Although the studio had been sold, Balcon intended to carry on producing films under the Ealing banner and so a new home would have to be found. During discussions Balcon had with John Davis, the managing director of Rank, prior to the sale of Ealing, one particular conversation stuck in his mind. It was a promise by Davis that two new stages would be built at Pinewood Studios for the exclusive use of Ealing. Whether Balcon misheard or misunderstood, Davis was later adamant that such a commitment was never made and that it would not be possible for Ealing to have sole use of these new facilities.
Nevertheless, Balcon felt betrayed and believed he could no longer move Ealing to Pinewood, where he feared it would lose its independence and become merely another subsidiary of the Rank Organisation. For one of the few times in their long association, Reginald Baker disagreed with Balcon and hoped that some compromise could be reached. Davis, too, implored Baker to make Balcon change his mind.
In the end, when it became obvious Balcon would not budge, Baker loyally stood by his friend’s decision. After the final cut of The Long Arm was delivered to Rank, Balcon terminated the financial and distribution arrangement deal Ealing had enjoyed with the organisation for the last ten years.
Having spurned the chance of a home at Pinewood, Balcon believed the reputation of Ealing was such that an alternative home would not be hard to find, and in the company of Baker flew out to New York looking for backers. News of their arrival travelled quickly through the industry grapevine and three major Hollywood movie companies set up meetings with them. In the end there was no need for any kind of negotiating or manoeuvring. An old friend of Balcon’s happened to be in town, Arthur Loew, who had just taken over as the new head of MGM. Loew was keen for Ealing to become part of the company’s British set-up over at Borehamwood in Hertfordshire. Contracts were signed and everything looked good, with Balcon happy for Ealing to be associated with such a world leader in cinema.
While most of Ealing’s staff had already been displaced around the industry, key creative personnel and senior technicians remained and now transferred over to the MGM studios in Borehamwood, where a special block was allocated to them. But it just wasn’t the same. ‘I don’t think any of us welcomed the change,’ wrote Tibby Clarke later. ‘There was little hope of the old team spirit being preserved now that we had ceased to be a self-contained unit, and the intimate atmosphere of our previous home was sadly missing from these new bleak acres of characterless buildings.’ Clarke felt relieved that a new contract he had signed did not bind him exclusively to Ealing so he wouldn’t have to work in the place all the time.
Even Balcon had to admit that the old magic was lacking. ‘It would be no use pretending that we did not have heavy hearts over leaving Ealing. To comfort myself, I used to say it was people that counted, not buildings. This was not strictly honest, as over the years there had developed at Ealing a spirit which had seeped into the very fabric of the place.’ Norman Dorme sensed this when he visited his old friends now working at MGM. ‘I was freelancing on a movie and I went down there and saw everybody. It was a very miserable little crew there, there weren’t many left. It was very sad.’
Still, Balcon was determined to make the best of it. And to this end he made a radical decision and hired Kenneth Tynan as a script editor, perhaps in a bid to make more radical and challenging films. At the time Tynan was the country’s leading theatre critic and one of the most audacious of literary journalists. His appointment came about after Tynan wrote an article in 1955 about Ealing Studios, calling it ‘the most lively and exciting movie production outfit in England’, and referring to their famous comedies, such as The Man in the White Suit and The Lavender Hill Mob, as ‘patriotic neo-realism’.
Balcon read the piece and was impressed enough in the spring of 1956 to take Tynan on at £2,000 a year. The job of script editor involved vetting scripts, giving advice and coming up with subjects and stories for films. ‘It seems nebulous enough to suit me splendidly’, Tynan wrote in his diary. Actually, Tynan took the appointment seriously, hoping ‘to act as a pipeline for the sort of blood transfusion I thought the British cinema needed’. Sadly it didn’t end up working out quite like that.
For the time being Ealing continued to make pretty much the same kind of movies they’d always done and with the same kind of people. The Man in the Sky (1957) was a solidly made suspense drama starring Jack Hawkins as a test pilot who refuses to bail out when the engine of his company’s latest prototype catches fire. Much of the location shooting took place at an airfield in Wolverhampton, where one day the real pilot doing the stunt flying overdid it and ran the aircraft into a ditch.
The Man in the Sky was directed by Charles Crichton, the last film he would make for Ealing. Like many of Ealing’s directors, Crichton found it difficult to maintain a successful career afterwards. He made a couple of films in the late 1950s, including the Peter Sellers comedy The Battle of the Sexes, but when he was invited to direct his first Hollywood picture, Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), he clashed with its star, Burt Lancaster, three weeks into shooting and was replaced by John Frankenheimer. By the mid-1960s Crichton had been swallowed up by television and in the 1980s was even directing corporate videos. When John Cleese approached Crichton to co-direct A Fish Called Wanda (1988), he hadn’t made a feature film for twenty-three years. A massive international hit, Crichton was nominated for an Oscar and, while he never made another film, the profits from Wanda ensured he had a very comfortable retirement. He died in 1999.
Then there was The Shiralee (1957), another outdoor Australian picture. Les Norman had come across the proofs of the novel by Australian writer D’Arcy Niland, read it and thought it would make a wonderful film. Balcon, though, wasn’t best pleased at the prospect. ‘How dare you give me that filthy book with all that foul language.’
‘Well,’ said Les. ‘The Aussies are sometimes inclined to call a spade a fucking shovel. But I’ll write a script that will exclude all the expletives and you won’t find offensive, but still retain the flavour of the book.’
Les Norman wanted Peter Finch to play the lead role of an itinerant bush labourer who returns home to find his wife is shacked up with another man. In a burst of anger he drags off his young daughter only to later realise he is saddled with her and so must learn to face responsibility for the first time in his life. Since his first British film, Train of Events for Ealing, Finch had gone on to become an international film star, playing opposite Elizabeth Taylor in Elephant Walk (1954) and appearing in two respected war dramas, A Town Like Alice (1956) and The Battle of the River Plate (1956). He gladly accepted the role in The Shiralee and returned to Australia for filming, arriving in Sydney to a large crowd of reporters. Taking one of them aside, Finch asked, ‘What do you do round here for a bit of crumpet?’ The conversation was overheard by a young naive reporter and the next morning her headline ran: ‘Mr. Finch expresses a fondness for crumpets’.
Made entirely on location around New South Wales, the crew returned to England afterwards full of stories. One that made Michael Birkett smile was of a local safari park. ‘It was very famous and it had huge notices all over the park – Do Not Get Out Of Your Car and Do Not Leave The Windows Open. This was all because of the lions and tigers and everything. There were all these dire warnings. And underneath these warning notices somebody had scrawled – Pommies on bicycles go in free.’
And there were two disappointing comedies, made more disappointing by the fact that they were the last Ealing would ever make. Barnacle Bill (1957), despite the presence of Alec Guinness playing the last of a line of distinguished seafarers who, upon retiring from the Royal Navy, purchases a dilapidated amusement pier, was rather lacking in the charm of Ealing’s past glories. Davy (1958) was a disappointing starring vehicle for Harry Secombe, as a young entertainer conflicted over the chance of a big break and who must decide whether to remain with his family’s music-hall act or go solo. Much better would have been a subject that Basil Dearden and Michael Relph were keen to do, a story about a young couple who inherit a debt-ridden old movie theatre. For some reason that Dearden and Relph could never understand, Balcon wasn’t interested and the much-loved The Smallest Show on Earth (1957) was made eventually by Dearden at another studio.