Ealing Plots (Part II)
After the war ended, Ealing’s comedies and dramas continued to bear the narrative hallmarks of the films it had made about the conflict.
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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 warnings: Murder; Death; Alcohol; Bereavement; Domestic violence.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote the first part of this piece on typical plots of Ealing films, and their ideological roots, talking about Ealing’s war films and also the films it made set during the war after the conflict was over:
I’m following that up here with Part II, looking at some of the typical structural elements of Ealing’s post-war comedies and dramas, with a particular emphasis on how the template of the war film echoed through both.
Post-war comedies
So much has been written about the topic of the Ealing comedy, but I really want to zero in here on a few common, overlapping elements. I also want to stress the extent to which these feature across the divide drawn by Charles Barr between the gentler films written by T. E. B. Clarke, and the more acerbic ones directed by Alexander Mackendrick and Robert Hamer. These are not simply formal similarities; they have their own structuring logics that frame the ideological conflicts within the films.
Firstly, there is the fantasy. Put simply, there is the point in the films whereby (in the main) rather ordinary people in pretty mundane, recognisable circumstances, find themselves in, or manoeuvre themselves into, remarkable scenarios (mostly within those same surroundings). In Hue and Cry (1947), it is the discovery by a bunch of youths that one of their employers, Mr Nightingale (Jack Warner) is the leader of a criminal gang that communicate via the pages of their favourite comic. In Passport to Pimlico (1949), it is the detonation of an unexploded bomb revealing that a small neighbourhood, Miramont Place in central London is in fact Burgundian territory and thereby independent of Britain. It is the discovery by the inhabitants of the fictionalised Scottish island of Todday of a shipwrecked consignment of whiskey in Whisky Galore! (1949). It is the discovery of a fabric that never gets dirty in The Man in the White Suit (1951). And so on.
The outcome of this is generally a form of mobilisation, whereby individuals or groups conduct quite remarkable operations, whether by meticulous planning or spontaneous activity, usually in defiance of the powers that be. The youngsters in Hue and Cry hatch a plan to use the same comic to lure Nightingale and his gang into a trap (after the police have refused to take them seriously). In Passport to Pimlico, there is the realisation by its inhabitants that they no longer have to follow the existing rules and regulations of post-war Britain; a handful of them conspiring to turn Miramont Place’s water back on after the authorities have cut it off; and a spectacular grassroots aid programme that begins with a few people throwing food to the residents of Miramont Place out of sympathy, and culminates with masses of packages being delivered from every borough. In Whisky Galore!, there is the clandestine rescue of the whiskey for purposes of holding a rèiteach, and the subsequent rapid concealment of that whiskey when customs officials turn up.
If those forms were more pro-social acts of law-bending and breaking, there is also the more explicitly individualist cases, where the fantastic scenario is the mobilisation. In Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), shop assistant Louie Mazzini (Dennis Price) methodically and surreptitiously murders his relatives, members of the D’Ascoyne family (all played by Alec Guinness) who had disinherited his mother, one by one in order to gain the dukedom of Chalfont. In The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), bank clerk Henry Holland (Alec Guinness) and foundry owner Alfred Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway) conspire to stage the robbery of gold bullion under Holland’s watch, melt it down and recast it as model Eiffel Towers, and ship it over to France. In The Ladykillers (1955), a gang of criminals posing as musicians rob a security van near Kings Cross Station in London, before the meddling of their landlady Mrs Wilberforce (Katy Johnson) and their own greed and distrust results in them murdering each other in succession.
I would argue that the fantastic events in Ealing comedies play a structural role equivalent to the war, or rather the intensification of the war (from a British perspective) in Ealing’s wartime films. We are presented with characters in some ways individually and/or collectively unfulfilled until something extraordinary happens. And, though played for laughs rather than straight, the characters find purpose in the process of mobilisation, and they overcome – if only temporarily – ostensibly more powerful conservative, restrictive, or established forces, by means of ingenuity and/or cooperation. They replicate aspects of Britain fighting ‘alone’, or indeed of the movements waging asymmetrical warfare in occupied Europe.
This is clearest in the Clarke-written Passport to Pimlico, whereby the realised independence and subsequent besiegement of Miramont Place enables the residents to re-enact the war in different ways, with former air raid warden Arthur Pemberton (Stanley Holloway), whose ideas for communal improvement had previously been ignored, becoming ‘prime minister’. He is appointed to this role by the newly arrived Sébastien de Charolais, heir to the dukedom of Burgundy, played by Paul Dupuis, who had previously starred as Yan, the Breton fisherman who helped ferry fleeing members of the British Expeditionary Force back across the Channel in Johnny Frenchman (1945), and then as a member of the Belgian Resistance working for the Special Operations Executive in Against the Wind (1948). Dupuis’s casting was emblematic of the way Ealing films found a flattering mirror for Britain in the resistance movements it had allied with.
It is also true, though, of the Mackendrick-directed Whisky Galore!, which is set in 1943, in the middle of the war, and yet the conflict so far away that places them under the supervision of the pompous English Home Guard captain Paul Waggett (Basil Radford), is Todday’s own phoney war. It is the discovery of the wrecked whiskey cargo that Captain Waggett fastidiously refuses to let them salvage, and which they capture and conceal anyway, that is their real war. Through their communal mobilisation, it brings about the solution to their collective problem, the whiskey shortage, and also individual ones in enabling Peggy (Joan Greenwood) and Catriona Macroon (Gabrielle Blunt) to marry Sergeant Odd (Bruce Seton) and George Campbell (Gordon Jackson) by ensuring the rèiteach can take place. As Monja Danischewsky, the film’s associate producer, later reflected in his autobiography, ‘no resistance movement in war-ravaged Europe was better organised than that in these war-ravaged islands’.1
We might also think about the broader similarity between the heist film, which The Lavender Hill Mob and The Ladykillers were comical early British versions of, and certain subgenres of war film that became especially successful in the decades after the Second World War ended, which centred on combatants behind enemy lines, such as prisoners of war or special operatives, of which Ealing’s The Captive Heart (1946) and Against the Wind respectively were again early examples. We have the secretive plotting of an ingenious, high-stakes, illegal act (in the view of the relevant ‘authorities’), whether that be a bank job, a breakout, or an act of sabotage, its tense execution, and its equally fraught aftermaths as the perpetrators go on the run.
These formulae set up the ideological tensions at play in most Ealing comedies: over the relationship between individual wants and aspirations and the collective good, between authority and order on the one hand and freedom and egalitarianism on the other; between tradition and radicalism. If the films ultimately came down in differing positions on these issues, they nonetheless were together engaged in an ongoing dialogue about how British society was organised, about the nature of British national character, that started with a shared set of references, for which the war was hugely formative.
For example, Whisky Galore! is more ruthless in offering no reconciliation with or rehabilitation of Captain Waggett, who ends the film a despondent figure or derision, than Passport to Pimlico is in concluding with the Pimlico-Burgundians reaching an amiable accommodation with the pompous civil servants Gregg (played by the same man, Basil Radford) and Straker (Naunton Wayne). But the former also recalls the uncompromising condemnation of upper-class incompetence and complacency of wartime films like The Next of Kin (1942), which ended with a condemnatory depiction of careless talk in front of a German spy by two officials (also played by Radford and Wayne!).
Post-war drama
The war also had a substantial, though complex, influence on the social realist dramas made by Ealing after the war, primarily directed by Basil Dearden – who previously directed The Bells Go Down (1943), about London firefighters during the Blitz, and The Captive Heart – and produced by Michael Relph. Just as the studio’s war films had been especially concerned with civil defence, and with blurring the lines between civilians and combatants within the war effort more generally, so its post-war dramas imbued post-war public services with wartime ideals. As Relph himself subsequently reflected, ‘…at the time we were still very service-minded after the war, and the fight against crime had taken the place of the fight against the Germans’.2
The question many Ealing post-war dramas asked was: what can we do with the energies, potential, and good intentions of ordinary Britons in the context of the post-war period? And the answer they frequently gave – just as they had in wartime – was: enlist them into the realms of the expanded state, invest those qualities within concrete, governmental institutions. The Blue Lamp (1950) follows new recruit Andy Mitchell (Jimmy Hanley) into the police force, taken under the wing of the experienced George Dixon (Jack Warner). In Cage of Gold (1950), Dr Alan Kearn (James Donald) takes over his father’s doctor’s surgery, now part of the new NHS. I Believe in You (1952) sees Henry Phipps (Cecil Parkinson), formerly of the Colonial Service, begin a new career as a probation officer, under the kindly guidance of the soon-to-retire Mr Dove (George Relph). These are films at least partly about social and institutional reproduction.
The continuity between the depictions of wartime and post-war institutions is neatly illustrated by The Blue Lamp. When, after appearing as Corporal Horsfall in The Captive Heart, Jack Warner wanted to take the role of crime boss Mr Nightingale in Hue and Cry, Balcon sought unsuccessfully dissuade him from being cast against type in this way, reportedly telling him ‘This warm Cockney corporal you created in the last film must go on a little longer’.3 The corporal did indeed effectively reappear when Warner was cast as the avuncular PC Dixon, a point reinforced by both The Captive Heart and The Blue Lamp featuring Gladys Henson in the role of his wife, and Jimmy Hanley as a sort of surrogate son.
The police, the NHS, the probation service, these are all institutions framed as embedded within their communities, made up of professionals who know their local neighbourhoods, are intimately familiar with and serve their inhabitants, and are recognised and respected by them. Nonetheless, the society they exist within is characterised as a troubled one, in which the qualities and aspirations that institutions might give meaningful purpose too are instead squandered in delinquency and crime – especially among the young, or the unfulfilled.
In The Blue Lamp, the truly rotten element is encapsulated by young hoodlum Tom Riley (Dirk Bogarde), PC Mitchell’s antithesis, who fatally shoots PC Dixon during a robbery. The murder crosses a line that causes the local community to rally around the police, confirming its qualities as their own, including among the more respectable local criminals, who collaborate in helping them catch Riley. In I Believe in You, Henry Phipps saves the essentially good Charlie Hooker (Harry Fowler) and Norma Hart (Joan Collins) from involvement in a robbery that would imperil their futures.
The Ship that Died of Shame (1955), meanwhile, demonstrated what happened when wartime purpose did not find a positive post-war outlet. Based on a story by Nicholas Monserrat (as was The Cruel Sea, made two years earlier), it centres on skipper Bill Randall (George Baker), first lieutenant George Hoskins (Richard Attenborough), and coxswain Birdie (Bill Owen), the highly effective wartime crew of a Navy gunboat; when the war ends, Hoskins convinces his former crewmates to band together to buy their former vessel and then to use it to smuggle ever more illegitimate cargoes, only for the craft to increasingly malfunction out of seeming guilt at its owners’ activities, eventually sinking (and killing Hoskins).
Elsewhere, though, the war itself (rather than its conclusion) was cited by Ealing films not just as as a marker of service-mindedness, but also as a cause of societal problems, often by explaining the trajectory of individual characters. Train of Events (1949) provides a portmanteau of stories connected by their characters’ involvement in a single rail crash, including actor Philip (Peter Finch), who murders his estranged wife Louise (Mary Morris), who had been unfaithful to him while he was serving in the Army during the war, and Richard (Laurence Payne), an escaped German prisoner of war.
In The Blue Lamp, the narrator vaguely says of Riley’s girlfriend Diana Lewis (Peggy Evans) that her involvement with him stemmed from her being from ‘a home broken and demoralised by war’, while we also learn that George Dixon’s son had died in the conflict. In I Believe in You, Charlie’s mother (Gladys Henson) attributes his involvement in gangs to his father dying in the war, while probationer Hon Ursula (Ursula Howells) has become an alcoholic after the death of her pilot lover; it is also implied that another probation officer, Matty Mattheson (Celia Johnson) lost her husband during the war as well.
In Frieda (1947), meanwhile, the film’s eponymous heroine (played by Mai Zetterling) is a German girl who moves to Britain after the war with her new husband Robert (David Farrar), an RAF pilot whom she rescued from a prisoner of war camp. Frieda examines the tensions generated by her presence in their Oxfordshire village, due to persisting local Germanophobia, and the pressure this places on her marriage, exacerbated by the arrival of her unrepentantly Nazi brother Richard (Albert Lieven). The film remains animated by the antifascist sentiments integral to the conception of Britain at the heart of Ealing’s wartime films. Yet it also emphasises the need to move on from the war itself, from understanding the fight between liberal democracy and fascism purely within the context of a conflict between Britons and Germans, lest they forget the lesson drawn at the end of the film by Robert’s hitherto fiercely anti-German aunt, Eleanor (Flora Robson): ‘You cannot treat human beings as though they were less than human…without becoming less than human yourself.’
It is apt to circle back here to Michael Relph’s remark, that the fight against crime had taken the place of the fight against the Germans, and ponder the discontinuities as well as continuities implied by such a statement. What does it mean to frame individual decency, social norms, and national character in contraposition not to German Nazism (and its fellow travellers), but to domestic criminality?
Well, it still entails mobilisation through institutionalisation, the integration of the individual into a greater whole (without losing their individuality) within the organs of the state. It still entails a celebration of duty and sacrifice for a greater cause, over selfishness and individualism. But it also means the latter proclivities are individualised and pathologised, rather than understood as an outcome of broader unequal socioeconomic conditions, of unjustified hierarchies. Whereas Ealing’s wartime (and post-war war) films condoned ruthless violence in the name of a just cause, its postwar films were concerned with its suppression at all costs. Whereas mobilisation in the war films meant of society as a whole, the institutionalisation of the whole community, the institutions of the post-war film are that little more sealed off from those communities, committed as they are to their protection – the meritocratic preserve of paternalistic, service-minded professionals.
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Monja Danischewsky, White Russian, Red Face (London: Gollancz, 1966), p. 155.
‘Interview with Michael Relph’, in Alan Burton, Tim O’Sullivan, and Paul Wells (eds.), Liberal Directions: Basil Dearden and Postwar British Film Culture (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1997), pp. 241–248 (p. 246).
Jack Warner, ‘Evening All: The Autobiography of Jack Warner (London: Star Books, 1997). Warner is especially effective as the secret crime boss Mr Nightingale in Hue and Cry, and as the treacherous Max Cronk in Against the Wind, precisely because he is so amiable as to make his heel turns midway through both films all the more surprising.