Simon HEFFER
Simon Heffer welcomes the current expansion of our film industry, but says there is no chance of recreating our brilliantly idiosyncratic studio system
For years the term “British film industry” has stretched the Trade Descriptions Act. Blockbusters financed with American money, with international casts, sometimes directed by Britons and sometimes not, remain huge successes for British studios. However, because of an increasingly common cinematic culture between Britain and America, and a near-common language, Hollywood’s massive footprint swamps British film. Lacking that handicap, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, for example, all maintain distinct industries, projecting their respective cultures in a way British cinema struggles to do.
British film is now set for a £700 million boost with a proposed new studio in Broxbourne, Hertfordshire. This promises 4,500 jobs for our beleaguered production professionals, and work for our actors and actresses, who have been hit hard during the pandemic. However, Broxbourne will not reduce Hollywood’s footprint: the investment is being made by its Sunset Studios, whose successes have included La La Land and X-men, the first film in that franchise. The tremendous economic boost it will bring is indisputable: £300 million could be poured annually into the local economy. Perhaps Epping will be the Beverly Hills of England.
Broxbourne is, however, a million miles from the small, characterful studios that made the British film industry of the mid-20th century truly great and individual, contributing massively to the historic culture of this country. Then, even the smallest towns had a cinema. Before television there was a greedy appetite for going to “the pictures”. Hollywood films were always popular but so too were gentler, home-made stories that held up a mirror to British life. British studios understood that desire implicitly, and satisfied it from the 1920s until the late 1950s, before the decline brought by television and the repeal of a law demanding a quota of British-made films be shown in cinemas.
The new venture will not be far from Elstree studios, where Netflix makes The Crown, and, a short trek around the M25 from Pinewood, where James Bond and other megafilms are made or finished off.
J Arthur Rank, the flour magnate who diversified into films, invested in 1935 in the Heatherden Estate in Buckinghamshire and built Pinewood studios. They soon supercharged the film career of Anna Neagle, in productions by her husband, Herbert Wilcox: but when war came the Crown Film Unit moved in, producing such important films as Humphrey Jennings’s Fires Were Started and Ian Dalrymple’s Coastal Command. These remain films by which we learn about the realities of that war.
Pinewood produced the later Powell and Pressburger films shot in colour – Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes
– and other memorable colour films (still then a rarity) such as The Importance of Being Earnest and Genevieve. It also made the early Carry On films and, before Bond and other high-budget features with overtly international appeal (such as The Ipcress File and The Battle of Britain),
Pinewood produced films with a distinctively British or, more to the point, English flavour – such as David Lean’s Oliver Twist in 1948, Bryan Forbes’s magnificent The League of Gentlemen in 1960 and the same director’s Whistle Down the Wind the following year.
Pinewood is the great survivor of the British studio boom. It now owns Shepperton, that byword for mainstream movies of the 1950s but whose studios changed hands frequently after that. Founded in 1931, Shepperton made two of Carol Reed’s greatest films, The Fallen Idol and The Third Man. In the 1960s, it produced worldbeaters such as Lawrence of Arabia, Dr Strangelove and The
Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
led the internationalisation of British film production, in 1977 making the first of the Star Wars films.
From the 1920s, studios began to proliferate around London. Also still extant – but only just, having nearly closed in 2012 after 99 years – are the Twickenham Studios. They, like many others of the time, flourished after 1927 on “quota quickies” – cheap and cheerful films that gave many actors, writers and directors their start, churned out to meet the British production quota. Twickenham specialised in B movies through the 1940s and 1950s and flourished in the 1960s, making the first two Beatles films as well as Alfie and The Italian Job, both starring Michael Caine.
The godfather of British film in its golden age was Michael (later Sir Michael) Balcon, whose most renowned role was to lead Ealing studios from 1938 to 1955. Balcon co-founded Gainsborough studios in 1924, setting up shop by the Regent’s canal in Islington, north London. Gainsborough became renowned in the 1940s for bodice rippers, most famously Margaret Lockwood’s 1945 romp The Wicked Lady, but it also produced two of the finest war films, Millions Like Us and We Dive at Dawn. Balcon was also an executive of Gaumont-british, who filmed at Lime Grove in Maida Vale (later used by the BBC) and at Shepherd’s Bush. In these primitive settings he gave Alfred Hitchcock his first directing job.
However, despite such successes studios succumbed to changes in society’s behaviour. Gainsborough closed in 1951. Denham, founded in 1936 by Alexander Korda, focused on quality, such as the early Powell and Pressburger movies – 49th Parallel, Colonel Blimp and A Canterbury Tale – but it also made many of the high-end films of the 1930s, including South Riding and Goodbye Mr Chips, then went on to 1940s landmarks, including
Henry V, In Which We Serve and Great Expectations, before it closed in 1952. Riverside Studios, in Hammersmith, opened in 1933 to make quota quickies but also produced the hugely successful The Seventh Veil in 1945 and the ineffable
The Happiest Days of Your Life, with Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford, in 1950; but the BBC bought it in 1954. Hammer Studios had various incarnations before going into liquidation in 1979, in their last years fulfilling the maxim that nobody ever lost money by underestimating the taste of the British public. From 1951 to 1966 it was based at Bray Studios, producing
Ealing also exemplified British heroism in films like ‘The Cruel Sea’
a magnificent, if increasingly self-parodic, string of horror films.
Ealing remains the studio most associated with British cinema. It opened in 1902 and after closing in 1955 is making films again, after 40 years in BBC ownership. Its identification with the British brand endures because its output consciously illustrated the British character, notably its sense of humour – Whisky Galore!, Passport to Pimlico and The Lavender Hill Mob. Ealing also exemplified British heroism in its war films – Went the Day Well and the awesome The Cruel Sea – and the darkening realities of post-war British life in It Always Rains on Sunday and The Blue Lamp. It developed black comedy that pushed boundaries but reflected an utterly English trait – as in Will Hay’s last film, My Learned Friend, and a film with a claim to be the finest ever made in Britain, Kind Hearts and Coronets, both of which manage to get laughs out of serial killers.
Broxbourne will power filmmaking in Britain for decades ahead. However, it can never replicate the sheer variety of influences and ideas, and the deep understanding of the British psyche, of the many studios that illuminated our cinema in its golden age.