Balcon, Ealing, and Institutional Identity

As head of Ealing Studios, Michael Balcon routinely told a story about the studio that cohered with the narratives of the films it made, and helped shape the way those films were received.

Michael Balcon sitting in his office at Ealing Studios in 1952 (Whittington/Popperfoto)

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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal developments.

Content warning: Antisemitism.

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I am currently in the process of finishing an article about Passport to Pimlico, Ealing Studios, comedy, and post-war Britain. This is well-trodden ground, but what (I hope!) is innovative about my approach is a focus on both the development of the film from concept to screen through different stages of production, and the subsequent public interpretation of the film by both the film’s makers and its reviewers. I’ve already covered some of this ground in previous posts for this newsletter:

Passport to Pimlico (1949)

‘It Laughs with and at the English’

This process of narrative and metanarrative-building need to be understood as part of a broader twofold process in play at Ealing under the leadership of Michael Balcon, who was head of the studio from 1938 until the final films were released under the Ealing brand in the late 1950s. Under Balcon, Ealing focused predominantly (though not solely) on making films about contemporary Britain, with a socially realist dimension, firstly with a principal focus on the Second World War as it was being fought, and subsequently shifting its attention to a wider array of subject matter, albeit among which socially concerned comedies and dramas were especially preeminent. Again, I have previously written about the generic and narrative dimensions of Ealing’s core output for this newsletter too:

Ealing Plots (Part I)

Ealing Plots (Part II)

The thematic and ideological continuities in this output were shaped by Ealing’s particular collective working structure, in which Balcon was an integral figure. This takes us onto the second component of Ealing’s storytelling, which I want to talk about in this post, which is the way the studio – and Balcon in particular – told a story through the press (and other avenues) about Ealing itself, as an institution and cast of characters, and its place both within British cinema as a national artform, and within Britain as a nation. Indeed, as I’ll highlight below, this story was frequently and deliberately analogous to and symbiotic with the stories being told in Ealing’s films at the same time.

Ealing at war

In her survey of Balcon’s own personal archive, Janet Moat argued that, with the outbreak of war a year after he had taken over at Ealing, Balcon was eager for British film production to avoid the problems that had beset it during the First World War, enabling Hollywood to irreversibly dominate the British domestic market, and tried unsuccessfully to persuade the new Ministry of Information to rationalise the industry.

During the war, Balcon was keener to make films based on original stories rather than adaptations, and that could appeal to US audiences, in part to persuade them to support the British war effort. He exercised extensive control over the production process at Ealing, and even while inevitably having to outsource work, monitored all details of film production. Balcon paid particular attention to audience and critical reception and stressed the importance of film beyond its mere ‘commodity’ value. He also continued to work on behalf of small producers, while opposing the Rank Organisation’s dominance of production, distribution, and exhibition.¹

Within this context, the studio came to specialise especially in a particular type of war film, presenting a social realist representation of the conflict, such as The Foreman Went to France, The Next of Kin (both 1942), Nine Men, The Bells Go Down, Went the Day Well?, San Demetrio London (all 1943), For Those in Peril (1944), and Johnny Frenchman (1945). These films possessed a plot structure pertaining to the narrative logic imposed upon the war experience as it unfolded. They began with a period of complacency – sometimes concurrent with the ‘phoney war’ period of the conflict – and a group marked by petty divisions and gripes, responding initially lethargically and uncertainly to war conditions. Then a genuine crisis would compel the group to mobilise, develop and display proficiency, put aside differences, endure deprivations, and make sacrifices. The films usually (though not always) ended optimistically with the promise of victory and a better future for a transformed community.

As Mark Duguid and Katy McGahan have argued, this generic specialisation and standardisation owed much to the arrival of the Brazilian documentary-maker Alberto Cavalcanti, previously of the hugely influential General Post Office Film Unit, to oversee the studio’s own documentary-making arm, the Ealing Shorts Unit, in 1940. He and the young directors under his tutelage, as well as another arrival from the GPO, Harry Watt, pioneered a more inventive approach to documentary-making that they would subsequently incorporate into Ealing’s feature films as they supplanted the studio’s existing roster of directors now engaged in war work elsewhere.²

At the same time, Ealing was also developing a clear brand identity, as Nathalie Morris has demonstrated. Publicity director Monja Danischewsky, who had previously worked as a press publicist, used his connections to ensure press coverage captured Ealing’s idiosyncratic image as a studio, and the public personas of Balcon and other key personnel, as well as utilising showmanship, hospitality, and sentimental appeal to ensure positive write-ups of Ealing’s films. Ealing also hired noted artists to produce posters and other publicity artwork, epitomised by Barnett Freedman’s ‘Ealing Studios’ logo, which captured its distinctive and much less overtly showy public image.³

The Ealing Studios logo (Barnett Freedman).

Balcon’s wartime narrative

Balcon too was extremely adept at using the press and other public fora to tell a story about the type of studio Ealing was and the type of films it made. He was a regular critic, in both the British and American film press, of the disadvantageous relationship between the British and American film industries, especially in the context of the wartime conditions facing British filmmakers. He also routinely criticised British directors and actors who had left for Hollywood in this period rather than do their duty by their country and the film industry that had nourished their earlier careers.⁴ Balcon was even more scathing about the British state’s approach to the country’s commercial filmmaking sector, lamenting the lack of resources available, the high level of entertainment tax, ongoing uncertainty over the future of quotas for British film exhibition and distribution, and encroachment by the various organs of state in film production.⁵

This was intrinsically connected to the role Balcon saw film as playing in the context of the war. Addressing the Workers Film Association in 1943, he conceded the effectiveness of German film propaganda and argued the British film industry likewise needed to project ‘our own ideas, our strength and our resources’ and provide ‘instruction’.⁶ Writing in the film press, he strongly defended Ealing’s practice of focusing on making war films on patriotic, aesthetic, and commercial grounds. More generally, he championed the calibre of British films and argued that they could succeed domestically in the first instance and subsequently in the US market on their own terms, if given fair coverage by reviewers and granted sufficient market access.⁷

The overlap between characterisation in Ealing’s wartime films and Balcon’s characterisation of Ealing in the wartime film industry, albeit with an eye towards a post-war era, was encapsulated in an article he wrote for Kinematograph Weekly in April 1945, entitled ‘Let British Films be Ambassadors to the World’. He argued that British film needed to counter Germany’s presentation of Britain as ‘blood-soaked Imperialists, punch-drunk degenerates, betrayers of our Allies, grovelling servants of fabulous Jewish plutocrats’:

The man in the street in New York, Paris, Brussels, Athens, Brussels and Rome must know something more of our country than the immediate foreign policy of its present Government. The Spanish Republican who has escaped the [Spanish fascist] Falangist cell should know that [the 18^th and 19^th-century radicals] William Cobbett and Tom Paine were as English as the non-Interventionists of the 1930s.

He chafed that Britain’s film industry had been ‘sneered at as a pastime of peace by Blimps in Service departments, frowned on as a frivolity by government departments vital to its wellbeing’.⁸

Ealing and the post-war British film industry

With the incoming Labour government drawing partly on precedents set during the War, and partly constrained by its persisting material legacies, Britain’s nascent post-war political economy centred on full employment, state welfare, worker unionisation, nationalisation of industry, initially stringent rationing and import restrictions, and imperial trade.⁹

Circumstances facing the British film industry in this period were rather perilous, with admissions beginning to decline from a peak in 1946, while access to finance for filmmaking was uneven; conditions were thus insufficient to support existing scale of production, while the strategy pursued by the likes of Alexander Korda of making bigger budget films with an eye to reaching the lucrative American market also backfired. In response to these challenges, the government implemented a series of policies intended to support the industry, including tinkering with quota levels, and introducing new vehicles for directing finance into production, but its own broader economic agenda also put it at odds with the sector at times, epitomised by a 1947 tax on film imports, intended to stem the outflow of dollars, to which Hollywood responded by cutting off film exports to Britain entirely until the tax was repealed the following year.¹⁰

In 1944, the Rank Organisation – Balcon’s former bête noire - acquired a major stake in Ealing that granted the studio greater financial security and enhanced distribution channels. Although the relationship between the two organisations remained uneasy at times, it granted Ealing the autonomy to continue with its mid-scale (both in volume and cost) production roster that enabled it to recoup its expenditure domestically. Within this context, Balcon fostered a working environment in which talented, in-demand staff sacrificed higher salaries available elsewhere for greater security, career development opportunities, and maintenance of artistic integrity. Film production at Ealing was remarkably collective, with decisions made through ‘round table’ discussions in which creative staff contributed ideas to films they were not directly involved in – though Balcon remained the key gatekeeper within this system.¹¹

Again, this served to maintain considerable thematic specialisation and replication within the studio’s output, albeit alongside some generic experimentation. Ealing did make some war films after the conflict had finished, such as The Captive Heart (1946), Against the Wind (1948), The Cruel Sea (1953), and Dunkirk (1958). Yet its broader output after 1945, though it included some historical films – including literary adaptations like Nicholas Nickleby (1947), and biopics like Scott of the Antarctic (1948) – tended to be set in the present. These films also tended, again with exceptions like Harry Watts’ Australian and East African-focused films, to be set mainly in Britain.

These contemporary, British-set films fell primarily into two broad categories. One was dramas, often concerned with some form of social problem, such as crime, delinquency, or racism, although at times with a more personal or psychological source to the conflicts at the film’s centre. The other was comedies, particularly the subtler, socially observant ones that would come to be classified as the ‘Ealing comedy’, but also broader or more stylised varieties as well, as Tim O’Sullivan has highlighted.¹²

Balcon and the political economy of post-war cinema

Ealing, and Balcon especially, continued during this time to tell a story about Ealing as a studio, British film more generally, and their place in the nation somewhat analogous to the stories it told about Britain more generally in its films. In a letter to Tribune in November 1945, Balcon took issue with the magazine’s recent claim that Ealing had lost a degree of its independence under its arrangement with Rank, adding by way of final riposte: ‘It is not money which makes films, but brain-power’ – something he claimed was evinced by the misguided pre-war financial splurge on filmmaking that had facilitated Rank’s dominance in the first instance – while promising that ‘whoever holds the purse will always find it devilish difficult to control what creative people with integrity want to say’.¹³

Meanwhile, writing for The Daily Film Renter at the start of 1947, Balcon characterised the recent history of British cinema as one where the frivolity and overly commercial focus of the pre-war period was shaken out of the industry by the shock of war, during which time it lost personnel both to the Services, and more gallingly in the flight of some to ‘sunnier climes’ far removed from the conflict. He argued that, ‘Out of the turmoil the new British film emerged, produced under bombardment and probably deodorised thereby of the clinging perfumes of artificiality and superficiality’, and found its audience with a domestic audience that under the strains of war, sought not escapism, but ‘something that told the truth and yet held out a hope for the future, and this could be naturally produced from a country with a great history and a great tradition behind it’.¹⁴

Given the unequal position of the British film industry relative to its American counterpart, and with Britain’s own weak currency position mitigating against a prompt return to freer trade, Balcon argued in 1945 that, for the time being, film imports should be limited by legislation. He opined that in the longer term expanding British film production might generate enough competition with US films in domestic, Dominion, and European markets as to compel Hollywood to reduce its own production levels and thus make a more reciprocal exchange of films between the two countries eventually possible.¹⁵

Just over a year later, with a government report on the film industry prompting revived rumours about it being potentially nationalised, Balcon argued that state control over an artistic medium like film was neither desirable nor possible, remarking ‘that we can learn from other countries the stultifying effect of bureaucracy on creative impulses’; nonetheless he also stressed that ‘the State through legislation can assure protection to the art-form when its existence is jeopardised (because it is also an industry) by normal industrial practices and competition’. He framed this as a partnership rooted in reciprocal obligations: ‘…for the State to take an intelligent and even participating interest in any and all of the arts is a healthy thing; and for the film producer to have an intelligent appreciation of his responsibilities towards the State is a moral obligation which he cannot side-step’.¹⁶

By the end of 1947, however, with the impasse over American film imports seriously jeopardising the viability of the industry entirely, Balcon was more explicitly critical of the government, arguing its Hollywood import duty had proven counterproductive in design and delivery, and was also sceptical that there was sufficient domestic film production capacity to meet the shortfall in supply. Instead, he told Edward Lanchberry of Answers:

An immediate saving of dollars could have been effected by raising the quota of British films…that would have meant a reduction at once in the number of American films shown and would have left an opening for the best of Hollywood’s productions. Art is international and I do not think we should prevent a reasonable circulation of foreign films, do you?¹⁷

Balcon and the turn to comedy

Lanchberry’s piece also captured the shift in Ealing’s thinking around how to represent Britain. Asked why British film had achieved greater prestige in recent years, Balcon initially told a familiar story about how the war had demonstrated the public appetite for weightier fare, but then he signalled his interest in what he saw as a lacuna in its current areas of specialism:

One thing we do lack so badly in British films is comedy. It has been completely neglected, but that is understandable as a consequence of the times we are living in. No one feels like being funny these days.¹⁸

This perspective was reiterated by Ealing’s literary editor Stella Jonckhèere, tasked with overseeing the approximately 40–50 plays, books, and typescripts the studio received for consideration each week (compared to approximately just six films made by the studio per year). She described the need for her department to anticipate trends some two years in advance, asserting that those with psychological themes had been played out, while costume dramas were now in vogue.¹⁹ Wary the very mention of her department would probably result in even greater inundation with manuscripts, she told Lanchberry:

If you must publish anything, do please stress that it is only comedies, preferably with some social theme, that we are interested in seeing. Hue and Cry is a good example. Although primarily a comedy it showed also how post-war youth was living in the blitzed areas and adapting itself to the conditions.²⁰

The question of comedy arose again in an exchange, reported by Lanchberry, between scenario director Angus McPhail and Henry Cornelius, who had been associate producer on Hue and Cry (and would subsequently direct Passport to Pimlico). When McPhail lamented that British cinema did not possess comedians of the calibre of their American counterparts, Cornelius countered:

No, we haven’t, but do we want them? We lack comedy, I agree, but I don’t think we want slapstick. Our line of comedy is the humour of situation. Personally, I should like to do another Hue and Cry, but they come along once in a thousand times.²¹

This heavy signalling of a new direction for the studio was also evident in a piece published nearly simultaneously in the Daily Renter, announcing that ‘Comedy will be the Theme at Ealing’, and that Balcon’s planned programme for 1948 comprised ‘a series of pictures which will break away from the dramatic subjects which have marked most of Ealing’s recent schedules’. It listed three films that the studio was working on: Another Shore (usually considered retrospectively as outside of the specific Ealing comedy subgenre), Kind Hearts and Coronets, and Passport to Pimlico.²²

Ealing’s switch to comedy was, however, only partial, coexisting with a continued production of dramatic films.²³ Writing for a special Kinematograph Weekly supplement on the studio in 1951, Balcon again told a story of how he had decided from the outset of his time at Ealing that to compete with American films, they needed to make ‘essentially “native” films, films about people and events similar to those familiar to our audience’, whether through a dramatic or comic lens – an approach he said that Ealing’s wartime output had vindicated and set the parameters for future success:

This meant that, after the war, instead of having to fight to have our standards accepted, we could continue, adapt and widen our policy of native realism on the firm foundation of the popularity and international standing of the British output of the war years.

With the end of the war there was a slight shift over from strict realism to a more fictional treatment of reality, and from the difficulties of war-time life to the lighter side of the national character. Nevertheless, clearly the same beliefs underlie the war films and such works as, on the one hand, “The Captive Heart,” “The Overlanders,” “It Always Rains on Sunday” and “The Blue Lamp,” and, on the other hand, “Hue and Cry,” “Whisky Galore,” “Passport to Pimlico,” and the rest of the so-called “Ealing comedies.”

That brings me to what is probably the most important point: that slowly, over these years “Ealing” has become less the name of a studio than a generic term to describe a certain type of film and a certain approach to the material.

Balcon attributed this to ‘the underlying conception of a native kinema’ that united the studio’s creative staff despite their own distinctive styles and subject preferences. He explained that Ealing’s smallness meant that ‘none of the impersonality of a large organisation can creep in’, and that they had made ‘a deliberate attempt to create stable employment and thus train men on a long-term policy’, culminating in their possessing ‘an outstanding loyalty to the idea of “Ealing”’.²⁴

Balcon, institutional identity, and storytelling

Thus, from wartime through to peace, and through shifting tendencies in the studio’s output, Balcon told a coherent story about the types of films Ealing made, the types of people who worked there, and where this fitted in within an environment of uncertainty for both the film industry and Britain as a whole He equated not only the types of films Ealing made with the character and experiences of British society, but also Ealing itself as emblematic of that same national community. Ealing and the British people, in this telling, were both imbued with a spirit of togetherness and public-spiritedness. They had to negotiate a state that largely partly shared these qualities, but that was also frequently heavy-handed or conservative in its instincts. They also had to protect themselves and their values from the frequently predatory and self-regarding behaviour of larger businesses, necessitating the constraint of unregulated capitalism.

This infusing of creative and commercial decisions with moral and political significances was more than just a public relations exercise. It was a particularly slick, idealistic articulation of Ealing’s workings as an institution and the organisational identity that underpinned it, within which Balcon was lynchpin. And it helps to explain why Ealing in the late 1940s made a comedy like Passport to Pimlico, again for commercial and creative as well as ideological reasons; and why the film and the generic conventions it followed and honed were likewise received in such explicitly ideological terms.

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You might also enjoy these posts from the Academic Bubble archive:

1. Janet Moat, ‘Inside Ealing: The Evidence of the Michael and Aileen Balcon Collection’, in Mark Duguid, Lee Freeman, Keith M. Johnston, and Melanie Williams (eds.), Ealing Revisited (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 26–38.

2. Mark Duguid and Katy McGahan, ‘From Tinsel to Realism and Back Again: Balcon, Ealing and Documentary’, in Duguid et al (eds.), Ealing Revisited, pp. 58–70.

3. Nathalie Morris, ‘Selling Ealing’, in Duguid et al (eds.), Ealing Revisited, pp. 91–100.

4. Michael Balcon, ‘America’s War Advantage Anent English Films; Too Top-Sided?’, Variety (3 Jan. 1940), p. 6; Michael Balcon, ‘Call up the Hollywood Britons’, Picturegoer and Film Weekly (11 May 1940), p. 11; Michael Balcon, ‘“You’re Wrong, Mr. Mooring”, Picturegoer and Film Weekly (10 May 1941), p. 12; Michael Balcon, ‘The Knockers are Inconsistent’, Kinematograph Weekly (13 Jan. 1944), p. 17; Michael Balcon, ‘Balcon Sounds Off on U. S. Film Producers’ Stance in England’, Variety (3 Jan. 1945), p. 113.

5. Michael Balcon, ‘Films and the Government’, The Spectator (28 Jun. 1940), p. 865; Michael Balcon, ‘Nothing to Help the British Producer’, Kinematograph Weekly 11 Jul. 1940), p. 5; Michael Balcon, ‘Rationalise!’, Sight and Sound (Winter 1940), pp. 62–63; Michael Balcon, ‘The Condemned Man Ate a Hearty Breakfast!’, Daily Film Renter (1 Jan. 1942), p. 7.

6. Michael Balcon, Realism or Tinsel: A Paper Delivered by Michael Balcon Production Head of Ealing Studios to the Workers Film Association at Brighton (London: Workers Film Association, 1943), p. 6.

7. Michael Balcon, ‘Not Even Our Best Friends Will Tell Us about the B.O. Pull of British Films’, Kinematograph Weekly (11 Jan. 1940), p. D1; Michael Balcon, ‘“In Reply to Yours of the Past Year, Daily Film Renter (1 Jan. 1943), pp. 5, 41; Michael Balcon, ‘Boxoffice Tells Story’, Variety (6 Jan. 1943), p. 146; Balcon, ‘The Knockers are Inconsistent’; Michael Balcon, ‘It’s the Film Itself that Counts’, Daily Film Renter (1 Jan. 1943), p. 6.

8. Michael Balcon, ‘Let British Films be Ambassadors to the World’, Kinematograph Weekly (11 Jan. 1945), p. 31.

9. For a discussion of the legacy of the Second World War for Britain, see Paul Addison, ‘The Impact of the Second World War’, in A Companion to Contemporary Britain, 1939–2000, ed. Paul Addison and Harriet Jones (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), pp. 3–22. For an outline of the post-war ‘British New Deal’, see Peter Hennessy, Having it So Good: Britain in The Fifties (London: Allan Lane, 2006), pp. 6–62.

10. On the state of the post-war British film industry, see: Bill Baillieu and John Goodchild, The British Film Business (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2002), pp. 45–76; James Chapman, The Money Behind the Screen: A History of British Film Finance, 1945–1985 (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2022), pp. 9–106. On the American film import crisis, see Jonathan Colman, ‘The US Embassy and British Film Policy, 1947–1948: A ‘Lesser but Highly Explosive Question’’, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, Vol. 7, No. 4 (2009), pp. 413–430.

11. For an account of the film production process at Ealing, see Lindsay Anderson, Making a Film: The Story of ‘Secret People’ (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1952).

12. Tim O’Sullivan, ‘That Ealing Feeling: ‘Ealing Comedies’ and Comedies ‘Made at Ealing’’, in Diguid et al (eds.), Ealing Revisited, pp. 135–144.

13. ‘The Film Industry: Reactions to Tribune’s Proposals’, Tribune (30 Nov. 1945), p. 13.

14. Michael Balcon, ‘The State and The Film Producer’, Daily Film Renter (1 Jan. 1947), pp. 8, 65.

15. ‘The Film Industry: Reactions to Tribune’s Proposals’.

16. Balcon, ‘The State and The Film Producer’.

17. Quoted in Edward Lanchberry, ‘Sidelights on the Movies’, Answers (22 Nov. 1947), pp. 3–5.

18. Ibid.

19. At that very point in time, Ealing was in the process of making the 17^th-century set costume drama Saraband for Dead Lovers, elements of whose production were also covered in Lanchberry’s article.

20. Quoted in Lanchberry, ‘Sidelights on the Movies’.

21. Ibid.

22. ‘Comedy Will Be The Theme At Ealing’, Daily Renter (20 Nov. 1947), p. 9.

23. Four of the six films released by Ealing in 1949 were comedies, but that was only the case for eight of the 24 it released between 1950 and 1954.

24. Michael Balcon, ‘A Style of Their Own’, Kinematograph Weekly (4 Oct. 1952), supplement, p. 9.