Chapter 10

Enjoying the British Invasion: From Brit-Grit to Frock Flicks

In This Chapter

Depicting real life with Free Cinema and New Wave

Tracing the relationship between British TV and film

Watching the book, reading the film

Building box-office blockbusters

When screenwriter Colin Welland accepted his Oscar for Chariots of Fire (1981), he declared optimistically that ‘The British are coming!’ A full-scale invasion of Los Angeles by Brits in shorts has yet to take place, but the story of competition, complicity and collusion between the British and American film industries is as dramatic and satisfying as any Richard Curtis rom-com.

Instead of attempting to compete with Hollywood glitz and glamour, British film-makers have often taken the opposite approach by turning the camera onto the grittier side of life. Although these social realist film-makers originally saw television as the enemy of cinema, they soon came to enjoy its increased production funding.

The British film industry has survived ups and downs and continues to enjoy success in film adaptations of classic literature and vital participation in two of the most successful film franchises of all time – James Bond and Harry Potter. And yet, these successes raise the question: just how ‘British’ is British cinema these days anyway?

Getting Real: Brit-Grit

If you happen to be in the UK, try finding a friendly person of a mature vintage (perhaps at a bus stop) and ask them what they think of British films. Chances are they say something along the lines of ‘Well, they’re all a little bit miserable, aren’t they dear? Horrible housing estates, criminals, all that shouting. I do like that nice Judi Dench though.’

What is it about British cinema that leads people to think first of dour kitchen-sink dramas (about the domestic lives of working class characters)? Do British film-makers set out deliberately to create something distinctively different from Hollywood glitz and glamour or is it simply because these films tend to be cheaper to produce for a perennially cash-strapped industry? Is it even down to the British weather, because drizzle and grey skies make the perfect backdrop for misery – or at least melancholy?

This section ponders these mysteries while examining the history of Free Cinema, the New Wave and more recent award-winning examples of Brit-grit.

Paying for Free Cinema

Britain’s distinguished tradition of documentary film-making was forged during the 1920s when the British Empire was at its widest extent. Film-makers such as John Grierson and Herbert Ponting were fired up by the drive to study the world and its peoples and bring a little slice of them back to cinemas at home (for more on these documentary films, turn to chapter 8). For a while in the 1930s these film-makers even worked together for a government body known as the Empire Marketing Board.

But by the 1950s the British Empire was in decline, and the formerly noble desire to study the peoples of the world on film became tainted by the difficult history of the colonised nations. If, as some native peoples believed, a still camera can steal your soul from your body then what can a movie camera wielded by an imperial superpower take away?

In 1951, Clement Atlee’s post-war Labour government tried to wipe the slate clean and look to the future with a national celebration: the Festival of Britain. The Festival turned out to be a key turning point for the British Film Institute (BFI), which had been around since the 1930s but made little impact outside of education and film archiving. The BFI commissioned and built a futuristic concrete ‘Telecinema’ on London’s South Bank centre to showcase new cinema technologies such as (gasp) 3D.

After the Festival was over, the BFI repurposed the Telecinema into a National Film Theatre (NFT), bringing about a new era of film culture. Of course a British cinema culture had always existed, but this time it was all grown up and intellectual.

Eager wannabe cinéastes (that is, passionate and well-informed film fans) queued up outside the NFT in their turtle-neck sweaters to see the latest Italian neo-realist effort (see Chapter 11 for examples) or hear talks from the Grand Old Men of British cinema, such as Grierson himself. Several of these articulate and educated young people began to think that British film needed a jolly good shake-up and that they were just the fellows to do it.

Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson were already involved in film criticism and programming films for cinema exhibition, and had started to make short documentary films using newly portable cameras on the streets of London and farther afield. A new public scheme known as The Experimental Film Fund (also under BFI administration) paid for several of these films. Still struggling to get their films seen by the public, Anderson, Reisz and Co. came up with the brilliant idea of screening them together at the NFT under the intriguing banner of ‘Free Cinema’ (as in free from the commercial bounds of the wider film industry). And thus they engineered an important cinematic movement.

The Free Cinema films were mostly short documentaries shot with black-and-white handheld cameras. They avoided old-fashioned voiceover commentary and were experimental with both image and sound. Here are three good examples (in chronological order):

• O Dreamland (1956): Lindsay Anderson tours a fairground in Margate. Although the film features no commentary, impressionistic sound was added in post-production. Watch out for the creepy laughing clown.
• Momma Don’t Allow (1956): Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson film an evening at a jazz club in London’s working class district of Wood Green.
• Nice Time (1957): Two young Swiss film-makers Claude Goretta and Alain Tanner create this bright and lively impression of a night out in Piccadilly Circus.

Breaking the New (British) Wave

Free Cinema may have made a big splash among the cosmopolitan film culture vultures of Soho and the South Bank, but reaching the general public of cinema-goers across Britain required a different approach. Just across the English Channel, radical young French filmmakers organised themselves into a movement known as the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) in the late 1950s (see Chapter 11 for more), and their British peers were only too keen to follow suit.

The subsequent New Wave films built on the spare, documentary aesthetic of Free Cinema to create bigger stories about working-class characters who challenge the social status quo. As narrative films, they took one step away from Free Cinema’s engagement with reality, but are still ‘realist’ in the sense of attempting to recreate everyday life, warts and all. Their working class protagonists were generally men who expressed clear dissatisfaction with their lot.

Yorkshire-born but Oxford-educated Tony Richardson was already an experienced theatre director, and his English Stage Company staged the first production of John Osborne’s controversial play Look Back in Anger in 1956, creating a storm of publicity and the so-called angry young man movement. Richardson then set up Woodfall Films to produce a film version starring brooding Welshman Richard Burton.

Here are two films featuring wound-up young men:

• Look Back in Anger (1959): Jimmy Porter (Burton) has a wife who’s from a social class higher than his own, and boy does he make her suffer for it. When he’s not letting off steam playing jazz trumpet in the local clubs, his favourite pastime is having a go at the missus. He’s abusive and unfaithful, and he never stops talking about how angry he is.
• Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960): Karel Reisz’s film offers a more sympathetic example of the angry young man protagonist. Arthur Seaton, played with real swagger by Albert Finney, is a disaffected factory worker with a boring family life, but his response is to get out and grab what he wants (which is mainly pints of beer and women). Hedonism being infinitely more attractive to audiences than petty marital abuse, the film was a surprise hit and created a vital new star in Finney.

These and other stories of boys taking out their feelings on girls understandably attracted charges of misogyny, both from contemporary critics such as Penelope Gilliat and from film historians looking back at the movement (notably John Hill). But some films of the British New Wave were ground-breaking in their depictions of sexuality and gender. Room at the Top (1959), a steamy story of sex and social climbing, was given an X rating by the British Board of Film Classification. This rating placed it in the same category as pornographic films, but the Associated British Cinemas chain nonetheless agreed to show the film, and it turned out to be a huge success. Seen from today’s perspective, Room at the Top is hardly pornographic, but its script and Simone Signoret’s performance acknowledge female sexual pleasure in a manner that was genuinely taboo-breaking.

Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey (1961) is unusual among the New Wave films in having a central character who’s neither male nor particularly angry. Salford teenager Jo (Rita Tushingham) finds herself pregnant and homeless and then almost succeeds in setting up an extremely radical family unit featuring a gay male father figure. Jo’s friend Geoff’s sexuality, although unnamed, is clearly articulated through Murray Melvin’s mannerisms and costume, and even though the family unit fails at the film’s conclusion, the film doesn’t punish him for being gay.

Another memorable female character was found in John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar (1963). Julie Christie’s Liz is so luminously beautiful that she seems straight out of a Hollywood movie, and the film’s balancing of Northern grit with wild escapist fantasy also signalled a way forward for the New Wave directors who each eventually moved away from the realist style that they memorably championed.

Finding poetry in common places

As the British New Wave film-makers grew in stature or moved off in different directions, an increased level of visual and narrative experimentation crept back into serious British cinema.

Tony Richardson’s Woodfall Films had their biggest international success with Tom Jones (1963), a free-wheeling adaptation of the Henry Fielding novel that used tricks borrowed from avant-garde theatre, such as allowing Albert Finney’s Tom to address directly the cinema audience. For Lindsay Anderson, European art cinema (see Chapter 11) was the model that inspired his later films, including If … (1968) and O Lucky Man! (1973).

Whereas the political baton of the New Wave films passed from film to television during the 1970s and 1980s (see the nearby sidebar ‘Brit-grit on the box’), the 1990s and 2000s saw a revival of interest in specifically cinematic visions of working-class life. This revival was part of a wider upturn in the fortunes of the British film industry enabled by increased production funding from public sources, including tax breaks and the National Lottery.

A good example here is the work of Shane Meadows, whose early short films and features found support from BBC Films, EM Media (a regional funding body) and the Arts Council’s Lottery fund, though Meadow didn’t really find his audience until Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) and especially This is England (2006). Using recognisable realist techniques including actor improvisation, handheld camera work and location shooting, Meadows adds a particular blend of warm characterisation undercut with savage moments of violence.

Grim and unsettling violence, particularly of the domestic kind, plays a key role in other Brit-grit films including Gary Oldman’s Nil by Mouth (1997) and Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur (2011). Here the characters are very angry men indeed, but they’re much older than their New Wave equivalents – and they often turn their rage upon their own families. Nonetheless, these films seem to play well with critics and awards juries, maybe because such gatekeepers see so many films and only remember the truly shocking. Both these films, as well as Tim Roth’s equally challenging The War Zone (1999), were first directorial efforts from well-established actors. Perhaps actors love creating roles that their peers can really get their teeth (and their fists) into.

In contemporary Brit-grit, the angry young men of the New Wave have given way to displaced or disaffected people of all ages, genders and races, but the issues of poverty and social injustice remain. The recent revival of social realist cinema also differs from the New Wave in that it has enabled several female directors to emerge as major figures, including the following:

• Andrea Arnold: This director’s Fish Tank (2009) treads familiar ground in its housing-estate setting, but she’s subsequently applied her realist style to period costume drama with an adaptation of Wuthering Heights (2011).
• Lynne Ramsay: This Scottish director’s films are infused with a visual sensibility that she developed as a photographer. Her Ratcatcher (1999) and Morvern Callar (2002) are as surreal and dreamlike as they are gritty. Ramsay’s career then stalled due to an aborted attempt to adapt one bestselling novel, The Lovely Bones, before being spectacularly reborn with another adaptation, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011).

The next time you watch a Brit-grit film, either from the classic New Wave era or any of the more modern examples, try and think about the ways that the screenwriter, director and actors work together to produce an impression of real life. Pay attention to the dialogue, which is often in British regional dialects and may be improvised by the actors themselves. Try to notice the elements of film style that make up the effect of realism, such as the use of natural lighting or handheld shaky camerawork. A comparison across historical periods will clearly illustrate that what is considered realistic in one era becomes obvious or mannered in another.

Meeting of the Screens: Big and Small

This book is called Film Studies For Dummies, right? So you could be forgiven for wondering why I’m suddenly talking about television. Well, Britain is a good example of a small-ish country that was only really able to support a viable film industry of its own for a short period when cinema audiences were at their peak (between around 1930 and 1950). Since then, film financing has relied upon international co-productions, government initiatives and, particularly, money from television. This means that separating the film industry from the television industry in the UK is an extremely difficult and not especially useful exercise.

Along with the financial and creative connections between TV and film in the UK, British television is also an important force because of the particular make up of its national broadcasting service. The British Broadcasting Corporation (the BBC, known colloquially as Auntie, or the Beeb) is the world’s oldest and largest broadcaster, and the fact that it’s funded by a licence fee rather than by advertising makes it an international model for public service broadcasting. Of course the BBC is no longer the only force in British television, but its influence casts a long shadow.

In this section I explore how television transformed itself from dangerous young upstart to sympathetic funding partner of the film industry, as well as casting a (confused) eye at the often bizarre offspring of the two media: TV spin-off movies.

Assessing British television’s influence on film

If you want to know how the British film industry felt about the upstart medium of television in the 1950s, you can look at how the gogglebox features in films of the era.

In Ealing Studios’ Meet Mr Lucifer (1953), popular comic Stanley Holloway plays a stage actor in a show with no audience. He falls, bumps his head and has a hallucination where the devil tells him that he invented television to make people miserable! The rest of the film vividly illustrates this theory through a series of episodes in which regular folk have their lives ruined after receiving televisions. A housewife becomes so enthralled by the telly that she neglects her chores and family duties! An impressionable young man falls in love with a singing TV presenter and is driven mad with jealousy! Meet Mr Lucifer is a strange little film, but its message is unambiguous: TV is the spawn of the devil.

Or consider this small moment from a more famous film: Arthur Seaton (Albert Finney), the hard-drinking, womanising (anti-) hero of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), returns home from a hard day at work to his parents’ house, where his dad is avidly watching the telly. Conversation proves impossible, infuriating Arthur to the extent that he has to go out on the lash.

You can read such depictions of TV on film as representing the views of the educated middle classes towards the newer media, a belief that it was a new ‘opiate of the masses’ and a debased form of mind-numbing entertainment with the potential to seriously damage family life. But you also need to consider them as signs that film-makers and producers were seriously worried that the new medium would destroy their regular audience of habitual cinema-goers.

Cinema-going habits in Britain did indeed change dramatically between 1950 and 1980. Admissions to cinemas rapidly declined from the incredible peaks reached during World War II, when more than 1.6 billion tickets were sold annually, to a desperate low of less than 100 million admissions a year by the mid-1980s. That’s a fall in sales of around 95 per cent, enough to bring any industry to the brink of collapse.

But television wasn’t entirely to blame for this remarkable change in consumer behaviour. Demographics played a large role, for example, because the ‘baby boom’ of the late 1940s and 1950s meant that more adults were caring for children and probably unable to get babysitters. Rapid population growth also changed cities, with new suburbs being built to accommodate growing families. This left city centre cinemas farther away from their target audience, resulting in many closures and shabby upkeep of those that survived.

In essence, people had a choice: take a bus trip into town to a run-down, fleapit cinema, or stay at home in the warm with the telly. Unsurprisingly, many voted with their cosy, slippered feet. (For more on the baby boom’s influence upon American cinema, head to Chapter 9.)

Coming to the British film industry’s rescue: Channel 4

The early 1980s were desperate times for the British film industry. Cinemas were run-down and mostly empty, the major film production companies such as Rank and ABPC were dropping like flies, and the new Conservative government was merrily dismantling the bodies and policies that had previously offered limited public support.

British film-makers with commercial potential were generally forced to relocate to Hollywood, and so the UK waved cheerio to the talents of Alan Parker and brothers Ridley and Tony Scott. The outspoken Parker also wrote scabrous newspaper articles about the terminal lack of artistic ambition in British film, and particularly the limited scale and viewpoint of kitchen-sink-style dramas that were better suited to television.

Whether you agreed with Parker or not, British cinema had a clear and desperate need for an injection of new ideas and exciting young talent. When it eventually arrived, that boost came from the very source that Parker blamed for the industry’s state of decline. More specifically, it came from a new TV channel with a chartered responsibility to innovate and cater to previously under-served minority audiences: Channel 4.

In 1982, Channel 4’s first CEO Jeremy Isaacs followed the lead of European broadcasters by offering small amounts of finance for films to appear on TV in the UK and in cinemas abroad, in order to create content for the new channel. A few years later changes in media legislation meant that it became possible to offer theatrical release deals to these ‘TV films’, and Film Four really took off as a new force in the British film industry.

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) seemed on paper to be the kind of uncommercial ‘politically correct’ project that was only suited to minority television, being a love story between a white male skinhead and a Pakistani businessman. However upon its release it became not only a critical success, earning BAFTA and Oscar nominations, but also a surprise box-office hit in the UK and internationally. It launched the theatrical film career of Stephen Frears and gave the (now multiple Oscar-winning) actor Daniel Day Lewis his big break. Most importantly, it represented new hope for the beleaguered British film industry, and it established a finance model that proved remarkably successful over the coming decades.

Practically every successful British film since 1985 has something to do with Channel 4 in one way or another, whether fully financed by the channel, bought for TV rights or made through co-production deals with bodies such as the BFI and British Screen. A few more key examples amply illustrate how Channel 4 saved the British film industry:

• The Crying Game (1992): Irish director Neil Jordan’s noir-ish thriller about the IRA became an Oscar-winning crossover hit. Its now infamous gender-bending twist generated enormous publicity.
• Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994): Richard Curtis, Working Title and Hugh Grant all owe their later successes to this classic English rom-com with an American female lead.
• Trainspotting (1996): Danny Boyle’s hyper-kinetic visuals and dance music soundtrack made British (well, Scottish) cinema genuinely cool again.

Leaping from TV to cinema screen

Beginning in the 1970s, things began to get really weird in the relationship between television and film:

• Hammer Film Productions, world-renowned producers of gothic horror films, had their biggest domestic success not with a Dracula or Frankenstein adaptation but with a big-screen version of the mundane British sitcom On the Buses (1971).
• The most recognisable character to emerge out of 1990s British cinema is probably Rowan Atkinson’s grotesque Mr Bean.
• The most profitable 2011 film by far was Channel 4’s comedy spin-off The Inbetweeners, which grossed more than £41 million from a budget of just £3.5 million.

Critics may hate them, but audiences just can’t seem to get enough of British TV spin-off movies. The 1970s was the golden era of the sitcom spin-off, with On the Buses being followed by Steptoe and Son (1973), Are You Being Served? (1977) and Porridge (1979) to name but a few.

So what accounts for often unglamorous TV stars such as Reg Varney and Wilfred Bramble invading the big screen? Principally, these films were commercial safe bets in an era when the film industry was going through serious financial difficulties. Spin-offs are cheap to make, have a built-in audience appeal and offer the (rather dubious) pleasure of watching your favourite small-screen stars in glorious cinematic colour.

Most big-screen versions took advantage of slightly higher production values by shooting on location (still rare in 1970s TV), and the most common narrative conceit was to place a familiar cast of characters in an unfamiliar setting (preferably in Spain).

These films may not stand up to much critical scrutiny, but you can at least defend them as the last gasp of genuinely popular British films made primarily for British audiences, because most other types of British films have to be made with international audiences in mind. The sense of humour of TV spin-offs is also often in the direct lineage of the great British music hall and variety tradition. And they now exist as a kind of memory vault for sitcoms that would otherwise have been long forgotten. For the Love of Ada, anyone?

The strategy of production company Working Title in the 1990s was entirely different. British films now had to succeed internationally in order to make a profit – witness Four Weddings and a Funeral and all the Richard Curtis rom-coms with American lead actresses. By extension, when Working Title realised that Rowan Atkinson’s weird little TV character Mr Bean was something of a cult star across the world, they polished him into an international hit by setting Bean (1997) in America. And the strategy paid off, with global box-office takings to put Hollywood to shame.

The ‘coming to America’ trope was also exploited by Sasha Baron Cohen’s surprise hit Borat (2006), albeit to much less sanitised effect. Cohen’s previous attempt to cross over into cinemas with his Ali G character had been a failure, but Borat’s confrontational guerrilla-style shooting and exploitation of gullible American bystanders resonated with the then dominant sitcom mode: the documentary-style comedy of embarrassment typified by The Office (2001).

But Borat’s success was nothing compared to Channel 4’s The Inbetweeners, which is currently the highest grossing comedy of all time in UK cinemas. With its sympathetically drawn oddball characters and especially the sunny holiday setting, this film brings the British sitcom spin-off back to its 1970s roots.

Adapting Great Works: ‘Oh, Mr Darcy!’

Pop quiz: name the two characters who’ve been portrayed most frequently in film and television around the globe? Need a clue? Think silly hat and weird teeth. No, it’s not Zorro and Austin Powers. In 2012, the clever people at Guinness World Records announced that the two characters you’re most likely to see on screen are Sherlock Holmes and Dracula. The king of fictional sleuths has appeared 254 times and been played by more than 70 actors including Basil Rathbone, Robert Downey Jr and Christopher Lee. Holmes is just pipped at the post, however, by the blood-sucking Count who’s appeared in a staggering 272 films or TV shows.

Meanwhile the most adapted writers are William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. In my unscientific poll of the Internet Movie Database writers’ credits, Shakespeare has a whopping 975 credits and Dickens has an impressive 339. (Check this out yourself at www.imdb.com.) These stats can of course be endlessly debated and quibbled over, but the overall trend is beyond question: when creating literary characters that continue to resonate with readers and audiences across many different types of media, the tiny British Isles punches way above its weight. So why, forsooth, is this the case? I dig deeper in this section.

Reviving the classics, over and over

The British Empire’s cultural and educational reach, the development of the novel and other literary forms, and the status of English as a world language all play a significant role in the success of British literary adaptations. But as regards the simpler question of why make yet another screen version of Romeo and Juliet or Oliver Twist, the answer is … because audiences continue to enjoy them.

The pleasures of the familiar costume drama have a great deal in common with those associated with all film or TV genres (see Chapter 5). You return to these stories again and again because they’re simple to recognise, they balance repetition with originality and they provide an opportunity to reach beyond the plotline to explore character, performance or other production values such as costume and setting.

But another important factor is at work here that separates these adaptations from popular genres such as action films or romantic comedies. The difference is what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu describes as cultural capital. Put simply, watching these films makes you feel cleverer and more powerful due to the high status of the original literary works. If you studied the texts yourself in school or college, you probably feel even more smug and self-satisfied! From the film-makers’ point of view, the cultural capital embodied in these reworkings can often translate into financial capital (box-office pounds and dollars), as well as increased respect and status within their notoriously fickle industry.

So everyone’s a winner, right? Well, not quite, because all systems of capital have winners and losers. Think how you felt in school the first time you were presented with a page of Shakespeare’s blank verse. Stupid, right? That’s because cultural capital has to be earned via education, and that isn’t equally distributed across society. Simply put: Shakespeare and Dickens are real turn-offs for some audiences.

But some adaptations effectively translate the original text into another form altogether. Amy Heckerling’s 1995 rom-com Clueless is a great example of this type of ‘invisible’ adaptation. The film is loosely based on Jane Austen’s Emma, but the central characters of spoiled, manipulative rich girl, stupid best friend and initially annoying and superior male love interest are plucked from their context in Regency England and placed in 1990s Beverly Hills. The fact that Clueless works so well is partly down to an implied similarity between the two historical eras and locales, with Beverly Hills being just as socially stratified and divided by wealth as Austen’s 19th-century Surrey. Of course you have to know that the film is based on Austen’s novel to enjoy this kind of reading, which brings me back to Bourdieu.

The majority of those who bought a cinema ticket to see Clueless were entirely unaware or uninterested in the fact of its inspiration. But the movie still resonated with audiences. Why? I suggest because of notions of essential character types reaching across human narrative history. But that’s way too big a story for this chapter. (See the section on Levi-Strauss and character archetypes in Chapter 13.)

The past today: Heritage films

Academics love to argue about what to call things. They fill entire articles and even books with attempts to define and refine conceptual frameworks, often creating careers in the process of coining a new and persuasive key term. Heritage films is a case in point. The film industry and audiences already have plenty of names for this type of cinema – costume dramas, period films, prestige pictures, even the slightly derogatory ‘frock flicks’ – so why invent another one?

The main reason why the term has become commonplace in scholarly circles is that it connects the films with other related areas of study and debate. For instance, when Merchant Ivory films such as A Room with a View (1985) were wowing audiences around the world, historians and sociologists were also discussing a trend among politicians, charities and museum curators towards an increased commodification (being turned into profit-making concerns) of British historical artefacts and buildings. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government even had a Department of National Heritage whose remit included the whole of the arts, not just museums and stately homes.

So the use of the term ‘heritage’ connects such films to broader debates about the value of British history, how it’s preserved and crucially how it should be exploited economically. Of course, you can view commodification in more or less positive terms. Marxist-informed scholars (see Chapter 13) tend to see it as a Very Bad Thing, given that history should be freely available to all, not just those who can stump up the cash for a membership to charities such as English Heritage. Other interpretations are more forgiving. You can argue that monetising history at least makes it available to some people, as opposed to it being completely lost.

When you think through the value of heritage in relation to films, these debates tend to focus upon whether the fictional worlds are authentic in historical terms. For example:

• You can argue that the pretty, ornate aesthetic of a heritage film such as A Room with a View stultifies its audiences and trivialises the serious undercurrents of class, gender and race that run beneath the frocks.
• Or you can say that the pleasure audiences take from these films – whether from costume, setting or props – is just as significant as the intellectual debate they stimulate. And what’s more, these appreciations are often undervalued by critics because they associate them with female audiences.

Whether you criticise heritage films for superficiality or celebrate their democratic, accessible approach to history and narrative, you can’t deny that they’re a vital cornerstone of the British film industry. Here are just a few more examples (in chronological order) that demonstrate these films’ economic importance:

• The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933): Charles Laughton’s jolly monarch produced a massive international hit for Alexander Korda. Sadly, Korda failed to reproduce this success.
• Chariots of Fire (1981): Hugh Hudson’s Oscar-winning sporting drama turned its producers Goldcrest into major Hollywood players. Sadly, Goldcrest failed to maintain this success.
• Atonement (2007): This sweeping epic of love set against World War II featured a narrative twist. Sadly, Keira Knightley continues to enjoy considerable success.

So the next time you sit down to watch a heritage film (perhaps on TV with your mum) by all means enjoy the extravagant costumes and detailed period settings. But also be aware that there is always more going on behind the (beautiful) scenes, and that representations of gender roles and class divisions always say far more about the moment the film is made than the time it’s set.

Beating Hollywood at Its Own Game

A beggar woman steals a baby! But wait, the family dog is on the case. Rover tracks down the thief and then brings father along to reclaim his child. The day is saved, hurrah! Such is the simple but exciting plot of Rescued by Rover (1905), which was a hit for British producer Cecil Hepworth. Today film historians consider the film to be a crucial aesthetic innovator because it uses editing (see Chapter 4) to build a sense of space and a thrilling race against time.

Despite pioneers such as Hepworth, Britain’s position as a world leader in cinematic art was severely inconvenienced by World War I. By the time the 1920s were roaring and cinema was becoming a fully fledged industry, the expanding British cinema circuits were already chock-a-block with American movies.

In this section, I celebrate popular British genres and analyse the Britishness of the internationally beloved creations James Bond and Harry Potter. I dedicate this section to Rover!

Producing local films for local people

From today’s perspective, in this multimedia, multichannel Internet age, you can easily forget that cinema-going was once the principal source of entertainment and information about the world for the majority of people in Britain.

During cinema’s heyday, between 1930 and 1960, going to ‘the pictures’ was such a popular pastime in Britain that most people attended several times a week, watching a mixed programme of shorts, cartoons, newsreels and feature films. As a result, the relatively small-scale British film industry easily survived and even prospered while making films primarily for its domestic audience. Much of this modest, home-grown cinema has specific elements designed to appeal to British audiences, which don’t necessarily translate to international cinema-goers. For this reason, these films are often great for revealing British national tastes and character.

Make ’em laugh, make ’em laugh

The most popular British films of the 1930s and 40s were musical comedies starring British singers, dancers and comedians. This status isn’t altogether surprising when you consider the early history of film as an entertainment form.

Cinemas didn’t just spring up out of nowhere and start showing feature films. At first short novelty films were shown in other entertainment venues such as fairgrounds and music halls beginning in the late 1890s. So, many of Britain’s first film stars began their careers belting out sing-a-longs from the music-hall stage. Just think of George Formby, the ukulele-strumming, toothy Lancashire lad whose goofy looks and high, nasal singing voice were no barrier to him becoming a major film star. Or consider Gracie Fields, whose cheery, down-to-earth manner and natural rapport with her stage audiences translated into films such as Sing as We Go (1934) and Keep Smiling (1938), which were just the tonic for Depression-era Britain.

George and Gracie excelled at making British audiences laugh, using jokes and local references that undoubtedly baffled international audiences. (No wonder that people often cite comedy as the least exportable of film genres.) Yet more respectable British comedy of the type Ealing Studios produced can often tickle the funny bones of foreigners too. The comedies produced by Michael Balcon at Ealing have clever, literary scripts and a more realistic aesthetic, and are often built around stories of plucky little chaps overcoming corrupt institutions, which chimed particularly well with immediately post-war audiences.

By the late 1950s and 1960s, however, the cheeky, seaside postcard humour of the Carry On … films was getting Britain chuckling. Filled with staple comedy characters such as naughty nurses and randy patients, the Carry On … team managed to build a series of 31 films from double-entendre gags and reassuringly familiar performances from its regular stars.

Scare ’em stupid

As genres, musicals and comedies are particularly adaptable to local cultural traditions, but often more difficult to appreciate out of cultural context. By contrast, successful horror films (see Chapter 5) seem to seep easily across national borders and into the international arena.

The films made by tiny British production house Hammer in the 1950s and 60s are excellent examples of horror’s transnational appeal; they were hugely profitable at home and overseas. Hammer’s versions of the gothic literary classics Dracula (1958) and The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) are rich in period detail, shot in lurid full colour and played seriously by reputable actors such as Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

The company continually modified its house style to match consumer taste and demand, famously ramping up the sexual content of later films such as The Vampire Lovers (1970). And when cinema audiences went into steep decline in the 1970s Hammer moved out of film production and into TV with Hammer House of Horror (1980). Hammer’s business sense was just as scary as its movies.

Bonding with Bond, James Bond

As is perhaps fitting for a globe-trotting playboy spy, the production of the James Bond films has always been a truly international affair. The rights to Ian Fleming’s bestselling novels were bought by a Canadian producer, Harry Saltzman, who teamed up with an American, Albert (Cubby) Broccoli, to make the films for Hollywood studio United Artists. The first one, Dr No (1960), cast a Scottish lead, Sean Connery; a Swiss love interest, Ursula Andress; and another Canadian, Joseph Wiseman, as the titular villain. Exotic locations in Jamaica and the West Indies feature prominently. Nonetheless, many fans describe the long-running series as ‘quintessentially English’, pointing to Bond as one of the true icons of British cinema.

But if this Britishness is absent from its production, where does it reside exactly?

One suggestion is that Bond’s attitude towards the rest of world marks him out as truly British, especially given his birth during the era following World War II, a time properly described as the end of the British Empire. Bond appeals to British audiences, so this logic goes, because he represents a bygone age when the British thought of themselves as the moral backbone of the entire world. But this nostalgia for a colonial past doesn’t explain Bond’s popularity with international audiences, nor can the colonial considerations truly be considered a potent force today.

Nonetheless Bond’s longevity as a cinematic action hero is remarkable and is largely thanks to the producers’ brave decision at the end of Connery’s career as the sexy spy to cast another actor in the role. Thus the character became bigger than any individual star who plays him. This replaceability means that Bond can be periodically reborn with a different physical presence and a different set of moral imperatives suitable to the age at hand.

So Connery’s cocky and violent Bond gave way to the suave charmer Roger Moore whose Bond outings borrowed from sci-fi and horror films. By the time of Pierce Brosnan’s Bond in the mid-1990s, the films were ramping up the explosions to compete with other stars of the era, such as Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Brosnan’s descent into campiness was reversed by casting Daniel Craig as a world-weary spy somewhat adrift in the information age. Craig’s Bond films are also visually muted with a realist aesthetic found in contemporary films such as the Bourne trilogy. The huge success of Skyfall (2012) has appropriately reinvigorated the franchise at a time when British cinema is also full of renewed confidence.

Try to watch Bond films from different periods and compare the lead performances as well as the supporting roles and villains. You can learn a great deal from the ways that sex and violence are portrayed over the many decades of the franchise’s existence.

Casting a spell: Harry Potter and the magical franchise

The cultural phenomenon of JK Rowling’s boy wizard translated with unbelievable ease from page to screen, and the eight films in the resulting franchise have grossed almost $8 billion. A neat trick indeed.

But those box-office billions largely go to Hollywood, because the films were produced entirely with American finance, and the rights to exploit the franchise in other ways are held by the canny Rowling herself or by Warner Brothers. Fans in the UK can tour the production studios at Leavesden, but if you want to experience the Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park, you need to fly to Florida, and not by broomstick.

The film rights to Rowling’s books were sold in a flurry of publicity in 1999, when the press reported that the author had insisted on British actors in the coveted roles. The public is unlikely ever to know whether Rowling’s preference was a genuine deal-breaker or simply a useful public relations exercise, but Warner Bros. paid unusual respect to the designated nationality of the films’ characters. They also made the decision to base production entirely within the UK, which was actually a far more significant coup for the British film industry as a whole. Producers chose Leavesden Studios, an enormous former aircraft hanger near Watford, as the films’ production base, and so began a decade of intensive and overlapping pre-production, shooting, post-production and publicity that employed huge numbers of technical and support staff.

The huge amounts spent on production don’t only benefit those directly employed by the film industry. Contractors and suppliers across the country were able to bid for a piece of the Potter pie. Now that this activity has ended, a positive legacy of increased levels of skills and experience within the industry is likely for many years to come.

So how do the Harry Potter films sit in relation to the history of British cinema? Many people see them as a pinnacle of quality ensemble acting, for which British films are often praised. They certainly contain occasional flashes of the rich tradition of popular film-making in Britain, from Ealing Comedy (Harry as the little chap standing brave against the corrupt establishment) to Hammer Horror (the sinister Death Eaters are as wreathed in fog as many a Bray set, where Hammer were based). (I discuss Ealing and Hammer in the earlier ‘Producing local films for local people’ section.)

The films also have a great deal in common with heritage films (check out the earlier section ‘The past today: Heritage films’), including the period feel of the settings and costumes, and the films’ version of boarding school often feels straight out of the 1950s. Above all, the Harry Potter films stand for a period of hugely successful collaboration between British creativity and international finance and marketing that seems likely to set the pattern for what becomes of the British film industry as the 21st century progresses. For example, the Oscar and BAFTA-winning Gravity (2013) was also shot in the UK with overseas finance.

So next time you plan a Harry Potter movie marathon, try to watch them as examples of British cinema made on an international scale. As above, consider comparing the films to classic British comedies, horror films or period dramas. The films’ ten-year production period provides a very human and real example of its young stars aging on screen, but you should also think about the development of the franchise’s visual style, from the glossy and brightly-lit Philosophers Stone (2001) to the darker, grittier feel of the final episodes.