The Ealing Achievement

In the Australia of the 1940s and 1950s the Ealing Films were special. They premiered in Sydney at the Embassy and State theatres and were screened throughout Australia by the Greater Union chain. These unpretentious low-budget films from a small studio in the London suburb of Ealing had an enthusiastic following. The famous Ealing comedies such as Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Lavender Hill Mob were regularly revived, as were the studio’s dramas, which in fact made up three quarters of its output. I remember in the late 1950s my father taking me to see one of Ealing’s great successes, the 1946 prisoner-of-war drama The Captive Heart in the Gothic Theatre, Willoughby, one of the many suburban houses that were lost with the coming of television. By then the studio’s understated narrative style was pleasantly familiar, as was the documentary realism, and I remember we were quite moved by the film’s intense love story and celebration of stoic courage.

Why were these movies so popular when the widely distributed American cinema was at its best, and there were fine continental films being screened regularly in theatres such as the Savoy in Bligh Street, Sydney? As I recall, in middle-class circles there was a liking for all things British—nice voices, good manners and all that. After all, it was a time when you barely heard an authentic Australian accent on the ABC. This definitely did not mean that poor British films were forgiven. An old friend recalled that in the isolated country town in which he grew up in the 1930s they would be depressed for a week when they learned that the Saturday night attraction in their only cinema was to be a George Formby vehicle.

The Ealing comedies were about believable situations that were taken to comic extremes—a boatload of whisky is wrecked on the coast and the locals decide to steal it in Whisky Galore, or an English village decides to run its own railway in The Titfield Thunderbolt. Moreover, in the dramas the middle- or working-class characters might be idealised but they were never patronised; and they were shown in believable settings such as the modest suburban houses created for Jack Hawkins’s superintendent and test pilot in The Long Arm and Man in the Sky or the large kitchens occupied by Jack Warner and Gladys Henson in Train of Events and The Captive Heart when they played likeable working-class characters. It was an England more or less free of the sort of class distinction of those films in which everyone dressed for dinner and had a butler and a maid. The Ealing films seemed to be about real people and celebrated the stoicism and determination many of us had come to admire about Britain during the war.

We know now that the films were created by a team of editors, writers and directors who had been assembled at the Ealing Studios by Michael Balcon early in the 1940s. Reportedly it was a very pleasant place to work. Everyone went to each other’s rushes and suggestions were encouraged. Balcon’s door was always open to new ideas. Alexander Mackendrick, director of The Man in the White Suit and The Lady Killers, told me that the studio head was perpetually worried, and the flustered executive brilliantly played by Cecil Parker in The Man in the White Suit was an affectionate caricature of Balcon.

In the foyer of the studio was the sign, “Ealing the studio of the team spirit”, and this was taken very seriously. According to Mackendrick, Charles Crichton (who directed The Lavender Hill Mob) worked without credit on Whisky Galore and Mackendrick, when the opportunity presented itself, did the same for Crichton (he couldn’t remember which films). Robert Hamer (director of Kind Hearts and Coronets) is known to have completed San Demetrio London when Charles Frend fell ill. The ideology of the studio was Left-liberal, but not socialist, with just about everyone taking less than they could earn elsewhere so they could work on the kind of projects being developed at Ealing. Stewart Granger’s arrival at Blenheim Palace in a Rolls-Royce for the filming of exteriors when he was starring in Saraband for Dead Lovers did not go down well in the tweedy, slightly insular atmosphere of the studio, even though he gave a brilliant performance in the film. 

Australian audiences might have been less enthusiastic about these movies if they had known the real story behind their extensive distribution here. Norman Rydge, the head of Greater Union, which distributed most of the British films in Australia, and was the parent company of Cinesound Films, had always been hostile to the features that had been made by Ken G. Hall at the small studio in Bondi during the 1930s. With the outbreak of war Rydge closed down feature film production “for the duration”. In 1943 Hall won Australia’s first Oscar for producing Damien Parer’s newsreel Kokoda Front Line. However, this did not deter Rydge from doing his best to end feature film making at Cinesound, even though he did tell Hall that the Oscar should be in his own office at Greater Union. (Hall sent him a highly illegal replica.) An order for new equipment was cancelled behind the Cinesound chief’s back. Hall’s rival director Charles Chauvel was allowed to complete Sons of Matthew at Cinesound, and every project Hall put up was politely rejected. “Anything to keep me out of my own studio,” Hall said bitterly in one of our many interviews.

It all became clear to Hall when John Davis, the managing director of Rank, visited Australia and was taken by Rydge to the Cinesound Studios. “I never could understand why it was considered necessary to make pictures in Australia,” Davis said to the Oscar-winning producer. “After all, we in England have four or five modern well-equipped studios, and nearly 4000 people employed. We can make all the pictures you need.” Rydge made no comment. To Hall it was clear; he was to be shut down and Rank would supply the films.

Of course Sir Michael Balcon and Ealing had nothing to do with this. They just had a distribution deal with Rank. But had Hall chosen to go public with this material, it could have been very damaging to both Greater Union and British films in Australia. He chose to keep silent until he came to write his autobiography, partly out of loyalty to the company and also because he admired the Ealing comedies. A few years later Davis was instrumental in the demise of Ealing itself. He blocked Balcon from using the new sound stages at Rank when the studio at Ealing became too expensive to maintain. 

In the 1960s and 1970s the Ealing films were ignored by the critical establishment, at least until Charles Barr wrote his groundbreaking study The Ealing Story in 1980. Dominating film commentary at the time was the auteur theory that concentrated almost exclusively on the personal vision of the director. Recently Ealing’s portrayal of British society has come to fascinate film historians, and most of the key films have been released on DVD. There are few extras but the transfers are excellent. Balcon, it seems, was conscientious about film preservation. So how do they look after fifty years or more?

I began the research for this piece by viewing one of the later films made after Balcon and his collaborators had left Ealing and were based at the MGM Studios in Britain. It was Man in the Sky (1957) directed by Charles Crichton and starring Jack Hawkins. The film had an unexpected immediacy and relevance. Certainly it portrays a world where even if you happen to be a test pilot you wear a suit to work and drive a baby Austin car. But the deceptively simple plot crafted by John Eldridge and William Rose could easily be transposed into a modern setting.

A test pilot played by Hawkins is demonstrating the prototype of a new transport plane for a prospective buyer when one of the engines catches fire. Everyone bails out except the pilot, who in spite of his boss’s pleas to ditch the aircraft and save himself, decides to try to land the plane.

In some ways the film works better now than it did in 1957. Back then we all knew Jack Hawkins would pull it off. He was yet to start playing his more sinister authority figures and was an icon of British fifties cinema. A happily naive viewer now would not be so sure of the hero’s survival, and might perhaps experience a better picture.

In any case the film works on a number of levels. First as a thriller; can our likeable hero land the plane? Here Charles Crichton’s instinctive understatement serves the film well. A contemporary director would be tempted to have an orgy of special effects and one emotional scene after another. Certainly there are some powerful exchanges that convey how dangerous the landing is going to be; but essentially all we have in Man in the Sky is a very difficult piece of flying that is executed on screen in real time by an uncredited stunt pilot. What’s more it was very dangerous. According to IMDb, in one shot omitted from the film the plane overshot the runway and damaged the nose. All of which, together with Hawkins’s sensitive portrayal of the strain on the pilot, creates some very believable suspense. A few brief scenes show the life of the small company that depends for its survival on the plane landing safely.

Most impressively of all we see the effect on his wife. Instead of a misty-eyed where-did-you-find-the-strength-darling scene, she is furious; and when he gets back they have a good old-fashioned domestic that has some very sensible things to say about virtues such as courage and responsibility. “The man who said ‘rather a live coward than a dead hero’ was probably a live coward.”

This film was made at a time when Ealing was supposed to be in decline. But once a modern audience becomes accustomed to the restrained style, and realises you have to listen to the dialogue, Man in the Sky can have an impact on the viewer that would be the envy of a modern action director. For those who know the historical context the film is even more affecting. Man in the Sky was made only three years after a Comet airliner crashed off Corsica, taking with it a class of schoolgirls and the famous broadcaster and historian Chester Wilmot. Audiences knew that if an aircraft was in trouble it was vital to find out what was wrong. 

The next film I examined was more of a period piece. The Long Arm (1956), directed by Charles Frend, was the last film made at the old studio and portrays a fifties London where police are unarmed and there are no racial tensions. Scotland Yard, represented by Jack Hawkins’s superintendent, is portrayed as a compassionate and reliable organisation. We know now from the investigations by the likes of Ludovic Kennedy that British coppers then could be quite adept at framing suspects. But there were enough that were scrupulously fair to make a film like The Long Arm believable and valid.

The tension here comes from an intricate puzzle about a series of seemingly unrelated robberies combined with a particularly nasty murder. There is a film noir touch to the repeated night shots of rain-washed streets and the interiors of darkened buildings employed by Frend and his cinematographer, Gordon Dines, to suggest a very real menace beneath the surface of this ordered society. Again we have an ordinary man showing unexpected courage simply because it is the right thing to do.

Unlike many of his Hollywood counterparts, Hawkins was able to invest parts like this with a rich humanity. He is aided by some fine writing from Robert Barr and Dorothy and Campbell Christie that includes deft portraits of his wife and son together with some welcome touches of humour. Charles Barr points out that we can see the beginnings of the television police series in The Long Arm. But rarely has this sort of police procedural been done quite so well. 

These examples come towards the end of a great tradition of film-making. To understand what Ealing could achieve at its height you need to go back to near the beginning. The Captive Heart (1946), directed by Basil Dearden, was about the experiences of ordinary soldiers as prisoners of the Germans. It was partly shot at a recently vacated camp in the British Occupied Zone, and the march from France into Germany was partly recreated using soldiers from the army of occupation still posted in Germany.

Thanks to my late friend the journalist and historian Ivan Chapman, I was given a unique insight into the making of this film. In the 1940s he had been Private Chapman of 2/1 Machine Gun Battalion 6th Division AIF. Ivan was captured in Greece and spent the rest of the war in a prison camp in Germany where he taught himself German and earned a Commander-in-Chief’s Commendation for his service as a medical orderly. After being liberated by units of Patton’s Third Army—“Sure glad to have you Australian cowboys with us,” the General drawled to the young Australian who was proudly wearing his slouch hat—Chapman was in a camp in Britain waiting to go back to Australia when they were visited by an entertainer. It was Basil Radford, famous for his role as the cricket-mad Englishman in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes.

Radford told the troops some very funny blue jokes, and after the show invited Chapman to come out “on the booze”. “Why me?” Ivan asked rather defensively. Radford explained that he was about to go on location in Germany to appear in a prisoner-of-war film and wanted to pick his brains. Chapman had liked him in the Hitchcock film and respected the actor’s concern to get it right. They adjourned to a nearby pub where the landlord gave them free drinks provided he could listen. “He wanted everything,” Ivan recalled. “Emotions, how we felt at different times, the lot. By the time we’d finished I was drenched in sweat from the tension.” Chapman enjoyed Radford’s Major Dalrymple when he finally got to see The Captive Heart at the Embassy in Sydney. But he was always to remember Radford as the tough, dedicated professional he encountered in the pub in England.

When I was teaching Film History at Mitchell College of Advanced Education I invited Ivan to discuss the film with my students. “They got it right,” he told us. “There was always a blinded soldier somewhere in the camp,” he said of Gordon Jackson’s moving performance as Lieutenant Lennox. Karel Stepanek’s chilling Gestapo man was, Chapman told us, only too believable. “They always wore those leather coats and the Germans were always afraid when they appeared.”

Unfortunately screenwriters Angus MacPhail, Guy Morgan and Patrick Kirwan could not have used Ivan’s best story about how they discovered the Russian prisoners were planning to sack and plunder the local village once they were free and the Australians put them under guard. “The war was over. We didn’t want something like that on our conscience.”

As well as the documentary realism the film has as its centrepiece an impossibly romantic love story of a Czech on the run from the Gestapo, played splendidly by Michael Redgrave. He takes on the identity of a British officer and hides out in the prison camp. To maintain his cover he is forced to write to the man’s wife, and they fall in love by mail. It all worked, even for my very with-it students, because of the quality of the writing in the letters, heard as voice-overs, and the truthfulness of the playing with Rachel Kempson, the real-life Mrs Redgrave, as the wife. I don’t think it is pushing it too far to see the protection of the Czech resister by all ranks in the camp as an implicit apology by ordinary Englishmen for the betrayal of Munich.

It is fascinating to compare the portrayal of the working-class other ranks played with great dignity by Jack Warner, Mervyn Johns and Jimmy Handley in The Captive Heart with the lower-deck characters in one of the first Michael Balcon productions at Ealing, Pen Tennyson’s Convoy (1940). The lower-deck characters are treated sympathetically but conform to the condescending working-class stereotypes of the period. And with the square-jawed Clive Brook as the captain of the cruiser, and “Rule Britannia” on the soundtrack, we know that the fortunes of the British Navy are in the very best of hands and everyone is going to be suitably heroic. The Captive Heart is equally patriotic. There is the haunting scene of the men marching into the camp whistling “There’ll Always Be an England” and the sense that they are recreating British life in captivity. But now officers and men are all in it together. Significantly, the screenwriter Patrick Kirwan worked on both films. For all its romanticism The Captive Heart is a richer, more inclusive work than the earlier film, and arguably the best prison-camp movie of them all.

As more Ealing Films are released on DVD I hope to explore the extraordinary achievement of Sir Michael Balcon and his team further. The Australian industry can learn a lot from these modest, unpretentious men who helped to redefine British cinema.