The Metropolitan Police and the British Film Industry, 1919-1956

Public Relations, Collaboration and Control

Alex Rock

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9781350295087
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350295094
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

This groundbreaking book investigates the murky relationship between the Metropolitan Police Press Bureau and the British film industry, shedding new light on police-media relations. Beginning with the culture of suppression during the interwar period, when retired police inspectors were threatened with loss of pension should they become involved with the film industry, the relationship shifted when a forgotten pioneer of public relations, Percy Fearnley, was appointed to the role of Metropolitan Police Public Information Officer in 1945. Fearnley was the first-ever journalist to take up this role and, through him, the Metropolitan Police embarked on a series of collaborations with the highest echelons of postwar British cinema, including J. Arthur Rank, Ealing Studios and Gainsborough Studios.

Using newly-declassified internal Metropolitan Police and Home Office correspondence, Alexander Charles Rock tells the story of the Metropolitan Police's project to manipulate the British film industry into producing propaganda under the guise of mainstream entertainment cinema. In doing so he offers a radical re-reading of the context of production of a number of canonical British films such as The Blue Lamp (1950), I Believe In You (1952) and Street Corner (1953).

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 ‘Now it’s entertainment, now it’s propaganda’: The processes of cultural production
• 2 Transparency or control: The Metropolitan Police Press Bureau 1919–38
• 3 A reassuring necessity: Mediating images of law and order in the Second World War
• 4 The police as producer: Percy Fearnley, the Metropolitan Police Press Bureau and the Making of The Blue Lamp
• 5 Real life as the Metropolitan Police insisted upon us seeing it: Division of labour and the collaborative production of Street Corner, 1950–3
• 6 ‘The machine at work’: Forensic filmmaking and The Long Arm, 1951–6
• 7 Conclusion: Further areas of research
• Bibliography
• Annotated Filmography
• Index
• Copyright Page