Balcon’s Britain
Among all the people who expressed the most optimistic spirit of Britishness in this period the best example is a Jewish adventurer’s son from Birmingham, brought up in radical and suffragette circles. His films have already been mentioned, for Michael Balcon was the man behind the Ealing comedies and scores of other films. He was the great interpreter of these years, second only to Churchill in crafting how the British remember themselves in the middle of the twentieth century. In a world culture dominated by the United States he was determined that Britain should be distinct and his vision of the British family blended the high-mindedness of Attlee with the impatient spirit of the coming Tory years. Had we faced nuclear annihilation then one of Balcon’s Ealing comedies would probably have been the last work of art broadcast by the BBC’s young television service. He is worth spending a little time on because his success and failure offers a key, or guide, to the underlying uncertainties and paradoxes of the age. Balcon bottled the most pungent elements of the spirit of Britain in the late forties and early fifties, and through his films we can inhale them freshly now as if the intervening years had not passed.
The Ealing studios are still there. The white painted, functional offices and the vast hangar-like shed would be instantly recognizable to Balcon, and they are busy, being used again to make films. Even the pub across the road where Balcon’s team of writers and producers drank, smoked, dreamed and fought is not much changed, though Ealing is a multi-ethnic, trendy place compared to the relentlessly suburban, indeed dull part of West London it was when the film studios were established there in 1931. They were intended to be a small British redoubt against the power of American cinema. Certainly, it is hard to imagine a more dramatic contrast to the sprawl, bright light and self-importance of Hollywood. The studios could easily be mistaken from the outside as a provincial school. In a way, they were. During the thirties Ealing had bridged the nineteenth-century culture of the music hall and the new world of cinema, making popular comedies by the Lancashire musical stars George Formby and Gracie Fields. Balcon himself had been working for a range of film-makers, including Gainsborough and Gaumont-British, struggling with the sheer gravitational force of the Hollywood system before being lured there himself. It was not a success. He fell out spectacularly with Louis B. Mayer, who once bawled that he would destroy Balcon ‘if it costs me a million dollars’. Balcon is said to have replied that he would settle for less. He happily quit to rule Ealing through the heroic days of the war, the years of New Jerusalem and carry on until 1955, the year of Eden’s election. He enjoyed a continuity no politican could rival and he was as passionate about national cinema as they were about the nation.
Ealing was in some ways a miniature Britain of the period. It had its autocratic, eccentric leader. It developed a robust, vaguely socialist patriotism under the conditions of the war (though Churchill was dubious about some of the war films, and half-heartedly tried to ban a couple for being defeatist). And in 1945 Balcon and his colleagues voted Labour – what Balcon described as their ‘mild revolution’ but they quickly became hostile to the pressing rules and regulations of post-war life. Like Britain Ealing was badly underfunded and thrived on a make do and mend approach to film-making, the cult of improvisation. It too had a rich array of political views and immigrants, people from the colonies, White Russians, semi-communists and militant trade unionists. Yet they were all expected to show total loyalty and to work for only modest rewards. Many decisions were taken round a large table at which free and frank expression was expected – the cabinet table, as it were – and these sessions were followed by heroic drinking bouts at that local pub. If Ealing had an ideology it was a misty one, something to do with fairness, decency, the importance of the little man, and of standing up to bullies, be they Bavarian or merely bureaucratic.
In the films shopkeepers and fishermen outwit Whitehall officials and excisemen; small boys and little old ladies outwit criminal gangs. There is an unmistakeable edge: so many heroes are working class, so many villains are posh. But they are also culturally and morally conservative. In its war films, thrillers, psychological dramas and adventure movies as well as the famous comedies, Ealing almost entirely avoids sex and violence. Writing at the end of the sixties when British horror films and ‘sexploitation’ films were taking off, Balcon wryly reflected that ‘if there has been a sex deficiency in the films for which I have been responsible over the years no great or permanent damage has been done, as current films are more than making up for lost time…there are many things in life other than sex and violence. There’s love, for instance…’ In Balcon’s Britain, ‘love’ was not yet coy code for making love. As was said of a non-Ealing film, Brief Encounter, the post-war British ideal seemed to be ‘make tea not love’. Films of understatement, films of bitten lips and dramatic silences; and, in a phrase by the novelist E.M. Forster, films about an English nervous system which ‘acts promptly and feels slowly’ are a good guide to how different the country was back then. It was all very non-Hollywood. It was consciously intended as an alternative way of understanding the world. Balcon had talked about the need to project ‘the true Briton’ to the rest of the world. He wanted a cinema that would show the Americans, the French and the Russians ‘Britain as a leader in social reform in the defeat of social injustices and a champion of civil liberties…’ It was a noble vision yet like Britain, Ealing was too weak, too underfunded and improvisatory, to live up to its ambitions. After an extraordinary flowering of creativity in the forties and early fifties, Ealing fell back into romantic, self-congratulatory guff and the rest of the world moved on.