After three years at MGM Balcon had grown dissatisfied with the impersonal nature of the arrangement. Within a year of joining there had been a bitter stockholders’ fight and Arthur Loew and other executives Balcon knew and had close friendships with left the company. After that, Balcon had little or no personal contact with the new management, who as it turned out had little interest in Ealing either, turning down ideas and projects that Balcon wanted to pursue.
The movie industry was changing, too, with a steep decline in cinema attendances, the growth of television and a rise in the cost of film production. So it was in this climate that Balcon and Reginald Baker were approached by Eric Fletcher, deputy chairman of Associated British Picture Corporation, with an offer to buy all the assets of Ealing. ‘After much heart-searching,’ Balcon admitted, ‘we accepted this offer and our company came under new control.’
For many of those who had worked for years at Ealing and then made the move to MGM, there was a sense almost of betrayal. As Charles Crichton later disclosed,
Whenever we asked for more money Mickie Balcon always said, ‘What are you talking about? This is your studio. I’m getting old, I’m going to retire, and then the studio will be yours, so don’t bloody well ask for any more money.’ And then suddenly, I wasn’t there, I’d left already, suddenly one day all those people who really thought that it was their studio were told, ‘That’s it, chums, fuck off.’ And people like Charlie Frend were absolutely shattered.’
Sir Philip Warter, chairman of ABPC, appeared to give the impression to Balcon that Ealing would be able to continue production of films; in fact, the official press statement announcing the purchase expressly stated this to be the case. But The Siege of Pinchgut (1959), a crime thriller set in contemporary Sydney and directed by Harry Watt, which was shooting as the sale went ahead, turned out to be the end of the road for Balcon’s Ealing. Michael Birkett was an assistant on the film. ‘We were all aware that this was the death of the studio name, that this was to be the last film, absolutely. Everybody knew.’
On that very final day of shooting there was no great fanfare or huge sense of sadness at the end of an era; the equipment was collected up and everyone just drifted away. That’s how Ealing Studios finished. ‘It wasn’t an emotional scene at all,’ remembers Michael. ‘I think mainly because the film wasn’t shot at the old Ealing Studios, so there was no call to be emotional or sentimental about it.’
When it became clear that ABPC had no intention of giving Ealing a production slate of films, the staff were dispersed. For the majority of the Ealing directors, the future turned out to be a bleak one as they floundered outside of the closeted world they’d enjoyed at Ealing. ‘None of those people really did anything afterwards, except for Sandy,’ says David Tringham. ‘Within the closeted environment of Ealing they could prosper. They were protected.’ Outside it was a very different story. After directing The Siege of Pinchgut, Harry Watt did not make another feature film and instead moved into television, as did Sidney Cole, who produced The Adventures of Robin Hood, Danger Man and The Adventures of Black Beauty. Charles Frend also worked heavily in television after directing only three post-Ealing pictures. By the end of his career he was shooting second unit on David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter. Leslie Norman made four rather minor post-Ealing features before he also moved to television. Whilst today television is a respected medium, this was not the case in the 1960s; film directors only worked in television when they were out of work, meaning that it was something of a come down in their career.
It’s not a great track record and begs the question, could these directors handle the cut and thrust of the movie business beyond the cosseted walls of Ealing. One of the reasons Michael Relph gave for why he and Basil Dearden succeeded better afterwards was because they kept more in contact with the rest of the industry. ‘But most of the others from Ealing were fairly ignorant of all that was going on outside.’ Thus Relph and Dearden were in a far better position than their fellow directors who had led ‘an excessively sheltered existence’. They’d been together working under the same roof for just the one company for so long that surely it gave rise to complacency. By the end it had all just got a bit too incestuous and too much of a mutual admiration society, and that damaged creativity. ‘The thing with the film business is, you don’t need any qualifications,’ says David Tringham.
But to be successful you have to have something you want to do, some film you want to make, some idea. And the thing with the Ealing lot is they didn’t, they did what the boss wanted, they weren’t independent, maybe only Sandy was. They were given jobs rather than chased an idea. I may be wrong but you never got the feeling they came to Michael Balcon with a subject they wanted to make.
This is a little unfair, since many of the directors from time to time did badger and hustle Balcon to green light a pet project of theirs. They weren’t always successful, of course, and being under contract, as directors used to be back in the old Hollywood studio system, had to take what they were given, whether they liked it or not. ‘They played it safe,’ affirms David. ‘They went by the book; this book that some useless person had concocted and these are the rules. And there was a definite class system, and it wasn’t based on talent, it was establishment. The problem with Ealing was they made small-scale, parochial films and it bred these people to be part of one big family, all friends together. It was all very cliquey.’
Following the demise of Ealing, Balcon moved into independent film-making. In 1959 he formed Bryanston Films, a cooperative of independent producers, which included a coterie of old Ealing chums including Hal Mason and Monja Danischewsky. Another echo of Ealing was Robin Adair, who was commissionaire on the door of Bryanston’s London office. Interestingly, given Balcon’s timidity at Ealing to embrace challenging film subjects, Bryanston was at the forefront of the British New Wave movement when it teamed up in the early 1960s with Woodfall Films, a production company established by the alumni of the Royal Court Theatre, namely playwright John Osborne and director Tony Richardson, to produce the kitchen-sink dramas The Entertainer, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.
Balcon, however, was very much a peripheral figure in terms of the creative side of the films that were made at Bryanston. Certainly he did not wield anything like the power he administered as head of Ealing. There was one telling incident that occurred after the private screening of one of the Woodfall films. As had been the practice at Ealing, Balcon rose to his feet to give his opinion and was told in no uncertain fashion by one of the Woodfall executives that they were not interested in what he thought or what he had to say.
Balcon remained a committed chairman of the company until it expired as a film-making entity in 1965. Then, after spending a troubled two years as chairman of British Lion, Balcon essentially retired as an active force in the British film industry, although he remained as a long-serving member of the board of governors of the British Film Institute. He died at the age of eighty-one at his home in Sussex in 1977.
As for the studios themselves, these remained in the hands of the BBC until 1992 when they were bought by a group called BBRK which hoped to make films very much in the style of the classic Ealing comedies. Nothing came of this aspiration and by 1994 the venture had collapsed and the studios reverted back to the control of the BBC since the entire purchase price had not been fully paid. A year later the studio was sold once again to the National Film and Television School but they occupied the buildings for only a short time.
2001 saw the rebirth of the Ealing name when new owners, Fragile Films, took charge and turned the studio back into a film production facility. Their first release couldn’t have been more apt, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest, a subject that surely would have found favour with Michael Balcon. Since then the studio has been a hive of activity; the now classic Simon Pegg comedy Shaun of the Dead was filmed there and in 2007 Ealing revived the St. Trinians franchise with two new installments based on Ronald Searle’s infamous boarding school for girls. Ealing is also home to the Met Film School, London’s leading provider of practical filmmaking courses. Independent television companies also make good use of the studio facilties; all the ‘servant’s quarters’ scenes for Downton Abbey were shot on the old stages.
For many years after the break-up of Ealing Michael Birkett kept in touch with Balcon, often visiting him at his house in East Sussex. Never once, though, does Michael recall an occasion when the subject of the good old days at Ealing was brought up. ‘We didn’t talk about Ealing at all. No, not really. We never reminisced. We were a bit too sophisticated for that.’
Michael, however, does have his own views about what Ealing stands for, and on a more personal level what Balcon personally managed to accomplish with the studio was nothing less than a major cultural achviement. ‘And it was entirely due to his own combination of naivety, innocence and acuteness. Also he must have had a good sense of what people wanted to see. Funnily enough we didn’t purposely go out to make box office films. The Rank Organisation were notable for making films that they thought would do well, but we ourselves weren’t really aiming for the box office at all. We concentrated on good stories that hopefully people would want to see.’
The last word belongs, as it should, to Balcon himself. Once asked if he could categorize what it was that made an Ealing film or what was the philosophy behind it all he simply replied: ‘By and large we were a group of liberal-minded, like-minded people. I don’t know if anyone was terribly politically involved, we were film-makers: it was our life, it was our total life.’