Boy and The Browning Version, and Philip Leacock's The Kidnappers. The ancient sport of falconry and the primal experience of gardening feel like lessons in growth in that they contribute to a changing character, but in Billy Elliot ballet functions simply as entertainment for a toe-tapping audience.
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.
Far from being cinematically backward, 1950s British film had dashes of imagination that outdid more famous or prestigious examples from the cinematic canon. In his contribution to this book, Dave Rolinson, particularly in his recovery of the neglected The Horse's Mouth, aptly draws attention to a sharper edge to 1950s British film comedy than is always acknowledged. British film of this period is not often credited with that kind of audacity or comic cheek. The comedy is often characterised as postcard or parochial, with the likeable but limited registers of, say, Henry Cornelius's Genevieve or Basil Dearden's The Smallest Show on Earth being typical of the range. Again a classic image from 1950s British cinema would be Jack Hawkins in The Cruel Sea, the epitome of quiet English integrity.
The Festival of Britain aimed to provide respite from the effects of World War II by celebrating the nation's past achievements in the arts, industry and science, as well as looking hopefully to a future of progress and prosperity. Film was integral to the Festival of Britain. The Festival of Britain seemed a natural place to demonstrate the fruits of British film production. This chapter focuses five of the more high-profile productions: Forward a Century, Air Parade, Waters of Time, Family Portrait and David. The Festival of Britain site in London on the South Bank featured a purpose-built film theatre, the Telekinema, for big-screen public television broadcasts and the showing of specially commissioned Festival films. To discuss the role of film in the Festival, Jack Ralph established the British Film Institute (BFI) Festival of Britain 1951 Panel consisting of prominent members of the British film industry.
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.
Stephen Frears's response to Woman in a Dressing Gown seems laughably inappropriate. Woman in a Dressing Gown is a drama that counterpoints two different kinds of women: if Georgie is the ideal of 1950s femininity, serene, sexually attractive and 'mature', then Amy Preston is its unacceptable face, scatty, scruffy and loud. The most useful touchstone for approaching Woman in a Dressing Gown as a 'proto-feminist' film is Betty Friedan's groundbreaking study of the disparity between the happy housewife image and the malaise and misery that lies beneath it, The Feminine Mystique. The Feminine Mystique often discusses and illuminates exactly the same problems that Woman in a Dressing Gown indirectly hints at or alludes to, through its presentation of the character of Amy. Throughout Woman in a Dressing Gown melodramatic tropes such as the use of lachrymose music are important.
For every 1950s British comedy assimilated into the academic canon, there are many which have fallen into obscurity, reinforcing the alleged disposability of the form. The Horse's Mouth is a fascinating starting point for a discussion of 1950s comedy, because of its treatment of the genre's defining themes: consensus and its breakdown through the alienating individualism of consumerism. It shares key characteristics with such 'canonical' Ealing comedies as The Lavender Hill Mob and The Man in the White Suit. Rather than harking back to wartime collectivism, the decade's comedies are shaped by the general election of 1951, particularly its anti-collectivist sub-texts. The communities of The Titfield Thunderbolt and The Mouse That Roared reflect the triumph of the British spirit over Nazi Germany's unsportingly ruthless professionalism, but their villains, rather than being.