the professional officer class in post- war cinema

364 Pages·2015·2.4 MB·English

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THE PROFESSIONAL OFFICER CLASS IN POST-
WAR CINEMA–
OR HOW BRITISH FILMS LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE
AFFLUENT SOCIETY

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by
Andrew Roberts

College of Business, Arts and Social Sciences of Brunel University

22nd September2014
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ABSTRACT

My central argument is that mainstream British cinema of the 1951 – 1965 period marked
the end of the paternalism, as exemplified by a professional ‘officer class’, as consumerism
gradually came to be perceived as the norm as opposed to a post-war enemy. The starting point
is 1951, the year of the Conservative victory in the General Election and a time which most
films were still locally funded. The closing point is 1965, by which point the vast majority of
British films were funded by the USA and often featured a youthful and proudly affluent
hero.
Thus, this fourteen year describes how British cinema moved away from the People as
Hero guided by middle class professionals in the face of consumerism. Over the course of this
work, I will analyse the creation of the archetypes of post-war films and detail how the impact
of consumerism and increased Hollywood involvement in the UK film industry affected their
personae. However, parallel with this apparently linear process were those films that
questioned or attacked the wartime consensus model. As memories of the war receded, and the
Rank/ABPC studio model collapsed, there was an increasing sense of deracination across a
variety of popular British cinematic genres. From the beginning of our period there is a number
films that infer that the “Myth of the Blitz”, as developed in a cinematic sense, was just
that and our period ends with films that convey a sense of a fragmenting society.
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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
Literature Review
Methodology
Structure of Chapters
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CHAPTER 1: The British Studio System and Stardom18
CHAPTER 2: Historical Overview 1951 – 1965
CHAPTER 3 – ‘The Chap’: Father Figures 1951- 1965
CHAPTER 4 – ‘The Chap’: Decent Young Types 1951- 1965
CHAPTER 5: 1951 – Setting the scene
CHAPTER 6: EMBRACING TINSEL 1953 - 1959
Ealing & Sub-Ealing Comedy – A Retreat into Nostalgia
The Rise of the New Elizabethan – Facing the Future with
Confidence
The Rise of the New Elizabethan – Facing the Future with
Confidence
CHAPTER 7 BRITISH COMEDY AND THE ART OF
SUBERVERSION
Absolute Showers – St Trinain’s and Private’s Progress
The 1960s and the Decline of ‘Traditional’ Comedy
CHAPTER 8: CHAPS IN UNIFORM
The War Film & the Professional Officer
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Adjusting to the Peace - The Last Days of Pax Britannica
CHAPTER 9 – Use the Bell, Sergeant – The Police in British
Films
CHAPTER 10: CAPTURING THE MOOD
I’m All Right Jack
Room at the Top
CHAPTER 11 Social Problem Dramas 1960 - 1963
CHAPTER 12: From ‘Jiving, Drivelling Scum’ to Future
Consumers – British Cinema and The Teenager
CHAPTER 13: ENGLAND SWINGS?
British Cinema and ‘The Scene’
007 – For Cad and Country
CODA – HEAVEN’S ABOVE!
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CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Acknowledgements

Without Professor Julian Petley and Dr Leon Hunt, this
thesis would not have come to fruition.

And without Alison, Maureen, Rhiannon and Sharon I
would have neither started nor completed it.
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INTRODUCTION

John Mills, Richard Attenborough, John Gregson, Dirk Bogarde, Donald Sinden…are
grown- up boys, trusting, vulnerable, decently worried and ready aye ready. (Durgnat
1970: 142)
The genesis of this thesis was the idea that the period of between 1951 and 1965 marked a sea
change in the image of the middle class male in British cinema. This work will chart the
change from the paternally minded professional whose skills guide society - a legacy of the
‘People as Hero’ model of Second World War cinema - to an isolated, anachronistic or even
criminal figure. At the beginning of the 1950s Roy Lewis and Angus Maude described the
English middle classes as providing ‘most of the nation’s brains, leadership and organising
ability’ (1950: 337). For much of the 1950s, a range of popular British cinematic genres –
comedy, war and detective drama – were apparently dominated by well-spoken senior
professional.
These figures would often arrive in their black Wolseley1 - or who inspired their chaps to
win the war. Their young subordinates would, in turn, willingly accept the verbal abuse
issued by bearded curmudgeons. By the end of the 1950s in the face of consumer affluence ‘the
high summer of a middle class cinema’ (Durgnat 1976:1) was coming to an end as seen in the
mainstream of British films. In the planning and execution of this thesis I have borne in mind the
wise words of Arthur Marwick - ‘we think readily in decades but that is only because we count
the years as we would our fingers or our toes’ (1998: 5).
Thus, a 14 year period bordered by the last year of the Attlee government – and the
development of the ‘Swinging London myth’ has been chosen with some deliberation. This
period encompassed a substantial growth of consumerism, the collapse of the country’s illusions
in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis and the rise of ‘youth culture’, which I will detail in Chapter
12. I have concentrated on the genres that directly related to the topic in hand – war films,
comedies, police drama and youth films - to describe how they moved from pictures
constructed of ‘imaginary bonds which work to hold the peoples of a nation together’ (Higson
1984: 26), guided by senior professionals, to those films apparently celebrating youthful
individualism. Throughout my work, I will be describing how various determinants shaped the
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films discussed – government initiatives, censorship1 and financial pressures. The majority of
these pictures were created under the auspices of an elaborate studio system but by the end of the
1950s, the decline in cinematic audiences had resulted in Rank and ABPC scaling down their
roster of in-house actors and directors. As Roy Armes observed:
Whereas in 1950 there were less than 400,000 licences, by 1959 this had grown to
over 9m…During the same period, the cinema audience and the number of cinemas
both fell sharply. In 1950 an audience measuring 1,396m visited 4,483 cinemas. By
1959 this had diminished to about 600m attendances and only 3,414 cinemas. (1978:
239)
From the late 1950s, there were a number of films helmed by directors previously assumed as
being from the mainstream of cinema that displayed a society that was becoming neither in
need of nor beyond the control of paternal control. Figures of apparent probity were often
perceived as more flawed than hitherto and by the 1960s, senior professionals seemed
increasingly marginalised or even corrupt as memories of the war rescinded. The increased use
of external production companies and sense of increased freedom from studio control
coalesced with a more liberal regime at the British Board of Film Censors introduced in 1958.
That is the major thrust of my thesis but it is first essential to define my terms, not least
‘mainstream’; I use this to describe films made for commercial release during our period. This
may sound excessively pedantic but a major part of my thesis is how, even within the tightest
of budgetary and creative restrictions, British films could and did question the status quo –even
in the form of a seemingly innocuous comedy, such as Genevieve (Henry Cornelius 1953). It
was also mainstream cinema of this period that produced Stanley Baker, British cinema’s first
young working class leading man.
The film critic Roger Manvell categorised cinema into three distinct strata. There was
the ‘high film’ that enthused creative professionals and film critic alike, the ‘low film’ in
the form of the ‘programme filler’ and ‘the middle film’ which was a box office staple and
offered ‘sound entertainment without demanding too much or too little of the audience’s
sensibilities’ (1947:10). It is the ‘middle film’, the type of picture associated with mainstream
British cinema that will predominate in my thesis for, as Robert Murphy argued:
When any thought at all is given to the British film industry in the 50s then the
tendency is to categorise it as a dull period between the gritty realism of the war years
and the American backed 'Swinging London' films of the 60s. Ealing declined, the
documentary movement disappeared and cinemas closed in their thousands as
audiences turned away from the predominant fare of nostalgic war films and inane
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comedies to their television sets. Looked at more closely, this dismal picture of decline
dissolves to reveal British cinema as surprisingly robust, fertile and adaptable. (1997:1)

1 The British Board of Film Censors came into being in 1913 as a self-regulating body without any
formal legal status in order to prevent the imposition of censorship by central government. (Robertson 1989:1)