Ealing Studios

Ealing Studios, British film production venue, famous for the classic Ealing comedies made there during the 1940s and 1950s. Films were produced at Ealing, a quiet West London suburb, as early as 1904 when Will Barker, showman and film pioneer, set up an operation there. One of his productions was the first British film of Hamlet (1912). Barker retired in 1920 and his studio—a large glasshouse that allowed filming in natural light—fell on hard times. New studios, the first in Britain purpose-built for sound, were constructed in 1931 to house Associated Talking Pictures, with theatre impresario Basil Dean in charge of production. Dean gave the northern comedians Gracie Fields and George Formby their start in cinema. Their films made money, but Dean’s more grandiose ventures such as Lorna Doone (1935, which he himself directed) were a disaster. Dean was ousted in 1938 and Michael Balcon was brought in to replace him. It was during Balcon’s regime (from 1938 to 1956) that Ealing came into its own.

At Ealing Balcon created the nearest the British film industry produced to a studio modelled after the classic Hollywood pattern. Like Warner Bros. in the 1930s, Ealing had its roster of personnel (writers, technicians) on permanent salary, its pool of actors, its regular thematic concerns—in short, a recognizable house style of film-making. Among those directors whose careers were started, or nurtured, at Balcon’s Ealing were Robert Hamer, Alexander Mackendrick, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, and Seth Holt, as well as writers, cinematographers, and such actors as Alec Guinness.

During World War II Ealing pioneered the documentary-tinged style of war film with such films as Next of Kin (1942, directed by Thorold Dickinson), Went The Day Well? (1942, Alberto Cavalcanti), and San Demetrio, London (1943, Charles Frend), a style later continued with The Cruel Sea (1953, Frend). After the war there was the great run of Ealing comedies, from Hue and Cry (1946, Crichton) to The Ladykillers (1955, Mackendrick). Balcon, a staunch patriot, ran the studio like a benevolent headmaster to produce films, as he put it, “reflecting Britain and the British character”. In 1956 Balcon’s team departed after disagreements with their backers, the Rank Organisation, and the Ealing studios were sold to the BBC. For the next 36 years television programmes and plays were made there, until the BBC sold the studios in 1992. Attempts to restart film-making at Ealing were hampered by financial uncertainties and in 1995 the National Film and Television School took over the site only to sell it on again in 1999 when plans to relocate there fell through. The studios’ new owners, a consortium including production company Fragile Films, announced plans for a £40 million redevelopment, adding more space and the latest digital facilities, and in 2001 production resumed under the Ealing name for the first time since the late 1950s with a new version of The Importance of Being Earnest.