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BRIEF
History OF BRITISH Film
written by Eszter Kurutz
2. The 1930s: Hitchcock, Asquith and Korda
3. The Golden Age of British Filmmaking
6. Movies in the 1980s and 1990s
7. British Film in the Present
The history of the British film started with an extremely fruitful innovative pioneering period between 1896 and 1906. The first screening took place in Marlborough Hall, London, 20 February, 1886. The new medium spread quickly and films soon appeared in the entertainment programs of the variety theaters and music halls. The first pioneer group produced so called actualities, i.e. short scenes from everyday life, at the beginning. One member of the group was George Albert Smith to whom the British owe the invention of editing. Another important figure of the time was Cecil Hepworth who not only filmed the funeral of Queen Victoria in 1901 but shot two of the most famous British silent films, Rescued by Rover (1905) and Comin’ Thro’ the Rye (1923).
However, after the success of the first filmmakers, British film failed to match the dynamism of American cinema or to create an alternative to it thus Hollywood films started to dominate the market in Britain as well. By 1927 the situation got so serious that the government decided to introduce the Cinematograph Films Act or the Quota Act which provided that a certain percentage of films shown in movie theaters must be made by British artists. Although the act was successful in increasing the output of British film production, most of the movies, also called quota-quickies, were low budget productions, done in haste without any serious attempt to make a quality film or to appeal to the international market. For this reason many saw a greater threat in these productions than in American films. However, the act helped develop the two most significant British genres, the comedy and the crime stories. Also, this upheaval in the industry led to the foundation of an infrastructure that would become significant in film production during the Second World War.
The 1930s: Hitchcock, Asquith and Korda
In the 1930s, Britain witnessed the emergence of a few great directors, among them the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. He was first employed as a writer, title designer and art director, and he got his first directing job in 1925, which allowed him to make films on his own, among them The Lodger (1926). He entered the sound era with his movie Blackmail (1929) but it was 39 Steps (1935), with Robert Donat in the title role, and The Lady Vanishes (1938) that made him into a director with international renown. He then decided to continue his career in the USA and left for Hollywood in 1940.
A rival of Hitchcock, Anthony Asquith has been less influential but he is still important from a historical point of view. The turning point in his career came when he was allowed to adapt G.B. Shaw’s Pygmalion (1938). The screenplay was written by the author himself, who received an Academy Award for his contribution to the film in 1939. The story was so inspiring that it was also made into a musical in the United States by George Cukor under the title My Fair Lady (1964). Later on in his career Asquith made two other Shaw adaptations, The Doctor’s Dilemma (1959) and The Millionairess (1960), but his masterpiece remains Pygmalion.
A little more complex is the case of Alexander or Sándor Korda, a director and producer of Hungarian background. He was already active in Hungary in the 1910s but was forced to leave the country in 1920. After trying his fortune in Vienna, Paris and Hollywood he settled down in England, where he founded his own studio London Film Productions in 1932. He surrounded himself with young and talented actors such as Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Viven Leigh, and he achieved his first international success with The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). Charles Laughton won an Academy Award for his role in the film, which was the first Oscar ever won by a British actor. Later on Korda became a very close friend to Winston Churchill for whom he also made propaganda films. Among Alexander Korda’s greatest successes as a director and producer we find The Four Feathers (1937) and The Thief of Bagdad (1940).
In the 1930s many British actors were tempted by the American industry and left Britain to make their fortunes on the other side of the ocean. Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Charles Laughton and Richard Burton all became famous in the United States: while Vivien Leigh won two Academy Awards for her roles in Gone With the Wind (1939) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Olivier won the Oscar with his most famous Shakespeare adaptation Hamlet (1948) and had been nominated for the award several times.
Beside popular moviemaking another trend of films emerged in the 1930s. The development of the documentary movement was initiated by John Grierson who realized that this genre could play a crucial role in society by providing an effective medium of communication between the State and the public. He thus believed that cinema was a form of publication which could be published in a hundred different ways for hundred different audiences if one treated the actualities with creative talent. Among the most significant films of the documentary movement we count Industrial Britain (1933) by Grierson, Man of Aran (1934) by Robert J. Flaherty and Night Mail (1936) by Harry Watt and Basil Wright.
The Golden Age of British Filmmaking
Although as the war broke out British cinemas were closed for a short period and the film industry was already in poor shape, changes appeared in the 1940s. There were about 50 films produced over the war which were mostly comedies, thrillers or a combination of these two, i.e. comedies making fun of the Nazis and their highly honored Führer. After the Ministry of Information was formed in 1939, such propaganda films were made as The Lion Has Wings (1939), produced by Korda and directed by Michael Powell. Another classic of the time was John Baxter’s Love on the Dole (1941) depicting Britain during the great depression of the 1930s. This film became the forerunner of the so-called ‘kitchen-sink dramas’ that appeared about 20 years later.
The 1940s marked the first success of Michael Powell. His film 49th Parallel (1941), with Leslie Howard and Laurence Olivier in the leading roles, is about the crew of a sunk Nazi U-boat who try to cross the 49th parallel between Canada and the neutral USA. The press criticized the film for being biased as the Nazis depicted in the movie were not caricatures but intelligent soldiers with feelings, doubts, and original thoughts. Emeric Pressburger received an Oscar for his script in 1943. In 1944 Powell worked again with Pressburger on the film A Canterbury Tale which became one of their most famous films they directed together, but Powell’s venture into psycho-thriller in Peeping Tom (1960) ended his career in Britain.
David Lean first worked as an editor before turning to directing in the 1940s. After his early successes Lean directed A Brief Encounter (1945) which many critics say has been the best romance ever made in British film history. In 1946 and 1948 Lean made his most famous Dickens adaptations (Great Expectations and Oliver Twist), which marked the beginning of his co-operation with one of the greatest actors in Britain, Alec Guinness. Although these movies alone show the genius of David Lean, he is still most renowned for his great epics: The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965) and in some respect A Passage to India (1984). (For more details see http://www.davidlean.com)
As the distress of the war was slowly melting away, the light genre of the Ealing comedies became more and more popular on the island. The success of Hue and Cry (1947) meant only the beginning of a decade-long row of comedies, such as Passport to Pimlico (1949), Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) with Alec Guinness in eight leading roles in the same film, The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955), in which the famous comedian Peter Sellers played one of his early but most beneficial roles.
Other important comedy series of the age included the Doctor-series (mostly with Dirk Bogarde in the leading role), or the Carry-on series which reached its zenith in the 1960s. The Carry-on films used nearly the same cast in a number of movies and always caricatured the contemporary hit films or popular genres, such as Carry on Constable (1960, police comedy), Carry on Spying (1964, spy-film comedy), Carry on Cleo (1964, historical film comedy) and Carry on Emmanuelle (1978, sex-film comedy). It was typical of the series, and basically of the age, to use ambiguity and sexual references to address the most delicate subjects only referred to before.
The popularity of the BBC-series Monty Python’s Flying Circus also has its roots in the comedy tradition of the post-war years. The Monty Python group (John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman) continued the tradition of doing away with taboo subjects by creating absurd characters and putting them into most bizarre situations. This biting satire and infantilism is also typical of the group’s first feature film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and later of Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979). Later on several members of the group turned to individual work. Terry Gilliam became the most famous of all of them, especially with his film Brazil (1984) and later with his American productions, such as The Fisher King (1991), Twelve Monkeys (1995), or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), all of which demonstrate a uniquely surreal and grotesque style.
In the post-war period, many talented British directors and artists continued to go to Hollywood to try their fortunes. It is, however, less known that several directors went to ‘swinging London’ in the 1960s to pursue their creative career there. Among these directors we find such great names as Roman Polanski, Francois Truffaut, Michelangelo Antonioni from Europe, and Joseph Losey or Stanley Kubrick from America.
Michelangelo Antonioni made one of his most famous films, Blow-up, in 1966. As the setting in Italy did not fit a character like the photographer Thomas, Antonioni found the blooming pop-culture in Britain a much more suitable place to tell his story about seeing or not seeing an assumable murder. Another important figure coming to London in the 1960s was Stanley Kubrick. His films have always been controversial but it is beyond doubt that in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) he created the foundation of the visual world of most later science-fiction movies. The film shows in a slow pace and in four parts the development of mankind all the way to space-age in such a beautiful visual manner that earned Kubrick an Academy Award the same year. His latter works, such as A Clockwork Orange (1971), based on the novel by Anthony Burgess, or Stephen King’s The Shining (1980) have also been much debated, but his Thackeray adaptation, Barry Lyndon (1975) proved that he could make a masterpiece no matter which genre he chose to film.
A new group of directors appeared at the beginning of the 1950s, establishing the basis for the Free Cinema movement which developed into the British New Wave in the 1960s. The most important members of the New Wave were Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, and Tony Richardson. As it becomes obvious through such examples as Room at the Top (1958), Look Back in Anger (1959), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), or This Sporting Life (1963), these films are all adaptations of contemporary social realist novels or kitchen-sink dramas written by the ‘angry young men’, i.e. John Osborne, Harold Pinter or Alan Sillitoe.
In the 1970s a change occurred in cinema-going habits. Going to the pictures was no more the entertainment of families or of the older generations but of the youth. As many times during British cinema history, American films dominated the market again, and British film needed to compete on equal terms with Hollywood blockbusters. One mean to lure the new viewers to the theaters was to go back to a genre that had been born in 1817, i.e. the horror tradition. Ever since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein appeared in 1818, people have been interested in the ghoulish. After the success of the American Frankenstein film with Boris Karloff in 1931, British directors discovered the need for this sort of entertainment. By the 1960s a whole series of Frankenstein films were born, among them The curse of Frankenstein (1957), The evil of Frankenstein (1964) or The horror of Frankenstein (1970). At the same time, this series also created its own brother, namely the Dracula cycle. After Bela Lugosi’s Dracula (1931), a British Dracula (1958) movie also appeared, continuing with Dracula Has Risen From the Graves (1968), Scars of Dracula (1970), The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), which all belong to the horror tradition of Britain that have had a significant influence on the international horror genre.
Although agent films emerged relatively early in British film history and became regular between 1934-38 (consider Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 steps (1935), Secret Agent (1936), or The Lady Vanishes (1938)) it was the Cold War that became the perfect background for the clear agent genre to appear. When we talk about the James Bond movies, we are referring to the most successful British film-series worldwide. The stories for the cycle were written by Ian Fleming, and after the success of the first Bond film, Dr No (1962), Sean Connery played the leading role another five times. After him the honor was given over to Roger Moore in Live and Let Die (1973), who also played in six Bond movies altogether. He was briefly followed by Timothy Dalton, and then by Pierce Brosnan, who has starred in four movies since 1995. The newest episode is to be released in 2006 with Daniel Craig in the leading role.
England has long been known for its musical traditions which first gained popular ground in the 1960s, when the American Richard Lester came to Britain to direct his famous Beatles films. Although London was then the center of pop-culture, everybody was struck by the success of The Beatles. Lester’s first film A Hard Day’s Night (1964) shows one day of the band but instead of making it a musical documentary, he brings comic scenes, limos, hotels, women, a hilarious press conference and, of course, a concert into the film. Lester set out to make another movie Help! (1965) with the band but afterwards he abandoned the music film. The Beatles cartoon Yellow Submarine (1968) and the concert film Let It Be (1970) were less successful and marked the decline of the band. However, the tradition of music film had been created thus Ken Russel’s Tommy (1975), an innovative rock movie with theatrical choreography gained serious acknowledgement.
However, all these movies that appeared in the 1970s, i.e. horror film, agent movies, or the musicals, were rooted in some earlier cinematic tradition and no original trend as it were appeared in the decade.
A serious political change took place in Britain in 1979, when Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister. Her rule marked a significant restructuring of the British film production. Thatcher was against the welfare state and believed in entrepreneurism. She extended her politics to the arts and to film as well, which resulted in the appearance of the independent filmmakers. Many films of the age reflected a strong opposition to Thatcher’s policies, as can be seen in Mike Leigh’s High Hopes (1988) or in Ken Loach’s Riff-Raff (1991) and Raining Stones (1993). These two directors represent social realism in film in the 1980s and 90s. Besides realism, a strong art cinema developed with Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway as leading directors. While the vulgarity of Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) created a great stir among critics, Jarman tried to emphasize another controversial issue to the British film market: the role of homosexuals in world history, and his own struggles with the AIDS disease.
Margaret Thatcher’s idea of giving back the nation its old dignity, its homogeneity, gave rise to other genres to show the anachronism of these ambitions. Britain was not at all homogeneous, it was and has been a multicultural country which had exploited and benefited from its former colonies. Thus black film, i.e. movies about Asian, Pakistani, or gay people, tries to show this heterogeneity through such movies as Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987), or Damien O’Donnell’s East is East (1999). The representation of social problems like unemployment continued in the 1990s as well. This was the time when Britain’s greatest mines were closed down and many men found themselves on the street feeling useless and hopeless. This problem is depicted in Brassed off! (1996), The Van (1996) or in the serious comedy The Full Monty (1997) which turned out to be one of the most successful British films of the decade.
Another cutting issue of the period became the youth problem and the use of drugs. The Irvin Welsh adaptation Trainspotting (1996) tells the story of a young man, Renton, who at first rebels against the yuppie culture of secure jobs, credit cards, and nuclear family, but in the end he seems to choose it himself. Meanwhile he experiences the euphoria and the horror of drug usage in Edinburgh. Renton is played by Ewan McGregor, one of Britain’s most well-known contemporary actors, who became famous through such roles as Christian in Moulin Rouge (2001) or Obi-wan Kenobi in the new Star Wars series (1999, 2002, 2005).
The other side of the coin is the development of the heritage film in the 1980s and 90s. These are quality costume dramas adapted from classic novels belonging to the literary canon or from biographies of famous personages living at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. These slow-paced films use a pictorial visual style and a certain set of actors, including Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham Carter, James Wilby, or Hugh Grant. Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, i.e. Merchant-Ivory Productions, formed the most significant producer-director couple who contributed greatly to this genre by making, among others, A Room With a View (1987), Howards End (1991), The Remains of the Day (1993), or The Golden Bowl (2000). The ‘Raj revival’ branch of the heritage film, i.e. films about the colonies, especially India, also deserves attention. It includes such movies as Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1992) or David Lean’s A Passage to India (1984). Although the adaptations made from Shakespeare’s work have been around ever since the beginning of movie history, some scholars, among them Andrew Higson consider the Shakespeare adaptations made in the 1990s as heritage films. Thus Zeffirelli’s and Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1990 and 1996), Oliver Parker’s Othello (1995) or Adrian Noble’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1996) would all be listed under this category. Although many of the above mentioned films are really beautiful in their artistic design, one must note that almost all of them try to reveal the awry side of Britain at the beginning of the 20th century. In doing this, most of the heritage films criticize Thatcher’s attempt to re-introduce the late-Victorian values typical of imperial England. It is, at the same time, certain that these films contributed greatly to the British film renaissance, starting with the success of Chariots of Fire in 1981. This genre affected also the most successful comedies of the 1990s, for example Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), which launched Hugh Grant on his international career, continuing with Notting Hill (1999) and Love Actually (2003), for instance.
The trends that appeared in the 1980s and 90s seem to continue into the present. For example the difficulties of the miners and inhabitants of small villages come to expression in Billy Elliot (2000). In this film we see Billy struggling with his otherness (he does not want to be a miner but a ballet dancer) while his father and brother are fighting for their rights as workers during the miners strike in 1984. The same way, the success of the new version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (2005) shows that the heritage genre still constitutes to be a significant part of the British film production, yet, other trends also start to show.
Besides the continuing genres we find the gradual ‘Americanization’ of British film. Movies like Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), About a Boy (2002), Love Actually (2003), or Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004) all try to align to the typical Hollywood love comedy style as much in their looks as in their meaning, although their humor remains ‘typically’ British. At the same time, it is worth noting that all these films depict modern or postmodern problems of gender, the disruption of the traditional family and the decay of old values. How and when Britain will find her own style again independently of Hollywood, is to be seen in the future.
learn more:
For more details about individual films, directors and British film history see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/
Written by Eszter Kurutz; used by permission © Eszter Kurutz 2006