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Nicholas Nickleby (1947) and a tongue-in-cheek homage to film noir, They
Made Me a Fugitive (1947). Cavalcanti’s later collaboration with Brecht
suggests a desire to present a political message in the form of entertainment,
with the demands of commercial cinema being left behind.
Though Anthony Asquith rarely ventured into the documentary, he espoused
the tenets of realism, or at least he seemed to:
No one will dispute that where people are shown doing their jobs, real
people cannot be equalled. In The Way to the Stars I continually used
real people in real settings, not only for general action shots but for all
sorts of bits and pieces. No body of actors in the world can convincingly
reproduce an RAF patrol or a ground crew, let alone a group of
American airmen playing softball. Here, incidentally, the individual action
and improvised action were a sheer joy. But an actor can give something
more real than the real thing. That is to say, he will express more of the
man’s inner personality, show us more facets of the character, present
us, in fact, with a more living figure.
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Real people can fill out the crowd scenes, but actors carry the drama. After
enduring the wooden acting displayed in some wartime documentaries, it has
to be conceded that Asquith had a point, even if his view conflicts with
Grierson’s contention that:
‘the material and the stories thus taken from the raw can be finer (more
real in the philosophic sense) than the acted article.... Add to this that
documentary can achieve an intimacy of knowledge and effect
impossible to the shimsham mechanics of the studio and the lily-fingered
interpretations of the metropolitan actor.’
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The robust tone hints at Grierson’s doctrinaire approach to film, with
entertainment value coming low on his list of priorities. Yet looking at Asquith’s
study of the personal costs of war, The Way to the Stars (1945), what comes
across today is its poetry rather its realism: a poem by John Pudney provides a
refrain throughout the film, linking characters who never meet. Personal
dilemmas are at the heart of several of Asquith’s films during this period
including The Winslow Boy (1948), The Browning Version (1951) and The Final
Test (1953), but these works are hardly experimental in Cavalcanti’s terms.
The Final Test, the story of a cricketer’s final match, makes a nod to realism by
including several famous players among actor Jack Warner’s fellow team
members, but the film comes across as stilted, due in no small part to the self-
conscious delivery of their lines. Where the views of Asquith and Cavalcanti
coincided was in the latter’s stress on the importance of the commercial film
rather than art, though Asquith was no more consistent in this respect. He
bought classic plays like The Important of Being Earnest (1952) to the screen,
but these period productions form a small part of his output. There were
popular hits like Fanny by Gaslight (1944), but he is best remembered for his
collaborations with Terence Rattigan, beginning with French Without Tears
(1939), which appealed mainly to middle-brow audiences. The exception is The
Way to the Stars (1945), which transcends categories and was a box-office
success.
Michael Balcon ran Ealing Studios, which had its golden period in the
decade after the Second World War. In his view, feature films should have
similar aims to the documentaries of the 1930s, which implied that they should
contribute to the moral worth of society. He went on:
‘Above all, it means that all concerned with the creation of script and film
must become careful students of the contemporary world; they must
know and feel their people and their country, the difficulties and joys that
are the stuff of ordinary life, so that they can re-create it on the screen.’
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This is the credo of realism, even if the films coming out of Ealing sometimes
presented a cosy and slightly quirky middle-class Britain, Passport to Pimlico
(Henry Cornelius, 1949) and The Titfield Thunderbolt (Charles Crichton, 1952)
being the worst offenders. Realism would be an intrusion in these rose-tinted
evocations of Britishness. The Man in the White Suit (Alexander Mackendrick,
1953) is altogether more clear-eyed about the state of Britain. It looks forward
to the Boulting brothers’ satires later in the decade, but comedy is seldom
discussed in terms of realism.
The producer of The Way to the Stars, Filippo Del Guidice, wrote in 1948:
I have travelled through many countries on the Continent of Europe
and in America, and have studied in books the way of life of other nations
which I have not visited, and I have come to the conclusion, since 1940, that
there is an enormous amount of subjects to be offered showing ‘the way of life’
in Britain.
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This implies a realist agenda which is belied by the works he produced such as
the whimsical Vice Versa (Peter Ustinov, 1947) and the artful Hamlet (Laurence
Olivier, 1948). His Two Cities production company garnered prestige rather
than cash by aiming at a middle-brow audience. This led to its absorption into
the Rank empire when times got hard. Del Guidice embraced realism in
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