While the studio itself was never hit during the war, the borough of Ealing was not immune to the odd bombing raid and the ear-piercing blast of the siren warnings. ‘I remember more the sirens because they interfered with the sound recording,’ recalls Maurice Selwyn. ‘So whenever there was an air raid we stopped filming and just had to sit there and wait until the all-clear. I don’t recall us going to any sort of air-raid shelter.’ While this may have happened on the odd occasion, for the most part staff were required to leave their work and assemble in the studio’s own air-raid shelter, which was about fifty-feet-long, made of brick with a concrete roof. ‘Ealing also had their own air-raid warning system,’ recalls Ken Westbury.
On the top of Stage 3A in a sort of sandbag emplacement was a plane spotter. He was an ex-stagehand and would always be up there. To keep busy we’d pass up bits of scenery for him to paint, but if an air-raid warning came in or he saw any anti-aircraft fire, he’d pack it up and hit the air-raid siren and everybody had to go to the shelter.
It was pretty miserable down there, to be sure, but everybody was acutely aware of how fortunate they were compared to other parts of London. ‘At night you could see the flames burning in the East End,’ remembers Madge. ‘We’d all say, “They’re doing the East End again”, and there was nothing you could do about it. We were lucky in Ealing. We were left alone pretty much.’
Still, a selection of staff did volunteer to carry out stints of fire-watching overnight at the studio, in case of incendiary bombs. ‘On top of that, the studio had its own Home Guard unit,’ recalls Ken. ‘Robin Adair was the sergeant and I assume Reginald Baker, or Major Baker as he liked to address himself as, was the commander. One of the shop stewards was another of the commissioned officers, having served in the First World War (Baker had fought with distinction on the Western Front during the First World War), and other staff members who were over military age were drafted in. They used to parade in front of the canteen. And there was a park right next to the studios with a gate leading onto it, and they used to do their military exercise out there after hours. It was just like Dad’s Army. There was rationing, of course, a shortage of just about everything, mostly petrol for vehicles, which affected location shooting. Also actual film stock, remarkable given how important it was in the making of a picture, as Robert Winter recalls:
The cameraman would ask, ‘Give us another roll of film.’ And the assistant would have to say, ‘Well, I’ve just been down to the camera store room and there’s nothing there!’ And so you couldn’t do anything. Mick Balcon would do all he could to talk to Kodak and the government. Mick was very well in with the government.
Ironically though, the war years saw Ealing operating at its most productive, with staff working a five-and-a-half-day week and long hours. ‘The studio would lay on special suppers for you if you had to work in the evening, which was quite a few of us,’ recalls Robert. ‘Sometimes you could be working till eight, nine or ten o’clock at night.’ To keep spirits and morale high, the studio organised a dance at Ealing town hall every month in which staff could mingle with directors and stars. As Robert remembers, any hubris or snobbery was left outside. ‘There was no, oh she’s a great actress like Phyllis Calvert or whoever, you can’t dance with her. We just all mixed and had a great time. Mick Balcon used to come along, too, when he could.’
The war also brought its own set of unique problems in terms of film-making. Ealing had decided to make a picture about the Yugoslav resistance movement led by General Mihailovic entitled ‘Chetnik’. The exiled Yugoslav government in London were fully behind the project, even going so far as to present the entire crew with decorations. Then disaster. Halfway through filming, Churchill withdrew British support from Milhailovic’s Chetniks and went into alliance instead with Tito’s Partisans. Those previously helping Ealing were now persona non grata and the film had to undergo drastic changes, and as a consequence took longer than usual to complete. For instance, when it came time to reshoot a scene that involved a dog, several months had gone by and the dog in question was now somewhat larger. There had been a beehive in the background of certain shots and somebody on the crew thought it was a smart idea to build the beehive twice as big in order to make the dog look the size it was before. ‘But where are we going to get bees twice as large?’ a lone voice piped up. The idea was abandoned.
In the end Undercover (1943), as the film went on to be called, was a rather routine war drama with the mountains of south Wales doing their best to stand in for Yugoslavia. Male extras were recruited from nearby coal mining towns, as well as from local acting groups and schools, including a fourteen-year-old Stanley Baker. At the time Baker was appearing in an end-of-term play in the village where he was born in the Rhonda Valley when director Sergei Nolbandov arrived and happened to see it. Impressed, he took Baker back with him to Ealing for a screen test and he got the part, not only his first role in a film, but his first professional job as an actor.
To re-create the look of an authentic battle, the effects crew employed smoke powder, which was stored in a can. For some reason this highly flammable material was kept beside the camera. One day a crew member was having a crafty fag and dropped the still-lit butt on the powder. The resulting explosion injured production supervisor Hal Mason, who was standing nearby and had to be rushed to hospital. Luckily he came away from it with only superficial burns.
A war film with a difference was Basil Dearden’s The Halfway House (1944), a supernatural tale concerning a group of strangers all seeking shelter at a remote Welsh inn during a storm, unaware the owners were killed when the building was bombed a year before. This picture, along with others such as Champagne Charlie (1944), which saw Tommy Trinder and Stanley Holloway as rival music hall performers in Victorian England, signalled a definite shift in the direction Ealing intended to head in the future. With the inevitable sense that the war was coming to an end with the Allies victorious, the search had already begun for new and exciting subjects, with less emphasis on the documentary-style approach that had characterised so much of the studio’s recent product. There was also the feeling that audiences’ appetite was for more escapist entertainment. Perhaps Balcon had read a recent editorial in the cinema trade paper, Daily Film Renter, which represented cinema exhibitors: ‘Their patrons do not want war films,’ it began. ‘They want humour, music and light romance. Their patrons have been bombed and gunned time and again. Do they want to sit in a cinema and be harrowed by more bombing – if only screen bombing. Wouldn’t they rather relax in their seats and laugh with the comedians in comedy, or lose themselves in the harmonies of musicals.’
Alberto Cavalcanti was associate producer on The Halfway House. During a location recce in Tiverton, Devon, he was driving past a cottage when he ordered the driver to stop. He had spotted a small dead tree in a garden and thought it ideal to lend the film an eerie touch. Getting out of the car he knocked on the door. An elderly man answered. ‘You will sell me please your tree,’ said Cavalcanti. The old man looked surprised: didn’t he realise the thing was dead? ‘That is why I want it.’ Cavalcanti took out his wallet. ‘I geeve you £5 for it. All right, hey?’ The old man couldn’t believe his luck. Just then a van belonging to the unit came tootling up the road and Cavalcanti made the occupants get out with spades and dig up his dead tree.
Unquestionably, Cavalcanti’s most significant contribution to the film was pairing director Basil Dearden with art director Michael Relph. ‘Cavalcanti was very much aware of what I contributed as an art director to the picture,’ recalled Relph. ‘He thought that Basil had certain strengths but that there were artistic qualities that could be supplied by me. That’s why he took me from being an art director and made me a producer to work with Basil.’ Together Dearden and Relph became the most prolific film-making team at the studio. ‘They were so reliable,’ claims Michael Birkett, who arrived a few years later at the studio where he worked closely with Balcon and on the studio floor.
You could rely upon them to shoot anything efficiently, they never made a pig’s ear of any movie they made, they did it absolutely with maximum efficiency. And if some movie got cancelled or delayed you could say to Basil and Michael, ‘Have you got anything?’ And they’d say, ‘Oh yes.’ They always had a script ready of something they were going to do one of these days and they would be able to shoot it for you immediately.
For Those in Peril (1944) was another of Ealing’s war pictures that paid special tribute to an unheralded strand of the armed forces; this time the nautical heroics of the Air Sea Rescue Services, which picked up stricken airmen from the sea in high-speed launches. From a story by Richard Hillary, the RAF airman who was killed after spending time at Ealing, it marked the directorial debut of Charles Crichton, and much of it was shot during actual manoeuvres in the English Channel. Crichton and his camera team would go out on the launches, but it was made clear that if a crash call came through, sod the film, the priority was the downed man in the water. Fair enough. ‘And we got a crash call once,’ remembered Crichton. ‘And to accelerate from just idling along at five knots to something like forty-five knots in no time at all, I mean how we didn’t go overboard I don’t know.’
Crichton was born in 1910 in Wallasey, Cheshire, and enjoyed a public school education. While studying History at Oxford he met Zoltan Korda, who offered him a job at London Films as an assistant editor, where he worked on several of the studio’s prestige productions: The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), Things to Come (1936) and The Thief of Bagdad (1940). It was Cavalcanti who brought Crichton over to Ealing, where his editing work impressed Balcon enough to let him direct his own picture. Maurice Selwyn worked on For Those in Peril and remembers Crichton as, ‘always relaxed, never hurried, always with a pipe in his mouth. He was not standoffish, but not a very chatty sort of bloke at all.’
The film is also notable for the first screen appearance of an actor who, over the course of the next three decades, would become one of the most instantly recognisable of all British stars – James Robertson Justice. He was discovered one night by the film’s co-writer Harry Watt compèring at the famous Players Theatre, which like The Windmill had the distinction of never closing for the whole duration of the war, and given the small role of Operations Room Officer.
For Those in Peril proved highly significant in another way, in that it introduced a certain Thomas Ernest Bennett Clarke to Ealing. A former Cambridge law student ‘Tibby’ Clarke, as he would be known to everyone at Ealing, had tried his hand at journalism, writing novels, even being a door-to-door salesman. Rejected by the army on medical grounds, he’d become a wartime reserve constable in the Metropolitan Police, until he was invalided out due to ill health. It was his friend Monja Danischewsky who invited Clarke one morning to a press show for Ealing’s latest release. After it was finished, the great and the good of the studio went to the bar at the Café Royal to thrash out the picture’s merits. After a long discussion it was decided that it didn’t have any; the script in particular was thought to have been of inferior quality.
‘We’ve got to get some new writers,’ announced Harry Watt.
‘But where are we going to find them?’ argued Basil Dearden.
After a heated debate the conclusion was reached that there was a serious lack of good screenwriters out there. It was at this moment that Clarke made himself known, ‘Well, I’m an available writer.’ Everyone looked at him with inquisitive eyes. ‘But I’m afraid I’ve never written a film script.’ They all looked away again; the sense of anticlimax was palpable.
About a week later Danischewsky made the suggestion to Balcon that perhaps Clarke could become a screenwriter at Ealing given half a chance. Balcon was dubious to say the least.
‘What films has he written?’
‘None,’ admitted Danischewsky. ‘But he’s lived a few.’
Clarke was about to take another job in Fleet Street when the Ealing offer came through. He would go on to pen some of the studio’s most fondly remembered films, from Hue and Cry and Passport to Pimlico to The Blue Lamp and The Lavender Hill Mob. ‘Such was his reputation within the studio,’ says Norman Dorme, ‘you reckoned that if it was a Tibby Clarke script it would be better than any of the other films.’ As Michael Relph put it: ‘Tibby had a streak of anarchy in him and understood those foibles of the British character with which the studio became associated.’
For Those in Peril was Clarke’s first screenplay proper, but he did work previously on The Halfway House – just a bit of script fixing. One evening on location in Tiverton, Clarke, Dearden and Cavalcanti wanted to hold a script conference. The manager of the hotel they were staying at suggested a small private room that after dinner was only ever used by one of his permanent residents and he was a dear old clergyman who was stone deaf. The crux of this meeting was to try and find a suitable juncture in the story to shoehorn in an important plot point.
‘I suppose at a pinch it could be worked into the dialogue between Steve and Jane when he first arrives,’ Clarke suggested. This idea was met with instant disapproval.
‘In the bedroom scene!’ decried Cavalcanti. ‘Oh no – Steve is seeing her for the first time in one, two month. He has no time for plot points, only for bim-bam, I love you, darleeng.’
‘Absolutely,’ agreed Dearden. ‘Steve’s only thought is to get her down on that bed and bang the daylights out of her.’
Just then the clergyman, whose presence the film-makers had totally forgotten about, raised his head from above his copy of The Times and said, ‘Your work must be very much like mine when I am composing a sermon.’