Despite Balcon’s supposed “socialist” leanings he was more of a liberal conservative like Prime Minister Clement Attlee, whose grandson recently remarked that he would have been at home in today’s British Conservative Party.īefore 1949, Ealing produced works in a diverse range of genres and, as Barr notes, “ Hue and Cry was not a genre film at the time” (4). Balcon’s type of realism and humour aimed to ignore the contradictions of post-war society and continue the ideologically manufactured discourse of the “People’s War” (which never really existed in practice) into the post-war period (3). Balcon also hated “naturalism” perhaps because of its associations with the work of Emile Zola, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser, and its perceived role in questioning the dominant norms of society. As Charles Barr notes in his study of Hue and Cry in Ealing Studios, the film ends with normality restored and repression sanctified by Mother Church while Joe Kirby (Harry Fowler), the film’s young protagonist and discoverer of a fiendish plot, is firmly aligned with his family. By no means did it resemble the more subversive formula for the role of humour documented by Freud in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, which aimed to lift the veil of socially-sanctioned repression to reveal a dark alternative world existing beneath, possibly resulting in a different form of society. Influenced by the British documentary movement, this discourse espoused understatement, the avoidance of excess, and the role of humour as a means of alleviating the material deprivations of post-war society. (“Tibby”) Clarke were more in tune with Balcon’s conservative vision than the more complex work of Robert Hamer and Alexander Mackendrick.īalcon’s ideology espoused a particular definition of “realism” in opposition to what he termed “tinsel”. Among this group of “Young Gentlemen”, director Charles Crichton and screenwriter T.E.B. In so doing, he utilised some of the approaches of MGM’s “boy genius” Irving Thalberg “to work on ideas that were acceptable to him in order to make films that were consistent in tone yet individually different, and at the same time to keep the studio running on an economic basis” (2). ![]() Taking charge of the studio in 1938 after several years managing Gainsborough and Gaumont-British, as well as an unhappy period running the British branch of MGM Studios, he soon formed a creative elite known as Mr. As Vincent Porter notes, both studios came “to represent something intrinsically and culturally British”, a particular ideological goal of Ealing’s production chief Michael Balcon (1). ![]() Clarke Phot: Douglas Slocombe Ed: Charles Hasse Art Dir: Norman Arnold Mus: Georges AuricĬast: Alastair Sim, Valerie White, Jack Warner, Harry Fowler, Douglas Barr, Joan Dowlingĭespite its association with the Ealing group of comedies which gained popular national and international acclaim during the early 1950s, Hue and Cry actually represents an accidental success that gave the studio a particular identity in much the same way as horror eventually defined Hammer Studios in the late 1950s. Source: NFVLS Prod Co: Ealing Prod: Michael Balcon Dir: Charles Crichton Scr: T.E.B.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |