Car Parts and Empty Sets – Ealing Studios Reconsidered

Ask a Brit to name the UK’s most famous film studios and the chances are they’ll plump for Ealing. Not Shepperton, Pinewood, Denham, Elstree, or even Bray, home of Hammer. Nope, it’ll probably be little suburban Ealing.

That’s quite an achievement, and it rests on a handful of well known and justifiably famous films. Ask that Brit to reel off a few of their titles and you’ll no doubt get such gems as Kind Hearts and Coronets, Passport to Pimlico, The Man in the White Suit, The Lavender Hill Mob, The Ladykillers, and Whiskey Galore. Push a little harder and you might add to the list The Cruel Sea, The Blue Lamp, Dead of Night or Went the Day Well. One key difference is that the first are all ‘Ealing Comedies’. Despite making up a small proportion of the films made by the studios during the 1940s and 50s, they have become so closely associated with the studios as to be almost indistinguishable from Ealing Studios itself. Ealing, in short, is comedy.

And on one level that’s fine. They are almost without exception excellent films. But do they – and the Studio – really justify the high regard in which they are still held? Because once you start to scratch the surface, what appears at first to be solid gold could be judged to be not much more than gold foil and thin stuff at that.

Now before you all lynch me, I’m not for one moment saying that those films are not worthy of their accolades. They are much loved and in many cases brilliant. If we ever had a film industry – another debate there – then these films are possibly among the finest it ever produced. But the studio that created them, I would argue, was far from perfect – and indeed was no different from any other post-war British industry, in fact, is a good example of all that went so horribly wrong in this country post 1945. And I’d further argue that if you look at the British car industry over the same period, the comparison becomes very interesting indeed.

Firstly, of the films in that first list I’ve named above, all were made in a six year period. And three of them were all in one year. Kind Hearts, Passport and Whisky Galore all came out in 1949 – the others between then and 1955. Just as we cherish these films, we also cherish some of the better outputs of the British car industry – the Minor, the Mini and the original Land Rover. Like the films named, they are exceptional examples – and created by exceptional individuals. But the rest of the output is less exceptional. Indeed, much of it is – and was – just rubbish.

A great deal is made of the ‘family’ that made the Ealing films, with Sir Michael Balcon at its head. Many people enjoyed their time there, and it produced some great talents, both on screen and off. But it has also been compared to a private school – and it was not run on ‘socialist’ lines. The building itself had separate entrances for the ‘bosses’ and the ‘workers’, with those lower down the management ladder having to clock in, just like any worker in a manufacturing job at the time. And while job security was exceptional – and this also created a stable pool of talent in all departments – it also led to a dangerous insularity. Nobody left, and few new faces came on board from outside ‘the family’. Finally, as with the car industry, the unions ruled the place. You did your job, but you also made sure nobody else who wasn’t in the same union could do your job either. Demarcation was strictly enforced.

This system did produce some excellent films, but it also produced a lot of dross, more so as the 1950s progressed. Indeed, it could be argued that by 1955 Ealing was finished, a fact recognised by one of its biggest talents, Alexander Mackendrick, who left after making The Ladykillers, and headed to Hollywood to make The Sweet Smell of Success. But after that, not much else. It can be argued that his film The Man in the White Suit is in fact an allegory of his time at Ealing – and a critique of the studio’s lack of innovation and outdated practices – and it’s a convincing argument. While many of Ealing’s technical people went on to long careers in the film business across the Atlantic, only a handful of its directors ever did, and you have to ask yourself why? Was it perhaps that they were able to thrive in the enclosed and cloistered world of Ealing, but couldn’t hack it in the more commercially focused world of Hollywood?

Like the British car industry, Ealing went down hill fast. It failed to keep up with its own audience or make new products they wanted to see. While it stayed ‘safe’, studios like Hammer put sexuality on screen in glorious colour in the swirling cloaked form of Dracula. You’ll work hard to find any sex in Ealing films. Only the highly subversive Kind Hearts comes anywhere near, and is all the more subversive – and better – for having Joan Greenwood’s husky voice put the sex into sexy. Instead Ealing is a man’s world. This is the studio, after all, which failed to spot the potential of an actress called Audrey Hepburn. Even Greenwood didn’t really get much of a look in after Kind Hearts. But then this is the studio where the one female writer, Diana Morgan, was known as ‘the Welsh bitch’. Maybe Hepburn was well out of it.

Of course the 1950s British ‘film industry’ also gave us Carry On, the Doctor series and the works of Norman Wisdom.  Just as the car industry eventually gave us the Austin Allegro and the Vauxhall Viva. And when British Leyland needed a state handout, even Ealing eventually had to go cap in hand to the National Film Finance Corporation after Rank’s much loathed John Davis pulled his own studio’s commercial funding.

So by all means, let us celebrate the great film legacy which Ealing has left us – and the fact that the studio is still there and working (making it one of the oldest film studios in continuous production). But it’s equally possible to look at Ealing in a very different way and see in its demise the collapse of yet another British industry which shone very brightly for a while, but deep down contained the seeds of its own destruction – and was incapable of doing anything to prevent it – while the best talent it nurtured left to put their skills at the disposal of the US film industry. Yes, we do have a film industry still, but like our car industry, it’s mostly in the hands of foreign businesses or propped up with foreign money. And those ‘foreigners’ have taught us how to do it better, and keep our skills to help them continue to do that, while their tax payer funded profits go overseas. It’s a cautionary tale we can still enjoy while watching the films from that all too short golden era of Ealing Studios. But you have to ask what might have been had it all been a little bit different.

Nigel Lawrence