Ealing Comedies

Ealing Comedies, group of satirical comedies, produced by Michael Balcon at Ealing Studios, that began with Hue and Cry (1947, directed by Charles Crichton) and ended with The Ladykillers (1955, directed by Alexander Mackendrick). Modest in production values, the films tended towards a Picture Post representation of British working-class life and were replete with eccentric characters with scant respect for authority or bureaucracy. The Ealing comedies—Passport to Pimlico (1949), directed by Henry Cornelius; Whisky Galore (1949), The Man in the White Suit (1951), and The Maggie (1954), all three directed by Alexander Mackendrick; Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), directed by Robert Hamer; The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953), both directed by Charles Crichton, among them—were genuine collaborations between writers and associate producers, whose roles were, to some degree, interchangeable. They were slightly self-deprecating studies of British post-war life and conditions with an undercurrent of deep seriousness.

T. E. B. Clarke, Robert Hamer, Michael Pertwee, Angus Mcphail, John Dighton, and William Rose created and adapted stories that were mildly subversive but not socially divisive. As is often the case with deeper comedy, there is an underlying seriousness, and class and snobbery are the running jokes in many of the films; sex is a long way behind. The crooks in The Ladykillers have names that capture their pretension: Professor Marcus (Alec Guinness) and Major Courtney (Cecil Parker), for example, both of whom are soon put in their place by Louisa Wilberforce (Katie Johnson), who lives in the elegant poverty of her bomb-damaged Victorian house. She finesses like a bridge player to outwit them, and finishes up with all the money they have stolen. In Kind Hearts and Coronets, the socially aspirant Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) felicitously murders a string of relatives, all played by Alec Guinness, who are blocking his way to the dukedom he feels would have been his had his mother married for property rather than love. As with the villains of The Ladykillers, his social climbing nearly pays off, but he has forgotten his memoirs, which lie, irretrievable, on the table of a prison cell. Mrs Wilberforce’s rickety house, as with the estates to which Louis Mazzini aspires, might be Britain itself. In the end, property does not change hands and the class system, good-humouredly, reasserts itself.

Another two Ealing classics, Hue and Cry and Passport to Pimlico, were partly filmed in the ruins of London. The first, in which hundreds of spirited youths clamber over a bomb-site in pursuit of a gang of crooks, is simply a boys’ comic-book story. The youngsters, children who have grown up during World War II, intuitively know how the British “muddle through”. The shells of buildings in these films themselves resemble characters whom audiences know well, symbols of a damaged but triumphant Britain. In Passport to Pimlico, documents discovered in a bomb crater confer the right of secession to a part of West London, which establishes itself as the State of Burgundy. In a gentle prod at bureaucracy, passport and border controls are quickly established, and the Whitehall civil servants who are dispatched to negotiate are quickly sent packing. Rationing is duly abandoned and Burgundy’s exotic and peculiar characters, played by Stanley Holloway, Margaret Rutherford, Raymond Huntley, and others, briefly emerge as heroes. Burgundy is swiftly besieged, however, and, cut off from the greater community, its inhabitants soon lose their enthusiasm for independence and are relieved to be able to negotiate themselves back into society at large.

The Ealing comedies provide a picture of Britain that is quaint, amusing, good-natured, and settled. With the exception of those films set in Scotland—Whisky Galore and The Maggie—a faint air of self-satisfaction settles around them. The throw-away performances, the plainness of their visual style, and the generosity of the writing encapsulate an image of a nation that only plays with the possibility of changing its antiquated social attitudes, considering things funnier as they are.