In 1946, Britons made 1.6 billion annual visits to the cinema. By 1970, this figure had dropped to 193 million and, by 2003, 167 million. Film production saw the same pattern. During the fifties, the British film industry offered about 120 feature films each year. In 1989, only thirty films were made in Britain, though over the past decade film production has recovered. These statistics remind us of the cinematic world we have lost. Film was central to British cultural life and popular leisure until the 1960s. It had a physical, as well as an imaginative presence in Britain, with cinemas taking their place alongside churches, pubs, dance halls, and football grounds as spaces of communal life. The Odeon and Gaumont cinemas that were once glittering symbols of modernity on the high street, playing host to childhood adventures, adolescent courtship, and family outings, are now more often homes to a different kind of communal activity: bingo.

It was in the fifties that cinema lost its preeminence. The villain was, of course, television. After 1954, working-class people began to buy televisions in greater and greater numbers. Cinema stalls and balconies slowly, but inexorably, emptied. The fifties have also been perceived as a difficult time for the quality of British cinema. It is, as one of the books under review suggests, “the most derided decade in British film history” (MacKillop and Sinyard, 2). The thirties and forties had seen innovative, distinctive cinema in Britain, whether thinking about the documentary movement or the Gainsborough costume dramas. In the 1960s, British film grew up, with important examples of social realism, such as Tony Richardson's Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), and visually and thematically adventurous works like If … (1968) by Lindsay Anderson and Performance (1970) by Nicholas Roeg. It is difficult to find examples of such obviously pathbreaking work in the 1950s. Foreign comparisons do not help. In France, the decade saw Henri-Georges Clouzot's Le salaire de la peur (Wages of fear; 1953) and Les diaboliques (The fiends; 1954), François Truffaut's Les 400 coups (The four hundred blows; 1959), and Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle (Breathless; 1959). Italian cinema was graced by Vittorio de Sica's Ladri di biciclette (The bicycle thieves; 1948), Stromboli (1950) by Roberto Rossellini, and Federico Fellini's La dolce vita (The sweet life) and Michelangelo Antonioni's L’Avventura (The adventure), both from 1960. Britain, by contrast, produced The Blue Lamp (1950), The Dambusters (1954), Doctor in the House (1954), and I’m All Right Jack! (1959). These films are many things, but few would argue that they are jewels of world cinema. Such comparisons, if stark, are, perhaps, not fair. Even Truffaut had something nice to say about Doctor in the House, though it is an assessment that should disturb admirers of his work: “this is a historical documentary—hardly romanticized—about British medical schools” (quoted in MacKillop and Sinyard, 9).

However fond we might be of the comedies and war films of the 1950s—and there is much to be fond of—fifties film thus has a bad reputation. There are, of course, parallels between this reputation and a broader assessment of the decade as stale and bland, a period blunted by political consensus and bloated by economic affluence, less momentous than the war years and less revolutionary than the sixties. But since the late 1970s, the powerful tides beneath the staid surface of the fifties have emerged with greater clarity. Particularly important has been work by the Birmingham Feminist History Group, Lynne Segal, and Frank Mort, showing just how critical the fifties were to the reconception of gender and sexual identities.Footnote 1 Others have noted the transformations in national and class identity and have examined the particular manifestations of modernity in postwar Britain.Footnote 2 Again, what becomes clear in this work is that some of the principal characteristics of contemporary Britain first emerged in the 1950s: a dealigned, or realigned, class system, the richness and tensions of a multiracial society, the negotiation of a postimperial and European identity, and the stirrings of rebellion against Victorian morality.

The five books under review all provide, in disparate ways, a recovery of British cinema of the 1950s. They make a good case for its qualities while providing an explanation for its failures and limitations. There are important (and acknowledged) antecedents for this work. The first, and perhaps still one of the most crucial, is Raymond Durgnat's A Mirror for England (1970). The uneven quality of British film in the forties and fifties did not trouble Durgnat; indeed, he embraced it, stating, “many fascinating moments occur in generally mediocre films.” Durgnat first articulated what has become a common way of describing British film in the fifties. It was, he claimed, a period of transition, alive with “intimations of controversy and … premonitions of decline.”Footnote 3 This memorable aperçu might also be applied, more generally, to the era's social and cultural history. Work published in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Robert Murphy, John Hill, Marcia Landy, and Peter Stead also helped lay the groundwork for later discussions of 1950s cinema.Footnote 4

There are three principal sets of questions about British film in the 1950s. The first is one closest to film history and criticism: What are the dominant aesthetic and thematic qualities of British cinema in the 1950s? The second concerns the distinctiveness of British film and the independence of the British film industry. Film, like popular music after the emergence of jazz, has been dominated by American production. Hollywood cast a long shadow over the world. Britain's film industry always existed beneath that shadow. One response was economic nationalism. Between 1927 and 1945, as a means of protecting the British film industry, a quota system was imposed on foreign (largely meaning American) films, both in distribution and in exhibition. The postwar General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades meant that Britain could only impose quotas on screenings of foreign films. In the fifties, 30 percent of first features had to be British, and 25 percent of second features. The government also went to great lengths to subsidize British film production. How successful was this struggle to remain independent and viable? But this is also, of course, a question about the aesthetic and thematic qualities of film. As Durgnat asked, “When is a British Film a British Film?”Footnote 5 What particular themes identified British films? Could Britain maintain artistic as well as financial autonomy from America? The final set of questions is the one most difficult to get at, and yet the most compelling: the relationship between cinema and society. What did British film of the 1950s say about social change and social identity? How did it reflect or construct gender roles, class identity, and national identity in a period of transition? How did audiences respond?

Sue Harper and Vincent Porter's British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference (2003) is a comprehensive and detailed survey of the state of the industry in the fifties. Theirs is “an industrial study—an analysis of the ways in which film organizations grappled with changing circumstances” and “the economic determinants of the industry” (Harper and Porter, 2). Like others, they suggest that in the 1950s, British cinema was in a “period of transition” when the “old patterns of social deference … showed signs of breakdown” (Harper and Porter, 1). Film had to “reassure audiences that the familiar emotional landscapes were there,” while providing them with “an image of new possibilities” (Harper and Porter, 267). Harper and Porter pursue this theme through a “modified base/superstructure model” of British filmmaking in the fifties, arguing that the structure of the industry mediated the kinds of films being made (3). The structural problems facing British cinema in the fifties were deep and pressing. The first, unsurprisingly, was finance. British film had to find some way to exist financially in the national and international markets, sometimes in competition with the Americans, sometimes in cooperation, and often dependent upon state aid. The second was technology. While British film had mastered black and white cinematography, it adapted less well to the new color processes of the fifties such as Technicolor and Vistavision, never quite seeming to know what to do with color. Harper and Porter trace the travails of major British studios like Ealing, Rank, and British Lion; more idiosyncratic houses like Hammer; and independent producers. These are interesting stories, painstakingly researched and told with both assurance and wit. Harper and Porter make a compelling case for linking the structure of the film industry to the limitations of British film in the fifties. The fate of Ealing Studies is instructive in this regard. Ealing was a powerhouse of the 1940s, producing some of the best and best-loved films of that era, like Hue and Cry (1946) and Passport to Pimlico (1949). But, despite early successes such as The Blue Lamp (1950), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), and The Cruel Sea (1953), Ealing lost its way in the fifties, wedded to a rigid style and a conservative ethos that eschewed both new aesthetic possibilities and, more important, a dynamic vision of society. The films that began to break out, both stylistically and in terms of popularity, emerged from a more independent corporate context. One of the most important of these, Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), showed an undeferential and, indeed, unapologetic working class for the first time on British screens, to enormous popular response. In this way, Harper and Porter argue for the centrality of class to cinema in terms of theme and audience reception. The films made by the Boulting Brothers and Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, such as I’m All Right Jack! and the St. Trinians’ series, did well with the public, for instance, because they cocked a snook at existing class hierarchies.

For all the valuable work done by Harper and Porter, their book is sometimes a frustrating one. The heavy emphasis on production histories and the history of production houses allows one to wander through the corridors of the film world, but this begins to feel like a rather tiresome maze after a while. The films themselves are often lost in the emphasis on financing and detail. After all, what is ultimately more important, The Entertainer (1960) as a production problem or as a film? Harper and Porter offer sketches and short analyses of many films but do not present a sustained film analysis until the book's conclusion.

Andrew Spicer and Philip Gillett concentrate almost exclusively on readings of fifties films, focusing on particular themes: Spicer on masculinity and Gillett on the working class. Spicer's study is organized around “the detailed analysis of significant male cultural types” (1) found in British films of the postwar period. The list is a long one: the gentleman, the professional, the action adventurer, the everyman, the fool (divided along class lines and culminating in the upper-class fool, the “silly ass” [Spicer, 112]), the rogue, the criminal (split into spivs, delinquents, and gangsters), Byronic men, damaged men, damaged Byronic men, angry young men, alienated young men, and so on. All roads of English masculinity seem to lead these days to Hugh Grant, and we end, predictably, with Grant as “Mr. Nice” (Spicer, 203), though we might also classify him as a “silly ass” (see subcategory of “fool” above). Is there, after all, any more embarrassing moment in recent British cinema than the spectacle in Love Actually (2003) of Grant as a Blairish Prime Minister bopping arrhythmically down the staircase of 10 Downing Street to the strains of the Pointer Sisters’ “Jump (for My Love)”? In the forties and fifties, Spicer sees a movement in dominant male types from the upper-class gentleman to a more democratic (though still hierarchical) middle-class officer or professional hero, such as Jack Hawkin's corvette captain in The Cruel Sea, Michael Redgrave as the scientist Barnes Wallis in The Dambusters, and so on. He also sees a new Everyman, of which John Mills was the best example, “a masculine ideal of stoicism, steadiness and modest hopes for the future” (Spicer, 27). Ultimately, Spicer argues, it was the middle-class professional or officer that dominated. This is a “return to traditional values” (Spicer, 201), even though not a stable or uncontested hegemony. Spicer's catalog of male types is a useful one, but there are shortcomings to the book. The first is perhaps obvious. The very number of types, subtypes, and cross-fertilizations makes me wonder if anything definite is really being said about postwar masculinity. To say that there are masculinities rather than masculinity is fine, but the varieties of masculinity in Typical Men are so legion as to be banal. The second problem is Spicer's decision not to discuss gay, black, or regional masculinities. Gay and black masculinities are critical markers of broader masculine identity. Important gay and black male characters also appear in films such as Sapphire (1959), A Taste of Honey (1961), and The L-Shaped Room (1962). To omit analysis of gay and black masculinity is a conceptual flaw. It also prevents forays into interesting territory. A particular figure of note is, for example, Dirk Bogarde, whose position as the “‘idol of the Odeons’” (Spicer, 91) was built around an ambiguous sexuality. One of the most striking postwar British films is Basil Dearden's Victim (1961), in which Bogarde plays a middle-class professional in crisis. But it is not a crisis induced by the experience of war, as was typical in so many films from the 1950s such as Ice Cold in Alex (1958), but rather a sexual crisis, a crisis of masculine identity. That Spicer does not discuss this film is surprising. A last criticism is the lack of a consistent comparative framework. Given the dominance of American film in the twentieth century, it would have been useful to have more of a comparison drawn between British and American masculinities, since the masculine identities of popular stars such as Bogarde, Alec Guinness, Stewart Granger, and Sean Connery existed, to some degree, in relationship to American counterparts.Footnote 6

Arguing that “class is in danger of becoming the social difference which dares not speak its name” (Gillett, 2), Philip Gillett surveys the landscape of class in British film from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s. He examines both the representation of the working class in feature films and the reception accorded such films by working-class audiences in different regions. Gillett offers a five-tiered model for thinking about images of class, encompassing the relationship to authority, the idea of community, value systems, the environment, and personal signifiers of class such as speech, hairstyles, and clothing. Using this framework, Gillett takes us through a variety of postwar films: domestic melodramas like It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), crime films such as London Belongs to Me (1948), and the series of comedy-dramas featuring the Huggett family, beginning with Holiday Camp (1947). Gillett's cinematic working class is one poised between the stalwart, if often one-dimensional and deferential, patriots of the Second World War and the unrepentant rebels of the sixties. It does not seem, however, that in the 1950s, the working classes broke out of a cinematic straitjacket that tended to see them as supporting characters in middle-class stories. Gillett rightly qualifies Durgnat's assertion that the working class played only a subservient role in 1950s films, but he still notes that it was difficult for images of coherent working-class communities or a distinctive working-class identity to emerge in those films. It was one thing to signal the working class through establishing shots of houses by a railway or scenes played out in cramped kitchens and bedrooms. It was quite another to furnish those interior and exterior shots with distinctive and relevant stories. Gillett has done excellent work in excavating the working-class presence in postwar film, but that presence remains an amorphous one. This is, of course, what makes the arrival of characters such as Arthur Seaton, Joe Lampton, and Colin Smith all the more explosive in the late fifties and early sixties.

British Cinema of the 1950s: A Celebration (2003) is a ragbag of a book, but no less interesting for this. The collection of essays put together by Ian MacKillop and Neil Sinyard from a 1998 conference vary in quality, and there is little in the way of an overarching theme, apart from the belief that fifties cinema is “rich soil” (MacKillop and Sinyard, 10). But there are fascinating contributions from Philip Kemp on Robert Hamer, the tortured director of Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), Dave Rolinson on Ronald Neame's The Horse's Mouth (1958), and Melanie Williams on Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957), directed by J. Lee Thompson.

Christine Geraghty's British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the “New Look” (2000) is the oldest, but also the most satisfying and most challenging, of the books under review. Her theme is the relationship between cinema and the “modern” in the 1950s. This is, first of all, a story about cinema as a cultural form. In the fifties, film lost its position as the principal modern form of popular culture, overtaken by television and pop music. But Geraghty also makes a compelling case for seeing that fifties cinema was about the shock of the modern in content, as much as form. Fifties cinema was, she argues, populated by modern and often divisive figures such as the expert and the new woman and was structured around the fracture between the traditional and the modern. Genre was one way of registering this tension. As Geraghty points out, many British comedies in the fifties were founded on rebellions launched, often by small communities, against the overweening reach of the modern world. Films like The Titfield Thunderbolt (1952) raised the flag of conservative counterrevolution: “when faced with a conflict between the traditional and the modern, they react to the traditional in a way that blocks off the challenge and risks that comedy can present” (Geraghty, 56). War films similarly saw off the threat of the modern. In a period without actual wars, war stories shored up the traditionally privileged and separate position of men through the representation and celebration of largely homosocial worlds, lovingly decorated with the spectacle of war and military technology.

At the edges of fifties film, we get a glimpse of the threat of the modern, the embers of uncertainty and instability that comedy and war films sought to damp down. Femininity is a case in point. Thinking about styles of realism, melodrama, and costume drama, Geraghty shows how the emotional and visual restraint of realist cinema and the expressivity and emotional excess of costume drama or melodrama worked together in many fifties films to reflect the complexities and dilemmas of modern femininity. In particular, these styles helped articulate the emotional, economic, and political boundaries of women's lives in that decade, mapping what could be felt, done, or said. This analysis is complemented by a sensitive discussion of the restrictions faced by actresses like Kay Kendall and Virginia McKenna in the pursuit of more innovative female roles. Where other studies tend to assume, but not examine, the American and European context, Geraghty offers a fascinating discussion of the place of Europe in British films through the liminal figure of the European woman, an ambiguous character of sexual freedom and autonomy (think Simone Signoret in Room at the Top [1958]). She argues that the sexuality of this character represented a way of negotiating and, indeed, repressing Europe in the postwar British imagination, paralleling political developments. This echoes recent work on the presence of America in European film.Footnote 7 She also considers the problem of race and empire in a fine chapter on the Commonwealth film.Footnote 8British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the “New Look” is an important book. Not least among its many virtues is the way that it sets a variety of kinds of film analysis firmly within the context of the social and cultural history of the fifties.

In different ways, all the works under review help answer questions about the position, distinctiveness, and social relevance of British film in the 1950s. Clearly, there was a precariousness to British cinema in the fifties as it hung on against the dominance of America in the global market, while trying to stem the decline of domestic audiences. It nonetheless survived. The underlying and distinctive theme of British film in the fifties was the confrontation with modernity. This could take the shape of changes in social deference, gender identities, or the representation of the working classes and the national community. Confrontation was usually gently represented, through comedies or quiet melodramas. Hesitancy and humor were more often the prevailing responses to change than violent opposition or division. But however muted the tone and look of British film in the fifties, cinema conveyed a period not of stability or certainty, but of transition and confusion. This is a theme confirmed by the growing literature on the social and cultural history of the fifties. In this frame, the apparent radicalism of sixties cinema looks less like a sharp departure than an attempt to articulate and resolve the tensions of the fifties.