British Women's Cinema by Bell Melanie;Williams Melanie;

Author:Bell, Melanie;Williams, Melanie; [MELANIE BELL AND MELANIE WILLIAMS]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2011-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

1950s British cinema and the ‘female group’ film

The 1950s presents an interesting case study because it is commonly assumed to have been inhospitable to women’s issues. For a long time British cinema’s output from this decade was written off as moribund and dull; an endless parade of war films and trite comedies with gender politics reduced to ‘the hegemony of the tweed jacket’ (Medhurst in Williams 2002: 6). Recent important studies have challenged this blinkered view: Harper and Porter (2003) understand it as an ‘anxious cinema’ uneasily negotiating the demands of modernity while Geraghty (2000) discusses the contradictory discourses shaping the ‘new woman’, but there is considerable work still to be done concerning gender politics. In this decade there was a sharp contrast between the official descriptions of women’s lives as wives and mothers within the companionate marriage and nuclear family, and the reality of increasing numbers of married women in the workforce, their wages in part fuelling the growth in production and consumption of new household goods. The period can be seen as a transitional phase in female equality where the profound social changes of the Second World War were absorbed and worked through in the social fabric. Popular cinema did engage with women’s problems and at times directly address female audiences, although output was never as prolific as the 1940s. The concerns of the beleaguered housewife for example are central to Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957) while Young Wives’ Tale (1951) offers a satirical take on the competing demands of work and career from a female perspective.

The female group film, which had enjoyed some popular success in the 1940s, continued to find a space in a cultural landscape dominated by social problem films and the genres of war and comedy. The social problem film, which ‘raise [d] topical social issues within a commercial cinematic form’ (Hill 1986: 67), was perhaps most hospitable to the theme due to its backdrop of ‘crisis’ scenarios or ‘extreme’ circumstances – typically prison or girls’ reformatory – which provided the setting for female group dynamics to flourish. Films such as The Weak and the Wicked, Good Time Girl (1948), Yield to the Night (1956) and Turn the Key Softly (1953) dramatise female relationships against a backdrop of incarceration, foregrounding the connections and differences between women. Related to the social problem genre were films that dramatised the changing social reality of contemporary Britain in the shape of the new welfare state, the NHS and the growth in social science disciplines. Set in a children’s hospital ward No Time for Tears (1957) follows the fortunes of a female nursing group, while Streetcorner (1953) deals with the experiences of women police constables, both films providing narrative space for different types of femininity and female life experiences to be explored.

In the comedy genre, the commercially successful St Trinian’s series dramatised the machinations of a large group of women. Inaugurated by the success of The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950) – where a girls’ school is

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