TO INSPIRE A NATION!
A new movie Their Finest, about the British film industry in wartime, is based on the novel Their Finest Hour by Lissa Evans. Producer STEPHEN WOOLLEY fills in the background
SOON after the withdrawal of Allied troops from Dunkirk in 1940, writers, producers and directors scrambled around for ideas for propaganda films dressed up as entertainment. They were under government instruction to inspire the public, which was desperate to be distracted from the onslaught of the Blitz but which was also cynical and depressed by the likelihood of inevitable defeat.
The Ministry of Information was charged with creating films of “authenticity and optimism to inspire a nation” and under the auspices of Jack Beddington, head of the MoI’s Films Division, it came close to pulling it off.
The MoI’s main task was to address the needs of a predominantly working-class, disenchanted, under-served and under-respected female audience. The women, it seems, wanted heart-swelling encouragement and entertainment but gave short shift to anything that didn’t smell of reality.
In 1940, before conscription was enforced, the government also needed women to volunteer to replace absent male factory workers. That urgency was more forcefully expressed at the outbreak of the Blitz when the MoI resorted to “informationals” – short films sandwiched between the features, so that audiences could not escape. These shorts were part public information, part scripted drama and part documentary. Audiences usually tolerated rather than embraced them.
To keep the films contemporary, the turnover and production time, including the scripting, was conducted at a ferocious pace. Inevitably with this kind of time pressure and lack of budget, some were doomed to fail, the most notable being A Call For Arms! (1940). It tells the story of two strippers (or “nudies” as they were known) who throw in their rather glamorous-looking lifestyle to join the female workers at the Woolwich Arsenal making bullets. Despite the excellent talents in front of and behind the camera, it was booed off the screen.
The MoI felt chastened by the experience. Henceforth it strove to be less patronising in its dramatised informationals, especially towards women.
AMONG the most talented women working in our wartime film industry was the one woman in the Ealing Studio writers’ room, Diana Morgan, hired to write what was referred to by some as the sentimental “nausea” (women’s dialogue).
Morgan was partially the inspiration for the character of Catrin in Their Finest (played by Gemma Arterton in the film), although the real Morgan was not quite as innocent of the world of showbiz as Catrin. She began her career as an actress and chorus girl in 1931 and wrote satirical revues for Max Wall and Hermione Gingold. After a career with Ealing, which began in 1940 and stretched into the 1950s, she became one of the creators behind ITV’s Emergency – Ward 10 (1957-1967), writing 112 episodes of the groundbreaking soap.
Despite the wartime emergence of female writers like Diana Morgan, there were no British female directors and only a handful of short films directed by women. Nonetheless, female characters dominated British screens. Margaret Lockwood, Phyllis Calvert, Patricia Roc, Anna Neagle, Deborah Kerr and Celia Johnson were box-office darlings, with a host of rising stars crowded behind them, including Googie Withers, Anne Crawford and Jean Simmons.
In the Bernstein questionnaire (an annual audience poll initiated by the Granada Cinemas chain in 1927), the top six actresses of 1937 were American. By 1946 there were only two Americans, Bette Davis and Greer Garson. Lockwood was number one and the list also included Calvert and Roc. Such was the newfound popularity of British films.
By 1943, 90 per cent of all single women between 18 and 40, and 80 per cent of married women with children over 14 were working. Women were also being conscripted into the Armed Forces.
Women were for the most part denied equal pay with men and they got less in compensation for industrial accidents than men. But there was an inevitable increase in their sense of responsibility and independence, their mobility and self-esteem. As the Mass-Observation survey noted of women in the services in 1944, they were “being forced to think for themselves instead of falling back on some opinion taken ready-made from husband or father”.
Successful box-office movies like The Gentle Sex (1943), I Know Where I’m Going (1945), Millions Like Us (1943), Went The Day Well (1942) and The Wicked Lady (1945) featured strong women’s roles.
It would be crazy to suggest that through the success of these films there was a seismic shift in attitudes towards women and their role in society. But what is true is that without the MoI’s desire to reach the widest possible audience, British cinema would not have achieved the level of realism that had hitherto been sidelined in favour of a British version of Hollywood glamour.
Not only were women in cinema controlling their own destinies but movies were being made with a new kind of freedom. The war brought together film-makers who were charged with producing cinema that reflected the world around the audience, but also a world they experienced first-hand themselves.
The unique experience of making films about resistance on the very edge of possible annihilation must have been exhilarating and led to a golden age of British cinema. Certainly Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger would never have made 49th Parallel (1941), The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Canterbury Tale (1944) or A Matter Of Life And Death (1946) without being prompted by Beddington and the MoI.
Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), with its stark realism and conspiratorial intrigue, would have been hard to imagine without his experiences as a film-maker in London during the Blitz.
WOULD Brief Encounter (1945) have made it to the screen if Noël Coward (desperately needing to get back into public favour after his song Don’t Let’s Be Beastly To The Germans was banned by the BBC) had not plucked David Lean from the editing room to direct In Which We Serve? And if Celia Johnson, who disliked making films, had not been persuaded to step off the West End stage to take part in MoI informationals, then her performances Daily Express Thursday April 13 2017 in 1942’s In Which We Serve and Brief Encounter may also never have happened. Anthony Asquith, with a trio of films starring John Mills – Cottage To Let, We Dive At Dawn (1943) and The Way To The Stars (1945) – achieved some of his finest work in the guise of creating propaganda. Ealing’s post-war classics – such as Kind Hearts And Coronets (1949) and Passport To Pimlico (1949) – were born out of this age of entertainment with a realistic edge, as were the post-war comedies of Launder and Gilliat like The Belles Of St. Trinian’s (1954).
If there was one key aim the MoI had in its propaganda ambitions it was to unify a diverse class-ridden nation. As Quentin Reynolds intones in one of the most effective MoI shorts, London Can Take It! (1940), made in the capital at the height of the Blitz: “Dr Paul Joseph Goebbels said recently that the nightly air raids have had a terrific effect upon the morale of the people of London. The good doctor is absolutely right. Today the morale of the people is higher than ever before.”
That unity depended on women, and British cinema played a major role in that unification. Actresses came to the forefront during the war playing parts in films that reflected women’s lives, told not just by men but also by female scriptwriters and producers. A seed was sown for future generations in front of and behind the camera. Their Finest opens at cinemas on April 21.
Girls Like Us, a season of wartime films, opens at the BFI Southbank on April 18.