What an amazing story. A group of talented people come together under a charismatic leader, they band together to meet the demands of a special set of circumstances, and they create something beautiful and lasting. And then, as the circumstances change, they drift apart, everything comes to an end… the way things do. And it lives, powerfully, in their combined memories.
When I was young and getting interested in movies – watching them, slowly figuring out that they were made, then that they were made by teams of individuals, and then, gradually, how they were made – there were names that meant something. Sometimes they were the names of people – directors, producers, actors. Sometimes they were the names of companies, each of which had its own special logo: the Warner Brothers shield, the Universal planet, RKO’s radio tower, Powell and Pressburger’s The Archers with the arrow hitting the target, the strong man striking the J. Arthur Rank gong. And then there was Ealing Studios, a modest design: the company name between laurel branches, like parentheses.
We associated each of these logos with a certain mood or feeling, comprised of the memories of all the pictures you’d seen from that company coming together in the mind. With the Ealing pictures, we always anticipated something special. There were all of those wonderful British actors, familiar friends who were right there when you needed them, and I always loved seeing the new faces, the people who’d been welcomed into the fold. And every Ealing film seemed to have been hand-made – each element, from the narrative to the production design to the cinematography to the acting to the language to the tone. That’s very important – the tone of the Ealing movies was quite different from everything else around, the comedies in particular of course.
As we learn in this lovingly compiled history, Ealing’s glory years, from Michael Balcon’s arrival in the late ’30s through to the sale of the studio facilities to the BBC in the mid-’50s, coincided with the War followed by the long national recovery. You see this again and again in film history, people drawn together at a time of national emergency, working together to create films that responded to the moment, sometimes directly (as in the case of Next of Kin or Went the Day Well?) and sometimes indirectly, striking a chord with the audience (I’m thinking of Dead of Night or Robert Hamer’s It Always Rains on Sunday or the comedies directed by Alexander Mackendrick and Charles Crichton). A little world was created at Ealing, a world that was sometimes egalitarian and sometimes not, every day filled with triumphs and calamities and sudden promotions and hilarious misadventures. When things were at their best, everyone was working towards the common goal of making a great movie.
How did a movie like Kind Hearts and Coronets, one of the peaks of English moviemaking, actually come to be made? A brilliant director (Hamer), equally brilliant actors (Alec Guinness, Dennis Price, Valerie Hobson, Hugh Griffith), a great writer (John Dighton) and DP (Douglas Slocombe, who never looked at a light meter – he read the sunlight on his hand), Art Director (William Kellner) and Costume Designer (Anthony Mendleson)… but beyond that you have to think about the conditions that made it all possible, the tone that Balcon set. And you could say the same of Dead of Night or Whiskey Galore or The Lavender Hill Mob or smaller, lesser-known films like Champagne Charlie or Secret People.
I love the reminiscences that Robert Sellers has compiled, about the can-do-spirit, the near-disasters (like Hamer and his crew forgetting that they’d left Alec Guinness strapped in an underwater cage for five minutes), the petty grievances of the union leaders (which Peter Sellers studied and later made use of in I’m Alright Jack), the challenging working conditions in the studio itself. It all feels oddly familiar. In fact, this lively, funny, moving history of a movie studio and the people who made it feels uncannily like…an Ealing comedy.
Martin Scorsese, 2015