Unit 8

BRITISH CINEMA

Is it British Cinema as bad as many critics have stated? Well, yes. But still, there’s some filmmakers that managed to make some great films. Here’s a selection of some Britain classic filmmakers and some information about them and their work.

Williamson

James Williamson directed one of the most well-known British silent films, The Big Swallow, which is a 1901 short comedy film, featuring a man, irritated by the presence of a photographer, who solves his dilemma by swallowing him and his camera whole. The three-shot trick film is, according to Michael Brooke, "one of the most important early British films in that it was one of the first to deliberately exploit the contrast between the eye of the camera and of the audience watching the final film”.

Hitchcock

Hitchcock began work on his tenth film, Blackmail (1929), when its production company, British International Pictures (BIP), converted its Elstree studios to sound. The film was the first British "talkie"; it followed the first American sound feature film, The Jazz Singer (1927). Blackmail began the Hitchcock tradition of using famous landmarks as a backdrop for suspense sequences, with the climax taking place on the dome of the British Museum. It also features one of his longest cameo appearances, which shows him being bothered by a small boy as he reads a book on the London Underground. Hitchcock explained how he used early sound recording as a special element of the film, stressing the word "knife" in a conversation with the woman suspected of murder.

In 1933 Hitchcock was once again working for Michael Balcon at Gaumont British. His first film for the company, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), was a success; his second, The 39 Steps (1935), was acclaimed in the UK and made Hitchcock a star in the US. It also established the quintessential English "Hitchcock blonde" (Madeleine Carroll) as the template for his succession of ice-cold, elegant leading ladies. This film was one of the first to introduce the "MacGuffin" plot device, a term coined by the English screenwriter Angus MacPhail. The MacGuffin is an item or goal the protagonist is pursuing, one that otherwise has no narrative value; in The 39 Steps, the MacGuffin is a stolen set of design plans.

Hitchcock's next major success was The Lady Vanishes (1938), "one of the greatest train movies from the genre's golden era", according to Philip French, in which Miss Froy (May Whitty), a British spy posing as a governess, disappears on a train journey through the fictional European country of Bandrika. The film saw Hitchcock receive the 1939 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director, the only time he won an award for his direction. Benjamin Crisler, the New York Times film critic, wrote in June 1938: "Three unique and valuable institutions the British have that we in America have not: Magna Charta, the Tower Bridge and Alfred Hitchcock, the greatest director of screen melodramas in the world."

Powell and Pressburger

Powell and Pressburger had careers separate from their collaboration – Powell worked his way up through the British film industry working with Rex Ingram, Hitchcock briefly, and as a director of ‘quota quickies’ in the 1930s, while Pressburger worked as a screenwriter at the mighty German studio UFA before fleeing to England after the rise of the Nazis – but it is the films they made together from 1939 (The Spy in Black) until the disbandment of their production company, The Archers, in 1957 that constitute their greatest overall contribution to world cinema. Powell in particular made great, interesting and even groundbreaking films (such as The Edge of the World [1937] and Peeping Tom [1960]) outside of this collaboration, but the string of works made back to back from 1943-1950 (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp [1943], A Canterbury Tale [1944], “I Know Where I’m Going!” [1945], A Matter of Life and Death [1946], Black Narcissus [1947], The Red Shoes [1948], The Small Back Room [1949] and Gone to Earth [1950]) are their towering achievement. Even within the context of the golden period of British cinema in the late 1940s, Powell and Pressburger’s films are both exemplary and aesthetically unique, while still being quintessentially English.

In the context of British cinema, Powell and Pressburger are often characterised as oppositional, almost maverick artists working within highly structured and generic production conditions. Almost every account of 1940s and 1950s British cinema (the key period in which Powell and Pressburger worked) pits two contrasting conceptions of cinema as dominating film practice and public reception. This contrast or dichotomy can be roughly summarised as a battle between forms of realism and escapist fantasy, comedy or melodrama. Most critical evaluations of British film in the decades between 1940 and the early 1970s generally favour those films which are more closely aligned with the techniques and traditions of documentary, realism and socially conscious drama (or its comic counterpart, the Ealing comedy). Thus, despite an affinity with some of these favoured characteristics, Powell and Pressburger’s films provide a challenge to orthodox conceptions of the strengths of British cinema, which have historically mostly relied upon clear distinctions, holistic definitions and organic models of critical appreciation. For example, A Canterbury Tale mixes together aspects of documentary, ‘realism,’ romanticism, expressionism and melodrama. Thus, the ‘difficulty’ of placing or situating Powell and Pressburger’s films is largely the result of their mixed and hybrid nature and the problems one encounters in trying to place them, even loosely, within one of these two basic traditions, and British cinema as a whole.

Jennings

Frank Humphrey Sinkler Jennings (19 August 1907 – 24 September 1950) was an English documentary filmmaker and one of the founders of the Mass Observation organisation. Jennings was described by film critic and director Lindsay Anderson in 1954 as: "the only real poet that British cinema has yet produced."

After graduating with a starred First Class degree in English, Jennings undertook post-graduate research on the poet Thomas Gray, under the supervision of a predominantly absent I. A. Richards, who was teaching abroad. After abandoning what looked like being a successful academic career, Jennings undertook a number of jobs including photographer, painter and theatre designer. He joined the GPO Film Unit, then under John Grierson, in 1934, largely it is thought because Jennings needed the income after the birth of his first daughter, rather than from a strong interest in film. Relations with his colleagues were difficult; they saw him as something of a dilettante, but he did form a friendship with Alberto Cavalcanti.

In 1936, Jennings helped with the organisation of the 1936 Surrealist Exhibition in London, in association with André Breton, Roland Penrose and Herbert Read. It was at about this time that Jennings, along with Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson, helped found Mass Observation and co-edited with Madge the text May the Twelfth, a montage of extracts from observer reports of the 1937 coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth for Mass Observation. A fiftieth-anniversary edition of this text was published in 1987 by Faber.

In 1938, he edited an issue of the London Bulletin which included a "collection of texts on the Impact of the Machine" and he used this material to prepare a series of talks to miners in the Swansea Valley while making The Silent Village. This prompted him to add more material and he obtained a contract from Routledge to work it up for publication as a book; he worked on it fitfully and thought it was almost ready just before his death. His daughter, Mary-Louise, asked Charles Madge to assist in finally editing it for publication in 1985 as Pandaemonium, 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers. The book was cited by writer Frank Cottrell Boyce as an influence in the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony, with an early section of the ceremony named after it.

The GPO Film Unit became the Crown Film Unit in 1940, a film-making propaganda arm of the Ministry of Information, and Jennings joined the new organisation. Jennings only feature-length film, the 70-minute Fires Were Started (1943), also known as I Was A Fireman, details the work of the Auxiliary Fire Service in London. It blurs the lines between fiction and documentary because the scenes are re-enactments. This film, which uses techniques such as montage, is considered one of the classics of the genre.

His films are otherwise shorts, inclusively patriotic in sentiment and very British in their sensibility, such as: Spare Time (1939), London Can Take It! (1940), Words for Battle (1941), A Diary for Timothy (with a narration written by E.M. Forster, 1945), The Dim Little Island (1948) and Family Portrait (his last completed film, which tells of the Festival of Britain, 1950). Co-directed with Stewart McAllister, Jennings' best remembered short film is Listen to Britain (1942). Excerpts are often seen in other documentaries, especially portions of one of the concerts given by Dame Myra Hess in the National Gallery while its collection was evacuated for safe-keeping.

Cavalcanti

Even though he’s Brazilian, his contributions to English cinema are still remembered. During the 1930s and 40s he transformed the capacities of British film-makers, yet his story is paradoxical, because it calls auteurism into question, and makes a powerful case for the genius of collaboration.

Having worked with great silent filmmakers such as Marcel L’Herbier or Walter Ruttman, he travelled to England to work for John Grierson's GPO Film Unit. He was involved in many capacities, from production to sound engineer. He was to spend seven years at the GPO Film Unit, working on many projects, most notably; Coal Face (1935), Night Mail (1936), Message to Geneva (1937), Four Barriers (1937), and Spare Time (1939). Much of Cavalcanti's work at the GPO was uncredited, he acted as a mentor to many new film makers, but in 1937 he was appointed acting head of the GPO Film Unit when Grierson left for Canada. When Cavalcanti was told that the only way the position could become permanent was to become a naturalized British citizen, he decided to leave the unit.

In 1940 Cavalcanti joined Ealing Studios, under the leadership of producer Michael Balcon. He worked as an art editor, producer and director. His most notable works of this period (many of them propaganda films) were Yellow Caesar (1941), Went the Day Well? (1942), Three Songs of Resistance (1943), Champagne Charlie (1944), Dead of Night (as co-director) (1945) and Nicholas Nickleby (1947). In 1946 Cavalcanti left Ealing over a dispute about money. He went on to direct three more films in the UK, before returning to Brazil in 1950.

Hamer

Hamer was born at 24 Chester Road, Kidderminster, along with his twin Barbara, the son of Owen Dyke Hamer, a bank clerk, and his wife, Annie Grace Brickell. He was educated at Rossall School, an independent school for boys near the town of Fleetwood in Lancashire, and won a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge but was sent down. He began his film career in 1934 as a cutting room assistant, and from 1935 worked as a film editor involved with such films as Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn (1939) co-produced by Charles Laughton. At the end of the 1930s, he worked on documentaries for the GPO Film Unit. He would later direct such films as It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) or Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), with Alec Guinness, one the most famous black comedies of all time.

NORTH-AMERICAN CINEMA

Even if no one can deny that most of the films done in Hollywood have always been quite bad, some great films were made within the studio system, especially during the period that goes from the 1930s to 1950s. Here's some brief information about how the system worked and about some great filmmakers.

Studio Sytem

Movie-making was a business, however, and motion picture companies made money by operating under the studio system. The major studios kept thousands of people on salary—actors, producers, directors, writers, stunt men, craftspersons, and technicians. They owned or leased Movie Ranches in rural Southern California for location shooting of westerns and other large-scale genre films. And they owned hundreds of theaters in cities and towns across the nation in 1920 film theaters that showed their films and that were always in need of fresh material.

In 1930, MPPDA President Will Hays created the Hays (Production) Code, which followed censorship guidelines and went into effect after government threats of censorship expanded by 1930. However, the code was never enforced until 1934, after the Catholic watchdog organization The Legion of Decency – appalled by some of the provocative films and lurid advertising of the era later classified Pre-Code Hollywood- threatened a boycott of motion pictures if it didn't go into effect. Those films that didn't obtain a seal of approval from the Production Code Administration had to pay a $25,000 fine and could not profit in the theaters, as the MPPDA controlled every theater in the country through the Big Five studios.

Throughout the 1930s, as well as most of the golden age, MGM dominated the film screen and had the top stars in Hollywood, and was also credited for creating the Hollywood star system altogether. Some MGM stars included "King of Hollywood" Clark Gable, Lionel Barrymore, Jean Harlow, Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Jeanette MacDonald and husband Gene Raymond, Spencer Tracy, Judy Garland, and Gene Kelly. But MGM did not stand alone. Another great achievement of US cinema during this era came through Walt Disney's animation company. In 1937, Disney created the most successful film of its time, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. This distinction was promptly topped in 1939 when Selznick International created what is still when adjusted for inflation, the most successful film of all time, Gone with the Wind.

Many film historians have remarked upon the many great works of cinema that emerged from this period of highly regimented film-making. One reason this was possible is that, with so many movies being made, not everyone had to be a big hit. A studio could gamble on a medium-budget feature with a good script and relatively unknown actors: Citizen Kane, directed by Orson Welles (1915–1985) and often regarded as the greatest film of all time, fits that description. In other cases, strong-willed directors like Howard Hawks (1896–1977), Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980), and Frank Capra (1897–1991) battled the studios in order to achieve their artistic visions. Those are the still regarded as some of the greastest filmmakers of all time.

Howard Hawks

Howard Winchester Hawks (May 30, 1896 – December 26, 1977) was an American film director, producer and screenwriter of the classic Hollywood era. Hawks was a versatile director whose career included comedies, dramas, gangster films, science fiction, film noir, and westerns. His most popular films include Scarface (1932), Bringing Up Baby (1938), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), His Girl Friday (1940), To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Red River (1948), The Thing from Another World (1951), and Rio Bravo (1959). His frequent portrayals of strong, tough-talking female characters came to define a type—the "Hawksian woman".

In 1916, Hawks met Victor Fleming, a Hollywood cinematographer who had been an auto mechanic and early aviator. Fleming had become involved in the film industry when a friend, Marshall Neilan, recommended Fleming to film director Allan Dwan as a good mechanic. (Fleming impressed Dwan by quickly fixing both his car and a faulty film camera.) By 1916, Fleming had become a cinematographer. Hawks met Fleming when he began racing and working on a Mercer race car—bought for him by his grandfather, C.W. Howard—during his 1916 summer vacation in California. He allegedly met Fleming when the two men raced on a dirt track and caused an accident. The meeting with Fleming led to Hawks' first job in the film industry, as a prop boy on the Douglas Fairbanks film In Again, Out Again (on which Fleming was employed as the cinematographer) for Famous Players-Lasky. Hawks began directing at age 21 after he and cinematographer Charles Rosher filmed a double exposure dream sequence with Mary Pickford. Hawks worked with Pickford and Neilan again on Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley before joining the United States Army Air Service.

Working steadily as a producer and scenarist in the first half of the 1920s at Paramount, Hawks moved up the ranks to begin directing at the Fox studio in 1926. For the most part, Hawks subsequently acted as his own producer, only rarely entering into agreements with more powerful studio executives, and only then committing for a limited period. By sheer force of will and personality, Hawks was able to retain a great deal of autonomy in the studio system. He frequently rewrote screenplays, improvised and filmed sequences on the spot without the previous approval of the Motion Picture Producers Association censorship authorities (the Hays Office), and dictated casting. In effect, the auteur theorists had an easier job elevating Hawks to the pantheon in the 1950s and 1960s than they did with virtually any other director (Hitchcock excepted). Hawks lived a long, physically active life, enjoyed his lofty critical stature, and gave interviews which cannily contributed to his legendary status. He was still planning films, including a remake of the 1928 A Girl in Every Port (to star John Wayne), at the time of his death in 1977 after complications from a fall at his home in Palm Springs.

What is especially noteworthy about Hawks is the sheer range of films he made. He worked in virtually every conceivable genre but, more remarkably, he left his characteristic mark on so many of them. Far from being hemmed in by genre conventions, Hawks was able to impress upon these genre films his own personal worldview. It is essentially comic, rather than tragic, existential rather than religious, and irreverent rather than earnestly sentimental. Among the genres Hawks enriched with his contributions: the Western (Red River [1948], Rio Bravo [1959], El Dorado [1967]); the screwball comedy (Twentieth Century [1934], Bringing Up Baby [1938], His Girl Friday [1940], Man’s Favorite Sport? [1963]); film noir (The Big Sleep [1946]); the historical epic (Land of the Pharaohs [1955]); the musical comedy (A Song is Born [1948], Gentlemen Prefer Blondes [1953]); science fiction and horror (The Thing [1951]); the combat film (Air Force [1943], The Dawn Patrol [1930]); the biopic (Sergeant York [1941]); the adventure film (The Big Sky [1952], Hatari! [1962]); the gangster film (Scarface [1932]); the racing film (The Crowd Roars [1932], Red Line 7000 [1965]); the prison film (The Criminal Code [1931]); the aviation film (Ceiling Zero [1936], Only Angels Have Wings [1939]). This generic diversity was matched by other significant contemporaries (Ford and Hitchcock did indeed make films other than Westerns and thrillers, respectively), but Hawks benefited from being able to avoid ‘typing’ himself as one kind of director, and therefore was able to move across genres. Irregardless of what genre he was working in, Hawks played around with gender conventions without ever absolutely undermining them, so that (to take just one example) the representation of ‘effeminate’ men occurred in films as generically different as Scarface and Bringing Up Baby. Yet gender play enabled Hawks to give his films the same kind of wry tonality.

Fritz Lang

Fritz Lang grew up in fin de siècle Vienna, during the Golden Autumn of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and he carried its intellectual and artistic heritage with him for the rest of his days. The son of a well-to-do construction magnate and his fervently Catholic (and formerly Jewish) wife, Fritz attended art school before World War I, imbibing the sensuous decadence of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. He also studied the explosive theories of Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, gleaning from them ideas about amoral übermenschen and unconscious drives which would animate his work for decades to come.

Lang came to America as part of a burgeoning wave of artistic expatriates that poured into Hollywood from Hitler’s Germany, Lang had trouble finding work, until he latched onto a property that would reignite his career. Fury (1936) was a compelling tale of tragic coincidence, and (once again) of the corrosive effects of seeking revenge. Joe Wilson (Spencer Tracy, in his breakout role) is mistakenly jailed for murder and apparently immolated when a vengeful crowd torches his prison. He miraculously escapes, and then watches with glee as his would-be executioners are tried for mob violence in a sensational court of law. Revealing himself to a hushed courtroom after his vendetta has destroyed his life-affirming spirit, and alienated him from his one true love (Sylvia Sydney), Tracy’s final speech is an eloquent plea for extending forgiveness, not for the other’s sake, but for the sake of the person who is obsessed with seeking revenge.

Orson Welles

Welles was an American actor, director, writer, and producer who worked in theatre, radio, and film. He is remembered for his innovative work in all three: in theatre, most notably Caesar (1937), a Broadway adaptation of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar; in radio, the legendary 1938 broadcast "The War of the Worlds"; and in film, Citizen Kane (1941), consistently ranked as one of the greatest films ever made. Despite his family's affluence, Welles encountered hardship in childhood. His parents separated and moved to Chicago in 1919. His father, who made a fortune as the inventor of a popular bicycle lamp, became an alcoholic and stopped working. Welles's mother, a pianist, played during lectures by Dudley Crafts Watson at the Art Institute of Chicago to support her son and herself; the oldest Welles boy, "Dickie", was institutionalized at an early age because he had learning difficulties. Beatrice died of hepatitis in a Chicago hospital, May 10, 1924, just after Welles's ninth birthday. After his father's death, Welles travelled to Europe using a small portion of his inheritance. Welles said that while on a walking and painting trip through Ireland, he strode into the Gate Theatre in Dublin and claimed he was a Broadway star. The manager of Gate, Hilton Edwards, later said he had not believed him but was impressed by his brashness and an impassioned audition he gave. Welles made his stage debut at the Gate Theatre on October 13, 1931, appearing in Ashley Dukes's adaptation of Jew Suss as Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg.  On November 14, 1934, Welles married Chicago socialite and actress Virginia Nicolson.  By 1935 Welles was supplementing his earnings in the theatre as a radio actor in Manhattan, working with many actors who would later form the core of his Mercury Theatre on programs including America's Hour, Cavalcade of America, Columbia Workshop and The March of Time.