Andrew Spicer, University of the West of England

Review Article

The British Are Coming

Four Volumes in The British Film Makers Series, published

by Manchester University Press:

Bruce Babington, Launder and Gilliat, (2002), pp. 246;

ISBN 0 7190 5668 3

Steve Chibnall, J. Lee Thompson, (2000), pp. 380; ISBN 0

7190 6012 5

Peter Hutchings, Terence Fisher, (2001), pp. 198; ISBN 0

7190 5637 3

Neil Sinyard, Jack Clayton, (2000), pp. 288; ISBN 0 7190

5505 9

The ‘British Film Makers’ series made a somewhat

audacious entrance to the world of letters with Brian

McFarlane’s monograph on Lance Comfort, published in late

1999. Even within the recent bourgeoning interest in

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British cinema that has seen a spate of publications,

here indeed was a series that was unafraid to explore the

less well-known figures within the British film industry.

Two of the volumes considered here – Steve Chibnall’s

study of J. Lee Thompson and Neil Sinyard’s of Jack

Clayton – continue this determination to discuss figures

who have not received any sustained critical attention

and who have become effectively invisible, part of the

‘lost continent’ of British cinema whose dimensions are

still enormous. The films of Frank Launder and Sidney

Gilliat occupy a territory that was, until recently, only

too depressingly familiar to students of British cinema:

well-known, much liked, but never subjected to

disciplined academic scrutiny and therefore not

critically understood. Geoff Brown’s 1977 study was more

an initial survey of their work, linked to the pair’s own

comments on the circumstances of the films’ production.

Bruce Babington’s monograph for this series is much more

concerned with their choice of subject matter and

questions of interpretation rather than exegesis. The

case of Terence Fisher is rather different, Fisher has

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been a much discussed director since David Pirie’s A

Heritage of Horror (1973) and been the subject of Wheeler

Winston Dixon’s monumental A Charm of Evil (1991). Peter

Hutchings’ present study shows that the series is also

prepared to reappraise well-known figures in the light of

new approaches and orientations, and Hutchings is

committed to understanding the whole of Fisher’s work,

not just the horror films that have preoccupied

discussion.

In their general foreword, the series editors, Brian

McFarlane and Neil Sinyard, argue that although

individual contributors will be free to adopt their own

approaches and methodologies – indeed they also appear to

have considerable freedom as to the length of their

monographs – there is an overriding concern to

contextualise historically the particular film-maker: ‘a

concern for how the oeuvre of each film-maker does or

does not fit certain critical and industrial contexts, as

well as for the wider social contexts, which helped to

shape not just that particular film-maker but the course

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of British cinema at large’. In this way the series

reflects the pronounced tendency in film studies as a

whole to move way from the abstract and highly

determinist theorising that characterised the 1970s and

1980s towards a more nuanced and empirically grounded

engagement with the key issues of authorship, genre,

visual style and the variable contexts of production and

reception. Each of these four volumes is careful to avoid

the more doctrinaire (and romanticised) excesses of the

auteur theory which has dominated discussion of the

director’s contribution by emphasising the specific

circumstances in which each worked, and the nature of the

collaborations in which each engaged. Without necessarily

using that terminology, each is informed by the

understanding (derived from Bourdieu) that underpinned

McFarlane’s study of Comfort – that the film industry is

best characterised as a complex shifting field of

cultural production, hierarchically organised but

unstable, which offers certain positions that the

director can occupy that have variable financial and

cultural currency. Each of these four directors

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experienced distinct highs and lows in their careers,

reflecting the extreme volatility of the British film

industry, the absence of a solid infrastructure and a

secure economic base.

If this concern for contextualisation sounds highly

impersonal and rather dry, one of the real strengths of

these four volumes is the contributors’ own passionate

engagement with the work of their chosen film-maker,

which takes the form of close textual readings and a

willingness to make aesthetic judgements. Again and again

one feels the irresistible urge to return to the films

with renewed excitement and interest, in order to

appreciate better the qualities that these writers have

discerned. In addition to the carefully considered

discussions of individual films, all four writers show an

impressive command of their material, knowledgeable about

sources, alert to the importance of shifting production

conditions and to the need to be specific and precise

about reception through, in particular, analyses of

reviews. All contain some biographical exegesis without

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allowing this to dominate discussion. Each contributor is

at pains to write lucid and accessible prose, alive to

critical debates but not burdened with an over elaborate

theoretical apparatus, which makes these volumes

potentially attractive to general readers as well as

students, though each constituency may be irritated with

the ‘B’ format size, which tends to snap shut at any

moment. In these ways they build towards the ‘lively and

authoritative’ accounts of particular film-makers which

is the series’ aspiration. However, they are not entirely

or equally successful in this regard, and I want now to

consider in more detail the particular accounts of their

chosen director that each provides.

Bruce Babington’s study of Launder and Gilliat engages

with two complex problematics: the nature of their

collaboration and the pair’s status. Their partnership

was formed, after each had served a significant

apprenticeship within the industry mainly as

screenwriters, through jointly writing several

screenplays for both Hitchcock – The Lady Vanishes and

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Jamaica Inn both released in 1939 – and Carol Reed: Night

Train to Munich (1940), Kipps (1941) and The Young Mr Pitt

(1942). When the pair made their first film as writer-

directors: Millions Like Us (1943), they co-directed, but

finding that was confusing for actors, they decided to

alternate the role with that of producer after the

formation of Individual Pictures in 1944. As Babington

describes it, theirs was a very close working

relationship, but with sufficient flexibility to allow

each one to take the leading role in projects that were

nearest their own particular interests and a more

distant, advisory role in those that reflected the

other’s preoccupations. Although Babington emphasises

that their sensibilities were distinct and different –

Gilliat was bookish and analytical with an interest in

art cinema including German Expressionism, Launder more

inclined to the populist and the romantic and with a

penchant for focusing on the female-centred group – it

was, he argues, a highly complementary combination whose

products need to be understood as wholes, rather than

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anatomised to try to ascribe individual portions to each

man.

It was also a durable and prolific partnership: Launder

and Gilliat worked on over 130 completed projects and

could be characterised as ‘constantly working craftsmen

rather than self-proclaimed auteurs’ (p. 2). But in order

to address the problem of their status and stature,

Babington concentrates on the 1943-53 period in which

their ‘most significant’ films are clustered. The price

of this emphasis, as he acknowledges, is to short-change

certain films, and some important collaborators, but it

does allow him to analyse the key films at length.

However, Chapter 5 does analyse more sparingly a wide

range of their later films, nearly all thrillers and

comedies (including the ‘St Trinians’ series which were

mainly Launder’s province and which declined

conspicuously in invention and wit), drawing out

recurring themes and patterns. Particularly welcome is

the consideration of films that have received almost no

attention including the noir thrillers Fortune Is a Woman

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(1957) and Endless Night (1972), the latter with its

fascinatingly ambiguous and flawed first-person narrator

(Hywel Bennett), both arch-schemer and tragic dreamer.

But it is the films from the key 1943-53 decade on which

Babington makes his claim for Launder and Gilliat’s

importance. Detailed attention is given to their well-

known triumphs that include Millions Like Us, Waterloo

Road (1945), I See a Dark Stranger (1946) and The

Happiest Days of Your Life (1950), but even more

importantly to those that have not received their due.

This important critical recuperation encompasses the

innovative drama Two Thousand Women (1944) which

remained, despite the spate of war films in the 1950s,

the only one to deal with women POWs, and The Blue Lagoon

(1949), their most successful but least discussed film,

but is best exemplified in the masterful discussion (pp.

96-115) of The Rake’s Progress (1945) an ambiguous,

ambivalent film which troubled contemporaneous

commentators and whose tone and stance is difficult to

locate. It is, at one and the same time, a detached

critique of a Thirties ‘type’ of the upper-class cad

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whose time has passed, and a moving elegy to its anti-

hero, Vivian Kenway, played by Rex Harrison. Babington

argues that one of Launder and Gilliat’s strengths is

their choice and use of actors – notably Alastair Sim

whose benign eccentricity could shade into the sinister –

and he articulates precisely the importance of Harrison

to the film: ‘The veneer of Harrison’s highly polished

charm fascinates partly because of the cracks that are

visible, and such suggestions are crucial in The Rake’s

Progress where tremors of subterranean, inchoate

dissatisfaction within the hero’s seamless style are part

of the film’s deepest meanings.’ (p. 101) It is

Harrison’s ‘fatal charm’ which embodies the

contradictions of the figure of the rake, at once morally

reprehensible, and liberating, one who refuses to accept

social norms and whose picaresque ‘progress’ serves to

expose the hypocrisies of ‘civilised’ society. Babington

also emphasises the importance of the father-son

relationship and deftly analyses the death of Colonel

Kenway (Godfrey Tearle), a scene of exceptional

poignancy. The Rake’s Progress is also one of the finest

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of Launder and Gilliat’s screenplays, both structurally

and in the witty dialogue, qualities that Babington

argues convincingly are cinematic rather than literary or

theatrical and compensate for their generally

unadventurous visual style.

Overall, Babington is looking for a formulation that will

value Launder and Gilliat’s achievement without recourse

to inflated ascriptions of a personal vision or

unmistakeable style. His claims for their significance

are therefore circumspect and carefully nuanced: ‘more

than ordinary filmmakers, touched with genius in perhaps

half a dozen films, and with more than common abilities

in many others’ (p. 209). His sense of them is as

responders to rather than initiators of cultural change,

but their response is intelligent and complex and

therefore highly revealing. The tantalisingly unrealised

projects about Marx and the Industrial Revolution are not

a lost centre, Babington argues, but part of a more

amorphous, free-wheeling sensibility that is difficult to

locate ideologically. Like many others, Babington judges

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that Launder and Gilliat are at their best when mildly

subversive rather than affirming any recognisable

position.

Babington’s account of their collaboration and their

status together with the critical context of their work

and their relationship to the historical and social

context, particularly the war and the difficult

transition to peace, the fabric out of which their best

films are woven, is detailed and convincing. However, he

is less successful in defining their importance to

British cinema, which is partly the result of his

concentration on textual analysis rather than matters of

context and genesis. There is little attempt to situate

Launder and Gilliat’s films within their precise

industrial contexts, the very different conditions of

production they experienced working first for Ted Black

at Gainsborough, before becoming part of Rank’s elite

band of Independent Producers, and then moving to

Alexander Korda’s London Films when the Rank empire began

to implode. In particular an opportunity was missed to

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discuss their role as both film-makers and impresarios

when, together with the Boultings, they joined the Board

of a reconstituted British Lion in 1958, the ‘third

force’ in the British film industry which was to play

such a significant role over the next decade.

J. Lee Thompson was always appreciated by his fellow

film-makers, but not by critics, with the exception of

Raymond Durgnat, and has therefore been consigned to a

black hole of condescension and ignorance from which

Steve Chibnall’s study, the longest in the series,

attempts to rescue him. Chibnall is more attentive to the

shifting industrial contexts, particularly because he is

concerned to demonstrate the adaptability of Lee

Thompson, whose fairly prolific output of some 45 films

covering every genre, makes him ‘perhaps the most

versatile director ever produced in Britain’ (p. 2). His

versatility was based on his intimate understanding of

the industry from a variety of perspectives, having

received training in acting, editing and scriptwriting

(he also wrote several plays and his directorial debut,

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Murder Without Crime (1951) was from his own play), as

well as having a keen appreciation of cinematography.

Although Lee Thompson had a lengthy career, he was

unfortunate in his timing, making internationally

orientated action adventure epics when the New Wave was

attracting attention to specifically British subjects,

and working in America when British films were in vogue.

His status was also damaged by I Aim at the Stars (1960),

a biographical film about Werner von Braun, the German

rocket scientist who designed the V-2 missiles which had

had caused such terror in London in the last few months

of the war, but who had been rehabilitated by the

Americans into a national hero for his development of the

first satellite. Critics accused Lee Thompson of

conniving in a distasteful apologia that was actually

offensive to British audiences. It was also a radically

uneven career as Chibnall sees it, a highly creative

period between 1955 and 1961 making challenging British

films, was followed by a thirty year stint in Hollywood

where, after making his best-known film, Cape Fear (1962),

as Lee Thompson himself acknowledges, he lost his way,

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abandoning his distinctive ‘signature’, becoming a well-

paid, in demand, but routine director of largely

formulaic films. He did return on occasions to Britain,

making films backed by American finance, that included

the interesting and visually accomplished horror film Eye

of the Devil (1968), and Before Winter Comes (1969), an

underrated film set in occupied Austria, a displaced

persons’ camp on the border between the British and

Russian zones at the end of the Second World War and

Country Dance (1970), based on James Kennaway’s novel,

which was too obscure for most tastes.

However, the later decline and critical disdain should

not obscure the importance of the earlier work. Although

Chibnall deals with the contexts of production and

reception of all twenty of these films, he reserves

detailed attention for eleven. These demonstrate his

major claim for Lee Thompson’s significance, that he was

not simply a versatile craftsman but an auteur,

innovative and distinctive in subject matter and visual

style, whose films exhibit unmistakable continuities. His

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best work demonstrates his ‘commitment to frankness,

innovation and socially conscious film making’ (p. 2), a

cinema of ‘moral dilemma’ (p. 8), which led to several

public spats with the censor. This commitment

characterises his small-scale back and white films such

as The Yellow Balloon (1953) and Woman in a Dressing Gown

(1957), as well as his action adventure epics such as Ice

Cold in Alex (1957), North West Frontier (1959), and The

Guns of Navarone (1961). Lee Thompson’s concern with moral

dilemmas that illuminate social tensions and hypocrisies

are shown at their most intense in films about

sympathetic murderers including Tiger Bay (1959), which used

the ‘Deutscher Star’ Horst Bucholz, a German heart-throb,

indicating the increased importance of the continental

market, and Yield to the Night (1956). The latter is the

subject of Chibnall’s lengthiest (pp. 70-98), and most

compelling textual analysis, which includes a superb

account of the dramatic opening sequence, discussion of

the counter-casting of Diana Dors in what became her most

memorable role as Mary Hilton, condemned to death for the

murder of her lover, and an exploration of the film’s

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frankness about women’s (and working class) sexuality,

its the courageous attempt to enlist sympathy for a

convicted murderer, and its delineation of institutional

and state hypocrisy. This analysis is placed within an

illuminating discussion of the film’s context, a Royal

Commission investigation into capital punishment and the

execution of Ruth Ellis in July 1955, the last woman to

be hanged in Britain. Although Joan Henry’s novel on

which the film was based was published in 1954 – Lee

Thompson had already made The Weak and the Wicked (1954),

an adaptation of her prison memoirs Who Lie in Gaol – and

the film shot before Ellis was hanged, Yield to the Night

was dogged by accusations of exploitation. It was also

hobbled by the pusillanimity of the British Board of Film

Censors which imposed an ‘X’ certificate, but remains a

courageous and ambitious film, both in its subject matter

and in its often innovative visual style.

Although Chibnall argues that such films justify Lee

Thompson’s auteur status, he is attentive to the key

collaborations that underpinned his work, notably with

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Joan Henry whom he married, editor Richard Best,

cinematographer Gilbert Taylor and art director Robert

Jones. Chibnall also demonstrates that only occasionally

could Lee Thompson engineer the conditions where his

creative preoccupations could flourish. As a contract

director for ABPC he had to undertake the fatally

compromised musical The Good Companions (1957) based on

the J.B. Priestley novel, which attempted to be both

nostalgic and a celebration of the new teenagers, perhaps

as a consequence of being loaned out to Rank for two

musicals As Long As They’re Happy (1955) and An Alligator

Named Daisy (1957), where he his direction strove to be as

unobtrusive as possible. However, when he was loaned out

to Rank again for North West Frontier, his status had

increased and he was able to gain more creative control.

As Chibnall argues, his emigration to America was

symptomatic of a declining British film industry where

continuous employment was impossible. Chibnall’s

description of Lee Thompson career is therefore carefully

historicised, and his achievements are more persuasively

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accounted for by this careful delineation of the

particular constraints and pressures in which he worked.

Peter Hutchings’ study of Terence Fisher is anxious to

retain a sense of someone working within a volatile and

declining British film industry, emphasising that

directing is a profession rather than or as well as an

artistic vocation. But he also wishes to emphasise that

Fisher is someone whose horror films have been the object

of intense cinephile attention because they are far more

memorable and engaging than other directors working in

similar position within the industry, and have had a

profound influence upon the development of the genre

internationally. Although Fisher himself was notoriously

prosaic about his own accomplishments and emphasised the

primacy of the script, Hutchings’ study is keen to locate

instances of a distinctive visual style that can provide

evidence of a distinctive talent even if he was not the

visionary auteur with a particular world-view that Pirie

discerned.

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Chapter 2 – ‘Fisher before horror’ – is a welcome

consideration of Fisher’s work at Highbury and

Gainsborough studios, before the move to Hammer that was

to have such a profound effect on his career and

subsequent reputation. Highbury, as Hutchings emphasises,

was Rank’s ‘B’ feature nursery, where fledgling

directors, technicians and actors could be tested out on

inexpensive productions made under severe constraints,

watched over by the eagle-eyed John Croydon. Fisher’s

first film as a director – he had worked as an editor

from 1936 onwards mainly at Gainsborough and Warner-First

National – was Colonel Bogey (1947) a typical Highbury

production, a 51 minute comic ghost story made as a

supporting feature for around £10,000. He worked on two

other features at Highbury, To the Public Danger and Song

for Tomorrow, both released in 1948. The former is of

considerable interest as, despite the characteristic

short running time, small cast and minimal sets,

Hutchings argues that Fisher manages to invest a film

that had its origins as a government road-safety campaign

with a ‘sense of postwar ennui and aimlessness’ (p. 45),

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though much of this might be attributable to Patrick

Hamilton’s radio play on which the film is based.

Indeed, my problem with Hutchings’ otherwise admirable

attention to Fisher’s early work is that he tends to

minimise the importance of the script and the role of the

producer in seeking to discern a developing visual style.

His discussion of Portrait from Life (1948), Fisher’s

first film at Gainsborough and a considerable step up

into first features (albeit modestly budgeted ones), is a

highly astute thematic and visual analysis of the film,

but neglects any discussion of the importance of the

screenplay which was principally the work of Muriel and

Sydney Box. As Box was also the head of the studio, he

would have taken the key decisions about the film,

including assigning Fisher to the production, but with

Anthony Darnborough having a more influential role as the

specific producer for this film. At Gainsborough, Fisher

had to take whatever came his way and therefore the

romantic comedy Marry Me (1949) represents another

assignment rather than the ‘inconsistency’ Hutchings

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discerns (p. 53). Fisher did have more scope on his final

two Gainsborough films, the gloomy psychological

melodrama The Astonished Heart (1949) and the distinctive

costume film So Long at the Fair (1950), and Hutchings’

analyses convincingly identify the beginnings of Fisher’s

‘mature’ style.

When, like nearly all the other studio employees, Fisher

lost his job when Rank closed down Gainsborough Studios

in 1949, he became even more the recipient of whatever

work came his way. It may come as a surprise to those who

think of Fisher as solely a horror director that he made

no less than fourteen crime thrillers and three science

fiction films in the next seven years. These were all

second features with budgets of £15-20,000, for a variety

of companies (including Hammer), which offered minimal

opportunities for a director’s creativity, as Hutchings

argues. Although he subjects these ‘lost’ films to

analysis, I think he short-changes them somewhat,

particularly Face the Music and The Stranger Came Home

(both released in 1954), two quite effective British

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films noirs whose composition, lighting and editing, in

which Fisher would have been closely involved, lift them

above the general level of the ‘B’ feature crime film.

It was The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), his first horror

film, which transformed Fisher’s fortunes and those of

its production company, Hammer films. In the first

chapter, Hutchings initiates an interesting discussion of

the horror genre, particularly the need to understand

genres as historically conditioned so that any claims for

their conservative or transgressive functions have to be

understood within specific cultural contexts. This paves

the way for his careful and detailed discussion of

Fisher’s output within the context of British gothic

horror. Hutchings regards the 1957-62 period (beginning

with The Curse of Frankenstein and ending with The Phantom

of the Opera) as the high point of Fisher’s career in

which his directorial skills developed rapidly. Hutchings

shows, for instance (pp. 85-94), how much more

accomplished Fisher’s second film Dracula (1958), is even

than Curse. He argues that Dracula is a more subtle and

complex work than is conventionally acknowledged and

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concludes: ‘In large part, this quality can be assigned

to Fisher’s contribution, with his perfectly judged

pacing and his compositional skill proving a key factor

in the formation of this most striking and accomplished

of horror films.’ (p. 94) Hutchings does not sustain his

analytical rigour in the discussion of the later films;

his consideration of The Mummy and The Stranglers of

Bombay (both 1959) for instance, drifts into more

speculative and abstract thematic analysis. And his case

for the precise nature of Fisher’s contribution to these

films would have been considerably strengthened if

Hutchings had said more about the specific conditions of

production at Hammer, which have been extensively

documented.

After 1962 Fisher’s career was more fragmented and

inconsistent, partly attributable to his two year

departure from Hammer and to the company’s own upheavals

through internal changes and the increasing

capriciousness of American finance. The later part of his

output contains excellent films such as The Gorgon (1964)

which alternate with indifferent science fiction films

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including Island of Terror (1966), and tired variations on

the horror formula such as Frankenstein and the Monster

from Hell (1974), Fisher’s final film. However, Hutchings

does detect a change in attitude towards women, there are

‘moments of female autonomy’ albeit in overwhelmingly

masculinist structures, as with the terrifying female-

monster in The Gorgon. Overall, Hutchings understands

Fisher as what could be called a metteur-en-scène whose

films are less characterised by the expression of an

authorial vision than ‘with the application of certain

film-making skills, notably his compositional and staging

abilities’ (p. 163). Hutchings avoids this term, because

he also wants to claim that his films display consistent,

or fairly consistent, thematic concerns, which I think is

problematic given the importance of the scripts. However,

in conclusion Hutchings returns again to Fisher’s

importance for cinephiles, someone whose films have the

power to stay in the memory and to transcend their

circumstances.

Jack Clayton has remained an invisible figure in

25

discussions of British cinema, someone who has not been

reclaimed either as an auteur or as a proficient genre

practitioner. Neil Sinyard’s study is most unashamedly

auteurist of the four, but his claims for Clayton’s

achievements are again grounded in detailed empirical

investigation and analysis, partly based on access to

Clayton’s papers, which have not been drawn upon before.

Drawing upon these gives Sinyard’s monograph a depth and

comprehensiveness not available to previous studies of

Clayton, though these have been confined to single

essays. In a particularly fascinating chapter,

‘Unfinished business: the unrealised projects of Jack

Clayton’ (pp. 206-222), Sinyard discusses the twenty-

seven projects which never reached the screen. Some are

discussed in illuminating detail, but others are simply

left as ‘but the film was never made’ for reasons that

are unexplained, leaving one to speculate whether

Clayton’s papers simply do not provide enough detail and

the reasons therefore unavailable; or whether Sinyard

does not consider them interesting enough to justify

further discussion. He deals with three in detail:

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Casualties of War (1970), Massacre at Fall Creek (1975)

and Silence (1978), perhaps because the screenplays are

available for analysis and all deal with difficult issues

of ethnicity and violence. The Pentagon scuppered

Casualties of War because the subject matter – the court

martial of four American soldiers accused of kidnapping,

raping and then murdering a young Vietnamese woman – was

obviously considered too damaging. Massacre at Fall Creek

was cancelled because of difficulties over casting and

treatment, and Silence (based on James Kennaway’s

posthumously published novel) because of changes in

personnel at Twentieth Century-Fox. These unrealised

projects are fascinating because they offer a glimpse of

the iceberg that actually constitutes the film industry,

where what audiences finally watch on their screens is

the visible tip of a gigantic edifice that is

scandalously wasteful of talent, time and money, and one

which is notoriously prone to the concatenation of

unpropitious circumstances which prevent a project from

coming to fruition.

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They also illuminate the difficulties that Clayton

experienced, especially in the latter part of his career.

However, as Sinyard documents so admirably, Clayton was

always a maverick, idiosyncratic, combative figure, who

found working within a conformist industry difficult,

especially given the hostile critical and cultural

climate throughout most of his working life. Clayton was

isolated from any major movements within the British film

industry, and his most famous film, Room at the Top

(1959), is also his least typical as he was not part of

the Angry Young Man or the British New Wave. In fact

Clayton refused to make films in which he did not

wholeheartedly believe and left a slender oeuvre of only

nine films. Although he had no preference for particular

subjects or genres, Sinyard detects an ‘underlying

consistency of style and theme that suggests that,

however varied the material, there is an individual

vision that gave coherence and unity to the oeuvre.’ (p.

5) Paradoxically, the very fact that all Clayton’s films

are adaptations, allowed him to work more personally on

the material, searching like his mentor John Huston for

28

the key shot that would provide the entry into the

particular world of the source, reshaped into an

individual filmic vision. In Sinyard’s view, although

Clayton considered himself to be a commercial film-maker,

his aspirations leaned towards arthouse films, and his

style, while highly distinctive, conforms to David

Bordwell’s definition of the art film style where an

‘authorial expressivity’ allows the shift from objective

to subjective modes of narration to be achieved within a

single film, coupled with an intrusive mise-en-scène.

Like the other authors, Sinyard’s approach is

chronological, tracing the major moments of Clayton’s

career, and analysing each film in detail. He ran away

from school to work at the local studio, Denham, where he

was a glorified errand boy called third assistant

director, before joining the RAF during the war and

directing one film for the Ministry of Information,

Naples Is a Battlefield (1944). After working as

production manager and associate producer, he directed

the acclaimed short The Bespoke Overcoat (1955), with a

29

budget of only c. £5,000 made for the John and James

Woolf’s Remus Films. This success led to Clayton’s

directing Room at the Top as the Woolfs had optioned John

Braine’s novel. Sinyard’s analysis of the film is

characteristically astute, attentive and painstaking. He

is particularly compelling in his discussion of the

film’s conclusion, which Sinyard regards as ‘one of

British cinema’s most harrowing wedding ceremonies and

most ironic happy endings’ (p. 52). Perhaps his

discussion of The Innocents (1961) (pp. 81-107) is his

finest because it is so subtly alive to the film’s

ambiguities and peculiar resonances, although The Pumpkin

Eater (1964) and the flawed Our Mother’s House (1967) are

also excellent examples of the craft of close textual

analysis. The attention to Clayton’s work in Hollywood –

The Great Gatsby (1974) and Something Wicked This Way

Comes (1983) – seems slightly out of proportion in a book

on British cinema, but there is ample space for

discussion of his final British film, The Lonely Passion

of Judith Hearne (1987) based on Brian Moore’s novel

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which Clayton had first thought of filming in 1961, and

the concluding television film, Memento Mori (1992).

As he asserts, Sinyard’s case for Clayton’s importance is

primarily an aesthetic one, a director whose films

deserve attention from people who care about the art of

cinema, therefore these painstaking analyses work very

powerfully to make his case. They also demonstrate that

although he is a stylist, Clayton’s films are humane and

morally enriching: ‘They pay tribute to the courage with

which ordinary people live their lives, often in

adversity.’ (p. 18) However, Sinyard’s concern for

Clayton’s place within the development of British cinema

gets less attention. Again the weakness is that the

workings of the industry are not fully dealt with as

Sinyard has a tendency to polarise art and commerce,

sliding into the more romantic extremes of the auteur

approach.

These four volumes constitute a substantial contribution

to British cinema studies, and form part of a flourishing

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series, which also includes Benjamin Halligan’s monograph

on Michael Reeves (2003) and imminent volumes on Terence

Davies and Joseph Losey. The formerly ‘unknown cinema’

is, at last, in the process of being mapped, its

particularities and peculiarities becoming understood and

better appreciated. In the process of assessing their

directors’ achievements, the scholars reviewed here have

also illuminated major areas of the British film

industry, notably the often despised 1950s – the

‘doldrums era’ – now emerging as a period of great

interest and complexity. However, something of the

impulse behind McFarlane’s opening study of Lance

Comfort, his emphasis that it is ‘more interesting to see

how the films came to be as they were’ rather than to

offer definitive readings of the films themselves, has

been lost. The studies considered here are, in my

opinion, overly preoccupied with close textual readings

with the consequence that they tend to be less

informative about the workings of the film industry than

they could have been. It would be a welcome development

if future volumes could consider figures other than the

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director, to appraise the contributions of screenwriters,

cinematographers and producers, and also to consider more

fully the ways in which many film directors and other

film-makers also moved into television, examining the

important cross-overs between the two industries. In

these ways the series could make any even more valuable

contribution to an appreciation of the true nature of

British cinema.

Author:

Dr Andrew Spicer, Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture,

University of the West of England (UK).

Work Address:

Faculty of Art, Media and Design

University of the West of England

Bower Ashton Campus

Kennel Lodge Road, off Clanage Road

BRISTOL

BS3 2JT

England.

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Tel. 0117 328 4778

Fax. 0117 344 4745

E-mail Andrew2.Spicer@uwe.ac.uk

Home Address:

Flat 2, 16 Burlington Road

Redland

BRISTOL

BS6 6TL

Tel. 0117 973 2349

Email. aspicer53@aol.com

Mini-Biography:

Dr Andrew Spicer is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at the Faculty of Art, Media and Design, University of the West of England and Programme Leader MA Film Studies and European Cinema. He has published widely on British cinema, including Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema (I.B. Tauris 2001), and is the author of Film Noir (Longman, 2002). He is currently editing a collection of essays on European Film Noir and completinga study of Sydney Box, both to be published by ManchesterUniversity Press, and a monograph on Four Weddings and a Funeral for the British Film Guides series published by I.B. Tauris.

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