Hope and Glory by Peter Clarke

Author:Peter Clarke [Clarke, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141939193
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

8

Never Had It So Good 1955–63

A CONSUMER CULTURE

Economics and politics aside, in the post-war years the British people had a ‘special relationship’ with American popular culture, disseminated by Hollywood. Even in the extremes of the dollar shortage, attempts to restrict imports of American films, whether by taxes or quotas, did not work. The Second World War reinforced Hollywood’s pre-existing dominance in the British market. It was a prime example of an American industry stepping in to supply consumer demand while British resources were diverted to supplying war priorities. Making feature films did not generally qualify as such – especially not films like Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), in fact a very gentle satire but one which, like the Daily Mirror’s populist campaigns, touched a raw nerve with the war cabinet. There was no such objection, of course, to In Which We Serve (1942), a nicely orchestrated anthem to the stiff upper lip, directed jointly by Noël Coward and David Lean, with a propaganda value that was the more effective for remaining implicit. Almost at the close of the war, it was clearly worth demobilizing Laurence Olivier, the most thrilling actor of his generation, to make his heroic version of Henry V (1945), which surely spoke for others, still awaiting ‘demob’, in saying that ‘there ne’er arrived from France more happy men’.

Not that Hollywood was ideologically unsound. Even before the USA became an ally, the ingenuous democratic message of a film like Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) was clearly directed against the dictators, and Casablanca (1943) became a classic partly because the romantic entanglement enacted between Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman tugged against the primacy of an anti-fascist struggle. It is a safe bet, however, that the millions who attended cinemas during the blackout or under conditions of post-war austerity were seeking escape, not least from propaganda. Hollywood showed them a new world where there was no food rationing and no shortage of nylons: often an opulent lifestyle, yet not that of the status-bound upper classes in Britain, but one in which automobiles and refrigerators were as much of a common culture as smoking cigarettes (the other irreducible drain on post-war dollars).

The sheer firepower of Hollywood should not obscure the fact that, during and after the war, British films acquired a reputation for quality, not just a cynical notoriety as cheaply made ‘quota quickies’. There had, of course, been isolated successes previously. The young British director, Alfred Hitchcock, made his reputation as a master of suspense with a notable adaptation of Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935) and went on, in The Lady Vanishes (1938), to evoke a sinister sense of the Europe of the dictators, cross-cut with a quintessentially English comic sub-plot about the latest score in the test match. The best British films succeeded by offering something subtly different from Hollywood. David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) turned a one-act play by Noël Coward into a beautifully realized account of a potentially adulterous passion, thwarted by social constraints.

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