Interwar Britain underwent many cultural and political transformations; two of the most significant were that cinema going became the pre-eminent form of popular entertainment and every adult gained the vote. Historians have tried to define the connection between these two changes and been especially interested in characterizing the extent to which cinema encouraged the newly enfranchised to support the forces of conservatism during the fraught 1930s. In analysing the politics of interwar cinema, they have focused on the overtly political content of films, assessing how far it favoured one party or ideology over another. In contrast, they have generally disregarded the forms assumed by these movies. As a consequence, they have failed to recognize the importance of the irreducibly ‘cinematic’ nature of interwar cinema – that is, its transatlantic production context, star regime, and genre conventions – which significantly shaped the character of the stories acted out on the screen.
This article focuses on one of cinema's most popular genres: the historical drama. It is concerned with eight bio-pics released between 1929 and 1938 in which political figures from Britain's past appeared as protagonist or supporting character. For the most part, censorship and convention prevented politics from being depicted in screen dramas set in the contemporary period. Historical films, however, were allowed to explore the subject in a uniquely open – but mythic – manner. As the article contends that the manner in which such movies treated politics was influenced by how they were produced, it makes much of the fact that they were generated within a transatlantic cinematic culture and often shaped by their stars’ public personalities, notably that of veteran stage actor George Arliss who in an eighteen-film career spanning 1929–37 played the duke of Wellington, a fictional prime minister and foreign secretary as well as, most significantly, Disraeli.
While ostensibly about real figures, the article highlights how far these movies adhered to prevailing dramatic conventions that sacrificed accuracy in favour of the search for a mass audience. The article does not deny the importance of the immediate political context in which these movies were created. However, overlooking interwar cinema's production context means historians have not properly understood why its historical dramas favoured Disraeli over Gladstone and, more substantively, promulgated an essentially deferential view of democratic leadership.
I
Britain experienced a series of profound political upheavals in the two decades that followed the First World War.Footnote 1 The 1918 and 1928 franchise acts saw the electorate nearly quadruple in size after it finally included every working-class man and all women. During the 1920s, Labour replaced the Liberals as the main party of opposition and it even formed brief minority governments; the country faced four general elections as its first-past-the-post system struggled to accommodate three parties; and a general strike threatened the legitimacy of parliament.Footnote 2 The international slump, which followed the 1929 Wall Street crash, threw British politics further asunder. In 1931, the Labour government, unable to deal with the economic consequences of increasing unemployment, resigned and was replaced by a Conservative-dominated National coalition led by former Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald.Footnote 3 As a result, political parties were for a time in almost as much flux as the world economic system.
The National government restored financiers' confidence in the ability of ministers to balance the books; but unemployment reached three million by 1932 and remained at over two million for all but one year of the remaining years of peace.Footnote 4 Despite fears, mass unemployment did not, however, lead to an overwhelming surge in support for fascism or communism: the National government easily won the 1931 and 1935 general elections.Footnote 5 The domestic challenge to democracy was nonetheless still on an unprecedented scale, while internationally the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany threatened Britain and its empire. As a result, by the end of the decade some predicted authoritarianism would supersede representative democracy.Footnote 6
At the same time as the country faced such extraordinary uncertainty, cinema going established a dominant position within Britain's popular culture.Footnote 7 Between 1934 and 1938, annual admissions rose from 903 to 987 million, which meant that on average every Briton visited a cinema twenty times a year. Cinema going was, however, not an evenly experienced activity: audiences were disproportionately drawn from the working class, women, and the young – the very groups that benefited most from enfranchisement after 1918. This pattern was partly because cinema going was such a cheap pastime, meaning that even the unemployed saw it as a necessity.Footnote 8
According to film historian Roy Armes, cinema helped maintain Britain's political stability during this troubled time. For, in a series of beguiling narratives, he claims, filmmakers imposed onto audiences an establishment view of the world that lauded monarchy, empire, and tradition, constructing ‘a facsimile world where existing values were invariably validated by events in the film and where all discord could be turned into harmony by an acceptance of the status quo’.Footnote 9 Writing, like Armes, in the 1970s, John Stevenson and Chris Cook argued that such stability had more material origins. According to them, unemployment was a regional problem that undermined the will of those few it affected while leaving the majority unmoved. Their explanation of the ‘revolution that never was’ disregarded cinema – except as a diversion available to the jobless.Footnote 10
Most interwar historians now accept Stevenson and Cook's assessment of the limited impact of unemployment. They nonetheless take the political significance of movie going much more seriously, such that Ross McKibbin could claim that the cinema ‘significantly mediated’ how its millions of patrons saw society.Footnote 11 McKibbin's stress on the importance of cinema was part of his, and other political historians', embrace of subjective influences in accounting for the success of the interwar Conservative party.Footnote 12 Bill Schwarz took this a step further when he highlighted the importance of ‘the irreducibility of the imaginative forms of politics’, in the creation of which cinema played a critical part.Footnote 13
The greater willingness of political historians to grant interwar cinema an influence over popular consciousness parallels film historians' embrace of a more nuanced view of its impact than that advanced by Armes. As Peter Miles and Malcolm Smith conceded, ‘it would be simplistic in the extreme to make any direct causal link between cinematic text and contemporary politics’.Footnote 14 Most notably, Jeffrey Richards and Anthony Aldgate disavowed the belief that cinema forced a ‘facsimile world’ on unwilling moviegoers. Instead, they see the relationship between filmmakers and audiences as a ‘two-way process operating in areas of shared experience and shared perception’. In their analysis of South Riding (1938) they consequently show how its producers ‘sought to encourage the assumption that society should continue to cohere and unite as it passed through the changing circumstances of the 1930s’. As just one of many movies that presented Britain as ‘one happy close-knit community’, Richards and Aldgate claim South Riding was ‘symptomatic’ of an industry that ‘had a positive and purposeful part in shaping’ a national ‘consensus’ defined by the widely desired pursuit of compromise.Footnote 15
According to this perspective, therefore, the relationship between cinema and audience was dialectical in nature, which means it would be as fatuous to claim that the text or context is ultimately determining as to prioritize the chicken over the egg. It is a position with which others situated in a variety of disciplines would agree.Footnote 16 Thus, while political communications theorist Murray Edelman claimed that ‘art is the fountainhead from which political discourse, belief about politics, and consequent actions ultimately spring’ even he conceded there could be ‘no simple causal connection here, because works of art are themselves part of the social milieu from which political movements also emerge’.Footnote 17
The absence of all but the most general and methodologically suspect of interwar audience surveys means historians cannot be too definitive about the impact of specific movies on individuals.Footnote 18 The lack of relevant records also means that even establishing the size of an audience for particular features is a hazardous task, except for a few cinemas with surviving attendance ledgers.Footnote 19 Yet, if the mind of the cinema audience remains ultimately elusive, clues exist as to the parameters of movies' influence. First, genre theorists suggest that when texts consistently rework the same storylines it is because their producers rightly believe such narratives evoke a positive response.Footnote 20 Intriguingly, this is the same approach Philip Williamson adopts in his argument for the effectiveness of the ‘underlying and consistent themes’ evident in the speeches of Stanley Baldwin.Footnote 21 While a politician might be obliged to change how voters think, however, filmmakers ostensibly merely seek commercial advantage from exploiting existing opinion. Indeed, some believe that as a consequence most dramas are, as David Edgar puts it, the ‘possession not of the writer but of the audience’.Footnote 22 However, an impressive number of United States surveys of the impact of contemporary political screen dramas indicate that they are more than mere mirrors of opinion.Footnote 23 Taken together, they indicate that while an individual drama cannot overturn fundamental beliefs and values, it does reinforce prior opinions and increase the salience of the story's central subject in audience members' minds.Footnote 24
Such insights underline the notion that filmmakers lacked the power to force alien ideas onto audiences. They could, however, shape popular perceptions by building on cinemagoers' established sentiments by reflecting back – and thereby reinforcing while reordering – beliefs producers, directors, and leading actors considered suitable for representation. In other words, there are grounds for believing that the interwar cinema ‘mobilized bias’ by taking audiences in a direction that was ultimately favourable to the National government.Footnote 25
II
Commercial feature films produced before 1939 rarely challenged the status quo, a characteristic many believe was primarily due to censorship.Footnote 26 The 1909 cinematograph act gave local authorities power to prevent the exhibition of movies while the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), established in 1913 by the industry itself, could alter a film's content or stop its production. Mainly concerned to police moral issues, the BBFC had the ability to prohibit the production of films tackling ‘controversial politics’.Footnote 27
The most cited instance of political censorship was the banning of the production of the 1933 novel Love on the dole.Footnote 28 Such an outright prohibition was exceptional because most studios believed profits – a rare commodity for British films – only came from entertaining their mostly working-class audience in as unchallenging a way as possible.Footnote 29 The central figure in the Ealing films of the 1940s, Michael Balcon, claimed of his interwar career as head of Gaumont British studios: ‘We were in the business of giving the public what it seemed to want in entertainment. We did not talk about art or social significance.’Footnote 30 As a result, one of Balcon's colleagues, Victor Saville, could recall that in his own movies: ‘I never attacked the establishment in any way.’Footnote 31 It was never likely that those entrepreneurs who led the British film industry would ever mount such an assault: many were inclined towards the Conservative party. Balcon and Alexander Korda advised the party on its propaganda; the latter even managed his company, London Films, with Conservative MP A. C. N. Dicey and employed Winston Churchill ostensibly as a screenwriter.Footnote 32
The consequent lack of films with ‘something to say’ depressed some critics.Footnote 33 But it did not seem to bother cinemagoers. When patrons in 1930s Bolton were asked what they wanted to see on the screen, their top three choices were ‘humour’, ‘beautiful things’, and ‘action’. Even less in demand than ‘religion’, ‘politics’ was the second least popular choice – after ‘killing’.Footnote 34 Audiences in wartime Macclesfield echoed these preferences, with slapstick comedies being amongst their most favoured movies.Footnote 35
Thus, as a novel and play Love on the dole might have been successful, but these forms prospered by appealing to a middle-class audience, rather than to the numbers and kind of people who determined the fate of a feature-length movie. Indeed, the prevailing view was that, as one critic observed of Love on the dole's stage version, ‘the stalls’ – the working and lower middle classes – would not come to see it for they ‘like laughter, but neither tears nor reflection’.Footnote 36 Indeed, it was because so few workers attended the theatre that the lord chamberlain felt it unnecessary to ban the play.Footnote 37
The BBFC in contrast prohibited the production of the film version for fear of its effect on the predominantly working-class cinema audience. It is, however, moot how many would have watched the film had it been made in the 1930s. For when Love on the dole was finally released in 1941, reviewers for the elite press praised its ‘realism’; but the critic of the Daily Mirror – fast becoming Britain's most popular newspaper – suggested the movie was ‘not everyone's idea of entertainment’.Footnote 38 Certainly, in working-class Macclesfield Love on the Dole did less than average business; and one informed observer believed the film flopped nationally precisely because it had accurately depicted the privations of proletarian life.Footnote 39
In 1937, Lord Tyrrell, president of the BBFC stated: ‘We may take pride in observing, that there is not a single film showing in London today which deals with any of the burning questions of the day.’Footnote 40 If censorship and filmmakers’ political bias contributed to this position so did commercial calculations based on ‘giving the public what it seemed to want’. The result was that interwar movies fought shy of depicting politicians and politics, controversial or otherwise. Certainly, when real politicians were represented on the screen they were historical figures – and presented in ways intended to entertain audiences.
III
The historical drama was one of interwar cinema's most popular genres.Footnote 41 Many films produced within this field were wholly fictional, with the past merely supplying glamorous costumes and colourful contexts. Others tackled the biographies of real figures and while such biopics were given new life with the success of Korda's The private life of Henry VIII (1933) they had always been well liked. This subgenre also contained a number of portraits of politicians from Britain's recent past. Disraeli (1929) and The Iron Duke (1935) had a prime minister as their protagonist while The house of Rothschild (1934), Clive of India (1935), Victoria the Great (1937), Parnell (1937), Sixty glorious years (1938) and Suez (1938) depicted an array of leading political figures. These movies not only contributed to what Hayden White terms the ‘historiophoty’ of modern British politics but they were also hugely popular.Footnote 42The Iron Duke and Victoria the Great were Britain's fourth most watched films in the year of their release while Bolton's cinemagoers declared the latter to be their favourite movie and in Macclesfield Sixty glorious years was the sixth most watched film of 1938.Footnote 43
According to James Chapman, historical dramas offered ‘a popular view of the past that promote[d] dominant myths about the British historical experience for lay audiences … they tend[ed] to endorse narratives that accord[ed] with popular views of history’ and so reinforced ‘narratives of national greatness’.Footnote 44 Moreover, as Pierre Sorlin has suggested, while ostensibly about the past, such films helped ‘reorganize the present’.Footnote 45 Chapman has certainly convincingly shown how far such film histories attempted to teach political lessons, most notably in regard to appeasement.Footnote 46 A few contemporaries also saw historical dramas as political interventions, notably the New Statesman critic who claimed that because the industry was controlled by the ‘money bags’ historical dramas were ‘resolutely anti-liberal: Dizzy is always a hero, Gladstone a skunk’, a view some historians have endorsed.Footnote 47 Certainly, Liberals were annoyed by how their party was depicted on the screen. The Manchester Guardian reviewer complained Disraeli for example reduced Liberalism ‘to the verge of imbecility’; indeed, so incensed was Hugh Ross Williamson by Gladstone's screen depictions, he wrote a play to put the record straight.Footnote 48
F. J. C. Hearnshaw, president of the Historical Association, conceded that historical dramas could never be completely accurate: if they were to be popular, ‘some deviations of fact’ were inevitable.Footnote 49 Even before the age of cinema, theatre audiences were known for their lack of concern for historical verisimilitude. As the critic William Archer noticed in 1912, on the stage: ‘Nero is bound to fiddle while Rome burns, or the audience will want to know the reason why … [An audience] wants to see Napoleon Napoleonizing. For anomalies and uncharacteristic episodes in Napoleon's career we must go to books; the playhouse is not the place for them.’Footnote 50 This was also the view of George Arliss, most famous for playing Disraeli, on stage, then twice on film, the movies being based on Louis Napoleon Parker's 1910 play. Parker had, however, nearly abandoned the task, thinking the Conservative leader an insufficiently theatrical figure. Arliss recalled the playwright, declaiming: ‘He was in love with his own wife, and nobody else, damn him! He did lots of great things, of course – but no good for the stage.’ Parker openly admitted that he consequently ‘played havoc’ with the facts and wrote what was ‘in no sense a historical play’.Footnote 51
Blatant inaccuracy did not, however, matter to the success of historical dramas. On the basis of five decades’ experience, Arliss wrote: ‘the man in the street … doesn't know anything about the history of his own country, and doesn't want to know’. ‘Cinema, and even theatre, audiences’, he argued, ‘have a very superficial idea of most historical characters – when they have any idea at all.’ Arliss claimed he only played an historical character if the work ‘was dramatic and interesting’. History, the veteran thespian added later as he, ‘then made it my business to read everything I could about the central figure with the object of enriching the character without interfering with the drama’. If history was an adornment, Arliss still believed it vital that dramas worked with audiences’ ‘preconceived ideas’, no matter how limited they were. Indeed, he warned of the danger of authors knowing too much about their subject, for fear the facts would interfere with the entertainment.Footnote 52
It was, then, for good reason that the Historical Association regularly complained of movies’ promotion of ‘grossly unhistorical legends’.Footnote 53 Indeed, as one critic had it: ‘Because I like history, I detest historical film.’Footnote 54 Yet, while they bent the past for commercial advantage, producers of historical dramas were sensitive to charges of inaccuracy and employed various devices to legitimize their accounts. In fact, both in Britain and Hollywood the historical biopic's ‘truth value’ played an important part in how they were marketed.Footnote 55
Most baldly, Victoria the Great began with the assertion that it was based on ‘actual events and happenings’ in the queen's life; and that ‘every incident is founded on historic fact and the political utterances by various statesmen are authentic’. Producers sought other ways to give their works a ‘historical’ appearance. Some movies included scenes set up to evoke well-known paintings: The Iron Duke used Daniel Maclise's ‘The meeting of Wellington and Blucher’ in this way. While not always effective, actors were made to look like those whom they portrayed. When preparing to play Disraeli on the stage, Arliss spent a considerable amount of time consulting portraits and busts as well as old magazines and photographs.Footnote 56 This seemed to pay off: the Manchester Guardian critic claimed Arliss on the screen ‘looks exactly like Disraeli’.Footnote 57 Film actors could also be placed in real locations to buttress the impression of accuracy: Sixty glorious years boasted of its access to numerous royal palaces and parks, prompting one reviewer to praise its ‘meticulous documentation’.Footnote 58
Direct evidence of the impact of historical dramas on audiences is inevitably limited. Reviews of Disraeli the play and movie, however, indicate that even the most sophisticated eyes could be lured into believing that which they knew to be false. When staged in London's West End during 1916, reviewers noted its ‘absurdly bad’ history and construction of ‘a Disraeli beyond our wildest dreams’. Yet, they also conceded that the prime minister emerged ‘humanized’ and as ‘jolly old fellow with a heart soundly in the right place’.Footnote 59 Hearnshaw described the 1929 film as one of the most erroneous dramas ever made; yet, while reviewers described it as ‘a picturesque reconstruction’, they also claimed it revealed the actual Disraeli's ‘sincerity’.Footnote 60
Mass Observation offers anecdotal insights into how audiences viewed the anachronistic nature of these dramas, suggesting that people who liked such films believed in their veracity – although perhaps inevitably those who did not saw them as ‘perversions of the truth’.Footnote 61 Yet, if, as an early anthropologist of film suggested, ‘audiences tend to accept as true that part of a movie story which is beyond their experience’ more will have accepted the screen version of the past than did not.Footnote 62 Moreover, given the similarities between historical dramas and those ‘docudramas’ so popular with late twentieth-century audiences, it is likely the former had an effect similar to the latter by encouraging audiences to accept fiction as fact.Footnote 63 This is especially likely given that most audiences’ grasp of history was weak. As a recent study has shown, even those primed with the facts believe the most gratuitously inaccurate screen rendering of the past.Footnote 64
IV
Hollywood played an important role in shaping Britain's historiophoty. Five of the eight movies highlighted here – Disraeli, The house of Rothschild, Clive of India, Parnell, and Suez – were shot in California. All but one of these – Parnell – were the responsibility of studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck who also played a key role in developing Arliss's Hollywood career. Despite – or because of – this, Zanuck's attitude to the past was even more cavalier than that of his elderly protégé.Footnote 65
These films do not, however, straightforwardly exemplify cinema's ‘Americanization’ of popular culture, something of a concern at the time, for some were much more ‘British’ than ‘American’.Footnote 66 They are, instead, instances of a transatlantic culture, one that preceded moving pictures and in which novelists and playwrights had helped embed a sense of commonality between the nations.Footnote 67 Thus, although Zanuck's Twentieth Century Pictures produced Clive of India in 1935, Britons W. J. Lipscomb and R. J. Minney wrote the script. Despite being told by Zanuck that the film had to be made comprehensible to ‘people in Nebraska’ who would never have heard of Robert Clive, the movie was actually little different from their 1934 West End play. The play had aimed to show London theatregoers what ‘a great and very likeable person’ Clive had been; the film repeated this exercise.Footnote 68 Consequently, while the Manchester Guardian critic believed the movie made a ‘conscientious attempt’ to stick to the facts, it depicted Clive as an enlightened figure who disinterestedly drew India within a benevolent empire.Footnote 69Clive of India was, moreover, but one of a number of Hollywood's historical films that embraced Britain's own mythology such that Gore Vidal, remembering his 1930s cinema going youth, wrote: ‘it seemed as if the only country on earth was England and there were no great personages who were not English’.Footnote 70
As Elisa Tamarkin points out, the anglophilia described by Vidal was a defining aspect of early American identity.Footnote 71 This empathy with the former colonial power took a step further in 1899 when the high school curriculum stipulated that students be taught British history as a precursor to their own.Footnote 72 Thus, when the early film industry depicted the British empire's most colourful episodes, such as The relief of Lucknow (1912), it naturally assumed the perspective of their white protagonists.
Complementing their cultural affinity, Washington adherents of the ‘Anglo-Saxon cult’ embarking on their first imperialist adventures looked to Britain as a strategic ally.Footnote 73 Secretary of State John Hay even wrote during the Boer War that: ‘The fight of England is the fight of civilisation and progress and all our interests are bound up in her success.’Footnote 74 The belief that the countries were partners in a shared civilizing project took something of a knock, however, when the US entered a period of isolationism after 1918. Even so, members of the American elite continued to promote partnership while the 1939 royal visit encouraged many to think Britain and the US shared the same democratic values.Footnote 75 At the furthest extreme of such interwar anglophilia was Hayes Hunter, who produced plays and directed films on both sides of the Atlantic. According to the Conservative MP E. P. Smith, this American's
ruling passion was the promotion of better Anglo-American relations … he was constantly returning to the theme and deploring the fact that not enough people here or in the United States realized that the future happiness of mankind very largely depended upon the most close and cordial relationships between our two peoples.
Hunter even wore an identity disc, on which was the legend: ‘An American who loved England.’Footnote 76
Hayes was a minor Hollywood figure. The attitude of those who ran the American movie industry towards Britain was dictated by more prosaic considerations. They produced films about Britain's past because American audiences liked them; and British cinemagoers accounted for half of Hollywood's foreign earnings.Footnote 77 There were, however, other calculations that led the studios to embrace British themed historical dramas in the way they did. This process is in many ways a cultural example of the kind of ‘path-dependency’ so beloved of some political scientists.Footnote 78 For, if Arliss the Harrow-educated actor had not travelled to the US in 1901, matters might have turned out rather differently. Spending nearly a decade criss-crossing the country starring in a variety of productions, by 1910 Arliss needed new material. After agreeing the subject with his American impresario (partly because Arliss and the Conservative leader looked so alike), he commissioned the prolific London-based, Anglo-American Parker to write Disraeli.Footnote 79 Parker's labours proved so successful with North American audiences – the New York Times described it as ‘one of the most popular plays of our time’ – Arliss toured with it for five years.Footnote 80
The actor's career was transformed in 1928 when Warner Brothers contracted him to reproduce on the screen some of his stage successes, including Disraeli. His theatrical background and cultivated ‘Englishness’ were especially attractive to Warners, an arriviste studio, ‘the black sheep of the Hollywood establishment’ and best known for the films of canine star Rin Tin Tin.Footnote 81 As related by Arliss, Harry Warner said of Disraeli that ‘he did not expect it to pay, but he was using me as an expensive bait to hook people into the cinema who had never been there before’.Footnote 82 American critics certainly thought such a ‘highbrow’ movie would appeal ‘more generally to the sophisticated and thinking audience than to the public as a whole’.Footnote 83Disraeli however surprised everybody: it was a commercial and critical triumph, Arliss won the Oscar for Best Actor and became, in Warner's words, ‘an important motion picture asset’.Footnote 84
If Arliss brought diction, distinction, and a new audience to Warners, Disraeli had his own appeal to the studio: he was of Jewish origin. Arliss recalled that Disraeli the play nearly closed within months of starting its run. The problem was, he claimed, the name ‘Disraeli’ then meant little to the American public, the drama being referred to as, ‘the play with a funny name’. Parker said that in Chicago, advertising the play's title did little good because those, ‘who saw it on the hoardings asked whether it was a new breakfast food’. The support of the city's Jewish theatregoers – who presumably had heard of the British prime minister – allowed the play to survive and build an audience.Footnote 85
For the Warner brothers – the sons of Jewish immigrants – Disraeli's appeal is clear. Its Jewish protagonist overcomes gentile opposition to promote universal – in this case imperialist – values from which all, gentile as much as Jew, gain. Disraeli was in fact one of a number of similar tales Hollywood's largely Jewish-run studios liked to tell at this time: it was the studio bosses’ own story and validated their assimilation within American culture.Footnote 86 Thus, while Parker's play noted, Warners’ film underlined Disraeli's ethnicity, inserting an opening scene in which a rabble-rouser enraged by the prime minister's origins, asks: ‘Do you want England to be run by an outsider?’ Throughout both works, the elite – clearly identified as Liberal – make snide remarks about the prime minister's background, culminating in the governor of the Bank of England calling him ‘an alien Jew’. The reaction of the Washington Post critic suggests the film's intended message got through, describing it as:
The thrilling story of the winning of an empire … the exciting account of a Jewish boy of talented, bourgeois parentage, who fought his way upward against the obstacles of racial prejudice, political hate and lack of caste to become the greatest prime minister in the history of Great Britain.Footnote 87
If Disraeli suggested some Britons were anti-Semitic, Britain was still shown to be tolerant enough to allow Jews to rise to the top and serve the national interest. Britain's openness was made even plainer in another Arliss film, The house of Rothschild, produced by Zanuck's Twentieth Century studios soon after the Nazis had assumed power. Set in the Napoleonic era, the film showed the British as considerably more tolerant than Germans; indeed, Wellington encourages one of his officers to court Julie Rothschild. The movie even concludes with a fictional scene in which the prince regent ennobles Arliss's Nathan Rothschild. The movie – which endorsed Jewish assimilation as much as it praised British tolerance – was so successful Warners re-released Disraeli to cash in.Footnote 88
Arliss had wanted to play Disraeli in the Rothschild film but had been persuaded against it – that was possibly an anachronism too far even for Zanuck.Footnote 89 Disraeli had, however, not been exhausted as a Hollywood subject. During 1937, Zanuck's newly expanded Twentieth Century Fox prepared to produce The rise of Disraeli with dashing Tyrone Power scheduled to take the lead: much of the research was said to have been completed and the script in preparation.Footnote 90 The film never materialized, a fate that also befell Korda's attempt to film Young Mr Disraeli in Britain, based on the play by Elswyth Thane, the American author of historical romances.
Disraeli did, however, appear in another Tyrone Power movie, Suez, a biopic of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the Frenchman responsible for the Suez Canal. This time, Zanuck hoped to persuade Arliss to take up the Disraelian mantle; but in vain, meaning that British actor Miles Mander assumed the role.Footnote 91 By the time Suez went into production, Hollywood's studio bosses had overcome their fear of expressing hostility to Nazism and so of being identified as ‘Jewish’. Even ultra-cautious figures like Louis B. Mayer had faced down isolationist hostility by calling on the US to join forces with Britain. However, if their films made this case, before 1939 they usually did so elliptically.Footnote 92
Perhaps because Zanuck was not himself Jewish, the pro-British bias in Suez was blatant and unembarrassed. According to the movie, de Lesseps's vision was of a canal open to the world, something he hoped would promote greater international co-operation. If the British initially oppose its construction, it is only because they fear the canal will give Louis Napoleon, the film's villain, control of a vital route to India. Gladstone is, however, presented as ideologically against the scheme through a small-minded, nationalist dislike of what he calls ‘fly-by-night foreign schemes’. Nonetheless, Disraeli, the leader as de Lesseps puts it of ‘progressive and intelligent English opinion’, one of the ‘men of vision who can see beyond national boundaries’ passionately supports the project. The two men make common cause; and the film even concocts a meeting during which Disraeli tells de Lesseps that in building the canal he was doing England's work. The Conservative leader even exits to fight an election in which he determines to make the canal its main theme. Disraeli's Jewishness is not referred to because it is not relevant to the story. However, his imperialism remains important – but is transfigured into a disinterested internationalism. In contrast, Gladstone's position is presented as a nineteenth-century version of Charles Lindburgh's isolationism.
Not every Hollywood historical drama was anglophilic. Based on a play by American Elsie T. Schauffler, Parnell starred Clark Gable as the Irish leader, showing his downfall following exposure of his affair with Mrs Kitty O'Shea. When the play came to London in 1936, the lord chamberlain refused it a licence after objections from relatives of Captain O'Shea, whose action to divorce his wife had precipitated Parnell's demise. After amendment it was, however, given a West End run. The play nonetheless still presented Captain O'Shea in nefarious terms – and showed Gladstone hypocritically exploiting the affair to secure Parnell's replacement by a more pliable Irish leader.Footnote 93 The Hollywood rendering, however, pushed Parnell's love affair further to the fore, if only to maximize Gable's screen time. As a consequence, while British critics mocked Parnell for its sentimentality, the apparent desire to prevent Gladstone from being seen as a villain won the movie some praise.Footnote 94 In fact, it shows Gladstone supporting Home Rule and as a potential Parnell ally: the villain of the piece is not the Liberal leader but O'Shea and ‘respectable opinion’.
Hollywood's interpretation of Britain's past was a mix of American and British influences: it was inherently transatlantic. America also cast a shadow over how the British constructed their own screen history as many home-produced movies were made with one eye on their reception in the lucrative US market. Balcon would often visit Hollywood to persuade American actors to work in his films ‘to make our product more saleable’ there. Arliss was Gaumont British studio's ‘biggest capture’ and perhaps because he played Wellington, The Iron Duke was particularly successful in the US, although other than casting it made few concessions to American audiences.Footnote 95Victoria the Great, however, showed how the queen and her consort prevented war between Britain and Union forces during the American civil war. Lincoln is even shown praising their intervention in a scene The Times critic thought was‘evidently designed to appeal to American sentiment’.Footnote 96
V
Hardly handsome, slightly built, possessed of bad teeth, and in his early sixties when he signed for Warners, Disraeli nonetheless made George Arliss a Hollywood star. Interest in film stars and the symbolic meanings to which they give rise is generally restricted to glamorous figures and concentrates on issues of gender, sexuality, or ethnicity: if politics is considered, it is that of the body rather than the body politic.Footnote 97 Despite his critical neglect, Arliss was a star just like any other – and one with consequences.
For much of the 1930s, Arliss dominated the historical drama genre; after Disraeli he played Voltaire, Nathan and Meyer Rothschild, Richelieu, Alexander Hamilton, and Wellington. Indeed, so omnipresent was he, the historian Philip Guedella remarked: ‘History, according to the cinema, has three epochs: the epoch of Roman oaths and circuses, followed by that of polygamous kings, followed by that of George Arliss.’Footnote 98 Moreover, when he was not playing historical roles, Arliss assumed the parts of millionaires, prime ministers, monarchs, and aristocrats, each of whom shared the same generic, genial characteristics. For, like many stars, Arliss's roles were presented as reflecting his real character: he was rarely photographed without a monocle or wielding a cane; while stories of filming stopping for afternoon tea and tales of his ‘man’ Jenner were widely reported in the press. That he was usually accompanied on screen by wife Florence – who often, as in Disraeli, played his loving spouse – reduced further the distance between Arliss and his screen roles. It was not therefore just because of his English theatrical background that Hollywood films respectfully billed him as ‘Mr. George Arliss’. As a consequence of his artistic hegemony, Arliss promulgated a particularly benevolent view of those great men who wielded authority in general and political power in particular to millions of more humbly placed cinemagoers.
As George Custen noted, Arliss's roles were ‘remarkably interchangeable … a kind of crafty uncle, always ready to help young lovers and uphold the honor of the country in which he happened to live’. In that regard, Disraeli set the mould: a scene in Cardinal Richelieu (1935) was simply lifted from the 1929 movie to conform with audience expectations of how an Arliss ‘great man’ should act.Footnote 99 The consistency of his screen persona was no accident, for Arliss enjoyed an unusually prominent role in the making of his films, effectively running a separate production unit. After four decades on the stage, Arliss had a strong sense of how audiences wanted to see him and ensured his characters were bent to that shape, something facilitated, in Hollywood, by his close working relationship with Zanuck.
Critics noted the extent to which Arliss was, as one put it, a ‘romantically inflexible actor’ who turned all his characters into versions of his own public persona, one in which ‘avuncular geniality’ was to the fore.Footnote 100 Hollywood wags put it more succinctly: Arliss was ‘The Man of One Face’.Footnote 101 His stage-bound, ‘stylized, precise, and artificial acting’ was, moreover, not for everyone.Footnote 102 Indeed, avant-garde critics, notably Graham Greene, mocked ‘his usual refinement or sentiment, his cultured English accent’, and his ‘sly soft episcopal speech, the long upper-lip, like that of a well-bred horse, the general tone of a good club’.Footnote 103 The Observer's C. A. Lejeune even mockingly referred to the veteran actor as ‘a benevolent old darling’.Footnote 104
The ‘incomparable Arliss’, as the Daily Mirror called him, was treated more favourably in the popular press. There, ‘the Arliss smile, the famous twinkle in the Arliss eye, or the hundred and one different expressions which Arliss is capable of giving to his fans’ were looked on with admiration.Footnote 105 For many cinemagoers wanted to watch this ‘benevolent old darling’ on the screen. Disraeli was said to be one of Britain's most successful films of 1930 while in 1934 Sidney Bernstein's survey of 125,000 cinemagoers even had Arliss as the country's most popular male film star, relegating Clark Gable to second place. Arliss was, without doubt, one of Britain's most popular stars of the 1930s.Footnote 106
Arliss played men of affairs as kindly, approachable, and even whimsical figures, although they were also wise and possessed the necessary low skills to achieve their disinterested ends: his screen Disraeli was even considered ‘glamorously sly’.Footnote 107 Not a man to challenge preconceptions, Arliss gave the cinema going public a version of leadership for which many of them appeared to hanker. Certainly, when the British producers of The tunnel (1935) – about an ill-fated attempt to create a physical link between Britain to the US – needed someone to play a plausible prime minister, they called on Arliss.
An expert in pandering to the public's ill-informed historical prejudices, Arliss nonetheless encountered a problem when playing Wellington in The Iron Duke. Characteristically, Arliss saw the duke as ‘a very human person’ who liked to play hide and seek. He was also confident that apart from a few phrases, like ‘publish and be damned’, most Britons ‘know nothing whatever’ about Wellington. Arliss consequently used his influence to ensure the film's duke reflected this vision.Footnote 108 Lejuene was certainly right to predict he would play this martial figure as ‘Dear Uncle Arthur’ and was one of a number of elite critics who felt the Arliss persona jarred with Wellington's less benevolent historical reputation.Footnote 109 If it jarred, however, it did the film no harm at the box office.
Arliss's real problem was, in any case, that another actor had already come to embody Wellington. Zanuck had warned his friend against the part because he believed that, ‘any Duke of Wellington who didn't look like Aubrey Smith would not be accepted in the movies’. For C. Aubrey Smith – of Charterhouse, Cambridge, and the MCC – had appeared as a ‘sensational’ Wellington in Arliss’ own vehicle, The house of Rothschild.Footnote 110 Prior to that, Aubrey Smith had carved out a niche as a supporting player specializing in ‘lordly, avuncular, authoritative’ roles, which would include a kindly Pitt the elder in Clive of India.Footnote 111 His Wellington was therefore some distance from the real duke; indeed, he merely gave a variation of the well-meaning, modest man of affairs, as patented by Arliss. Aubrey Smith was, however, over six feet tall, lantern-jawed and although in his seventies a physically imposing figure. Unhappy at his usurpation, Arliss claimed he was at least the same height as the real Wellington, but was forced to concede that he had run counter to the ‘preconceived ideas of the general public’. But in this case he had gone against preconceptions created by Hollywood more than History. This was, moreover, a lesson learnt by Herbert Wilcox who employed Aubrey Smith – not Arliss – to reprise his duke in Victoria the Great and Sixty Glorious Years.Footnote 112
VI
To help define their protagonists' motives, the nature of their antagonists and the impediments they had to confront if they were to achieve their ambitions, the films analyzed were framed within a generic dramatic structure. In 1945, Zanuck outlined the formula for a successful biopic to his more obtuse subordinates. He highlighted the compelling need for audiences to have a ‘rooting interest’ in the person depicted, meaning that the protagonist's life had to be made congruent with those of cinemagoers.Footnote 113
This is why so much effort was spent establishing protagonists' desire for conventional domestic contentment. For, scriptwriters could confidently suppose regard for family was something they shared with most in the audience. Public duty was then presented as threatening romantic love and family, so as to highlight the extent to which each character had to make sacrifices for the national interest. Robert Clive's home life is thrown upside down thanks to his desire to ensure the right kind of government for India. Wellington in The Iron Duke is constantly trying to return to hearth, home, and that perfect cup of tea but the need to make peace in Europe repeatedly frustrates his ambitions. In Victoria the Great, Albert expends his failing energies drafting a telegram that will prevent war with the US and dies as a result.
The need for a ‘rooting interest’ also explains why Disraeli, Clive, Wellington, and Victoria are presented as political ‘outsiders’, something else they shared with most cinemagoers. While scriptwriters bent history to breaking point for dramatic purposes, they could go only so far, for while the audience was disproportionately working class, young and female this could not be said of their protagonists. Clive of India comes the closest to using class as a way of giving audiences a rooting interest by showing him to be a poorly paid clerk working under oppressive conditions. Even after he has made his fortune, Clive demonstrates righteous contempt for the pompous and incompetent bosses who run the East India Company. As we have seen, Disraeli's ethnicity was used to highlight his outsider status. The Iron Duke faced a trickier problem, for Wellington might not have been the richest of landowners but poor he was not. This, the movie solves by highlighting his identity as a straightforward military man standing outside of politics, indicating his contempt for ‘you politicians’. He even declares: ‘I hate politics more than poison!’ As a monarch, Victoria posed an even greater ‘rooting’ problem for Wilcox's two films. His solution was to use her gender and youth, for as a political naïf she is surrounded by an army of aged men, some more avuncular than others, intent on telling her what to do. Moreover, despite her position, the queen never loses her common touch: the films stress as much as they can Victoria's deep concern for the welfare of her subjects and servants.
In dramatizing Disraeli's motives, Parker used a template into which subsequent screen politicians fitted. As one critic of Disraeli the play saw it, beneath the theatrics, Parker highlighted with ‘great force the passionate dreams and imperial ambitions of the great statesman’.Footnote 114 The playwright even has one of Disraeli's admirers assert her hero was only concerned with ‘making his country great’. Disraeli takes just one episode in the prime minister's life: his high-risk purchase of shares in the Suez Canal, an achievement to which Suez and Victoria the Great faithfully refer. This was, as William Archer might have put it, Disraeli ‘Disraelifying’, for the audience: whatever his other qualities, it is Disraeli's imperial ambition that was the most dramatically significant.
Clive of India shows its hero making a fortune out of the sub-continent, but presents that as legitimate: Clive is merely trying to get on. The film does, however, emphasize how little he took compared to others. It also makes it clear that Clive's last trip to India was an act of self-sacrifice designed to root out corruption in the East India Company and strengthen Britain's position. This is because Clive had come to see India as a ‘sacred trust’ for which government should assume responsibility. Indeed, the film presents securing India for the empire as Clive's ultimate vindication, one for which Pitt the elder on behalf of George III gives him thanks. Like Disraeli, therefore, Clive is defined by his support for advancing the empire.
Victoria the Great and Sixty glorious years unlike the other two movies were British made and could not have been produced had not Edward VIII lifted his father's ban on depictions of the late queen.Footnote 115 Wilcox's films show Victoria embodying the national interest – which they define in imperial terms – and preoccupied with her subjects’ prosperity, presenting her, the Manchester Guardian believed, as ‘an actively beneficent constitutional force’.Footnote 116 In these movies, the New Statesman critic claimed that prime ministers, ‘succeed one another like patient dogs’ and complained of their ‘ludicrous inadequacy’ as portraits. As a consequence, Gladstone was reduced to ‘the man who left Gordon to his fate’ and Disraeli boiled down to ‘the man who bought the Suez Canal’.Footnote 117 Such brevity, however, means they outlined the normative role expected of Victoria's premiers: to do the monarch's work, which is to say serve the national – that is imperial – interest.
Victoria the Great even suggests that in seeking the repeal of the corn laws, Robert Peel was merely acting on his monarch's wishes. For repeal is instigated immediately after Victoria becomes aware of the people's suffering – through reading Oliver Twist. At the very moment she first appreciates their unfortunate position the royal couple are disturbed by a demonstration outside Buckingham Palace, which establishes that the high price of bread created by the corn laws is the reason for their misery. The film then cuts straight to a scene in which Peel is praised by Albert for demonstrating ‘true loyalty’ to his monarch by putting her people's interests before those of his own party.
If Victoria the Great shows Disraeli opposing repeal, Peel explains it away by referring to his ‘youth’ – although in reality Disraeli was in his forties. By the film's climax Disraeli has, however, been restored to his accustomed position, when he makes Victoria empress of India. Furthermore, in Sixty glorious years Disraeli and monarch are shown as united over Suez. His ‘youthful’ indiscretion apart, therefore, audiences are meant to think well of Disraeli. Gladstone, as The Times reviewer noted, was more ‘unkindly treated’; his only appearance in Sixty glorious years presents the great Liberal as, in the words of the Manchester Guardian critic, a ‘shifty, dilatory politician’, for failing to pay heed to Victoria's demand that troops be immediately sent to save General Gordon.Footnote 118 Yet, if Gladstone was late in acting on his monarch's wishes the movie identifies Lord Palmerston as actively opposing them. For Palmerston favours war with Russia, a conflict the royal pair believe unnecessary, and while the foreign secretary prevails, the wisdom of their counsel is confirmed when the Crimean War descends into a pointless waste of life.
The films invariably pitched their protagonists against foreign forces threatening the empire: German (in the play) or Russian (in the film) spies in Disraeli; the French and Indian princes in Clive of India; continental aristocrats in The Iron Duke. Yet, in order to be in a position to face these challenges, all but Wellington has to take on Britain's political elite and overcome ‘politics’ itself.
In Disraeli, partisan obtuseness means the Liberal elite refuses to exploit the opportunity presented by the availability of Suez Canal shares. Rejected by the Bank of England, Disraeli turns to the Jewish financier Meyers who ‘not being a party man but a patriot’ funds his plan. The main difference between the stage and screen versions of Disraeli is the extent to which the latter emphasized how much party sentiment motivated hostility to Disraeli's adventure. Gladstone – absent in the play – is shown persuading MPs to oppose the scheme while the governor is unambiguously identified as a keen Liberal.
Often the cockpit of events, the Commons plays a vital – if vaguely defined and paradoxical – part in these dramas. The verbal battles fought across the despatch box between Disraeli and Gladstone are presented as full of (unexplained) significance. The stage for great speeches delivered by great men with great consequences, the Commons is, however, also frequently shown as dominated by a baying mob hostile to the protagonist. Significantly, both Victoria films depict Albert's mortification at the hands of an unruly Commons. The prince consort observes MPs debating the repeal of the corn laws so he will be better able to help his wife rule wisely. The MPs nonetheless demand he leave the gallery, humiliating Albert and upsetting the queen in the process. The flawed character of the Commons is also established at the conclusion of Clive of India. The chamber is packed with dishonest former officials of the East India Company, men whom Clive has rightly sacked. Facing a vote of censure on trumped up charges Clive makes what Pitt declares to be a ‘magnificent speech’. It is, the prime minister nonetheless concedes, one that will have no effect whatsoever: Clive loses the vote.
Finally, these movies invariably depict the people as, at best, capricious and open to manipulation by the protagonists’ enemies. Wellington is ‘the idol of the people’ at the start of The Iron Duke but is subject to newspaper speculation about his relationship with a married woman. This press-invented scandal – which at least allows Arliss to exclaim ‘publish and be damned!’ – turns the people against him. Lord Castlereagh assures Wellington that ‘Nobody thinks anything about it except the crowd. They have to be answered.’ Wellington responds: ‘Ah, the crowd. Dangerous cattle – eat out of your hand one day and bite your fingers off the next!’ Similarly, Clive of India illustrated how the press could turn the people against a man of honour. When he first returns from India, Clive is greeted by cheering crowds, but on coming home for the last time he is stoned after journalists had claimed he was corrupt. Sixty glorious years also shows how a malign politician might turn the people against their own interest. Palmerston mobilizes the queen's subjects against Albert, for opposing his policy of war with Russia. The people consequently see the prince as a traitor after the foreign secretary makes them ‘wild with rage and fear’, turning Britain into, as Albert complains, a ‘mad house’. Thus, while both Victoria films end with the queen cheered by crowds celebrating her 1897 jubilee, she has also been shown enduring their less peaceable side: when rioting about the corn laws they even break the windows at Buckingham Palace.
VII
In dramatizing Britain's political history, 1930s filmmakers told stories of selfless leaders and benevolent monarchs advancing a national interest defined in predominantly imperial terms. As embodied by George Arliss in particular, such films presented their protagonists as wise, paternalistic, and humane. While ostensibly about the past, these films articulated a coherent if romantic normative vision of how British politics should operate, one that highlighted the role of monarchs and statesmen while it diminished the agency of parties and the people. Shrouded in the beguiling gossamer of cinematic authenticity, these were uniquely persuasive accounts.
In their depictions of Disraeli and others, these dramas gave audiences the leaders they wished for during a troubled decade. Despite confronting tribulations comparable to those faced by contemporary politicians, these historical figures were shown nonetheless laying the foundations for prosperity at home and an imperial peace abroad. Historiophoty performed a similar role in the US. There, a series of Hollywood films humanized Abraham Lincoln while elevating him to the status of national saviour and, thereby, ‘gave hope that the nation could produce great presidents in times of trial’.Footnote 119
It is no wonder some contemporaries and historians have suggested that the historical dramas discussed here were the product of those ‘money bags’ who ran the British film industry, part of a wider attempt to impose a ‘facsimile world’ onto their customers. Britain's studio bosses were certainly mostly Conservatives – and many of their counterparts in Hollywood, specifically Darryl F. Zanuck, were registered Republicans. This does not, however, properly explain why these films assumed the character they did, for that was largely due to the transatlantic cinematic culture within which they were created.
These movies nonetheless promulgated a view of democracy convenient to defenders of the status quo. Moreover, Disraeli's dramatic prominence could not but rebound to the specific advantage of the Conservative party. Certainly, in the wake of the 1918 franchise act, Stanley Baldwin was wont to cite Disraeli – the social reformer – as evidence that his party had always been concerned to improve working-class lives.Footnote 120 Baldwin did not need to belabour Disraeli's role as the hero of Suez as he already held, as Jeffrey Richards has it, ‘a special place in the Imperial portrait gallery’.Footnote 121 Thanks to the school curriculum, all Britons knew about Disraeli's – as well as Clive's, Wellington's, and Victoria's – close association with the righteous advance of their benevolent empire.Footnote 122 As a result, Disraeli, like imperialism, appeared to transcend politics. Thus, when they tried to explain his dramatic popularity, critics, except on the left, rarely mentioned Disraeli's partisan identity. Instead, they focused on his personal qualities, suggesting he was so frequently and positively depicted because he was such ‘a picturesque figure’ whose life was marked by ‘contrast and paradox’, there being ‘more drama in every ten years of his career than in many even conspicuously eventful lifetimes’.Footnote 123 There was some truth in that romantic view of Disraeli's biography; but, as Baldwin appreciated, he was also a figure replete with political significance.
If Baldwin exploited the real Disraeli to win working-class votes, Conservative Central Office was alert to the electoral possibilities of his dramatized version and Arliss was happy to help. In 1930, the actor had straddled the bounds between the two Disraelis when he placed a wreath at the late prime pinister's Parliament Square statue as part of a Primrose League memorial procession.Footnote 124 In the run-up to the 1935 general election, he went even further. At that time, the Conservatives had a fleet of cinema vans that exhibited short propaganda movies, and which reached an estimated 1.5 million people. One of these films had Arliss play Disraeli in which he reportedly ‘took the great Victorian statesman's ideas as the basis of a stirring message to present-day Britain'.Footnote 125 That party officials believed a veteran actor performing as a long-dead Victorian statesman might persuade Britons to vote Conservative was the culmination of a transnational cultural process that owed much to the skills, not just of Arliss but also of Louis Parker, the positive reactions of North American theatre audiences, and the calculations of Warner Brothers.
Arliss did not, however, just embody an Atlanticized Disraeli; he also personified the kind of paternalistic, kindly, homely statesmanship that appealed to a significant proportion of the cinema audience. As Egon Wertheimer noted, even workers attending Labour party meetings deferred to leaders with an elevated social background who showed they cared.Footnote 126 This imagined style of leadership found an echo in the public persona developed by Stanley Baldwin, one that was similarly cross-partisan, relaxed, unbombastic, and performed to millions of radio listeners and cinemagoers.Footnote 127 As two letters Baldwin received during the 1935 campaign suggest, this persona appealed to a variety of those who joined the electorate after 1918. The first was sent by a working man from Dagenham who wrote that, having listened to all his radio broadcasts since 1926, ‘altho’ I have never met you I feel I know you quite well’. He would be voting National, he claimed, ‘because you lead it, because I feel I can trust you and because, above all, you typify in yourself that innate steadiness and probity that is Britain and has made our people and Empire what they are today’. A few days later, Baldwin received another missive, from a schoolmistress in rural Nottinghamshire. She declared:
You are just wonderful! … The Country cannot carry on without You and Your Colleagues; and I hope God will give you strength to still be our earthly ‘Rock of Ages’ for many, many years to come. You are the Stand-by for our Dear Old Country in your magnificent, sincere, quiet way, but you ‘Get There’ every time, and with God's help you will be there Nov 14th.Footnote 128
If the evidence, such as it is, suggests that the historical dramas discussed here encouraged voters to turn to the kind of leadership offered by Baldwin, the movies’ significance lies less in how they might have shaped preferences and more in how they highlighted the popularity of a personalized style of leadership that appeared to transcend partisanship and the people's uncertainties. This was a strikingly traditional, pre-democratic statesmanship but one that had mutated to suit the modern, ‘feminized’ mass electorate; for it was humanized, domesticated, and announced its qualities modestly.Footnote 129 Such an imagined leadership was not crafted by propagandists intent on manipulating opinions for political ends – as was apparently the case with wartime historical dramas that evoked parallels between their protagonists and Winston Churchill.Footnote 130 Instead, it emerged from the interaction between playwrights, actors, and film studio bosses on both sides of the Atlantic as they tried to find an audience and turn a profit.
If historians are unable definitively to quantify the precise scale on which cinema contributed to the Conservatives’ interwar dominance, reference to the historical dramas of the 1930s nonetheless supplies further evidence as to how it was achieved. For, vindicating Michael Saward's general claim that art and politics are representing practices that share ‘strong aesthetic and cultural dimensions’, this article suggests that by the 1930s the techniques required to achieve popularity with a cinema audience were increasingly similar to those needed to win general elections.Footnote 131 Politics and the cinema did enjoy a close relationship in 1930s Britain, although not of the kind historians have hitherto imagined.
