realistic means. This prompts the question what is realism? Labels can be
The political aspect of realism has been little considered. The temptation is
to see it as serving a left-wing agenda, but closer examination reveals that the
situation was more complex. Progressives certainly looked to realistic
representations of working class life as a sign of unfinished business in the
class struggle, but conservatives could take comfort in a traditional,
understandable style, far from the excesses of Pabst or Buñuel. Even this
simple distinction between progressives and conservatives can be misleading.
In seeing film as a means of furthering democracy, Grierson was a radical, yet
it could be argued that his reforming instincts were dissipated as he became
absorbed into the machinery of government. E. M. Forster was a pacifist in the
First World War, became the first president of the National Council of Civil
Liberties in 1934 and was even handed in criticising Nazism, Stalinism and
colonialism. He turned down a knighthood, his preferred aristocracy being the
sensitive, the considerate and the plucky.
19
While his script for A Diary for
Timothy (Humphrey Jennings, 1945) gives a flavour of his humanistic outlook,
his 1938 essay ‘Two Cheers for Democracy’ reveals a man confronting the
classic liberal intellectual dilemma: acknowledging the inequalities in society,
while betraying unease at the conformity and the levelling down which might
ensue from their eradication.
20
Jennings was a surrealist painter in his early
days and joined Auden in working for Mass-Observation with its fascination for
the minutiae of proletarian life, while Manvell was a member of the Fabian
Society’s film group which investigated the British film industry. These and
other luminaries were university educated, shared a liberal socialist outlook
and had no doubts about what was good for the masses – a quality they shared
with John Reith, director-general of the BBC. None of these figures was a
populist. Their version of realism was filtered through a particular sensibility
which working people might not always have recognised or accepted. The
danger of this approach is that it played down the humanity of the people being
studied, presenting their world as a series of problems – poor housing,
inadequate healthcare, etc. – which needed to be solved. John Baxter was
close enough to the people to avoid this pitfall, in spite of sometimes lapsing
into sentimentality. His characters in Love on the Dole (1941) live and breathe.
Among a younger generation of film-makers in the 1950s, the university
educated Lindsay Anderson followed his mentors in emphasising the social
value of film in his writing and his early work as a documentary director; his
later films like If... (1968) abandoned realism, though they were certainly anti-
establishment. Basil Dearden rose through the ranks in a career which followed
the opposite trajectory. After working on a variety of Ealing projects including
fantasy and costume drama, Dearden concentrated on bringing social
problems to the screen, from youth crime (The Blue Lamp, 1949) to race
relations (Sapphire, 1959). This is realism with a purpose, but there is no sense
that Dearden found common cause with Anderson: his aim was to humanise
the system, not to overturn it. His films are fascinating as social history, but
they can fail to catch fire as drama. A comparison might be made with the work
of Jack Lee, the brother of the poet Laurie Lee, who served his time making
documentaries and was one of the few directors with a working-class
background. Once a Jolly Swagman (1948), the story of a young man who
abandons his job, against his family’s wishes, to take up motorcycle racing,
successfully conveys the tedium of manual work and the working-class
suspicion of bettering oneself. Lee manages to show the psychological reality
of the youth’s plight, while making full use of the motorcycle stadium for
location shooting and with no sense of the worthiness which sometimes afflicts
Dearden’s work. For some directors, it is not always clear whether the
marketing opportunity took over from the message. Films which purport to
examine youth crime, but seem to revel in the experience are
Cosh Boy (Lewis
Gilbert, 1952) – one of the first films to rate an ‘X’ certificate – and The Boys
(Sidney J. Furie, 1962). These were tailored for a youth audience, who
presumably didn’t favour cautionary tales. By the mid-1960s, the family
audience had largely abandoned the cinema in favour of television. Cathy
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