Ealing Revisited edited by Mark Duguid, Lee Freeman, Keith M. Johnston and Melanie Williams (BFI, 2012). 304 pages. ISBN: 978-1844575107 (paperback). £18.99
About the reviewer: Dr. Alexandra Simcock teaches Film and Television Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her current research focuses on the history, industrial and critical status of the American made-for-television movie - an explicitly hybrid and traditionally undervalued genre. She is also interested in processes of remaking and repetition within media production and reception.
E-mail: alexandra.simcock@nottingham.ac.uk
There is much more to Ealing than the string of comedies the studio is best known for: the likes of Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955). This is the founding premise of Ealing Revisited, perhaps the first major book devoted to the studio in its entirety since Charles Barr’s Ealing Studios was first published in 1977 and since George Perry’s Forever Ealing in 1981. The collection addresses both the familiar and lesser-known aspects of the studio’s history, its films, its politics and its personnel. Building on the work of Barr, Perry, and other scholars who have produced studies of the studio’s individual films or directors, as well as utilising fascinating primary materials from some of the BFI’s special collections, the contributors explore the many different facets of Ealing from its ‘prehistory’ under Basil Dean in the 1930s to its legacy in the 1950s and beyond. With the exception of the two chapters by Steve Chibnall and Dylan Cave, however, the book is restricted to the most familiar definition of ‘Ealing Studios’ – using that description to refer to the films made between 1938 and 1959 by the production company headed by Michael Balcon and situated at Ealing studios.
But if the book follows almost every other study of Ealing Studios in this, it also expands scholarly understanding of the studio by addressing areas other studies do not. This includes a chapter by Janet Moat devoted to teasing out themes that emerge from material contained in the Michael and Aileen Balcon Archive, held by the BFI. Robert Murphy contributes a chapter that balances the perception of Ealing as ‘cosy’ and consensus-seeking with insights into the studio’s darker side – in the process making the case that ‘Ealing dark’ extends beyond the films of Robert Hamer and Sandy Mackendrick and that the cheery Ealing that these filmmakers supposedly rebel against now looks ‘increasingly difficult to define.’ Similarly taking on previous studies and beliefs about Ealing, Geoff Brown offers a contribution on French composer Georges Auric. Placing Ealing within a wider context, Brown reminds the reader of other influential non- British personnel who helped to shape the studio’s productions, and makes the case that (at least when it comes to Auric) Ealing’s projection of British character was ‘enriched by a European perspective’.
... a much fuller picture emerges of the true range and diversity of Ealing’s output
Through contributions like these, which address the neglected aspects of Ealing and its less familiar films (including the studio’s Australian productions, and its wartime documentary and propaganda shorts), a much fuller picture emerges of the true range and diversity of Ealing’s output. With twenty chapters, the insights offered are necessarily concise, often leaving a desire for more, but the limits imposed here do allow for a broad range of topics. The editors’ desire to go beyond the core comedy titles to find new ground within Ealing Studios is achieved.
The desire to push against the stereotypes of Ealing as cosy and conformist also begins to happen here in places. But if any readers are expecting all the common images of Ealing to be disputed, they will be disappointed. Many of the contributions support rather challenge the established ways of understanding the studio’s significance: that it worked with a British idiom – projecting a particular idea of Britain and the British character; that its films emphasise and celebrate the community pulling together to take on a more powerful foe; that it incorporated a particular realist impulse; and that it functioned as a kind of ‘family’ working together in a defined location and not requiring the use of creative talent outside of this community of filmmakers and technicians. Some contributors do more than others to challenge or qualify these conceptions of Ealing. Yet even where these notions are reinforced, they are grounded more solidly in new evidence and serve to add further layers of nuance to our understanding of one of Britain’s best loved and most iconic cinema institutions.
Dr. Alexandra Simcock