Ealing Feelings!

THE PROJECTIONIST PRESENTS : Ealing Feelings : A salute to the supernal studios, and here are some of their finest fettle finessed features. Enjoy these Balcon sarnies it's an all-out Ealing escapade today in The Projection Room -----

for further reading here is my article where I deconstruct the evolution of the studios

The Evolution of Ealing by Veronica Jones, Film Historian, 2013.

Producer and financier Sir Michael Balcon had a connection to Ealing that dated back to 1938, when he took over the post from Basil Dean, the man who built the studios in 1931. The Ealing era under Balcon had little to do with the emintently respectable kind of cinema Dean preferred to promote  yet the two regimes still had many similarities and points of continuity. Both men were on their respective pilgrimages to make certain that the studio's product was stereotypical and characteristically British. It was these very words on the plaque that was erected on the studio buildings in 1955, when they were sold off to the BBC that put the matter in a nutshell:


'Here during a quarter of a century were made many films projecting Britain and the British character'

Dean would create an Ealing brand that projected Britain largely through the pictorial image of the country. Balcon never neglected this image either; 1947's Hue and Cry, the film that ushered in those signature Ealing comedies, that strikingly explored the blitzed landscapes of ol' blighty, while one partial documentary feature, 1945's Painted Boats was completely given over to canals. Yet his distinct projection of Britain went a sight deeper than the details of urban and rural landscapes. The best of Balcon films use the country's characteristics as a veritable springboard for their tales of community endeavors, of idiosyncratic souls ever tilting at unwieldy officialdom.

Gracie thought she'd have a Fields day when she swanned off to America.

Another link between these two periods is the importance that is given to comedy. Gracie Fields in 1938, had been seduced by an offer she just simply could not refuse via an American company, otherwise known as 20th Century, which just happened to produce her last trio of British films, the last of which was 1939's Shipyard Sally. Thereafter, the three Hollywood films she was affiliated with in the last few years of the war, would obliterate her film career. The Lancashire tradition of comedy was sustained at Ealing by the production of George Formby films up to 1941's Turned Out Nice Again, and that's when he would officially succumb to Columbia British, unwavering as Britain's top box-office star for a whopping six years between 1938 and 1944, and such a lengthy run as this was a feat virtually unheard of at the time. And the popular tradition  of low-brow, low-budget movie makers was then taken over by Will Hay and he himself worked for Balcon in his Gaumont-British days and would transfer his activities to casa Ealing from 1941 until 1943 when his faltering health sadly would curtail his career.

The sardonic Sim, an most excellent exponent of Ealing

The brand of comedy that Ealing was notorious for would see a dramatic change in its tempo after the war. In lieu of producing vehicles for comic stars with permanently established personas, Balcon embarked on making films that were designated for a motley collection of versatile performers that were extremely adept in the realm of comedy. Enter Alastair Sim, Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood, Margaret Rutherford and Cecil Parker. The new Ealing comedy was now created by a team and for a team.

Hamer, never one to pander, resisted Ealing's charms in the end.

Balcon would continue and also intensify Basil Dean's long tradition of benevolent paternalism. Signs with legends like ' The studio with team spirit' graced the walls. Balcon carefully would encourage the individual talents within his team. Future producers and directors began as editors (Robert Hamer, Charles Crichton), assistant editors (Seth Holt), writers Alexander Mackendrick) art directors (Michael Relph). Monja Danischewsky made the transition from publicist to writer and finally associate producer.

They all had faces even a mother couldn't love.

The studio, in fact, became exactly the kind of isolated community that it loved to celebrate in its films. It was populated by a closely knit group of talents all happily united in a common goal and somewhat leery of outsiders or anyone who was quote unquote different. Once established at Ealing, people had a tendency to remain there. And certainly those who moved away, namely Henry Cornelius and Robert Hamer were seen as rule's exception.

Balcon's organization was drawn together during the war years, when in common with British films of the period, Ealing's output testified to a new strength, character and overall sense of purpose. Convoy (1940) was an enormously popular film at its time - a meaty melodrama of life on board a convoy ship. It's slogan would be 'Entertainment with authenticity' but at this early stage of the war, the authenticity in Convoy was primarily in its location footage. Director Pen Tennyson (tragically killed in an air crash the following year) shot so much background material on the high seas that subsequent Ealing directors constantly returned to his footage to fill out their own maritime features and shorts. The mores of Tennyson's characters were decidedly less authentic, the officer class would parade on deck with binoculars in tow, while the meek workers stoked the fires and would check the gauges that were down below, both social groups self-consciously keeping one another at arm's length.

Things got ever so emotional in San Demetrio London (1943)

But the pull of the war's events - and the influx of documentary-reared talent, like the director Harry Watt, would help Ealing films reflect Britain's new spirit of comradeship; all layers of society working together with courage and good humour. By the time of San Demetrio, London (1943), authenticity of emotional content was considered infinitely more important than the authenticity of location.

Rank and file...

With the war now drawing to a close, Ealing prepped for peacetime production. a deal made with J Arthur Rank's empire in 1944 ensured the company security for the future and a guaranteed release in Rank's cinema circuit for all their impending films. And what were these masked films? Balcon made an extravagant statement about this in the trade magazine called Kinemotograph Weekly in January 1945 :

Sir Michael Balcon

'British films must present to the world a picture of Britain as a leader in Social Reform, in the defeat of social injustices and a champion of civil liberties...Britain as a questing explorer, adventurer and trader...Britain as a mighty military power standing alone and undaunted against terrifying aggression.'

Baby, it's cauld outside.

One could just about wedge Scott of the Antarctic (1948) into that scheme, but it hardly accounts for Ealing's anthology of supernatural stories as 1945's Dead of Night, or romance rural style in The Loves of Joanna Godden (1947) that starred Googie Withers, or even in the onslaught of comedies that followed suit in the post-war era.

It is not in the British character, despite Balcon's declaration in 1945, to use films to confront the bigger issues and to conquer all and sundry. Ealing soon realized this and would instead settle for nominal issues, smaller communities and characters far too humble to stride anywhere lest their dreams.

Give his Bogardes to Broadway from the illuminating Blue Lamp

In comedies and dramas, Ealing kept the community war spirit fire burning. London's East End would be featured in It Always Rains on Sunday, and it was the are of Paddington Green featured in The Blue Lamp (1950). Other films would observe the cross-section of society; the varied frequencies of a London dance hall in the apt Dance Hall (1950) a collection of seamen on weekend leave in Pool of London (1951). Post-war Ealing hosted some new wrinkles, and this was evident in the case of 1946's The Overlanders and the other Australian and African films such as Eureka Stockade (1949) and Where No Vultures Fly (1951) respectively.

This was without a doubt, Ealing's richest period. The infamous comedies emerged, three of them in the year 1949 (Whisky Galore, Passport to Pimlico and Kind Hearts And Coronets) all quite disparate in tone. In Hamer's Kind Hearts and Coronets, Dennis Price undertook the disposal of the D'Ascoyne family and this was peppered by its dark humor, literate script and an optical elegance that was unique in Ealing's output. Alexander Mackendrick's Whisky Galore! provided a caustic look at human foibles as Hebridean islanders and a bombastic British resident (the great Basil Radford) clashed over a consignment of whiskey that was rescued from a wrecked ship. Henry Cornelius' Passport to Pimlico, boasted a script by stalwart T.E.B Clarke, presented a boisterous picture of yet another commune hellbent to forsake constraints and portrayed the London district of Pimlico as an independent, ration-free state after a dusty document had revealed the area to be an outpost of the once powerful Duchy of Burgundy.

Ealing dramas of the period, as The Blue Lamp, would celebrate community life, although the population and officialdom were now seen working alongside together in efforts to combat the anti-social elements that threatened its smooth running. Jack Warner portrayed P.C. Dixon, a personification of the British bobby - ebullient  homely, who fancies a round of darts and his garden plants. When he is fatally wounded during a botched robbery, even the underworld frat unite with the authorities to nail the murderer (the culprit was Dirk Bogarde) amidst the cheerful crowds at a greyhound stadium.

As the Fifties trooped on, however, Ealing's projection of the Britisher's life began to falter. Comedies and melodramas regurgitated the familiar formulas with diminishing returns. Comedies, although having their moments as in 1953's The Titfield Thunderbolt and The Maggie (1954) reached the height of whimsicality in Barnacle Bill (1957) where a sea captain played by the incomparable Alec Guinness, kitted out a rundown pier as an ocean liner. Saving the day was The Ladykillers in 1955, and its here that Mackendrick and his right hand man, writer William Rose made a virtue of Ealing's fixation with the quaint and the decrepit, and this was more than up to standard. Ealing dramas would pale considerably to what they once were, as in the case of Dunkirk (1958) and though it presented all the emotions and scenarios of the past war astutely, it was done so in a manner so cold and clinical that it instantly congealed into cliches.

Ealing in a jarring moment with 1955's  hybrid filmThe Ship That Died of Shame

After Ealing's home studio was sold to the BBC in 1955, productions would continue at MGM's Borehamwood studios. Their final film was The Siege of Pinchgut, released in August of 1959. And now without a base to call home, Balcon's central principles of continuity and community were no longer maintained. Stressing the importance of common purpose and the free exchange of ideas, he had once described a production unit as ' a sort of soviet.' His acerbically witty and well admired colleague Monja Danischewsky would characterize Ealing, albeit with a distinctive emphasis, as Mr Balcon's Academy ' There is no contradiction : that there was a genuine exchange of ideas, without any such regard to hierarchy, under Balcon, is undoubted ; that the headmaster would have the last word no less so.

Although Mr Balcon's career did not cease and desist with the passing of Ealing, his later years were absolutely consumed with the general politics of survival for independent production in Britain.