Community‘Mild anarchy’

WhimsyEccentricity

Supporting the underdogJoyous

Life-affirmingComedy

The Dark Side

Forays into darkness

Out of 95 films under Michael Balcon, 17 are actually comedies

There’s one horror, several crime films, melodramas, romances, costume dramas, historicals, lots of war films and one experimental fantasy.

Even some of the comedies have a dark undercurrent.

Dead of Night (1945)Directors: Alberto Cavalcanti, Robert Hamer, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden

• Ealing’s break from usual documentary realism into atmospheric horror

• Portmanteau film of different, linked stories

Two stories that deal with sanity work best:

1. A ventriloquist becomes possessed by his dummy (creepy!)

2. An antique mirror reveals cracks in a middle class marriage

Closest to familiar Ealing comedy: Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne play two golf obsessed upper class twits who haunt each other.

Sexual repression – the downside of British restraint

However, lack of self restraint leads to…

William Rose – writerAlexander MacKendrick – Director

Comedy from mutual murder!

Also directed by Alexander Mackendrick

Consider the more cynical elements: * The island is populated by alcoholics

*Captain Waggett is incompetent, rather than just buffoonish

*The ending is quite bitter all round

Similar to the TEB Clarke films in theme, but with a sour undercurrent

Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), directed by Robert Hamer, is a cheerful black comedy about serial murder

• Kind Hearts and Coronets…treats the values of English culture in an angrier, more

elegant, more cynical and less cautious way; it mercilessly exposes forms of behaviour, rituals and class differences

How?

Get this down for the exam!

The critic Richard Dacre has suggested that what we think of as the Ealing house style is actually the individual concern of screenwriter T.E.B. Clarke, the “architect of Ealing’s popular image of cosy whimsicality”; the films he wrote “depict a Britain of shopkeepers, friendly spivs, jolly coppers, incompetent but honest bureaucrats, kind-hearted squires, contented old-age pensioners and eccentrics”, while the works of Alexander Mackendrick and Robert Hamer (including Kind Hearts) offer “a dark commentary on those values”.

What makes the film cynical?

Consider the usual Ealing ethos:• Class • Gender• Community• ‘Britishness’• Self restraint• Mild anarchy and restoration of order• Documentary realism in style

Are these all here in the same way as the T.E.B. Clarke films?

The familiar ‘documentary realism?

• Trick photography• Period setting• Elaborate costume• The ‘deadpan’ style of Luis’

narrative is matched by the mise-en-scene (i.e. all surface, no hint of psychological depth through lighting, etc)• Stylised performance

What are the messages and values of the darker comedies like Kind Hearts and The Ladykillers?

How far do the films you have studied for this topic share similar messages and values?