Melodrama, Self and Nation in Post-War British Popular Film

Johanna Laitila

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367589066
• eBook ISBN: 9781351056564
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book investigates the portrayal of nationalities and sexualities in British post-Second World War crime film and melodrama. By focussing on these genres, and looking at the concept of melodrama as an analytical tool apt for the analysis of both sexuality and nation, the book offers insight into the desires, fears, and anxieties of post-war culture. The problem of returning to 'normalcy' after the war is one of the recurring themes discussed; alienation from society, family, and the self were central issues for both women and men in the post-war years, and the book examines the anxieties surrounding these social changes in the films of the period. In particular, it explores heterosexuality and nationality as some of the most prominent frameworks for the construction of identities in our time, structures that, for all their centrality, are made invisible in our culture.

1 Introduction

History and Myth

This project originally commenced in September 2013 in St Andrews, Scotland, on the week that marked the beginning of the one-year countdown to the Scottish independence referendum. The following year, on 18 September 2014, the referendum attracted an 84.6 per cent turnout at the polls, the highest in the UK since the introduction of universal suffrage, as 55.3 per cent of the Scottish electorate voted ‘No’ to independence (BBC News 2015, ‘Scotland Decides’). Yet another historical referendum was held in June 2016 as Britain voted to leave the European Union (EU). The ‘Brexit’ negotiations led by the new prime minister, Theresa May, have since proven difficult, and Britain’s role in the European community will likely be in transition for years to come after its official withdrawal from the EU, which is expected to take place in 2019. Meanwhile, following the referendum, many Scottish National Party (SNP) supporters are pushing for a second independence vote in Scotland.

Aside from these recent, transformative debates, the discussion on equal marriage laws in Scotland was given considerable press attention in 2013 and 2014, and the Marriage and Civil Partnership Bill was eventually passed by the parliament and granted royal assent in February 2014. The borders of nationality and citizenship – as well as their gendered manifestations – have thus been actively negotiated in the recent past, and the notion of a changing Britain is currently as tangible as ever. In the autumn of 2013, the upcoming independence referendum caused quite the stir among the English, Irish, and Welsh Scotland-dwellers I know, a number of whom seemed slightly baffled to be granted a vote on the basis of residency. One such Englishman remarked how he really felt more ‘British’ than ‘English’ in his everyday life – save the occasional incident of being clad in a cricket uniform, he remarked with sarcasm. That same week, a Scottish gentleman stopped me on the street to discuss the referendum – an invitation to national political discourse par excellence. While purely anecdotal, such examples demonstrate how passionate, humorous, and often self-ironic the British can be about their nation(s) and national identities. As Ernest Barker puts it, ‘We have a steady national habit of grumbling at ourselves and everything which is ours; but there is a smile behind the grumble’ (1948: 81). Such anecdotes moreover go to show how the discourses of politics and mundane experience negotiate and reproduce nationalities in our daily lives.

It seems impossible to write about nationalities without some degree of passion, and British nationalities are no exception. If anything, the complex relations of the different nations within the UK make ‘nation’ and ‘nationality’ particularly problematic concepts in the British context, without even thinking on the scale of the British Commonwealth. While this book does not attempt to address the national inclusions and exclusions contained within Britishness per se, nor to analyse the distinct English, Scottish, Welsh, or Northern Irish nationalisms or nationalities, the unstable internal divisions within Britain should, nonetheless, always be a starting point when writing about ‘British’ film. Any attempts at neutrality, in critical or cinematic explorations, often equate ‘Englishness’ with ‘Britishness’, thus proving anything but neutral. I will return to the debates around nationalities later in this Introduction, but a brief personal disclaimer is in order here. As a Finnish citizen who has lived in Scotland for several years, I am approaching the issue of British nationalities from the point of view of a partial outsider, which lends itself to the prerequisite of ‘confession’ urged by the theorist of nationality Michael Billig (1995: 95). That is, I am not approaching British cinema and Britishness as a voyeur but as a British cinema enthusiast as well as a curious observer of, and participant in, British culture. Tackling such a topic as an ‘outsider’ has its obvious limitations as well as certain benefits. For instance for Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘outsideness is a most powerful factor in understanding’ within the cultural sphere (1986: 7). Even though I may not fully agree with Bakhtin’s claim, I am nevertheless hoping that the benefits of my partial outsider position will balance out its inevitable shortcomings here and allow for some unexpected theoretical intersections. In fact, the distinction between an outsider and an insider is, of course, an inevitably slim one within the realm of nationalities, and, as Benedict Anderson writes, ‘the nation presents itself as simultaneously open and closed’ (2006: 146).

This book examines the parallel reproduction of nationalities and sexualities in British popular films, crime and melodrama more specifically, during what is one of the most written about eras in British and Western history: the last half of the 1940s and the first years of the 1950s. This book presents a text-oriented, interdisciplinary approach, and, to allow sufficient space for the extensive analysis of individual films as primary texts, the main emphasis is further narrowed down to films made in the years 1945–48, with a few primary films made in the early years of the 1950s in the final chapter. With the lack of an auteur tradition in British cinema, focussing on a narrower time span seems more useful in order to examine thematic and aesthetic patterns in this type of text-oriented research and to add to the extensive body of research on British cinema of the period.

As the Filmography in this book suggests, the films made during this period offer a plethora of material to investigate, and the selection of films for the book was by no means easy. However, the films chosen for close analysis offer particularly fascinating parallels and contrasts in their presentations of nationalities and sexualities, and open up possibilities for viewing ‘against the grain’, which merits further examination. The selection of films is moreover informed by the, often uneasy, interaction of realistic and melodramatic elements in the films. I am equally interested in films in which nationality and sexuality are overt concerns and those in which questions of identity are disguised – often in the flamboyant costumes of melodrama. The aim here is not to name nation and heterosexuality as ‘roots of all evil’, to borrow the name of a 1947 Gainsborough film, but to explore how nationalities and sexualities are presented as fragile in the films of the period. Further, this book draws from films across the artistic spectrum, and its aim is not to assess films or genres according to their presentations of gender and nation as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ – nor to place them along a transgressive/regressive divide or celebrate or dismiss films, authors, or studios according to such qualities – but to pay attention to the often conflicting explorations of identity and desire in popular films.

Each chapter in this book contributes to a core argument concerning the parallel trajectories of nationalities and sexualities in these films. Chapter 2 explores amnesia and awakening in four melodramas, exploring how the depictions of psychological ailment differ along gendered lines. I will, first, look at examples of male amnesiacs in Caravan (1946) and The October Man (1947), and, second, look at examples of female amnesiacs in Madonna of the Seven Moons (1945) and The Seventh Veil (1945). This chapter investigates the significance of both individual and collective remembering and forgetting in the construction of the nation and individual identities. These films are particularly resonant of the post-war period in that forgetting the self, and the national past, is simultaneously elating and tragic.

Chapter 3 looks at presentations of time and space in post-war films and relates temporality to the construction of ‘queer villains’ in A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and The Wicked Lady (1945). It also investigates how implications of sexual ‘deviancy’ were connected to non-futurity in post-war cultural imagination and analyses portrayals of conflicted temporality in two Ealing films: It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) and Dead of Night (1945). In the films discussed in this chapter, even when hope for the future does exist, there is a forceful undercurrent of lamentation and, often, trauma, as seen in particular in the case of Dead of Night (1945) and A Matter of Life and Death (1946). The first half of this chapter analyses the acute sense of entrapment within a traumatic, queer temporality in Dead of Night and the conflict between national and personal temporality in It Always Rains on Sunday (1947). The other half of the chapter focusses on the temporal structures and the framework of futurism in The Wicked Lady (1945) and A Matter of Life and Death.

Finally, Chapter 4 explores the trope of naming in the cinema of the period by taking two films of the early 1950s, The Blue Lamp (1950) and The Long Memory (1953), to build a comparison with the late-1940s films that dominate the discussion in this book – the chapter will show that the concerns with gender, sexuality, and nationality explored in films of the immediate post-war period remain relevant as the decade changes and war fades further into the past. In addition to these films, this final chapter looks at uneasy social ‘calls’ and the presentations of women as distorted mirrors for male national subjects in Odd Man Out (1947) and The Magic Bow (1946). The problematic of reconstructing the family and renegotiating gender roles and national and sexual identities is a significant feature of these films, even though only The Blue Lamp explicitly names social issues arising from the post-war situation as its topic.

First, though, it is necessary briefly to consider both the volatile historical events in Britain that form a backdrop to the films analysed in this book, and the concerns with melodrama, crime, and genre, before tackling some rather awkward terminological definitions within the realm of nationalities, sexualities, and their theories.

‘Bloody Uncomfortable’: From War to Post-War

The Second World War commenced on 3 September 1939 and ended in Europe on VE (Victory in Europe) Day, 8 May 1945, and in Japan in August 1945, after the atomic bombs were released by the United States in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The origins and consequences of wars are often widely debated, which is notoriously the case with the Second World War.¹ It was a conflict of vast, indeed catastrophic, impact, and it thus rightly generated the widespread use of terms such as ‘total war’ and ‘People’s War’ in Britain. The new language sought to depict the massive extent of national mobilisation and the effects of the war on civilians due to rationing; shortages; disruptions caused by the bombing of cities, blackouts, and evacuations; and the emotional strain of air raids, cold, separation, fear of death, and invasion during the Blitz.

The role of propaganda in the Second World War was unprecedented in military history, both in the UK and internationally.² In Britain, the wartime Ministry of Information (MoI), initially set up to manage state propaganda during the First World War, was re-established after the Second World War broke out. During the first years of the war especially, the state of public morale was observed by MoI, and more specifically its Home Intelligence Division, as Mackay posits, ‘in an almost obsessional way, taking the public’s pulse by what it thought, felt and said’ (2002: 1). The MoI also commissioned Mass-Observation, an independent social research group, to observe and record the status and shifts in civilian morale (Mackay 2002: 1).³ The most famous propaganda victory of the wartime British coalition government followed the events in Dunkirk in the summer of 1940 (26 May–4 June), with the military defeat presented to the public as the ‘Dunkirk spirit’, a term that sought to encapsulate the ideal of British grit. Winston Churchill as prime minister played a significant part in wartime state propaganda. In his speech in front of the Bradford Town Hall in December 1942, Churchill stated,

All are united like one great family; all are standing together, helping each other, taking their share and doing their work, some at the front, some under the sea or on the sea in all weathers, some in the air, some in the coal mines, great numbers in the shops, some in the homes – all doing their bit.

(Charles Eade (ed.) 1943: 245)

Churchill’s speech resonates with the People’s War ideology, which portrayed the nation as a ‘family’ – in a popular nationalist image – and emphasised the importance of everyone ‘doing their bit’. The nation, in this light, is something of a fiction, created in part through speech and rhetoric, in particular in wartime.⁴

The Second World War propaganda machine in Britain also extended to the silver screen, and the war had a profound impact on British film production as well as British ‘national’ cinema. In addition to monitoring the national atmosphere, the MoI, together with the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), had an interest in cinema as an art form, with a particular focus on the documentary realist genre, in their endeavours to manipulate public morale and morals. The Films Division of the MoI funded both documentaries and feature films, and thus had a direct involvement in the making of films. Directors such as Carol Reed, David Lean, and Humphrey Jennings were associated with the documentary realist genre, which dominated film production in the early years of the war, while Ealing Studios’ Michael Balcon, as a producer, is often seen best to epitomise wartime collaboration between film as art, on the one hand, and propaganda, on the other. For instance Sue Harper has argued that, during the war years, Balcon was ‘the producer most in sympathy with government aims’ (1996: 201). Films produced by Balcon in the years of the war, such as The Next of Kin (Thorold Dickinson 1942) and Went the Day Well? (Alberto Cavalcanti 1942), support such claims; these films promote values of national loyalty and unity, and punish treachery in their narratives.

Cinema, rather than literature, was consequently the dominant artistic medium of the Second World War, and it was not only the MoI that was inspired by British cinema in the 1940s: cinema attendance was high both during and immediately after the war. The quality of British cinema is also thought to have peaked in the period, which is often cited as ‘a golden age of British cinema’ (Richards and Sheridan 1987: 13).⁵ The emergence of a British ‘national’ cinematic style did not, however, occur without growing pains. Arguably British cinema is an outsider in itself, existing in what seems to be a constant inferiority complex in the daunting shadow of its big brother Hollywood, making it an ‘other’ cinema by definition.

Inevitably, in discussions of British film, Hollywood and the American film industry have been constant points of comparison. Towards the end of the Second World War discussions around Hollywood cinema intermingled with general feelings of anti-Americanism. In a June 1945 issue of the popular British film magazine Picturegoer, actress Phyllis Calvert analyses the comparisons between British and American cinema rather well when asked what she wants for British film:

I want to see British films judged fairly. At the moment, there is a tendency to compare our films with American films without considering the very different circumstances under which they are made. In America itself, the people do not have to make films with out-of-date equipment, short supplies and under conditions such as we have experienced in this country during these war years.

(23 June 1945: 6)

One of the recurring topics of debate has been the relative star power of domestic stars in comparison to Hollywood’s, debatably much shinier, ones. The discussion, perhaps unsurprisingly, always seems to be centred on female stars in particular, and during 1945, the last year of the war, the star power of British actresses seemed to be a hot topic on the pages of Picturegoer. In a July 1945 issue, for instance, columnist P. J. Dyer presents the provocative article ‘To Find a Star’, which dismisses the plain charms of Britain’s favourite film stars – Phyllis Calvert, Margaret Lockwood, Deborah Kerr, and Patricia Roc – in favour of American ones (21 July 1945: 6–7). In his article, Dyer collaborates with an American serviceman to muse, ‘What do the American Servicemen in this country think of our actresses?’ (7). In the same issue, the editor concernedly asks, ‘Have we no Lauren Bacalls?’ (21 July 1945: 3). Later in the year, July’s star issue caused an outrage among the Picturegoer readers, who flooded the magazine’s ‘Letters from Our Readers’ section in the 15 September issue (14). In the same issue, a response from Margaret Lockwood – appropriately entitled ‘Margaret Lockwood is Furious!’ – is released. The column delivers what the title promises as the ‘furious’ Lockwood writes, ‘It’s not only on my own behalf I’m furious. I’m furious at the casually slighting way our most popular girls have been treated’ (Picturegoer 15 September 1945: 3).⁶ These references to rivalry in relation to American cinema and Hollywood stars may, of course, seem painfully trivial in light of the devastating purging of ‘outsiders’ that was systematically taking place in Europe, and Germany in particular, during th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Amnesia and Awakening in Four Melodramas
• 3 Post-War Imaginings of Time and Space
• 4 Subjects, Signors, and Signoras: Naming and Interpellation
• 5 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index