Article in Film International · November 2006 doi: 10. 1386/fiin

Chance of a Lifetime (Bernard Miles, 1950); the trouble was that audiences

were unenthusiastic.

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For the American documentary film-maker and photographer Paul Strand,

audiences and film-makers were seen as marching together in a crusade. He

made clear in a Sight and Sound article what he didn’t like: 

There is a certain kind of realism in the Hollywood film of violence; the

torn and bleeding face of a prizefighter is true to real life. But such truth

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has no purpose, except to excite the sadistic and masochistic feelings of

the audience – to exploit on an emotional level. We must reject both this

venal realism as well as the mere slice of life naturalism which is

completely static in its unwillingness to be involved in the struggle of

man towards a better and fuller life.

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By this reading, the lack of a social agenda in naturalism distinguishes it from

realism. Grierson, Balcon and Jennings would have supported the notion of

film having a moral purpose, though their viewpoints were not so militantly left

wing. Strand’s distaste for the Hollywood product is unsurprising for somebody

who took a purist view of film and fled McCarthyism. The risk of adopting such

an approach is that it can lead to a disdainful view of audiences, who are more

concerned with entertainment than politics. Harold Pinter is a left-wing luminary

who has wrestled with this contradiction more recently. He has followed

Strand’s example in letting the artist’s viewpoint take precedence.

Critics could be as ambivalent as the practitioners. Writing in 1947, Roger

Manvell, the doyen of commentators on the cinema, considered that

bombardment had brought about a stiffening of the general audience resolve in

favour of realistic treatment and truer emotional attitudes. He continued: 

‘The British critic and a section of the British public are realists, and they

like the realistic element in American films ... The virtue of British films

lies rather in honesty of conception and realism of treatment than in

technical efficiency of screen writing and narrative.’

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Aside from the questionable assumptions underlying this view (escapism

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slipped under Manvell’s aesthetic radar), British productions get damned with

faint praise. They seem to have little to offer other than realism, while the

section of the public favouring this was presumably the section which 

appreciated neo-realist films. Where this leaves the work of Powell and

Pressburger is not clear; realism was low on the agenda in their postwar work.

Six years later, Manvell still esteemed realism highly, but couched his praise in

more parochial terms: ‘But to be indigenous a film must successfully merge the

British Character with the British Scene and not present confected stories and

artificial characters against a background location of real streets and sunlit

mountains.’

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 By this time, realism was becoming harder to find. Its conventions

had permeated the cinema to the point where audiences could no longer

accept the illusion that the camera was following the lives of real people. The

saturated hues of Technicolor glorified artifice. Middle-class cinema epitomised

by Genevieve (Henry Cornelius, 1953) was in the ascendent in Britain and

Manvell was looking back to what he called the unequalled artistry of the war

years. It could be argued that his memory was selective. Wartime films were a

mixed bunch as in any period, while propaganda and artistry could be uneasy

bedfellows. Even in the more distinguished efforts like In Which We Serve

(Noël Coward and David Lean, 1942) and The Way Ahead (Carol Reed, 1944),

the message that everybody should pull together can seem intrusive.

Similar sentiments to those of Manvell came from Milton Schulman, film critic

of London’s Evening Standard. Lamenting the absence of real people doing

real things, he predicted: ‘this undiscriminating non-demanding audience which

ensures a reasonable profit to any widely distributed film, would stop going if

they are shown films that mean something instead of films that don’t.’

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This

could be interpreted as elitism or a plea for better education. It is also a

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counsel of despair. If ‘films that mean something’ lacked audience appeal,

there was no incentive to make them and the British government had neither

the cash nor the inclination to step into the breach. 

Gerald Young was more positive. He had advice for directors: 

[They] must take frequent trips round Britain and learn how people

speak. They must use scripts written by men who write only for films and

not by novelists being paid extravagant sums for bookish dialogue. They

must overcome their class-conscious aversion to would-be film players

who perhaps do not speak as ‘naicely’ as they do. In these British voices

in the rough will be found the diamonds that make real film stars.

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This shifts the blame from the audience to the film-makers. The two factors

which Young identifies as hindering the adoption of realism are dialogue which

fails to lift off the page and a class bias among actors. Stilted dialogue was

also the subject of complaints from Lesley Blanch and J. B. Priestley, but

novels were a favoured source for film scripts rivalled only by stage plays.

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Perhaps there was an undue reverence in Britain for the written word, but

producers were responding to demand. Screen adaptations of Dickens like

David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946) pleased critics and public alike. A

comparable financial success was My Brother Jonathan (Harold French, 1948)

adapted from a novel by Francis Brett Young, though neither book nor film has

worn well. 

There is more truth in Gerald Young’s accusation of a class bias among

actors. This stemmed from an education system which channelled the working

class into manual jobs, leaving acting as a louche, middle-class profession.

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There was also a consensus among drama schools, theatre managements and

the BBC about what was an appropriate mode of speech to put before the

public. Regional accents and working-class speech patterns were erased from

the few working-class actors, Jessie Matthews and Anna Neagle being notable

examples. Only a maverick like Bernard Miles or comedians like Frank Randle

could buck the system. 

A problem not mentioned by Young is that some actors resorted to

techniques learned for the stage, with Tod Slaughter, Tom Walls and Laurence

Olivier being among the worst offenders. Unlike their American counterparts,

relatively few British actors devoted themselves wholeheartedly to the screen

and most underwent a long stage apprenticeship. Any aspirations to realism

could be stifled by an over-the-top performance, though larger-than-life

characters like Robert Newton and Donald Wolfit could give surprisingly subtle

performances such as Newton’s doctor in Obsession (Edward Dmytryk,1948)

The credo of realism reached into the government. It certainly enthused

Herbert Morrison, who addressed the annual dinner of the Cinema Exhibitors

Association in 1945 in words which could have come from one of the directors

or critics already quoted: 

Let your films sincerely portray the British attitude to life, the humour and

courage and endeavour of the ordinary British man and woman, in a

world of reconstruction and high hope... Show the British and their lives

and institutions as they really are and you can’t go wrong.

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What exhibitors made of this is not recorded, though they could not afford to

take a lofty position about realism: they had a shrewd idea what their

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predominantly working-class audiences wanted and only satisfying that

demand ensured a full cinema. As the secretary of the Manchester and Salford

branch of the Association put it in 1948: 

‘A word of warning to British producers may not be out of place... British

pictures are tending to be too realistic; romance is lacking. The

Cinderella theme... is the one which seventy per cent of audiences

expect to see. The realism in British pictures is precisely what all our

patrons are living day in and day out. They see enough of that.’

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Not surprisingly, some 80 per cent of films seen on British screens were

American.

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 In the long term neither quotas not taxes changed this situation

markedly.

Realism was a much-used and much-abused term. Those who wrote about it

assumed that realism was a good thing. In Britain, the documentary movement

had powerful advocates and official support, but its influence on feature films

was not as strong as its supporters liked to believe. It Always Rains on Sunday

(Robert Hamer, 1947) and Dance Hall (Charles Crichton, 1950) portrayed

working-class life with some veracity. These represent the gritty end of Ealing’s

output; substitute middle-class characters in middle-class surroundings and the

films would cease to be termed realistic even if the plots were retained. The

British version of realism is distinctive and specific in its class connotations. It

allowed middle-class audiences and film-makers to experience working-class

life vicariously. This became evident with the New Wave of the late 1950s,

when middle-class directors like Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz discovered

the North and showed in steely black and white how the other half lived. 

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When realism goes beyond the depiction of a physical environment, the term

becomes more problematic, as Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) exemplifies.

An obvious feature of the film is the stylised and superficially banal dialogue.

This and the humdrum surroundings of the station where the couple meet belie

the depths of their feelings. Though the first working-class audiences laughed,

few middle-class audiences would fail to appreciate the emotional turmoil

caused by the illicit affair, to which the dialogue acts as a counterpoint. Is this

depiction of the restrained British character an example of psychological

realism, or was Noël Coward, who wrote the original stage play and had a hand

in the film script, responsible for perpetuating a stereotype of middle-class

behaviour? Alternatively, has the notion of a stereotype been imposed

retrospectively on the film? Its spirit is close to that earlier love story, Jean

Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934), itself shot in the style of poetic realism pioneered by

Ruttmann and Vertov. 

Roy Baker’s The October Man (1947) is a study of a man suffering from a

head injury, who suspects that he may have committed a murder. This was one

of several films prompted by the postwar interest in psychiatry, more famous

American examples of the genre being Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1946) and The