Ealing Revisited

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

Went the Day Well? (1942)
Ealing Revisited
Edited by Mark Duguid, Lee Freeman, Keith M. Johnston and Melanie Williams
BFI/Palgrave Macmillan  304pp  £65 / £18.99

In 1938, when Michael Balcon took over Ealing Studios, he phased out what he called the crowd-pleasing ‘tinsel’ films starring George Formby, Will Hay and Gracie Fields. With the aim of bringing more realism to the screen and being consciously different from Hollywood, Balcon drafted in staff from the GPO Film Unit. These included Alberto Cavalcanti, who went on to direct several Ealing films, the best-known being Went the Day Well? (1942), and Harry Watt.
Their philosophy was described by Watt as ‘taking actual true events, using real people, but also using “dramatic license” to heighten the tensions and the storyline.’ This form of documentary-style realism proved ideal to promote propaganda during the Second World War in producing films for the Ministry of Information and the studio’s own commercial feature films, beginning with The Big Blockade in 1942.
The themes of Ealing’s wartime films included a contribution to the ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ campaign (The Next of Kin,1942) and the threat of a German invasion (Went the Day Well?), but the underlying theme of all Ealing’s wartime films was the morale of the British people and the need for unity in the face of a common enemy. Having shown that the community had to pull together during the war, Ealing’s early postwar films dealt with many of the issues surrounding reconstruction, social mobility, status and class.
At its peak Ealing Studios produced a series of classic comedies that projected the indomitable spirit and character of the British people to the world. Such films as Whisky Galore (1949), Passport to Pimlico (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), The Man in the White Suit (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955) showed ‘ordinary’ communities and individuals responding to the changes in postwar Britain.
Whatever the situation, intrinsic British values won the day and the films reflected the male, middle-class, democratic team spirit of the Ealing management, who nicknamed Diana Morgan, their only female  scriptwriter, ‘the Welsh bitch’.
Yet the image of parochial Little Englanders fighting the might of Hollywood against all the odds is misleading. As the essays in this book underline, the classic Ealing comedies represent only a small part of the 95 feature films produced under Balcon’s leadership.
Outside the canon of classics are overlooked comedies, dramas, thrillers, melodramas and documentaries. Undermining other preconceptions, Ealing made an extended effort to establish an Australian production base, made several films with female central characters, such as Dance Hall (1950) and The Feminine Touch (1955), and many of its key staff came from overseas or embraced influences beyond our shores.
Ealing Revisited explores the economic and practical demands of making many of these films. For example, Catherine Surowiec’s chapter on Anthony Mendleson, Ealing’s first resident costume designer, notes that up to 1949 he had to claim coupons from the Board of Trade to obtain fabrics and clothing. Keith Johnston contributes a chapter on how in the 1950s Ealing Studios creatively used Technicolor film to show that the studio was not ‘a whimsical place of legend’ but was ‘eager to experiment with the expressive opportunities of colour and happy to move beyond its own realist tradition.’

Nigel Watson is a writer specialising in film and technology.