‘The Old and and the New; Revisited – but not always Revised’

Associated media

Ealing Revisited Edited

By Mark Duguid, Lee Freeman, Keith M. Johnston and Melanie Williams

This collection of essays marked retrospective screenings of a range of Ealing films, a season devoted to the Scottish-American director, Alexander Mackendrick, and a small exhibition of archive and publicity material. Together, these events were part of the BFI’s focus on British film in the year of the London Olympics.

Schematically, the films screened were divided between ‘”Ealing light” – morally unambiguous, optimistic, consensus-seeking, sometimes utopian’ and ‘“Ealing dark” – morally complex, socially critical, challenging, cynical’. Robert Murphy, authoritatively, duly comments on film noir at Ealing, returning to Michael Balcon’s own coinage of an opposition between ‘realism’ and ‘tinsel’, here arguing on behalf of the distinctive signature of the director Basil Dearden.

Chronologically, the book spans the period preceding Balcon’s command of his ‘Academy of Young Gentlemen’ to the recent revival of film production at Ealing. Even so, Steve Chibnall remarks that the films best known from Basil Dean’s tenure – star vehicles designed for Gracie Fields and George Formby – constituted less than a quarter of the studios’ output in the 1930s, with independent producers, hiring Ealing facilities, accounting for the rest. Dean’s infamous attachment to stage adaptation is set against Balcon’s preference for original screenplays.

Janet Moat, surveying the material deposited by Balcon with the BFI (a vast archive on which other contributors draw) notes his insistence that it be named equally for his wife, Aileen, in acknowledgement of her support over decades in the British film industry. Melanie Williams contributes an essay on women in Ealing films; Colin Sell writes on the representation of children and child actors, hitherto neglected participants in Ealing’s ensemble of players. The archive supplies material pertaining not only to projects realized or delayed but also unrealized. The Ealing scholar, Charles Barr, discusses Ken Tynan’s unfilmed scripts. Careers cut short by war include that of Balcon’s protégé, Pen Tennyson.

The diversity of Ealing’s output is acknowledged in the production of fiction and non-fiction material – of both re-tooled ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ propaganda during the war and thereafter: a ‘regimental mascot’, said Tynan. Balcon’s own conception of Ealing as a British ambassador extended, by way of various London boroughs and the English regions, to films made in Scotland (Whisky Galore! 1949 and The Maggie 1954) and Wales (The Proud Valley 1940), to films made in the outposts of the former empire (with Stephen Morgan writing on Ealing films shot on location in Australia). Elsewhere, contributors discuss more and less successful ventures in transatlantic production and distribution. Geoff Brown, in an essay devoted to the composer, Georges Auric, appositely observes that Balcon’s Ealing ‘family’ embraced a number of émigré and foreign personnel.

Further essays bring background figures to the fore. Nathalie Morris, at second and third hand, comments usefully on alternative versions of original publicity material and on posters produced for re-releases of Ealing films, not least acknowledging the work with Balcon of the Russian Anglophile, Monja Danischewsky. Catherine A. Surowiec discusses the work of Anthony Mendelson, not least on Robert Hamer’s 1949 Kind Hearts and Coronets, where costuming plays a key role in defining and differentiating character. Surowiec’s essay is amply supported by black and white film stills and colour sketches.

Mostly, essays contained in this collection are enlightening (they prioritize the unfamiliar); sometimes they justifiably find occasion to amplify the already familiar; occasionally they are under-researched (weakly venturing into territory more adequately covered elsewhere – not least by fellow contributors). The disparity suggests a lack of editorial competence and coordination. But, following the example of previous BFI compendia publications, it is good enough to have gathered together this much of material in a single volume.

Ealing Revisited, edited by Mark Duguid, Lee Freeman, Keith M. Johnston and Melanie Williams is a BFI book published by Palgrave Macmillan. 304pp. ISBN 978-1-84457-510-7