Ealing Plots (Part I)
The Second World War was the formative period for Ealing Studios under Michael Balcon, and the nascent mythologisation of the conflict became embedded in its mode of storytelling.
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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: Death; Murder; Suicide.
I’ve returned again this month to a perennial favourite topic of mine, Ealing Studios, for an article I’m writing on Passport to Pimlico and the post-war settlement. That article builds on this piece I wrote on the film for the newsletter:
What I want to discuss in this post is the ideological underpinnings of Ealing films at a narrative and generic level: the way their typical plots baked certain logics into the way these films functioned as political parables; the origins of those logics; and the tensions that existed between their different elements. It’s a lot to cover, so I will split it into two halves, with Part II following soon.
I take my lead in part from Charles Barr, whose 1977 book Ealing Studios – which I’ve also written about for this newsletter – remains a foundational work in the study of Ealing’s films, but which I think carves too sharp a dichotomy between the work of people he really admires, such as the directors Alexander Mackendrick and Robert Hamer, and those towards whose artistic and political credentials he is more dismissive of, like scriptwriter T. E. B. Clark. My own view is that typical plot elements remain hallmarks of Ealing films across that divide, and that the ur-narratives they work within condition the ideological content of their films even if they chafe against them.
I commence this analysis of Ealing plots with the formative wartime period of the studio’s filmmaking under Michael Balcon (who headed it up from 1938), and its continued production of films set during the war after the conflict had concluded. Part II will look at the studio’s post-war comedies and social dramas.
Wartime films
As the Second World War progressed, the conflict itself became integral to most of the films the studio produced. There is a recurring structure to these films that pertains to the logic of the narrative being imposed upon the British war experience more broadly even as it was unfolding. They often begin within the setting of a group marked by petty divisions and gripes, who initially respond lethargically and uncertainly to the circumstances of war – a kind of ‘phoney war’ period. Then comes a genuine crisis which makes it necessary for the group to mobilise, develop and display proficiency, put aside differences and work together, endure deprivations and make sacrifices. The films usually end on an optimistic note with the promise not only of victory, but also a better future for a transformed community. They exhibit the influence of documentary realism, imported in part through Ealing employing directors like Alberto Cavalcanti and Harry Watt, previously part of the documentary filmmaking unit attached to the Empire Marketing Board, the General Post Office, and the Ministry of Information in succession.
It is particularly striking that while these films sometimes focus on sets of characters within the armed forces, they are more often concerned with depicting those whose occupational status or particular circumstances blur the distinctions between combatant and non-combatant. San Demetrio London (1943), for example, depicts a Merchant Navy crew who successfully salvage their own oil tanker after it is attacked by a German warship, while The Bells Go Down (1943) is about a group of East Londoners who join the Auxiliary Fire Service and serve at the height of the Blitz, and For Those in Peril (1944) is about Air Sea Rescue. Went the Day Well? (1942), meanwhile, portrays a village community compelled to bravely rise up in concert when a locally billeted group of soldiers turn out to be an invading group of German paratroopers.
Adversity as a source of unity is another principal component of Ealing’s wartime films. There is space for individual initiative, bravery, and ingenuity, particularly in contexts where effective leadership is absent and the situation particularly perilous, as with the titular hero of The Foreman Went to France (1942), who travels over of his own accord to France to rescue vital armaments machinery from the advancing Germans. Where characters are shown as particularly rebellious, such as ‘Yank’ Preston (Robert Beatty) in San Demetrio London or Tommy Turk (comedian Tommy Trinder) in The Bells Go Down, the audience gets to enjoy their individuality while also being instructed in the importance of its sublation into the collective. Indeed, individual acts of self-sacrifice are often the way this message is conveyed, as when Tommy dies in The Bells Go Down after gamely scaling a burning hospital building, rather than let his former rival Ted (James Mason) risk his own life in doing so.
The small group facing danger together, whether locality or service unit, stands in for broader national unity, as in Nine Men (1943), which centres on a troop of soldiers who represent a regional and social cross-section of the wider United Kingdom, bravely defending a fort surrounded by the Italian Army in the Libyan desert. This could be extended to represent international unity as well, as with Johnny Frenchman (1944), in which the fractious relationship between rival Cornish and Breton fishing villages is smoothed over through the exigencies of war, epitomised by the romantic union between Cornish girl Sue Pomeroy (Patricia Roc) and Breton Yan Kervarec (Paul Dupuis).
Also central to these films is the notion that suffering and inflicting the violence of war necessarily educates and transforms both individuals and broader British society. In Went the Day Well? and The Next of Kin (1942), about a planned British raid on a German-held French coastal village and German intelligence’s efforts to uncover and foil it, obliviousness and undue deference have frequently grievous consequences. Both films also contain scenes where ordinary women brutally kill a German soldier and spy respectively, in a courageous but futile effort to foil the infiltrators’ plans, only to be immediately discovered and tragically murdered themselves.
Meanwhile, upper class characters are shown as at best particularly prone to complacency and mistakes as in The Next of Kin, or at worst as active Nazi-sympathisers and abetters, as with the squire Oliver Wilsford (Leslie Banks) in Went the Day Well?. They stand in for the ‘Guilty Men’ of the pre-war leadership who had presided over both economic hardship at home and failure to stand up to German aggression abroad. Vicar’s daughter Nora Ashton (Valerie Taylor), whose father has already been killed by the German invaders, ruthlessly shoots the Squire dead in Went the Day Well? after discovering his treachery, a ritual purging of hereditary but alien leadership.
Post-war war films
Ealing continued to make films set retrospectively during the war after the conflict had finished, as well as ones directly concerned with its aftermath. I want to focus here, briefly, on the former, because although they were but a small component of Ealing’s output during the second half of the 1940s and the 1950s, they nonetheless illustrate continuities between the plots and underlying ideological concerns of Ealing’s wartime and broader post-war output.
The Captive Heart (1946) is an early example of the prisoner-of-war film that would be produced by British film studios in far greater quantity from the 1950s onwards. However, whereas those tended to present POWs as uniformly upper middle-class, The Captive Heart was infused with the same collectivist, cross-class ethos as Ealing’s wartime films. It has a principal protagonist: Czechoslovakian Captain Captain Karel Hašek (Michael Redgrave), who is masquerading under the name of a deceased British officer, and in maintaining a written correspondence with the latter’s estranged wife for the sake of concealing his true identity, falls in love with her. Yet the film is nearly equally concerned with the lot of the rest of his fellow prisoners, members of the British Expeditionary Force whose tribulations, sacrifices, and endurance it depicts over the five years from their capture during the fall of France until the end of the war. Their recreation, in the unpromising context of the prison camp, of the world they have left behind is described admiringly by the insider/outsider Hašek in one of his letters as typical of ‘scores of camps across Germany…each a little piece of England’.
Against the Wind (1948), meanwhile, depicts a Special Operation Executive team, including a number of Belgian exiles, undercover in Belgium where they are tasked with destroying a German record office and freeing a high-profile SOE officer before he can be taken back to Germany. The dual mission is a success, but not without the death of one of the operatives, Julie (Gisèle Préville), upon parachuting into Belgium, and of another, Jacques Piquant (Paul Dupuis), who dies by suicide after his cover is blown helping another member of the team evade capture. There is also a suspenseful scene where one operative, Michèle Denis (Simone Signoret) executes in cold blood another, the amiable Max Cronk (Jack Warner), with whom she had built up a warm rapport, after realising he is a double agent. Against the Wind is very much in the vein of the earlier Went the Day Well? and Next of Kin, with its emphasis on the need for caution, alertness, self-sacrifice, and a willingness to engage in ruthless violence under the circumstances of war.
There is a marked difference between these 1940s films and two Ealing made about the war in the 1950s, The Cruel Sea (1953) and Dunkirk (1958). The Cruel Sea focuses on the crew of HMS Compass Rose, or rather principally its experienced Lieutenant Commander George Ericson (Jack Hawkins) and his novice sublieutenants Keith Lockhart (Donald Sinden) and Gordon Ferraby (John Stratton), as they navigate the Battle of the Atlantic and the German U-boat threat. There is a continuity in some ways with the earlier films, with its depiction of war as a learning process, and requiring individuals to take difficult decisions with awful repercussions, as in the famous scene when Ericsson orders his crew to drop depth charges on an oncoming U-boat, sacrificing the lives of merchant crewmen afloat in the water after their own boat is wrecked. Yet Ericsson – and Jack Hawkins – embodies an upper middle-class professionalism, sealed off from the lower orders and civilian life, which is rather distinct from Ealing’s wartime films.
Dunkirk, meanwhile, was one of the very last films Ealing made. It tells the story of the evacuation of the BEF at Dunkirk from two principal perspectives: that of journalist Charles Foreman (Bernard Lee) and his selfish businessman neighbour John Holden (Richard Attenborough, who ultimately sail their own small boats across the Channel to rescue members of the BEF after German forces overrun France; and that of Corporal ‘Tubby’ Binns (John Mills), who seeks to lead a small group of soldiers to safety after they become stranded near the French coast. There are again some of the elements of those earlier Ealing war films, depicting divisions, selfishness, and complacency within society (including between civilians and servicemen, and among servicemen) until a real element of jeopardy is introduced by Germany’s sudden westward advance, at which point individuals properly band together, take initiative, risks, and difficult decisions, and in some case sacrifice their lives.
Yet there is little of the optimism found in those earlier films. Its spirit is embodied by what Foreman tells Corporal Binns when they encounter each other in France:
Everybody saying that war was so damnable it couldn’t happen again, shoving our heads in the sand like a lot of ostriches. Well the Germans didn’t think that way, to them war meant guns or butter. They chose guns. We chose butter.
This is the critique offered by so many wartime Ealing films of Britain prior to 1940, and Dunkirk accordingly encapsulates in its final voiceover narration, the way the events it depicts were increasingly remembered as the war progressed, and afterwards:
Dunkirk was a great defeat, and a great miracle. It proved, if it proved anything, that we were alone, but undivided. No longer were there fighting men and civilians. There were only people. A nation had been made whole.
Yet this jars with the bleak tone of the more than two hours that preceded it: Dunkirk is a film about the phoney war and its sudden conclusion, made at a time when Ealing was on the verge of closing, and when the radicalism of Britain’s wartime coalition and post-war Labour government had been followed by two terms of resumed Conservative rule. This is but an unconvincing mimesis of the unity of the war years, a faltering recollection of what it had seemed to mean. Whereas in The Captive Heart, the fall of France was the beginning of something, in Dunkirk it was very much an ending.
Part II of this post is now available to read here:
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