Table Of ContentHollywood and the Invention
of England
ii
Hollywood and the Invention
of England
Projecting the English Past in American
Cinema, 1930–2017
Jonathan Stubbs
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: England, Their England 1
1 The Uses of Literature: Adaptation and Englishness in the 1930s 15
Sound, censorship and ‘better pictures’ 18
‘Properly English and properly Dickensian’: David
Copperfield (1935) 22
‘The best possible literature’: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) 28
Literature at war: Wuthering Heights (1939) and
Pride and Prejudice (1940) 33
2 Abstractions of Empire: Filming British Imperialism in the
1930s and 1940s 41
‘Ruling and protecting these countless millions’: The Lives of
a Bengal Lancer (1935) 45
‘One of the most distinguished events in history’: The Charge
of the Light Brigade (1936) 50
‘Delightfully evil in the Fascist sense’: Gunga Din (1939) 56
Empire films and the Second World War 62
3 Ideology and Adventure: The Post-War Swashbuckler Film 69
‘A nation divided’: Ivanhoe (1952) 72
‘Under banners unknown’: Knights of the Round Table (1953) 79
4 Cosmopolitanism and the Cold War: Historical Epics in the
1950s and 1960s 93
‘A show on film’: Around the World in 80 Days (1956) 98
‘The magic of distant places’: Lawrence of Arabia (1962) 108
vi Contents
5 Boom and Bust: The English Past in the Swinging Sixties 119
‘A living past’: Tom Jones (1963) and The Charge of the
Light Brigade (1968) 122
‘Intimate spectacle’: Becket (1964) and Anne of the
Thousand Days (1969) 128
Manhattan transfer: My Fair Lady (1964) and Camelot (1967) 134
6 Intimations of Quality: English Heritage and the ‘Specialty’
Film in the 1980s and 1990s 143
‘A holiday out of time’: Heritage film and American indies 147
‘Films of consequence’: Heritage goes to Hollywood 153
‘An emotional event’: The rise of Miramax 157
7 Pirates, Wizards and Wardrobes: The English Past in the
Contemporary Family Film 165
Licensing the past: Intellectual property, conglomeration
and the franchise boom 169
Fantastic rebates and where to find them: Global production
and incentive schemes 180
Conclusion: An Available Past 191
Bibliography 197
Index 210
Acknowledgements
I’ve been thinking about the ideas and issues in this book for some time
and my research has benefitted from interactions with various scholars and
institutions over the years. It began with work undertaken while I was a student
at the University of East Anglia. I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities
Research Council for providing funding which made this work possible. I’m also
very grateful to Andrew Higson and Peter Krämer for their invaluable guidance,
expertise and feedback on earlier drafts. Thanks are due to my colleagues and
students at Cyprus International University for providing a rich scholarly
environment while this book took shape. I’d also like to thank Katie Gallof at
Bloomsbury Academic for her enthusiastic support during the writing process.
This research would not have been possible without the help of archivists
and librarians on both sides of the Atlantic. I’d therefore like to thank the staff
at the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles, the USC Cinema-Television
Library, the USC Warner Bros. Archives, the UCLA Special Collections and
Arts Special Collections Departments, the BFI National Library in London, the
National Archives at Kew, the New York Public Library and the British Library.
I’m particularly grateful for the expertise of Barbara Hall at the Margaret Herrick
Library and Ned Comstock at the USC Cinema-Television Library.
Some parts of this book are reworked from material which has appeared
elsewhere. Chapter 3 was published in a different form in Exemplaria: Medieval,
Early Modern, Theory as ‘Hollywood’s Middle Ages: The Script Development
of Knights of the Round Table and Ivanhoe, 1935–53’. The section on Lawrence
of Arabia in Chapter 4 reworks material which was published in The Journal of
American Studies of Turkey as ‘“A Sword with Two Edges”: Lawrence of Arabia
(1962) and the End of Empire’. Chapter 5 contains elements which were published
in The Journal of Popular Culture as ‘“Steeped in Tradition, Seized By Change”:
Swinging London and the American Reception of Tom Jones (1963)’ and in The
Journal of British Cinema and Television as ‘The Runaway Bribe? American Film
Production in Britain and the Eady Levy’. I’m grateful to the editors concerned
for giving me permission to adapt this material.
Finally, I would like to thank my family in Britain and Cyprus for their
unstinting support over the years, particularly Alison Stubbs and Joan Love.
Finally, for her love and patience, this book is dedicated to Asliye Dağman.
viii
Hollywood and the Invention of England Introduction: England, Their England
Introduction: England, Their England
What is certainly and consistently true of the history of classical Hollywood as
presently written is that the industry’s prestige product has been excluded from
the critical canon as criticism seeks to construct a Hollywood cinema worthy –
thematically, aesthetically, ideologically – of study.1
Richard Maltby
In the spring of 1965, Bob Hope stepped on stage at the Santa Monica Civic
Auditorium for the 37th Academy Awards ceremony. Making his twelfth
appearance as master of ceremonies, Hope welcomed the audience to ‘Santa
Monica on the Thames’, highlighting a conspicuous trend among the nominated
films, actors and other personnel. He proceeded to crack wise about the
apparent lack of American representation among the nominees, remarking that
‘Hollywood is handing out the foreign aid’ and advising winners to ‘show their
passports’ on their way to the podium. ‘Don’t we deport anybody?’ he quipped
after reading out a list of acting nominees. As the evening continued, a majority
of the acting awards were duly handed to English performers – first Peter Ustinov,
then Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews – and two films came to dominate: Mary
Poppins (1964), which took five awards from its thirteen nominations, and My
Fair Lady (1964), which won eight of its twelve nominated categories, including
Best Picture. Both films were unmistakably English in their content. As Hope put
it, My Fair Lady was ‘good, if you like foreign language pictures’. But at the same
time, both were unmistakably American rather than British in origin. Although
they evoked a manicured, suspiciously clear-skied London of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, both were manufactured on soundstages a few
miles apart in Burbank, Los Angeles. No British film company of the period
could have made films which were so lavish, star-laden or technically elaborate,
nor could the British film industry hope to distribute them so extensively.
Hollywood’s England had eclipsed the indigenous version, at least in terms of its
1 Richard Maltby, ‘Nobody Knows Everything: Post-Classical Historiographies and Consolidated
Entertainment’, in Steve Neale and Murray Smith (eds.), Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (New
York: Routledge, 1998), 40.
