British Cinema

I

Introduction

British Cinema, historical development of British cinema in the sound period.

II

Early Developments

Although Britain made a substantial contribution to the development of early cinema, it was soon outpaced by Hollywood and Germany, and many directors, Alfred Hitchcock and Herbert Wilcox included, directed their first films in Munich or Berlin, where technical standards were higher. While they, and such directors as Maurice Elvey, were to have long careers, it was not until the Cinematograph Films Act (1928) that producers saw the incentive for investment in new and advanced technology and studios. The “Quota” Act, as it was known, made it a legal requirement for British cinemas to show a percentage of British-made films: by 1935, this was to be 20 per cent. Within a few years British film production was transformed.

Although it had its downside, with many shoddy films—“Quota quickies”—and American production companies establishing their own British satellites to exploit the market, Britain’s two vertically integrated companies, British International Pictures Ltd (BIP) and Gaumont-British, consolidated their positions with more ambitious productions. BIP, for example, produced three prestigious films directed by E. A. Dupont at its Elstree studios—Moulin Rouge (1928), Piccadilly (1929), and Cape Forlorn (1931)—all of which would have been made in Germany a few years earlier. Cape Forlorn, a sound film, made in three separate versions with three different international casts, is an early example of the multilingual film, an attempt to reach the international markets. When, in 1932, the owners of Gaumont-British, the Ostrer brothers, took over and refurbished Lime Grove Studios, Michael Balcon, as Head of Production, produced his biggest film to date, Rome Express, the prototype train thriller. Written by Sidney Gilliat, who was to become one of Britain’s most important directors, directed by Walter Forde, photographed by the distinguished German cameraman Günther Krampf, and featuring Conrad Veidt in a charismatic performance, it confirmed the belief that high-quality films could be made in Britain and succeed in the United States.

The slump in the German film industry when sound was introduced brought many film technicians to Britain in search of employment. As well as Krampf, the cine-photographers Mutz Greenbaum (later Max Greene) and Otto Heller, and the designers Oscar Werndorff and Alfred Junge were among those who settled permanently in Britain. Almost simultaneously the flamboyant Hungarian director/producer Alexander Korda, who had worked in Berlin, Hollywood, and Paris, came to produce “Quota” films for Paramount. He was followed by producers, writers, and others, driven out of Germany by the rise of Nazism.

The change in the British film scene led to unprecedented developments in the industry. Films, when not consciously domestic in character, were intended for the American market. Korda soon branched out on his own to form London Film Productions, borrowing money from a multitude of backers to produce and direct The Private Life of Henry VIII in 1933, which made a star of Charles Laughton. Its international success led to Korda receiving financial backing from the Prudential Assurance Company and to the building of Britain’s finest studios at Denham, west London, which were intended as a magnet for the best British independent producers and were expected to show a profit from the rental of space alone. Korda’s grasp of American distribution was unique among British producers, and his films, which included a number of major productions, were distributed by United Artists. He directed The Private Life of Don Juan (1934) and Rembrandt (1936); and produced Paul Czinner’s The Rise of Catherine the Great (1934); Harold Young’s The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934); The Ghost Goes West (1935) by René Clair; William Cameron Menzies’s Things to Come (1936); Jacques Feyder’s Night Without Armour (1937); and Zoltán Korda’s Technicolor romance, The Four Feathers (1939).

Other producers borrowed directly from banks, on a film-by-film basis, and with little financial control. The Capitol Film Corporation, headed by another émigré producer, Max Schach, was responsible for a string of Viennese-influenced, anodyne musicals, such as Abdul the Damned (1935), Pagliacci (1936), and Land Without Music (1937), the last two starring the famous tenor, Richard Tauber. Schach’s most successful film was made at Denham, an adaptation of the stage play Love from a Stranger (1937), but, as with all the films he produced, it was poorly distributed, losing £80,000. In January 1937, Twickenham Film Productions, which produced cheaply made “Quota” films from a tiny studio, collapsed with heavy debts. The auditors revealed the careless financing that was infecting the whole industry and, with a reputed £5 million lost, bank-lending to producers stopped. Receivers were appointed to a whole string of small production companies and Gaumont-British announced losses of nearly £100,000 in February 1937. With no one to fill the studios, Korda lost control of Denham to his financiers and finally to J. Arthur Rank, who, over the next six years, rapidly expanded his films and cinema interests.

Gaumont-British’s expensive “prestige” films, such as Lothar Mendes’s Jew Süss (1933), with Conrad Veidt, and Maurice Elvey’s remake of a German film, The Tunnel (1936), were aimed at the American market, but were financial disasters. Eventually, mounting debts forced the temporary close-down of its studios at Shepherd’s Bush, London. While financial limitations had prevented Gaumont-British from using colour and the rapidly developing technology, it produced some of Hitchcock’s seminal films, including The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The Thirty-Nine Steps (1936), and The Lady Vanishes (1938), as well as a number of others—I Was a Spy (1933), The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1935), and King Solomon’s Mines (1937) among them. In November 1937, Balcon left to join MGM-British, but he was unhappy working for Louis B. Mayer and, in July 1938, took over Associated Talking Pictures from Basil Dean, eventually changing the studio’s name to Ealing.

III

World War II and After

With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, almost all Americans and many exiles from Europe left Britain for Hollywood. Even the patriotic Korda, who had taken British nationality in 1936, was forced to complete the experimental Technicolor adventure, The Thief of Bagdad (1940), in Hollywood. The documentary movement, which John Grierson had established as the GPO Film Unit in the early 1930s, became the Crown Film Unit, and the Ministry of Information (MoI) maintained government control of production by approving and initiating scripts before releasing film stock for films to be made. Crown produced a number of important propaganda films, including two major achievements by Humphrey Jennings, Listen to Britain (1942) and Fires Were Started (1943). Alberto Cavalcanti, who had taken over from Grierson at the GPO Film Unit, moved to Ealing under Michael Balcon, taking a number of junior colleagues with him. This led to a number of documentary-influenced subjects being made within the commercial sector, including Convoy (Penrose Tennyson, 1940), The Foreman Went to France (Charles Frend, 1942), Nine Men (Harry Watt, 1943), Went the Day Well (Cavalcanti, 1943), and San Demetrio London (Frend, 1943).

Ealing became the focus for British realism, while the Korda tradition was kept alive solely by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and their company, The Archers. Using, whenever they could, Korda actors and Korda technicians, they developed a series of challenging and experimental films: 49th Parallel (1941), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), I Know Where I’m Going (1945), and A Matter of Life and Death (1946), among them.

Rank gradually extended its control of British film production throughout the 1940s. Apart from Denham, it absorbed Pinewood, Highbury, and Islington studios and developed huge distribution and exhibition outlets. During the war it financed Two Cities, which the Italian exile Filippo Del Guidice had formed in 1937, and Independent Producers. Among the films that Del Guidice supervised are two by Anthony Asquith—The Demi-Paradise (1943) and The Way to the Stars (1945)—and two by Carol Reed—The Way Ahead (1944) and Odd Man Out (1947)—while at the latter, Powell and Pressburger (the Archers), Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat (Individual), and David Lean, Ronald Neame, and Anthony Havelock-Allan (Cineguild) were given unprecedented backing to write, produce, and direct, and the quality of British films took a further leap forward. After co-directing the MoI-inspired Millions Like Us (1943) and Waterloo Road (1944) for Gainsborough, Individual produced two of the most outstanding films of the period—The Rake’s Progress (1945) and I See a Dark Stranger (1946)—and Lean, the editor of such films as Pygmalion (1938) and One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942), after establishing himself as a director at Two Cities with In Which We Serve (1942), went on to direct This Happy Breed (1944), Brief Encounter (1945), and Great Expectations (1946), featuring such actors as Rex Harrison, Trevor Howard, Celia Johnson, and Alec Guinness. Film costs were, however, escalating and the two patriotic Technicolor films Henry V (1944), co-written, produced, and directed by Laurence Olivier, and Gabriel Pascal’s Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) ran fiercely over-budget, the latter, at £1.27 million, becoming the most expensive film ever produced in Britain at the time. Rank misguidedly believed that, although others had failed, he could break into the American market and continued to finance films from The Archers, such as A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947), and The Red Shoes (1948), as well as the less expensive subjects, such as Green for Danger (1946), Captain Boycott (1947), and The Blue Lagoon (1948) from Individual. The days of the bottomless purse were over, however, and, in the 1950s, when Rank retrenched, many of those whom Rank had financed throughout the war left to work for Korda, who had re-established himself in England at Isleworth Studios, where he was responsible for Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949). With this further upheaval in British film production, “risk money” was again in short supply. The government finally established the National Film Finance Corporation (NFFC), the National Film Bank, which had long been advocated, and, also, set a tax on cinema admission—the Eady Levy—the revenue from which was to go directly to producers in Britain. The NFFC operated a revolving fund of £6 million and made loans to selected individual projects, while the Eady Levy attracted American producers such as Sam Spiegel and “Cubby” Broccoli to Britain.

Ironically, Ealing, under Balcon, was entering its most successful phase, giving European subjects a British dimension. In 1945, Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, and Robert Hamer directed a portmanteau film of supernatural stories, Dead of Night, which can now be seen as a British response to the excesses of the German Expressionist film, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919). Soon after, Harry Watt made a MoI-inspired film The Overlanders (1946), which dramatized the Australian contribution to the war, and Charles Crichton made Hue and Cry (1947), a British variation on the 1931 novel by Erich Kästner, Emil and the Detectives. More remarkable still was Robert Hamer’s It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), which converted the pessimistic mood of the Carné/Prévert film of the 1930s to the East End of London of the immediate post-war years. Ealing’s sense of Englishness gradually turned towards eccentricity with Passport to Pimlico (1949); Hamer’s masterpiece, Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), which featured Alec Guinness in a gallery of cameo performances; Charles Crichton’s The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953); and The Man in the White Suit (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955) by Alexander Mackendrick. Comedies or not, Ealing’s films were essentially “state of Britain” productions: Basil Dearden’s Frieda (1947) examined the British notion of “war-guilt”, while The Blue Lamp (1950) was the first film to establish the British bobby (policeman) as less of a law enforcer and more of a social worker. Ealing was, however, like the England it so often depicted, exhausted, worn out by the war and its subsequent privations, and it closed in 1959. One of its editors, Seth Holt, directed one of its final productions, the stylish, if mannered, thriller Nowhere to Go (1959), which proved the catalyst for a number of independent productions that were to follow—tough, “noirish” subjects such as Hell is a City (1960), Payroll (1961), and The Small World of Sammy Lee (1963).

If British cinema was for the most part weary, inspiration was to come from the English Stage Company, which presented new and sometimes controversial plays to British audiences. It found its focus in 1956 with its production of Look Back in Anger by John Osborne, which led to the coinage of the expression “angry young men” to describe a loose grouping of playwrights and novelists including Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Kingsley Amis, and John Wain. Allied to this group were such figures as Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz, and Lindsay Anderson. Through their movement, Free Cinema, they argued for artistic independence and a British cinema that was less attached to traditional values and past triumphs, and associated itself with contemporary concerns and aspirations. The model, notwithstanding a greater social commitment, was the French nouvelle vague (New Wave), which, by its spirit and sense of self-discovery, revealed a new range of cinematic possibilities. The historical moment was caught first, not by Free Cinema, but from the more traditional source of John and James Woolf’s Remus films, which produced Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959), from the novel by John Braine, and which, for the first time in British cinema, broached “adult themes”. Osborne, Alan Sillitoe, David Storey, and other writers provided the literary base for a flurry of independently produced films from Woodfall, Bryanston, and Independent Artists, films such as Look Back in Anger (1959), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961), and This Sporting Life (1963). This last was a financial failure and the Rank Corporation, who distributed it, turned against supporting “kitchen-sink” dramas.

The new vitality, which Lindsay Anderson and his colleagues sought, took a new turn in the 1960s, led by youth culture with its emphasis on fashion and pop music. Britain, albeit with financial advantages to producers, became a focus for international film-making. In Blow Up (1966), the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni visualized 1960s London as a commercially manipulated distraction from the unresolved political dilemmas that faced the country, a view of Britain shared by Joseph Losey, the expatriate American director who, with the stylish analyses The Servant (1963), Modesty Blaise (1966), and Accident (1967), took a disparaging perspective on its obsession with class and sex. Among other American directors, Richard Lester, who had directed the early jazz-pop oriented It’s Trad, Dad (1962), suddenly hit his stride with two modish films featuring the Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965), and, in 1964, Roger Corman directed two of his most admired horror films, The Masque of the Red Death and The Tomb of Ligeia. Apart from Losey, the greatest impact from the United States was made by Stanley Kubrick with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971), introducing technical standards previously unknown in Britain.

IV

Modern British Cinema

In the early 1980s financial support for British cinema through the NFFC and the Eady Fund was withdrawn by the government, and television co-funding, primarily inspired by the independent station Channel 4’s showcasing of films, became increasingly important to the industry’s survival. It led the way as one of the main supporters of British cinema, seeking theatrical openings prior to television screenings, developing international co-production agreements, and balancing on a knife-edge between commercial concepts and individual expression. The BBC’s promised development into feature film production was slower than Channel 4's to mature, although in 1997 it was behind Wilde and Mrs Brown, as well as the admired but little seen The Gambler, which were all notable for a combination of strong acting performances and modest production budgets. In 1997 the Arts Council also became a conduit of state support for commercial film production when funding from the National Lottery was announced for a number of companies which each put forward a slate of films for production. A new body, the Film Council, took over this responsibility in 2000.

British films, however, have been something of a hit or miss affair; Peter’s Friends (1992), directed by Kenneth Branagh, and Brassed Off (1996) are good examples of stock fare, the kind of films that Britain does well, but that break no new ground, while Mike Newell’s equally conventional Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) achieved a spectacular commercial success, commodifying British heritage within a fantasy of classlessness. As with the higher-budgeted Enigma-Goldcrest films, Chariots of Fire (1981) and The Killing Fields (1984), both of which were produced by David Puttnam, it suggests that there is no unifying approach to British film-making, and commercially inspired British cinema will continue to be notable only for its one-offs, that either adopt American formulas or are dependent on American financial support. As an example of this, an ambitious literary adaptation such as the award-winning The English Patient (1996) by Anthony Minghella was an American production, its producer Saul Zaentz having previously been responsible for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Amadeus (1984), and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988). David Lean, John Boorman, Alan Parker, Nicholas Roeg, and Ridley Scott are examples of British directors who have self-consciously sought the international stage.

Of those who have eschewed the Hollywood route, Peter Greenaway, whose British Film Institute/Channel 4-funded The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) was a succès d’estime, has, in spite of a developing aesthetic confidence, received decreasing praise with each subsequent film; in the late 1990s he indicated a withdrawal from cinema. Indeed, Britain’s long-term, relatively unpublicized cinematic achievement from the late 1970s to the 1990s was more closely associated to the committed anger of the 1960s, questioning “heritage culture” and examining emotionally more morally challenging territory. Chamber works included: from Terence Davies, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), The Long Day Closes (1992), and The Neon Bible (1995); from Mike Leigh, High Hopes (1988), Life is Sweet (1991), Naked (1993), and Secrets and Lies (1996); from Ken Loach, Fatherland (1986), Riff-Raff (1990), Land and Freedom (1995), and Carla’s Song (1996); from Derek Jarman, Jubilee (1978), Caravaggio (1986), and Edward II (1991); and Sally Potter’s international co-production Orlando (1993). These were especially characteristic of a fresh inspiration that was also parochial, effected by Thatcherism. Yet even these remained art house films that achieved minimal commercial runs, and were often seen by distributors and exhibitors as commercial liabilities.

Quite different in tone, ambition, and spirit was the output of Figment Films, whose Shallow Grave (1994), Trainspotting (1996), A Life Less Ordinary (1997), all directed by Danny Boyle, and Twin Town (Kevin Allen, 1997) took their inspiration from the films of Martin Scorsese, the Coen brothers, and American genre cinema. To a greater degree than any other beneficiaries of FilmFour International, these films were less preoccupied with the issues of social deprivation and class that have haunted British film-makers, than with the nature of commercial cinema itself. Their characters survived and triumphed over heavily criminalized cultures to escape the past, its savagery, and unfairness. At the centre of Figment was a team led by the producer Andrew Macdonald and director/producer Boyle; behind their productions were companies such as Polygram and 20th Century-Fox, who provided not only the main body of production finance, but also advertising strategies that helped place the films on the world stage. Their sense of collaboration, their searching for fresh subjects and ideas, their appreciation of a genuinely young and demanding audience with cross-media interests, an unusual sense of excitement, and brilliant marketing distinguished their work. Their films suggest that the failure of British film-makers in the past, as Alan Parker has argued, is less to do with a shortage of directorial or technical talent and more with the limited imagination of British producers.

Yet the faltering development of British film production, under-investment, and inadequately developed scripts, needs to be seen in the wider perspectives of distribution and exhibition that have bedevilled British cinema for decades. Films without adequate distribution and exhibition guarantees frequently languish unseen; without adequate publicity a film, no matter how good, is unlikely to appeal to potential audiences and will therefore attract little interest from distributors and exhibitors. Relatively inexpensive and admired miniatures, such as Mrs Brown and The Full Monty (1997), despite their arrays of well-established British actors, stand little chance of succeeding on the international stage unless they are taken up, publicized, and distributed by one of the larger conglomerates such as Miramax.

This can be seen in the contrasted fates of two British films released in 2001. Last Orders, directed by Australian-born Fred Schepisi and adapted from a prize-winning novel by Graham Swift, boasted an impressive cast headed by Michael Caine, Helen Mirren, and Bob Hoskins, and an intelligent, funny, and moving script. Ineptly handled by its distributors, it vanished without trace despite good reviews. Whereas Bend It Like Beckham by Gurinder Chadha, a pleasant but slight cross-cultural comedy about two schoolgirls with footballing aspirations and starring a pair of unknowns, netted a shrewd deal with Fox Searchlight and pulled in sizeable audiences in the United States and elsewhere, besides launching the stellar career of Keira Knightley.

Some British film-makers, however, doggedly refuse to let the deal and the box-office dictate their careers. Since his cinematic debut in 1995 with the road movie Butterfly Kiss, Michael Winterbottom has remained startlingly prolific—roughly a film a year—despite the fact that few if any of his films have shown a profit. Shooting fast and cheaply, generally with hand-held cameras and on location, Winterbottom has ranged over a bewildering variety of genres. He has tackled period drama with Jude (1996), adapted from Thomas Hardy, The Claim (2000), from Hardy again but reworked as a snow-bound Western, and the unclassifiably eccentric A Cock and Bull Story (2005), from the supposedly “unfilmable” Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne; dystopian science fiction in Code 46 (2003); dramatized documentary in Welcome to Sarajevo (1997), In This World (2002), and The Road to Guantánamo (2006); explicit erotica in 9 Songs (2004); and romantic comedy in With or Without You (1999); among much else.

Winterbottom's versatility and resilience is to some extent reflected in British cinema as a whole. Lurching from crisis to crisis seems to have become a habit; the latest disaster, whether it is the drastic pruning back of FilmFour's franchise by parent company Channel 4, or the Treasury clamping down on tax loopholes, is greeted with cries of dismay and prophecies of doom—after which the industry picks itself up and carries on much as before. The situation in the first decade of the 21st century, although hardly classifiable as a boom, looks essentially healthy: recent years have found veterans such as Stephen Frears (The Queen, 2006), Mike Leigh (Vera Drake, 2004), Ken Loach (The Wind That Shakes the Barley, 2006), and Shane Meadows (This Is England, 2006) operating near the top of their form, alongside newcomers like Andrea Arnold (Red Road, 2006), David Mackenzie (Young Adam, 2003), Neil Marshal (Dog Soldiers, 2002; The Descent, 2005), Pavel Pawlikowski (Last Resort, 2000; My Summer of Love, 2004), Lynne Ramsey (Ratcatcher, 1999; Morvern Callar, 2002), and Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, 2004). Add to these the work of brilliant occasional visitors such as Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men, 2006), and it becomes evident that British cinema's capacity for survival against the odds is far from exhausted.