British Cinema and the Cold War: The State, Propaganda and Consensus 9780755695751, 9780755695744

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List of Illustrations

1. The Demi-Paradise (1943)

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2. Forbidden Territory (1934)

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3. High Treason (1951)

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4. Operation Malaya (1953)

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5. The Man Between (1953)

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6. The Prisoner (1955)

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7. John Halas at work on Animal Farm (1954)

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8. Animal Farm (1954)

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9. 1984 (1956)

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10. 1984 (1956)

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11. Quatermass II (1957)

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12. The War Game (1966)

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13. Chance of a Lifetime (1950)

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14. The Man in the White Suit (1951)

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15. The Angry Silence (1960)

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16. Friends and Neighbours (1959)

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17. The Damned (1961)

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General Editor’s Introduction

The effects of the Cold War on American cinema have been much studied. But the Cold War also cast its long shadow over British culture and society. In this exhaustively researched, persuasively argued and compulsively readable book, Tony Shaw gives us the first full-length study of the effects of the Cold War on British cinema. Nothing escapes his eagle eye, from the garlanded ‘A’ feature film such as The Third Man, recently voted the best British film of all time, to the grade ‘Z’ quickie, Down Among the Z Men. He encompasses many genres, from thriller to comedy, from science fiction to imperial epic. He examines thematically the images of ‘the enemy within’ and ‘the enemy without’, the perceived communist threat to good industrial relations and the debate about nuclear weapons and nuclear war. Fascinatingly he traces the history of the production of the film versions of the great Orwellian antitotalitarian works Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, revealing the involvement of the CIA in the former and comparing the film and television versions of the latter. He also explores the opportunities for dissent, through for instance the activities of pseudonymous American blacklistees. He maintains throughout a useful contrast and comparison with both Hollywood and those products of Eastern European cinema shown in Britain. Shaw’s careful contextualization and thorough analysis re-establishes the significance of a large number of neglected British films of the 1950s – High Treason, The Net, The Prisoner, Animal Farm and The Young Lovers among others – and demonstrates the role played by the cinema in creating an anti-communist consensus in Britain from the 1940s to the 1960s. Jeffrey Richards

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For Shirley

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank the following individuals and institutions for the help they gave in providing advice, information or sources: Tony Aldgate; BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham; Daniel Bell; Bodleian Library, Oxford; Roy Boulting; British Film Institute Library, London, particularly Janet Moat and Saffron Parker; James Chapman; Charles Cooper; Bryan Forbes; Stanley Forman; Colin Gardner; Stephen Guy; Halas and Batchelor Archive, London, especially Vivien Halas; Hertfordshire University Library; Melvin J. Lasky; Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics and Political Science; F. Borden Mace; Peter Mellman; National Museum of Labour History, Manchester; Public Record Office, Kew; Jeffrey Richards; James Robertson; Ray Ryan; Dan Somogyi; Southampton Institute International Animation Research Archive, especially John Southall; Sol Stein; Frances Stonor Saunders; Tamiment Library, New York University, New York, especially Peter Filardo; Michael Thornhill; Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri; David Turner; Harold Whitaker; Owen White. All of the above share the credit for what is good in the book. For its flaws, errors and inaccuracies, I alone am responsible. The Stills, Posters and Design Division of the British Film Institute and Southampton Institute International Animation Research Archive provided the illustrations in this book. Grateful acknowledgement is extended to the BBC, Canal+ Image UK Ltd., Carlton Television, Channel 4 Television, Columbia Pictures, and Halas and Batchelor for allowing the reproduction of stills in which they hold copyright. Financial assistance was provided by

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British Cinema and the Cold War the Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research. Along the way family and friends have supplied technical assistance and an essential forum for the fruitful discussion of movies. Special thanks must go to John Bell, Cyril Deans, Louise Heckles, Ifan Hughes, Pete Kind, Andy Nadin, Ernest and Patricia Shaw, Billy and Sue Thompson, and Peter Venables. I am indebted to all those at Mansfield Road Football Club, Oxford for helping to keep Sunday mornings sacrosanct despite deadlines, and to Manchester United Football Club for providing an ageing centreforward with profound inspiration. This book is dedicated to Shirley Heckles: teacher, counsellor and partner.

List of Abbreviations

ABPC ACCF ACT ACCT BBC BBFC CCF CDC CEA CFU CIA CND COI CPGB CPSU CPUSA DEFA DDR ECA EIU ERP FBI GBPC

Associated British Picture Corporation American Committee for Cultural Freedom Association of Cine-Technicians Association of Cinematograph and Television Technicians British Broadcasting Corporation British Board of Film Censors Campaign for Cultural Freedom Civil Defence Corps Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association Crown Film Unit Central Intelligence Agency Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Central Office of Information Communist Party of Great Britain Communist Party of the Soviet Union Communist Party of the United States of America Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft (East Germany’s state-owned film organization) German Democratic Republic European Cooperation Administration Economic Information Unit European Recovery Programme Federal Bureau of Investigation Gaumont-British Picture Corporation

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British Cinema and the Cold War GFD HUAC IPD IRA IRD ITN KGB KPD MFU MGM MI5 MI6 MOD MOI MPS NATO NBC NFFC ODSK OPC PSB SCR SFC TUC UFA UN USIA USIS WFA WFPL

General Film Distributors Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives Information Policy Department Irish Republican Army Information Research Department Independent Television News Soviet Intelligence and Security Service Communist Party of Germany Malayan Film Unit Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Military Intelligence 5 (British security service) Military Intelligence 6 (British secret intelligence service) Ministry of Defence Ministry of Information Motion Picture Service North Atlantic Treaty Organization National Broadcasting Corporation National Film Finance Corporation Society of Friends of the Soviet Cinema Office of Policy Coordination Psychological Strategy Board Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR Socialist Film Council Trades Union Congress Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (Universal Film Studio, Germany) United Nations United States Information Agency United States Information Service Workers’ Film Association Workers’ Film and Photo League

Introduction

All wars, especially cold wars, are fought in part through words and images. Information – and its concomitant, propaganda – was central to the 40-year battle fought between the ‘East’ and the ‘West’ after the Second World War. Once the Soviet Union had achieved nuclear parity with the United States in 1949, a direct military clash between the superpowers was generally considered to be suicidal. The resulting psychological conflict – an alternative to ‘real’ war – was unparalleled in scale, ingenuity and power, and presented at its most basic as a contest between two implacably opposed ideologies. In a period of information and entertainment overload, stretching from the heyday of radio to the birth of satellite television, it was almost impossible not to be touched in some way by the barrage of official and unofficial Cold War publicity. Virtually everything, from the Olympics and opera to literature and space travel, assumed political significance and hence was deployed as a weapon both to marshal opinion at home and to subvert societies abroad. If the pictures hanging in art galleries could be used by the US Central Intelligence Agency and the Soviet Ministry of Culture to present ideological superiority to the elites of their respective societies, moving pictures were aimed emphatically at the masses.

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British Cinema and the Cold War The American and Soviet film industries are known to have played an integral part in the establishment of a Cold War culture in their respective countries. Much has been written about the premium successive Soviet governments between the October Revolution and the final days of glasnost placed on film as a means of transmitting social and political messages. This volume of scholarship can be attributed in part to Lenin’s and Stalin’s infatuation with cinema – and the opportunity this provided for analysis of film as a medium of mass indoctrination between 1917 and 1953 especially – together with the widespread reverence for the ‘classic’ works of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko and Vertov.1 Hollywood is widely held to have contributed significantly to the ‘Red scares’ that periodically swept American society after 1917, particularly during the McCarthy era of the early 1950s.2 More recently, historians have cast light on Hollywood’s semi-official capacity as advertising agent to the US government during the Cold War, exporting American ideals in line with the State Department’s wishes.3 This study focuses on the treatment of the Cold War by the British film industry, principally between 1945 and 1965, that is when East–West tensions were at their height and the Cold War became fully institutionalized,4 and when ‘going to the pictures’ was Britain’s chief extra-domestic leisure activity and the cinema was a, if not the, principal medium of communication and attitude formation in the nation.5 It aims to correct the impression given by the ‘standard’ histories of British cinema that the Cold War was a subject almost entirely overlooked by film-makers,6 and to place the film industry’s representation of the Cold War within a wider social, political and cultural framework. This means exploring the main Cold War themes addressed by features, documentaries and newsreels, examining the motives that lay behind the making of this film material, and assessing the extent to which culture, public opinion and foreign policy-making intersected in Britain during the Cold War. In particular, I wish to locate British Cold War cinema within the context of recent scholarship which has examined the evolution of Cold War values in Britain after the Second World War and the part played by Labour and Conservative governments in helping to orchestrate an antiSoviet consensus, partly via the mass media. Some historians, influenced by the revisionist and post-revisionist view of the Cold War, interpret the effects of the elites within Clement Attlee’s administration, assisted by the anti-communist Trades Union Congress (TUC) and Whitehall’s new semi-secret anti-communist propaganda vehicle, the Information Research

Introduction Department (IRD), in Gramscian terms. Peter Weiler, for example, has developed a complex and sophisticated argument to suggest the incorporation of the powerful post-war labour movement into the hegemonic values and ideology of the state. According to Weiler, the popular support for Attlee’s Cold War stance in the late 1940s ought to be seen in this light, less as a spontaneous reaction by the British people to Soviet aggression and much more as a manufactured, constructed response.7 However, others argue that the process was double-edged: that the triumph of Labourism during and after the war saw the state itself accept the need for nationalization and Keynesian economic management, and that the public’s and media’s defence of a vigorous form of social democracy against the threat posed by Stalinism in Britain and overseas grew organically out of this ‘settlement’. Or, as Richard Thurlow puts it: ‘It was more a symbiotic and dialectical relationship – “Butskellism”, as politicians and political commentators later called it – rather than a manipulative conspiracy on the part of the establishment’.8 The efforts made by British governments between 1945 and 1965 to integrate the cinema within their anti-communist and anti-Soviet propaganda campaigns are at the core of my analysis. The relationships between film-makers, censors and Whitehall are investigated throughout the period with the intention of exploring the restrictions placed on the cinematic depiction of the Cold War. Chapter 1 provides an essential background to this by examining the film industry’s attitude towards, and representation of, communism and the USSR between the Bolshevik Revolution and the end of the Second World War. This was a formative period for East– West relations during which the film industry’s financial and censorship structures were firmly established. Throughout the book films are seen not simply as passive ‘reflectors’ but as potentially active producers of political and ideological meanings. Identifying these meanings is easier on some occasions than others. While Chapter 2, for instance, looks at the cinema’s relatively transparent updating of the espionage genre in the 1950s and 1960s to fit in with fears of communist subversion, Chapter 5 scrutinizes the more problematic connection between the public’s anxieties about nuclear war and the boom in cinematic science fiction in the same period. References in this chapter and elsewhere to the output of Cold War-related material in other media alerts us to the complexity of mass cultural forms in the post-1945 period, to the complicated processes involved in the creation of Cold War stereotypes, and to the deeply political nature of the cinema during this era.

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British Cinema and the Cold War Choosing to concentrate only on films made in Britain during this period risks presenting an unbalanced account of how the Cold War was presented to British cinema-goers.9 Hollywood films dominated the British market from the beginning to the end of the period and not to recognize the potentially significant role American productions had in shaping British perceptions of the Cold War would be misleading.10 Hollywood was also a vital component of US Cold War cultural diplomacy: according to one estimate, between 1948 and 1962 Hollywood made 107 films in which the fight against communism was an overt theme, nearly all of which were released in Britain.11 Many other American films underpinned Western values discreetly or even unconsciously. Chapter 4 goes some way to addressing the issue of Hollywood’s ‘Americanization’ of British Cold War mentalities by conducting a case study of the mid-1950s cinematic versions of George Orwell’s classic novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Both films offer examples of the cross-fertilization of official British and American Cold War information strategies, in which British film-makers and cinema-goers were assigned a key role. Elsewhere I will point out the extent to which British Cold War films differed in style and content from their American counterparts, thereby suggesting the evolution of a distinct British Cold War cinema. This distinctiveness will be underlined further by assessing those films imported from Eastern Europe and China into Britain during the 1950s and 1960s as part of the British Communist Party’s strategy of showing cinema-goers ‘the sunshine of living Socialism’. This book does not hope to contribute to our understanding of the cinema as an art form. Nor am I interested in modern film theory and semiotics, for these approaches do not help to answer the questions I am posing. Several of the films discussed below – such as Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) or Val Guest’s The Quatermass Experiment (1955) – are well known to film historians, and I have tried to shed new light on these from a political, rather than an aesthetic or theoretical, perspective. There are many others, however, particularly in Chapters 3 and 6, dealing with the cinematic depiction of life behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ and British industrial relations respectively, that have disappeared from view almost entirely. By bringing attention to these productions I hope to widen the field of film historiography and to recapture the contemporary cinematic vision of the Cold War as fully as possible. While some of the films analyzed were expensive blockbusters whose potential for influence was great, others enjoyed very limited public exposure. Many of the films looked at in, for

Introduction instance, Chapter 7, which focuses on the cinematic critique of Cold War orthodoxy, were seen by relatively few people but are worthy of detailed analysis in terms of the messages they sought to transmit and for what they reveal about the British system of film censorship. Taken as a whole, these films will hopefully encourage us to think of the Cold War as a conflict fought as much within as between two systems, as an international civil war in which culture played a central role. Whether it was in its ‘high’ forms or, in the case of this study, in ‘low’ forms, the rhetoric and images of that culture were an important factor in causing and deepening a conflict which dominated the second half of the twentieth century.

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1 Raising the Curtain

It is the early summer of 1939, and Soviet marine engineer Ivan Kouznetsoff (played by Laurence Olivier) arrives in the small English port of Barchester, to supervise the production of an icebreaker for which he has designed a ‘revolutionary’ propeller. Romance blossoms between Ivan and Ann Tisdall (Penelope Ward), grand-daughter of the eccentric millionaire shipbuilder Runalow (Felix Aylmer), but both personal and professional relationships fall foul of the Russian’s ideological didacticism and the suspicions his communist beliefs arouse among his hosts. ‘It’s not safe to let him in the house,’ squeaks Ann’s sceptical aunt Winnie. Hers is the voice of the silent majority in Britain that, for over 20 years, has treated Russians as either anarchists or spies. Returning to England a year later to complete his job, Ivan finds Barchester utterly changed. The town displays many of the egalitarian features found in the USSR itself. War has given the inhabitants a greater social purpose and produced in ‘reactionary’ Britain seeds of class harmony hitherto unimaginable to a committed Marxist. Runalow no longer wastes his time on afternoon tea, the Tisdalls have opened their doors to poor urban evacuees, and the shipyard workers and managers cooperate seemingly as equals. News of Germany’s attack on the USSR in June 1941

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1. Comrades in arms: the Russian Ivan (Laurence Olivier) and English Ann (Penelope Ward) stand together under the threat of the Luftwaffe. The Demi-Paradise (1943).

brings a determination to do everything to help what the towns-folk lovingly refer to as the ‘brave Russian people’. Barchester’s annual pageant is held in honour of Ivan’s village and ends with a rousing rendition of ‘the Internationale’. The community no longer sees Ivan as an alien intruder, a visiting Soviet trade delegation is heartily welcomed, and the formation of new shipyard production committees hints at fundamental changes in British working practices. Finally, the icebreaker is launched amid wild celebrations, its Stakhanovite-like construction standing as a lasting monument to Anglo-Soviet unity. The Demi-Paradise (Anthony Asquith, 1943) attests to the widespread admiration felt in Britain for the USSR during the Second World War. Written and produced by White Russian émigré Anatole de Grunwald, and directed by the son of the former British premier, the film visually evokes the hopes many in Britain carried for a new dawn in Anglo-Soviet relations. Winston Churchill’s coalition government sought to channel this proRussian enthusiasm through official campaigns designed to distinguish between the Soviets’ war deeds and communism. The wartime Ministry of Information (MOI) had at its disposal powerful means of media control, but ultimately there was little it could do to prevent the public’s reverence

Raising the Curtain for the Red Army overlapping into support for the Soviet way of life, symbollically expressed in the profusion of hammer-and-sickle lapel badges.1 The Demi-Paradise illustrated the dilemma faced by officials in the MOI’s Soviet Relations Division. In its overall message the film could in no senses be described as pro-communist. Asquith was not only from the best Liberal stock but, being a senior member of the ‘Ideas Committee’ via which the MOI briefed film-makers, was fully aware of the government’s efforts to depoliticize the USSR.2 Despite this, in his diligent, progressive qualities, Olivier’s character might have been modelled on the Comintern’s archetypal ‘Soviet Man’ – which is presumably why the film’s script was approved by the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky.3 British wartime cinema promoted the USSR in other ways. Numerous short films, documentaries and imported Russian features were distributed in Britain in the four years after Hitler’s launching of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, showcasing the Soviet war effort and, usually unintentionally, displaying many of the positive aspects of the Soviet system in the process. The image presented by the newsreels, argues P.M.H. Bell, was not simply one of Russian strength and fighting spirit, ‘but also that of a resilient, efficient and popular regime, often held up as an example for the British people to follow’.4 The phenomenon of ‘Russomania’ had passed its peak by the time the war came to an end, but the sense of solidarity many in Britain felt with the USSR still remained strong. The political and cultural imprints left by the Grand Alliance were visible throughout society, including the film industry. Indicative of this was producer Michael Balcon’s use of the word ‘soviet’ to describe the creative, egalitarian spirit which infused Ealing Studios in late 1945.5 By 1950, however, ‘Red’ spelt danger rather than courage on British cinema screens. The visiting Russian sniper feted for her heroism by the English villagers in Tawny Pipit (Charles Saunders/Bernard Miles, 1944), for instance, was now a gun-toting Soviet automaton guarding the Iron Curtain in Highly Dangerous (Roy Baker, 1950). The determined yet radiant Slavic faces toiling in the fields and factories in 100 Million Women (Soviet Film Agency, 1942) had been eclipsed by the fearful stares of the oppressed citizens of Eastern Europe in State Secret (Sidney Gilliat, 1950).6 Films promoting mutual understanding between liberal democracy and communism had begun to yield to the cinema of the Cold War, in which East faced West in diametric opposition. This chapter explores the above cinematic volte-face within the context of the wider political and public debate surrounding Anglo-Soviet relations

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British Cinema and the Cold War in Britain between 1943 and 1950. These years were crucial in the development of Cold War mentalities in Britain and mark a period in which the new Labour government quickly constructed a sophisticated anticommunist propaganda machine, specializing in the dissemination of ‘grey’ material via the mass media at home and overseas. By outlining the key themes and techniques fashioned by official propagandists at this point, and assessing the cinema’s relationship to them, we shall be able to analyze the film industry’s treatment of the Cold War during the 1950s and 1960s from a more critical perspective. It is one of the chief claims of this book that the cinema played an important role in the evolution of a strong anti-Soviet consensus in Britain at the height of the Cold War. The feelings, beliefs and values that constitute consensus are, of course, rarely formed overnight but tend to emerge more slowly over a long period. Before assessing the cinema’s approach to the Cold War in the late 1940s, therefore, we should first consider the medium’s treatment of the USSR in the years after its birth in 1917, linking this both to the attitudes towards communism expressed by the state and other opinion-formers, and to the film industry’s commercial structure and political outlook. By delineating the cinema’s portrayal of communism, and politics generally, in the inter-war years, it will become clear that the framework of the cultural Cold War was firmly established in Britain long before the late 1940s and that the film industry had a central place within it.

I The Bolsheviks’ complete subordination of the cinema to state needs in the years following their seizure of power in Russia is well documented. The use of agit-trains equipped with moving pictures during the 1918–21 civil war, the establishment of a new all-union cinema company, Sovkino, in 1924, and the creation in 1925 of the Society of Friends of the Soviet Cinema (ODSK), a mass organization designed to link audiences more closely with the cinema industry – these and other actions underlined Lenin’s famous remark that ‘film is the most important of the arts’.7 The British cinema would never be submitted to such tight, Sovietstyle control during this – or any other – phase of the cultural Cold War, but from the outset of the conflict the medium was inextricably associated with the state’s anti-communist bearing. Britain had approximately 4500 picture theatres in 1917, frequented predominantly by the urban working class. Many in authority regarded the cinema as a potential breeding

Raising the Curtain ground for radicalism on the understanding that the lower classes were more gullible and open to political persuasion. Evidence suggests, in fact, that in political terms the cinematograph might have been more of a conservative than a subversive agent during this period. Rachael Low submits, for instance, that one of the main reasons why the levels of violence which accompanied the 1912 coal strikes were lower than anticipated was because many strikers preferred to spend their temporary freedom enjoying themselves at the cinema, rather than campaigning on the streets or attending union meetings.8 In the years 1917–21, fears of a revolution in Britain reached an intensity unknown in more than three generations. Events in Russia combined with the domestic upheaval wrought by four years of European slaughter to produce social, economic and political crisis. When London’s police force went on strike in August 1918, in the midst of a nationwide wave of industrial disputes, Prime Minister Lloyd George believed a Bolshevik takeover to be imminent. Thereafter, unemployment, communist activities (the Communist Party of Great Britain, or CPGB, was born in 1920) and evidence of a steeply rising curve of working-class discontent – strikes, mutinies, riots, even the formation of soviets – presented continual threats to the existing order.9 Meanwhile, the government sought to destroy the nascent Soviet regime by supporting the White forces in the Russian civil war. This outraged many of the newly enfranchised in Britain and led to active resistance to the policy on the left. Sections of the press countered by presenting the Bolsheviks as nothing but ‘a gang of murderers, thieves, and blasphemers whom it was almost a sacred duty to destroy as vermin’.10 Novelists, many of whom had barely adjusted to having Russia, a longtime enemy, as an ally in the Great War, exploited the fear of a British revolution with stories which illustrated the nightmare scenario of Britain subjected to violent take-over and rule.11 By the end of the First World War cinema had become the chief mass communications medium in Britain. The ‘total war’ had, moreover, transformed the cinema into a large-scale instrument of state propaganda in Britain, just as it had elsewhere. Screened images of the conflict produced under the War Office’s auspices, such as The Battle of the Somme (1916), had served powerfully to personalize the heroism of Allied troops and the horrors of German war-making. Commercial features, like the London Film Company’s 1914 (1915), had dramatized military and patriotic virtues. By early 1918, the Cinematograph Branch of the Department of Information had become the Cinematograph Department of Lord Beaverbrook’s more

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British Cinema and the Cold War powerful Ministry of Information, producing feature and short films for various government departments, and centralizing the distribution of many others.12 The film industry took pride in its morale-boosting role during the war, and pleasure in the commercial profits it accrued. War, with its customary moral polarities and sensationalized accounts of bravery and death, proved to be good for business. The conflict also confirmed the industry’s conservatism, politically as well as morally. Before August 1914 film-makers had often heeded official advice on matters of ‘public concern’, from sex and crime to national security.13 Having developed a firm, and mutually beneficial, relationship with Whitehall during the Great War, many film-makers were likely to concur with officialdom’s identification of any foreign (or domestic) enemy afterwards. This was especially the case if that foe reneged on its wartime commitments and, as with Lenin’s regime at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, signed a peace treaty with the ‘Hun’. Links established between ministers and film-makers facilitated the dissemination of official anti-communist guidance, and provided opportunities for the cross-fertilization of propaganda ideas. An early sign of this was the informal arrangement made between the cabinet’s Supply and Transport Committee (STC) and the Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association (CEA) in 1921. Lloyd George had established the STC in 1920 to counter the threat posed by industrial strikes. Throughout the 1921 coal crisis, the STC’s Publicity Sub-Committee produced pamphlets, press releases, posters and cinema propaganda designed to turn the public against the striking trade unionists by, among other things, showing the suffering that arose from revolutionary movements. Working through the CEA, the theatre-owners’ protective association, allowed the government to present itself as a neutral arbiter between the employers and unions.14 The film trade evolved into a highly capitalized modern industry in the decade after the Great War. Although American finance grew to be ubiquitous in all sections of the industry, particularly distribution, British finance capital began to support British exhibition and production. The City of London, in particular, working through a range of financial institutions, most notably insurance firms, held the main purse-strings of the industry. As silent films gave way to ‘talkies’ in the late 1920s, a dependence on private capital was replaced by the growth of public companies, with the large number of small firms which hitherto had characterized the industry being rationalized into circuits with renting and production interests. Economic power came to be concentrated in three

Raising the Curtain main concerns: Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC), based at London’s Elstree Studios; Gaumont-British Picture Corporation (GBPC), which produced films at Islington and Shepherd’s Bush; and Odeon Theatres, the exhibiting empire run by Oscar Deutsch. By the mid-1930s, the British film industry was more or less a form of oligopoly with an enhanced determination and ability to defend the interests of business in the face of any ideological opposition.15 The First World War had also played a significant role in the establishment of the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) as Britain’s most important film censorship body. Set up in 1912 by the film industry itself to safeguard its interests against the effect of differing nationwide regulations, the BBFC issued certificates which, by the end of 1919, a majority of local authorities had come to accept as a sufficient guarantee of a film’s suitability for public exhibition. The wartime cooperation between the BBFC, Whitehall and the government’s press censorship apparatus served to convince the Home Office that the board, headed (until 1948) by secretary Joseph Brooke-Wilkinson, who was in charge of the Department for Film Propaganda to Neutral Nations during the war, could be trusted to act in accordance with the broad lines of social convention. The result, writes James Robertson, was that ‘Liaison with government departments grew into a permanent characteristic of the BBFC’s work after the First World War, while the BBFC also quietly retained its originally temporary wartime authority to censor “topical” films, whether they were educational documentaries or pressure group propaganda vehicles’.16 The fear of a communist insurgency appears to have been at least a factor in the strengthening of political censorship at the BBFC after the war. In 1917 the board had drawn up a list of 43 rules relating to ‘controversial’ subjects which, if infringed by film-makers, led to cuts or bans. The list expanded to 67 in 1919 and included the retention of the wartime rules circumscribing the depiction of conflict in industrial relations, Britain’s poor relations with former allies, and British maltreatment of colonial peoples.17 In the years following, self-censorship was encouraged by regular meetings the BBFC’s senior personnel held with individual producers and distributors at the board’s offices in Wardour Street, to discuss projected films and changes to those completed.18 Direct suppression tended to be limited to the classics of Soviet revolutionary cinema, such as Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) and Mother (Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1926). By 1925, the grounds for intervention on the part of the

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British Cinema and the Cold War censors included ‘incitement to class hatred’ and ‘Bolshevik propaganda’ – the first overt admission that the BBFC was discriminating against a particular political party.19 During the 1930s, the BBFC tightened its control via the practice of script-vetting to eliminate unacceptable material before shooting began. The need to avoid religious, moral and political ‘controversy’ of any sort remained uppermost in the minds of the censors. Anything which threatened respect for authority, encouraged debate about the status quo, or questioned British foreign policy was suspect. The BBFC rejected several projects which denounced conditions under communism on the basis that they contained references to anti-state activities; often even the depiction of Russia was deemed controversial and therefore offlimits.20 Such restrictive practices were not confined to the cinema. The Lord Chamberlain’s Office used its powers as theatre censor to veto plays it considered dangerously left-wing throughout the 1920s and 1930s, often in association with the Home Office and Foreign Office.21

II Censorship notwithstanding, several British films were completed and released in the inter-war period that commented overtly either on class politics or life in the USSR. Like their American counterparts,22 British films made in the earliest years of the cultural Cold War correlated strongly with official attitudes towards the Soviet government and the establishment’s fears of Bolshevik subversion. While diplomatic relations were opened up between London and Moscow in 1924 they were little more than formal throughout the inter-war years, especially under the Conservativedominated National government of the 1930s.23 The mistrust of, and opposition to, communism was clearly expressed in films, but usually couched in a far less crude and hysterical manner than Hollywood’s output. While the fundamental differences between the two countries’ political systems were alluded to, rarely was it stated or even implied that Britain was ideologically at war with the USSR. Most British films appeared opportunistic in their portrayal of the USSR rather than as part of a concerted anti-communist campaign. With one or two exceptions, stories depicting events in the Soviet Union or the dangers posed by communism were woven into the fabric of established genres, setting them apart from the distinct ‘Red scare’ thrillers produced by Hollywood. This more restrained form of propaganda was in keeping with British cinema’s political cautiousness and the largely asocial flavour of the mass literature of the period.24

Raising the Curtain With the exception of Russia – The Land of Tomorrow (Maurice Sandground, 1919), a low-budget production that warned of the inherent dangers of unconstitionalism via the tragic death of its revolutionary heroine,25 films that portrayed life in the new Russia presented an image of the Soviet state as dictatorial and dysfunctional. The Land of Mystery (Harold Shaw, 1920), a ‘factual’ depiction of the fall of the Romanov dynasty and rise of Bolshevism, was reported in the press to be the most expensive British film ever made. In July 1920, the film was previewed by an invited audience including MPs and members of the House of Lords, after which footage was added of rural Russia set in between the Tsar’s downfall in February 1917 and Lenin’s seizure of power in October. This had the effect of allowing audiences to distinguish more clearly between the advances in political and personal freedom made in the summer of 1917 under the short-lived social democratic provisional government – a body which had won strong approval among British politicians at the time 26 – and the ‘anarchy’ since brought about by Bolshevik radicalism. After further cuts made at the behest of the BBFC, the film was granted an ‘A’ certificate (for adults) in November 1920.27 Forbidden Territory (Phil Rosen, 1934) was based on a Dennis Wheatley thriller about the rescue of a British baronet’s son from a Siberian prison camp. In its story-line and ideological stance, this film provided the basic ingredients for the cycle of Cold War espionage melodramas that flourished in the 1950s: the ‘typical’ Englishman fighting injustices in a politically and geographically alien environment, the ruthless police chief pursuing his prey assisted by ubiquitous spies, murderous purges and internal exile, the cooperation between the trapped Westerners and communist dissidents, and evidence of the threat posed by the Soviets to the outside world (in this case, the ‘forbidden territory’ was revealed as a giant military aerodrome). One Labour MP protested in Parliament that Forbidden Territory was anti-Russian and a deputation from the Friends of Soviet Russia, a body connected with the CPGB, requested that it be banned. Later, the Maryport Communist Party in vain asked the exhibitors to withdraw it as a ‘libel on the Soviet working man’.28 The BBFC was acutely mindful of its international duty as tensions mounted in the 1930s, and banned anti-Nazi films with impunity lest they compromised the government’s appeasement strategy.29 Forbidden Territory was approved by the board on the basis that ‘there is no political element in it at all’, a curious interpretation presumably related to the fact that at the time, unlike the Third Reich, Soviet Russia was not officially deemed a

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British Cinema and the Cold War

2. Cold War – 1930s style: Barry MacKay (left) and Ronald Squire (centre) plotting Anthony Bushell’s escape from Stalin’s gulag. Forbidden Territory (1934).

‘friendly nation’ by the censors.30 The film turned out to be sufficiently popular to warrant a re-release as an ‘old favourite’ in April 1940, at a point when the USSR’s reputation in Britain had reached a new low following the Red Army’s recent occupation of eastern Poland and invasion of Finland.31 Based on a James Hilton novel, and financed by Alexander Korda, Knight Without Armour (Jacques Feyder, 1937) encapsulated perfectly the proactive conservatism which characterized so much of British screen output between the wars.32 Korda was head of London Films and the dominant figure in the British film industry in the 1930s, a pro-imperialist, anglophile Hungarian who epitomized the period’s powerful ‘dream merchants’ and who, with close connections with key political and diplomatic figures, viewed the cinema as a means of protecting the existing social structure and projecting British values overseas.33 Knight Without Armour told the story of Ainsley Fotheringhill (Robert Donat), a young, poetryreading Englishman who joins the pre-war Russian revolutionary movement, to which he feels a vague commitment, as a British spy. When the Tsar is toppled, Fotheringhill is appointed an assistant commissar and charged with taking the Countess Alexandra Vladinoff (Marlene Dietrich) to Petrograd for trial, but decides instead to save the aristocrat’s life by helping her escape into exile. After a series of near-fatal mishaps while being

Raising the Curtain hounded by the dastardly Bolsheviks, the couple finally traverse the heavily guarded border on an American Red Cross train, bound for Britain, depicted as a haven of freedom. The BBFC raised no objections to the script of Knight Without Armour, believing that ‘there is no attempt at political propaganda of any sorts’.34 In the sense that the film refuses overtly to engage with the politics of the Russian Revolution this is true, but its vilification of ideologues and revolutionaries could not be more clear. Repeated scenes of mass executions reduce Russian events between 1917 and 1919 to little more than, as Graham Greene’s review in Night and Day put it, ‘a kaleidoscope of murder’.35 Ends are shown to be confused with means as Reds and Whites alternately machine-gun each other. Neither side gives any consideration to the vast majority of ‘ordinary’ Russians in the middle who suffer from the cruelty and dislocation wrought by extremism; they are captives of the zealots almost as much as the fugitive lovers. It requires the unflappable and pragmatic Englishman to steer the sensible course between right and left, and opt for ‘dear old reactionary Britain, characterized at the start of the film by Royal Ascot and dinner in a first-class railway restaurant car, in preference to remaining in the people’s paradise’.36 First-hand experience has shorn Fotheringhill of his radicalism and taught him that real progress can only be achieved incrementally by working within constitutional boundaries. Another batch of films conveyed a similar message in a more domestic or imperial setting. Like George Pearson’s critically and commercially acclaimed Reveille (1924),37 Dinah Shurey’s The Last Post (1929) exploited the sentimental patriotism associated with the Great War to produce a powerful condemnation of left-wing militancy. This film at least dared to portray some of the repercussions of post-war working-class disillusionment, while implying that better times were just around the corner, particularly for the unemployed. Twins David and Martin (both played by John Longden) are fighting alongside each other in the trenches when David’s nerves break under the pressure of constant bombardment. While convalescing, David is visited by Christine who, realizing his weakness and dependence on others, consents to marry him despite being in love with Martin. David then joins a secret society agitating for socialism, and Martin, on his return from the front, finds him involved in a treasonable act in which his own name has been falsely used. A court-martial follows, and in order to spare the woman he loves, Martin refuses to say anything to implicate his brother, paying for his silence with his life. The production draws to a close by juxtaposing the silence of an emotionally charged

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British Cinema and the Cold War military funeral with the raucous violence of the 1926 General Strike, thereby highlighting the consequences of the brothers’ very different actions. By attributing David’s action to psychological instability, The Last Post not only equated support for socialism with mental weakness, it also implied that agitators preyed on shell-shock victims. In contrast, Martin’s strong and resolute character is emphasized throughout; even when he refuses to help the state convict his brother by putting family before the law, his patriotism is never in doubt. David would never be capable of such self-sacrifice: his is the world of ideological dogma which purports to put the people’s betterment first but callously overlooks the cost of this to the individual. He and his shady associates are shown to be betraying the very ‘masses’ whom they claim to represent, notably the men who fought for freedom during the war. This includes Paul, David’s surviving brother, an army chaplain who was blinded by shrapnel. Thus, David has turned against both country and God. For her part, Christine is an unwitting accomplice to David’s crimes and morally culpable for neglecting her marital and national duties.38 The Flight Commander (1928), made for Gaumont-British by the most prolific director in British film history, Maurice Elvey, boasted the biggest set hitherto erected for a British production and a guest appearance by World War One flying ace Sir Alan Cobham. The Chinese-based drama capitalized on an atmosphere of renewed anti-communist paranoia stirred in the late 1920s by intelligence revelations of Soviet malfeasance in Britain and the empire.39 The Bolshevik threat to British interests in China appeared in the shape of Ivan, a Russian wireless operator who instigates an indigenous attack on a European mission. The assault is timed deviously to coincide with both a local religious holiday and the marriage of the resident missionary’s daughter to the British trader Mortimer, thereby illustrating the communist contempt for normal codes of decency and traditional institutions. With the British troops caught off guard, the mission is besieged by bloodthirsty hordes and all looks lost until Mortimer sacrifices his life in radioing for help, allowing Cobham to fly to the rescue.40 The Foreign Office persuaded the producers via the BBFC to eliminate graphic scenes of an aerial bombardment of Chinese villagers for fear of inflaming Chinese xenophobia when, as was planned, The Flight Commander was exhibited as anti-communist propaganda in Asia.41 The result was a versatile and unusually explicit anti-communist film that served as a powerful plea for vigilance and lent weight to those who argued that that the Russians were behind anti-Western agitation in China. Among these were Sir William

Raising the Curtain Tyrrell, permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office, later president of the BBFC between 1935 and 1947.42 Images of class differences saturated British films during the 1920s and 1930s in terms of dress, language and recreation, but such differences were rarely presented as acrimonious despite the long-lasting antagonisms left in the wake of the 1917–21 crisis.43 On the few occasions that the existence of potential class conflict was treated, the effect would invariably be to promote social integration on the one hand, while validating the hierarchical structure of British society on the other. Social contradictions and the aspirations of the underprivileged majority were down-played in favour of images that organized the audience’s experience in the sense of compromise and the acceptance of social constraints. Just as emotional problems were shown to find an easy solution in matrimony, challenging political or social issues would invariably be defused by being personalized and turned into mere clashes of character.44 Randall Faye’s ‘quota quickie’ 45 comedies, Hyde Park (1934) and If I Were Rich (1936), typified this defusing technique. Both films ridiculed the socialist pretensions of their leading protagonists, each members of the petty bourgeoisie: butcher Joe Smith (played by George Carney) in the former, and hairdresser Bert Mott (Jack Melford) in the latter. As soon as the men are given the chance to enter the aristocracy via a bogus inheritance, each of them jettisons his principles, only to discover the burdensome nature of wealth, status and power. Having found that the rich are less idle than they appear, Joe and Bert cannot wait to return to their more comfortable, if less affluent, station. Snobbery is identified at all levels while class relations are depoliticized. Both films end on a harmonious, consensual note: with the social order being reinforced from below, and family and class differences reconciled by the sweet sound of wedding bells.46

III Throughout the inter-war years, film was used for publicity purposes – theatrically and non-theatrically – by a range of interests at many levels in Britain: from national and local government to religious societies, hospitals and tram companies.47 The British labour movement spawned a variety of organs which were critical of the commercial cinema ‘dream machine’ and sought to provide a product which was a form of opposition to the images dominating the silver screen. The Masses Stage and Film Guild, connected

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British Cinema and the Cold War to the Independent Labour Party Arts Guild, operated in the early 1930s to bring plays and films of an international and democratic character to working-class audiences. The Socialist Film Council (SFC), the London Co-operative Society, the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society and the Workers’ Film Association (WFA) – all associated in some way with the Labour Party or trade union and cooperative movements – produced films throughout the decade. Output included the SFC’s The Road To Hell (1933), about the degradation of the means test, and the WFA’s The Builders (1939), which dealt with the life of bricklayers and masons, and promoted the benefits of trade unionism. Local Labour parties experimented in the field of production, the WFA had a thriving distribution network, and in some areas cinemas were directly controlled by the miners.48 Often overlapping with the film activities of the official labour movement were those of the CPGB and aligned organizations. As would be expected given its allegiance to Moscow, the CPGB conducted an active programme designed to establish workers’ cultural and recreational bodies that would act as alternatives to their bourgeois counterparts, in order to challenge capitalism directly and promote the ideals and achievements of the USSR. Soviet films were exhibited under the auspices of politicocultural bodies like the Workers’ International Relief and Friends of the Soviet Union and, despite censorship restrictions, seem to have made some impact on labour audiences.49 The Federation of Workers’ Film Societies was founded in 1929, with its own production and distribution company, Atlas Film. Atlas sponsored newsreels, mainly about unemployment, hunger marches and working-class demonstrations. Similar material was produced, distributed and exhibited from the mid-1930s onwards by Kino, the Film Section of the Workers’ Theatre Movement. Using mobile vans, Kino brought films closer to where the working classes lived and worked. An offshoot of Kino and the Workers’ Camera Club was the Workers’ Film and Photo League (WFPL). This had three active sections: newsreels, feature film and still photograph groups. Its output included Jubilee, a film exposing George V’s 1935 Silver Jubilee via the customary ‘deadly parallel’ principle, contrasting shots of the East End Jubilee tour of the king and queen with those of East End slums, unemployment offices and dole queues.50 As committed as they were to the creation of a rich proletarian cinema, it is unlikely that these radical film groups had a significant influence upon the general public’s thinking about domestic and international politics. Compared with the Conservatives, the Labour Party was far less innovative in the development of film publicity. As a whole, the official

Raising the Curtain labour movement lacked the resources to establish a fully-fledged film service. Nor did it have the useful connections which the Conservatives had in the industrial mainstream, most notably with Gaumont-British and British Movietone.51 The profound ideological differences which existed between many in the Labour and Communist parties – aggravated during the CPGB’s ‘class against class’ approach of the early 1930s – also prevented effective cooperation and confused the left’s message for audiences.52 The CPGB itself never had a formal production, distribution or exhibition unit of its own, in part because many party workers believed in a form of revolutionary puritanism which characterized cultural work as a waste of valuable time and energy.53 Tactical naivety meant that Kino failed to react adequately to important political events of the day, like ‘the Battle of Cable Street’ in October 1936 and the civil war in Spain. Moreover, the workingclass element in many groups, such as the WFPL, was minimal.54 Overall, the impression is that of a minority of middle-class leftist activists who were restricted to preaching to the converted at small-scale political meetings and film societies, and who had to compete against a commercial cinema product which was genuinely popular among workers and an integral part of their collective culture.

IV The British cinema is often said to have ‘come of age’ during the Second World War, as film-makers exploited the opportunities provided by the conflict to explore new subjects and to use innovative techniques. Films such as John Baxter’s Love on the Dole (1940), with its depiction of the grimness of life for the unemployed in Salford’s slums, Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), which attacked the conservative attitudes holding back the war effort, and Coward and Lean’s In Which We Serve (1942), with its inter-mingling of the classes aboard HMS Torrin, seemed to indicate that the film industry had entered a new era in which ‘realism’ offered a progressive challenge to escapist ‘tinsel’. Together with Launder and Gilliat’s Millions Like Us (1943) and Waterloo Road (1945), with their more rounded characterization of workingclass figures (including women), these productions are viewed by some historians as evoking, or helping visibly to manifest, the shift to the left that took place in wartime Britain.55 The ‘people’s war’ undoubtedly represents one of the most fruitful and creative periods in the history of the British cinema, yet the changes which

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British Cinema and the Cold War the industry underwent between 1939 and 1945 can be exaggerated. The cinema was more than ‘simply a vehicle for the downward transmission of ideologies which uniformly supported official needs’, and the BBFC’s strait-jacket was loosened to some extent.56 Fighting a propaganda battle in tandem with government also helped to politicize many in the film trade. For some, such as Michael Balcon, chief of production at Ealing Studios, making films about the stresses imposed by conflict and the nation’s future reconstruction highlighted the failure of film-makers to reflect the ‘agony’ of unemployment and poverty in the 1930s.57 The development of new talent within the industry during the war – from editors to cinematographers and set designers – suggested that filmmaking had itself been ‘democratized’ to a degree, and was now more of a collaborative process in which the established producers and directors would be less able to impose their will.58 At the same time, the war had witnessed a further consolidation of financial power within the film industry. Having created solid foundations for themselves in the 1930s, it was the two major film impressarios, Alexander Korda and, especially, J. Arthur Rank, who after 1945 had the commercial weight to put most of the nation’s film talent to work. Using the capital from his family’s flour business, Rank had first entered the film business in 1933 as joint honorary treasurer of the Religious Film Society. From this small-scale evangelical enterprise grew a film empire as expansive as any in British cinema history, comprising, by 1942, two of the three major circuits, Gaumont-British and Odeon (an aggregate of over 600 theatres), the prime renting organization, General Film Distributors (GFD), and the best available studio, Denham, as well as Pinewood and Gainsborough.59 Rank was propelled by Christian fervour, patriotism and money. Politically, he was a staunch Conservative, turning down a peerage from Attlee in the late 1940s, for instance, averring that he would never accept an honour from a socialist. Though the ‘Methodist magnate’ always denied any interference with his film-makers’ ‘creative processes’, he baulked at financing movies which he found to be ‘morally dubious’ in any way.60 Despite rumours at the time, Attlee’s administration never once considered breaking the entrenched hegemony of the impressarios by nationalizing the British film industry. The Labour government sponsored a succession of investigations into the industry’s shortcomings, including increasing monopolization and the threat from an ever-more avaricious Hollywood, and introduced, among other things, a tariff on American film imports and the National Film Finance Corporation (NFFC) with

Raising the Curtain the purpose of lending money to independent producers.61 These measures had little effect overall, however, with the exception perhaps of the Eady Fund, established in 1950 to divert a proportion of box-office receipts towards British production. The view of the British film industry identified by the 1944 Palache report, as lopsided, tilting in favour of distributors and exhibitors at the expense of independent film-making, therefore remained.62 British producers were consequently inclined more than ever before to put profitability before artistic merit. When audiences started to tumble in the 1950s due mainly to the competition from television, the circuits’ proportional control of the industry was bolstered rather than reduced.63 There is evidence of the war having instilled a greater sense of confidence among many on the left in the film trade. Members of the left-wing documentary film movement were given the opportunity to experiment more boldly with the use of documentary film as a means of public education, and to present their material in locations such as town halls and factory canteens where many people were more receptive to their themes.64 Communists set up the Soviet Film Agency in London in order to make dubbed versions of Soviet films more widely available and to liaise with British distributors.65 Indicative of the wartime politicization of trade unionism within the film industry was Our Film (1942), a short film made by members of the Association of Cine-Technicians (ACT) at Denham Studios calling for the setting up of joint production committees to improve Britain’s economic efficiency. Designed also as an expression of solidarity with Soviet film workers, Our Film was at the time heralded by communist documentarist Ralph Bond as ‘the first entirely voluntary and co-operative film to be made by professional workers in this country’.66 As a rare example of a propaganda film conceived outside official policy, however, this small-scale production perhaps demonstrated the effectiveness of the MOI’s efforts to persuade the mainstream cinema to play down Soviet communism. As a whole, the film industry seems to have conformed with government guidelines about the presentation of the USSR as much as, if not more than, any other medium.67 Anthony Asquith’s The DemiParadise was the only major feature to explore Anglo-Soviet relations in any depth, and even this aimed to be more of a celebration of ‘typical’ English tolerance and sturdiness in wartime than a call for Anglo-Soviet solidarity.68 Stalin’s evil image may have been softened by newsreels and Soviet imports, but there was no feature film remotely comparable to

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British Cinema and the Cold War Hollywood’s Mission to Moscow (Michael Curtiz, 1943), which defended the 1939 Nazi–Soviet Pact and pronounced ‘Uncle Joe’ ‘a great benefactor of mankind’.69 In contrast, the ‘special relationship’ between the United States and Britain was the subject of many British (and American) films during the latter stages of the war, some connected with the MOI’s operation to promote transatlantic understanding and so lay a sure foundation for future peace. Films such as Leslie Driscott’s Welcome Mr. Washington (1944) and Asquith’s The Way to the Stars (1945) glossed over the animosity aroused in many towns by the GIs’ ‘occupation’ of Britain, in favour of a rosy picture of Anglo-American relations based on time-honoured cultural and political affinities.70

V The Yalta Conference of February 1945 and the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in April 1949 stand at either end of an intensely scrutinized period in international history. It was during these four years that the term ‘Cold War’ achieved common currency in its modern sense, signifying the shift in East–West relations from long-standing mutual suspicion to direct economic and military confrontation.71 The thrust of most recent scholarship has suggested that it was London as much as Washington which forced the pace towards confrontation with Moscow in the mid- to late 1940s.72 This is not to say that Britain slipped automatically into a Cold War stance after the Second World War. Debate over the genuineness of Stalin’s security fears, and the possibilities of Britain’s form of democratic socialism acting as an autonomous ‘third force’ between American capitalism and Soviet communism was intense among policymakers.73 By the end of 1947, however, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin’s thinking had caught up with those advisers who as early as mid-1946 had despaired of reaching any sort of compromise with what, to them, was a Soviet regime bent on ideological and territorial hegemony.74 A domestic fuel crisis, Soviet machinations in the Middle East, unrest in India and Palestine – combined with the announcement of the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan in March and June 1947 respectively – all served radically to restrict London’s freedom of manoeuvre in foreign affairs. Thereafter, the road to the formation of a Western alliance – via the Czech coup of February 1948 and the 1948–9 Berlin blockade – was well laid.75 As the Cold War occupied centre stage to a greater extent than before, the Labour government established an increasingly elaborate

Raising the Curtain long-term anti-communist propaganda campaign, at home and overseas. In April 1946, the same month in which the MOI was disbanded, the Foreign Office created the Russia Committee to co-ordinate overall policy towards the USSR, including propaganda.76 Together with the Foreign Office News Department, and the Number Ten Press Office run by the former editor of the Daily Herald, Francis Williams, the Russia Committee initially took a defensive approach towards publicity, owing to Bevin’s sensitivity to left-wing critics.77 A subtle programme of political re-education, conducted largely via the mass media, sought to disabuse the public of Stalin’s wartime avuncular reputation and counter Russian allegations of British imperialism.78 As Anglo-Soviet relations grew worse the publicity strategy grew increasingly offensive in nature, particularly in the wake of the Kremlin’s establishment of a new operational base for political warfare, the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform), in September 1947.79 The creation, in February 1948, of the IRD, ‘a dedicated unit to prepare briefing material on communist policy, tactics and propaganda’ at home and abroad, marked the Foreign Office’s move into the covert side of the intensive struggle for ‘men’s minds’.80 Funded by secret vote in the same manner as the security and intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, the IRD was soon acting as the fulcrum for the government’s propaganda attacks on the USSR, disseminating free information on a strictly unattributable basis. Its chief recipients were opinion-formers: academics, trade union leaders, MPs, the BBC, Fleet Street and the film industry.81 Information officials also liaised with the film trade via the MOI’s replacement, the Central Office of Information (COI), a common service department which supplemented the information services of home and overseas ministerial departments. Its Films Division oversaw the production and distribution of government films made by private contractors and, until its closure in 1952, the Crown Film Unit (CFU), which specialized in documentaries.82 In light of the film industry’s well-established respect for Whitehall’s interpretation of national security, it was only natural for the mainstream cinema to consign the USSR to pariah status once the Cold War reemerged in a more graphic form after 1945. This was not an entirely straight-forward process, however, nor one in which government propagandists could take the cinema for granted. In terms of feature films, the industry’s reaction to the opening diplomatic salvos of the Cold War was arguably the most muted of all the domestic mass media. Audiences had

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British Cinema and the Cold War to wait until the release of Victor Saville’s Conspirator in August 1949 for an indigenous feature to appear which commented directly on the Cold War.83 British films made between 1945 and mid-1949 touching on international affairs tended to focus on the continued threat posed by Nazism rather than communism. Castle Sinister (Oscar Burn, 1947), Eyes That Kill (Richard Grey, 1947) and Counterblast (Paul Stein, 1948) dwelt on the existence of secret Nazi organizations in Britain working to rebuild Germany. Though groundless in reality, such a theme was understandable given the deep scars the war had inflicted on British minds.84 Simultaneously, films such as William Freshman’s Teheran (1947), together with imported Soviet features that also perpetuated the dangers of Nazism, hinted at continued friendship between London and Moscow.85 During the war Nazism had generally been presented in British films as part of the inner dynamic of German political culture in which, except for a tiny underground resistance, everyone in the Third Reich was complicit. In its harrowing portrayal of an innocent German nurse (played by Mai Zetterling) who, having married an English soldier at the end of the war, is then cruelly persecuted by her husband’s family, Frieda (Basil Dearden, 1947) anticipated the cinema’s subtle post-war refurbishment of Germany’s image, with ‘ordinary’ Germans increasingly portrayed less as accessories to Nazism and more as its victims.86 As this film tempted cinema-goers to revise their impressions of their former adversary, Sleeping Car to Trieste (John Paddy Carstairs, 1948), a reworking of Walter Forde’s prototype train thriller, Rome Express (1932), pointed audiences (albeit somewhat ambiguously) in the direction of a new enemy – the Eastern European spy.87 The general absence of feature films relating to East–West tensions can be attributed mainly to the commercial pressures for entertainment of a ‘light’ nature during the post-war austerity years, but censorship played a part too. The BBFC objected to at least one script conceived during this period because of its negative Cold War connotations. Written by Charles Frank, Dress Optional was a benign slapstick comedy about three displaced persons in occupied Germany who become embroiled in British intelligence efforts to foil a Soviet coup. On examining the script in February 1949, the censors effectively put an end to the project by asking for over 80 cuts and condemning it as ‘distasteful’ and ‘politically inadvisable’.88 The BBFC had at least half an eye on Whitehall’s wishes when reaching such conclusions. In mid-1948, William Wellman’s The Iron Curtain (1948), Hollywood’s sensationalist ‘docu-drama’ based on the recent Gouzenko revelations of Soviet espionage in Canada, was passed uncut following

Raising the Curtain discussions between the board and representatives from the Home Office, Foreign Office and Scotland Yard.89 Official input into this decision was denied in the House of Commons by Bevin’s parliamentary under-secretary, Christopher Mayhew, who was also the chief architect of the IRD.90 Some film-makers may have been reluctant to contribute towards the media’s burgeoning anti-communist offensive for political reasons. A number of factors militated against a clear anti-Soviet consensus in Britain immediately after the Second World War, including sympathy with the Soviet request for a secure Western border, American unreliability and the faith among some on the left in the potential compatibility of communism and social democracy.91 In 1947, the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR (SCR), a body founded in 1924 to create cultural links between British and Soviet artists, writers and scientists, formed its first film section. Its main aim was to facilitate the exchange of films and cinematic expertise between the two countries, for creative and financial profit. Entrepreneurs like Alexander Korda, the section’s first president, were always looking to expand market potential, and, notwithstanding its anti-capitalist ethos, the USSR was no exception. Some members also hoped that the resulting interchange could help to defuse Anglo-Soviet tensions, and arrangements were made to open channels with the Soviet embassy and the film section of VOKS, the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, in Moscow.92 The Film Section’s progress was ultimately minimal. Negotiations over an exchange of ten films each between Britain and the USSR, proposed in 1949 by the President of the Board of Trade, Harold Wilson, and encouraged by the Film Section, ended in failure.93 The section was still in operation in the mid-1960s, but long before this its membership had shrunk to a small number of communist stalwarts, led by the writer-director Ivor Montagu.94 It was Korda who inspired one of the most popular and critically acclaimed films of the post-war period, and a production often interpreted as marking the point at which British cinema entered the Cold War fray.95 Directed by Carol Reed, another member of the SCR Film Section, The Third Man (1949) revolved around the ostensible death in post-war occupied Vienna of the American racketeer Harry Lime (Orson Welles). Searching for clues as to the cause of his friend’s mysterious demise, author Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) learns that Lime is a fugitive sought by the British military for trafficking in watered-down penicillin. Loyalty and pious romanticism prevents Martins from believing the allegations

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British Cinema and the Cold War until he is confronted by children crippled by the adulterated medicine. By the time he (and the audience) finally gets to see Lime more than half way through the film, Martins has fallen in love with Lime’s Austrian girlfriend Anna (Alida Valli), who faces the constant threat of deportation by the Russians. A frantic chase ensues between the two Americans within the city’s cavernous sewers until Lime is cornered and shot. The film ends with Lime’s second – but this time real – funeral, and Anna’s discarding of Martins at the cemetery gates, thereby mocking his heroic pretensions. With its skilful noir style techniques, exotic camera angles, dangerous location work, witty dialogue and memorable theme music by Anton Karas, it is easy to see why this melodrama of state corruption and personal disillusionment captured the public’s and the critics’ imagination (as it still does today).96 Of greater interest in this context, however, is The Third Man’s origins. Korda’s wish to make a film in Vienna derived principally from the dramatic potential he saw in the four-power occupation of the city and a desire to spend his company’s cash reserves held in Austria. Graham Greene, with whom Korda and Reed had worked on The Fallen Idol in 1948, was commissioned to create a suitable story. Both Korda and Greene, together with the author’s adviser in Austria, Elizabeth Montagu, had been employed by MI6 during the war, and there are indications that the trip Greene made to Austria and Czechoslovakia in early 1948 ostensibly for film research purposes provided suitable cover for informal intelligence activities on the sensitive edge of Moscow’s sphere of influence.97 In Vienna, Greene was given considerable help with his script from Peter Smolka, the Times correspondent for Central Europe. Smolka (alias Smollett) had been a close friend of Kim Philby’s during the Austria civil war in the 1930s before being appointed head of the MOI’s Soviet Relations Division, where evidence points to him acting as a Soviet ‘mole’.98 Greene also knew Philby well through having worked in the same department in wartime intelligence and the author would go on to pen a notoriously sympathetic introduction to the spy’s autobiography following his defection to Moscow in 1963. It remains unclear whether Greene was aware of Philby’s double-agent status in 1948–9, but Philby undoubtedly provided inspiration for the persona of Harry Lime. While in mid-1930s Vienna, Philby had helped dissidents to escape through the city’s labyrinthine sewers and married an Austrian partly to give her the safety of British nationality.99 Both Greene and Philby later described espionage

Raising the Curtain as an intoxicating ‘racket’ in which principles counted for little and, correspondingly, Lime is a supreme example of the cinema gangster: a callous, self-seeking opportunist with wit and charm whose underworld knows no rules.100 This is not to say that Lime is Philby or that Welles’s character is meant to convey an ideological message. Allusions to the Cold War can be seen in the film if they are sought. Some commentators have, for instance, pointed to the significance of the British officer Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) being the most potent agent of goodness through his ambition to restore humane order in post-war Austria. Similarly, Anna’s plight as a displaced person on the run from the Russians serves to contrast British benevolence with the Soviets’ ruthless occupation strategy in Vienna’s eastern sector.101 But the division of Vienna is a comparatively minor theme in The Third Man and, unlike many later films set in Central Europe – including Reed’s The Man Between (1953) – there is no clear distinction drawn between the ‘civilized’ West and the ‘totalitarian’ East. Lime is selling secrets to the Russians, but he is far from being a Soviet stooge. Rather than an extension of communist misrule, his criminal behaviour can be seen more as a consequence of the destruction wrought on Vienna by the bombers and tanks of the Allied forces. When The Third Man was released in October 1949, so far as it can be judged no critic linked the film to the Cold War.102 Some (though not all) viewed it as an international variant on the cycle of ‘spiv’ films made in Britain between 1945 and 1950 whose locale was criminal and often the black market.103

VI If feature films were out of step with the Labour government’s anti-Soviet offensive in the late 1940s, what of the industry’s non-fictional output? Documentaries and newsreels remained an integral part of the structured experience offered to cinema audiences until the late 1950s and consequently were of considerable value to official and non-official publicists. Documentary film-making had expanded dramatically during the Second World War. The CFU had acted as the linch-pin of official wartime film production and its series of feature-length narrative-documentaries – such as Harry Watt’s Target for Tonight (1941) and Humphrey Jennings’ Fires Were Started (1943) – are widely held to have raised the profile of documentary with cinema-goers. Newsreels acted as the front-line troops in the

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British Cinema and the Cold War battle for morale at home and the projection of Britain abroad between 1939 and 1945. The wartime performance of both media confirmed in most people’s minds the unique ability of the moving camera to capture the reality of events as they happened.104 The COI Films Division produced and distributed numerous short documentaries on various subjects relating to the Cold War in the late 1940s and beyond, most commissioned by the Foreign Office. The majority tied in with the government’s strategy of championing the ‘positive’ aspects of Western life and policy. ‘We must put forward a rival ideology,’ Bevin told the cabinet in early 1948. ‘We must stand on the broad principle of Social Democracy which, in fact, has its basis in the value of civil liberty and human rights.’ 105 Coordinated for the most part by the Foreign Office’s Information Policy Department (IPD), this strategy sought to complement the IRD’s more ‘negative’, anti-communist approach.106 Generally speaking, these films fall into two categories. Films in the first category were produced in response to particular events or issues, about which departments deemed it necessary to deliver immediate or urgent messages. These documentary shorts were intended either to allay public fears – for instance, about the effect of mounting tensions on Britain’s trade – or to celebrate policy successes. The best example of the latter is Berlin Airlift. Originally made by the Information Services Division of the Control Commission for Germany in January 1949, the film was re-edited by British Movietone News for the COI and, having been updated, exhibited in British cinemas after the Soviet blockade of Berlin had ceased in May 1949. Marshal Tedder, Chief of the Air Staff, added an English commentary, together with a forward. The ten-minute-long film told the story of ‘the most outstanding transport achievement in the history of aviation’, of how British, Commonwealth and American air crews had for ten months fought against all the odds to keep the democratic part of Berlin ‘free’. The smiling yet determined faces of the ‘indefatigable blockade runners’ are shown, plotting their course through Soviet-controlled air space to deliver everything from coal to gifts of chocolate for grateful German children. A jaunty rather than sombre soundtrack reminded the audience of the 43 airmen lost in the operation, martyrs to the Western cause.107 The second category sought to explain the wider thinking behind Western strategy or policy initiatives, such as defence coordination, rearmament or developments in Anglo-American relations.108 Most energy was expended on publicizing the United States-sponsored European

Raising the Curtain Recovery Programme (ERP) which began in April 1948. Via the government’s ERP Information Policy Group, established in June 1948, the COI worked in collaboration with the Lord President’s Economic Information Unit to produce a series of films released monthly in Britain and overseas under the title ‘The World in Action’. The first of these films was dedicated to a ‘dramatic report of the facts and implications of the Marshall Plan’ and, by emphasizing the benefits ERP aid brought to Britain through the stimulation of production to replace dollar imports, delivered a riposte to critics on the left who argued that the plan was a form of American economic imperialism. Officials boasted a ‘cast-list’ ‘perhaps more impressive than any Hollywood feature’, comprising senior ministers, respected journalists and illustrious American politicians.109 Another film in the same series was a documentary made by the Rank Organization promoting European unity. In the case of this production, liaison arrangements between officials and film-makers may have been facilitated by Bevin’s son-in-law, Sidney Wynne, who was Rank’s chief of publicity.110 Five major companies dominated the British newsreel industry after the Second World War: Gaumont-British and Universal, which belonged to the Rank Organization; Paramount News, allied to the international Paramount reel; British Movietone, owned partly by the American Fox Film Corporation and Lord Rothermere’s Associated Newspaper group; and, Pathé, linked with ABPC. Of these, Gaumont-British and Pathé had the largest distribution, reaching more than 1000 cinemas each. All the reels appeared twice a week and were limited in length to a maximum of 700 feet. Approximately £400,000 a year was spent on newsreel production, in addition to the cost of printing 80 million feet of film.111 The BBC introduced regular television news bulletins in 1955, the year in which Independent Television News was created as a common service for the arrival of commercial television. Paramount News was the first newsreel company to close in the face of these new rivals, in 1957, and GaumontBritish/Universal followed in 1959.112 Attlee’s administration eyed the newsreels with considerable suspicion in 1945 due to the established links between the Conservatives and the newsreel industry, and the support the five companies had lent the political status quo between the wars by agreeing to sanitize their coverage of social and political issues.113 In the event, once newsreel producers and editors became aware of the ideological gulf between the Labour Party’s socialist ambitions and Soviet-style communism, the likelihood of friction between ministers and the newsreels on matters of foreign policy diminished. As

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British Cinema and the Cold War subsidiaries of the same companies that produced and distributed most feature films, the newsreels were already predisposed to be anti-communist. Labour ministers were also in a position to exploit the sense of shame and guilt that the newsreel industry felt for having collaborated in the National government’s conciliatory approach towards Hitler, emotions that resulted in a fear of being seen to ‘appease’ Stalinism.114 The continuation until 1949 of the ‘rota’ system introduced by Whitehall during the Second World War, an arrangement which obliged the newsreels to share a restricted amount of film material due to the shortage of raw stock, reinforced the companies’ consensual approach towards editorial policy and enabled the government in certain circumstances to control the supply of information at source.115 Peter Boyle has demonstrated in his analysis of Paramount News and Gaumont-British News Cold War output between 1945 and 1950 that British newsreels adopted a stridently anti-Soviet tone from early 1946 onwards, consistently omitting the qualifications and nuances which British and American statesmen included in their key pronouncements on foreign affairs. Paramount’s spot-news story covering Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in Missouri in March 1946 left out, for instance, his expression of tentative hope for continued cooperation with the Soviets, but instead interspersed its report with shots of Nazi manoeuvres in the 1930s, thereby giving vivid visual reinforcement to the former premier’s call for military preparedness and raising the spectre of appeasement.116 This pattern of subjectivity and misinformation was repeated in the companies’ coverage of later events and issues, through developments in Eastern Europe and atomic weaponry to the Berlin blockade and the creation of NATO. Soviet actions would invariably be accompanied by sombre pictures and music, and if film was not available from certain Cold War arenas – such as the Greek civil war – scenes might instead be faked.117 In 1948, following moves by Pathé’s producer-in-chief, the IRD and IPD established direct contact with the newsreel companies. This supplemented the companies’ regular consultations with the COI and was aimed at ‘bringing the contents of the newsreels more neatly into conformity with our wishes’.118 By the time of the Korean War in 1950, Gaumont-British News had entirely abandoned any impartial pretensions it ever had, with highlycharged commentaries condemning pacifists as ‘Reds’ who threatened ‘the Free World’.119 Most British cinema-goers in the 1940s and 1950s regarded the newsreels as the purveyors of straight news rather than views, and the fact

Raising the Curtain that they so inadequately reflected the breadth of British opinion on international affairs during the late 1940s compared with the press, for example, is therefore not without significance. It is doubtful whether, by presenting a consistently strong case for the anti-Soviet prosecution, the newsreels by themselves changed people’s minds as regards where the blame for the breakdown of the Grand Alliance lay. Yet seeing the ‘reality’ of the Soviet threat and the tangible benefits capitalism brought to war-torn Europe in terms of food and fuel in newsreel clips – and documentaries – presumably lent at least some solidity to Bevin’s policy. The newsreels might also have made the fictional depictions of communism and the USSR more believable when the cinematic Cold War reached its apogee in the 1950s.

VII In his study of British culture in the Cold War era (defined as 1945–60), Robert Hewison argues that 1945 marked not the end of war, but merely the opening of a new phase started by the explosion of the atomic bomb. The ‘siege conditions’ under which Britain had been living since 1939 thus continued, reinforcing the conservative responses of a culture that had every reason to want to ‘get back to normal’.120 The above examination of one aspect of Britain’s ‘low’ culture – the cinema – casts an ambiguous light on Hewison’s notion of continuity. On the one hand, it suggests that British perceptions of the USSR and its foreign policy were in flux for several years after VJ Day. On the other hand, it indicates that the roots of the Cold War were firmly embedded and had been exposed at the cinema for several decades before the late 1940s. Viewed from this perspective, the disappearance of sympathetic Soviet role models such as The Demi-Paradise’s Ivan Kouznetsoff from British cinema screens after 1945 did not amount to a sudden about-turn on the film industry’s part. Instead, the burst of pro-Soviet enthusiasm shown by the cinema between 1941 and 1945 represented, in the long term, a temporary spasm. British films had evinced consistent support for the political and social status quo overtly, and covertly, since before the Bolshevik Revolution. When the cinema’s anti-Soviet stance began to take shape in the late 1940s, therefore, this signalled little more than a reversion to the norm. The cinema had been a propaganda vehicle from the very outset of the cultural Cold War, in Britain as well as the USSR and USA. If we adjudge the Cold War to have started in its fullest sense in 1947, British cinema-

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British Cinema and the Cold War goers had been privy to a 30-year-long dress rehearsal. Many of the themes or basic narrative frames through which films exposed the dangers of communism in the Cold War cinema of the 1950s and 1960s can be traced to this earlier period. As we might expect, their form would assume greater virulence the deeper and more institutionalized the conflict grew during these decades. While there clearly was at least some scope for countervailing images to prick the cinematic anti-communist consensus, all the indications were that unless things changed such images would generally be restricted to the unconventional margins of an instinctively cautious and conservative industry.

2 Deviants and Misfits

I would ask you all to be on your guard against the enemy within. There are those who would stop at nothing to injure our economy and our defence. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance… Our fight is not only against physical but against spiritual forces. In Britain and the Commonwealth and in the democracies there are diverse creeds, but their adherents all believe in the supremacy of a moral law. Let us then arm ourselves against evil, with an equal enthusiasm to preserve and protect the higher creeds in which we believe. Prime Minister Clement Attlee, BBC radio broadcast, 30 July 1950 1

Espionage and subversion first became popular cinematic subjects during and after the First World War, glamorizing an otherwise disturbing theme. By the late 1930s, the genre was one of the British film industry’s most commercially successful, with Alfred Hitchcock especially producing outstanding romantic melodramas such as The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938), films which cautiously reflected contemporary international tensions. During the Second World War, the MOI actively promoted films that warned of the threat posed by Nazi fifth columnism. Major features such as Thorold Dickinson’s The Next of Kin (1941) and, particularly, Alberto Cavalcanti’s disturbing Went The Day Well? (1942) not only

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British Cinema and the Cold War blurred fact and fiction to manufacture memorably effective propaganda: they also brought the spy film much closer to the realm of reality.2 In many ways, the Cold War provided the perfect setting for the creative exploration of this film genre. The advent of nuclear weaponry brought with it the fear on both sides that if secrets were given away millions of lives would be at risk. This most obviously related to spying scientists but, by extension, could also include potential subversives in the diplomatic and military fields and elsewhere. It was, above all, the fear of strategic surprise – the ‘nuclear Pearl Harbor’ as some in Whitehall called it – that led to the blossoming of Britain’s intelligence services after 1945.3 Furthermore, the rich ideological nature of the conflict highlighted the role of educators, whether in the universities or schools; those influential in labour circles, such as trade union officials; and the mass media in general, including film-makers. In other words, a direct link could be made at least by some between national security and apparently apolitical occupations, a link that contained the natural ingredients for conspiracy theory and paranoia. This chapter examines how British cinema reflected and contributed to these anxieties through films released between 1949 and 1965 that dealt directly with the notion of ‘an enemy within’. It looks in particular at how domestic communism, perceived by government to be the main threat to the political and economic status quo, was represented and at the methods offered for combatting it. By interpreting this theme of subversion widely it is possible to take in films that focused on the enemy within the British empire; but I have generally excluded those that depicted communism’s influence within British industry (which are dealt with in Chapter 6). I want to show that these films tended to take their lead from the politics (and sometimes the politicians) of the day, pinpointing two distinct ‘waves’. The first, dating from the early 1950s, identified communism as a palpable menace to British society, necessitating unprecedented security measures. The second, beginning in the early to mid-1960s, saw the dangers of communism to some extent counter-balanced by a sense of uncertainty about the activities and management of the state security apparatus.

I Conspirator, Britain’s first identifiable Cold War feature film, was directed at MGM’s Elstree Studios by one of the film industry’s most respected espionage exponents, Victor Saville. Having co-produced the aforementioned The Flight Commander (1928), in the early 1930s Saville made

Deviants and Misfits a number of acclaimed spy films set around the Great War, before taking over from Michael Balcon as head of MGM production in Britain. After 1939 he became a powerful figure in Hollywood, albeit with few directorial roles.4 MGM had a strong track record of making successful movies in Britain, dating from the encouragement offered by the 1938 Cinematograph Films Act to American companies willing to invest heavily in ‘British’ projects. The best known of these, A Yank at Oxford (1938) and the public school-set Good-bye, Mr. Chips (1939), had cast a transatlantic light on hallowed British institutions. Conspirator, released in August 1949, sought to appeal to as wide an audience as possible in a similar fashion.5 The making of Conspirator can be attributed partly to the political pressure imposed on Hollywood in the late 1940s to re-assert its antiSoviet credentials. In May 1947, the Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives (HUAC) started to conduct closed hearings ‘regarding Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry’. Open sessions followed in October, turning, in the words of one critic, ‘the dream factory into a paranoid fantasy’. HUAC chairman J. Parnell Thomas, who believed that Hollywood had become a ‘Red propaganda centre’, enquired of MGM’s chief executive, Louis B. Mayer, whether his studio was making any anti-communist films. Already under suspicion for having countenanced the making of the pro-Soviet Song of Russia (Gregory Ratoff ) in 1944, Mayer answered in the affirmative.6 In fact, MGM jumped on Tinsel Town’s anti-Red bandwagon more reluctantly than many other studios in the years ahead, mainly because Mayer, like Jack Warner, head of Warner Brothers, believed that overtly political features (of whatever persuasion) were box-office poison.7 Ninotchka, Ernst Lubitsch’s 1939 anti-communist parable starring Greta Garbo, was granted a re-run by MGM in 1948, including in Italy where it contributed towards the US State Department’s pro-Christian Democrat propaganda campaign in the run-up to the country’s bitterly-contested first post-war general election (won by the Christian Democrats).8 The Red Danube (George Sidney), a sensationalist account of the forced repatriation of Russian citizens by the Soviet government from post-war Central Europe, was released by the studio in 1950.9 When Hollywood’s leading executives agreed to Thomas’s demands for the ‘blacklisting’ of anyone with communist connections in the wake of the HUAC hearings – an action that mentally scarred the American film industry for over a decade – in his defence Mayer cited, with some justification, the fear of censorship and the need to appease public opinion.10

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British Cinema and the Cold War With a screenplay written by the New Yorker columnist Sally Benson based on Humphrey Slater’s 1948 novel, Conspirator adopted the popular espionage formula to produce an archetypal Cold War narrative. Its strong cast included a sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, playing her first adult role, and Robert Taylor, one of several leading actors who had appeared as ‘friendly’ witnesses at the HUAC congressional hearings of October 1947 to substantiate claims that Hollywood was ‘infested’ by communists.11 Taylor played Michael Curragh, a Guards officer passing on Anglo-American military secrets to a foreign power via a subversive political party. He marries, despite the disapproval of his masters, but is then ordered to ‘liquidate’ his young wife when she discovers his treacherous activities. Curragh’s tortured soul causes him to botch the attempt, whereupon at the command of his superiors he commits suicide. It then transpires that the intelligence services had been aware of Curragh’s spying all along and were feeding him false information in order to mislead the organization and ensnare more of its operatives. Not once is it stated explicitly in Conspirator that the officer is furthering the communist or Soviet cause. This unwillingness to name the threat is a characteristic of the vast majority of British Cold War films and generally sets them apart from their American and Soviet counterparts. Reticence nonetheless still allowed for a clear political message. Cold War propaganda is evident throughout Conspirator. In one scene a debate takes place which purports to analyze why a man becomes a traitor, and in another it is made clear that ‘one never questions the party’. Curragh’s contacts are Eastern European stereotypes, ‘Ralek’ and ‘Alex’; their mission, ‘the greatest social experiment in the world’, has obvious Marxist overtones. As with other films of this early period, confidence is shown in and loyalty encouraged towards the authorities’ surveillance activities. Natural justice prevails in the end when the traitor seeks redemption via an honourable bullet, while his distraught wife then puts the national interest before personal grief by keeping MI5’s information secret and agreeing to tell everyone that Curragh shot himself because she had left him. Many critics ridiculed Conspirator’s introduction of the idea of communist subversives within the British military. Kinematograph Weekly called it ‘fantastic’ and ‘hokum’; Variety thought it ‘highly fanciful’ and suited more to the ‘paranoid’ American market.12 Certainly, compared with The Iron Curtain, Hollywood’s first Cold War movie, and RKO Radio Pictures’ notoriously hysterical Woman on Pier 13 (1949), Howard Hughes’s troubled film which bore noted similarities with Conspirator’s plot,

Deviants and Misfits Saville’s film really only amounted to a half-hearted swipe at communism.13 There were some people, however, who would not have considered the film to be so far-fetched. The CPGB was clearly a marginal electoral force in the late 1940s. By mid-1947 party membership had declined by a third from its wartime peak to under 40,000 and both seats it had won at the 1945 general election were lost in 1950.14 Nevertheless, sections of the press and government remained keenly aware of the attraction of communism to potential dissidents. While many of these fears have now been proven to be exaggerated, they certainly seemed plausible in the light of the CPGB’s hard-line sectarian policies during this period and the reports reaching ministers which outlined the Soviets’ use of national communist parties, fellow travellers and sympathetic liberals to form a ‘fifth column’ to spy and act as agents of influence for their own interests.15 Unlike Hollywood, throughout the Cold War the British film industry was neither publicly investigated for evidence of communist subversion nor openly coerced into projecting onto screen the political establishment’s conspiratorial suspicions. Calls to set up a British version of HUAC went unheeded, parliament did not go witch-hunting, ‘guilt by association’ was never enshrined, there were no loyalty oaths, and no ‘Great Fear’.16 Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s prominence in US politics between 1950 and 1954 caused deep concern to many people in Britain who saw him as ‘a Frankenstein monster leading the American people down the road to Fascism’.17 The revulsion to the United States’ swing to the right helps to explain why several blacklisted American film artists were able to continue their careers in Britain.18 A series of private and official measures were taken in the late 1940s and early 1950s which, nonetheless, created an atmosphere of cultural caution in which film-makers had to work. A British version of the Truman Loyalty Security Programme was introduced into the civil service between 1948 and 1955, with positive vetting installed in 1952.19 A special Cabinet Committee on Subversive Activities was set up, and the BBC conducted an informal blacklisting of real or suspected communists, overseen by MI5.20 Smear campaigns were carried out against real or suspected communists in the teaching and lecturing professions, and restrictions placed on the publication of literature by known or suspected communists.21 ‘We don’t live in a world of neat plots,’ claimed the novelist and broadcaster J.B. Priestley in October 1948, ‘but in a foggy atmosphere of prejudices and cross purposes, silly rumours, tragic blunders’. As an indication of this, in April 1949 the John Lewis Partnership dismissed one

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British Cinema and the Cold War of its department store employees for refusing to sign an anti-communist declaration.22 There is no evidence of these measures having played any part in the devising or making of Conspirator, though it is unlikely that the Guards would have been allowed to cooperate as they did during shooting had subversion been shown in a different light.23 Be that as it may, by suggesting that communism exploited the vulnerable and the socially inadequate (traits attributed, in Curragh’s case, to a lonely childhood), that it deprived people of their private lives and demanded total obedience, and that it could even infiltrate the military, the film’s message was fully in keeping with those forces, both inside and outside government, that urged education and vigilance. By implying that Curragh’s disloyalty stemmed in part from overhearing Irish Republican Army plotters in his youth, the film also drew on contemporary fears of the threat posed to the British state by another long-standing enemy, and one that had collaborated with Hitler. In the process, terrorism, Nazism and communism were conflated.24 Conspirator’s poor box-office performance probably had less to do with the public’s rejection of its political appeal and more with the film’s lack of suspense and dated style. According to the Daily Herald, Taylor’s Curragh appeared more like ‘a comedy detective’ than a dangerous spy, while the Monthly Film Bulletin described the script, acting and direction as ‘uniformly devoid of life, interest or verisimilitude’.25

II Political subversion was a popular theme in British films released in the wake of Conspirator. Paul Temple’s Triumph (Maclean Rogers, 1950), based on Francis Durbridge’s radio serial, involved the eponymous hero unmasking the mysterious ‘Z’ organization, hidden in the New Forest stealing atomic secrets. Dick Barton Strikes Back and Dick Barton at Bay, directed by Godfrey Grayson in 1949 and 1950 respectively, were roughand-ready productions aimed at the schoolboy market, with the radio sleuth chasing either criminals or foreign agents dealing (again) in weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile, Alien Orders, a short documentary made by the CFU and released in 1951 under the Colonial Office’s auspices, raised the spectre of communist banditry in the empire, Malaya in particular.26 New ground was broken in the representation of fifth columnism in 1951, however, with the release of Roy Boulting’s High Treason. This

Deviants and Misfits ‘Cold War text par excellence’, according to Marcia Landy, arguably ranks as the most overtly political film of the whole post-war period.27 The Boulting twins, John and Roy, had for a decade worked together by interchanging the roles of producer and director. Since Dawn Guard (1941), one of the first films to take a progressive stance on Britain’s war aims, the brothers had earned a reputation as critical social commentators rather than mere cinematic entertainers. Fame is the Spur (1947) and The Guinea Pig (1948) had placed them on the political left of the film industry, a perception strengthened by John’s service in the international brigades during the Spanish Civil War.28 The idea for High Treason came from independent producer Paul Soskin, who reportedly wanted a film which ‘not only dealt with the network of underground subversive activities in the country, but would also grip and entertain audiences… startle them by its topicality… and show how well Britain is organized to deal with such problems’. Roy Boulting agreed to act as scriptwriter (with Frank Harvey) and director, while John, unusually, worked separately on The Magic Box (1951), a biopic of cinema pioneer William Friese-Greene as part of the Festival of Britain celebrations. Roy was intent on issuing his own warning about the communist infiltration that he perceived within Britain’s circles of power. Like many social democrats who hoped the Second World War would mark a turning point in British and international politics, the Boultings had grown increasingly disappointed with what they saw as the USSR’s cynical activities in Eastern and Western Europe in the late 1940s.29 Roy’s disillusionment was further animated by a brief post-war stint on the executive committee of the ACT. Communist film-makers such as Ralph Bond, Sidney Cole and Ivor Montagu had held leading positions within the ACT, without actually controlling it, since the union’s formation in 1933. Between 1939 and 1947 the union’s membership had increased from roughly 2000 to over 6000, bringing with it an enhanced radicalism, expressed at its most extreme in calls for the nationalization of the film industry. Boulting witnessed at first hand how the communists on the union’s executive were able to out-manouevre his and others’ opposition to such policies, leaving him with the impression that communism was inherently devious and secretly prevalent throughout the ACT and large sections of the labour movement in general. Subsequent close scrutiny of certain MPs on the left of the Labour Party encouraged Boulting to believe that the USSR’s baleful influence reached almost to the very top of Britain’s political system.30

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British Cinema and the Cold War In order to make the communist threat as believable as possible, Boulting drew on actual events and, without necessarily knowing it, official propaganda material which had recently highlighted public fears of a ‘Red plot’. In particular, Boulting’s script was influenced by an explosion in July 1950 at Portsmouth dockyards where arms supplies bound for the conflict in Korea were being stockpiled. This incident, following on the heels of a spate of troublesome industrial disputes, was immediately misinterpreted by the government as sabotage.31 Attlee’s subsequent radio broadcast warned the nation to be ‘on guard against the enemy within’, by which he clearly meant the CPGB, and also called into question striking trade unionists’ loyalty to the fast-developing war effort. By September, ministers were warning BBC listeners of a syndicalist conspiracy, while the IRD briefed the media and ‘responsible’ elements within the Labour Party and TUC about the Cominform’s renewed sabotage campaign. A general legislative assault against communists was considered by the cabinet, only to be rejected in late 1950 as likely to be counter-productive in publicity terms, drive communists underground and so reduce the flow of intelligence concerning their activities.32 High Treason starts with a dramatized reconstruction of the Portsmouth incident and expands to the planned destruction by saboteurs of Britain’s eight great power-producing centres. This is intended to prepare the ground for a communist coup, to be synchronized with Soviet military moves in Western Europe. Using Britain’s electricity supply as the film’s focal point was particularly apposite. In August 1950, Lord Citrine, chairman of the British Electrical Authority, had told the Minister for Fuel and Power, Philip Noel-Baker, that he ‘was satisfied that the Russians regarded our Power Stations as the nerve centre of British industry’, a warning that was discreetly leaked to the press.33 The film’s saboteurs are not merely foreigners and militant foremen but respectable members of society, including shopkeepers and civil servants. Whilst these individuals are motivated by utopian ideas of a peaceful, egalitarian world, their leaders are debased intellectuals who use the ‘front’ of an international school to preach the self-contradictory virtues of ‘democratic discipline’. The movement’s ostensible chief is the aristocratic MP Grant Mansfield (Anthony Nicholls), who belongs to the so-called People’s Progress Party. The plot moves to its dénouement when ex-serviceman Jimmy Ellis (Kenneth Griffith) turns against his comrades, sickened by the group’s fascist-like murderous techniques. Jimmy dies a hero alerting the police of the diabolical attempt to bring the country to its knees,

Deviants and Misfits

3. SOS: seconds before he is shot in the back by a co-saboteur, Jimmy (Kenneth Griffith) taps out the message which is instrumental in saving the nation from ‘the enemy within’. High Treason (1951).

and the subversives are thwarted just in time in a violent gun battle filmed on location in Battersea Power Station. Britain survives but the true éminence grise, the mysterious Cominform agent Stringer, ominously remains at large. According to Raymond Durgnat, High Treason was the closest Britain came to McCarthyism on film, with ‘its witch-hunt… weirdly testifying to the hysteric current of its time’.34 It is difficult to disagree with this verdict in terms of the film’s sweeping assault on ‘deviant’ minorities. In contrast to Conspirator, communism is shown in High Treason to have burrowed deeply into British society, exploiting the nation’s open and democratic system. Pacifists, admirers of the avant-garde and homosexuals are just a few examples of the ‘misfit’ accomplices in the conspiracy. As the monolithic enemy has grown in size, so its subversive methods have grown more sophisticated, tailored to exploit each country’s weaknesses: in Britain’s case, its class differences and the public’s undue attachment to privacy. The British people must respond to this, it implies, by conducting a spirited offensive strategy of their own, of which the enhancement of the national security apparatus is merely a part. After all, it takes the combined efforts

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British Cinema and the Cold War of the Special Branch, MI5, the Air Ministry and War Office to defeat the subversives in the film, and only then with a dose of luck. Unlike Seven Days to Noon, the Boultings’ atomic weapons thriller released in 1950,35 High Treason makes no attempt to consider the possible merits of the idealists’ case. In the film’s two key dialogue scenes – when Jimmy confesses to his mother and brother, and the megalomaniac Mansfield pits his wits against Commander Brennan (Liam Redmond) of Scotland Yard – the group’s quest for ‘a better world’ is dismissed as either a tragic fantasy or a passport to dictatorship. The divisions inherent within all totalitarian movements, particularly between the intellectuals and the foot soldiers (who openly despise each other), imply eventual implosion. In the meantime, communism will continue to mimic Nazism: in confusing ends and means (‘Your friend died a fine death,’ Jimmy is callously told after learning the fate of his neighbour in the dockyard explosion); in treating individuals merely as cogs in a machine, leading to the loss of autonomy and responsibility; in digesting its own converts (Jimmy faces immediate execution once his doubts emerge); and, ultimately, in being fanatical, dogmatic and elitist, and therefore alien to the vast majority of British people. The moral ascendancy of the authorities is reinforced by their refusal to indulge in dirty tricks, even when pitted against the ‘forces of darkness’. Thus the home secretary refuses to issue the security services with a search warrant for Mansfield’s house on the grounds of insufficient evidence. ‘I’m paid to protect the individual from the state as much as the state from the individual,’ he intones. The surest way to safeguard the cherished British way of life, Boulting tells us, is for the people to police themselves. Jimmy has betrayed his family (including his late father, a war hero), but they have also failed in their duty by allowing him to stray. In circumstances when the enemy is invisible, and the price of defeat so high, everyone must pull together and watch their nearest and dearest.36 This surveillance extends into the workplace, social clubs, even Westminster itself. In the latter regard, Boulting’s propaganda was unusually direct. Mansfield’s character bears a striking resemblance to one of a group of left-wing Labour MPs whom the director privately (if mistakenly) labelled crypto-communists.37 During filming the Labour Party’s secretary, Morgan Phillips, warned Sir Hartley Shawcross at the Board of Trade of the damage such a story-line could inflict on the government’s anti-communist campaign. Shawcross was assured by the NFFC, which was helping to fund the film, of the MP’s ‘independent’ status and of High Treason’s non-propagandistic nature.38 The USSR is not

Deviants and Misfits mentioned by name in the film but the signals are apparent. Mansfield’s visit to a foreign embassy is the cue, for instance, for Boulting to employ the cinematic trick of actors speaking directly to the audience in order for the viewers to establish a mutual understanding with the film. ‘Guess which one,’ says Brennan, looking straight at the camera, as the MP enters the building. Newspaper headlines link Mansfield with a Cominform meeting in Warsaw and the Soviet diplomat Andrei Gromyko, thus creating a conspiratorial consensus with viewers. It remains unclear whether the Labour Party’s continued sensitivity helped lead to reports that MI5 had a hand in vetting the script, but it is highly likely that this was a factor in the film’s release being delayed for eight months until after the October 1951 general election.39 Rank’s publicity loudly, and justifiably, proclaimed the ‘timely’ release of High Treason. Dock strikes and exposés of the CPGB written by disaffected members occupied much newspaper space in 1951, as did the defections of diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in May.40 Despite this, and the ‘U’ certificate granted the film by the BBFC, its box-office returns were disappointing. Some people might have been put off going to see it by press reports of the film’s clumsy depiction of the communist threat, others by already having had their fill of shoddy Hollywood Red-baiting melodramas like I Was A Communist for the FBI (Gordon Douglas, 1951), with which High Treason was compared.41 As for the impact on its audience, some critics found High Treason’s depiction of duffel-coated communists far from persuasive, while others equated its highly effective political message with that of earlier films like The Iron Curtain.42 Despite the authorities’ genuine fears of a Soviet-inspired assault on Britain’s energy supplies, ironically some critics labelled the plot implausible.43 If the government hoped that this particular film might alert people to the peculiar vulnerability of certain sections of British industry, such comments indicate that these aspirations remained unfulfilled. But by fostering and perpetuating popular images of domestic communism as base, murderous yet dangerously infectious, High Treason was surely useful in reinforcing calls for greater watchfulness.44

III Cinema-goers were constantly reminded of the need to be on the look-out for political ‘deviants’ masquerading as ordinary citizens in the 1950s, implying that the Cold War was as much an international civil war as an

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British Cinema and the Cold War inter-state conflict. Perhaps learning from the limited success of High Treason, however, subversives tended to be depicted as operating in small, isolated groups rather than as part of a wider conspiracy; many were stockin-trade ‘intellectuals’ occupied in sensitive positions as opposed to workingclass industrial saboteurs. As the decade wore on, films raised new issues to keep pace with important political, military and diplomatic developments.45 The style and quality of these productions varied considerably. Rough Shoot, directed by Robert Parrish and released in 1952, clumsily sought to fit a flimsy Cold War plot into the mould of a 1930s espionage melodrama. US army colonel Roger Taine (played by the popular American lead Joel McCrea) rents a house in Dorset for a week’s shooting. Wandering the moors one day, Taine fires a warning charge of buckshot at a poacher who is killed. Unbeknown to the American, the victim is a British secret agent who has been shot simultaneously by a hidden sniper. The distraught Taine is soon told the truth by Sandorski (Herbert Lom), an eccentric Pole recruited by MI5 to break an Eastern European spy ring working in Britain. After a car chase, the two men round up the subversives at Madame Tussaud’s waxworks museum. A Soviet ‘mole’ in the defence establishment is captured and files relating to the latest atomic weapons trials in Australia are prevented from falling into enemy hands. Those who had read Geoffrey Household’s 1951 novel Rough Shoot were probably surprised to find that the book’s fascist subversives had turned into communists on screen. Changing the culprits’ political affiliation to chime with contemporary events made commercial sense, as did the attempted exploitation of the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ (in the book Taine is a Dorset quarry agent) and the injection into the story of the by now almost obligatory nuclear sub-plot.46 Scriptwriter and political thriller author Eric Ambler, for one, knew the political significance of his adaptation, having just penned Judgement on Deltchev, a left-wing indictment of Stalinism.47 Had the film not borrowed so heavily from Hitchcock’s espionage manual – right down to the train journey and drunken, treacherous aristocrat – it might have worked as an up-to-date comedy thriller. As it was, anachronisms were legion, not least the amateur spy-catcher Sandorski, whose penchant for challenging gunmen armed only with a swagger-stick bordered on the ridiculous. Explicit topical references – when the camera lingers on a wax dummy of Stalin, for example – consequently looked out of place. The overall impression was that of a half-hearted, opportunistic film with a tame propaganda message, which audiences found unappealing.48

Deviants and Misfits Secret People (1952) represented an attempt by director Thorold Dickinson to make a European-style ‘art house’ film that dramatized the debate about the ethics of terrorism. Originally conceived by Dickinson and novelist Joyce Cary in the early 1940s and based on an IRA incident in Liverpool, by the time the film was finished at Ealing Studios in 1951 it had been shorn of all Irish connotations.49 The film was set instead in London in the 1930s and told of two sisters, Maria (Valentina Cortesa) and Nora (Audrey Hepburn), who become entangled in a bomb plot by fellow European exiles against the tyrants who have taken over their country. When Maria kills an innocent waitress with explosives intended for evil dictator General Galbern, she realises she is being manipulated, and gives her life to save Nora from the same fate. The opening performances of Secret People at the Odeon in Leicester Square were disrupted by communist demonstrators who, believing that General Galbern represented a fascist dictator (Mussolini or Hitler), interpreted the film as an attack on communist opponents of fascism. Dickinson later blamed these demonstrations for the failure of the film, arguing that Ealing was so shaken by them that the film was recut and only sent out as a second feature with limited promotion.50 It seems more likely that Secret People was killed by slack construction rather than by Michael Balcon’s fears of a left-wing backlash. Almost without exception, critics found the story structurally and politically confusing, The Spectator’s reviewer going so far as to label it ‘the most boring film I have ever seen in my life’.51 That said, the political protests highlighted the importance which British communists attached to the cinema as a forum for Cold War debate and the sensitivity surrounding the subject of fifth-columnism during this period. Less controversial was Anthony Asquith’s aviation thriller made at Pinewood in 1953, The Net. This film superficially appeared to be an attempt by Two Cities to cash in on the immense popularity of David Lean’s The Sound Barrier (1952), but resembled more closely Paramount’s The Atomic City (Jerry Hopper, 1952) in highlighting the claustrophobic life-style of Cold War scientists.52 Cocooned within an artificial, top security environment, yet one that the enemy still manages to penetrate, the dilemma faced by The Net’s protagonists reflected both society’s growing anxiety towards the creation of a military–scientific complex and the dangers that insane or politically naive scientists-come-technocrats posed to the nation’s safety. Later films, such as Wendy Toye’s low-budget thriller The Teckman Mystery (1954), focused on the same theme.53

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British Cinema and the Cold War Behind the barbed wire of a heavily guarded research station, the brilliant aviation inventor Heathley (James Donald) conducts experimental tests on the M.7, his new, high-speed jet aircraft of potentially limitless power. The ‘net’ breeds jealousy and discord. While ‘smoothie’ colleague Alex (Herbert Lom) chases Heathley’s neglected wife Lydia (Phyllis Calvert), the project’s secrets are being leaked to a ‘foreign power’ by an unknown spy. Following the mysterious death of the project director and a near-fatal test, Whitehall sacks Heathley despite the lack of hard evidence. Dr. Bord (Noel Willman) then persuades the desperate Heathley to break ranks and take the M.7 for a test flight together. When the test succeeds, Bord pulls a gun and orders Heathley to fly East. After a wild struggle during which the aircraft crashes through various speed barriers, the traitor is killed and Heathley returns home, his devotion to the West reciprocated by that of his loving wife. William Fairchild’s script remained true to John Pudney’s novel in illustrating how loyalty could be broken by causes other than political ones. It is the overwhelming ambition to succeed which fundamentally motivates Heathley throughout the film, despite his vaguely muttered hopes that the M.7 might help change the world and bring peoples closer together. Producer Antony Darnborough was far more interested in the psychological nature of Pudney’s story than any explicit Cold War implications,54 and this was reflected in the convincing portrayal of the prison-like manner in which the scientists are locked away from the outside world. The military and government authorities are shown to be mentally and physically suffocating the scientists, one moment pressurizing them to complete the project, the next saying it is a waste of money and threatening to shut the whole thing down. Several critics praised the film in these terms, while others commented on the significance of Heathley’s decision to risk his life to remain in the West rather than defect to the East where many believed scientists were accorded greater respect. Bord’s violent and underhand tactics could also be seen as an illustration of the fundamental difference between ‘the Free World’s’ sometimes damaging quest to push back the frontiers of knowledge and the Communist World’s determination to win the supersonic race at all costs.55 If communist fifth-columnists were inciting treachery in the West, it was only natural that they should be portrayed as exacting revenge on those who had defected from the East. This was the subject of several lowbudget, moderately popular films in the 1950s, a sub-genre that reflected the intense media speculation surrounding the real-life, semi-clandestine

Deviants and Misfits game of cat-and-mouse over asylum-seekers played between the KGB, MI6 and the CIA.56 Little Red Monkey (Ken Hughes, 1954) stands out among these productions principally because it was the first British film to suggest a link between political subversion in Britain and the communist regime in China. Leon Duschenko, the scientist in charge of the Soviet Bloc’s guided missile experiments, arrives anonymously in London en route to a new life in the United States after escaping from East Berlin. Several top British and American scientists have recently been murdered in mysterious circumstances in Britain, and the only clue is a red monkey spotted at the scene of every crime. US State Department agent Locklin (Richard Conte) and Harrington (Russell Napier) of the Special Branch are therefore assigned to protect the defector, who represents a great coup for Western intelligence. Within hours, however, he has been kidnapped and is traced to the headquarters of a communist front organization masquerading as ‘an international friendship club’ which plans to smuggle him back ‘over the fence’. A shoot-out results in the freeing of the scientist and the killing of the midget head of the gang, an oriental who turns out to be the owner of the dreaded monkey. Plots involving bizarre villains with pet primates are rarely intended to be taken seriously by cinema-goers. Like an increasing number of films made during the 1950s and 1960s, Little Red Monkey was based on a television programme (in this case, a serial by Eric Maschwitz), and it is unlikely that Hughes, renowned more for his resourcefulness than political convictions, had in mind anything other than box-office receipts.57 Yet it is the film’s non-propagandistic nature that makes its subversion connotations all the more interesting. First, the film implies that for all of the damage inflicted on British intelligence by recent revelations of highly-placed Soviet ‘moles’, the nation’s security apparatus is still intact. Second, the film shows that political desertion is by no means all one-way traffic, a fact confirmed by the highly public defection of five Soviet intelligence agents in the early months of 1954, immediately prior to the film’s release.58 Third, the fifthcolumnists are both ruthless and disaffected. Once given their orders mysteriously from overseas, they have no compunction about eliminating party backsliders, despite paradoxically displaying ideological doubts themselves (more cinematic evidence that communism sows the seeds of its own destruction). Finally, the film pointedly defends the authorities’ right to curtail democratic liberties in the fight against subversion, particularly the freedom of the press. Zealous but naive journalists, obsessed by

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British Cinema and the Cold War their right to print details of the latest Cold War events despite Special Branch warnings as to the potential costs, are used by the front organization to discover the defector’s whereabouts. The fact that one of the reckless reporters loses his life suggests that imposing careful restrictions would serve the media’s and the wider national interest.

IV Though the threat of Maoist-inspired subversion in Britain felt far removed to most people in the 1950s, what the cinema also portrayed was the more readily identifiable challenge which Beijing, and the communist movement in general, posed to political stability in Britain’s empire in Asia and Africa. By the Second World War, the British film industry had for a generation played an important role in mythologizing the empire, emphasizing the ideals of service and duty and the spread of civilization rather than strategic and economic gain, and underlining a symbiotic relationship between the colonies and homeland. Scores of films had helped many viewers to conceive of the empire and Britain as coterminous, sharing the same values, friends and enemies.59 The images of imperial subversion provided by the cinema during the first two decades of the Cold War, as the empire came to a stuttering end, therefore had the potential to reinforce, and perhaps extend, those of fifth-columnism at home. British cinema showed that it was not immune to the changing nature of the empire after the Second World War. Largely gone was the paternalistic triumphalism of films such as Alexander Korda’s Sanders of the River (1935), dedicated to those ‘handful of white men whose everyday work is an unsung saga of courage and efficiency’, ‘the Civil Servants – keepers of the King’s Peace’.60 Instead, films either sought to inject a liberalizing element into the colonial discourse (such as Thorold Dickinson’s Men of Two Worlds, shot in Tanganyika and released in 1946), or they depicted the passing of empire (such as Nine Hours to Rama, Mark Robson’s fictionalization of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, released in 1962). It would be difficult to talk of a school of anti-imperial films, however. For all its progressive images of the Negro as hero, Men of Two Worlds, for example, still managed to highlight the differences between the ‘sophisticated’ Europeans and the ‘ignorant’ and ‘superstitious’ natives.61 These productions were, in any case, far outnumbered by others which, while acknowledging the newly emerging empire-commonwealth, re-affirmed the ‘virtues’ of

Deviants and Misfits British imperialism and the ‘benefits’ it had brought to colonies past and present. Thus the empire was acclaimed as the purveyor of political plurality (for instance, in Ealing’s 1948 Australian historical drama, Eureka Stockade); of Christianity (in Ken Annakin’s 1954 New Zealand ‘Western’, The Seekers); of enlightened law and order (in Wolf Rilla’s 1956 South Seas drama, Pacific Destiny); and, reflecting contemporary concerns, of conservationism (in Harry Watt’s 1951 Kenyan adventure, Where No Vultures Fly). Such messages were themselves significant to the Cold War consensus in light of the constant Soviet denunciations of ‘reactionary’ Western imperialism.62 It is the prominence in post-war films of problems within the colonies caused by alien political forces which has greater relevance to this chapter. Native unruliness had often been attributed at the cinema to interfering outsiders, particularly Russians, Germans and Arabs. Africans were still falling prey to the last of these, their age-old screen exploiters, in films such as Harry Watt’s 1954 West of Zanzibar.63 In the 1950s and 1960s, these conventional culprits were on many occasions joined or replaced by others who either explicitly espoused communism or could be seen to be working for it. Bhowani Junction (George Cukor, 1956), for instance, a sprawling saga starring Ava Gardner and Stewart Granger set in the last days of the Raj, blamed the violent bloodshed which accompanied Britain’s departure from India squarely on communist infiltration within the Congress Party. Communist evil was personified in Ghanshayan (Peter Illing), the ruthless revolutionary leader prepared to kill countless numbers in order to create the conditions necessary for takeover.64 Re-writing history in this fashion not only allowed viewers to look from a novel perspective at the circumstances surrounding Indian independence and the political turmoil that had subsequently blighted that country. It also encouraged audiences to consider the immediate danger posed by communism’s parasitic tendencies and its ability to create anarchy in those parts of the world where Western defences were dangerously fragile. Victorian and Edwardian costume dramas, many of which dropped hints along similar lines, abounded in the later part of this period. Reflecting both the perceived threat to and growing nostalgia for the empire, these included Zarak (Terence Young, 1956), North West Frontier (J. Lee Thompson, 1959) and Khartoum (Basil Dearden, 1966).65 Going to the cinema did not always lead to a trip down the imperial memory lane, however. A substantial number of films were also set in current colonial trouble spots where British soldiers fought armed insurgents: chiefly the

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British Cinema and the Cold War Malayan emergency (1948–60) and the Mau Mau conflict in Kenya (1952–60). The extent to which these films actually informed the audience about the emergencies they depicted is open to question. Jeffrey Richards suggests in his study of the ‘Cinema of Empire’ that such films ‘are simply action pictures or romantic dramas, which have introduced Mau Mau or Malayan terrorists for the sake of topical colour’. Susan Carruthers argues, on the other hand, that many of the films offer valuable insights into the cinema’s treatment of race relations and the problems associated with the visual representation of terrorism.66 What concerns us here is the extent to which these productions, which were arguably more influential than any others in shaping attitudes towards imperial subversion because they depicted its contemporary ‘reality’, might have helped further to foster anti-communism, possibly with government support. Reference has already been made to Alien Orders (1951), a short documentary sponsored by the Colonial Office which highlighted the menace that communist bandit raids presented to the peace of Malaya and emphasized the need to maintain large-scale troop contingents as long as the emergency lasted. This illustrated the importance which British officialdom attached to film as a counter-insurgency tool. The Attlee administration had immediately recognized the need to sell the new-look empire-commonwealth based on ‘partnership’ to the British public, to the Americans, and to the indigenous peoples themselves; thus Men of Two Worlds was made at the behest of the Colonial Office as part of a campaign which promised social and economic reform in the empire.67 As the Cold War’s influence spread worldwide in the late 1940s and 1950s, partly via Mao’s victory in China, so propaganda efforts were redoubled. In August 1949, Attlee established the Colonial Office Information Policy Committee to coordinate propaganda for the colonies, including anti-communist publicity, the aim being to ‘convince the world our conduct had been and is progressive and the best in the world’.68 Western governments, once fearful mainly of Soviet incursions into Western Europe and Japan, now sought to shore up the developing world lest the Cold War be lost, as it were, by the back door. Thus the process of European decolonization and the East–West conflict became inextricably intertwined, with armed uprisings against British rule providing some of the main focal points.69 During the Malayan emergency, British cinema-goers had access to one feature film explicitly set in Malaya (The Planter’s Wife) and another implicitly (Windom’s Way),70 one long documentary (Operation Malaya), several Malayan Film Unit (MFU) shorts akin to Alien Orders,

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4. The illusion of reality: after hacking their way through the jungle for three days, and with the cameras miraculously positioned behind the enemy, the army patrol surprise and attack the terrorist camp. An example of a reconstructed battle scene from the documentary Operation Malaya (1953).

and numerous newsreel stories on the jungle fighting.71 Although none of these, other than the MFU shorts, were produced directly by the British or Malayan governments, all, apart from Windom’s Way, received assistance from the colonial authorities. All of this output, again with the exception of Windom’s Way, correlated strongly with successive British governments’ own mediated version of events. Operation Malaya (1953) was shot on location by David Macdonald, best known for Desert Victory, his paean to the Desert Rats released in 1943.72 This was an upbeat, patriotic dramadocumentary extolling the bravery of the Malayan police and armed forces in their daily efforts to keep the ‘communist terrorists’ at bay. Reconstructed battle scenes used surrendered enemy personnel to lend the film authenticity. Hence we ‘see’ the normally invisible, cowardly communists up to their dirty tricks: laying ambushes, extorting innocent peasants and murdering British soldiers before disappearing into the ‘impenetrable canopy’. Equating communism with a disease, the narrative told of the dire consequences should the Chinese peasants ‘be contaminated by

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British Cinema and the Cold War the ideologies the terrorists represent’. Newsreels consistently took a similar line, due perhaps partly to an over-reliance on footage shot by MFU cameramen. Emphasis on the terrorists’ successful exploitation of the dense jungle undergrowth reinforced the popular perception of communism as a dark, clandestine, underground movement burrowing its way by stealth into liberal democracy’s weak points.73 The Planter’s Wife (Ken Annakin, 1952) and Windom’s Way (Ronald Neame, 1957) offered quite differing perspectives on the Malayan situation. Both were Rank productions shot predominantly at Pinewood which juxtaposed the failing marriages of their leading characters – planter Jim Fraser (played by Jack Hawkins) and doctor Alec Windom (Peter Finch) respectively – with the growing estrangement between the colonialists and the indigenous population that was tearing the country apart. Yet the two films diverged considerably on the issue of who was to blame for native dissent. Whereas Annakin’s categorically pointed the finger at marauding ‘terrorists’ (read ‘communists’),74 Neame’s focused on the stubborn white plantation manager (Michael Hordern) whose over-reaction to the workers’ desire to grow their own rice leads the men to strike and eventually to join the communist rebels. Windom’s Way was praised at the time for being ‘conscientious’, and later classed by Raymond Durgnat as ‘one of the maturer films of empire’ for acknowledging the possibility of negative elements in imperialism and repudiating simple-minded anti-communism.75 Durgnat’s assertion is seemingly borne out by the crude images of communism conveyed in The Planter’s Wife. Though their leader is interestingly shown to have fought with the British against the Japanese during the Second World War, the terrorists attacking Fraser’s plantation are devious and fanatical, digging tunnels (the underground theme again) and using children as human bombs. Animal symbolism, a favoured technique of the film propagandist, strengthens the message, with communists identified with the snake which creeps into the family home only to be despatched by the son’s pet mongoose.76 At the same time, Windom’s Way is perhaps almost as paranoid, for it makes the point that if Asians are treated like ‘coolies’, they will fall into the arms of communism, and this despite the fact that the ideology is, again, shown to be profoundly alien to the natives. There is, in other words, no alternative that is politically attractive to the indigenous community. Given the inherently violent nature of communism (villagers are brainwashed into believing that ‘cold steel’ is the only way to fight for their freedom), the end result will be anarchy.

Deviants and Misfits The Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya, in contrast with events in Malaya, was frequently headline news in 1950s Britain. By the end of the emergency in 1960, Mau Mau had been the subject of white papers, novels, instant histories and countless press enquiries, each offering an explanation for, or sensationalizing, a violent, seemingly mystifying phenomenon. Three feature films can be added to these outpourings – Simba (Brian Desmond Hurst, 1955), Safari (Terence Young, 1956) and Beyond Mombasa (George Marshall, 1956) – together with numerous commercial newsreel stories.77 Although the evidence is less clear-cut than in the case of the Malayan films, the indications are that these treatments, all of which involved shooting in East Africa, were also touched in some way by the colonial authorities.78 Although not necessarily explicitly about the Kenyan emergency, all lent support to the official interpretation of it. After initial doubts, Whitehall in fact believed that Mau Mau had nothing to do with communism (indigenous or international), and the uprising was instead officially projected as a civil war between progressive and regressive factions of the same tribe, the Kikuyu.79 This was the dominant theme of the liberal-minded Simba, which cast Dirk Bogarde (then Rank’s most prominent star) as the Englishman Alan Howard who arrives in Kenya, only to discover that Mau Mau has murdered his farmer brother. The main culprit eventually turns out not to be the British-trained doctor (Karanja) suspected by Howard, but his tribal chief father (the notorious leader Simba). In the final sequence both Africans die, but not before Karanja has optimistically pointed the way forwards for Kenyans by asking Simba’s followers to choose between ignorance and tribalism, and education and peaceful modernity.80 Safari, starring Victor Mature and Janet Leigh, and Beyond Mombasa, with Cornel Wilde as lead, were both produced by Adrian Worker and distributed by Columbia. Both were traditional African adventure narratives using reallife issues largely as a backdrop, and consequently offered nothing like as serious a critique of Kenyan affairs as Simba. The manner in which Mau Mau (known as the ‘Leopard Men’ in Beyond Mombasa) was presented as a manifestation of primitivity and motivated by psychological factors, including witchcraft, nevertheless fitted in easily with official views on the insurgency. As at least one critic pointed out at the time of its release, Simba was not another Planter’s Wife.81 Neither it, nor the other two films above, attributed colonial terrorism directly to communism. All three, however, might have added to the Cold War siege mentality that characterized

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British Cinema and the Cold War Britain in the 1950s. Mau Mau attacks on ‘innocent’ British civilians (rather than on other Africans, far more common in reality) 82 were the focus for each of the films. While this can be explained mainly in commercial terms, one possible result might have been to encourage a greater closing of ranks at home and abroad. Furthermore, ideas imported from the developed world into East Africa are shown generally to have brought progress in Simba; Dr Karanja personifies clear-headed, benevolent British (or Western) values. Conversely, in Beyond Mombasa these ideas are presented as part of the problem. The leader of the Leopard Men is exposed as the mad white ‘missionary’, Hoyt, played by Leo Genn. Given the intense debate over what lay behind Mau Mau, the theory that a dark outside force might be involved at least in some small way seemed plausible to many. In the context of the second ‘scramble for Africa’ between East and West, such forces tended to have Red tinges, especially when they were more concerned about uranium deposits than with hunting for wildlife, as in Beyond Mombasa. At the same time, all of the films help to refute the claims made by the CPGB that both the grounds for a communist-led uprising existed in Kenya and that Mau Mau represented legitimate nationalist aspirations. As we would expect of feature films, little or no attention is paid to the socio-economic background to the emergency. The role of the security forces, which were guilty of embarrassing excesses in what was a dirty but largely unseen war in the forests of the ‘White Highlands’, is also left unexplored. While Simba does condemn the racist intolerance of many settlers, the Kenya settlers’ public relations office in London ultimately interpreted it as positively raising the profile of the Kenyan situation.83

V The cinema’s fascination with Cold War subversion continued into the early 1960s. Indeed, this period arguably marks its apogee, with over a dozen films directly related to the subject appearing between 1959 and 1963, including comedies.84 The 1960s were on the whole a boom time for espionage fiction. In his critique of ‘the revolution in English life in the fifties and sixties’, The Neophiliacs (1969), Christopher Booker argues that the real explanation for this new popularity of spy stories was not so much that they were a reflection of the increase in real life spying, as a more subtle reflection of the Zeitgeist:

Deviants and Misfits They provided, in fact, the perfect vehicle for ‘dream-nightmare’ stories in which no one’s identity was certain, in which self-assertive lone heroes could wander at will, in any disguise, through any social milieu, and in which acts of violence and promiscuity, vaguely condoned by the fact that the heroes were always fighting for ‘our side’ against ‘the enemy’, could take place at any time, without any need for elaborate explanation.85

Such a view might go some way to account for the immense royalties earned by Ian Fleming in this period, augmented by the transferral of his James Bond novels to the screen (dealt with below). The audacious role allotted British intelligence agents in such films as The Traitors (Robert Tronson, 1962) and Master Spy (Montgomery Tully, 1962) also corresponded with this. However, Booker’s theory does not explain the growing sense of disillusionment found in other films, leaving the impression that spying, and the contemporary political system of which it formed a part, increasingly bore the marks of a dirty, contemptible business. Two notable examples of this were No Love For Johnnie, made in 1960 for Rank by Betty Box and Ralph Thomas, and Ring of Spies (Robert Tronson, 1963). Based on the controversial novel of a disenchanted Labour MP, Wilfred Fienburgh,86 No Love For Johnnie opens with middle-aged Labour MP Johnnie Byrne (Peter Finch) returning to Westminster after his party’s victory in the general election, though not to the government post he had expected. This political setback is accompanied by a personal one when his wife Alice (Rosalie Crutchley), a leading communist, leaves him. Johnnie is easily persuaded to join a small ‘ginger group’, organized by the cryptocommunist Renfrew (Donald Pleasence) with the object of harrying the government. Simultaneously, Johnnie falls for a model half his age with whom he chooses to spend the afternoon in bed rather than ask a crucial question in the House on behalf of Renfrew. Cynically escaping a vote of no-confidence at a constituency meeting, Johnnie is then jilted and resigns himself to patching things up with Alice. Dejected and demoralized, Johnnie is suddenly offered a minor government position by the prime minister and told that one had previously been withheld because his wife made him a security risk. Sitting triumphantly on the government front bench for the first time at the end of the film, Johnnie drops his reconciliation plans, thus confirming absolutely his naked political ambition. Following the mileage the Conservative press had made out of Fienburgh’s exposé of his party’s spiritual bankruptcy, No Love For Johnnie was naturally interpreted in some quarters as anti-Labour propaganda.87

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British Cinema and the Cold War According to Betty Box, herself an ex-member of the Communist Party, John Davis, who had taken over the day-to-day running of the Rank Organization in the 1950s, intended the film to be a slur on the left.88 It is of course possible to see shades of High Treason in the film’s depiction of the Labour Party’s militant tendency; the thin-lipped Renfrew’s surreptitious telephone calls to his unidentified controllers emphasize the faction’s subversive intent. More powerful, however, is the film’s criticism of parliamentary life in general. Like many New Wave films of the era, No Love For Johnnie aimed several sharp blows at the establishment, in this case back-scratching and back-stabbing careerist MPs. The hypocrisy of the new generation of image-conscious politicians (Johnnie only comes to life when in front of the television cameras) is matched by Stanley Holloway’s fatherly Fred Andrews, representative of the old guard, with his hollow boasts of knowing ‘the people in the streets’. The threat of political subversion is regarded by both of these types as just another opportunity for exacting petty revenge or making a nuisance for personal gain. By meddling with the party’s undesirables, Johnnie makes himself more attractive to a leadership keen to iron out dissent. Thus, the moderates are seen to use the extremists, in stark contrast to High Treason. Moreover, though the communists are by no means presented sympathetically, they at least appear to have genuine beliefs. Alice’s ideological commitment, for example, contrasts positively with her husband’s quest for power at all costs. No Love For Johnnie’s box-office performance was lukewarm, but the film arguably signalled a growing public disaffection with machine politics in a materially cosy yet spiritually unsatisfying age. Johnnie’s mid-life crisis might even be viewed as a metaphor for the nation’s sense of an increasing loss of idealism.89 Ring of Spies, described by Robert Murphy as ‘a splendid apotheosis of the Cold War melodrama’,90 was based on the Portland affair of 1961. This was just one of a number of spy and security scandals that rocked the Macmillan administration in the early 1960s, culminating in the 1963 Profumo revelations.91 Frank Launder, whose scriptwriting and production partnership with Sidney Gilliat dated back 20 years, had attended the trial of the Portland spies at the Old Bailey and set about reconstructing their activities in as realistic a manner as possible.92 Like No Love For Johnnie, the film centred on the embittered self-doubts of a middle-aged professional employed in a politically sensitive occupation, on this occasion Harry Houghton (Bernard Lee), a cipher clerk at the Port Auxiliary Repair Unit in Portland, Dorset. Too fond of drink and women, but lacking the looks

Deviants and Misfits and money to fulfil his desires, the shambolic Houghton is offered cash for secrets by a suave Russian agent, Gordon Lonsdale (William Sylvester). Houghton seduces a colleague, lonely spinster Elizabeth Gee (Margaret Tyzack), and persuades her to steal confidential papers from her office. Nervous at first, the couple grow careless and greedy after setting up home together and partying with their new, glamorous friends. Suspicions are aroused, MI5 sets a trap and the spy network is traced to the Ruislip suburbs. Here the security services discover a sophisticated smuggling operation being run by the apparently ordinary and harmless Krogers (David Kossoff and Nancy Nevinson). Ring of Spies makes it quite clear that Houghton and Gee have committed a serious crime against the British state. Unlike similar films ten years earlier, however, the pair are not condemned outright. The film instead makes an attempt to focus on the psychology of contemporary treason. The two clerks lead sad and tragic lives, partly related to the mind-numbing nature of their work. Houghton might be a fool, but he is endowed with enough charm and warmth to make us understand his weaknesses. His resentment of his upper-middle-class seniors, for instance, is not borne of ideological dogma but because he sees them as complacent buffoons. ‘The film almost persuades us,’ wrote the critic in Films and Filming, ‘that, in their shoes, we could have acted as they did’.93 Moreover, as in No Love For Johnnie, the threat posed by the corrupting power of communism seems far outweighed by the temptations of Western affluence and promiscuity. Lonsdale puts on the sleazy parties, portrayed, as with everything else in the film, with gritty realism, but he is merely feeding the pleasure-seeking desires of an increasingly materialistic and valueless society. The signs are that Ring of Spies performed well at the boxoffice, with the conspicuous exception of Ruislip itself where, presumably to avoid causing embarrassment to the Krogers’ former neighbours, it was not shown.94 By the time many saw the film Lonsdale had been swapped for Greville Wynne, an MI6 agent caught red-handed by the Soviets in 1963. This might have served to confirm the image of spying as a cynical game in which both East and West played by the same unstated but gentlemanly rules, thus lending a rich irony to Houghton’s line of weary resignation uttered to his mistress, ‘What’s it all matter anyway?’ 95 Between the release of No Love For Johnnie and Ring of Spies, James Bond had made two appearances at the cinema: in Dr. No and From Russia With Love, both directed by Terence Young in 1962 and 1963 respectively. The Bond phenomenon has been analyzed from a variety of angles. Bond

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British Cinema and the Cold War films have themselves been approached as Westerns dressed up in modern clothes, fairy tales, supernatural fantasies, twentieth century folk epics, adult comic strips, and so on.96 All commentators at least agree, however, that the films, if political, are less anti-Soviet in tone than Fleming’s Bond novels. This of course does not mean that the films lack Cold War connotations, despite statements to that effect by their creators Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman.97 The Russian intelligence service SMERSH, very much at the centre of events in Fleming’s books, is pushed into the background in Dr. No by the international crime cartel SPECTRE. Yet the film’s plot still operates within Cold War tensions, revolving as it does around the eponymous madman’s attempts to divert American rockets launched from Cape Canaveral from a secret missile base in the Caribbean. Few people in the audience can have missed the parallels between this and the Cuban missile crisis, which had reached its critical stage when the film was released in Britain in late October 1962.98 Other movies which located Bond firmly within the political and ideological co-ordinates of the Cold War include From Russia With Love, Goldfinger (Guy Hamilton, 1964) and You Only Live Twice (Lewis Gilbert, 1967), together with those produced during the early stages of ‘the second Cold War’ in the early 1980s.99 Given that the ‘Bondian’ ideology is predicated on outsized action in exotic, foreign locations, however, none of these films deal explicitly with subversion within Britain, and they therefore fall outside the scope of this chapter. The Bond series – with its bizarre and thoroughly evil villains, beautiful women and formulaic humour – was something of an aberration, a throwback to old-fashioned patriotic cinematic gentleman heroes such as Bulldog Drummond and Richard Hannay.100 British spy films in the mid- to late 1960s are generally darkly sceptical, confirming the reaction to the subversion consensus of the 1950s. These productions show not only uncertainty about the hostile forces Britain faced (at home and overseas), but also a deepening anxiety about the practices of the nation’s own security services. The Bond films were the flip-side to this: ‘gadget-filled adventures for middle-aged kids’, as Maurice Sellar puts it.101 Film-makers transferred to the screen novels by writers challenging Cold War orthodoxies. Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1965), for example, faithfully reflected John Le Carré’s bleak dictum that there ‘is no victory in the Cold War, only a condition of human illness and a political misery’.102 Others such as Sidney Lumet’s glum The Deadly Affair (1966) and Frank R. Pierson’s tragic The Looking Glass War (1969) followed, saying much the same thing.103

Deviants and Misfits Just how far the cinema’s treatment of Cold War subversion had changed by the end of our period can be illustrated by reference to Sidney J. Furie’s The Ipcress File, released in 1965. Even more downbeat than Len Deighton’s bestselling novel of the same title, the film starred the then virtually unknown Michael Caine as lowly British intelligence agent Harry Palmer. Its narrative was quite conventional, albeit with a few more twists and turns than normal. Government scientists are mysteriously either quitting their posts, disappearing or defecting. Ordered to search for the missing Professor Radcliffe (Aubrey Richards), Palmer uncovers a trail of blackmail, assassination, coded tapes and brainwashing. This leads to his capture and torture, as a result of which (like Laurence Harvey’s Raymond Shaw in John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, released in 1963) 104 he is primed to respond to a particular sound. At the very end, however, we discover that Palmer is feigning obedience in order to unveil the traitor within the service, his chief (Nigel Green). There is no evidence to suggest that those behind the making of The Ipcress File sought to cause any sort of political stir (which the film did not). Producer Harry Saltzman had bought the rights to this and other Deighton works lest Bond should lose his grip on the public’s imagination.105 Palmer’s working-class rebelliousness (he grins enthusiastically when condemned as ‘insubordinate, insolent, a trickster, with criminal tendencies’) might have worried some in Whitehall but it significantly does not stretch to treachery. Being an ‘ordinary’ Cockney who brings his ‘birds’ back to his shabby bedsit makes him appear more of a lovable rogue than a dangerous degenerate at the heart of Britain’s intelligence service. At the same time, the film draws attention to the internecine struggles between the Ministry of Defence and Home Office which act to the detriment of national security. While acknowledging MI5’s need to undertake counter-subversion, it also implies that such activities often merely produce self-perpetuating conspiracy theories. Though we see who the culprit is at the end, this does not fully explain the murkiness of the enemy’s identity throughout. We think that Harry has been whisked off to Albania to be brainwashed (only to find then that he has been imprisoned in a cleverly designed London warehouse), but the subversives do not appear to be communists. It is also unclear what the point of the convoluted intrigue is anyway: to protect further scientists being lost to the ‘brain-drain’, or to give the pen-pushing, form-filling MI5 drones something to do? Harry might be ‘real’ in the sense that he shops in supermarkets and bets on the horses, but he also lives in a netherworld to which ‘we’ cannot – and do not want to – gain

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British Cinema and the Cold War entry. What is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in this world, where both sides are amoral and exploit the apparently streetwise but in reality naive Palmer, remains unanswered. At the very least The Ipcress File, which was popular enough to produce two sequels,106 suggested that the fight against the Cold War enemy within had become a complex drudge.

VI This chapter has concentrated exclusively on those British films made in the two decades after the Second World War that dealt explicitly with the principle of a threat to security on the Cold War home front. It has sought to show how consistent a theme communist subversion was in the cinema during this period, mirroring that widely exhibited in contemporary political discourse and popular literature. Few of these films were major box-office successes; several were low-budget howlers that were so overdrawn and claustrophobic as to caricature their own purpose. Audiences might have reacted as negatively to these as most commentators claim Americans did to the vulgar Red-baiting movies produced during Hollywood’s ‘Paleolithic’ phase of the Cold War in the early 1950s.107 It is hard to imagine that this large body of films did not have some impact on the British picture-goer, however, feeding suspicions and helping to produce what we can now judge to be an exaggerated fear among the public of an enemy within.108 The message delivered was for the most part emphatic: communists in Britain were untrustworthy and could infiltrate all aspects of life – from parliament to the corner shop. Communism represented a critical and on-going threat to British values in particular and Western democracy in general. In other words Britain was at war, domestically and overseas, in the same way that it had been between 1939 and 1945 – militarily, economically and spiritually. This was still the case by the end of the 1960s. Even if questions were being asked in some films about the manner in which Britain was countering the threat, communism (and its followers) was still beyond the pale. Films critical of the management of the secret services had appeared, but few of these doubted the need for their continued existence. The war of attrition continued, with little cinematic dissent.

3 And Never the Twain Shall Meet

The film can remind the bereaved Russians, the disarmed Greeks, the vast underground armies of France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Italy – yes even Germany itself in its time – that Britain gave birth to Tom Paine and Cobbett as well as to Baldwin, Chamberlain and MacDonald, to remind them that it once gave refuge to Marx and Lenin as well as a house in Carlton Terrace to Von Ribbentrop – to tell them in fact that for centuries and with all our faults, our country has led the world in tolerance, the defence of freedom and Social Reform. Michael Balcon, production chief at Ealing Studios, April 1946 1 The devil has to be given a particular shape in order to know what virtues are being asserted. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1980) 2

If one group of British films indicated who the enemies were on the Cold War home front, many others identified in a more profound sense why they – and their allies overseas – needed to be defeated. Scores of mainstream feature productions released during the 1950s and 1960s showed the public what they were fighting for and against in the conflict. Some films performed one of these tasks, others both. Some productions did this

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British Cinema and the Cold War overtly, and perhaps intentionally, via plots set firmly and clearly within the conventional Cold War arena. Others delivered their messages more discreetly, and unconsciously, in an apolitical framework. Together, these films conveyed an array of negative and positive images, seamlessly contrasting Western ‘virtues’ with Eastern ‘vices’. In the process, they helped to characterize the Cold War as a bipolar phenomenon fought between sides whose mores, values and governmental systems represented mutually exclusive ways of life. One of the most powerful means of establishing and reinforcing the differences between the East and the West at the cinema in these two decades was through the portrayal of everyday life in the communist sector. This chapter looks at this theme from two angles: first, how the conditions under ‘really existing Socialism’ (as Soviet terminology put it) were presented to the British people by the film industry mainstream; and second, how such images were confirmed or challenged by Eastern European films that were distributed in Britain during the same period. Each category of film material will be examined within the context of two competing official propaganda strategies. While the British government sought to demonize Soviet monolithism and advertise the benefits of social democracy, state-sponsored Eastern European film-makers concentrated on dazzling those in the West with what was termed ‘the sunshine of Socialism’ in the East. Particular attention is paid to the tendency of British film-makers to identify Stalinism with ‘Red fascism’, and the presentation of the conflict between communism and capitalism as a modern holy war courtesy of the West’s recruitment of Christianity. Finally, the extent to which the majority of British film-makers lent the Western cause implicit support of a more ‘positive’ but outwardly less political nature is considered via an analysis of the ideology and output of Ealing, one of the country’s most influential post-war studios.

I It is difficult to see how the Cold War could have lasted for as long as it did without the effective segregation or self-segregation of the communist region of the globe. The creation after 1947 of two distinct political and economic systems, or ‘sub-universes’,3 meant that for the first time in the mass media age one part of the civilized world found it virtually impossible to know what people living in another were thinking and doing. Information about particular events did cross boundaries throughout the

And Never the Twain Shall Meet conflict; indeed, propaganda functioning as an ‘impregnational’ weapon was used extensively by all the chief belligerents.4 And yet, as Eric Hobsbawm reminds us, ‘the sheer degree of mutual ignorance and incomprehension that persisted between the two worlds was quite extraordinary, especially when we bear in mind that this was a period when both travel and communication of information were utterly revolutionized’.5 Highpowered summits did take place, and representatives of the two ‘camps’ met regularly on football pitches and running tracks, but these were never more than partial, sporadic encounters between rivals increasingly presented as fundamentally separate entities. Self-segregation and containment inevitably encouraged a sense of mutual suspicion and hostility. It also fostered speculation about life ‘on the other side’, particularly in the West where the greater freedom of speech promoted its wider public expression. Central to this was the Western perception of an ‘Iron Curtain’, behind which ‘darkness’ was taken to reign. Employed rhetorically first by Churchill as a symbolic construction in March 1946, the term quickly captured the imagination of the public and the elites to the point at which, by the early 1950s, to many people it represented reality. The same highly-charged political meaning was soon applied to its Asian equivalent, the ‘Bamboo Curtain’, following Mao Tse-Tung’s victory in China in 1949, even though it, too, was far more permeable than the phrase suggested.6 By entering into Western consciousness, allied with the pejorative ‘Soviet satellites’ and ‘Soviet Bloc’,7 such language rendered the complexities of the Cold War easier to fathom, and was a useful tool in helping to establish clear binary differences between the communist and democratic regimes. The public’s lack of access to solid facts about the conditions behind the ‘curtains’ made mass media images of those conditions all the more important. It would, of course, be naive to suggest that British people looked to the cinema before the newspapers or radio for a regular update on events in Eastern Europe and China. However, as Hortense Powdermaker reminded her readers at the height of the Cold War, there was among film audiences a well-documented tendency to accept as accurate depictions of places, attitudes and life-styles of which they themselves had no first-hand experience, based on the credibility of visual evidence.8 Some Western film-makers were drawn to the general theme due less to political motives than because of the scope it offered for playing around with the mystery or adventure genre in strange, foreign locations. Productions such as Action of the Tiger (Terence Young, 1957) and Yangtse Incident (Michael

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British Cinema and the Cold War Anderson, 1957), set in communist Albania and China respectively, were examples of this.9 At the same time, other film artists sought either to use the cinema as a vehicle for explicit comment on the East–West divide, or to explore issues relating to events in the East picked up via the press or other sources. It is on these latter two categories of film that I want to focus. Before doing this it is worth considering briefly the potential influence official British propagandists had on the cinema’s portrayal of life ‘on the other side’ during this period. From the moment of its birth in early 1948, the IRD concentrated the bulk of its efforts on undertaking ‘offensive’ measures in order ‘to expose the myths of the Soviet paradise’. In 1948 alone, the IRD produced 22 briefing papers on different aspects of Stalinism which were circulated to British diplomats abroad and selected journalists, politicians and trade unionists at home.10 Eastern European émigrés were recruited to its ranks and defectors interrogated for useful material on living conditions in the region.11 The department scored its first major success at the UN in October 1948 with a revealing media campaign on Soviet labour camps. A constant theme underpinning this, and many later campaigns, was the resemblance communism bore to fascism, in terms of its systematic assault on civil liberties, disregard for basic human rights and dependence on the cult of personality.12 Events such as the February 1948 Czechoslovak coup – in which the communists seized power from a hitherto relatively independent government – were exploited as evidence of the imperialist nature of Soviet foreign policy, and hard-hitting factual material disseminated documenting the many real shortcomings in Soviet and Eastern European society. Particular emphasis was placed on the Stalinist terror,13 and the assertion that the sovietization of Eastern Europe had been planned.14 The precise impact of these ‘grey’ activities on the British film industry in the late 1940s and beyond is difficult to gauge. The relatively few IRD files which have been released into the public domain are extremely opaque as regards the department’s direct cinematic contacts. One progress report from August 1949, nevertheless, makes it clear that the organization had already managed to talk secretly to ‘a few personal acquaintances in the [film] industry’, presumably about some of the thematic material set out above. The IRD preferred such private conversations to the sponsorship of official films, which it believed was too clumsy a method of propaganda.15 It is likely that several of these ‘acquaintances’ derived from the relationships which a number of IRD personnel had established with film-makers while working for the wartime MOI.16 The fact that so many films dealing

And Never the Twain Shall Meet with the Cold War were inspired or shaped at least partly by reports in the press and other public opinion outlets, many of which were themselves the recipients of IRD material, suggests that the Foreign Office had less need for direct links with the film industry. In September 1949 Christopher Mayhew was already claiming that the organization ‘has had an impact out of all proportion to its size and cost’.17 By the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, officials were outlining the ‘revolutionary’ progress that Whitehall had achieved in the publicity field since the start of the Cold War in enabling the majority of people in Britain and Western Europe ‘to recognize Communist aims and methods for what they are’.18 The domestic and international war of words that took place over Korea between 1950 and 1953 had the effect of sharpening the government’s anti-communist propaganda instruments, including film, still further.19 Cinema-goers were given their first fictional glimpse of life ‘on the other side’ via two British features completed in 1950 – the first released just before Korea imploded in June, the second a few months afterwards. Both films reinforced the official ‘line’ on conditions in the emergent ‘Eastern Bloc’ and left viewers in no doubt of the threat posed to ‘the Free World’ by the Soviet system. State Secret, released in April 1950, starred Douglas Fairbanks Jr as American surgeon John Marlowe, invited to a mythical Eastern European country to attend the ailing dictator, General Niva. Vosnia appears on the surface to be attractive and pleasantly civilized but underneath suffers from political and social decay. A junta headed by the unscrupulous Minister of Public Services, Colonel Galcon (Jack Hawkins), ruthlessly controls the country. Marlowe soon learns that Niva’s life must be saved for a crucial forthcoming ‘election’ – ‘carefully organized to produce a spontaneous demonstration of loyalty to him,’ says Galcon – which will be used as a mandate for increased repression. When Niva dies and a look-alike is substituted to save the regime, Marlowe is prevented from leaving the country because of his knowledge of the fraud. Realizing his imminent ‘liquidation’, Marlowe escapes from house arrest and is hunted down by Galcon’s secret police, until his eventual flight over the mountainous border with a Vosnian nightclub performer, Lisa (Glynis Johns). The idea for State Secret had first occurred to Sydney Gilliat, the film’s director and script-writer, in the 1930s when stories circulated of foreign doctors secretly attending Hitler and Stalin. When filming began on the project in the summer of 1949 it was not Gilliat’s intention to condemn communism specifically but rather to offer a critique of totalitarianism in

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British Cinema and the Cold War general. Vosnia was meant to be a composite of Franco’s Spain and Tito’s Yugoslavia, where referenda similar to that depicted in the film had recently been held.20 The blending of familiar wartime images of Nazism with topical Cold War references meant, however, that the film was broadly interpreted as an indictment of ‘Red fascism’.21 This was the emotive label which some politicians, intellectuals and publicists in the West had quickly attached to the USSR’s creation of a post-war sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and which held that the totalitarian methods common to communist and fascist regimes over-rode their ideological differences.22 Gilliat went to great lengths to authenticate Vosnia’s ‘otherness’, including location work in the seclusion of the Italian Dolomites and the concoction of a Slavonic-sounding language.23 Fairbanks’s well-known role outside films as an anti-communist, pro-UN lobbyist possibly either weakened or added weight to Marlowe’s political convictions.24 The detailed attention paid to the mise en scène was mirrored in State Secret’s unusually ideological dialogue. Marlowe and Galcon are readily identifiable as respective purveyors of Western and Eastern philosophies, pitting their wits with radically different interpretations of the concepts of ‘duty’, ‘freedom’ and ‘progress’. The two men are shown to be ‘worlds apart’, with Galcon justifying expediency on the Marxist-Leninist basis of the need ‘to make history’, confronted by Marlowe’s passionate faith in human nature: ‘You can’t deceive a whole people indefinitely’. When he is on the run, Marlowe then takes every opportunity to lecture ordinary Vosnians on the verities of authoritarianism versus liberal democracy. ‘You people live in a miasma of suspicion and distrust, and as usual the first victim is plain, ordinary common sense,’ he tells Lisa. Life in Vosnia is portrayed as virtually identical to that in Nazi Germany, with an emphasis on the ubiquity of surveillance, arbitrary violence sanctioned by the state, and the insidious role of a government-controlled mass media. Allusions to the recent and on-going Stalinization of Eastern Europe are made throughout via the ‘political re-education’ of Lisa’s imprisoned father, Galcon’s use of riots as a means of manufacturing consent, and, above all, the constant pressure imposed on the Vosnian ruling elite from an unseen outside force, suggesting that Niva is a Soviet puppet. In the end, Galcon is himself purged, and anticipates a fate analogous to the numerous Communist Party apparatchiks put on trial in Eastern Europe in the late 1940s, facing trumped-up, unbelievable charges, as he puts it, as ‘a cryptoFascist, a liberal humanitarian or a simple deviationist’.25 State Secret was a commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic and widely acclaimed as

And Never the Twain Shall Meet one of the best thrillers a British studio had made for years. Critics referred to it fondly as ‘Hitchcockian’, and the film attracted several favourable comparisons with The Third Man.26 In Highly Dangerous (1950), directed by Roy Baker and scripted by Eric Ambler, the scene shifted more firmly to the Balkans, where British entomologist Frances Gray (Margaret Lockwood) is sent incognito to investigate rumours of bacteriological weapons experiments. Despite being informed by Whitehall that her trip is ‘a matter of life and death to humanity’, Gray initially treats her mission lightly. On setting foot on communist soil, however, her mood is transformed. All about her are the tell-tale signs of oppression: the claustrophobic atmosphere produced by the omnipresent guards, strict censorship, restricted movement, spartan hotel conditions and down-trodden citizens in a state of permanent fear. When her contact is shot – accidentally, according to the secret police – Gray strikes up a ‘special relationship’ with American investigative journalist Bill Casey (Dane Clark). The couple steal the offending insects and destroy the enemy’s laboratory, though not before Gray has undergone a cruel interrogation at the hands of the misogynistic police chief, Razinski (Marius Goring). Gray and Casey eventually escape across the border with the help of a small band of resistance fighters. Highly Dangerous was one of the few Cold War films to feature a female lead protagonist, let alone one playing a senior scientist. Lockwood was something of a role model to many female cinema-goers due to her portrayal of strong-willed, often wicked ladies, and so made a natural choice for the feisty Gray.27 As with State Secret, many of the images within Highly Dangerous resembled those deployed by the cinema during the fight against Nazi totalitarianism. The film made a point of contrasting the personalized relations of the West – Gray and Casey naturally fall in love – with the de-individualized nature of Eastern Bloc society. Sabotage, vilified when conducted in Britain, is seen to be justified when carried out at the expense of the East, a message underlined by the assistance given to the couple by a dissident priest whose presence also serves to link God with the West. The sinister efficiency of communism is juxtaposed with the time-honoured British virtue of ‘muddling through’, best illustrated by customs officials comically dithering over whether the smuggled insects should be quarantined when the heroic pair return to London. Finally, Casey agrees to withhold the whole story from his editor, thereby helping to protect Western security at the cost of a profitable scoop and putting the international interest above individual gain.

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British Cinema and the Cold War Ambler and Baker were fusing several themes to add a new twist to the emerging Cold War genre rather than explicitly issuing a warning about the proliferation of bacteriological arms,28 but Highly Dangerous helped set the tone for later films dealing with the subject of germ warfare. Beginning in 1950 and continuing throughout the decade, East and West fought a running propaganda battle over chemical and bacteriological weapons, with each side charging the other with gruesome bacterial discoveries and strategies. The war of words reached deafening proportions during the Korean War when the Americans were accused of dropping plague-ridden insects over China and North Korea.29 That the cinema capitalized on the public’s subsequent fears about germ warfare through such films as Herbert Wilcox’s The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk (1957) is not surprising, but what is more significant is the false impression left by these productions that only the communist world had developed a biological capacity.30

II For 40 years, Berlin was the most prominent symbol of the Cold War and the divided nature of Europe. Effectively split in two following the Soviet blockade of its Western sectors between June 1948 and May 1949, in the 1950s the city was the centre of tension in the East–West dispute. As well as representing a defeated Nazism, it was also the only exit to the West through which people from the East could freely pass. Between 1949, when the German Democratic Republic was formally constituted with East Berlin as its capital, and August 1961, when the Berlin Wall was built, there was a constant haemorrhage of ‘escapees’ from the East: anyone could reach West Berlin by simply taking the U-bahn train from Friedrichstrasse to the Tiergarten. This human traffic was deeply embarrassing to the Eastern authorities and the source of intense public and media interest on both sides of the conflict.31 Arguably the most graphic cinematic dramatization of Berlin’s schizophrenic personality during the whole of the Cold War was Carol Reed’s The Man Between, released in September 1953. The film’s chief financier was Alexander Korda who, following an approach from the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, arranged in 1953 for the IRD to use his bank account as camouflage for Western intelligence subsidies to Encounter. This was a new magazine which Muggeridge, in his capacity as vice-president of the British Society for Cultural Freedom, hoped would act as an influential anti-communist vehicle among intellectuals worldwide.32 In The Man

And Never the Twain Shall Meet Between Reed sought to capture what he saw as the complexities of the Cold War by filming among the ruins of a divided Berlin and by concentrating on the trade in human lives that was conducted around the Iron Curtain’s most conspicuous ‘hole’.33 The result was a film of greater political ambiguity than others dealing with life in the East, but one which still managed to deliver a vehement assault on communism. Arriving in Berlin to stay with her brother Martin (Geoffrey Toone), a British army doctor, young Susanne Mallison (Claire Bloom) soon becomes suspicious of Martin’s new German wife Bettina (Hildegard Neff ), who is threatened on the telephone and trailed by a boy on a bicycle whenever she leaves the house. On a sight-seeing tour of the Eastern sector, the nervous Bettina introduces Susanne to Ivo Kern (James Mason), a former lawyer engaged in black market activities who is paid by the communist authorities to hunt down fugitives in the West. Kern is revealed as Bettina’s first husband, whom she presumed had been killed during the war, and a shadowy figure now using emotional blackmail to persuade Bettina to lure Martin’s friend Olaf Kastner (Ernest Schroeder) into the Eastern zone. Kastner’s success at spiriting refugees out of East Berlin has made him the prime target for the outraged communist authorities, who want him eliminated. Susanne falls in love with Kern in the process of trying to free her sister-in-law from his clutches, but is then mistaken for Bettina by the communists, kidnapped and taken into the Eastern zone. His conscience pricked, Kern rescues Susanne from the East German Volkspolizei who give chase. Just when their escape seems certain, Kern is shot a few yards from the frontier, leaving Susanne free, together with Kastner, to drive through the Brandenberg Gate into the West. If The Man Between’s plot was criticized by one journal for being ‘unduly imaginative’,34 there was unanimous praise for the film’s location work. It was this, above all else, that produced what many saw as the film’s chief strong point – its unremitting tenseness.35 This atmosphere can be attributed to a combination of the gruelling schedule imposed on the actors by Reed, the pressures imposed on Reed by Korda, and the peculiar difficulties of shooting in Berlin. The start of filming was delayed by Mason’s initial insistence on making his journey to Berlin overland which, had he not finally agreed to fly, would have meant travelling by a military train requiring British Foreign Office, US State Department and Soviet permission. The Soviet authorities in the eastern sector then forbade Reed from shooting any scenes there owing to the implication in The Third Man that they were prepared to harbour a criminal like Harry Lime. Elaborate

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British Cinema and the Cold War props were consequently created to reproduce the Eastern zone in the West, including enormous portraits of Stalin and extras dressed as East German policemen, which caused confusion among West Berliners and complaints in the East Berlin press.36 With the Western authorities’ blessing, Reed filmed as many Berlin landmarks as possible, including the Funk Sports Arena, one of the city’s 85 camps for refugees from the East. Finally, Reed worked as close to the Russian zone as possible in streets like Moritzplatz, using the East Berlin ruins as a backdrop. This was not merely for authenticity. ‘I hoped to convey something that is not visual, the jittery feeling that pervades the area. I wanted our actors to feel it. They did.’ 37 The announcement of Stalin’s death in the middle of the location work in March 1953, an event which tipped Eastern Europe into a sea of hysterical mourning and political uncertainty, can only have added to the crew’s nervousness.38 Like The Third Man, The Man Between vividly captures the demoralization of life in a vanquished and pillaged nation. Desmond Dickinson’s camera dispassionately surveys the decay of bombed-out buildings, the vacant lots and the omnipresent rubble of Berlin. Through Susanne’s eyes we see the squalor of both halves of the city, with urchins picking through rubbish and malevolent-looking clowns staring at her as she arrives at the airport. Corruption is shown to be as intrinsic a feature of everyday life in Berlin as it was in Vienna, and divisions exist within as well as between the two sectors. The Western elite still dines at the city’s famous Resi Restaurant, where customers secure shady deals on telephones linking the tables, while the majority outside live in poverty. The whole city is a frenzied mess of financial and political intrigue, of which the Cold War forms only one, albeit significant, part.39 In other respects, however, The Man Between illustrates the significant shift in Reed’s and Korda’s perspectives on the Cold War since the late 1940s. In The Third Man, the Russians constituted only one threatening element that was far outweighed by the post-war racketeering of a distinctly non-political nature. In The Man Between, the communists are undoubtedly the main cause of Berlin’s instability. Kern, the cynical ‘spiv’, initially seems a carbon copy of Lime, but later turns out to be a blackmail victim of the sinister Eastern police chief, Halendar (Aribert Waescher). By ultimately atoning for his crimes by laying down his own life for Susanne and Kastner, Kern acts in accordance with both cinematic and Western Cold War orthodoxies. His shooting in the back for breaking through a checkpoint makes sense in dramatic terms, but it also helped to confirm the

And Never the Twain Shall Meet

5. Someone to watch over you: Ivo (James Mason) and Bettina (Hildegard Neff ) – divided by communism. The Man Between (1953).

Western image of Eastern Europe as a prison (or concentration) camp, with trigger-happy wardens guarding the hole in the fence. East Berliners were not being gunned down for trying to cross the open border, though the erection of the Berlin Wall would change this.40 The cinema-goers’ association of Mason with Rommel, whom he played in The Desert Fox (Henry Hathaway, 1951) and The Desert Rats (Robert Wise, 1953), might also have increased the audience’s antipathy towards Kern’s adversaries. Having turned against Hitler and one form of totalitalitarian regime, the ‘good German’ was doing it again.41 Kern’s murder is, moreover, a logical conclusion to the communists’ activities up to that point. In the early 1950s, East Berlin was more regimented and ramshackle than the West, a legacy of the Red Army’s occupation and reparation shipments, combined with the AngloAmerican efforts to rebuild the Western half of the city as a beacon of liberal capitalism.42 In The Man Between, these features are presented almost entirely as a manifestation of communist misrule. The Eastern authorities are reduced to Soviet automatons whose gangsterism has

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British Cinema and the Cold War spread throughout the city. Their trench-coated Stasi agents are the kings of the underworld, using boys as spies by day and thriving in the darkness of disrepair at night. The ubiquitous posters of Lenin and Stalin act as a reminder of the wider political framework for their criminal pursuits. The slogans on the walls alert audiences both to the all-embracing nature of communism and the potential for resistance in East Berlin to it, while the drab cafes, shops and clothes serve as an indictment of an anti-consumerist culture that homogenizes and suffocates civic virtue. It is open to question why, given his reputation for subtlety and creative boldness, Reed chose to take such a conventionally pro-Western line and finish the film with a crude act of stock heroism. During production The Man Between suffered more than its fair share of scripting and financial problems, which some believe played a part in weakening the story.43 It might be expected that the communist Daily Worker would criticize Reed for having ‘taken his technique to one of the key points of the world and… shirked the challenge’,44 but there was more than a grain of truth in this judgement, as contemporary press comments and Reed’s biographer affirmed. The director conspicuously failed to explore the motivations behind the communists’ actions in particular, resulting in an imbalance not usually seen in Reed’s films.45 In the event, The Man Between attracted a mixed response from the critics and the public. Whereas the Daily Mirror and Daily Telegraph pronounced it ‘brilliant’, many, like the New Statesman, found it skilful but lacking in passion.46 American audiences appear to have liked it more than the British, and overall the film only just broke even.47 This came as a disappointment to many involved in the production, especially in view of the film’s timely release. Only three months earlier, in June 1953, demonstrations by East Berlin construction workers calling for a general strike had sparked the first recognizable uprising against communist rule in Eastern Europe. Over 100 men and women died in the subsequent riots, which were put down by Soviet tanks, and thousands more were arrested. These tumultuous events captured the headlines in the West, and provided a pertinent backdrop for The Man Between.48

III The cinematic depiction of the communist world as a byword for cruelty and iniquity grew commonplace as the Cold War matured. Most films touching on the subject were a variation on the Eastern European-as-captive

And Never the Twain Shall Meet theme, with the tragic plight of dissident opinion much to the fore. The Death of Michael Turbin (Bernard Knowles, 1955), for instance, was financed by Douglas Fairbanks Jr’s production company and starred Chris Rhodes as a political prisoner somewhere in Eastern Europe narrowly escaping execution with the help of two sympathetic guards. Flight from Vienna (Denis Kavanagh, 1955) was a thriller which presaged the 1956 Hungarian uprising by telling of the defection of two high-ranking Hungarian communists, one a security official and the other a scientist. Peter Maxwell’s The Long Shadow (1961) looked back at the same uprising and Soviet attempts to kidnap the infant son of the rebels’ leader. Compton Bennett’s Beyond the Curtain (1960) starred Hungarian émigré Eva Bartok as an East German refugee and stewardess on a West German plane forced down in East Germany, who is cajoled into staying only to be ‘rescued’ and taken back to the West by her flying officer fiancé.49 Few of these productions, and others of their type, were either particularly financially profitable or politically challenging. The one partial exception to this was the portrayal in The Long Shadow of an unhelpful American consul, an allusion to the United States’ much-criticized refusal to lend the Hungarian rebels concrete assistance in late 1956 despite having encouraged the revolt principally via radio broadcasts.50 However, in concentrating solely on the depravities experienced in the Soviet sphere of influence, often using plots loosely based on real events, these films can be seen as making at least a contribution to the further rigidification of the Cold War. By ‘opening a window’ on the East, they also lent important visual support to the many novels and scholarly books, newspaper and magazine articles, radio and television programmes, and concerts, plays and art exhibitions produced during the period that verified the West’s occupation of the aesthetic and moral high ground in the conflict.51 Those people tempted to look at the battle between the two Europes, and between communism and capitalism generally, as a latter-day morality play tended to emphasize the religious dimensions of the Cold War. The persecution of religion under ‘godless communism’ was one of the most emotive of the major themes of Cold War discourse in Europe and the United States. In popular culture, ‘religion’ – largely understood as Christianity and, to some extent, Judaism – became discursively associated with ‘liberty’, ‘democracy’ and ‘Western civilization’ and was held in sharp contradistinction to the amalgam of ‘atheism, barbarism and totalitarianism’ that was communism. Official Western propagandists, including the CIA and IRD, took every opportunity to contrast the West and its ‘gospel’ of

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British Cinema and the Cold War religious tolerance with the ‘fanatic faith’ of those in the East led by their ‘pseudo-Gods’ in the Kremlin.52 The BBC’s European services and Radio Free Europe, funded and briefed by the Foreign Office and CIA respectively, consistently sought to ‘mobilize the great spiritual and moral resources’ that were still thought to exist behind the Iron Curtain. In the West, for all the fierce winds of secularism, such rhetoric reaffirmed a Manichaean perspective on the Cold War – one in which the forces of ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ met in mortal combat.53 Brief reference has already been made to the cinematic conflation of the Cold War and religion, namely the Church’s role in opposing the imaginary communist regime in Highly Dangerous. Many others superseded this small example as the 1950s progressed. In September 1955, critic Catherine de la Roche drew attention in Films and Filming to the frequently recurring themes of religion, war and anti-communism in British and American films of the period. ‘This can hardly be coincidental,’ she argued: Many people, including some in Hollywood, believe that the Cold War is fundamentally a conflict between Christianity and atheism and that religion is therefore a strong weapon against Communism. Whether the pictures dealing with these three subjects are deliberate propaganda or not, they belong to the same, easily recognizable, pattern of ideas… The best propaganda, of course, is indirect, hardly noticeable. How many of us, I wonder, have not been taken in by any of it? 54

As with any film cycle, the ‘religious revival’ at the cinema in the 1950s was motivated by a variety of factors: economic, social and political. Cecil B. De Mille’s biblical spectaculars such as The Ten Commandments (1956), for instance, were inspired by the audience’s desire for greater sexuality on screen, the fact that titillating scenes were more permissible in lascivious biblical pageants in which actors appeared scantily dressed, and the producer’s wish to use Egyptian (or Roman) despotism as a metaphor for Soviet tyranny.55 Similarly, the cycle of religious films produced by the Rank Organization in the late 1950s was driven by the desire to make a financial profit as well as to evangelize.56 The religious revival took a multitude of forms and styles, ranging from facile melodramas to the dour realism of Irving Pichel’s historical drama Martin Luther (1953), a film financed by the Lutheran churches of Germany and the United States.57 Somewhere in between stood the Hollywood science fiction of Red Planet Mars (Harry Horner, 1952), which depicted the resurrection of the Orthodox faith in Russia and the overthrow of the Soviet regime courtesy of an alien intervention.58 In some films religion was incidental, while in

And Never the Twain Shall Meet others it was a central element in the story. An example of the latter was The Devil Never Sleeps (Leo McCarey, 1962), a tale of missionary heroism set during the Chinese civil war, starring William Holden as an unlikely Catholic priest.59 The film that prompted de la Roche’s article, and has greatest relevance to this chapter, was Peter Grenville’s The Prisoner. Adapted by Bridget Boland from her own 1954 West End play, and released in May 1955, The Prisoner focused explicitly on the contemporary conflict between Catholicism and communism in Eastern Europe. The film was a thinly veiled dramatization of the show trial and detention of Cardinal Jószef Mindszenty, the post-war Catholic Primate of Hungary. Mindszenty had been arrested in December 1948 as part of the Rakosi government’s policy of subjugating the church to the state, itself linked to the swingeing attacks made by the communist regimes upon their domestic opponents – actual or potential – in the late 1940s and early 1950s.60 Charged with treason and currency offences, at his spectacular trial in February 1949 Mindszenty ‘confessed’ all and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Media coverage of the trial, actively promoted by the IRD in Britain and overseas,61 provided many in the West with clear and compelling images (often in the form of ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographs) of communist injustice and Catholic suffering.62 Together with Poland’s Cardinal Wyszinski and Croatia’s Cardinal Stepanic,63 Mindszenty came to be seen by many conservatives and Catholics as a pivotal figure in world history, presiding over the apocalyptic struggle between East and West, good and evil. As Daniel L. Watson writes: In the mythology constructed by their promoters, the plight of the ‘Captive Cardinals’ not only revealed the true horrors of Communism, and served as a warning of the terrible fate which could yet befall a vulnerable West, but their unique position on the front-line between East and West also created an elevated position of moral authority which allowed them to critique what they saw as the moral weakness and hypocrisy of Western liberalism.64

Because his story was the most publicized and most lurid, involving accounts of torture and drugging, Mindszenty became the most useful means by which the discourse surrounding the cardinals could be extended beyond conservative Catholic activists and right-wing Eastern European exiles to the broader public. Throughout the 1950s, dozens of pamphlets, hagiographic biographies, and radio and television dramas played on Western anxieties about communist sedition, and promoted the image of

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British Cinema and the Cold War Mindszenty in the United States and Western Europe as a ‘martyr’ singlehandedly holding back the flood of communism. Whilst the devotional literature of the Catholic sub-culture tended to distance the cardinals from their complicated historical context, eliding elements that might be compromising (such as their sometimes ambivalent attitude towards fascism), the ‘more mainstream works went even further in establishing “Eastern Europe” and its clerics as a universal metaphor for elevated and innocent suffering, by creating mythical countries, and using futuristic settings and unnamed composite characters’.65 Mindszenty’s story had already been the source for a Hollywood Bmovie in 1950 called Treason (Felix Feist), but the film appears to have left little impression on its audience.66 In contrast, The Prisoner was a notable financial success, received unanimous critical acclaim, and caused a significant stir in political and religious circles. It is difficult to ascertain the degree to which those involved in the production were motivated by the subject matter’s Cold War connotations. Boland, who had already shed light on East–West tensions in her 1945–6 play The Lost People (released as a film in 1949),67 was an actively practising Catholic. So was Glenville, better known for his eclectic directorial work in the theatre, including the stage version of The Prisoner. When Alec Guinness, who played the unnamed cardinal both on stage and screen, converted to Catholicism shortly after the film’s release, Glenville acted as his sponsor. All three were close friends, and it is their personal and artistic relationship that seems to have influenced the film’s development most. Neither the producers, London Independent, nor Columbia, the distributors, appear to have had any creative input.68 The Prisoner’s stylized narrative of clerical persecution at the hands of ‘totalitarianism’ establishes the clear binary difference between the enforced atheism of the communist East and the religious and political freedoms of the democratic West. The film is woven around the relationship between its two central characters, the cardinal and his interrogator (Jack Hawkins), and the latter’s systematic attempts to extract a false confession from the ‘national monument’ for crimes against the state. Neither the cardinal nor the country in which the events unfolds are named but its audience and critics understood the film to be the Mindszenty story. What little real ‘action’ there is takes place almost entirely within the confines of a jail, although there are fleeting scenes of public unrest outside, including the shooting dead of a boy found chalking words of resistance on a wall.

And Never the Twain Shall Meet The cardinal and interrogator initially appear very similar: former colleagues in the wartime resistance, both are cool, articulate and mildmannered. But, whereas the interrogator has aristocratic blood, the cardinal’s origins are humble, thereby emphasizing the latter’s association with ‘the people’.69 Rather than torturing the cardinal physically, the interrogator relies on modern psychological methods. ‘It is the mind that is important to us… regard me as your doctor,’ he intones, implying the cardinal’s Catholicism is a curable illness in Marxist eyes. The tricks employed by the interrogator as the months pass – solitary confinement, fatigue, glaring lights and skilfully worded questions – drew on the topical theme of communist ‘brainwashing’. Stalin’s political show trials of the 1930s had been taken as the first proof in the West of the communists’ reputation as the ‘engineers of human souls’ par excellence. Such fears increased markedly in the 1940s and 1950s, first because of the highly publicized Eastern European show trials in which senior communists admitted ludicrous crimes, and then as a result of the ‘change’ various Western POWs underwent after their treatment by their communist captors during the Korean war, including, most alarmingly, their stated wish to become Chinese citizens rather than be repatriated. This was the catalyst for a full-scale ‘brainwashing’ scare in Western Europe and the United States,70 manifested in such British films as The Master Plan (Hugh Raker, 1954), The Blue Peter (Wolf Rilla, 1954), The Gamma People (John Gilling, 1955) and The Mind Benders (Basil Dearden, 1963). John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962) was the outstanding Hollywood example of the sub-genre.71 When the interrogator’s techniques fail to ‘turn’ his victim – because the cardinal remains pure and true to his beliefs – he is forced to resort to characteristically inhuman communist tactics. The dramatic climax comes in a scene demonstrating the indecency characteristic of all totalitarian systems – a coffin is brought to the cardinal and opened to reveal his elderly mother, anaesthetized so as to appear dead. In this moment of shock the interrogator is able to draw out the single weakness in the cardinal’s armoury: he is the illegitimate child of a prostitute and has never been able to love his mother. Destroyed by this confession, the cardinal stands before a show trial and admits to ever greater sins, of having no love for man nor God, and of having betrayed his resistance comrades to the Nazis. But the cardinal’s acceptance of the execution sentence handed down to him by the kangaroo court – later commuted to ‘open’ imprisonment – enhances his moral stature and establishes his ‘martyrdom’. It is instead the interrogator

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6. God versus evil: meting out communist justice, the brutal interrogator (Jack Hawkins) humiliates the cardinal (Alec Guinness) before ‘the people’s court’. The Prisoner (1955).

who must admit real defeat. Revolted by his actions, he resigns, telling his military superiors that ‘I am too fastidious to be trusted. I cannot half serve a cause.’ The trade press dismissed The Prisoner as too grim and intellectual to arouse anything beyond a minor interest in the art theatre market, but the majority of Fleet Street’s critics recommended the film highly as an exciting and almost unbearably moving tale of life behind the ‘Frontier of Fear’, as the Daily Mirror put it. Comments as to the film’s political message ranged from the Daily Express’s ‘wrestling match of the minds that symbolizes the dilemmas of our time’, to the Sunday Graphic’s labelling of Guinness’s protagonist as ‘a living reproach to the Reds’.72 More than one critic saw The Prisoner as a combined screen version of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940); several suggested that the film could virtually be read as a documentary on the Mindszenty story.73 Even the Daily Worker was forced to admire the film’s powerful acting, though it deplored ‘its falsification’ of the Mindszenty case and misrepresentation of communist arguments through recourse to ‘old stock bogy men… and prison officials who treat executions with

And Never the Twain Shall Meet jocular unconcern’. Kinematograph Weekly called the film ‘compelling propaganda… certain to make a deep impression on the majority of audiences’.74 The impression The Prisoner made on many Catholics was indeed deep, but also contradictory. In Italy, the Film Board banned it on the grounds that it was ‘anti-Catholic’, while the Irish Censorship Board banned it for being ‘subtly pro-Communist and tending to the subversion of public morals’. The film then won the Grand Prix Award of the Offico Catholique International du Cinema for illustrating ‘the final victory of the soul – strengthened by the grace of God – upon a destructive ideology’. Britain’s Cardinal Griffin declared, via Guinness, that it was ‘a film which every devout Catholic should see’. In Easter 1955, a review panel at the Cannes Film Festival, which included a Soviet delegate for the first time, rejected it after judging the film ‘anti-Communist’. Later, the Venice Film Festival selection committee told producer Vivian Cox that The Prisoner was being withdrawn because it was ‘politically dangerous’.75 Despite, or perhaps because of this controversy, the film took over £100,000 in ten weeks at New York’s Plaza Theater and was awarded the ‘Best Foreign Film Award’ of the US National Board of Review. In Britain, Columbia distributed it to film societies via its 16mm division of Wigmore Films, the result being that The Prisoner was still in the public domain when Mindszenty once again became international news during the abortive Hungarian revolution in late 1956. Still in prison when the uprising began, in October Mindszenty was dramatically liberated by Hungarian soldiers and broadcast his support for the rebels on the eve of the Soviets’ fatal intervention in early November. He then took refuge in the American embassy in Budapest, where he stayed until 1971, consistently refusing to accept the reconciliation negotiated between the Hungarian government and the Vatican.76

IV If this is how West depicted East at the cinema, how did the East represent itself? Since the late 1920s, the CPGB had made strenuous efforts to use film as a ‘weapon in the struggle’ against capitalism, forming an integral part of a vibrant labour film movement. Attempts to convey its message in the inter-war years largely relied on the exhibition of imported Soviet films by clubs frequented mainly by middle-class intellectuals, such as London’s Film Society, a technique that was given added impetus during the Second

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British Cinema and the Cold War World War following the establishment in London of a Soviet Film Agency. With the onset of the Cold War proper, this form of inter-cultural exchange grew in importance. The more closed-off the East became, the greater was the need for outside advertisement in order to generate wider ideological and material support. If communist parties in the West produced and distributed their own films about the East all the better. Moscow considered it imperative to correct the West’s jaundiced interpretation of Eastern events and life-styles, whichever way the message was delivered, and the rhetoric of ‘peaceful coexistence’ together with the cultural ‘thaw’ instituted under Khrushchev gave this process further impetus.77 The Soviet film industry itself was beset with suspicion and paranoia in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This reflected the ‘high’ Stalinism of the dictator’s final years, and was mirrored throughout much of the Eastern European film industry, over which Moscow exerted considerable post-war control.78 Under Andrey Zhdanov, the reactionary post-war Minister of Culture, and Ivan Bolshakov, appointed the first Minister of Cinematography in March 1946, film production languished. After June 1949, all scripts had to go through the central administration in order to ensure compliance with the Kremlin’s cultural dictates, the official campaigns against ‘cosmopolitanism’ and the US dominated output. The result was films that were wholly unsuitable for exhibition outside the Soviet context given their messianic, xenophobic style.79 The crude nature of their major source material failed to deter the CPGB’s film activists from developing a positive Cold War strategy. To the likes of film-maker Ivor Montagu, a regular visitor behind the Iron Curtain, and Sam Aaronovitch, secretary of the party’s National Cultural Committee, the drawing up of clear boundary lines in the late 1940s accentuated the ‘battle of ideas’ between right and left, and the role of film within it.80 Socialism was no longer a theoretical construct confined to one country but was now being practically applied across the globe. This offered the committed film activist unprecedented scope for ideological promotion, allowing the camera to show both the converted and the doubters where and how Marxist-Leninist principles brought tangible improvements in living conditions. It also provided an essential counterpoint to what the CPGB saw as the growing ‘Americanization of Britain’s cultural life’, via Hollywood’s ‘vicious and corrupt influence’ especially.81 ‘Films from the Soviet Union, China and Eastern Europe are the sunshine of Socialism,’ claimed Colin Siddons, Bradford delegate at the CPGB’s

And Never the Twain Shall Meet 1952 Congress. ‘We must ensure that as many members of the working class as possible see them.’ 82 The immediate post-war years witnessed a severe reduction in the distribution and exhibition of communist films in Britain, linked in part to the film trade’s perception of the USSR as an enemy.83 In the early 1950s, however, the CPGB’s film culture experienced a mini-renaissance. In February 1950, the New Era Film Club was founded in London by a group of party youngsters to act as a film society, a 16mm projection service for clubs and trade union branches and a production outfit. Branches of the club were soon established in several provincial cities, showing, among others, Polish shorts.84 In 1951, Plato Films Ltd. was founded, financed by proceeds from Montagu’s now defunct Progressive Film Institute and the British-Soviet Friendship Society. Using the slogan ‘See the other half of the world’, Plato distributed films from the USSR, the People’s Democracies and China on 16mm.85 Contemporary Films Ltd, set up at the same time by McCarthy blacklistee Charles Cooper, operated along similar lines. Several other developments took place on the theatrical front, thereby widening access to many of the films distributed by the above agencies.86 Official pressures and bureaucratic restrictions made it difficult for Soviet film-makers to deal realistically with contemporary subjects in the early 1950s. Those Soviet films distributed in Britain during this period therefore tended to offer their audiences few revelations about life in the East. Literary classics, such as Gogol’s The Inspecting General (Vladimir Petrov, 1953), and Great Patriotic War adventures, such as Brave People (Konstantin Yudin, 1950), predominated instead.87 However, Plato especially capitalized on the greater artistic creativity which followed Stalin’s death, distributing a string of Soviet features of topical interest. Examples included The Big Family (Joseph Heifits, 1954), which sensitively handled the personal relationships of a family of shipbuilders; Moscow and Muscovites (Roman Grigoryev and Josif Poselsky, 1957), a documentary giving ‘a glimpse of various facets of Moscow life from morning to dusk’; and, Atoms For Peace (D. Bogolyepov, 1956), a documentary on the development of Soviet atomic energy.88 According to one British trade journal, The Team from Our Street (A. Maslyukov, 1955), a comedy about juvenile gangs in a small town, afforded ‘some fascinating sidelights on Russian domestic life’. Rather than highlighting Soviet achievements, this film impressed on some viewers the extent to which East and West shared the same civic and family values. ‘They apparently face, as we do, the problem of getting children to use the facilities laid on for them and of making the

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British Cinema and the Cold War facilities fit the children’s needs,’ wrote one critic, in some amazement.89 A steady stream of documentaries, shorts and features acquired from East Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and China also told similarly positive stories about Eastern economic developments and life-style changes throughout the 1950s.90 And yet, for all these signs of progress, importing and displaying the rays of socialist sunshine was a process dogged by difficulties at every stage. Obtaining the films from Eastern companies in the first place was fraught with problems, many self-imposed. For instance, over a year elapsed between Ivor Montagu’s request for a copy of the controversial East German feature film, Council of the Gods, and its release in Britain in April 1952, mainly due to misunderstandings between Montagu and the film company DEFA.91 The British government and the BBFC rarely intervened directly in the process, but they maintained a steady interest in film imports from the communist world. In 1951, for example, Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison proposed the use of the royal prerogative in order to ban Always Prepared, an East German documentary about the 1950 Whitsun Youth Festival in East Berlin. The National Union of Students had requested an import licence for the film and Morrison expressed concern in cabinet that the documentary ‘might give younger people a favourable impression of conditions in Eastern Germany’. His suggestions that the film ‘be severely edited, and material introduced to point to resemblances between the Communist and Nazi regimes’ was considered by ministerial colleagues, only for the idea to be rejected and an import licence granted, partly because a majority in cabinet considered it more likely that ‘the average audience’ would be repelled by rather than attracted to the film.92 MI5 and MI6 kept a constant check on Plato’s activities, apparently using some of the material that the company imported for training its new recruits in language skills.93 The poor quality of prints and the English dubbing or subtitling rendered many films that did arrive unscathed from the East unwatchable or unintelligible to ordinary viewers. The parlous state of the CPGB’s finances then made the actual screening of the films problematic. Projection relied to a great extent on a network of agents running their own shows. The technical equipment for this diminished yet further when the New Era Film Club was wound up around 1954.94 Attempts to circumvent these shortcomings by getting the party’s chief target audience, the trade unions, to hire films from Plato and Contemporary for conferences failed utterly. The distribution by the CPGB of Eastern European films merely

And Never the Twain Shall Meet confirmed the suspicions held by many trade unionists that the party was Moscow’s tool.95 Overall, therefore, while the impact of some of these productions should not be discounted it is unlikely that the alternative cinematic version of life in the East provided by these films made much of a dent in British public opinion. Evidence suggests that most were consumed by minority audiences already committed to the political views that the films expressed. British cinema-goers traditionally took a strong dislike to any foreign-language films, let alone those tinged with the odour of an ‘alien’ ideology. Even during the mid-1950s cinematic ‘thaw’, most Eastern European films still came across to Western critics as too slowpaced and propagandistic.96 Consequently, filmic representations of the very real advances made by the socialist camp in economic and technological terms between 1945 and 1960, even if creatively made, tended to get lost amid complaints of heavy-handedness. The fact that most of these films so consistently and clumsily underlined the East’s ‘otherness’ might well have inadvertently encouraged some uncommitted viewers who had doubts about the West’s policies to think along prevailing Cold War lines.

V Hitherto my analysis has concentrated on the competing visions of the East presented to the British cinema-goer in the 1950s and 1960s. Most British films of the period paid little attention to this subject, preferring instead to steer clear of politics (in overt terms) and situate comedies, thrillers, melodramas and so on in the domestic British context. These films are not necessarily without significance, however, for what many of them unconsciously conveyed was the sense of life ‘on our side’ in contrast with that behind the Iron Curtain. In any international conflict, images of one’s own way of life are as important as those of the enemy’s. Public manifestations of these images can be taken as an indication of what people believe (or ought to believe) they are fighting for, as opposed to against. For their part, Whitehall’s Cold War propagandists adopted a dual approach towards their mission: on the one hand, using ‘negative’ publicity to spread the evils of communism, while on the other disseminating ‘positive’ material at home and overseas about ‘the virtues and advantages of our system’. Promoting the British way of life as ‘the highest exemplar of Western civilization’ would, in the Foreign Office’s opinion,

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British Cinema and the Cold War underpin and increase support for ‘us’, while further distancing and discrediting ‘them’.97 It would of course be myopic to see a call to Cold War arms in every film that extolled British or Western virtues in one way or another during this period, but it is important to emphasize the implicit support given by the cinema to the notion of Britain as the stable home of social democracy. Artistically and politically, British films on the whole exuded conservatism in the 1950s. The liberal social realism of the 1940s tended to give way to films that, like the ‘Doctor’ and ‘Carry On’ comedies and the enormous number of Second World War dramas, encouraged cosy compliance rather than sceptical enquiry.98 This is not to say that such deference should be attributable solely to the exigencies of the Cold War; the ‘complacency and inertia’ which many see as marking 1950s Britain had many causes.99 Nevertheless, what Nora Sayre writes of Hollywood in the same period might equally be applied to Britain: ‘The tenor of the films of the Fifties was that ours was a splendid society, and that one ought to cooperate with it rather than criticize it’.100 The studio that managed to project a mildly progressive yet deeply consensual image of Britain more consciously than any other during the late 1940s and 1950s was Ealing. Between 1938 and 1959, Ealing produced nearly 100 films. This distinctive body of work has come to be regarded as unique, both in terms of its consistent communal viewpoint and the role it played in British culture. During the Second World War, Ealing quickly acquired a semiofficial status and became the studio on which the MOI most relied for inspirational films. Michael Balcon, Ealing’s production chief, developed a system in which a close-knit bunch of directors, scriptwriters and producers worked famously as a ‘team’, with Balcon positioning himself as the final arbiter in order to ensure that films corresponded with his own personal ideology. Balcon likened the cinema to the church, as an institution that, because of its immense power of influence, had a responsibility to its audience to educate as well as entertain. Ealing’s ‘marriage’ with the God-fearing J. Arthur Rank in 1944, an arrangement that left the studio free to make films on its own terms with Rank’s financial backing, underlined its reputation as the social conscience of the post-war British film industry.101 Balcon’s sense of duty translated into the projection of liberal democratic, socially responsible values. Ashamed of the escapist nature of Britain’s inter-war films, Balcon, like many other Ealing stalwarts, emerged from the struggle against fascism part of the ‘radicalized’ middle class that voted

And Never the Twain Shall Meet Labour for the first time.102 His search for change had its limits, however. According to Balcon, the war had vindicated Britain’s fundamental ‘greatness’. What was now needed was a ‘mild revolution’ based on the nation’s abiding qualities: consensus, fairness, an unofficial communality, political continuity and humorous iconoclasm. It was down to British film-makers patriotically and truthfully to reflect and project the ‘British way of life’, at home and abroad: The world, in short, must be presented with a complete picture of Britain and not with large fragments from the picture: Britain as a leader in Social Reform in the defeat of social injustices and a champion of civil liberties; Britain as a patron and parent of great writing, painting and music; Britain as a questing explorer, adventurer and trader; Britain as the home of great industry and craftsmanship; Britain as a mighty military power standing alone and undaunted against terrifying aggression.103

Almost all of these qualities and virtues were transposed onto celluloid at Ealing in the post-war decade. Reference was made in Chapter 2 to the studio’s promotion of a modernizing empire-commonwealth. Scott of the Antarctic (Charles Frend, 1948) committed extensive resources to a Boys’ Own story of British heroism, and was chosen for the 1948 Royal Film Performance and eulogized by the Conservative Rothermere press.104 Nicholas Nickleby (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1947) conscientiously adapted Dickens, though less memorably than David Lean’s versions of the same period. The Blue Lamp (Basil Dearden, 1950) saw the police and the underworld join forces to catch the killer of Jack Warner’s ‘bobby’. Frieda (Dearden, 1947) starred Mai Zetterling as the German outsider reluctantly, but finally, accepted into her English husband’s local community. Passport to Pimlico (Henry Cornelius, 1949) and Whisky Galore (Alexander Mackendrick, 1949) struck a blow against bureaucracy and acquisitiveness in favour of communal individuality. Later comedies such as The Titfield Thunderbolt (Charles Crichton, 1953) and Genevieve (Cornelius, 1953) reflected Ealing’s continued embodiment of ‘timeless’ notions and respect for ‘quaint’ British institutions, just as the new ‘Elizabethan age’ was beginning. Meanwhile, The Cruel Sea (Frend, 1953) and Dunkirk (Leslie Norman, 1958) retold epic wartime deeds.105 None of the films above could be regarded as in any way official. The police and the Admiralty granted their full cooperation in the making of The Blue Lamp and The Cruel Sea, but this was nothing particularly unusual. With the exception of The Divided Heart (Crichton, 1954), a ‘woman’s picture’ set in post-war Bavaria, no Ealing film released between

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British Cinema and the Cold War 1945 and 1959 offered any direct comment on the Cold War.106 Balcon does appear to have built on the firm relationship developed between Ealing and Whitehall during the war. He was appointed honorary advisor to the NFFC, wrote reports for the Board of Trade on the British film industry’s resources, and was knighted for his services to the industry in 1948. As a sign of the Labour Party’s faith in Ealing, Balcon was also asked in 1947 to make a feature marking the party’s fiftieth birthday in 1950, only for the project to fall through due to disagreements over property rights.107 Balcon’s private papers testify to his awareness of Cold War politics and the role of films therein. In May 1949, he drew satisfaction from reports that British films were attracting larger audiences in some theatres behind the Iron Curtain than the ‘propaganda’ material churned out by the people’s democracies’ own studios.108 In the wake of the Geneva conference in August 1955, Balcon discussed with scriptwriter T.E.B. Clarke the possibility of marking the ‘thaw’ in East–West relations by making a comedy in Russia. Clarke had drafted a letter to the Soviet ambassador stating that it was hoped that a wholly non-controversial and non-political film, possibly about cricket, would help to kill prejudices. Though theoretically in favour, Balcon warned that the proposal was ‘full of tricks’ politically and diplomatically, and the idea was eventually shelved.109 Whether Ealing’s output carried the government’s seal of approval is to some extent beside the point, however. Even though many of the studio’s films are susceptible to different interpretations,110 they overall presented a positive picture of a Britain going through what were to many people hard times. Balcon would later describe these films as a ‘safety-valve for our more anti-social impulses’.111 Supplying escapist entertainment which relieves tension during wartime is significant in itself, yet the Ealing films amounted to more than this. Ealing’s output contained some of the biggest commercial and critical successes of the period. Millions flocked to watch household British names in British settings celebrating British virtues in a ‘typically’ apolitical British fashion. Without knowing it, or necessarily acceding to it, these millions were provided with a consistent set of principles based on what made the British system, if not perfect, still the best, and which was the antithesis of Stalinism. Left-of-centre, but with a distinctly middle-class hue, Ealing fitted into the prevailing earnestness that was apparent in such institutions as Penguin Books, the Picture Post and the News Chronicle. All stamped their government’s Cold War stance with liberal-leftish authorization, and, in their avowed anti-materialism, distinguished Britain’s role in the conflict from the United States.112

And Never the Twain Shall Meet Commenting in the late 1940s on HUAC’s malignant influence on Hollywood, one British journalist allowed himself a sardonic aside on the contrasting ways things worked in Britain, ‘where a spectral un-British Activities committee spontaneously inhabits and inhibits the minds of writers and directors’. On reading this, Balcon’s reaction was to constitute himself permanent chairman of the committee, a measure of his sense of humour, his standing within the national film industry and his awareness of the cinema’s ideological role.113

VI In 1953, Karel Reisz, destined to become one of the leading lights of the New Wave film movement in Britain in the early 1960s, urged British and American film-makers to overhaul radically their anti-Soviet propaganda strategy by switching the public’s main attention from the negative aspects of communism to the positive features of liberal democracy. In getting this balance wrong, Reisz argued, the West’s two leading film industries were not only peddling anti-communist material of an increasingly counterproductive crudity, they were also guilty of wasting a valuable opportunity by failing to define ‘Western democratic values in terms sufficiently striking to serve as an effective alternative’.114 This chapter would seem to cast at least some doubt on Reisz’s assertions. It must be acknowledged that Reisz was writing largely in reaction to the over-simplification of Hollywood’s output brought on, he believed, by McCarthyism. To those British film-goers fearful of Senator McCarthy’s ‘Robespierre-like ascendancy’ in the United States in the early 1950s, seeing such Hollywood Red-baiters as The Steel Fist (Wesley Barry, 1951), The Hidden Secret (Wallace A. Grissell, 1952) and Red Snow (Boris L. Petroff and Harry S. Franklin, 1952) probably confirmed their worst suspicions.115 Yet it might still be argued that Reisz’s worries were to an extent misplaced when directed at the British film industry. The analysis above substantiates his claim that, when it came to depicting life under socialism during the Cold War, many British film-makers opted for the lowest common denominator. Certain films did, though, treat the subject in a more sophisticated fashion by, for instance, highlighting the ambiguities in postwar central European politics. Others still capitalized on powerful popular myths to produce extremely effective anti-communist propaganda. Moreover, Reisz appears not to have taken into consideration that great body of films which seemed wholly apolitical but actually served to underpin

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British Cinema and the Cold War many of the very same social democratic virtues the British government sought to promote in its battle for ‘men’s minds’. Ealing’s output is conspicuous in this respect because of its chief ’s ideological approach towards the cinema, but many films produced in other studios put the same positive gloss on capitalism, consciously and unconsciously. As with those films that dealt with the issue of Cold War subversion, therefore, the overall impression left by this cinematic fare was of a polarized world in which ‘we’ (meaning the West) held the moral high ground. Two Europes had in a sense existed for centuries,116 but these were now presented as implacable enemies – one stood for human decency and was free, the other formed the Soviet empire and was a virtual prison camp. Inside their own sphere, the communists – always shown as an elite in order to differentiate them from ordinary people – were as repressive and malevolent as those working on their behalf in Britain. With a slight modification in the costume and language departments, images of Nazis were re-used until the communists’ own characteristics became easily identifiable – utopian, self-serving, deceitful and paranoid. The relatively few films that offered a countervailing viewpoint stood little chance of altering the prevailing perception of ‘the other side’ as suffocatingly conformist. The West, meanwhile, was a place in which politics and politicians were shown a healthy disrespect, none more so than in Britain, still the beacon of democracy.

4 Screening Orwell

Communism believes that human beings are nothing worse than somewhat superior animals… and that the best kind of world is that world which is organized as a well-managed farm is organized, where certain animals are taken out to pasture, and they are fed and brought back and milked, and they are given a barn as shelter over their heads… I do not see how, as long as Soviet Communism holds those views… there can be any permanent reconciliation. US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 15 January 1953 1

If proof were needed that literary images could play as important a role in the cultural Cold War as those viewed at the cinema, it can be found in George Orwell. ‘The finest political writer in English since Swift’,2 ‘one of the greatest English stylists of his time’,3 Orwell was by the time of his death at forty-six in January 1950 established as one of the chief spokesmen and arbiters of his generation on domestic and international affairs. Inspired by democratic socialist principles, Orwell’s writing was interwoven to an unusual degree in British fiction by a European and internationalist view of history and politics.4 This feature, together with a characteristic unadorned style (‘good prose is like a window pane,’ Orwell claimed),5 was

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British Cinema and the Cold War most clearly illustrated by his two literary masterpieces, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). These novels, the combined sales of which exceed any comparable post-war writer in English,6 were immediately interpreted as an engagement with the Cold War, and contributed to that conflict several of its most potent images. What follows is an analysis of the nature and impact of their conversion into films in the 1950s.

I Animal Farm was first conceived by Orwell during the Spanish Civil War and written between November 1943 and February 1944 when he was literary editor of Tribune. However, it was not until August 1945 that the allegory based on the Russian Revolution appeared in the bookshops, published by Secker and Warburg. Publishers either failed to identify the book’s commercial value,7 or, more commonly, were afraid to take it because of its anti-Stalinist message. T.S. Eliot at Faber, for example, did not believe that ‘this is the right point of view from which to criticize the political situation at the present time’.8 The MOI warned at least one company (Cape) of the damage the allegory would cause Anglo–Soviet relations, arguing curiously that Orwell’s use of pigs as the ruling caste would be particularly offensive to the Russians.9 ‘The first British post-war novel,’ according to Malcolm Bradbury, became an immediate bestseller and made Orwell famous, literary critics drawing favourable comparisons with Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. By 1955, Animal Farm had sold a quarter of a million copies in the United States alone and been translated into 22 languages.10 Despite its seemingly simple plot, Animal Farm was immediately interpreted in several often conflicting ways. Orwell himself aimed to project two principal themes. The first was ‘to expose the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone’ and, by extension, to condemn tyranny universally – ‘to clear men’s minds of cant and worship so as to guard against what he feared would be a future even more threatened by totalitarianism’. The second theme was more positive, of ‘revolution betrayed’, that despite events in the USSR socialism was still an achievable goal and was not bound to be perverted by any and every post-revolutionary regime.11 While some critics and readers saw this, others found reason to label the novel Tory, Trotskyite, even Anarchist.12 In the book’s final chapter, Orwell actively sought to anticipate and thereby warn against the re-emergence of great power, capitalist-communist

Screening Orwell rivalry in the wake of the Second World War, and it is therefore ironic to find Animal Farm (together with Nineteen Eighty-Four) being used as antiSoviet propaganda when East–West relations began to freeze in the late 1940s. In 1949, the IRD promoted the novel’s translation and distribution in Europe and the Middle East in association with the US State Department. Orwell lent his own support to these activities in the last year of his life, freely licensing faithful translations of Animal Farm for the Eastern European market.13 In April 1949, he discussed with IRD official Celia Kirwan the best means (including film) of attacking Stalinism,14 and divulged to her a list of personalities – which included playwrights J.B. Priestley, Cecil Day Lewis and Sean O’Casey, and actors Orson Welles and Paul Robeson – who in his opinion were ‘crypto-Communists’.15 Orwell’s enthusiastic approval of Whitehall’s anti-Soviet stance has been seen by some commentators as indicating a rejection of socialism in his later years, but is more likely part of the campaign waged by leftist writers and intellectuals for a ‘third way’ between American capitalism and Soviet communism in the late 1940s and the concomitant need to defend democratic socialism more aggressively.16 In 1950, the IRD bought the strip cartoon rights for Animal Farm for distribution via local papers in large parts of the developing world, where this ‘brilliant satire on the Communist regime in the USSR’ would be ‘a most effective propaganda weapon, because of its skilful combination of simplicity, subtlety and humour’.17 By early 1951, the IRD’s thoughts had turned to making a film strip of these cartoons for schoolchildren, only for this to be superseded by an altogether much grander project.18

II The origins of the animated, feature-length film of Animal Farm lie within the American secret services. In June 1948, the US National Security Council issued a directive establishing a new agency to conduct deniable political, economic, paramilitary and psychological operations to counter the ‘vicious covert activities of the USSR, its satellite countries and Communist groups to discredit the aims of the United States and other Western powers’. The Office of Special Projects – soon the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) – was to operate under the policy direction of the Departments of State and Defence, and was housed within the CIA for administrative support.19 Frank Wisner, OPC chief, was fascinated by the power of propaganda and consequently, armed with a budget in 1949 of $4.7 million (growing to $200 million in 1952), hired Joseph Bryan III,

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British Cinema and the Cold War Virginian navy veteran, ‘brilliant writer and creative thinker’, to run a Psychological Warfare Workshop.20 This unorthodox unit, made up almost entirely of liberal-oriented Princeton alumni, acted as a think-tank, devising often unconventional schemes to undermine the solidarity of the emerging Eastern Bloc and to sharpen the Americans’ anti-communist publicity techniques.21 In 1950, two of the Workshop’s operatives, writer Finis Farr and Carleton Alsop, formerly a film producer and Hollywood agent, began negotiations with Orwell’s widow and literary executor, Sonia Blair, over the film rights to Animal Farm.22 This dovetailed with the OPC’s strategy of creating a more progressive image for the West, whether it be via the building up of democratic international front groups or in this case by exploiting Orwell’s radical credentials.23 The scheme was also linked to President Truman’s ‘Campaign of Truth’ launched in April 1950. This heralded a more aggressive and comprehensive propaganda policy dedicated to maintaining the faith in ‘the Free World’ while destabilizing Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, with motion pictures assigned an integral role.24 Substantial provision was made for overseas film production without attribution to the US government, for consumption not only by the illiterate in undeveloped countries but also ‘among industrial workers, farmers and youth in more advanced countries, [where] motion pictures are a prime instrument for building confidence, exposing the threat of aggression and combatting tendencies towards neutralism’.25 Legendary director Cecil B. De Mille, who was already on the board of the National Committee for a Free Europe – with which producer Darryl F. Zanuck and actor Ronald Reagan also had connections 26 – was appointed the chief film consultant of the United States Information Agency (USIA).27 In March 1951, Sonia Blair sold the animation film rights of Animal Farm to an independent production company, Louis de Rochement Associates, with Carleton Alsop having acted as conduit.28 The result was an ostensibly normal commercial enterprise but one in reality substantially brokered and financed by the OPC (Alsop and Farr provided the lion’s share of the projected £90,000 costs).29 As a sign of gratitude, Joseph Bryan apparently arranged for Sonia Blair to meet Clark Gable.30 Harvard-educated Louis de Rochement had co-founded (with Roy E. Larsen of Time, Inc.) The March of Time documentary series in 1934, a novel concept in screen journalism which offered cinema audiences a dynamic, in-depth view of the news. After the Second World War, first as a producer for Twentieth Century Fox and thereafter as an independent,

Screening Orwell he pioneered the trend toward realism and on-location shooting of features. De Rochement was, according to James Agee,31 one of the very few producers whose films bore his unique identity no matter who directed them, and a man who ‘like John Grierson… regarded the motion picture as a pulpit from which to deliver very personal views of the world’.32 Although de Rochement objected to Joseph McCarthy’s extreme antics, he was nevertheless acutely suspicious of communist subversion in the United States throughout the 1950s.33 Such fears might have been encouraged by his unusual contacts within the secret services. In 1952, de Rochement produced a crude Cold War melodrama, Walk East on Beacon, about J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men outsmarting Soviet spies, with the full and enthusiastic cooperation of his close friend Louis B. Nickols, the FBI’s public relations director. While in Britain working on Animal Farm he spent time cultivating American and British intelligence agents following the Burgess–Maclean affair. It is difficult to say categorically whether it was via these connections that de Rochement came into contact with the OPC, but Animal Farm appealed to him not only artistically but also as a persuasive argument, even weapon, against Soviet tyranny.34 In November 1951, de Rochement secured the services of Britain’s largest and most respected animation company, run by husband-and-wife team John Halas and Joy Batchelor.35 Halas and Batchelor had risen to prominence during the war making humorous shorts for the MOI, including the ‘Abu’ series which directed anti-Nazi propaganda to the peoples of the Middle East.36 Such work confirmed both the proselytizing qualities of animation, enhanced by its instant accessibility and apparent ideological innocence, and Halas and Batchelor’s distinctive style, which combined the sentimentality of Disney with an Eastern European graphic boldness and darkness.37 Government sponsorship continued into the postwar period with the COI Films Division’s Charley series, designed to promote the idea of the welfare state in a new and differently democratic Britain. This, allied with private commercial work for Esso, Shell and BP, and commissions for NATO and the European Cooperation Administration (ECA), enabled the company to make a reasonable living.38 There appears to be four main reasons why de Rochement was willing to take the risk of hiring Halas and Batchelor rather than Hollywood’s established and more experienced animators, Disney or Fleischer. First, the British company was smaller and could produce films at a lower cost; a Charley cartoon, for instance, cost less than one third of an American cartoon of the same length.39 Second, de Rochement’s associate, Lothar

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British Cinema and the Cold War Wolff, had worked with the firm while chief of the Marshall Plan’s European Film Unit (also linked with the OPC via the CIA) in the late 1940s. He could therefore confirm that the company possessed the requisite artistic and intellectual skills to deal with the difficult levels of visualization which Animal Farm’s philosophical and narrative complexity demanded.40 Another contributory factor, given de Rochement’s subversion fixation, may have been the HUAC investigations in 1951 of alleged communists in the US animation industry.41 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the lighter the American hand in the film the greater its propaganda potential became. Halas and Batchelor themselves grew more aware of the political nature of the project as production progressed, but there is no evidence that they (or their colleagues) knew of the precise origins of the film. As humanists who saw film as a vital medium for the expression of internationalist ideas, they believed that Animal Farm carried the simple message to which no right-minded individual could possibly object – that ‘power corrupts’.42

III Transferring Orwell’s novel to screen represented a major logistical challenge to Halas and Batchelor, and the film was a notable artistic achievement. Animal Farm became the first feature-length animation film made in Britain for the entertainment of the general public and the first ever made for politically conscious adults.43 Work by the 80 artists employed was split between Stroud and London, where the largest studio in Europe was developed for this kind of specialized production. John Reed, cartoon director at Disney since 1935, was put in charge of animation; Matyas Seiber, who had worked on previous Halas and Batchelor projects, composed the score; and Maurice Denham, the experienced stage actor who was just breaking into films, performed all the voices. In all, 300,000 man-hours were required to create 250,000 drawings and over 1000 coloured backgrounds. Film-making was initially scheduled to take 18 months at a cost of £90,000, but in the end stretched to three years and totalled roughly £120,000.44 Halas and Batchelor felt the heavy burden of converting into film one of the world’s best-known, seemingly straight-forward, yet sophisticated fables. The film’s breakdown chart showing all of the novel’s characters in their various relationships to the plot and to each other reveals an acute awareness of Animal Farm’s political significance. Those incidents which

Screening Orwell

7. Hungarian-born, Bauhaus-trained John Halas, with some of the preliminary sketches for Animal Farm (1954).

strengthened the main dramatic form were retained while other sections were discarded. Conveying the satirical element was particularly challenging given animation’s emphasis on the visual rather than the spoken, but this was overcome by a naturalistic style, augmented by a stark rather than glossy presentation, which accurately captured Orwell’s combination of humour and deep pessimism. The Swiftian sense of irony was transmitted via the film’s emphasis on the changing slogans. The end product was a film that reduced the storyline to essentials but generally followed Orwell’s narrative very closely.45 Halas and Batchelor normally worked autonomously, relying on their own skills to convert a commission to screen. This was not the case with Animal Farm. The contract drawn up between RD-DR Corporation, one of several within the de Rochement organization, and Halas and Batchelor following the agreed treatment in the summer of 1951, gave the former significant scope in shaping the film.46 Input came from several interested parties. De Rochement was himself heavily involved, discussing alterations at the planning and timing stages in September 1952, and commenting specifically on when the pigs should take over the farmhouse and when the

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British Cinema and the Cold War ‘all animals are equal’ slogan should come in. On viewing the early material, he insisted that Napoleon’s demeanour and behaviour be modified to make him more authoritarian, and proposed changes to his keynote end speech. Lothar Wolff ’s supervisory role strengthened de Rochement’s control and provided the unit with an expert Cold War propagandist familiar with European audiences.47 News of the production attracted the attention and advice of various literary luminaries, including Victor Gollancz and Lord Weidenfeld.48 Fredric Warburg, who had fought personally to publish Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four and in the process developed a close friendship with Orwell, took a particular interest. Between 1951 and 1953 Warburg was treasurer of the British Society for Cultural Freedom, a body secretly financed from the Paris headquarters of the CIA-funded Campaign for Cultural Freedom (CCF). The CCF was an intellectual and artistic movement that led a liberal offensive predominantly against communists and fellow travellers during the Cold War.49 Both the honorary secretary and general secretary of the British Society for Cultural Freedom, Michael Goodwin and John Clews respectively, were IRD contract employees.50 Warburg visited the Halas and Batchelor Studios on several occasions, principally in the autumn of 1952.51 It is impossible to tell what effect – if any – these visits had on the film-making, but it is significant that Warburg had misinterpreted Nineteen Eighty-Four as marking Orwell’s break with socialism and as an attack on the left as a whole, which he perhaps felt ought to be conveyed in the filmic treatment of his other great novel.52 Despite reportedly having the authority to approve the script and storyboard in order to ensure that the film was ‘a faithful adaptation of her husband’s classic’, Sonia Blair soon lost interest in the finer points of the production.53 As the company’s experienced and gifted scriptwriter, Joy Batchelor nevertheless grew increasingly frustrated with tampering outsiders. De Rochement, for one, insisted on being kept up to date on the script.54 In early 1952, a draft script was also assessed by the powerful US Psychological Strategy Board (PSB). Established in April 1951, the PSB was charged with uniting the whole of the American national security bureaucracy – State Department, CIA (which absorbed the OPC in 1951), military services and other government agencies – behind a campaign of psychological warfare in a grand effort to combat the Soviet Union.55 For two years, it acted as ‘the nerve center for strategic psychological operations’ and ‘focal point… of activities to influence the opinions, attitudes, emotions, and behavior of foreign groups’.56 A Motion Picture Service

Screening Orwell (MPS) working through 135 US Information Service (USIS) posts in 87 countries, which in 1952 reached an estimated audience of over 300 million, was predictably given high priority by the organization.57 The MPS employed producer-directors who were given top security clearance and assigned to films which articulated ‘the objectives which the United States is interested in obtaining’ and which could best reach ‘the pre-determined audience that we as a motion-picture medium must condition’.58 The PSB worked on the basis that if art was to be good propaganda it needed to be good art, a theory borne out by its cultivation of respected film directors like Frank Capra and studio executives such as Nicholas Schenk, president of MGM, Columbia’s president Harry Cohn, and Walt Disney.59 The Animal Farm script crossed the desk of the PSB’s deputy director, Tracy Barnes, in January 1952 courtesy of media executive Wallace Carroll, a consultant to the US government on psychological warfare throughout the 1950s.60 The PSB’s film experts were disappointed with the script’s propaganda value and offered suggestions for improvement. ‘[T]he theme is somewhat confusing and the impact of the story as expressed in cartoon sequence is somewhat nebulous. Although the symbolism is apparently plain,’ the critique concluded, ‘there is no great clarity of message’.61 One of the PSB’s propaganda lines during this period was to accuse the Soviet regime of having perverted Marxism 62 and promoting a wider reception of Orwell’s novel corresponded nicely with this. However, for the film to have its fullest impact – and contribute to the PSB’s three-fold ‘consolidate, impregnate and liberate’ strategy – ease of understanding was considered essential. PSB officials argued, therefore, that it was far better to simplify, presumably even at the cost of modifying Orwell’s meaning, rather than confuse the audience with an overly precious adherence to Orwell’s text.63 Collaboration between the PSB and OPC in 1952 on political activism in Western Europe meant that there was ample scope for the former’s views on Animal Farm to blend into those of the film production team.64 Despite going a year over schedule and through the debilitating process of nine different scripts, the film’s message was ultimately evident. Several significant alterations were made to the book for quite normal commercial or artistic reasons. For instance, by having Old Major (Marx-Lenin) die immediately at the end of his revolutionary speech rather than days later created a more dramatic, heart-rending opening. Similarly, the ferocious chasing and killing of Snowball (Trotsky) in one scene a third of the way through precluded the latter’s alleged attempts to overthrow the new regime while in exile, but made dramatic sense in terms of being more

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British Cinema and the Cold War visual and shockingly violent. Certain other changes are, however, worthy of further comment given their cumulative political implications. There is no doubting Orwell’s depiction of Napoleon (Stalin) as a despicable tyrant, nor that de Rochement’s desire to magnify his authoritarian nature made commercial sense. Yet the book states that during the seminal Battle of the Windmill (the Second World War) ‘all the animals, except Napoleon, flung themselves flat on their bellies and hid their faces’.65 This represents Orwell’s attempt to be fair to Stalin, who remained in Moscow after the launching of Operation Barbarossa, directing affairs from the rear. In the film, however, Napoleon is singled out as the only animal (apart from Squealer) who does not fight, other than issuing in a cowardly way a few orders from the safety of the farmhouse in response to direct attacks on him. Similarly, the book attributes Napoleon’s trading with humans partly to the economic needs of the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s, whereas in the film Napoleon’s motives are reduced to pure greed (in the shape of jam for himself and the other pigs). Related to this last point is the wider one of the way the film diminishes the book’s human characters and its references to the iniquities of capitalism and the limitations of liberty. Far less is made in the film of why the animals rebel in the first place; the ‘tyranny of human beings’ in Orwell’s opening chapter is reduced on screen to Jones’s drunken cruelty. The role that the humans play throughout the book in trying to stamp out the rebellion via black propaganda and the flogging of animals for singing the revolutionary anthem is cut. ‘Sugarcandy Mountain’, Orwell’s reference to Christianity as the servile upholder of the status quo, is omitted altogether. Two of Orwell’s central characters, Pilkington and Frederick (the British and German governing classes), are virtually elided. Other than Jones himself, the humans are reduced in the film to an indeterminate pub rabble. In doing so, the film plays down the significance that the book attached to capitalist in-fighting, and Orwell’s condemnation of Britain and Germany’s devious strategy of isolating the USSR prior to the Second World War. This line of interpretation is given a further twist in the final scene, which amounts to a wholesale inversion of Orwell’s ending. The book concludes on a bleak note, with the now clothed pigs drinking, brawling and gambling with their human farmer neighbours, and agreeing they have a common interest in keeping the lower animals and lower classes subservient. The ‘creatures outside’, reads the last sentence, ‘looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already

Screening Orwell it was impossible to say which was which’.66 Orwell’s suggestion is that there is no difference between old tyrannies and new, between capitalist exploiters and communist ones. Moreover, the raucous farmhouse party is meant to satirize the cynical power politics of the first wartime meeting between Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt at Teheran in November 1943, and to predict their inevitable future conflict based on self-interest. This is why Pilkington and Napoleon draw the ace of spades together at the end of their card game. By participating in this future struggle, warns Orwell, the masses would once again be serving their oppressors’ ends.67 The film changes this dénouement in two ways. First, the audience is not allowed to feel that the capitalist farmers and communist pigs are on the same debased level. The farmers are excluded from the scene altogether. Consequently, the watching creatures see only pigs enjoying the fruits of exploitation – a sight which impels them to stage a successful counterrevolution by storming the farmhouse. John Halas years later explained this radical twist in terms of the film-maker’s conventional need to have an upbeat, active ending that sent audiences away happy. In fact, although the revolt scenario appeared in production records as early as March 1952, the ending was the source of a six month dispute between de Rochement and the directors, especially Batchelor, who wanted to stick to the book’s conclusion. Whether de Rochement’s motives were commercially or politically grounded is unclear, but his insistence on the beasts mounting a fight-back eventually prevailed.68 The result is not only an uplifting ending but also one which underlines the film’s anti-Soviet message. In the context of the US government’s strategy of ‘liberating’ those living under communist rule, the film’s counter-revolutionary theme is particularly intriguing.

IV Billed as ‘the most controversial film of the year’, Animal Farm was released by RKO in New York in December 1954 and opened in London a month later. It immediately attracted international coverage, helped by ‘the sort of unexpected advance publicity for which Hollywood would sacrifice its last picture of a pin-up girl’.69 A gala reception at the UN added to the film’s already pregnant political overtones.70 When Prime Minister Winston Churchill complained that Old Major’s voice too closely resembled his own, conjuring an absorbing image of the staunch Conservative exchanging places with the father of communism, the film’s appeal grew further.71

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8. The twist in the tail: with the humans having been airbrushed from the party, Napoleon (centre) and his ‘comrades’ celebrate their takeover of the farm. Moments later the beasts’ revolt will begin. Animal Farm (1954).

Critical responses to Animal Farm stressed its technical expertise and innovation. Though a few critics thought the film too Disney-esque in places, it was instantly proclaimed a landmark in the history of British animation. Voicing the consensus, Kinematograph Weekly called it ‘brilliant. At once thoughtful, controversial, challenging and witty, but never malicious, it should intrigue all classes and, except for tiny tots, all ages.’ 72 The film’s paymasters would have been heartened by its reception politically. Encounter, the CCF’s flagship journal, criticized the film for obscuring what it understood to be Orwell’s message and not being sufficiently anti-Soviet, but this interpretation was unique.73 The New York Daily News labelled it ‘a sparkling satire on Kremlin madness’, the Catholic Herald ‘a merciless commentary on the Slave State’, the Daily Mail ‘the child’s guide to the Communist fallacy’, and the Daily Worker ‘an essay in political distortion and despair’.74 The changed ending did not go unnoticed by the critics, testimony to the cultural importance of Orwell’s work. Some were scathing, either for political or artistic reasons. ‘I wonder what sort of conferences led to this high-handed decision,’ 75 protested the Tablet, without pressing the issue.

Screening Orwell Reacting to recent White House overtures which signified a shift in Cold War tactics, the Glasgow Herald went a little further: ‘and as for the political implications, it may be observed that even President Eisenhower has been constrained a little to damp the enthusiasm of those who call the sheep and goats and donkeys of Eastern Europe to rise in rebellion’.76 Other critics applauded the twist. ‘Reading the book,’ The Times stated, ‘one felt with passionate conviction that the animals were right to rebel’.77 Most ordinary viewers, however, would in all probability have interpreted the film as a straight adaptation of an important book written by a revered radical. Those in the audience able to read the ideological signs would have been encouraged to think that the Soviet order was not only flawed but also either beatable or inherently self-destructive. ‘At last an antiCommunist film has come along that is 100% effective artistically and hence is really telling as propaganda,’ declared the Catholic Universe, ‘[showing that] Communism is an evil system that does not even make for material happiness’.78 The film was eagerly and imaginatively promoted. The American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF), the US offshoot of the CCF, went to great lengths to make Animal Farm’s opening run at New York’s prestigious Paris Theater a platform for domestic and international success. Media contacts spread word of ‘one of the most important antiCommunist documents of our time’; discount rates were offered to students and labour unions; and strenuous efforts (ultimately forlorn) were made to persuade MGM to act as the film’s distributors.79 A cartoon strip drawn by one of the animators, Harold Whitaker, appeared in the British and international press. Merchandising spin-offs, unusual for the period, included children’s animal figurines.80 Despite this, the film was not a great success; its initial run in Manchester, for example, lasted only a fortnight.81 Hopes that it would mark the beginning of a British assault on Hollywood’s $10 million monopoly of the colour animation market were unfulfilled despite a 1955 Berlin Film Festival award. De Rochement’s plans to make John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress with Halas and Batchelor were subsequently abandoned.82 ‘One of British film’s more honourable failures,’ claims John Baxter, Animal Farm was arguably too serious a subject for a medium commonly thought of as suitable only for children.83 Whether the film still prospered in political terms is debatable. Few records exist relating to the reception overseas of this most international of films. Being animated, however, Animal Farm was easily translatable, and versions in Japanese, Swedish, German and other languages soon appeared.84

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British Cinema and the Cold War In France, where, for obvious reasons, Napoleon was renamed Caesar, it was lauded as a powerful parody of the Soviet regime.85 The CIA helped to finance distribution, though it was often powerless to circumvent bans imposed on the showing of the film, principally behind the Iron Curtain.86 If the film’s chief target was the (potentially) dissident element suffering under the communist yoke, it therefore failed. If, on the other hand, success is measured in terms of its broadening awareness of Animal Farm, previously confined largely to the literary-minded middle classes, a different picture emerges. The perspective changes again if the film is examined by way of its subtly contrived Cold War message, serving as both a warning to developing states and a reminder to doubters in the West of the sordid Soviet record. Nor should the film’s potential impact be restricted in time. By the early 1960s Animal Farm (and Nineteen Eighty-Four) had become standard reading in British and American schools. The existence of the animation film rendered it a popular pedagogical aid, helping in the process to provide a new generation with a tendentious grounding in the origins of the Cold War.87

V Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s last, dystopian novel, has over the last 50 years arguably been more influential than Animal Farm, certainly in terms of its phrases and coinages passing into the common language. Published in Britain and the United States simultaneously in June 1949, it sold over 400,000 copies in its first year alone and confirmed Orwell’s place in the modern literary pantheon.88 By drawing on his deep political understanding of the mechanisms of terror, psychological invasion and brainwashing, the author was widely praised for having followed his brilliant essay on recent events with another posing horrific questions for the future. ‘Orwellian’ was soon added to ‘Kafkaesque’ to describe the development of many a state and many a public vocabulary, up to and beyond 1984. As of 1981, the book had sold over ten million copies in paperback throughout the English-speaking world and existed in 23 other languages.89 Nineteen Eighty-Four was intended to act as a warning against the threat of totalitarianism, whether from the right or left. So complex were its targets, however, that nearly all commentators immediately seized on one theme to the exclusion of others. Bernard Crick argues that Orwell should have made his message more clear, rather than trying to explain the novel’s theme afterwards by press releases, and that by failing in this regard

Screening Orwell the book’s confused reception was unavoidable.90 Its application to the Cold War was similarly inevitable, especially in the light of the tumultuous events which had taken place in Eastern and Central Europe while Orwell had been writing the novel and on which it was thought he was commenting.91 The book was banned in Eastern Europe,92 where Pravda, the CPSU’s daily newspaper, tore into Orwell’s ‘monstrous future in store for man, [in which] he imputes every evil to the people’. Reynolds News criticized it for aiming to abuse and stir up hatred against the USSR. Time and Life magazines saw it as a comprehensive anti-socialist polemic, with ‘Ingsoc’ representing the British Labour Party. Philip Rahv in Partisan Review praised it extravagantly as ‘the best antidote to the [Soviet] totalitarian disease’ so far produced.93 Ironically, therefore, Nineteen Eighty-Four came to be used for the very purpose it warned against, propaganda for the maintenance of a super-state conflict. ‘Whatever Orwell believed he was doing,’ argues Alan Sinfield, ‘he contributed to the Cold War one of its most potent myths… In the 1950s it [Nineteen Eighty-Four] was marvellous NATO Newspeak’.94

VI Nineteen Eighty-Four was adapted first for the small screen by America’s National Broadcasting Company and shown in September 1953.95 More controversial and politicized was Nigel Kneale’s version, made with Sonia Blair’s approval and televised by the BBC in December 1954. This twohour-long play met with considerable praise from critics for its accurate interpretation of the novel, its efforts to put over the principles of Orwell’s language and for the individual performances of Andre Morrell as O’Brien and Peter Cushing as Winston Smith.96 Among the wider public and press the production caused a furore. Newspapers condemned the ‘sadistic’ nature of the play (one viewer had reportedly died of a heart attack) and parliament debated the need to censor such television output.97 Producer Rudolph Cartier read the novel as a warning against totalitarianism in all its forms, including fascism, communism and McCarthyism, but the majority of MPs and journalists saw the play in straight Cold War terms, as a renunciation of life behind the Iron Curtain. ‘Orwell’s play [sic!] shocked many people who never read his book,’ stated the Daily Mail. ‘We are glad if 1984 has jolted them into a realization of the beastliness of Communism – for they will know better that there is something we must fight with all our strength of mind and will.’ 98 The film effectively

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British Cinema and the Cold War ‘launched’ Orwell as a ‘public’ writer, marking the point when the language of his novel entered the popular imagination and when Nineteen Eighty-Four became, as Stalin’s biographer Isaac Deutscher characterized it after the telecast, ‘an ideological superweapon’ in the Cold War of words.99 The desire to capitalize on the tumult surrounding this play seems to have been a major factor in the decision to make a cinematic version of Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1955. The film rights had been acquired from the Orwell estate in 1953 by the former president of RKO turned independent producer, Peter Rathvon.100 During the 1950s, Rathvon was a leading advocate of ‘international pictures’ – Hollywood-financed films shot on foreign locations which brought tax advantages, lower production costs and foreign box-office.101 In 1955, Rathvon formed Holiday Film Productions to make 1984 at Associated British’s Elstree Studios. Hiring a strong AngloAmerican cast and Michael Anderson, director of the 1954 blockbuster The Dam Busters, the intention was to profit financially and politically. During HUAC’s investigation into communism in the American film industry in the late 1940s Rathvon had shown little sympathy for the blacklisted ‘Hollywood Ten’, including RKO artists Edward Dmytryk and Adrian Scott.102 With a distinguished career in banking and business behind him, Rathvon’s Cold War stance was somewhat predictable. In the case of 1984, a $100,000 subsidy from the USIA, which retained control of the script and guaranteed the film a worldwide showing, was a significant bonus. Nineteen Eighty-Four’s value was already well known by American propagandists, having been compulsory reading for PSB officials in 1952. The intention was, according to the USIA’s chairman, to make ‘the most devastating anti-Communist film of all time’.103

VII Filming at Elstree began in June 1955, though the broad framework of the production appears to have been constructed earlier in the year, partly as a result of Rathvon’s communication with the ACCF’s executive director, Sol Stein. Prompted by members like film director Elia Kazan and actors Robert Montgomery and Hume Cronyn, in the mid-1950s the ACCF sought active involvement in several prominent theatrical projects in the United States and overseas.104 These included financing stage adaptations in Australia and Latin America of Arthur Koestler’s novel based on the 1930s Moscow trials, Darkness at Noon (a major inspiration for Nineteen Eighty-Four); promoting anti-communist television documentaries such as

Screening Orwell NBC’s Nightmare in Red in tandem with the USIA; and, conversely, discouraging distribution of feature films perceived to carry anti-American or anti-capitalist overtones, such as H.G. Clouzot’s 1953 thriller The Wages of Fear.105 The ACCF earnestly believed that the West was losing the cultural Cold War in this period. Such activities therefore reflected the organization’s determination to make its campaigning increasingly political and explicitly anti-communist, an approach which eventually led to a parting of ways with the tactically more conservative Paris-based CCF.106 In January 1955, Peter Rathvon approached Stein requesting advice on 1984’s screenplay and publicity for the film. After consulting colleagues, Stein, a successful playwright who like many New York liberal intellectuals of the period interpreted Orwell’s book as an attack on ‘Red fascism’,107 made a series of ‘suggestions’. These, nearly all of which can be seen in the final print, were effectively confined to two areas: ‘verisimilitude’ and the ending. Stein argued that for the film to do justice to the book and make audiences aware of the dangers posed by present-day communism, the production had to have as contemporary a feel as possible. He therefore recommended that armbands replace the sashes worn by members of the Anti-Sex League in the book, and the trumpets used to herald the regime’s announcements be eliminated because of their association with pageantry and melodrama. Stein’s emphasis throughout was on making 1984 a reality rather than fiction. Caricatures were to be reduced as much as possible and the film given a docu-drama appearance. Finally, the very fact that the film was meant to represent a version of reality necessitated a change to Orwell’s ending. Rather than leaving the audience in ‘total despair’, with Winston Smith capitulating to Big Brother, it was essential to at least hint ‘that human nature can not be changed by totalitarianism… so that the viewer, like the person behind the Iron Curtain, will be left with some small measure of hope’. This could be done, Stein proposed, by emphasizing the enduring love between Winston and his fellow rebel Julia.108 Compared with Animal Farm, the making of 1984 in the summer and autumn of 1955 was smooth and problem-free. Not surprisingly, given the rumpus over the television play, the BBFC had already allotted the film an ‘X’ certificate at the scripting stage, without asking for any major deletions.109 At £300,000, production costs were relatively high and could be accounted for partly by the choice of Edmond O’Brien and Michael Redgrave to play the lead roles of Smith and O’Connor (O’Brien in the novel) respectively. O’Brien’s stock had recently risen considerably following his winning the supporting acting Oscar in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The

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British Cinema and the Cold War Barefoot Contessa (1954). Ironically, Redgrave had been on Orwell’s list of suspected crypto-communists in the late 1940s, but his socialist leanings appear to have had no bearing on either his decision to take part in 1984 or his performance.110 A further expense was Terence Verity’s ingenious art work which successfully created an imaginary yet starkly realistic London by eschewing fashionable science-fiction techniques as much as possible. The elaborate studio sets were augmented by highly publicized location work in Hyde Park and the East End.111 1984 opened in London in March 1956 and in the United States six months later. As with Animal Farm, first impressions of the film are those of a relatively straight adaptation of the book. On the whole the film remains close to the novel in incident and plot. Winston Smith’s disillusionment with life in Airstrip One, his soul-destroying work for the Ministry of Truth punctuated by frightening Two Minute Hate sessions, his passionate and rebellious love affair with Julia, the couple’s imprisonment, torture and brainwashing by the ruling elite – all of these key features survive intact. A sense of Orwell’s sordid, claustrophobic atmosphere is conveyed by the ubiquitous telescreens and secret police, rumours of traitors being ‘vaporized’, and the rat-infested junk shop where the two lovers pathetically create their own private life among the ‘proles’ until their betrayal by the landlord. At the same time, simplification and condensation abound, inevitably so given the book’s many almost unfilmable sections. Orwell used paradox – the Oceania slogan ‘War is Peace’, for example – for some of his most telling blows, and such purely literary devices could not be effectively translated to the screen. On closer inspection, however, more substantial changes become apparent which confirm traces of the film’s abettors. A commentary at the very outset seeks to set 1984 outside the science-fiction genre and to place events in ‘the immediate future’. Shocking pictures of genuine atomic explosions follow, representing the nuclear conflagration of 1965 (undated by Orwell) and the subsequent establishment of Oceania. This emphasis on reality continues throughout, with the Thought Police toting machine guns rather than lasers and Eurasian prisoners being paraded through an easily recognizable Trafalgar Square. Julia (Jan Sterling) dons a chastity armband rather than sash and behaves more like a 1950s housewife than Orwell’s libidinous modern woman; the old-fashioned trumpets are replaced by electronic sounds. The overall effect is to make Orwell’s world more tangible and believable, and his picture of society 30 years hence more relevant to contemporary politics.

Screening Orwell

9. London’s future? Winston Smith (Edmund O’Brien) and his omnipresent leader on the streets of Airstrip One, Oceania. 1984 (1956).

One of the major planks of Orwell’s novel was the criticism it levelled equally at all great powers. Indeed, Nineteen Eighty-Four was in this sense a natural extension of his argument in Animal Farm, that continued rivalry between the powers could result in a world divided into three super-states locked in never-ending combat (a Cold War). Alliances (like that between the United States, USSR and Britain between 1941 and 1945) would expediently change from time to time, but the real losers would be the masses, fed on a diet of propaganda and coercion.112 This theme is obfuscated in the film. Oceania is certainly at war with Eurasia, but this is attributed wholly to the designs of Big Brother rather than the workings of the international system. Moreover, Eurasia remains an enemy throughout rather than, as happens towards the end of the book, suddenly being announced as an ally. Thus, Orwell’s reference to the bankrupt nature of the Grand Alliance during the Second World War, intended to force people to question their leaders’ motives, is excised. Winston’s failure to read the book ostensibly written by Goldstein, leader of the underground in Oceania, explaining how the three-state conflict

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British Cinema and the Cold War emerged out of that between Russia, China and the United States, has a similar effect.113 Big Brother is never identified either in the book or the film. Stein had recommended to Rathvon that in order to emphasize the possibility of Big Brother’s real existence, in the film his posters ought to have the photograph of an actual human – say, of the now dead Stalin – rather than being a cartoon caricature. For some reason this advice was not followed and a cartoonish ‘BB’ stares out from the walls.114 The unmistakable indications in the film, nevertheless, are that Oceania’s ruling party is modelled on the Soviet regime, with Nazi flourishes. Thus, some of Orwell’s nomenclature such as ‘comrades’ stays in the film whereas other key points are taken out. Oceania’s currency, for example, is changed from dollars, denoting American imperialism, to sterling. None of the explicit comparisons between Ingsoc and the communists, which O’Brien makes in the book while brainwashing Winston, find their way onto the screen. Consequently, the important point that Russian communism was in fact inferior to Ingsoc in terms of its ability to break its opponents’ will and its ultimate quest for equality rather than power was omitted. The highlighting of a Soviet-style show trial, with ‘traitors’ Rutherford and Jones confessing their guilt before execution, further altered the book’s message.115 Orwell’s story was not entirely pessimistic. ‘If there is hope,’ writes Winston, ‘it lies in the proles’.116 But Orwell rejected the possibility of the human spirit rising above pain and privation. Faced with the dreaded rats in Room 101 at the end of the novel, a broken and wizened Winston forsakes Julia and learns to love Big Brother instead. Believing this to be dangerously defeatist in the context of the Cold War of the mid1950s, Stein had produced a draft alternative version which proved Winston’s surviving freedom of spirit.117 This was taken a stage further in the film released in Britain.118 As soon as Winston and Julia meet after their release from the Ministry of Love, we see that nothing can erase from their minds the knowledge that the system is evil. They are living proof that the human soul cannot be completely overcome, even by the most powerful regime. Winston shouts ‘Down with Big Brother’ and is shot, promptly followed by Julia, who also sacrifices herself to the cause of freedom. Orwell’s savage masterpiece is thus brought into line with conventional screen morality and orthodox Western beliefs. Rathvon argued in Newspeak-ian terms that this ‘logical’ change was what ‘Orwell might have written if he had not known when he wrote the book that he was dying’.119 Orwell had in fact expressed particular

Screening Orwell

10. Peace-Sex-Hate: In their final act of atonement, Rutherford and Jones are led to the steps of Trafalgar Square to declare their undying love for Big Brother. 1984 (1956).

objections to Nineteen Eighty-Four being altered in any way by publishers and, for the record, Sonia Blair was reportedly ‘horrified’ with the ending of the film.120

VIII The reception of 1984 failed to match the expectations of the film’s backers. To some extent the film’s makers were in an impossible position. As several commentators noted, it required a near miracle to make Orwell’s psychological detail and intellectual argument as imaginative and convincing on the screen as they were in print. And the high regard in which this ‘greatest of all political parables’ was held rendered criticism of any adaptation almost inevitable.121 The casting and acting, however, were also culpable, with all three leading players found wanting: O’Brien because of his incongruously large girth and for being too obvious a rebel, Sterling for trying to be too glamorous, Redgrave for simply being languid. Furthermore, the American accents of O’Brien and Sterling were felt to jar with those of their British colleagues, detracting from the representation

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British Cinema and the Cold War of London life in the near future. Rathvon’s attempt to exploit the AngloAmerican connection seems in this sense to have backfired. Michael Anderson’s direction lacked the inspiration and style he brought most successfully to the war film genre in the 1950s. The strait-jacket imposed on him by a producer intent on sending the correct ideological message might explain this.122 1984 attracted some plaudits from the trade papers and mainstream press. The Daily Film Renter, for example, complimented the film for keeping ‘all the frightening angles of the bureaucracy-run mad world which Orwell foresaw as the future’. The Daily Telegraph bettered this, arguing that ‘Orwell’s masterpiece… loses none of its shattering impact on the screen’.123 According to most critics, however, the film was impossible to categorize and would therefore confuse and deter audiences. In attempting to make Orwell’s work shockingly topical by eschewing the technical wizardry of the science-fiction genre, 1984 merely ended up looking cheap, shabby and unconvincing. Stripped to its basics, the novel lost many of its most subtle and powerful features. The intense freedom of the love scenes, for instance, was never communicated, and even the torture scenes lacked impact (though presumably the rules of censorship played a part in this). Despite Stein’s best efforts, the characters seemed so rootless they could scarcely begin to engage viewers’ sympathies. Those not ‘repulsed’ by the horror found the film ‘boring’, ‘plodding’ and, above all, ‘depressing’.124 All agreed that the 1954 television adaptation was superior: the Daily Sketch sardonically called the cinema production ‘the BBC’s proudest hour’.125 Many critics spotted the changed ending and its political significance. Representing the majority’s view on this, Milton Shulman in the Sunday Express condemned it as ‘our own kind of doublethink’.126 However, others – both on the political right and left – either thought the ending was ‘more true to life’ or missed it (and the film’s other alterations) altogether.127 This suggests that the majority of normal viewers would themselves have been ignorant of the distorted version of Nineteen EightyFour they were being presented with. It also indicates that, for all the film’s weaknesses, a large proportion of these people would have left the cinema having their fears of the USSR confirmed. The comments of the Evening Standard’s reviewer are perhaps most apposite in this regard: [Nineteen Eighty-Four] is a denunciation of Us as well as Them. But the film shows only one side of Orwell’s picture of the future. It has left enough out to provide the Russians with material for an equally powerful and shocking film

Screening Orwell about the West. Orwell would have appreciated the irony of 1956 revising Nineteen Eighty-Four to suit its own prejudices and assumptions.128

At the box-office 1984 seems to have performed poorly, despite the attraction of Orwell’s name and the notoriety of the recent television play. Having an ‘X’ certificate naturally restricted the public’s access, but overambitiousness appears to be the principal cause of the film’s unpopularity. By trying to straddle several genres – horror, romance, science fiction and thriller – 1984 over-reached itself, satisfying few of the fans of these types of movie.129 There is little doubt that the film, while not being the major asset the USIA anticipated, was still of some value to Western propagandists. Its generally poor quality and low-budget appearance, however, meant that it soon dated, and by the time the film was withdrawn from circulation in 1973 by the Orwell estate, it had long passed into obscurity.130

IX ‘Ask any Stalinist today what English writer is the greatest threat to the Communist cause,’ wrote George Woodcock in The Writer and Politics in 1948, ‘and he is likely to answer “Orwell”’.131 There is no doubting Orwell’s consistent anti-communist position, or his ambition ‘to make political writing into an art’.132 Yet his English radicalism was infused to the end with a passionate sense of independence. ‘The Prevention of Literature,’ his defence of intellectual liberty published in 1946, warned how bureaucrats, press lords and film magnates conspire ‘to turn the writer, and every other artist as well, into a minor official working on themes handed down from above’. Orwell refused to succumb, believing that ‘imagination, like certain animals, will not breed in captivity’.133 Orwell died at a key point, after the Cold War had begun but before its full global dimensions had become apparent. Consequently, despite having spelt out in one of his last essays his desire for ‘a Socialist United States of Europe’ independent of Russia and America,134 debate ensued over the precise coloration of Orwell’s political affinities. What I have tried to show in this chapter is how the cinema contributed to this debate, and therefore Orwell’s legacy. The symbiotic relationship between literature and film had been of course established well before the 1950s, and Orwell was not the only author to have his works transferred to the cinema screen by film-makers wanting to comment on the Cold War during this period. But Orwell stands out because of his totemic image as a popular political prophet.135 Few other political writers were as well known or had their

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British Cinema and the Cold War views so widely applied to contemporary events while they were alive, let alone after their deaths. Converting his most famous books into films lent the two novels even greater appeal and a more collective impact.136 And the fact that Orwell’s name was so strongly associated with propaganda makes the use to which Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four were put by filmmakers richly ironic. That both novels needed to be so heavily distorted illustrates Orwell’s ideological distance from Western Cold War orthodoxy. What the above also confirms is the importance of British, and European, cinema as a forum for the international cultural Cold War. It is not known whether John Foster Dulles, cited at the head of the chapter, had Orwell’s Animal Farm in mind when making his keynote speech to the American Senate in early 1953, still less the film of the book then currently in progress. But what is clear is the US government’s interest in including British film-makers and cinema-goers as part of its anticommunist propaganda campaign. Several high profile Hollywood figures – John Ford and John Wayne among them – added their support to their government’s ‘Militant Liberty’ campaign in the 1950s, designed to ‘explain the true conditions existing under Communism in simple terms and to explain the principles upon which “the Free World” way of life is based’.137 By promoting the making and distribution of documentary and feature films in Britain and elsewhere, the chances were much greater of both maintaining an anti-Soviet consensus in the West and encouraging dissent within communist strongholds.138 As the Animal Farm and 1984 productions show, this was at times a discreet exercise implemented by a sophisticated propaganda network. In both these cases, the general public, critics and even senior production staff were entirely unaware of political manoeuverings behind the scenes. What the full impact was of this form of US cultural diplomacy, on both the public in these countries and on politicians like Dulles whose own images of the Cold War were also open to reinforcement by the media, is a question that requires further research.

5 Future Imperfect

Nuclear weapons, it is now clear, had a remarkably theatrical effect upon the course of the high Cold War. They created the mood of dark foreboding that transfixed the world as the late 1950s became the early 1960s. They required statesmen to become actors: success or failure depended, or so it seemed, not on what one was really doing, but on what one appeared to be doing… It was no accident that Dr. Strangelove reached the screen in 1964: the play upon which Stanley Kubrick based his film had been running for quite some time. John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1997) 1

One theme implicit within many of the films already discussed, and which needs to be considered separately, is nuclear weaponry. The shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki dominated the Cold War, producing among politicians and the public a mixture of fear, awe, deference and dissent. Myths and images of nuclear energy established before the discovery of fission – many, as we shall see, via the cinema – were expanded and refined in the 1950s especially. As sociologist Edward Shils remarked during that decade, ‘atomic bombs made a bridge across which apocalyptic fantasies, marching from their refuge among fringe groups, invaded all society’.2 This

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British Cinema and the Cold War was, after all, an era in which people were encouraged in some countries to shave their cats and dogs to prevent them becoming radioactive.3 Like everyone else, those working in the British film industry could not but be affected by the new, more deadly East–West arms race which threatened to cut short their own and their families’ lives so abruptly. Reactions naturally differed from one individual to another. Several directors, notably Stanley Kubrick and Peter Watkins, the makers of Dr Strangelove (1964) and The War Game (1966) respectively, found the mechanics of nuclear destruction intellectually spell-binding and consciously used film as a medium for public instruction. To many others, the whole subject – comprising atomic energy as well as weapons – offered the potential for large financial profit. This was particularly the case for those with prior experience of working in science fiction, arguably the genre most associated with 1950s cinema and from which the Cold War drew many of its most powerful images. Whatever the motives of individual film-makers and projects, collectively a copious body of films emerged that represented a substantial contribution towards the public’s assessment of the nuclear issue. The ‘main feature’, to extend Gaddis’s metaphor, centred on diplomatic affairs, with actor-statesmen such as Churchill, Khrushchev and Kennedy revelling in the lead roles. Watching the Cuban missile crisis unfold daily on television in October 1962, for instance, was more compelling than any theatrical depiction of nuclear brinkmanship could probably ever hope to be.4 However, what took place on the big screen could be viewed as an important sub-plot of the main feature rather than a distracting sideshow, not least because of the intrinsically visual nature of the Bomb. Analysis of these films will be divided into three sections. The first examines the cinematic comment upon the West’s nuclear strategy and Britain’s independent deterrent. The second focuses on the wider issue of nuclear science and its effects on society. The third concentrates on the filmic representation of the nature of the nuclear holocaust and Britain’s civil defence provisions. Emphasis throughout is placed on the relationship this cinematic output bore to official policy and publicity in the field.

I Britain reacted ambivalently to the American use of the atomic bomb against Japan in August 1945. A majority of people, exhausted by six years of fighting, doubtless shared Churchill’s view that the Bomb seemed like

Future Imperfect ‘a miracle of deliverance’ when Tokyo surrendered in September.5 At the same time, with very little solid information to go on about the effects of nuclear warfare, most people inevitably reacted to the arrival of the ‘atomic age’ in terms of what they already had in their heads, that is, their own stock of existing ideas and myths. Indicative of this was the first news story from Hiroshima, by the Daily Express’s Peter Burchett, which talked in terms drawn from the language of science fiction, of his ‘wandering through the rubble stupefied by the vistas of death’.6 Feelings of wonder combined with horror. ‘A great many people,’ Mass Observation reported in August 1945, ‘whether they realise the full power of the bomb or not, felt misgivings about the use of so powerful a weapon’.7 Hollywood quickly capitalized on the American public’s fascination with nuclear science, starting in 1946 with MGM’s The Beginning or The End?, a pseudo-documentary loosely based on the Manhattan Project. Other studios soon followed suit, offering a range of interpretations of the ‘atomic era’.8 In the five years after Hiroshima, only four British films touched on the subject, each involving Nazis or criminals dabbling with nuclear apparatus: Night Boat to Dublin (Lawrence Huntingdon, 1946), Lisbon Story (Paul Stein, 1946), Eyes That Kill (Richard Grey, 1947) and Dick Barton Strikes Back (Godfrey Grayson, 1949).9 What appears as a missed opportunity can partly be explained by the ‘veritable lead shield of secrecy’ 10 which surrounded Attlee’s decision to develop nuclear weapons in January 1947. In sharp contrast with Truman’s stated policy of ‘aggressively disseminating’ atomic information in order to offset Americans’ fears, Attlee avoided publicity whenever possible. Parliament was told the minimum about the nation’s atomic energy and weapons developments, and MPs considered it ‘indecent’ to ask about them.11 The press and broadcasters were stifled by a combination of D-notices and self-censorship.12 A culture of deference was quickly established in which, even after the British people had been told obliquely of the atomic bomb project in May 1948, only a small minority in the mass media dared to discuss the issue publicly. Informed discussion was therefore limited and potential dissent on peace and defence issues marginalized.13 Viewed in this context, Seven Days to Noon, made by the Boulting brothers and released in August 1950, comes as something of a surprise. Here was a film that tackled the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe directly and questioned the wisdom of Britain’s atomic developments. Its plot revolves around a British nuclear scientist, Professor Willingdon (Barry Jones), who steals an atomic device the size of a typewriter from his

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British Cinema and the Cold War laboratory and threatens to explode it in London unless the government ceases production of nuclear weapons. Ministers refuse to negotiate, and a huge man-hunt for Willingdon ensues while the capital is evacuated. Shots of deserted streets are intercut with borrowed Second World War newsreel footage, deliberately creating an eerie realism. The fugitive is eventually traced to a city-centre church where he is gunned down and London saved with only seconds to spare.14 Seven Days to Noon displayed the Boultings’ trademark association with current affairs. In September 1949, news reached Britain that the USSR had successfully conducted its first atomic bomb test, several years ahead of schedule. This came as a ‘shattering moment of truth’ 15 for many in Britain who, despite promises of American protection, now felt defenceless against a nuclear assault. The country was then shaken in January 1950 by the arrest of Harwell scientist Klaus Fuchs on charges of spying for Moscow. Few doubted that there was some sort of link between the two events, particularly when another of Harwell’s top physicists, Bruno Pontecorvo, defected to the USSR in September 1950.16 Subversion fears increased, with the cabinet growing nervous about the possibility of a clandestine Soviet atomic attack on London via smuggled explosives.17 The year also witnessed the first stirrings of the mass anti-nuclear movement in Britain that would later consolidate around the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). The British Peace Committee claimed more than a million signatures to the Stockholm Petition for unconditional international nuclear disarmament, an appeal backed by the communist-led World Peace Conference and therefore loudly condemned by government propagandists.18 Critics felt that Seven Days to Noon tapped into the national psyche brilliantly, Sight and Sound praising it for its ‘awareness of contemporary issues, rarely enough reflected in British films’. Leonard Mosley argued in the Daily Express that the film ‘bring[s] into light all the nasty fears and terrors of the ordinary citizen… It is the sort of threat which all of us – over bars, in the kitchen, across the work desk and the intimacy of our bedrooms – have been talking about for months’. Audiences seem to have concurred: it was a great commercial success and voted one of the top ten films of the year in the Daily Mail’s annual poll, while scriptwriters Paul Dehn and James Bernard were awarded Oscars for best original story.19 One of the strengths of Seven Days to Noon, and one that set it apart from the majority of British Cold War films during this period, was its exploration of the dissenter’s motives. Willingdon is presented as an idealist

Future Imperfect and committed Christian faced with a dilemma owing to the destructive powers his scientific work has produced. ‘We placed this burden on his shoulders,’ his vicar and confidant tells the Special Branch officer, ‘and left him alone to deal with it’. Willingdon’s mission is to awaken the world to its senses and redirect science back to ‘bring happiness’, an aim with which many viewers presumably sympathized. ‘The film does not present a reassuring picture of individual or collective effort,’ argues Marcia Landy, emphasizing the psychological dimension of Seven Days to Noon. ‘Rather, it dramatizes the blindness of the masses, the ubiquitous threatening sense of modern urban life and of modern technology and mass society.’ 20 Nevertheless, the underlying ideological values espoused by the film ultimately turn us against the fugitive scientist’s liberal-pacifist views. Willingdon’s growing insanity and disregard for ordinary people’s lives undermine his rational and humanitarian principles. The authorities, led by Superintendent Folland (who would re-appear in High Treason), are conversely depicted as trustworthy guardians of the country’s interests. In the film’s longest scene, the prime minister makes a Churchillian speech equating disarmament with appeasement, and Hitler with Stalin. Thus, although Willingdon is not portrayed as a fifth columnist, he is, by implication, doing Moscow’s bidding. Britain, it would seem, cannot afford to misjudge her enemies again: her great power status and solidarity with ‘the Free World’ make the possession of the Bomb obligatory. Despite the Boultings’ success, no other nuclear-related film produced in the early and mid-1950s was nearly as provocative as Seven Days to Noon. Indeed, virtually all films corresponded with orthodox political opinion, focusing either on the Soviets’ attempts to discover the West’s atomic plans or lending weight implicitly to the rationality of the government’s nuclear deterrent strategy. The ‘spying’ or ‘unhinged’ scientist appeared in a large number of films, many of which had only a tenuous Cold War connection. By the 1950s, atomic scientists had in official and public eyes shifted from being the revered masters of ineffable knowledge, the ‘social policemen’ of the mid-1940s, to the individuals who would be most likely to endanger the nation (and world generally). This would be the result either of academic naivety or, as the sequence of espionage scandals seemed to suggest, more likely by treachery.21 The cinema contributed to these suspicions by revising its established image of the scientist as ‘crazed genius’. Thus we see gullible scientists being rescued by MI5 and the FBI from the clutches of Eastern European kidnappers (Escape Route, 1952); endangering national security due to stress-induced amnesia (The Man in the Road, 1956); committing

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British Cinema and the Cold War suicide after leaking secrets to the communists (They Can’t Hang Me, 1955); and using the press for pacifist propaganda (Front Page Story, 1954).22 The extent of government involvement in this cinematic approach is unclear. Ministers and officials did encourage a public discourse that made ‘peace’ a subversive concept during this period.23 Whitehall also sponsored rearmament and services’ recruitment shorts, such as the CFU’s Wing To Wing (1951) which spoke of NATO as ‘a glorious brotherhood’.24 As the decade elapsed, government generally took a more proactive approach towards media coverage of the activities undertaken at atomic energy installations. In 1950, for instance, Attlee had refused permission for the release of CFU shots of the laying of pipelines to take effluent out to sea from the Windscale nuclear reactor in Cumbria. By mid-1952, however, CFU shorts like Harwell and Atoms at Work were being shown at cinemas, intended to assuage fears of radiation leaks and emphasize the medical and industrial spin-offs of nuclear developments.25 In December 1953, in reaction to the USSR’s successful hydrogen bomb test in Siberia that August, President Eisenhower launched his ‘Atoms for Peace’ campaign at the UN, a formula designed to pool international nuclear resources for humanitarian purposes. Of the more than 100 short films showing the peaceful uses of nuclear energy offered on loan worldwide in the decade afterwards, almost half were American and nearly half the rest British.26 In the midst of this cinematic output, broadcasters and newspapers continued to censor meaningful discussion of the state’s nuclear military strategy, while participating in an official counter-campaign against critics of the Conservatives’ nuclear policy.27 As for the public itself (mis-informed or otherwise), polls suggested general approval of government policy tinged with a sizable sceptical minority. When Britain finally entered the ‘nuclear club’ via weapons tests off the coast of Australia in October 1952, 60 per cent approved of the country acquiring the bomb, 22 per cent disapproved, and 18 per cent were undecided.28 Several films are notable, however, for expressing through comedy some degree of the anxiety that many people felt about Britain’s burgeoning nuclear establishment and the country’s role in the spiralling arms race. Top Secret, directed by Mario Zampi and released in 1952, starred George Cole as a sanitary engineer employed at an atomic research station who is bundled off to Moscow by Soviet agents under the impression that he is a Harwell scientist. Fun is poked at technocrats on both sides of the geopolitical divide for their juvenile fetish with the latest weapons, and facetious comments made about the clandestine rituals of the British

Future Imperfect military. Down Among the Z Men (Maclean Rogers, 1952) was the second cinematic vehicle for the Goons radio team, a send-up of the obsessive secrecy surrounding Britain’s atomic scientists and intelligence services. Harwell (or ‘Warwell’) again figures prominently, together with the Goons’ stock-in-trade affectionate mockery of the officer class and past imperial greatness.29 Top Secret caused a minor furore in the press for its ‘bold’ (others said ‘outrageous’) approach to the nuclear issue, while in such characters as ‘Professor Pureheart’ and ‘Captain Bloodnock’ Down Among the Z Men in some respects prefigured Kubrick’s darkly satirical Dr Strangelove. Yet these comedies were strictly of the crazy gang rather than black variety, displaying, as the Daily Film Renter put it, ‘that admirable hearty spirit of the best Public School magazine irony’. Neither film was intended to be deeply critical of the status quo. Both directors were mainly makers of low-budget, unambitious features situated solidly in the industry mainstream.30 The representation of a form of benign atomic ‘madness’ was then joined in the late 1950s and early 1960s by a small number of films which, while not amounting to serious opposition to the government’s nuclear strategy, did collectively register an audible protest. The motives behind their making varied, as did the degree of criticism they expressed and the policy alternatives they suggested. Some were major box-office attractions, others intended for a more narrow market, but all symbolized the mood of what has been labelled the most frightening phase of the Cold War, an era which saw the mid-1950s ‘thaw’ in East–West relations replaced by turbulent events in Budapest, Berlin and, ultimately, Havana. Pacifism on screen was a rarity in the two decades after the Second World War. Cinema-goers were instead inundated with films which told of the ‘good war’ Britain had fought against Hitler: in the air, on land, at sea and at home.31 Analyzing Hollywood’s Second World War features of the late 1940s, Gary Wills argues that, though the movies were putatively concerned with the fight against fascism, ‘the real enemy was Communism, and the real battle was to impose the psychological conditioning necessary for a new kind of “war”’.32 Such a narrow interpretation cannot realistically be applied to the British film industry’s prodigious recycling of the war in the 1950s. Films like The Colditz Story (Guy Hamilton, 1954), The Battle of the River Plate (Michael Powell, 1956) and Ice Cold in Alex (J. Lee Thompson, 1958) – to name but a few – had probably less to do with any sort of anti-communist conditioning than with providing (as Lewis Gilbert, director of Carve Her Name with Pride

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British Cinema and the Cold War [1956] and Sink the Bismarck! [1960] later put it) ‘a kind of ego boost, a nostalgia for a time when Britain was great’.33 Evoking Britain’s ‘finest hour’ in this fashion was, however, not without significance for the Cold War: given the perceived threat posed after 1947 by ‘Red fascism’, the films’ glorification of military hardware and solutions, and their amplification of the dangers of dropping one’s guard. Of these films, Peter Ustinov’s Private Angelo (1948), Anthony Asquith’s Orders to Kill (1958) and Jack Lee’s Circle of Deception (1960) stand out owing to the unusual emphasis placed on the stupidity of military conflict.34 A similar message, but situated in a Cold War context, was relayed by Philip Leacock’s Escapade, released in 1955. Based on a long-running West End play written by the pacifist Roger MacDougall, Escapade was scripted pseudonymously by the blacklisted Donald Ogden Stewart.35 School teacher John Hampden (John Mills) has three boys at boarding school who dream of activating their father’s peace-loving philosophy. On the verge of expulsion for inveterate troublemaking, Icarus, the eldest, steals an aeroplane in which he flies to a four-power summit in Vienna, armed with a petition signed by children from all over England calling for nuclear disarmament. This causes a media frenzy and considerable public debate about the nature of the East– West conflict. Despite Leacock’s intention to show that ‘to be a pacifist you really had to be a fighter’, the film actually ended up ridiculing the boys’ militancy by presenting their pacifism in a comic light.36 At the same time, the film did exhibit a clear preference for the schoolboys’ naivety over the cynicism shown by the great-power statesmen, a telling point in the light of the failure of the Geneva summit in the summer of 1955. Raymond Durgnat later identified Escapade as a ‘lonely harbinger of student CND direct action’.37 CND was launched in February 1958 with the twin objectives of an international ban on nuclear weapons tests and the British government’s unilateral abolition of its own stock of nuclear weapons. The organization stimulated a wave of film activity, and a series of films were made of its annual marches to Aldermaston, the site of the government’s bestknown atomic-weapons research facility, and the invasion of military bases organized by the Committee of 100, CND’s civil disobedience wing which drew in several prominent figures from the world of arts and entertainment, including John Braine, George Melly, Herbert Read and Lindsay Anderson.38 The latter, architect of the ‘Free Cinema’ movement, had in 1957 lambasted British cinema for its failure to tackle contentious

Future Imperfect socio-political issues, including nuclear weapons.39 March to Aldermaston (1959), a 33-minute documentary record of CND’s first Easter march in 1958, was made by a film-makers’ collective under Anderson’s supervision and distributed by Contemporary Films. The film differed considerably from the overwhelmingly suspicious treatment the march received by the press, radio, television and cinema newsreels.40 Its deployment of ‘natural’ television-style interviews, combined with the skilful intercutting of shots of the marchers and curious onlookers with still photographs of Hiroshima victims, represented a significant stylistic departure in the documentary field and a simple yet powerful piece of propaganda. The fact that the film opened at London’s Academy Cinema in tandem with Jean Renoir’s pacifist classic La Grande Illusion (1937), however, indicates that its audience was largely restricted to an initiated minority.41 The Mouse that Roared, also released in 1959, was the most caustic of a series of Ealing-type satires made in the late 1950s that focused on the perils of thermonuclear escalation. Others included Rockets Galore (Michael Relph, 1958) and SOS Pacific (Guy Green, 1959).42 American producer Walter Shenson had acquired the film rights to Leonard Wibberley’s Saturday Evening Post serial ‘The Day New York was Invaded’ in 1954. The project languished for four years, with prospective backers and distributors claiming that its lampooning of great-power politics lay outside the American public’s sense of humour. After acting as chief publicist on Carl Foreman’s The Key in 1958, Shenson then approached the blacklisted American writer-producer, who agreed to finance and produce the project through Open Road Films, an offshoot of Columbia.43 Foreman had been driven out of Hollywood to Britain in 1952 owing to his communist links dating from the 1930s, leaving behind a script for High Noon (Fred Zinneman, 1952) which many interpreted as a veiled attack on HUAC.44 His decision to take on The Mouse that Roared seems to have been commercially rather than politically oriented, in line with other productions during this period of his career.45 The Mouse that Roared’s plot was a cross between Henry Cornelius’s Passport to Pimlico (1948) and Charlie Chaplin’s A King in New York (1957). On the verge of bankruptcy because the United States has successfully imitated its wine, the European duchy of Grand Fenwick declares war on the superpower in the hope of being generously reimbursed in defeat. Tully Bascombe (Peter Sellers), who leads Fenwick’s chain-mailed invaders, is unaware he is expected to lose, however, and brings Washington to its knees by capturing the Pentagon’s Q-bomb, one

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British Cinema and the Cold War hundred times more powerful than the hydrogen bomb. The tiny country is then feted by all the great nations, each cynically seeking an alliance, but Bascombe forces through an international disarmament agreement via the League of Little Nations. The film was widely praised in comedic terms – the News Chronicle thought the script by Roger MacDougall and Stanley Mann ‘fizz[ed] with invention’ – but as political satire opinions differed. Newspapers ranging from the Daily Worker to the Liverpool Daily Post argued that the film poured a welcome dose of cold water on the absurdities of contemporary diplomacy. But others on the left, such as Reynolds News and Tribune, refused to find the film’s subject matter remotely funny and dismissed as dangerous ‘rubbish’ the implied suggestion that small states could supply a faith and trust lacking among the great powers. More significantly perhaps, Films and Filming pointed out what it saw as the dangers inherent within all ‘anti-Bomb’ comedies of this nature: ‘Audiences are more likely to come out of the cinema feeling that the Bomb is not such a bad thing after all, than they are likely to be made aware that the Bomb and human nature are a pretty deadly mixture’.46 Be that as it may, the film did well at the British box-office, was given a special showing at the June 1959 Geneva Foreign Ministers Conference, and led to a sequel, The Mouse on the Moon, directed by Richard Lester, in 1963.47 Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) has been submitted to a multitude of interpretations – psychological, sexual and political – a process encouraged by the director’s enigmatic, almost mystical image.48 However, few would argue with its classification as one of the most powerful denunciations of nuclear deterrence theory produced during the whole of the Cold War in any medium. Soon after the film’s release, ‘Strangelovian’ became a widelyused adjective to describe the bizarre belief – or so it seems now – that despite having enough warheads to destroy the world several times over, each side’s safety required projecting the most credible possible determination to use them.49 More importantly for us, because Dr Strangelove is so far removed from the cinematic mainstream, it serves to reveal how little even seemingly critical films strayed from official orthodoxy. Tom Milne, for one, saw this at the time, asserting in Sight and Sound that Dr Strangelove ‘makes every other film about The Bomb look like a pretty game’.50 Kubrick’s vision of the demented Strategic Air Command chief played by Sterling Hayden, General Jack D. Ripper, launching an unauthorized nuclear attack on the USSR, thus triggering the Soviets’ ‘doomsday

Future Imperfect machine’ which kills all life on earth, was shot at Shepperton Studios between October 1962 and April 1963. This location had less to do with the British film industry’s greater tolerance for controversial projects compared with Hollywood, and more with the fact that Kubrick had recently moved to London to escape what he saw as the ‘destructive competitiveness’ inherent to Hollywood and the violence of New York, his home town.51 Being based in Britain did allow Kubrick to avoid much of the interference he might have faced in the United States from Columbia, the project’s financiers, and from the US Air Force, which regularly exerted pressures on film-makers interested in depicting its activities during this period.52 It also added to the degree of British input: ex-RAF lieutenant and active member of CND, Peter George, whose 1958 novel Two Hours to Doom provided the inspiration for the film, assisted Kubrick (and Texan Terry Southern) with the screenplay; Ken Adam, fresh from his recent work with the James Bond production team, designed the revered Pentagon ‘war room’ set, a variation on that he had used for Dr No in 1962; and veteran British cinematographer Gilbert Taylor was employed as director of photography.53 Having ‘Goon’ Peter Sellers play the three roles of Strangelove, President Muffley and RAF Group Captain Mandrake enabled British audiences to relate to the film more directly still. John Trevelyan, secretary of the BBFC, somewhat surprisingly agreed to give the film an ‘A’ rather than an ‘X’ certificate after promises from Columbia’s London chief that the comic elements would be emphasized over the adult.54 Even acknowledging the British influence, Dr Strangelove remained an intensely personal film of Kubrick’s. By 1963 the director had collected over 70 books on nuclear strategy and was determined to educate the public about what he saw as the very real dangers of an accidental Armageddon.55 In terms of idiom, fictional location, plot and the nationality of the majority of its characters, the film was profoundly American, which goes some way to explaining why it attracted far greater political hostility in the United States than in Britain.56 Nevertheless, few in the British press (and presumably the public) failed to see the film’s wider focus and importance. It was not Kubrick’s intention somehow to re-enact the recent Cuban missile crisis but many people inevitably saw the parallels. ‘A comedy for our age, about our age,’ proclaimed the Daily Herald. ‘A masterpiece,’ declared the Sunday Telegraph, ‘a comedy of awesomely plausible errors… daring the audience to think the unthinkable’.57 Others, albeit largely at the ‘quality’ end of Fleet Street, commented on how Dr Strangelove had exposed the parameters within which British cinema (and theatre) had hitherto operated

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British Cinema and the Cold War when it came to the nuclear strategy question. Most anti-Bomb films and plays were, according to the Observer, ‘overrun by a peculiar kind of wet naivety’.58 Despite the concurrent release of Sidney Lumet’s similarly plotted but more sombre nuclear war thriller Fail Safe, Dr Strangelove took $5 million in domestic US rentals alone, making it Columbia’s most profitable film of 1964.59 Quite how the film fared at the British box-office is unclear. Distributors Rank offered it only a partial release, though whether this was for commercial or political reasons is difficult to determine.60

II The production of science-fiction films in Britain pre-dated the nuclear era. Several of the most successful contributions to the genre made before 1945 were replete with contemporary political and social connotations, not least Alexander Korda’s Things to Come (1936), which told of how war in 1940 would be followed by plague, the collapse of civilization and the first rocket-ship to the moon.61 Many science-fiction films made in the inter-war period broached issues that would dominate the genre 20 years later, such as the conflict between science and nature, the meaning of humanity, and the benefits of a planned society.62 However, whereas the films of the 1920s and 1930s tended to be futuristic fantasies, those of the 1950s and 1960s were based more in the present. Furthermore, while the inter-war films generally espoused faith in science and in the progressive possibilities of the future, those made after the Second World War were predominantly deeply pessimistic and intended to frighten. The advent of the ‘atomic age’ was a major factor in producing this ‘new wave’ of British science-fiction cinema, many aspects of which were replicated in Hollywood.63 Science-fiction movies and literature had for a generation toyed creatively with the idea of a nuclear world, without really being taken seriously.64 Suddenly, with Hiroshima, the future seemed to have come to the present; fantasy was reality, and consequently all the more intriguing to film-makers and film-goers. The subsequent emergence of a full-scale Cold War, with the proliferation of nuclear weapons at its core, added further impetus to science fiction. Officially imposed secrecy surrounding atomic energy and weapons generated public suspicion and fear, on which fictional speculation about the threat from ‘the other side’ and from science in general thrived. The growing obsession with ‘outer space’ in the 1950s then gave the sci-fi genre a further twist. UFO sightings in the United States began in earnest in the late 1940s and soon developed

Future Imperfect elsewhere. As man sought to push back the interplanetary frontiers and conquer the ‘unknown’ (itself part of the technological Cold War, particularly during the Khrushchev and Kennedy era), questions were asked about the existence and identity of ‘aliens’, together with the nature of ‘the other’ – terrestrial and extra-terrestrial.65 These factors combined to produce a ‘golden age’ in the history of science-fiction cinema and literature, one in which the enthusiasm for rational solutions was seen to coexist uneasily with fears of global conflict and social disintegration.66 The glut of science-fiction films made in Britain between 1953 and 1963 touches on several themes relating to the public’s interpretation of the nuclear age. We have already noted the scientist-as-spy image in Cold War cinematic discourse. In Cold War science-fiction films the scientist generally appears either as a possible source of salvation or as a major figure responsible for the creation of monstrosities. Brian Murphy has argued that the American ‘monster’ movies of the 1950s, such as The Thing (Christian Nyby, 1951) and Them! (Gordon Douglas, 1954), while reflecting the anxieties accompanying science, all ultimately buttressed the moral and political order. In these films the scientist, the military and the government unite to defeat their abominable foe, ordinary Americans do exactly as they are told, and the people are taught that there is no turning back the technological clock.67 British cinema went through its own ‘monster’ faze, though whether these films delivered a similar consensual, authoritarian message is debatable. Many were, as John Baxter writes, ‘feeble imitations of American successes’.68 Among the 1958 releases, for instance, were Behemoth the Sea Monster (Douglas Hickox and Eugene Lourié), in which a prehistoric creature, revivified by radioactivity from atomic tests, swims up the Thames until it is despatched by a radium-tipped torpedo from a midget submarine; The Strange World of Planet X (Gilbert Gunn), which sees the unbalanced Dr Laird (Alec Mango) killed by a mysterious visitor from another planet, along with the giant mutant insects his electronic experiments have produced; and The Trollenberg Terror (Quentin Lawrence), in which aliens lurking in a radioactive cloud above a Swiss mountain are destroyed by a UN scientific investigator and two telepathic sisters.69 Manmade monsters, such as Frankenstein, had been present on the cinema screen for years, but creatures now appeared as a consequence not of individual madness or wickedness, but as a result of tampering with the laws of nature by ‘the system’. Whereas Frankenstein might terrorize a village, the powers held by these new creatures threatened the whole of

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British Cinema and the Cold War mankind. The ‘machine’ had taken over from human agency, hence the need for assistance from superior beings from beyond our world. In 1956, science-fiction critic Damon Knight referred aptly to this new ‘creature cycle’ as ‘anti-science fiction’.70 What Charles Derry called ‘the horror of Armageddon’ was represented more forcefully in the shorter cycle of films made in the mid- and late 1950s by Hammer Productions, notably those centred on the activities of Professor Bernard Quatermass.71 Re-formed in 1947 by owner James Carreras, Hammer Films operated almost like a mini-studio, developing a repertory company of directors and actors so that each film would have a consistent look and style. Carreras, a strong, interventionist managing director, cared little for mixing politics and film. His philosophy was simple: ‘I’m prepared to make Strauss waltzes tomorrow, if they’ll make money,’ he once boasted. By the mid-1960s, Hammer’s name had become synonymous with horror, the company having led the post-war resurgence of this genre with commercial successes like Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958).72 The juxtaposition of science fiction with classic horror in British cinema in the 1950s was no mere coincidence. In looking at the darker side of 1950s British conservatism, Marcia Landy suggests that they are both very much a part of the ‘ideological crisis’ which befell British society after the Second World War, manifested in the form of juvenile delinquency, an increased divorce rate and rampant consumerism, as well as the pressures caused by the Cold War. Whereas the horror films focused on the personal aspects of the crisis, the science-fiction films highlighted the broad social instability of the period.73 Carreras and Fisher, in fact, produced Britain’s first ‘new’ science-fiction film, Spaceways, in 1953. Mingling romance and espionage with murder and rocket-ships, the film was dismissed as ‘ludicrous’ by the trade press and shunned by the public.74 The release two years later of Val Guest’s ‘X’rated The Quatermass Experiment signalled Hammer’s more adult approach to the genre. Based on Nigel Kneale’s immensely popular 1953 BBC television serial of the same name,75 The Quatermass Experiment broke box-office records on both sides of the Atlantic, and offered an outlandish yet significant critique of Cold War science and conformity.76 Leslie Norman’s X The Unknown and Guest’s Quatermass II, released in 1956 and 1957 respectively, added to the critique. The Quatermass Experiment tells the story of astronaut Victor Carroon (Richard Wordsworth) who, having mysteriously survived his rocket’s crash-landing, gradually transmutes into a plant-like creature wandering

Future Imperfect through London, killing and transforming others, until being destroyed by electrocution. As the carrier of an alien life form menacing present-day Britain, Victor could be interpreted as the disguised communist enemy within. Yet the fact that sympathy is constantly elicited for the manmonster – through its pathetic failures to commit suicide and desperate attempts to overcome loneliness by befriending an innocent child – suggests that Victor ought to be viewed as more of a victim than a threat. Like in Seven Days to Noon, the fugitive is eventually cornered in a church, in Victor’s case Westminster Abbey. However, a key difference is that whereas the pacifist Professor Willingdon used God to cover his tracks, Victor seeks Christian forgiveness and refuge from the hunting authorities. The real culprits are the scientist Quatermass (Brian Donlevy) and the deferential society of which he is a part. It is Quatermass who sends Victor into space, who is unmoved by his subsequent dehumanization, kills him when he no longer serves any useful purpose, then returns to work unrepentant like a modern Prometheus. Meanwhile, the public and police – in the form of dependable Inspector Lomax (Jack Warner) – are, despite mild protestations about traditional morality, either unwilling or unable to stop any of this. On one level, the film therefore seemed to be spelling out the dangers posed to the actual human form by scientific ‘advances’. On another level, it appeared to highlight the individual’s submergence within a larger amoral mass and the personal alienation that results. Ultimately, the film had more to say about the alien-as-outsider than the alien-asinvader, raising the spectre of a society without feeling.77 X The Unknown, which tells of a mysterious force thriving on the radiation emitted from a Scottish research station, was less powerful than The Quatermass Experiment but is notable for being one of the first films to parody the complacent attitude of the authorities towards the threat of radiation. David Pirie argues that the film displayed an obsession with radioactivity bordering on acute paranoia,78 yet the core fears expressed by the film were in many ways grounded in reality. Not even physicists knew the full extent of thermonuclear power in the 1950s, a fact illustrated most clearly in March 1954 when the radioactive fall-out from the American BRAVO test in the Pacific caused the first human casualties of the H-bomb era. ‘[S]omething must have happened that we have never experienced before, and must have surprised and astonished the scientists,’ an uneasy Eisenhower admitted to journalists, trying, but failing, to limit the accident’s political fall-out.79 On the very day that production began on Quatermass II in May 1956, The Times informed its readers of another

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British Cinema and the Cold War giant bomb having been dropped, producing ‘the most stupendous release of explosive energy on earth so far’. To many people the official statements claiming that such tests ought to be welcomed because they served as ‘a substitute for war’ smacked of recklessness in the context of the dangerous levels of radiation being detected around the world.80 Quatermass II closely resembles Don Siegel’s 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. While the latter is widely regarded as one of the statements about the collective paranoia of 1950s America, the former has been called (albeit rather exaggeratedly) ‘the greatest British anxiety movie of all’.81 Both films tell of pods from outer space taking over people’s bodies and an individual’s increasingly desperate efforts to raise the alarm before the whole country – Britain in Quatermass II, the United States in Invasion of the Body Snatchers – succumbed to aliens. The symbols of subversion and conspiracy contained within both films render them easily recognizable as thinly veiled anti-communist nightmares. Indeed, the political allegory could hardly be more overt in Quatermass II, with its depiction of MPs and the Commissioner of Scotland Yard having been ‘infected’.82 Like Siegel’s classic, however, Guest’s film says as much about science and the threat posed by the banality of 1950s society as it does about communism. On this occasion Quatermass himself is a far more attractive representative of the scientific community: it is he who first exposes a topsecret synthetic food factory near Carlisle as the aliens’ headquarters and then uses his knowledge of chemistry to kill the seemingly indestructible monsters growing within. However, questions remain as to why scientists like the obsessive Quatermass expend so much energy on spectacular projects like moon colonies, rather than serving the immediate needs of society. The fact that the aliens’ installation is identical in appearance to Quatermass’s projected lunar site casts doubt on the technocracy’s motives, especially those related to space exploration, itself connected to the superpowers’ arms race. Why – the film suggests – should mankind’s planetary colonization be any different in nature to the aliens’ attempted occupation of earth? By meddling recklessly with the ‘unknown’, scientists and bureaucrats are depicted as the co-creators of terrible threats to society, in this case the gigantic blobs hidden within the factory’s cavernous domes. Scientists, companies and governments were indeed beginning to invest heavily in synthetic foodstuffs during this period, claiming that the world would be rid of Malthusian fears forever. To some observers this was further proof that a scientific-industrial complex was being allowed potentially to run amok, playing with the natural order for dubious rewards.

Future Imperfect

11. Cold War alienation: Professor Quatermass (Brian Donlevy) bends over the dying Broadhead (Tom Chatto) after the latter has been smitten by a strange and horrific phenomenon inside the mysterious research establishment. Quatermass II (1957).

Experimentation with the human food chain, critics argued, carried its own risks of biological and ecological mutation on a far wider scale than that uncovered by Quatermass.83 The fact that earth is spared the horrors of alien totalitarianism is undoubtedly a cause for relief, but at times in the film it is difficult to tell which of the local towns-folk who supply the aliens with cheap labour have been infected. This naturally adds to the suspense, but it can also be interpreted as a comment on the creeping uniformity of an increasingly affluent and soulless society. The towns-folk ultimately revolt against their ‘masters’ partly because they have been put on short time as the installation is near to completion, but to suggest that this is a politically subversive message seems misplaced.84 Throughout, the locals are deeply suspicious of outsiders such as Quatermass who threaten their cosy newtown development. As with Invasion of the Body Snatchers, this perhaps symbolizes the concern observers felt in the 1950s with the public’s willingness to conform to a social ideal whose promise of individual and communal development was illusory. Entirely defensive of their private existence, the Cumbrians cannot spot the dehumanization unfolding

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British Cinema and the Cold War within their so-called community. To make matters worse, the corollary to this condition seems to be an over-readiness to accept the word of political authority.

III Clearly, then, the cinema reflected the British public’s ambivalence towards modern scientific achievements and the uses to which they were being put by government. It might also be said that, via their unique expression of reality, certain films produced a distinct ideology relating to nuclear matters. For all their different messages, however, what unites all of the films analyzed thus far is the lack of images actually depicting events during and after a nuclear war. Dr Strangelove, for instance, the one film in which the ultimate disaster is not averted, effectively ends when Major ‘King’ Kong (Slim Pickens) rodeo-rides his bomb into oblivion. What the ‘end of the world’ looks like is left to the audience’s imagination. Other films mentioned do leave clues to the apocalypse by the close relationship drawn between radiation, mutation and death. Yet none speculate on the rich variety of related issues, many of which seem to be fertile sciencefiction territory. These include the sheer power unleashed during World War Three and the chances of survival. In fact, very few British films made during the ‘first Cold War’ sought to portray the nature of the nuclear holocaust and the possibility of life afterwards. This can partly be attributed to the culture of self-censorship on the subject across the mass media, and an impression among producers and distributors that the subject was not commercially viable. Support for this view can be found overseas. Hollywood produced only a handful of such films, despite Washington’s relatively open attitude towards atomic information.85 The Japanese film industry could point to the success of the harrowing docu-drama Children of Hiroshima (1952), given a limited release in Britain in 1955, but its popularity seems to have been confined to the Asian market – unlike the more fantastic Godzilla series which started in 1954.86 The BBFC was, anyway, alert to the inherently ‘controversial’ nature of any such material (indigenous and foreign) and likely to impose audience restrictions. Even then the authorities were not above intervening to protect what they defined as the public interest. In Nottingham in 1956, for example, police seized publicity posters for two relatively mild American atomic fantasies, The Day The World Ended and Phantom From 10,000 Leagues, on the grounds that they were excessively lurid.87

Future Imperfect Images of a Third World War nevertheless did appear on British cinema screens during the 1950s and 1960s, prompted by a variety of motives. Most were subsidized by government as part of its civil defence programme. Successive administrations worked on the assumption that nuclear deterrent strategy could only work in the long run if a majority of the population believed that the results of a Soviet attack would not be catastrophic. Otherwise, British resolve to fight a nuclear war could not be expected to hold. Civil defence was consequently vigorously promoted for humanitarian purposes and to persuade people that, by learning the relevant facts and taking elementary precautions, they would be able to cope with whatever Moscow (and later Beijing) launched at Britain. Between 1948 and 1967, annual civil defence expenditure ranged between £10 million and £24 million.88 Formed out of the Second World War Air Raid Precaution organization in 1949, and reaching a peak of 375,000 members in 1961, the all-volunteer Civil Defence Corps (CDC) epitomized the government’s self-help approach. While politicians would provide a national plan, education and training, civil defence was to be a fundamentally private, family-oriented concern: the defence of the public by the public. Pamphlets, journals and door-to-door canvassing repeatedly emphasized the role of the home, thereby recasting the family as an agency of the state, and downplayed the effects of radioactive fall-out, hoping to produce a rationally controlled fear of nuclear war.89 The cinema’s role within this strategy can be illustrated by reference to one particular COI short made in 1951. The Waking Point bears marks of the general ‘war scare’ which accompanied the outbreak of the Cold War’s first ‘hot’ conflict, in Korea, in the summer of 1950. The film’s dual purpose was to act as a recruiting vehicle for the Civil Defence services, dangerously lacking men and equipment according to Home Office reports, and to allay fears about the holocaust’s impact, in part by presenting civil defence as a coherent, simple and effective programme. The considerable time spent on re-drafting the script was testimony to the film’s importance, as were the accompanying press adverts, posters, leaflets and civil defence campaign guide. The film was shown nationally in 1951 and 1952 in tandem with ‘trailers’ distributed by all five major newsreel companies encouraging enlistment in the CDC.90 The Waking Point opens with a scene at a provincial cinema, where Joe (John Slater) has gone to relax after a hard day’s work. Newsreels alert Joe to the threat of international communism in Asia and Europe, and the need for everyone to devise contingency plans. ‘Can we be sure that

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British Cinema and the Cold War tension and mistrust so deeply stirred can be dispelled by peaceful means?’ asks the commentary. Despite his heavy work-load and his wife’s illness, Joe is keen to join the CDC, but Gwen (Barbara Lott) is appalled and urges her husband to enjoy life rather than worry about what might spoil it. She changes her mind, however, when their son escapes near death in an accident at a local sand-pit, a crude metaphor for the dangers of society burying its head when troubles loom. Joe subsequently enlists in the local Civil Defence unit which came to the boy’s rescue – thus forging community spirit with national interest – while allusions to appeasement and Britain’s military unpreparedness during the 1930s clarify the message further. Having made the connection between Civil Defence, family values and patriotism, the film then looks at the training that Joe undergoes in the CDC and the benefits that the body’s activities offered the country in a future war. Joe learns that the casualties expected from the atomic heat flash will far outnumber those experienced during the Second World War – but only if no defensive measures are taken. Effective protection from flashburn, radioactivity and blast effects come in quite ordinary forms: curtains, building materials and earth, even old Anderson shelters.91 The need to make immediate plans for home protection is reinforced by a dream sequence (rendered less frightening by BBFC cuts), in which Joe has to deal with a panic-stricken crowd of thousands fighting to cram into the few available municipal shelters as the bomb falls. This was in fact the sort of scenario anticipated by government, particularly in major conurbations where many dwellers were effectively written off owing to direct hits.92 Whether The Waking Point fulfilled its objectives is questionable. In trying to dramatize and lessen the potential horror of a nuclear attack, it inevitably simplified certain aspects, leaving some viewers either irritated or confused. ‘Why does a trained rescue worker look upwards with unprotected face at an approaching atom-bomber?’ asked the Film User’s critic. ‘A good recruiting film is still needed,’ he concluded.93 However, for a government keen to present civilian atomic defence as uncomplicated but still built on firm, scientific foundations, this was always going to be difficult.94 Spencer R. Weart claims that in Britain, just as elsewhere, official attempts to explain calmly the power of the Bomb probably heightened rather than lessened the public’s fears about surviving the superpower endgame.95 Given the sensational media coverage of thermonuclear escalation in the 1950s, itself a necessary element in the deterrent strategy, governments perhaps had little alternative but to be proactive. From this

Future Imperfect perspective, the handy tips provided in pamphlets and films about, for instance, using a vacuum cleaner to collect radioactive fall-out, or extinguishing hydrogen bomb fires with stirrup pumps, made sense.96 The reality was, however, that by the late 1950s ministers harboured few illusions about the possibilities of Civil Defence providing little more than marginal relief to a population subject to between 100 and 300 megatons of H-bombs. In 1958, a Gallup poll showed that 80 per cent of the British public expected less than half of Britain’s population to survive a nuclear war, generating an increasingly cynical attitude towards Civil Defence publicity, and prompting questions in certain quarters about how much the public really knew and had the right to be told.97 One film that went some way towards addressing this growing disquiet was The Day the Earth Caught Fire, produced and directed by Val Guest for Melina Productions in 1961. Guest had written the screen treatment in 1954, but several companies rejected the idea before Michael Balcon and British Lion agreed to back it in 1961. The screenplay was then completed with Wolf Mankowitz and technical advice provided by Arthur Christiansen, the former editor of the Daily Express, who also starred in the film.98 The plot married science fiction and journalism to provide a speculative but plausible picture of Britain suffering a post-blast crisis. Fleet Street is startled by reports of strange meteorological phenomena: blizzards in New York, floods in the Sahara, tornadoes and devastation in Russia. Official explanations are guarded and contradictory. Two Daily Express journalists – Stenning (Edward Judd) and Maguire (Leo McKern) – discover that climatic upheavals began after simultaneous Soviet and American nuclear tests at the two poles. Soon the whole world knows that the 50-megaton H-bomb explosions have tilted the globe’s axis, putting earth on a collision course with the Sun. Temperatures rise, water is in severe shortage and the emergency services are powerless to prevent widespread panic and looting. Scientists consult and formulate a desperate plan to save the planet in which all nations are to unite in exploding four super bombs in order to correct earth’s orbit. On detonation day, in a deserted London, Stenning dictates a final story pondering on the future of mankind. In the Express’s machine room, two front pages have been printed bearing the headlines: ‘World Doomed’ and ‘World Saved’. Showing what the world might look like after a nuclear testing accident is not, of course, the same as depicting Mutual Assured Destruction. At the same time, the film offers a glimpse of some of the stark conditions which a nuclear assault would leave everyone exposed to: uncontrollable

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British Cinema and the Cold War fires, typhus epidemics linked to a breakdown in health provision, food shortages due to diseased wildlife, and the degradation of community washing centres. Special effects (showing the Thames dried-up, for example) spliced with documentary footage added authenticity, supported by shots of a real CND rally in Trafalgar Square where the actors mingle with demonstrators. Within all this, the government is not only impotent but also discredited, for having lied about the climatic changes, it then resorts to martial law, which merely results in water being sold on the black market and the creation of anarchic no-go areas. Consequently, when the prime minister broadcasts to rally the nation in its hour of need, little respect is shown by the listeners. ‘Powder and shot for the Aldermaston marchers,’ is how Kinematograph Weekly described the film’s message.99 Criticism of the ‘system’ is not without its ambiguities, however. The ending leaves the possibility that, for all of the powers’ ‘monkeying around with nature’, by improbably uniting their scientific knowledge the statesmen could yet pull the world back from the brink. This representation caused certain commentators to claim that the film could not be taken as seriously as its American counterpart, Stanley Kramer’s 1959 On the Beach, which depicted the atomic destruction of the northern hemisphere in 1964.100 The fact is that it was not meant to be, and unlike Kramer, Guest was not called upon to defend himself before an equivalent of a congressional committee concerning ‘world guilt’ about nuclear weapons.101 But the signs are that, had The Day the Earth Caught Fire displayed stronger convictions, the censors would have requested modifications. As it stood, the BBFC deemed the film suitable only for adults, partly because of recent press reports that the USSR was about to let off a 100-megaton test bomb. International tensions were high in 1961 following the US attempt to ‘liberate’ Cuba and the creation of the Berlin Wall, and it is in this context that John Trevelyan presumably believed allowing unrestricted access to the film would border on the reckless.102 Peter Watkins’s The War Game (1966) directly challenged this readiness to censor (and be censored) and the very notion of nuclear war ‘survivability’. As a BBC television documentary, it differed in many respects from cinematic productions, not least in terms of being subjected to fewer commercial pressures. Nevertheless, the film has considerable relevance to this study: first, because of its far more graphic depiction of the effects of a nuclear attack on Britain than those seen in films made for the cinema; second, owing to the debate surrounding the government’s role in the BBC’s decision to ban the film from television, and the light this

Future Imperfect sheds generally on the media’s freedom to cover nuclear issues in Britain during this period; and finally, the film’s subsequent leasing to cinemas and private film clubs. Watkins conceived of The War Game in 1963 as a means of puncturing the ‘silence on why we possess nuclear weapons… to make the man in the street stop and think about himself and his future’.103 Displaying the same attention to detail shown in his highly acclaimed television documentary, Culloden (shown by the BBC in 1964), Watkins spent two years absorbing printed nuclear scholarship, visiting Berlin, and interviewing civil defence experts, bio-physicists, war strategists and psychiatrists. ‘Every sprocket was analyzed like an Eisenstein spectacle,’ he claimed.104 Shooting was completed in four weeks in spring 1965 using a cast of amateur actors to accentuate realism and reduce costs. The film was then edited down to 47 minutes in length that summer.105 The end result was ‘A warning masterpiece’, according to the Observer. ‘The War Game may be the most important film ever made,’ wrote Kenneth Tynan. ‘It should be screened everywhere on earth.’ 106 The War Game proposes a politico-military chain reaction starting in Vietnam and leading to a limited nuclear assault on Britain. It then proceeds to deal at length with the effects and consequences of the attack on an area in Kent, where two missiles have fallen. The action, deploying a grainy newsreel technique, is interspersed with inserted quotations from nuclear texts, civil defence manuals, and leading public figures and scientific authorities. The film makes a vehement assault on the public statements of various socially, politically and theologically engaged parties relating to the subject of nuclear war and disarmament. These statements, originally designed to allay public fears on various practical and moral grounds, are juxtaposed with hideously convincing scenes depicting acute personal suffering or social and moral disintegration in the face of mounting panic by ill-informed people. Blazing fire storms wreak havoc, policemen kill the maimed to put them out of their misery, civilians raid military food supplies, and helpless doctors tell of people ‘falling apart’. The unmistakeable impression left is that defence was a meaningless concept in the thermonuclear age, and those people who escaped the immediate effects of World War Three would be consigned to a fate almost worth than death: a primeval existence marked by trauma, savagery and disease.107 In November 1965, the BBC announced that The War Game was ‘too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting’ and would therefore not be

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12. Not like the Blitz: Kent’s emergency services failing to cope with the numbed and disfigured after the Bomb has dropped. The War Game (1966).

shown, adding that there had been no outside pressure on the corporation to reach its decision.108 This statement caused protest and counter-protest in the press and parliament, and led to arguments about government censorship which have continued for over 30 years.109 There now seems little doubt that the government passed on to the BBC’s senior officials very clear advice that to broadcast the film would be contrary to the national interest, and that this played a significant part in the corporation’s final decision. Of particular note during the episode was the close relationship between Cabinet Secretary Sir Burke Trend and Lord Normanbrook, his predecessor and BBC chair of governors. One of a handful of Whitehall officials to see The War Game at a private showing organized by the BBC in September 1965, Trend admitted that the film presented an accurate picture of what would happen if Britain were bombed, and warned that broadcasting it into millions of homes would cause a number of difficulties, including interfering with the government’s civil defence cuts and plans to implement its recent review of emergency planning.110 Yet, just as significant as the government’s reaction to The War Game was the overwhelming support which the ban received from those within the BBC and the other mass media representatives who were allowed a preview at the British Film Institute (BFI) in February 1966. There were

Future Imperfect calls from elements of the liberal and left press for the film to be televised, but to most newspapers the production was deemed either gratuitously violent, politically dangerous or monstrously misrepresentative – in short, CND propaganda.111 No-one from the British film industry appears to have sprung to Watkins’s defence. Most BBC personnel, even Watkins’s contemporaries on the editing and directing staff, seem to have viewed him as a maverick and sympathized with the corporation’s executives.112 The culture of deference in nuclear matters was not as pervasive in the mid-1960s as it had been in the mid-1950s; this is indicated by the BBC’s having financed Watkins’ project in the first place. Nevertheless, during this period a majority within the media still worked within strict parameters on nuclear issues, keenly aware of their ‘responsibility’ to the national interest as purveyors of potentially sensitive information. To these people, Watkins had over-stepped the mark that distinguished legitimate fictional speculation from the reckless representation of actuality. With its paradoxical headline – ‘Brilliant – But It Must Stay Banned’ – the Daily Sketch typified this body of opinion.113 In the event, the BBC agreed in March 1966 to allow the BFI to take The War Game over for limited, ‘non-sensationalist’ distribution. This not only brought the BBC financial rewards, but also substantially reduced the possibility of Watkins capitalizing on his notoriety by remaking The War Game as a feature film. Watkins himself was strongly opposed to the BBC– BFI deal, which he believed would defeat the whole object of his film by effectively restricting access to it ‘to a certain mental and intellectual “type”’.114 The War Game ran for 26 weeks in London’s West End. Elsewhere, if it was not always shown in cinemas due to sanctions imposed by local authorities, it was projected to audiences in youth clubs, film societies and church halls. After one year it was estimated that one-and-a-half million people had seen the film, rising to six million by 1985 (the year in which it was televised by the BBC).115 The War Game was a consciousness-raising device for many people who never actually saw the film at the time, as well as those who did. Unilateralists and ‘pro-Bomb’ campaigners both claimed that making the film available to the public helped their cause.116 But had The War Game originally been shown in the medium it was designed for, in close proximity to television’s news and current affairs coverage, its impact might have been even greater. Indeed, the fact that the authorities had far fewer qualms about the film being shown at the cinema instead of on television is a measure of the diminished influence of the former compared with the latter by the mid-1960s. S.M.J. Arrowsmith probably

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British Cinema and the Cold War exaggerates but still makes a valid point when he claims that ‘A more damning indictment of the mounting irrelevance of the cinema as a social force in the television age can hardly be imagined’.117

IV The nuclear factor shows how, rather than being monolithic and closed expressions of orthodox Cold War ideology, British films could at times during the 1950s and 1960s serve as powerful representations of a society unsure about where the East–West contest was heading. On British cinema screens, the Bomb was certainly not portrayed simply as the instrument that had brought peace to the world and had helped maintain it during the height of the Cold War, as Lawrence Suid claims of most American films during the 1950s.118 Audiences had access instead to different, often contradictory, commercial and official images that reflected the British public’s scientific ignorance, instinctive deference, atomic amazement and, above all, fear for the future under the nuclear umbrella. The extent to which this output had a hand in encouraging the greater public support for nuclear disarmament that existed in Britain compared with the United States is impossible to judge.119 Science fiction, the genre through which most fears of nuclear developments were transmitted at the cinema, was an economically successful and powerful genre throughout much of the Western world during this period, not just Britain. Images of giant ants, strangers from Venus, or devil girls from Mars – whether in films, comics, novels or on cereal packets – were (and are) open to a variety of interpretations, many completely unrelated to nuclear issues.120 More than one historian has speculated, for instance, on the connection between the increasingly sombre nature of British science-fiction films in the 1950s and the sociopolitical anxiety associated with a country losing its imperial role. By showing Britain as the prime target for alien invasion, so the theory goes, such films served to re-assert the country’s international standing and its ability to repel any threats to its independence.121 The signs are that by the mid-1960s, despite (or perhaps even because of ) the Cuban missile crisis, many people were learning to live with the threat of nuclear annihilation. It might be argued that science fiction played some part in this process of accommodation by making the unthinkable somehow ‘knowable’, if we see the genre as one, rational way of making sense of the profound irrationalities of nuclear developments. This is not to say that, by trivializing nuclear issues, the cinema necessarily

Future Imperfect sanitized opinion on these developments – something of which one historian accuses the BBC in the 1940s and 1950s.122 At the same time, it should alert us to the limits British cinema operated within when depicting nuclear issues. While several films expressed anxiety about nuclear proliferation, few amounted to protest against it, and fewer still seemed to be suggesting that the prospect of Armageddon did not make the Cold War worth fighting. When one film – The War Game – did, the conservatism of the film industry and the mass media in general was demonstrable.

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[T]his film can do nothing but harm to the cause of greater friendliness and understanding between management and labour. It will cause great resentment on the part of manufacturers and bankers who are shown as being quite ready in their own selfish interest to sabotage the national effort. It will be welcomed by Communists for whom it will provide much ready propaganda, particularly those elements which, to the continued embarrassment of Ministers, are demanding direct worker control of the nationalized industries. It will be a disservice and a handicap to those in Government circles and in industry who are trying to spread the system of joint consultation and a common approach to the problems of industry. Sir Godfrey Ince, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Labour, 17 March 1950 1

British films about industrial relations were limited in both number and scope prior to the Second World War. According to Jeffrey Richards and Anthony Aldgate, the films made epitomized the conservative nature of the inter-war cinema, condemning strike action and emphasizing the need for harmony between workers and management during ‘the hungry thirties’ especially.2 Stephen Jones tempers this viewpoint in his analysis of films in the 1930s antagonistic to the social and industrial order, such as John

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Blue Collars, White Suits Baxter’s Doss House (1933) and A Real Bloke (1935), and support for his view that social strife was depicted on screen during the period comes from James Robertson.3 Key structural factors, nevertheless, militated against authentic representations of proletarian or industrial surroundings. For a start, the majority of producers believed that to depict reality in this respect invited commercial if not political disaster. Picture-goers, they felt, went to the ‘dream palaces’ to forget about the dreariness of the work-place and unemployment, hence the popularity of, and need to compete with, Hollywood ‘escapism’. Ideologically, to present industrial troubles as anything other than dangerous or unpatriotic would be inimical to a capitalist concern.4 Acting as ‘gatekeepers’ for the status quo were the BBFC. The ‘relations of capital and labour’ had appeared on the board’s list of subjects deemed taboo as early as 1917. During the 1920s, only one film centring on industrial disputes – Fred Paul’s benign The Right To Strike (1923) – seems to have slipped through the censors’ net.5 In the 1930s, the BBFC tightened its grip by scrutinizing hundreds of pre-production synopses, scenarios and scripts for potentially inflammatory sexual, political or industrial material. The body’s objections to a project would normally lead to it being immediately abandoned by the film company. Typical of this was a synopsis submitted by Gainsborough in 1932 under the title Tidal Waters, which revolved around a strike by Thames watermen. ‘It is impossible to show such scenes without taking a definite side either with or against the strikers,’ wrote the BBFC, ‘and this would at once range the film as political propaganda of a type that we have always held to be unsuitable for exhibition in this country’.6 There was a degree of elasticity, however. Gaumont-British’s Red Ensign scenario was passed for filming in 1934, for instance, despite focusing on strikes and sabotage at a Clydeside shipyard. The difference in this case seems to have been the management’s successful calls for everyone to ‘pull together’ and work for nothing. ‘Quite a good story with a strong patriotic note,’ noted the board’s vice-president, Colonel J.C. Hanna.7 The two decades after 1945 saw a comparative abundance of films dealing with industrial relations, as several directors and producers sought to paint a more faithful picture of life on the factory floor and the changing relationship between capital and labour. This can be traced to some extent to the more open approach towards the subject taken by films during the Second World War, such as The Shipbuilders (John Baxter, 1943) and Hard Steel (Norman Walker, 1941), and the arrival in July 1945 of a

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British Cinema and the Cold War Labour government publicly committed to socialism.8 These changed political and cinematic circumstances alone make the post-war films commenting on industrial relations worthy of analysis, but the films take on greater significance in the context of the Cold War. By concentrating on the relationship between management and trade unions, such films arguably touched on the broader issue of class conflict more directly than any other single genre. For many on the political right and left, the conflict between the ‘bosses’ and ‘workers’ was, literally and metaphorically, at the ideological heart of the East–West divide. Work-place relations were often where class differences came into sharpest focus, highlighting the adversarial rhetoric and reality of ‘them’ versus ‘us’, the ‘haves’ against ‘have-nots’. Communism’s perceived powerful influence within the workplace in post-war Britain added greater political significance to industrial relations. Officials and commentators increasingly spoke of a domestic ‘industrial Cold War’ in the 1950s and 1960s. Unlike during the 1917–21 period, officials generally did not see strikes during these decades as the precursor of political revolution. Nonetheless, they were widely regarded as deeply harmful to the economy and a peculiarly British phenomenon. These were viewpoints on which the cinema (and mass media generally) had much to say. This chapter focuses chiefly on the relatively small corpus of British feature films that dealt with industrial relations during the ‘first Cold War’. These films were among the most controversial of the whole period, continually arousing the ire of those on both sides of the industrial divide as well as government. An analysis is also made of official attempts to use the cinema as a vehicle for economic propaganda and the political implications of the film material produced. In the process, I wish to present a broader picture of the motives behind, and nature of, the filmic representation of a consistently sensitive subject in post-war Britain, and one central to understanding the portrayal of a key domestic determinant of the Cold War.

I Post-war Britain faced an unprecedented challenge in social, political and economic terms. In charge of a country virtually bankrupted by the struggle against Nazism and inheriting the progressive legacy of Churchill’s wartime coalition, the Attlee administration promised to build nothing less than a ‘New Jerusalem’. The ‘people’s war’ would, it was claimed, lead to a ‘people’s peace’, ridding the nation forever of Beveridge’s ‘five giants’: want, disease,

Blue Collars, White Suits ignorance, squalor and idleness. To most people this meant full employment, comprehensive welfare and improved housing, secured within a vaguely defined egalitarian framework.9 Whether this programme amounted to a wrong turning for Britain has recently been much debated, with several historians arguing that priority ought to have been given instead to the re-equipment of British industry and the expansion of scientific and technical education. Be that as it may, Attlee’s legislation would come to form the basis of a ‘post-war settlement’ which endured for a quarter of a century.10 A speedy and sustainable economic recovery was the key to constructing this New Jerusalem. National economic success, in turn, depended on stability and peace in the work-place. Industrial relations were, in fact, closer to the heart of economic policy in Britain than in almost any other country in the world in the post-war period. From the 1940s to the 1970s, most policy-makers believed Britain needed to develop some kind of national understanding between the state, management and the trade unions on what the economy could afford in wage increases, in order to ensure the maintenance of full employment and thus the survival of the post-war social settlement.11 Reference has already been made in Chapter 1 to the Attlee administration’s innovatory propaganda campaigns designed to increase public support for its policies, and its economic programme was no exception. Millions of pounds were invested by the government’s Economic Information Unit (EIU), part of the Lord President’s office, in promoting productivity drives in particular and the Keynesian ‘mixed economy’ generally. The common aim was to teach employers and employees alike the benefits of British-style corporatism.12 Along with posters, press advertisements, publications and exhibitions, film played an important role in this unique economic public relations exercise. In addition to cinema newsreels, between 30 and 35 films, each focusing on an aspect of the economic situation, were produced in 1946–7 as part of the government’s attempt to increase productivity. ‘More films were commercially distributed during 1947 than ever before in the history of the government’s film activities,’ writes William Crofts.13 Approximately two thirds of these were made by contractors and a third by the Crown Film Unit, all coordinated by the COI Films Division. The slogan ‘We Work or Want’ was at the heart of this material, much of which was also screened in non-theatrical locations such as factories and foundries. Tinges of the Cold War marked this output from an early stage. Lex Hornsby, the Ministry of Labour’s chief information officer, observed in 1946 that the

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British Cinema and the Cold War outstanding feature of trade union and employers’ conferences organized by the government to publicize the production drive in Scotland was the intervention of groups of communists, whose persuasive arguments drew applause from delegates. The government, he concluded, had failed to convince the public that increased productivity was not a matter of political controversy but the ‘nation’s business’, a problem which had to be addressed immediately.14 By looking at a selection of these official films we can gain a picture of how government sought to appeal to different groups in different ways. A Yank Comes Back (1948) was conceived by S.C. Leslie, head of the EIU, and written and produced by the Hollywood actor Burgess Meredith, who also starred. The aim of the film was to present the nation and its achievements through the eyes of a former GI making a return visit to Britain, hopefully deceiving the public into thinking that the 30-minute film was made for audiences in the United States.15 Meredith tours the country asking real-life steel workers, miners, farmers and housewives about jobs, rationing, production quotas, and so on. While still clearly suffering the after-effects of the war, the ordinary British man and woman is shown to be coping well and looking forward in typically stoical fashion to the ‘brave new world’ on the horizon. Temporary sacrifices are required by all because everyone is working as a team for the common good.16 What A Life (1949), a cheaper short, employed black comedy to defuse some of the tension caused by the government’s anti-inflationary measures. Two friends are so depressed, partly due to financial worries, that they attempt suicide by drowning. On failing, they devote their time to persuading relatives and strangers humorously of their own, and the country’s, relative prosperity and well-being. Parliamentary questions indicated that to many observers this film broke the bounds of good taste.17 Over To You (1951) was a joint Anglo-American production, distributed in Britain and overseas, which aimed at supporting the Marshall Plan generally, and boosting production in the textile industry via integrated technical expertise specifically. The film showed a team of British hosiery experts (scientists, trade union officials and management) visiting the United States to exchange technical know-how.18 The absolute need to work for export, one of the mantras of Stafford Cripps’s term as Chancellor of the Exchequer between November 1947 and October 1950, was the subject of one of Halas and Batchelor’s officially sponsored cartoons, Robinson Charley, released in 1948. Targeting a mass audience, and narrated in homely, easily comprehensible language, the film’s popularity confirmed the ability of

Blue Collars, White Suits animation to overcome the barriers of social class and authority in a lowkey, entertaining style.19 Ealing Studios had already agreed to make a film for the National Coal Board when it was asked by the COI Films Division in 1947 to turn a script entitled ‘Tomorrow is Beginning’ into a feature. The story, which received strong backing from Cripps and Herbert Morrison, Lord President of the Council, told of consultation between management and workers in a postwar Welsh light engineering factory, and was modelled to some extent on Launder and Gilliat’s Millions Like Us (1943). The project was designed to raise morale, instil confidence, foster a spirit of industrial cooperation and decry unofficial strikes, and would probably have gone into production but for Ealing’s heavy commitment to Scott of the Antarctic.20 They Gave Him The Works, a short made by Greenpark Productions along similar lines, appeared instead in 1948, sponsored by the government’s Prosperity Campaign Committee. The film shows a disaffected workforce, combined with a clumsy, aloof management, leading to poor factory relations and low productivity. The situation is resolved by the establishment of a wartime joint-production committee and consultation between shop stewards, foremen, workers and directors over wages and working conditions. Elements within the Conservative Party demanded – without success – that the film be withdrawn for dangerously promoting workers’ control, though the most it advocated was that some attention be paid to the notion of worker participation in management, with the industrial system fundamentally remaining the same, if operating more efficiently. The Communist MP Willie Gallacher argued as much when the matter was raised in a Commons debate, suggesting sarcastically that the film be retitled ‘Let Them Take The Works’.21 The row over this last film was as nothing, however, when compared with the political furore which greeted the first post-war commercial feature to focus on industrial relations. The fact that Chance of a Lifetime (1950) appeared at all, benignly consensual as it was, indicated a greater latitude towards the subject on the part of the BBFC in the wake of the Second World War. This was something the board had already hinted at when giving the go-ahead in 1946 for the Boultings’ Fame is the Spur, a highly political film loosely based on the life of the former Labour Party leader, Ramsay MacDonald.22 Nevertheless, the questions asked of the makers of Chance of a Lifetime, and the barriers placed in the way of its distribution, illustrated the authorities’ and film industry’s continued sensitivity towards industrial affairs. Chance of a Lifetime was scripted,

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British Cinema and the Cold War produced and directed for the independent Pilgrim Pictures by Bernard Miles, a Fabian-style socialist and creator of the whimsical wartime comedy celebrating English rural values, Tawny Pipit (1944).23 Its co-writer was novelist and scenarist Walter Greenwood, whose bestselling book about life among unemployed Lancashire cotton workers between the wars, Love on the Dole (1933), had been transposed to the screen in 1941 after various difficulties with the BBFC.24 Greenwood and Miles visited scores of factories in 1948 in order to get a feel for post-war industrial conditions. The film was shot in 1949 in documentary style on location in a disused Cotswolds woollen mill, mainly with the use of small-part actors for greater ‘authenticity’.25 Courtenay Dickenson (Basil Radford), managing director of a small firm of agricultural engineers, is perplexed by the difficulties of modern industrial management – labour problems, raw material shortages and battles with the ministries. When a trivial incident provokes a strike, Dickinson challenges the workers to run the factory themselves. To his surprise, the challenge is accepted (albeit reluctantly), and Dickinson takes an enforced holiday at home. Two ageing shop-floor employees, Stevens (Bernard Miles) and Morris (Julien Mitchell) assume control and immediately run into difficulties, some due to inexperience and others caused by the firm’s bank and the suppliers of raw materials. Just as progress is being achieved, their main customer cancels its order and the firm faces financial ruin. Hearing this, Dickinson comes to the rescue, placing his marketing expertise at the workers’ disposal. The firm’s products are sold elsewhere, the boss joins a new board on which the workers are represented and, as the businessman’s magazine Scope put it, ‘the film ends in a blaze of sweetness and light’. This corresponded with Miles’s own interpretation of socialism, namely cooperation between workers and management, rather than full-scale nationalization.26 As paternalistic and liberal-minded as Chance of a Lifetime was, the very idea of meddling with private ownership in any way, especially on screen, struck some as sinister extremism. The major circuits, owned by Rank and Associated British, refused to show the film, claiming that it lacked excitement, was ‘too political’ and would annoy employers.27 Consequently, in January 1950, Miles and British Lion, the film’s distributor, approached Harold Wilson, chairman of the Board of Trade, to ask that he set up a special selection committee under the terms of Section 5 of the 1948 Film Act. The selection committee’s role, as set out in the act, was to recommend first feature bookings on one of the three major circuits for independently produced British films that were considered suitable ‘by

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13. Labour in power: the workers settle into ‘their’ factory, led by the pragmatic modernizer Adam (Kenneth More, centre) who is destined to become joint-manager. Chance of a Lifetime (1950).

reason of their entertainment value’, the aim being to encourage greater creativity within the film industry at the expense of rival Hollywood imports. In February, the selection committee, comprising business, trade union and film industry representatives, agreed with British Lion, and the film fell by lot to Rank’s Odeon circuit for showing nationwide.28 While Rank delayed arranging the film’s bookings, discussions took place between government officials, ministers and business lobbyists about whether Chance of a Lifetime should be banned. On 17 March, Sir Godfrey Ince, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Labour, wrote a fierce letter to his counterpart at the Board of Trade, Sir John Woods, pressing for the film not be given the go-ahead because of the damage it would cause to management-labour understanding. This, in turn, would jeopardize the government’s joint consultation strategy, and play into the hands of communists who were loudly proclaiming that anything less than direct workers’ control of industry was ‘reformist’ bankruptcy.29 Ince’s attitude towards the film was dismissed as ‘thoroughly silly’ by one Board of Trade official and construed as alarmism ‘on a par with that of the London Transport Board, who would not allow a film company to photograph a man’s hat being

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British Cinema and the Cold War blown off by one of the tornadoes that sweep through our tube stations’. Indeed, the Lord President’s Office and EIU saw Chance of a Lifetime as decidedly beneficial to industrial relations and productivity efforts, and even encouraged the Board of Trade to show the film in factories for precisely these purposes.30 To George Isaacs, former general secretary of the printing trades union, now Minister of Labour, allowing the film to be seen at all was political folly. During the London dock strike of 1949, to which the government reacted by declaring a state of emergency, Isaacs was unequivocal in both his public denunciation of ‘disruptive elements’ and ‘imported agitators’, and his characterization of the strike as ‘nothing but a Communist manoeuvre’.31 This tied in with the Labour leadership’s national campaign calling for a purge of communist trade unionists, carried out in association with the IRD and the TUC’s Freedom First Committee.32 Faced with renewed industrial unrest in early 1950, fomented, in his opinion, by Moscow’s ‘lackeys’, the CPGB, on 31 March Isaacs wrote directly to Wilson to warn him that, although he had personally not seen the film, it contained ‘dangerous propaganda’ principally because ‘the real message… is that direct workers’ control of industry can be a success’. The president of the British Employers’ Confederation affirmed this viewpoint in a letter to Wilson in early April.33 The matter was finally resolved in cabinet on 6 April, sandwiched between two items related to increasing Cold War tension overseas. Wilson, who apparently had watched the film, told colleagues that he, the film industry and prominent industrialists believed that the Ministry of Labour was over-reacting, and the cabinet approved this line of argument.34 Two weeks later, the Board of Trade circulated a document which emphasized its confidence in the selection committee’s ability to spot political propaganda, which was not within the body’s official remit. Simultaneously, Morrison wrote to Isaacs, seeking to assuage any fears he still might have about the film: it is fatally easy to exaggerate the influence of the cinema on the minds of its audiences, who go to it as a matter of cosy habit, or to get away from familiar home surroundings, or for the pleasure of proximity to a favoured companion, or for any one of a hundred reasons – but not to be preached at or edified. If indeed this film did contain an obvious subversive message, I should expect its audiences to react against it and not to it; because they would resent being got at in that way.35

Chance of a Lifetime opened in London in late April 1950 and toured the provinces in June and July. The attention the film attracted was due less to

Blue Collars, White Suits its content or message than the fact that it was the first time that the government had exercised its powers under the 1948 Film Act and forced a production to be shown in a major cinema circuit.36 A piqued Rank deliberately queered the film’s pitch by pronouncing it dull and, despite the healthy controversy surrounding the film, Chance of a Lifetime flopped at the box-office. The disappointing public response was interpreted by many within the industry as proof of the cinema audience’s distaste for films that focused on social and political issues.37 Compared with earlier films dealing with industrial relations, Chance of a Lifetime was more probing and honest in depicting the mutual hostilities of workers and management. Critics referred to the ‘revolutionary’ naturalistic characterization of British workmen, and evidence suggests that it was this aspect of the film which appealed most to audiences.38 Ideologically, however, the film was largely seen for what it was: an affectionately presented, sentimental comedy that put the traditional English liberal values of conciliation, coownership and progressive pragmatism in the context of contemporary industrial affairs. This helps to explain why the Conservative press did not attack it, while some on the far left, such as Ivor Montagu, who had commented on a draft script Miles had sent him, condemned it as reactionary.39 A Mass Observation survey indicated that just over one in three people who watched the film saw it as a plea for better understanding and cooperation between employees and employers.40 It was this consensual message that the BBC’s former director-general, Lord Reith, and Anthony Crosland, one of the rising stars on the Labour right, presumably had in mind when they complimented Miles after the film’s opening. ‘Great job, you should be proud of it,’ was Reith’s response. ‘Bloody marvellous! And you don’t mention the word “Socialism”,’ exclaimed Crosland.41

II The late 1940s were quickly labelled the ‘age of austerity’, a phrase synonymous with shortages, fuel crises, penny-pinching and ‘spivvery’. This was an era which saw whalemeat steaks replace ‘Woolton pies’ and ‘when TV was only a metropolitan toy, ball-point pens a source of wonder, and long-playing records a transatlantic rumour’.42 In contrast, during the 1950s, Britain experienced an unprecedented period of economic growth and rise in the standard of living. Between 1951 and 1964 there was uninterrupted full employment, while productivity increased faster than in

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British Cinema and the Cold War any other period of comparable length in the twentieth century.43 ‘Butskellism’ was the term coined by The Economist to denote the common approach towards economics pursued by the Labour and Conservative chancellors. By the mid- to late 1950s, austerity had given way to ‘affluence’ as the leitmotif of the age. Politicians and intellectuals spoke of ‘the end of ideology’, ‘embourgeoisement’ and the emergence of the first classless, post-capitalist society.44 All around were the symbols of new-found prosperity and consumerism: the massive sale of cars, washing machines and refrigerators; expanding house-ownership on cheap mortgages; and the ‘swinging’ opportunities for the young with their Vespa scooters, ‘trendy’ fashions and cheap holidays on the Costa Brava.45 In terms of individuals’ wages and life-styles, most British people certainly never had had it so good, to borrow Macmillan’s famous phrase.46 When the spotlight is shone on specific areas, however, Britain takes on a less idyllic hue. It is clear, for instance, that a broad agreement between the major political parties over the need for a more benevolent form of capitalism did not amount to an agreement on how to achieve this. Thus, historians have recently revised the notion of a politico-economic ‘consensus’ having predominated at Westminster in these years.47 If high politics begins to look more polarized, so too does wider society. Macmillan himself admitted in 1957 that certain sections of the population had not yet shared in the nation’s new-found prosperity but implied it was merely a matter of time before they would be able to do so. When this boom started to falter, signalled by a balance of payments crisis in 1961, it was apparent to several observers that the seemingly unstoppable ‘stop-go’ cycle of the British economy was bound to prevent full inclusiveness.48 To many people, ‘affluence’ in this respect turned out to be very much a myth, albeit a very powerful one in which large numbers continued to believe and aspire to. Class differences remained based on existing inequalities, and pessimistic tracts with titles like The Stagnant Society (1961) and Suicide of a Nation (1963) anticipated the ‘declinist’ literature of the 1970s.49 Contributing to the debate about where Britain had ‘gone wrong’ in the Observer in February 1963, the novelist and former communist Arthur Koestler was characteristically trenchant: In no other country has the national output been crippled on such frivolous and irresponsible grounds. In this oldest of all democracies class relations have become more bitter, trade union politics more undemocratic than in De Gaulle’s France and Adenauer’s Germany. The motivation behind it is neither Communism, Socialism, nor enlightened self-interest, but a mood of disenchantment and cussedness.50

Blue Collars, White Suits Hostile industrial relations were highlighted at the time, and have been since, as one of the chief causes of Britain’s poor economic record in comparison with her rivals in the 1950s and 1960s. Statistics reveal how far Britain was lagging behind some countries. Between 1950 and 1962, for instance, the UK’s share of world trade dropped from 25 to 15 per cent, while West Germany’s grew from seven to 20 per cent. And yet figures also show that in the ten years after 1954 Britain lost fewer days through strikes than any other major industrial country in ‘the Free World’, except West Germany.51 This is not to deny that the triangular relationship between government, trade unions and management, seen by most as crucial to economic well-being and advance, proved unworkable on several occasions during this period; nor that many of those disputes which did arise – mainly in shipbuilding, the docks, mining and motor vehicle manufacture (employing about seven per cent of the working population) – underscored the peculiarly outmoded structure of the British trade union movement, producing inter-union rivalry and petty demarcation squabbles. These problems were exacerbated by the amateurish nature of the average British managing director and the lack of technical training at all levels of industry.52 And yet, none of this fully explains the frequently intemperate coverage industrial disputes received from public opinion-formers during this period. As David Childs argues: ‘Strikes got a great deal of space in the media. Gradually, a kind of hysteria built up, which, as with the balance of payments, made matters worse.’ 53 This might be attributable in part to industrial relations acting as a nexus for Cold War politics, class identification and the workers’ determination to climb the affluence ladder. In the next two sections we shall consider the manner in which cinema reflected, and contributed towards, the perception of the industrial relations ‘problem’ in the 1950s and early 1960s.

III Of the handful of films which dealt in some way with this subject in the 1950s,54 three stand out. Each were comedies not only about contemporary industrial relations, but ones that also dared to depict some of the bitterness between managerial and blue collar staff to which Koestler alluded. Each approached the subject from a slightly different angle, thereby widening the context in which the conflict between ‘bosses’ and ‘workers’ might be seen. Each offered differing opinions both on the causes of industrial unrest and how it might be averted (albeit ones that, as will be

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British Cinema and the Cold War shown, were not necessarily picked up by audiences). Together, they illustrated how far the mainstream cinema was prepared to go in commenting on industrial relations and, to some extent, the class issue during a period less marked by old-style BBFC restrictions. His Excellency, directed by Robert Hamer and released in late 1951, represents what might be defined loosely as the modern, democratically consensual school of industrial relations films. Administrative officials and inhabitants of the Mediterranean island colony of Arista are startled by the appointment as governor of blunt Yorkshire-man George Harrison (Eric Portman), an ex-docker and trade union leader. For years Arista has been bedevilled by labour problems at its all-important naval dockyard. On arrival, Harrison investigates conditions for himself and concludes that the dockers have a fair case for higher wages. His lieutenant governor, Kirkman (Cecil Parker), explains that these can only be met out of income tax which the assembly, dominated by the millionaire industrialist Zamario, will not vote. When the idealistic Governor tries to impose the new tax on the wealthy Aristans, Zamario pays the dockers’ leader Morellos (Geoffrey Keen) to incite a strike. Rioting breaks out, and His Excellency’s sincere and honest efforts end in tragedy when he is forced, against all his principles, to call out the troops to save the dockyard. The next day, having arranged to meet the dockers face-to-face, Harrison is met with verbal and physical abuse from the men courtesy of the demagogic Morellos. Risking his life in order to be heard, Harrison’s fiery Tyneside rhetoric eventually succeeds in making the dockers understand what he is trying to do for them. The Governor returns to his palace with a black eye, a tattered, bloodstained coat and the best possibility of a labour settlement that Arista has yet known. His Excellency has been labelled one of Ealing’s ‘thematically more audacious movies’, and in terms of combining industrial relations and colonial problems this seems justified.55 Portman had declined a role in the 1950–51 West End play from which the film was adapted because of its heavy political overtones, and during production Michael Balcon agreed to delete the play’s references to Maltese political corruption and workers’ unrest following appeals by the island’s officials.56 Despite this, the film’s location was a great deal less fictional than others of its type (shooting was done in Sicily), and the film at least attempted to portray faithfully the cynicism which clouded many aspects of industrial negotiations (and colonial government). Unlike Chance of a Lifetime, it also admitted to the possibility of violence playing an integral, albeit negative, part in leading

Blue Collars, White Suits to an industrial settlement, one reason why the Monthly Film Bulletin drew attention to the film’s ‘interesting and dramatic issues’.57 There were limits to the exploration of these issues, however. Hamer is regarded as having been one of the few ‘subversives’ within the Ealing ‘team’, best exemplified by his wicked satire on the Edwardian class system, Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).58 Yet in many ways His Excellency perfectly fitted the mould of Balcon-esque paternalistic liberalism to which the majority of Ealing’s post-war productions conformed. This might be attributable to the difficulties Hamer reportedly had in deciding whether the film should be comedy or drama.59 Plain George Harrison, a man who had successfully made the journey from factory to Government House, personified the ‘mild revolution’ which Balcon supported under Labour: committed to social good but willing to temper his idealism and borrow from others’ experience. Being a former workers’ leader, he was, moreover, the ideal prism through which to view one of the emerging threats to that ‘revolution’, union-management hostility. Thus, we see that the chief cause of trouble at Arista’s dockyards is not the ideological gap between the employer and employees, but individual venality and the manipulation of legitimate grievances. Left to themselves, if treated ‘fairly’, the inert workers act peacefully once they learn, as Harrison tells them, that strikes are bad for their country and their wages. The way to achieve industrial peace is the same as in any other community dispute: to negotiate in good faith, if necessary with empathetic guidance from a respected mediator. (It helps, in Harrison’s case, when the interlocutor shares a love of football with the workers.) There is nothing wrong with the existing politico-economic structures that progressive tolerance cannot fix. All classes, and interest groups, can learn from one another, just as Peggy, Harrison’s housekeeping daughter, finds there is a good and honest compromise between supper for ten from one rabbit and dinner for one from one duck. Harrison is one of Balcon’s beloved ‘mild anarchists, little men who long to kick the boss in the teeth’, but not usurp his position.60 Alexander Mackendrick’s The Man in the White Suit, another Ealing release in 1951, inverted this consensual optimism to present a radical picture of industry and of contemporary Britain generally. It can also be seen as a veiled assault on Ealing itself by an iconoclastic insider frustrated at the studio’s well-intentioned, but increasingly hypocritical smoothing over of simmering post-war conflicts.61 The ‘problem’ facing industry as set out by Mackendrick is not simply union militancy or devious plutocrats (though they do form a part of it), but the fundamental inability of a

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British Cinema and the Cold War sclerotic industrial structure to cope with innovation and modernization. It has been argued that the film goes so far as to posit the irreconcilability of capitalism and progress, but this seems doubtful.62 Associate producer Sidney Cole was a communist but, aside from discussions with the director about the depiction of the trade union representatives, his influence on the film appears to have been minimal.63 Mackendrick instead sought to offer his audience a critique of the British capitalist industrial structure, in order to portray ‘a stagnant, post-Imperial Britain, terrified of change and clinging to a crumbling and threadbare past’.64 It is for this reason that Charles Barr calls The Man in the White Suit the definitive Ealing film, in the sense of being prophetic in its analysis of the dominant lines of force in British society. The same theme of national regression also informed Mackendrick’s subsequent Ealing material, most notably The Ladykillers (1955).65 The threat to the cosy industrial status quo in The Man in the White Suit comes in the form of eccentric Sidney Stratton (Alec Guinness). A laboratory dishwasher at Birnley’s Lancashire textile mill, Stratton invents a fabric that repels dirt and will seemingly never wear out. By emphasizing Stratton’s total lack of consideration for the consequences of his actions, Mackendrick was taking a sideswipe at the reckless, disinterested nuclear scientist.66 Far more obvious, however, is the criticism levelled at Birnley and his rival mill owners who, together with the unions, conspire to suppress the invention. To the former, everlasting suits mean fewer new ones to be bought; to the latter, the fabric cannot be allowed to go on the market because of the unemployment it will create in mills and laundries. Both groups are equally shown to be selfishly guarding their interests, even to the point of imprisoning Stratton, though the film’s depiction of the dangers of monopoly capitalism in the guise of the cruel and murderous Sir John Kierlaw (Ernest Thesiger) was arguably unprecedented.67 Despite this, the film was not intended as merely ‘a plague on both your houses’. Mackendrick’s target was, as Philip Kemp puts it, ‘the system itself, classridden and self-perpetuating, which can ingest and remould in its own image any impulse towards change’.68 Balcon’s vision of a ‘mild revolution’ was, therefore, in Mackendrick’s opinion, a sham predicated on deference and conservatism, bringing about what Anthony Howard would notably refer to 12 years later as ‘the greatest restoration of traditional social values since 1660’.69 The majority of critics recognized that The Man in the White Suit differed significantly from Ealing’s usual material in aspiring to serious meaning. The Manchester Guardian called it the studio’s ‘bravest adventure’;

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14. The restraints of British conservatism: the dangerously inventive Sidney (Alec Guinness) struggles to free himself from the evils of capitalism, personified by the odious Sir John (Ernest Thesiger, left). The Man in the White Suit (1951).

Time and Tide rated it ‘the most profound of the Ealing comedies’; while the Monthly Film Bulletin thought it ‘one of the liveliest and most interesting experiments in British film this year’.70 Politically aware viewers might have drawn a topical parallel with the manufacturers’ cartel against long-life light bulbs, on which the Monopolies Commission reported in 1951.71 Yet it is likely that only a minority of ordinary cinema-goers spotted, let alone agreed with, the film’s full radical intent. The Man in the White Suit was far more intellectually challenging and complex than most mainstream productions, and the average watcher was probably confused by its moral and political ambiguities, as historians have been.72 The fact that Stratton is in the end humiliated not by his enemies but because his fabric turns out to be technically flawed probably encouraged evasion of the issues raised by the film; such a suit can never be manufactured, so the main cause of the ‘problem’ has disappeared. Presenting subversive themes in comedy form is double-edged at the best of times. On the one hand, Mackendrick claimed that comedy was the most

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British Cinema and the Cold War effective route by which to express ‘dangerous’ ideas because an audience’s guard was lowered. But it could equally be argued that the comic framework serves ‘to avoid, repress or displace the treatment of sensitive issues by, so to speak, drowning them in laughter’.73 Perhaps the key point to make here is that Mackendrick in fact had little alternative because, as he later intimated, such a ‘brutal theme’ would never have got the go-ahead from Michael Balcon in anything but a comedy format.74 This begs the question how many other film-makers, outside Ealing, were forced to operate within similar guidelines, given the tendency for potentially controversial themes such as industrial relations to appear in what to some was the innocuous channel of comedy. The Boultings’ I’m All Right Jack (1959) was neither as original nor as subversive as The Man in the White Suit, but was far more influential in helping to create an image for the public of strikes, and especially the role of aggressive trade unionism in their outbreak. For this reason it has been the subject of considerable analysis. Anthony Aldgate, for instance, calls it the industrial relations film par excellence, while Arthur Marwick rates the film as significant a critique of 1950s affluent Britain as Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, published in 1957.75 There is a case for arguing that, like Mackendrick, the Boultings were not seeking to comment just on industrial relations, for I’m All Right Jack can also be read as an attack on television, nudism, advertising, the press, personnel management and class hostility.76 John Hill suggests that the film represented an assault on the greed of the modern, soulless consumer society,77 but the majority of the press (and presumably the public) viewed it as a ground-breaking satire targeted on Britain’s industrial strikes.78 The plot for I’m All Right Jack is relatively straight-forward and revolves around the buffoonish attempts by innocent university graduate Stanley Windrush (Ian Carmichael) to enter industrial management. After some preliminary fiascos, Stanley is employed on the shop-floor of his uncle Bertram’s arms factory, where, he is told, a solid foundation for modern business will be developed. In fact, Bertram (Dennis Price) has a contract with an Arab buyer, and is planning a strike as an excuse to pass the order on to his shady partner, Cox (Richard Attenborough), at an increased cost to be split three ways with the buyer’s agent. Stanley soon finds himself at loggerheads with the unions, led by chief shop steward and expert agitator Fred Kite (Peter Sellers), and precipitates a crisis by demonstrating his potential working speed to an undercover time-and-motion observer hired by his uncle. When new schedules are introduced, Kite orders his men to

Blue Collars, White Suits down tools, and Stanley is ostracized. However, the plan then backfires when Cox’s factory employees come out in sympathy, quickly followed by thousands of others nationwide, and the press turns Stanley into a national hero. ‘Peace’ is restored via the sacking of Stanley on mental health grounds and the withdrawal of the contentious schedules. I’m All Right Jack offered a deeply cynical, if highly comical, comment on the divisions within British industry in the late 1950s, reflecting the attitude of those like the Boultings whose hopes for a ‘new Britain’ under Attlee had given way to a sense of angry disillusionment.79 Both capital and labour are mercilessly lampooned, with the employers and middle managers variously depicted as greedy, incompetent, on-the-make and out of touch, and the factory hands portrayed as workshy, gormless, comfortable yet militant. The most novel feature of the film, however, was the pathetic and ignorant Kite, for which Sellers reportedly prepared assiduously by watching newsreels of trade union delegates.80 The shop steward was in many ways a more authentic representative of shop-floor opinion than trade union branch secretaries during this period, but by the late 1950s had become a jocular and sometimes hostile figure in the media. More than anyone else, it was the shop steward who was, largely unfairly, held responsible by the press for the growing rift between union leaders and the rank-and-file and the spate of unofficial strikes which prevented even higher rates of productivity.81 Kite reinforces this dark stereotyping of the shop steward by being hypocritically racist and a lover of all things Russian, not to suggest he is not working directly for Moscow but more that his ideological pretensions are half-baked and pompous. It was Kite’s prominence in the film which left Carmichael, for one, in no doubts that the unions were a greater target of criticism than management.82 I’m All Right Jack prompted outrage on the far left. Activists within the ACTT tried to stop the film in mid-production; the Daily Worker condemned it as ‘All Right Jack and No Left’; and several Welsh mining districts shunned it.83 Yet, to interpret the film as merely an assault on the CPGB would be patently false given the manner in which ‘big business’ is shown to exploit strike action. It is noteworthy that those on the right did not criticize the film. Equally significantly, it was apparently chosen by the Queen for entertainment at Balmoral prior to the 1959 general election – though this could also be taken as evidence of the film’s apolitical reception.84 To judge whether the film represented a stunningly accurate depiction of contemporary industrial life, as many in Fleet Street claimed, or a transferral of the journalistic version of that life to the big screen,

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British Cinema and the Cold War seems inappropriate given that the Boultings never claimed to have made a documentary. But in complimenting I’m All Right Jack for being ‘not so far from the reality as told in the daily news of strikes’, the Manchester Guardian might have been closer to the truth than it intended.85

IV The inter-relationship between press and cinematic portrayals of industrial troubles was most vividly exemplified by Beaver Productions’ The Angry Silence, directed by Guy Green and released in 1960. This film characterized the hysteria which developed in the British public mind about the origins and implications of strikes more than any other during our period. Largely because of its association with the New Wave school, the film was seen at the time as the breakthrough of cinematic social realism into the factory. It might now be described as the paranoid counterpart to I’m All Right Jack, placing the issue of industrial relations directly within the context of the Cold War. Beaver Films was set up in 1958 by Richard Attenborough and Bryan Forbes within the framework of the Allied Film Makers, a consortium of four partnerships allowed to develop their own projects supported by certain financial guarantees from Rank and the National Provincial Bank.86 Both men had grown increasingly disenchanted with the film industry, Attenborough because of type-casting, and Forbes due to his inability to find film roles worth playing or producers willing to make films of his own scripts, which mainly reflected contemporary social concerns.87 An initial anti-apartheid project collapsed owing to a dearth of financial confidence in what was a politically risky enterprise for the commercial cinema.88 Attention then switched to a synopsis written by Richard Gregson and his brother, Michael Craig, Attenborough’s co-star in Guy Green’s 1958 Sea of Sand, about a factory hand boycotted by his colleagues for not joining an unofficial strike. This was based on a story Craig had read in the York press while performing there theatrically. Coincidentally, Forbes had just written a film treatment along similar lines, called ‘A Dangerous Game’, inspired by newspaper reports about a railwayman who had committed suicide after his work-mates had refused to talk to him for three years after a strike.89 Beaver bought the film rights to the GregsonCraig treatment, and Forbes produced the first draft script of The Angry Silence in early 1959. Among several changes made at this stage was the

Blue Collars, White Suits introduction into the plot of the communist infiltrator Travis (subsequently played by Alfred Burke), a character Forbes based closely on an agitator who, according to the press, had recently instigated a baggagehandlers’ strike at Heathrow airport. Forbes, a liberal with a background in wartime intelligence, was inclined to see such incidents within the context of Khrushchev’s threats to take over the West by non-military means.90 Attenborough then had the task of selling the idea on Wardour Street at the relatively low cost of £140,000, only to find that British Lion, the main backer of independent productions, rated it too costly for a ‘risk’ subject. Suggestions were made to tone down the content linguistically and politically, and give it a happier and more conventional ending. However, these were resisted in favour of paring the production costs to the bone: for example, Forbes agreed to take no money for co-producing the film, while the lead actors worked for a standard flat fee of £1000 (plus a percentage of any profits). By these means the budget was cut to £97,981, of which British Lion put up 70 per cent and the NFFC the remainder.91 Shooting took only a month to complete in late summer 1959. An actual factory in Ipswich was used for location, with employees working as extras. Journalists Alan Whicker and Daniel Parsons added further authenticity as television reporters sent to interrogate the strikers outside the factory gates. After its first showing, British Lion insisted on watering down certain elements, but Forbes’s and Attenborough’s complaints meant that the final product was very close to what they wanted. The Angry Silence had a low-key premiere at London’s Old Plaza in March 1960 and immediately provoked controversy, for a number of reasons.92 The opening scenes of The Angry Silence immediately set the film apart from previous ones dealing directly with industrial relations. To the accompaniment of Malcolm Arnold’s brooding music, a shifty, mysterious figure (later identified as Travers) arrives unannounced at Martindale’s engineering factory in Melsham, and forms a works committee with Connolly (Bernard Lee), a hitherto unobtrusive shop steward, as mouthpiece. The factory itself, as Penelope Houston wrote in Sight and Sound, actually ‘looks like a place in which something might really get made’; the atmosphere of realism is enhanced by the workers’ coarse colloquialisms.93 Connolly and Davis (Geoffrey Keen), the works manager, are soon at loggerheads over apparent trivialities, and an unofficial strike is called. Tom Curtis (Attenborough), a young family man, and a dozen others (mainly older employees faithful to democratic union methods) defy the pickets, but calculated acts of violence force the others out. When the strike ends

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15. Brotherly love: Fighting for his right to work, Tom (Richard Attenborough) bravely runs the gauntlet of pickets outside Martindale’s, while the bespectacled Travers (Alfred Marks) looks on. The Angry Silence (1960).

through a compromise agreement with the board, Tom is ‘sent to Coventry’ under Travers’s orders, thrown off the works football team and systematically ignored by everyone, even his lodger and best friend, Joe (Michael Craig). Travers then instigates another wildcat strike by circulating false rumours about mass sackings, but again Tom stands firm. On the eve of being fired on the grounds of trouble-making, Tom is beaten up by his teddy-boy work-mates and loses an eye. Feeling disgusted, Joe tracks down the main culprit and drags him back to a works meeting, where the men are barracking a union official who is warning them of the threat posed to ‘work of national importance’ by sinister ‘outside influences’. Joe confronts the men with their own shame, and another kind of silence falls over the mass. Defeated but undetected, Travers quietly leaves town, free to repeat his machinations elsewhere. Forbes and Attenborough would later claim that The Angry Silence was intended as an overall plea for the individual’s right to dissent from the majority, rather than an explicit warning about subversives within the labour movement, and several critics interpreted the film this way.94 It is

Blue Collars, White Suits also true that the film commented caustically on industrialists by depicting Martindale as spineless; that Martindale’s references to German industrial superiority reflected creeping doubts about whether Britain really had ‘won’ the last war; and, by having Tom maimed by teenage thugs, the film offered an insight into the perceived threat posed by the so-called ‘mindless youth’. Yet even Alexander Walker, one of the few commentators to accept the film’s espousal of individualism, asserted that The Angry Silence stood out because it ‘built an attack on union abuses that up to then had never been so scathingly stated in a British film’.95 In the mid- and late 1950s ministers talked of an ‘epidemic’ of unofficial strikes, caused or exploited by communists.96 Short official films were distributed either highlighting the danger of communism within the trade union movement or playing it down, depending on particular circumstances.97 On occasions the CPGB itself deliberately fuelled suspicions by leaking stories to the media in the hope of compensating for its diminishing membership and creating instability in the board room. This played into the hands of the IRD, which, equipped with information gathered by MI5, peppered journalists with material linking trade union corruption and gerrymandering with political activity conducted by union officials in the interests of Moscow. Books like Woodrow Wyatt’s The Peril in our Midst (1956) were also published courtesy of the department’s front organization, Phoenix House.98 As it was, the only proven case of communist abuse of power in a British trade union during this period was the Electrical Trades Union. This was exposed in 1956 in the New Statesman and on BBC Television’s current affairs flagship, Panorama, and led to the eventual expulsion of the union from the TUC and the Labour Party. Political strikes were extremely rare.99 In one sense, The Angry Silence can be viewed as an updated, more narrowly focused version of High Treason. In place of young Jimmy Ellis, who found himself caught between loyalty to family and party, is the tragedy of Tom Curtis, whose only ‘crime’ is his desire to do an honest day’s work and who is prevented from doing so by the very movement (nameless but obvious) which purports to defend the workers’ rights. Communism, in the guise of Travers, passes through the strike-hit factory ‘like a bacillus through the human body’.100 Nothing is as it appears. The shop steward’s seemingly genuine plea for improved sanitary arrangements turns out to a smokescreen for a closed shop. Connolly is himself a pawn, not being privy to Travers’s over-arching scheme and privately ridiculed by him for his naive, anachronistic approach towards industrial action.

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British Cinema and the Cold War Travers plans to defeat capitalism covertly, not via a re-run of the 1926 General Strike, the route favoured by Connolly. Union decisions are taken without any real discussion, with the lax, apathetic ‘brothers’ willing to acquiesce, while the sensible, pluralist, thinking ‘workmen’ try to persuade the others of the adverse effects of strikes. These attempts ultimately fail because militancy has produced mob rule. Those who may have misgivings about jeopardizing their careers face the prospect of a beating by the teenage morons who seize on the right to strike as a licence to run riot. John Hill, who argues that the very structure of The Angry Silence militates against a sympathetic portrayal of the strikers and anything like a balanced picture of industrial relations generally, elaborates upon this last point. The emphasis on the ‘individual as hero’ nearly always transforms the ‘mass’ into a ‘mob’. The crucial element of conspiracy completes the individual/mob dichotomy by attributing the strike to simple manipulation rather than any form of legitimate grievance the men might have, or it being an inherent characteristic of capitalism. Part of the reason for this is the film’s reticence about showing the experience and organization of work, a trait common to nearly all mainstream productions. Moreover, conventions of narrative and character structure identification with Tom, whose home life is the only one we learn about. ‘Our relationship to Curtis is thus premised on interiority, our relationship to the strikers, on exteriority,’ writes Hill. Apart from Joe, the strikers are never alone but appear herdlike, as in the final aerial shot of the film, which shows them penned in behind the factory walls, resembling sheep.101 The Angry Silence received wide acclaim from critics for its vivid, hardhitting portrayal of a sensitive subject normally treated, if at all, with indulgence.102 It was chosen to be Britain’s official entry at the 1960 West Berlin Film Festival, where it received the prize of the International Catholic Cinema Office. The script also earned Forbes an Academy Award nomination, and Beaver made a handsome, if unspectacular profit.103 Politically, the film briefly acted as a focal point for the wider debate about the ‘industrial Cold War’. The national and provincial press recognized its considerable power to proselytize, for good and ill. ‘One wonders how many good, well-meaning trade unionists and employers ready to sacrifice an unpopular man if it means getting on with the job, will see the film, remember acts of selfishness and cruelty, and feel a little dirty, too,’ wrote Campbell Dixon in the Daily Telegraph.104 Several Conservative newspapers seized the opportunity to turn the film to their advantage, some suggesting that it delivered a resounding condemnation of all strikes, others that it

Blue Collars, White Suits illustrated the Trotskyite threat. Having identified the ‘infiltrator’ as communist, the Daily Mail claimed that The Angry Silence was ‘a film that everyone must see’, while the Evening Standard argued that it ‘contains enough topical, combustible matter to keep the TUC chiefs in session until the sacred cows come home to Congress House’. ‘See How Red Peril Works’, was the Essex Chronicle’s headline.105 The Sunday Times judged that the film was an attack on the abuse of unions rather than the unions themselves, and even the Labour-ish Daily Mirror considered it ‘a film of importance to every worker in Britain’, before urging its readers to ‘Watch Travers!’ 106 Though outnumbered, those further to the left accepted this general interpretation of the film but sought to point out its flaws. Reynolds News and Tribune criticized the film for not paying any attention to the motivations of people who made up the crowd. ‘Why do the workers agree to the first strike which is over comparatively trivial issues, will cost them money, and do them little good?’ asked the latter. Another observer saw Tom Curtis as the equivalent of Marlon Brando’s character in Elia Kazan’s 1954 film On the Waterfront, viewed by some as a filmic vindication of McCarthyite informers.107 The Daily Worker’s critic, Nina Hibbin, put the film to the test by discussing it with three London trade unionists, and concluded: You will not recognize this brand of trade unionist because it does not exist in Britain… It is a lying travesty of the way British working men and women behave… this is a vicious, ugly and cruel film which makes a virtue of selfishness and disloyalty and shows the workers as fools, morons and bullies.108

There were similar feelings of outrage wider afield. The Trades Council in Ipswich called for a boycott of the film, claiming that it represented a betrayal of those workers from Reavall and Company’s engineering who had taken part as extras. The miners’ union in South Wales requested cinemas and miners’ welfare institutes not to show the film. ‘Why should we give facilities for something which tries to prostitute all we have struggled for?’ spat the miners’ leader, Will Whitehead. Without having seen the film, the secretary of Derbyshire district miners dismissed it as ‘dirty propaganda’.109 Attenborough and Forbes were genuinely shaken by this reaction, and spent a large part of April and May 1960 setting out their case, by the end of which The Angry Silence had come close to being a cause célèbre. Forbes appeared on television to defend the film, while Attenborough invited the Ipswich extras to a private showing and addressed audiences from Aberdeen to London’s Garrick Club. ‘This sort of Fascist behaviour

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British Cinema and the Cold War is just what the film is about,’ he declared. ‘Mob rule by a few scheming Communists.’ 110 References were made to the film in parliament and by political speech-writers. Attenborough sought to strengthen his position by claiming that several Labour MPs thought the film ‘quite admirable’.111 Eventually, the furore died down, though the film continued periodically to attract strong opinions within the film industry. Over a decade after the film’s release, director Ken Loach protested that ‘although it had an arguable point, it was one that the film-makers should have hesitated to use to the disadvantage of working men so long as there were no other British films to espouse the workers’ grievances with equal zeal’.112 Certain ‘grievances’ did get something of an airing in other New Wave films in the early 1960s. Many of these productions introduced the sort of proletarian heroes never seen before in the British cinema and were widely praised for presenting a refreshing, inside picture of working-class life. At one point, such films as The Entertainer (Tony Richardson, 1960), A Taste of Honey (Richardson, 1961), A Kind of Loving (John Schlesinger, 1962) and Billy Liar (Schlesinger, 1963) looked to have changed the very face of British cinema. As the Manchester Guardian put it in September 1962, ‘A British film nowadays, if it is to be taken seriously, must set its scene among the more or less rebellious young people of the industrial North or Midlands; it must be tough, realistic, iconoclastic (possibly nihilistic, too) and thoroughly working class’.113 As ‘revolutionary’ as these films were in terms of regional accents and sexual mores, however, they rarely stretched to commenting on conditions or relations within the work-place. Work, and strikes, were a noticeable absence in the films of the New Wave. This had the significant effect, according to one historian, ‘of removing social and economic relations from the agenda’.114 The partial exceptions to this were the cinematic versions of Alan Sillitoe’s two novels, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, released in 1960 and 1962 respectively. The fact that the two books were transposed to the screen at all was a measure of the British film industry’s liberalizing tendencies during this period.115 Of equal interest in both cases, however, was the disquiet the books raised at the higher echelons of the film industry, and the changes they underwent along the way. Neither of Sillitoe’s stories focused on industrial relations, but were essentially about two working-class youngsters – Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Colin Smith in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner – and their battles against conventionality in urban and borstal settings. Both novels were, nevertheless,

Blue Collars, White Suits punctuated by barbed comments on the nature of capitalism and the Cold War. ‘They were angling for another war now, with the Russians this time,’ says Seaton, displaying his characteristic contempt for the establishment. ‘But they go so far as to promise that it would be a short one, a few flashes and it would be all over. What a lark!… They think they’ve settled our hashes with their insurance cards and television sets.’ 116 These expressions of discontent were not entirely cut during the filmmaking process, yet the tenor of the stories was altered to make the ideological aspects more ambiguous. This appears to have been the result of commercial pressures and an atmosphere of constraint fostered by the BBFC.117 Sillitoe himself was scathing about the ‘distortion’ Saturday Night and Sunday Morning suffered at the hands of the BBFC. ‘It seems to me that censorship in the British film industry is in its own way as hidebound as that of Soviet Russia,’ he complained in July 1960, when the film was finally given an ‘X’ certificate after months of consultations between Sillitoe, Woodfall Productions and the BBFC.118 His own script’s characterization of the anti-authoritarian borstal boy, Colin Smith, who, in the key scene in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, deliberately throws a race he could so easily win, struck the BBFC’s examiners as little more than the portrayal of ‘a good hero of the British Soviet’. The whole story was judged to be ‘blatant and very trying Communist propaganda’ and full of ‘claptrap like “All Army officers and policemen are bad and all workers are good”’.119 It was neither, but these reactions bear witness to the forces within the film industry aligned against the more open exploration of ‘problematic’ subjects well into the 1960s. Albert Finney’s Seaton does take a swipe at the ‘gaffers pushing around the sheep’ from his lathe, while Tom Courtenay’s Smith burns his late father’s insurance money because he sees it as a pay-off from the factory which had recently sacked him for striking for wage increases. Had these acts been part of stories set within a more conventional political framework, it seems unlikely they would have been allowed to appear on screen. As it was, because so much of the public’s attention was drawn to the sex and violence depicted in the films, their effect on audiences was probably diluted.120

V British films during the ‘first Cold War’ treated the ‘relations of capital and labour’ quite differently to those prior to the Second World War. Gone was the strait-jacket of consensus, saturated with the spirit of unquestioned

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British Cinema and the Cold War unity and paternalism. In its place were productions like The Man in the White Suit and I’m All Right Jack which, in their own ways, were every bit as radical and eye-opening as anything about industrial relations made by Hollywood, for instance, during the same period. Indeed, compared with their American rivals, British studios generally adopted a far more sober approach towards the subject. There was certainly no equivalent of novelist Ayn Rand’s Screen Guide for Americans, published by the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals and distributed throughout Hollywood’s studios in the late 1940s. Rand’s booklet specifically warned that it was ‘the moral duty of every decent man in the motion picture industry to throw into the ashcan, where it belongs, every story that smears industrialists as such’. This directive was by no means followed to the letter, but its spirit prevailed for many years.121 It would have been perverse, of course, if British film-makers had supported the free enterprise system so dogmatically after 1945. The Second World War left a legacy of economic interventionism that was fundamentally intact even after 13 years of continuous Conservative government between 1951 and 1964. The cinema ignored this new state of affairs at its peril, and some film-makers sought to comment directly on the industrial dimension of the Keynesian experiment, either because relaxed censorship rules allowed them freedom to explore an issue hitherto deemed off-limits, or because of the subject’s contemporary resonance (both in its own right and as a microcosm of Britain’s wider problems). All film-makers who dealt with the subject were aware of the potential for controversy, and indeed the majority deliberately courted it. These were films made to inform as well as to entertain, by directors and scenarists who saw themselves as political activists rather than merely passive observers. The fact that so many of these films were comedies should not blind us to this, though it does indicate the difficulties their makers had in portraying industrial relations in more dramatic or unconventional forms. Issues that were at root economic were almost bound to be simplified when framed within a dominant cinematic form predicated on the importance of the individual and the spotlighting of leading men and women. These films – official and commercial – testify to the mass media’s, and the government’s, perception of an ‘industrial Cold War’ dominating labour-management relations for much of this period. This was despite the fact that, comparatively speaking, these relations were generally quite good. The net total of workers involved in strike action rose between 1953 and 1959, for instance, by 140 per cent, and that of working days lost by

Blue Collars, White Suits 160 per cent. However, these were increases from a very low base, so although the scale of the changes themselves was dramatic, it does not necessarily mean that strike activity had a dramatic impact on the economy as a whole.122 In the 15 years after the Second World War, Britain lost only one-ninth of the working days that were lost through industrial disputes in the fifteen years after the First World War.123 At least part of the explanation for this discordance lies with the international Cold War. The vast majority of the films examined in this chapter were created, and often viewed, within the context of the ideological struggle between communism and social democracy. At times this could be quite explicit, as was the case with The Angry Silence’s pinpointing of the Marxist menace sowing worker discontent. On other occasions, such as in His Excellency, industrial unrest was not attributed to a foreign source, yet the film had just as much to say on the essential compatibility of capitalist ownership and workers’ rights. By no means every film brushed over the class divisions in many of the work-places of the ‘New Jerusalem’; indeed, Macmillan’s claim in the late 1950s that ‘the class war is obsolete’ seems curiously misplaced when set alongside the likes of I’m All Right Jack.124 That said, it is clear where most films stood in relation to the dangers posed to the economy and social stability by industrial disputes and the relevance this had for the on-going East–West conflict. Not one of the mainstream films could be described as supportive of trade unionism, let alone direct workers’ control of parts of the economy. Nearly all encouraged a suspicious attitude towards activism within the factory gates, resulting in a limited conception of industrial relations, of workers’ rights and of the means of representation. Though this should not altogether surprise us given the commercial nature of the film business, it is no less significant.

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7 Alternative Images

In 1945, it is often said, we had our revolution… According to the British cinema, however, nothing happened at all. The nationalization of the coal fields; the Health Service; nationalized railways; compulsory secondary education – events like these, which cry out to be interpreted in human terms, have produced no films. Nor have many of the problems which have bothered us in the last ten years: strikes; Teddy Boys; nuclear tests; the loyalties of scientists; the insolence of bureaucracy… The presence of American troops among us has gone practically unremarked; so have the miners from Italy and the refugees from Hungary… we must question the significance, and the justice, of the use those in political and financial control of us are content to make of this powerful, essentially democratic medium. Lindsay Anderson, ‘Get Out and Push!’ (1957) 1

As we have already seen, British cinema challenged official Cold War orthodoxy from a number of angles between 1945 and 1965. Films expressed uncertainty about the sanity of nuclear deterrence, questioned Westminster’s notion of a new classless Britain and hinted that elements within British intelligence were almost operating as a state within a state. Finding evidence on screen of outright opposition to the state’s overall Cold War policy is more difficult, however. Even before the Bolshevik

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Alternative Images Revolution, decision-makers within the British film industry had consistently marginalized political debate and helped bolster the social and political status quo. After 1917, groups on the left especially were considered anathema to national well-being and consequently presented as ‘extremists’ or excluded from the screen altogether. After 1945, the removal of Nazi Germany as a barrier to the spread of communism in Europe further underlined this cinematic approach. The swift emergence of an East–West nuclear arms race again placed Britain on a war footing. The threats to capitalism and the country’s very existence were now intertwined and, like other media, the film industry renewed its wartime propaganda efforts. Having circumscribed political ‘controversy’ in the inter-war era, the BBFC’s paternalism slowly diminished in the wake of the Second World War, but its sanctions still amounted to a powerful embargo on political dialogue. Limitations on expression were further increased by Whitehall’s renewed sensitivity to communist propaganda, leading to continued official interference with the BBFC’s already fragile independence. No pro-Soviet or pro-communist feature films were made in Britain during the whole of the ‘first Cold War’. Nevertheless, there was greater scope for Cold War cinematic dissent in Britain compared, for instance, with the USSR and United States.2 As a result, a small number of films were either produced or imported that, without necessarily attempting to turn conventional opinion on its head, offered a more deeply critical perspective on the Cold War than those analyzed up to this point. This, final, chapter explores the different forms in which these films expressed opposition, the variety of motives that lay behind their production and distribution, and the obstacles they needed to overcome to reach a wide audience. By highlighting, on the one hand, the role played by the community of Hollywood blacklistees working in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and, on the other, the efforts made by left-wing distributors to exhibit Eastern European films, the importance of British cinema as a forum for the international cultural Cold War is further underlined. Evaluating the scope of cinematic Cold War dissent also provides a litmus test for the theory – so stridently articulated in Lindsay Anderson’s influential 1957 essay – that during this period British cinema was extraordinarily socially inhibited and politically restrictive.

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British Cinema and the Cold War

I Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s British films reflected few of the misgivings that many of its patrons felt about the East–West dispute, with the cinema preferring instead to paint a generally rosy picture of a Britain united in the face of Soviet aggression. As the conflict appeared more intractable, however, an increasingly fractious debate developed within some quarters of the industry as to the role film-makers should be playing in the Cold War. Few voices were heard in protest, for instance, when Karel Reisz issued his rallying call to Wardour Street and Hollywood in early 1953 for a more dynamic attack on communism. Two years later, by contrast, the editors of Films and Filming condemned the film community on both sides of the Atlantic for acting as reckless Cold War protagonists rather than interested but detached commentators. Film-makers stood accused by some within the trade of having become dangerously embroiled within East–West politics and of consistently representing aspects of the Cold War in ways that could only deepen international enmity.3 Such allegations helped to bring about a reaction among some filmmakers in the mid-1950s to the industry’s crude polarization of East and West. A small number of films appeared in the middle and towards the end of the decade that took a less dogmatic attitude towards the Cold War. Foremost among these was The Young Lovers, a romantic thriller directed by Anthony Asquith and released in 1954. An American intelligence officer, Ted (David Knight), who is employed in the code room at the London embassy, by chance meets Anna (Odile Versois), the daughter of an Eastern European minister. On learning that they are in love, Anna’s father applies emotional pressure to precipitate their break-up, while Ted’s colleagues suspect him of treachery (mental and actual). Telephones are tapped and the couple are trailed to their few clandestine meetings. When Anna discovers she is pregnant, they run away, sailing out into the English Channel in search of a ‘third place’ where they can be at peace. Their boat is demolished but the couple survive the storm and escape from their assailants. Only Anna’s message to her father is found: ‘You say the world is divided in two. We cannot escape that fact, but we are going to try. You who live in separate worlds, you cannot believe in innocence. You cannot believe in love.’ Critics praised The Young Lovers for its novel way of foregrounding the effect of the Cold War on human relationships.4 The film unconventionally

Alternative Images blurs the differences between the characteristically bureaucratic East and the open, tolerant West; both sides are presented as paranoid and oppressive. Questions are posed about the individuality possible within either system and the definition of treason within each ‘bloc’, thus signalling a very different message from earlier films which also fused romance and espionage, such as MGM’s Conspirator. Whereas the enemy in the latter was communism, in The Young Lovers it is identified as the machine-like way in which the Cold War state shackled the young and innocent. Anna’s child, moreover, raises the prospect of the imprisonment of future generations within an endless and heartless conflict. The Young Lovers’ story appealed to Asquith’s conciliatory nature and possibly represented atonement for his earlier contribution to anti-communist paranoia, The Net (1953). The film’s scriptwriter was George Tabori, a noted anti-fascist who saw dangerous parallels between events in Europe in the 1930s and the recent shift to the right in Western politics.5 It is unclear whether the awards conferred on the film by the industry reflected artistic, commercial or political tastes.6 Raymond Durgnat later classed The Young Lovers as the ‘sharpest cinematic repudiation of the Dulles image of the Cold War’ to appear in the period, yet more than one critic noted at the time how weakened the film’s appeal for coexistence was by the happy, optimistic ending.7 In the opinion of its producer, Anthony Havelock-Allan, the film ‘lacked guts’ and the ‘hard edge’ necessary for an effective ‘blast against McCarthyism’.8 The film had the potential, as one reviewer put it, to ‘arouse compassion and anger… about the tragedy of a divided world’,9 but the weight of its Cold War criticism should not be overstated. The Young Lovers was at least more thought-provoking than Ralph Thomas’s Iron Petticoat (1956), with which it bore superficial resemblance. This also played around with the theme of barrier-crossing lovers, but in comical rather than dramatic form. The eventual marriage of Russian and American pilots Vinka and Chuck (played by Katharine Hepburn and Bob Hope) might be read as offering support for the post-Stalinist ‘thaw’ in East–West relations, but its emphasis on the political and material differences between the two sides effectively ruled out any prospect of a permanent engagement.10 Despite the failure of Khrushchev’s policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’, and the charges of duplicity aroused in the West by the Soviets’ deStalinization process,11 the late 1950s saw within Britain a steady rise in opposition to a continued hard-line approach towards Moscow. Those on the left denounced the strategy as potentially reckless, whereas many in the uncommitted middle ground considered it unimaginative. Even if Britain

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British Cinema and the Cold War was experiencing an economic boom, few believed the country could indefinitely afford a rate of defence expenditure comparable with the superpowers.12 The major focus of literary and dramatic talent in the period, the ‘Angry Brigade’, was principally imbued with a sense of disillusionment with the immediate past and a loathing of the material priorities of a newly affluent Britain rather than discontent with East– West relations. ‘There are no good causes left to die for,’ says Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s seminal 1956 play Look Back in Anger (transferred to the cinema screen in 1959); Archie Rice, played by Laurence Olivier on stage in 1957 and screen in 1960, personified Osborne’s view of Britain as a run-down music-hall act in The Entertainer.13 Nevertheless, the Royal Court Theatre, Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop and others became points around which demands for more purposeful politics were organized, including a reassessment of Britain’s Cold War stance.14 If opinion polls are anything to go by, the general public in Britain shared in this sense of Cold War ambivalence. In October 1950, with British troops fighting in Korea, one poll asked if the government’s policy towards the USSR was too firm: seven per cent said yes, 26 per cent thought it was about right, and 52 per cent believed it was not firm enough. When asked in February 1959 whether they thought that the Soviets really wanted to end the Cold War, 30 per cent answered yes, 28 per cent no, and 42 per cent did not know. Three years later, in April 1962, asked if they would prefer to risk an atomic war rather than living under communism, 35 per cent opted for the risk, 27 per cent chose communism, leaving 38 per cent not knowing.15 Cinema-goers were far from inundated with material exploring these and other issues directly, but certain films did allude to the Cold War in ways that had not been seen ten years earlier. Carlton-Browne of the FO (1959) was one of several uninhibited satires made by the Boultings in the late 1950s aimed broadly at the British establishment. It was the institution of Whitehall – personified in Terry Thomas’s blundering diplomat – that the Boultings had in their sights, rather than its policies.16 The film’s jokes about colonial administration, UN efforts to quell local revolutions, and American and Soviet spheres of influence, nevertheless, had ‘uncomfortable topical parallels’ for some journalists and madarins.17 In July 1959, the Foreign Office advised a film industry selection committee against showing the production at that summer’s inaugural Moscow International Film Festival, on the grounds that its ridiculing of the Kremlin would not be fully appreciated by less sophisticated Russian audiences and could cause

Alternative Images

16. Close encounters of an ideological kind: George Wheeler (George Cooper, left), chairman of the Bursley Men’s Club, Albert Grimshaw (Arthur Askey) and Wilf Holmes (Reginald Beckwith) watch eagerly for a reaction as the two Russian visitors Olga (Tilda Thamar) and Nikki (Peter Illing) take their first sip of English ale. Friends and Neighbours (1959).

a diplomatic incident. It may be the case that Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, who reportedly considered it an excellent satire, objected to CarltonBrowne of the FO more because of the damage it might inflict on Whitehall’s image overseas than its lampooning of the Soviets. Either way, the film was not screened at the festival, and negotiations for a great power summit then delicately poised in Geneva were allowed to proceed undisturbed.18 Friends and Neighbours (Gordon Parry, 1959), adapted from a play by Austin Steele, took its cue from the greater openness that characterized East–West relations in the late 1950s. A series of cultural and educational exchange programmes were set up between countries within the two camps during this period, some for humanitarian reasons, many in line with official propaganda strategies. Behind the latter lay the hope that, by experiencing life on the other side of the Curtain, visitors would act as agents for change within their own sphere.19 The subject was ripe for comedy, helped further by the reputation for engaging joviality Khrushchev himself cultivated while on tour in the West. Friends and Neighbours correspondingly turns a visit by two Russian social workers to the archetypal working-class home of the Grimshaws (played by Arthur Askey and Megs Jenkins) into a

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British Cinema and the Cold War vigorous, old-fashioned farce. The film resembles The Demi-Paradise (1943) in its use of visiting Russians as a vehicle for the celebration of England’s quaint and idiosyncratic virtues. At the same time, by dwelling on the similarities between ordinary Russians and Britons it also encourages viewers to question prevailing Cold War stereotypes. The social workers’ concern for the Grimshaws’s daughter’s love life, for example, marks them as worldly and sympathetic despite years of so-called communist indoctrination.20 Novels such as John Wain’s The Young Visitors (1965) – about the challenges and seductions presented to a group of Konsomol students by their first Western experience in London – played on a similar theme.21 Our Man in Havana (Carol Reed, 1959) started life as ‘Nobody to Blame’, a film treatment drawn up by Graham Greene for Alberto Cavalcanti just after the close of the Second World War. Whether it was because Cavalcanti did not really like it, or because, as the Brazilian director claimed, he was informed by the BBFC that ‘no certificate could be issued to a film that made fun of the Secret Service’, the project was shelved. Greene wanted his subsequent novel (published in 1958) and screenplay, about a vacuum-cleaner salesman based in Cuba recruited by MI6, to highlight the increasingly absurd nature of the Cold War – ‘for who can accept the survival of Western Capitalism as a great case,’ he argued.22 Assisted by acclaimed performances from Alec Guinness as Wormold the unassuming salesman, and Noel Coward as the umbrella-toting Hawthorne, head of MI6’s Caribbean network, Greene and Reed succeed in cutting holes in the institutionalized culture of Cold War espionage. Unlike many of the other cloak-and-dagger spoofs of the period, such as Carry On Spying (Gerald Thomas, 1964) and Morecambe and Wise’s The Intelligence Men (Robert Asher, 1965), the use of comedy sharpens the film’s message by mixing sophisticated wit with a menacing atmosphere. ‘There is in the writing a blend of the ironic and the ruthless,’ wrote one critic, ‘a switch in mood from farce to disturbing seriousness, that is tartly refreshing in itself while requiring the utmost brilliance and evenness of style in the direction’.23 Wormold dreams up bigger and bigger lies to satisfy London’s insatiable appetite for secrets, inventions which not only pay well but ultimately trap the innocent. As with The Third Man and The Man Between, Reed’s mastery of location work added considerably to the film’s visual thrust and sense of reality, and, once again, produced its own behind-thescenes Cold War sub-plot. Filming in Havana had been problematical in the late 1950s due to Cuba’s political instability. Fidel Castro’s victory on New Year’s Day 1959, ousting the pro-American Batista regime, proved to

Alternative Images be a blessing for Reed and his associates, who secured permission to shoot the film in Havana with little difficulty. Two conditions were imposed, however: the film-makers were required to add over 50 Cubans to the cast and crew, and to submit to regular visits by a government committee which sought to ensure that the film contained nothing derogatory to the infant regime.24 Overall, Our Man in Havana was received well in Britain and the United States – the Observer considered it ‘Reed’s best film since The Third Man’ – but it was only a modest commercial success.25

II The political suppression of alleged communist subversion in post-war Hollywood largely revolved around two rounds of investigations conducted by HUAC. The first started in October 1947, and led to the blacklisting and imprisonment of several film-makers who refused to divulge their political affiliations, and who became known as the ‘Hollywood Ten’. The second, more damaging wave of hearings opened in March 1951 and produced widespread blacklisting which did not begin to lift until the early 1960s.26 After this second round, a sizeable minority of those ‘named’ by ‘friendly’ witnesses as past or present Communist Party members emigrated to find work. Mexico received the single largest contingent, followed by Britain and France.27 Had it not been for the passport hurdles erected by the Department of State (hurdles which subsequently restricted the émigrés’ further movement), many other screen artists would also have left the United States. It is a measure of the greater freedom from political interference the British film industry enjoyed during the Cold War that several prominent blacklistees chose to move to Britain to continue their careers. Even though the allegations of communist conspiracy made against them were groundless, it is also a mark of the industry’s relative toleration of left-wing viewpoints that they were employed at all, especially given their notoriety.28 Among the exiled who arrived on British soil in the early 1950s were producer and scriptwriter Adrian Scott, one of the Hollywood Ten; Donald Ogden Stewart, who had won an Oscar for The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940); scriptwriter Howard Koch of Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) and Mission to Moscow (Curtiz, 1943) fame; scriptwriter Carl Foreman, latterly an important part of Stanley Kramer’s socially conscious film-making team; and the director Joseph Losey, best known for his anti-racist, pro-peace allegory The Boy with the Green Hair (1948).29

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British Cinema and the Cold War The ability of the blacklistees to find work and make films of a political nature in Britain turned out to be limited, however. Many British producers were deterred from using the blacklistees’ talents because no American distributor would touch their credited work. The adoption of pseudonyms was one way of getting around this problem, but was not wholly successful.30 At least one of the émigrés – Losey – received a warm welcome, being befriended by Anthony Asquith and fellow left-wing members of the industry, Ralph Bond and Sidney Cole. Despite this, he and the others found it difficult to secure membership of the ACT, which was vital for full access to job opportunities.31 Competition from indigenous artists in a diminishing industry was highly intense, and being away from friends and family with money worries was hardly conducive to creativity. Most blacklistees in Britain ended up living a precarious existence from irregular, lowly paid work. Thus, Scott earned a living mainly by writing for television, while Koch contributed to a mere four films in 13 years.32 Only Foreman thrived, graduating to become a writer-cum-producer largely responsible for a string of conservative and profitable Second World War films, and ultimately rising to be governor of the British Film Institute between 1965 and 1971.33 In 1959, Losey articulated the frustration felt by many of the blacklistees. The British film industry, he argued, was ‘going to Hell on wheels… Subjects are generally conventional and unimaginative with many taboos’.34 Despite such criticisms, a few of the exiles did manage to overcome their isolation and issue audiences with some form of Cold War protest. Indeed, it was out of the blacklistee community that some of the most biting criticism of the institutionalization of the Cold War emerged on the British screen. This can be attributed to some extent to the dissidents’ desire to publicize their own plight, or even exact revenge on their McCarthyite pursuers, but it also reflected their deeper anxieties about the nature of East–West relations. Charlie Chaplin was sixty-seven years old when he produced and directed his first (and only) British film, A King in New York, at Shepperton Studios in 1956. Having been accused of moral deviancy for over 20 years due to a series of scandalous liaisons with teenage actresses, rumours of Chaplin’s communist leanings began during the Second World War, when he was among the first to advocate the opening of a second front in Europe to assist the Red Army. These intensified into a smear campaign in 1947, with the release of the pacifist Monsieur Verdoux. Spearheaded by the American Legion and the Catholic War Veterans, which

Alternative Images highlighted the film’s anti-capitalist message, right-wing pressure groups organized to boycott Monsieur Verdoux and succeeded in drastically limiting its circulation.35 In September 1947, Chaplin was subpoenaed by HUAC to testify on his alleged communist affiliations. His response was to send a terse telegram, honestly denying having ever joined a political party, and proclaiming himself ‘a peacemonger’.36 Still a British citizen despite 42 years of US residence (considered suspicious in itself in a period of hyperAmericanism), demands increased for Chaplin’s deportation. In 1952, while en route to London for the European premiere of Limelight, word arrived that the US attorney general had instructed immigration authorities not to issue Chaplin a re-entry visa unless he submitted to an inquiry of his moral worth. Chaplin thereupon settled down in Switzerland, promising never to return to the United States and affirming his commitment to world peace. In 1954, he shared the winner’s prize of the Soviet-sponsored World Peace Council with Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich and in 1956 met Khrushchev and Bulganin during their visit to London.37 A King in New York was Chaplin’s bitter rejoinder to the treatment HUAC had meted out to him and an attempt to pronounce more widely on contemporary international affairs. Chaplin himself played the lead role as exiled King Shahdov of Estrovia who arrives in 1950s America seeking sanctuary. As a victim of political extremism in his own country, Shahdov not only expects to enjoy the fruits of American freedom and vitality, but also anticipates wide support for his call for nuclear disarmament. Instead, he finds rampant capitalism, political hysteria and poverty, and as a penniless celebrity is reduced to making television commercials in order to get his message across to the American people. It is via this quintessentially American public forum that the king then proceeds to condemn the signs of decadence he sees around him – plastic surgery, ‘rock-and-roll’ and the principles of ‘big business’ generally. Having befriended ten-year-old Rupert (played by Chaplin’s son, Michael), whose parents have been imprisoned for contempt of Congress for refusing to ‘name’ names, Shahdov is subsequently interrogated by HUAC. The hearing ends in high farce, with Shahdov accidentally dousing the committee members with a firehouse. When Rupert is forced to inform on his parents’ political associates, Shahdov decides to return to the relative safety of Europe, though not before uttering a withering assault on a country bereft of its much vaunted idealism. While some critics praised Chaplin for his boldness in focusing the cruelty and absurdity of McCarthyism on a boy, and demonstrating its horrors by showing how it assailed the child’s character and spirit, many

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British Cinema and the Cold War others were embarrassed and felt that these virtues had been spoiled by a combination of Chaplin’s sizeable ego and comic anachronisms. ‘For the first time we see the terrible spectacle of the greatest clown attempting gags that are not funny,’ the Monthly Film Bulletin commented.38 Penelope Houston, writing in Sight and Sound, suggested that the old master had let himself down and short-changed others awaiting a strong cinematic exposé of American anti-communism: The true, great satire on McCarthyism that Chaplin might have given us would not have been content with pointing out that committees can easily be made to look foolish and that people who stand in the way of a machine are likely to get hurt. There is also the state of mind, the climate in which the excrescence flourishes. Missing it, the film misses more than that: the great weapon of laughter misfires; the McCarthyist committee is drenched, but not lampooned.39

By allowing personal rancour to intrude into the film, Chaplin probably elicited irritation as much as compassion from audiences. Difficult to love off screen at the best of times because of his unbridled conceit, the onetime ‘tramp’ now possessed fabulous wealth which obviously immunized him from the worst of the deprivations suffered by most of HUAC’s victims. By playing a monarch, Chaplin also appeared to be asserting his superiority over the other blacklistees.40 The fact that by the time of the film’s release in late 1957 McCarthy himself was dead and the United States had begun to recover its political sanity no doubt diminished some of the film’s power as a topical critique.41 For all this, elements within the British press did review A King in New York favourably and, while it was obviously far from one of the best of Chaplin’s 80 films, his name alone was still enough to attract a large number of interested viewers (and potential support for the blacklistees’ cause). The film did not have the verve and arresting satire of his anti-fascist polemic The Great Dictator (1940), but its dissenting punch was sufficient to register disapproval in official American quarters. The film would not be shown in the United States until 1973.42 Wisconsin-born Joseph Losey was setting out on his Hollywood career rather than nearing the end of it when he was blacklisted in 1952. Losey had already carved out a successful career in the theatre in the 1930s and 1940s, first as the director of the Marxist-oriented Federal Theater Project’s ‘Living Newspaper’ productions, later as Bertolt Brecht’s collaborator on the Los Angeles and New York stagings of Galileo. Between 1948 and 1951, he made five feature films, including a remake of Fritz Lang’s M in 1950.43 In 1947 Losey was a vocal defender of HUAC’s first Hollywood

Alternative Images targets, including Adrian Scott, the producer of The Boy with the Green Hair. His friendship with the blacklisted and exiled Brecht, his sponsorship of composer Hans Eisler (whose brother, Gerhardt, was the head of the Communist Party in the DDR), and his own membership of the CPUSA rendered him extremely vulnerable when HUAC’s investigations of the film industry were revived in 1951. Losey’s ‘naming’ by witness Leo Townsend a year later led to his flight to Britain, where he would live and work until moving his base of operations to France in 1976.44 Losey’s collaboration while in Britain with playwright Harold Pinter – on The Servant (1963), Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1971) – would establish his reputation as one of the most skilful, intellectual exponents of post-war cinema.45 Losey found himself in something of a creative wilderness in 1950s Britain. Reduced initially to penning scripts for the British Transport Commission, he directed only a handful of low-budget melodramas.46 The Intimate Stranger (1955) and Blind Date (1959) illustrated Losey’s resorting to allegory and double entendre to hit back at perceived McCarthyite injustices. The Intimate Stranger was developed from a screenplay by Howard Koch, writing under the pseudonym ‘Peter Howard’, and told of the blackmailing of British-based Hollywood director Reggie Wilson (Richard Basehart) by pathologically jealous studio employee Ernest Chapel (Mervyn Johns). Chapel, who resents the American’s attempts to transform a smallscale, Ealing-style studio into just another component of the Hollywood dream factory, exploits Wilson’s womanizing reputation by rigging a staged affair in order to estrange the film-maker from his studio boss father-in-law. Wilson falls victim to the machinations of an informer, is blacklisted and almost driven insane. Only when the plot is uncovered and the conspirators arrested is Wilson’s innocence proven to his detractors.47 Blind Date was, as Colin Gardner points out, ironically both the product and subsequent victim of Losey’s last major bout with the Hollywood blacklist, whose influence still reached far afield even in the late 1950s.48 In 1958, Losey had intended to shoot an atomic disaster script written by fellow exile Ben Barzman, with Columbia’s financial backing and the popular young German actor Hardy Kruger in the lead role. When this proposal collapsed due to Columbia’s fear of being associated with the two ‘names’, producer Sidney Box offered Blind Date to the same creative team. Another blacklistee, Millard Lampell, was brought in to help rewrite Eric Ambler’s original script.49 Blind Date expanded the exile-as-pariah theme of The Intimate Stranger through the tale of a London-based Dutch artist, Jan van Rooyen (Kruger), who is framed for the murder of his

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British Cinema and the Cold War ‘girlfriend’, Jacqueline (Micheline Presle). The woman is actually Lady Helen Fenton, who has been jealously masquerading as the real Jacqueline in order to kill her husband’s mistress and arrange for the unsuspecting van Rooyen to be apprehended with the pay-off money. Only the classconsciousness of the proletarian investigating Welsh detective, Morgan (Stanley Baker), saves the down-at-heel artist from a McCarthy-style railroading by an old boy network, headed by Chief Inspector Sir Brian Lewis (Robert Flemyng), that is unwilling to doubt the aristocrat’s word. ‘While Jan and Morgan’s working-class backgrounds evoke obvious sympathies with Communist fellow-travellers,’ writes Gardner, ‘Sir Brian and the police establishment are contiguous with the hard-line sanctimony of HUAC’.50 Blind Date gave Losey his first critical and commercial success in Britain but in the United States the film ran foul of the renewed anti-communist paranoia triggered by recent revelations of cracks in the blacklist’s own ‘Iron Curtain’.51 ‘Alleged REDS, in partnership with ex-NAZI sell BLIND DATE to PARAMOUNT,’ screamed Variety, referring to Kruger’s membership of the Hitler Youth. Paramount was persuaded to drop its scheduled distribution of the film in late 1960 by an incensed American Legion that labelled Blind Date communist propaganda. The film’s box-office bellyflop ruined Losey’s attempts to forge a long-term deal with Columbia, despite having in September 1960 signed a repentant anti-communist oath for the company.52 The Damned (1961) is one of Losey’s least-known features,53 but it arguably amounts to the most profound cinematic critique on dominant Cold War values made in Britain during the period covered by this book. When James Carreras, Hammer’s managing director, hired Losey for the project, he expected a straight-forward adaptation of H.L. Lawrence’s novel The Children of Light, and a film which fitted Hammer’s trademark package of low-budget horror-cum-sci-fi.54 During filming in May and June 1961, however, Losey refashioned the screenplay to reflect more pressing socio-political issues. Rewrites by West Indian playwright Evan Thomas, with whom Losey shared ‘a certain political kinship’, distanced the film yet further from the book. The result was, on one level, a strange hybrid of two genres: a variation on the science-fiction staple of the mad scientist run amok (with utopian fantasies of building a new master race in the laboratory), combined with the 1950s teddy-boy film. On another level, The Damned fused the themes of class, education, violence and mass destruction to concoct a uniquely uncompromising and subversive formula.55

Alternative Images

17. Class experiment: Looking forward to Armageddon, the on-screen Bernard (Alexander Knox) preaches to the cold-blooded elite of the future. The Damned (1961).

Like Village of the Damned (Wolf Rilla, 1960) and Children of the Damned (Anton M. Leader, 1964), Losey’s film has at its core a group of mysterious children, but the similarities are misleading. Losey’s children are the product not of an alien invasion but of the paranoid minds of the scientific and governmental establishment. Having all been born in the same week to mothers accidentally exposed to an unknown kind of radiation, the cold-blooded eleven-year-olds are held captive in a sealed underground cave – half nuclear bunker, half school dormitory – near Weymouth. Deadly to anyone who comes in direct contact with them, the children are being secretly nurtured as the immunized ruling class of the apocalyptic future. Their surrogate father, civil servant/scientist Bernard (Alexander Knox), communicates with his protégés via a system of Big Brotherlike surveillance cameras, oblivious to criticism from his former lover, sculptress Freya (Viveca Lindfors). This grim parable reflects what Losey saw as ‘the irresponsible use of the new atomic powers put into the hands of the human race, and… the lack of responsibility of scientists for what they create’.56

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British Cinema and the Cold War Losey juxtaposes the state-sanctioned, covert violence of the civil service with teenage delinquency in Weymouth itself, chosen for location shooting because of its sleepy yet seedy image and the biological warfare installation supposedly nearby.57 Both forms of violence are presented as complementary mutations of the prevailing social order, in which the real ‘damned’ are not the radioactive children but the indifferent silent majority. Thus the motley crew of ‘teds’, ‘greasers’ and ‘mods’, led by King (Oliver Reed), who terrorize locals and tourists in pseudo-militaristic fashion, and are eventually caught up in King’s sister Joan’s attempts to free the children, serves to underline Weymouth’s social and class degeneration rather than the contemporary threat posed by ‘youth’.58 The gang’s choreographed violence, accompanied by rock lyrics ‘Smash-Smash… Kill-Kill-Kill’ which anticipate Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971),59 is to be deplored. Yet this at least has the virtue of being open and direct, as opposed to what Losey saw as ‘the indirect, hidden, hypocritical violence of the men who assumed the right, through some kind of old school educational system, to corrupt, pervert and brainwash the minds of the young’.60 Losey was, in this respect, attacking the British class system, a ‘liberal’ schooling regime that contained instead of stretching pupils’s imaginations, and the ‘fascist elitism’ which had developed under the threat of the Bomb.61 Swedish-born Freya is the film’s one redeeming, free spirit, invented by Jones and Losey as a creative moral antidote to The Damned’s unrelieved pessimism, and whose bird-like models (sculpted by Elizabeth Frink) react against the sterility surrounding her. Without knowing its gruesome details, until the end, Freya openly despises Bernard’s clandestine experiment, viewing it as the last refuge of a petty, solipsistic mind. ‘A public servant is the only servant who has secrets from his master,’ Freya asserts, and is one who imposes his will by exploiting the people’s weakness, ignorance and fear of the ‘public enemy’.62 Yet, she is ultimately no match for Bernard (‘Losey’s most frightening creation,’ according to James Leahy),63 whose ‘defection’ from decent human behaviour has the stamp of omniscient official support. Having discovered Bernard’s pathetic guinea pigs, briefly liberated from their cave, it is only natural that Freya should be murdered. Personal relationships cannot be allowed to endanger a scheme which implies that a thermonuclear war is both highly probable and only survivable via a vaccination process which turns people into cold-blooded, mindless Orwellian creatures. The final image is of Joan (Shirley Ann Field) and her American boyfriend (Macdonald Carey) drifting out to sea

Alternative Images dying of radiation sickness. Accompanied by the cries of the re-imprisoned children, a helicopter waits above ready to torch the boat and erase all evidence of the break-out. The BBFC seems not to have requested any cuts to The Damned, but the film’s road from the studio to screen was not uneventful. Hammer first insisted that the incestuous allusions between King and Joan be toned down, and then inserted a change relating to Freya’s death against Losey’s wishes. Instead of the impersonal state murder favoured by Losey, in the final cut Freya is shot by Bernard. Commercial rather than political motives probably explain the change, but its political impact was potentially significant. As Vincent Porter argues, ‘This completely altered the meaning of the film by implying that her death was the act of a single mad scientist, rather than the logical outcome of her conflict with the pro-nuclear values of the British state’.64 The distributors, Columbia, then exercised their contractual rights not to put the film out until the last possible moment because of its subversive political message.65 The Damned opened in the West End without a press preview in May 1963, as the second half of an ‘X’-certificate double-bill with Maniac (Michael Carreras), a typical blood-and-gore Hammer chiller about murders by oxyacetylene torch in the Camargue.66 Losey was himself far from convinced by The Damned, believing it fundamentally weakened by the flawed premise that human organisms could transmit radiation without being affected by it.67 Reviewers tended either to find the film weirdly confusing or immensely powerful. The Daily Telegraph spotted the flaw but still thought it a ‘brilliant piece of work… about living-and-dying with the Bomb’. A perplexed Variety critic applauded its ability to convey a ‘fearsome message’ on the one hand, but lamented its failure to take a firm stand on the other. ‘Its social criticism cuts like a whip,’ purred Raymond Durgnat, who rated it one of the most important films of the year, if not the decade. The Observer’s Philip French concurred, hailing it ‘one of the most significant recent British movies, a disturbing work of real importance’.68 The Damned won the Associazione Stampa Guiliana Trieste Premio della Critica at the second International Science Fiction Festival in 1964, but was not released by Columbia in New York until July 1965, its running time cut from 87 to 77 minutes.69 The reviews in the United States were good, but few. Judith Crist’s in the Herald Tribune alluded to the manner in which its production company and distributor had marginalized the film. The Damned was, she wrote, ‘a remarkable movie unsold and, when finally sold, unsung, to be discovered

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British Cinema and the Cold War in a 42nd Street grind house or on the bottom of a light-topped double bill’.70 A decade later, Hammer’s historian emphasized the film’s novel and durable qualities: ‘Since then [1963], the image of a ruthless institutionalized violence has become almost conventional; even so it has never been again portrayed in such memorable images’.71

III An earlier chapter analyzed the CPGB’s efforts to conduct a ‘positive’ Cold War propaganda strategy by disseminating films, largely made in Eastern Europe, which projected the ‘sunshine of living Socialism’. Concomitant with this was the need to use film in a more destructive sense, as a means of attacking and exposing capitalist methods and policy, in order to legitimize communist actions and weaken Western solidarity. Much of the imported Eastern European material which falls into this category was principally intended for consumption within the USSR and the people’s democracies themselves, and consequently tended to look out of place in Britain both in terms of story-lines and its virulent anti-Westernism. For example, the release in 1949 of a sound version of V.I. Pudovkin’s 1928 revolutionary classic, Storm over Asia, complete with new critical references to the United States and Churchill, attracted a new and enthusiastic generation of cinema-goers in the East, but when it was distributed by the Soviet Film Agency in Britain the film engendered negligible interest.72 Much greater interest was aroused among British audiences and politicians when such imports combined Cold War dissent with reinterpretations of the Second World War. A comprehensive analysis has yet to be undertaken of the relationship between the Cold War and the enormous number of films made in Britain and elsewhere in the 1950s and 1960s depicting events during the Second World War. That these films frequently contained coded references to the East–West conflict is beyond doubt. This was to some extent inevitable given the cinema’s predilection for mobilizing past disputes as propaganda vehicles for current conflicts, often, in the British case, to avoid the censor’s antipathy towards ‘controversy’.73 Having spent the years between 1939 and 1945 reinforcing the ‘just war’ thesis, it was a short step for many in the British film industry to refashion the war’s morals in a new, yet equally dangerous, international context. The result was that the Second World War became one of the chief battlegrounds of the Cold War propaganda conflict, with omission just as important as commission. This

Alternative Images goes some way to explain why British and American Second World War films largely elide the USSR’s contribution to the defeat of Nazism.74 What concerns us here, however, are the attempts made by the Eastern European film industries to deploy the Second World War experience, and the reaction to this in Britain. The Fall of Berlin (Michail Chiaureli, 1949) was perhaps the most widely seen of all Soviet-made Second World War films imported into Britain in the 1940s and 1950s.75 A two-part monumental ‘artistic documentary’, shot in the USSR, Germany and Czechoslovakia on Agfacolour stock purloined by the Red Army from the former UFA Studios near Berlin, the film was a ‘textbook summation’ of the Great Patriotic War ‘as Stalin wanted to bequeath it to posterity’. It provided both a justification for the sacrifices of the war effort and a legitimization of the post-war settlement in Europe.76 In early 1952, the film entered Britain under the auspices of the Film Section of the SCR.77 Before its distribution, in April Churchill was given a private showing of the film at Chartwell, and there was another at Westminster for MPs. The Fall of Berlin explicitly condemned Churchill and Roosevelt for their failure to support the Red Army’s decisive campaign against the Wehrmacht, and went a long way towards blaming Churchill personally for causing the long-term rift between the Grand Alliance partners with his insistence on maintaining the British empire.78 The Foreign Office considered banning the film, or at least making alterations to it, but both courses were rejected in favour of a prologue to be shown on screen before the film started. This was a joint BBFC-Foreign Office statement that highlighted the freedom enjoyed in Britain ‘to show the other fellow’s point of view’ and the historical inaccuracies contained within the film. The Russian’s ‘epic defence of Stalingrad’ and triumphant march on Berlin was offset by the attention drawn to the vital and courageous assistance given to the Red Army by the Royal and Merchant Navies, the RAF’s strategic bombing of Germany and Montgomery’s victories in North Africa.79 In the Foreign Office’s opinion, The Fall of Berlin was too obviously one-sided to be effective communist propaganda for British audiences.80 The film did a lot better commercially than most Soviet (or foreign) films in Britain. After a six-week run at the New Gallery in London’s Regent Street, it toured the country, starting with Manchester in July 1952. Some critics rated it as technically better than any British or Hollywood war film yet produced, with the air-raid sequences and final scenes of bitter fighting in the Reichstag terrifyingly real and historically compelling.81 However,

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British Cinema and the Cold War there is no evidence that seeing the film encouraged people to modify their perception either of Britain’s role in the war or of the origins of the Cold War. Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, whom Churchill had contacted in May to ask about the truth of the film’s depiction of Hitler ordering the flooding of the Berlin underground to hold back the advancing Russians, dismissed the film publicly as mythologizing propaganda.82 While the Daily Telegraph thought it ‘likely to satisfy only the simple-minded’, the Daily Mirror’s Fred Majdalany ‘couldn’t help thinking it strange that the country most practised in propaganda should still be so bad at it’.83 The repeated use of the word ‘grotesque’ to describe the film’s portrayal of Churchill at the February 1945 Yalta Conference confirmed the prime minister’s inviolable reputation as ‘the greatest living Englishman’ and hinted at official briefings of critics.84 It was left to the Sunday Times and Evening Standard to point out that The Fall of Berlin had more in common with its British and Hollywood counterparts than first met the eye: ‘Its silence on American and British aid to Russia in the early days of 1941–2 is no more reprehensible than the equal silence of most British and American war films on Russia’s contribution to victory in 1943–44’.85 The main aim of East German cinema – that of educating the public – came across best in films about the past. Propagandistic art, as it developed in the DDR, was based on the convergence of the creative act – at every stage preconfigured and controlled – with ideology. Its consistency, and above all its continuity, was unparalleled throughout Eastern Europe. All studios were owned by the state film organization DEFA, with output reflecting the social conditions and problems of a divided country which had suffered 12 years of Nazi rule.86 In the 1950s and early 1960s, DEFA produced several films that amounted to an Eastern variation on the Western theme of ‘Red fascism’. By drawing links between the Third Reich and the West before, during and after the Second World War, Nazism was first denounced, then disowned, as a particularly virulent strain of capitalism, against which communism was sure innoculation. The DDR lacked official diplomatic representation in London and therefore a base from which to distribute films in Britain. Spotting an opportunity, Plato Films volunteered to act as an intermediary, to the point at which the company was effectively acting as the cultural relations department of a non-existent embassy. This collaboration led to highly acclaimed tours in Britain of the ‘Brecht matinee’ of the Deutsches Theater and Yiddish singer Lin Jaldati, and the importation of film material which ran into difficulties of various kinds.87

Alternative Images Council of the Gods (1950) was scored by Hans Eisler and directed by Kurt Maetzig, a key figure in post-war East German cinema who had helped to establish DEFA and became the director of the Potsdam Film School. The film was intended to be a propaganda super-production of the type made in the USSR, and cost almost three million marks. In it, Maetzig attempted to prove that the Americans had intervened in the 1945–6 Nuremberg war crimes trials to prevent the exposure of their wartime collaboration with the German chemicals giant, I.G. Farben, a notorious contributor to the Nazi Party’s coffers. This was designed to stress the intrinsic connection between Nazism and capitalism and to provide evidence of the early preparations made by ‘big business’ for a renewed confrontation with communism.88 In June 1951, prints of Council of the Gods and Peace Will Win, a film of the World Peace Congress held in Warsaw in November 1950 made by Dutch documentarist Joris Ivens,89 arrived at London airport, having been requested by Ivor Montagu. The films branch of the Board of Trade referred the matter of import licences to the Foreign Office due to the recent minor cabinet interest in DEFA’s Always Prepared. The Foreign Office replied in August, stating that although the showing of the films was undesirable, to prevent their import would require special legislation covering all objectionable propaganda, raising major political issues. Officials agreed, instead, to defer importation to ensure that the films could not be shown in the UK in time to affect British attendance at an imminent communist-organized youth rally in Berlin.90 A similar rally in Dortmund, interpreted by the allied authorities as the signal for a communist revolt in West Germany, was cancelled following a British-led raid on the East German Communist Party’s headquarters in Dusseldorf in September, designed to seize documents, literature and films imported from the East.91 Customs cleared Council of the Gods in September, whereupon Montagu spent several months negotiating with DEFA over the cuts required by the BBFC and the alterations needed to avoid libel charges. A final version was agreed, and the film released in April 1952, distributed by Plato, Contemporary and Bond Films.92 Leaving aside its subtitled form, Council of the Gods was never likely to cause a considerable stir among the majority of British cinema-goers. Its central charge was powerful, but difficult to prove.93 Potentially far more embarrassing to the West was a series of DEFA exports, made in the midto late 1950s, that highlighted the prominent positions Nazi war criminals held in West German society. These revelations were a lot less deniable,

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British Cinema and the Cold War and appeared to run directly counter to the West’s humanitarian image. Holiday on Sylt (1959) was made by documentarists Annelie and Andrew Thorndike and targeted Heinz Rheinefath, who had been responsible for crushing the resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto and was currently the mayor of the German holiday town of Sylt. Operation Teutonic Sword (1958), also made by the Thorndikes, accused the commander of NATO’s Central European Land Forces, Hans Speidel, of having played a role in the assassination of French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou and King Alexander of Yugoslavia in Marseilles in October 1934. These two murders, hitherto attributed to Croatian terrorists, were held to have greatly benefitted Hitler’s foreign policy objectives.94 Both films were banned outright by the BBFC on the grounds that they were, according to an internal censors’ memo, ‘critical of a government with which this country has friendly relations’.95 Coupled with the cuts and bans applied to other films from communist countries during this period – such as the Thorndikes’ The German Story (1956) and Ivens’s Song of the Rivers (1954) 96 – this decision prompted Ivor Montagu to question whether the BBFC’s fear of controversy had changed in 20 years. ‘For all the ritual denials of political censorship,’ he asserted, ‘the ultimate political powers remain couched in reserve; first as the film life of Nurse Cavell could be banned by the “independent” B. B. of F. C. at a moment when Neville Chamberlain was making up to Hitler, so the board at the present day could invent reasons for forbidding film revelations of the Nazi past of West German functionaries when Macmillan was making up to Bonn’.97 John Trevelyan, the BBFC’s secretary, publicly denied that any political motives lay behind the decision to ban the films, arguing instead that ‘We did not think that cinema entertainment was the right place for putting over defamatory material about living persons’.98 The fact that Speidel sued Plato for libel shortly after the London County Council had granted Operation Tentonic Sword an exhibition certificate, an action which drove the distribution company to the verge of bankruptcy, did little to justify Trevelyan’s dubious public reasoning, as he later admitted.99 The combined strength of the BBFC and the country’s strict laws of libel can, therefore, be seen as an impediment to foreign films that sought to change the British public’s attitudes towards the Cold War. At the same time, the restrictions imposed on such oppositional films by the state or the industry mainstream need to be placed in perspective. Had the Thorndikes’ campaign against ‘Western fascism’ reached British cinema screens, its effect on public opinion would probably have been negligible.

Alternative Images Eastern European imports continued to carry the overtly communist label anathema to most people. This was especially so after political events such as the Soviet invasion of Hungary – which the CPGB refused to condemn – seemed to spell out the meaning of communism to them.100 The overall lack of dubbing facilities hampered the distributors’ ability to reach a wide cross-section of British society. Charles Cooper, the director of Contemporary Films, tellingly later confessed to being ‘afraid of taking the risk of going into many working-class areas with a foreign-language film with subtitles’.101 In a visual entertainment market already overflowing with Hollywood imports, and being increasingly squeezed by television (from which the CPGB was banned at election times until 1966),102 the impact of these minority films can only have been marginal at the best of times.

IV At the time of publication in 1957, Lindsay Anderson’s oft-celebrated assault on his fellow film-makers’ socio-political vacuity was arguably more justified in respect to the Cold War than any of the other ‘problems’ he identified. In the ten years since the freezing of East–West relations in 1947, only one British film – The Young Lovers – had appeared which gave concrete expression to public dissonance about the conflict. The opening of the Cold War’s second decade, however, can now be seen as marking something of a watershed in the film industry’s treatment of the phenomenon. Apparently influenced first by the mid-1950s ‘thaw’, and then by the establishment of pressure groups like CND actively campaigning against aspects of government policy, a number of films emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s that questioned official Cold War doctrine. By no means all of these films were intended or interpreted as a direct attack on government policy. There was a significant difference, for instance, between the dystopic tragedy of The Damned and the irreverence of CarltonBrowne of the FO. One sought to criticize, to assail, to change conventional opinion; the other to mock and lampoon. Yet even satirical swipes were sufficient to cause offence at times given Whitehall’s sensitivity to Cold War cinematic protest. Taken together, these films suggested that the Cold War was now the stuff of farce, exploited by both sides for personal, petty gains, and a breeding ground for hypocrisy and malevolence. We should not make too much of this dissent, as the dozen or so films analyzed above represent a tiny fraction of those made during this period. Of these, several suffered cuts at the hands of the censors or producers

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British Cinema and the Cold War which had the effect of diluting their messages. Others were either aimed at a minority audience, were poorly distributed or banned outright from British cinemas. Only a handful attracted sufficiently large numbers to make them commercially successful. Not one was reported as having had an impact on public opinion relating to the Cold War generally or to the particular dimension of the conflict on which the film focused. Part of the explanation for there being so few oppositional films made or distributed in Britain lies in the wider political and cultural environment. Although far from being an impartial observer, the philosopher and CND activist Bertrand Russell had a valid point when he wrote in 1963 of the manner in which Cold War ideology made attempts at domestic political change appear at best misguided, at worse compliant with alleged Soviet aggression: ‘The elimination of dissent was achieved by identifying dissent in the popular mind with support of the “enemy”, the “devil”, the irreconcilably wicked Russians’.103 Added to this was the in-built conservatism of a film industry fighting a losing battle against television. The 1960 annual report of the Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association called for ‘the making for general release of films of family entertainment value’ and ‘the avoidance of themes and incidents which… were offensive to the reasonable taste and standards of those whose patronage was necessary to the health and future of the industry’.104 There were independent producers who challenged this type of selfdenying ordinance, but their room for manoeuvre was, as John Hill writes, ‘severely compromised by the exercise of combine power which greatly restricted both the possibilities for raising finance and opportunities for securing exhibition’.105 A liberal/left strand in the alternative film culture became more pronounced from the late 1950s with the growth of CND and the New Left, out of which Anderson’s own March to Aldermaston (1959) emerged.106 It is significant, however, that thereafter Anderson, the only Free Cinema director who was actively involved with the left and with left film-making and who remained persistently anti-conformist, concentrated on the ‘kitchen sink’ rather than the Cold War. Films on single-issue campaigns continued to be made intermittently by CND and other anti-orthodox groups through the 1960s, but these made little headway against a general cinematic backdrop of ‘business as usual’.107

Conclusion

When British cinema’s coverage of the ‘first Cold War’ is looked at in its entirety, a pattern begins to emerge. Between 1945 and 1949, with the notable exception of newsreels, the film industry steered away from comment, as if unsure about the audience’s readiness to go to war again, especially against a country which had fought so bravely to defeat Hitler. The early 1950s saw an end to this ‘phoney war’, with film-makers updating story-lines and characters from the inter-war years to produce a cinema of anti-communist paranoia, reaching across several genres to encompass the ‘realistic’ depiction of life in the East as well as science-fiction invasion fantasies. Slowly but surely thereafter, the East–West conflict assumed more of an institutionalized appearance, in which suspicion and fear of ‘the other side’ were still much in evidence, but the threat of any sort of attack – either from within or from without – appeared less serious. By the late 1950s, signs of mild dissent had begun to appear, with comedies, melodramas and science-fiction productions registering a growing sense of unease with the spiralling arms race and the state’s interference in people’s lives in the name of national security. By the end of the period covered here, while a majority of films continued to project Western values consciously and unconsciously, a minority had become self-reflexive to the point of self-critique.

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British Cinema and the Cold War The Damned, Dr Strangelove and The Ipcress File marked the opening of a new phase dating from the early 1960s in which the cinema’s overall support for Cold War orthodoxy mingled with cynical asides about the lamentable dimensions of an increasingly claustrophobic and authoritarian conflict. Aside perhaps from the creature films and fantasies of mass destruction – many of which mimicked Hollywood material – the Cold War did not produce any new filmic genres in Britain. The menace of ‘the other’, most importantly, easily slotted instead into well-worn, pre-existing structures. Nevertheless, there were certain distinctive elements to British cinema’s treatment of the conflict. First, compared with its Soviet and American counterparts, the British film industry generally approached the Cold War in a far less histrionic and crude manner. There was no British equivalent of the USSR’s hysterically anti-capitalist They Have a Native Land (A. Faintsimmer, 1950), in which the Americans are depicted as greedy perverts coercing children into slavery and prostitution in post-war Germany; nor of Hollywood’s Night People (Nunnally Johnson, 1954), in which Gregory Peck’s army colonel describes communists as ‘head-hunting, blood thirsty cannibals out to eat us up’.1 This is not to say that British films were less politically motivated or ideologically coloured. It might be argued that by eschewing vulgarity and playing off against the insensate hatred of Hollywood’s more extreme anti-communist offerings, British films faithfully reflected that society’s more moderate self-image and thereby fulfilled one of the chief requirements of successful propaganda as defined by John Grierson: ‘the art of public persuasion’. Second, simply by being situated in Britain or the empire, these films highlighted more directly than Hollywood imports the impact of the Cold War on the British people. The dangers of communist sabotage presumably appeared less fictional when located in a Midlands engineering factory or a London power station rather than, in the case of Hollywood’s I Was a Communist for the FBI, in a Pittsburgh steel factory. Cold War ‘alienation’ might have been more believable when centred on a sleepy community in Cumbria rather than in the American Midwest. Third, overall British films were ideologically less homogeneous than either Hollywood or the Soviet film industry during the period, though whether this made any appreciable difference to the audience’s attitudes towards the Cold War is another matter. British film-makers suffered far less political coercion than their American or Eastern European counterparts, but dissent was marginalized almost as effectively, and certainly more discreetly, by the circuits’ disproportionate control of the industry and a quietly effective system of censorship.

Conclusion Though the British film industry reflected the dominant attitudes found in British politics throughout the Cold War, the cinema was not an instrument of the state. The abolition of the MOI deprived the British government of any direct means of controlling film output after April 1946, other than in the constructive sense of sponsoring official ‘public information’ material through various Whitehall departments. The film industry was neither purged of ‘subversives’ by a British version of HUAC, nor forced into manufacturing a variant on Soviet socialist realism. A small number of producers and directors were privy to ministerial or official advice, the legacy of an established intimacy between senior film industry executives which had been strengthened during the Second World War. But there was no equivalent to Hollywood’s Cold War ‘militant libertists’, the consortium of film-makers and actors constructed in the 1950s and approved at the highest levels of US government. The film industry certainly appears not to have been infiltrated as deeply as Fleet Street by official propagandists, though this might be due to the absence of any sort of film-makers’ ‘lobby’ with which officials could hold non-attributable briefings. A great deal of cinematic Cold War material should therefore be viewed as the combination of pre-1941 anti-communism and wartime anti-Nazism, with many film-makers working on the assumption that Britain needed to play a central role to protect liberal democracy against a form of Soviet lebensraum. Considerable official influence could, nonetheless, still be imparted on the film industry’s Cold War output. This took the form of ministerial overtures, either directly with ‘friendly’ producers or directors, or via the BBFC; the security services’ supervision and financial support for particular film projects; and the IRD’s dissemination of anti-Soviet propaganda (either through the press, via contacts in Wardour Street, or in association with its sister agencies in the United States), many of whose themes strongly resembled those pursued by British film-makers. Added to this was the government’s control over the allocation of certain financial resources for film-makers who as a group were already inclined to be noncritical of the economic system that nurtured their industry. The backdrop to all of this was a general climate of anti-communism throughout society fostered, though by no means wholly created, by a political establishment that was growing increasingly media- and image-conscious. It is of course impossible to quantify the effects of the cinema’s coverage of the Cold War on audiences. While the conflict was, in one way or another, the subject of at least 130 British-made feature films between 1945 and 1965, except for the rare Mass Observation survey there is no

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British Cinema and the Cold War way of telling how viewers related to what unspooled before them. As David Lodge reminds us in his late 1950s novel The Picturegoers, the ritualistic playing of the national anthem at the end of the day’s last showing was no guarantee of the audience’s patriotism. Neither should it be taken for granted that viewers always saw what was on screen, let alone agreed with the film-maker’s interpretation. ‘The cinema was a kind of low-voltage brothel for half its customers,’ writes Lodge, ‘and an ice-cream parlour with entertainment for the other half ’.2 It is also true at times that too much can be read into the mass media’s power to influence opinion. As Richard Pells put it in reference to American ‘cultural imperialism’, considered by many to be at the heart of the Cold War, sometimes ‘a movie is just a movie and a cheeseburger is just a cheesburger’.3 While recognizing that films can mimic as well as project, one does not have to adhere to the ‘magic bullet’ theory of communication to suggest that films (and other media) when organized in a particular fashion can directly affect public perceptions. British Cold War cinema might not, to borrow Bernard Cohen’s formulation, have told film-goers what to think, but it surely played a significant role in telling these people what to think about.4 These films at least helped to define how many aspects of the Cold War – political, economic, ideological, material and personal – were perceived by the millions who saw them. Official propagandists were not always successful in dictating or setting the Cold War agenda for the mass media, but they and many in the film industry helped to establish a ‘primary interpretation’ of the conflict. Alternative views were forced to relate largely to this dominant frame of reference.5 This goes some way to explain how fully the Cold War was ‘internalized’ by many people in Britain, including by those in Westminster and Whitehall. George Kennan, the architect of US ‘containment’ policy, criticized the ‘frontier mentality’ of the US Cold War stance in the 1950s, suggesting that State Department policy was to some extent being modelled on the Hollywood Westerns of that era.6 It is quite possible that a similar self-fulfilling process took place in Britain, with politicians and officials (including that most famous of film ‘buffs’, Winston Churchill) having their Cold War fears and beliefs reinforced by the very cinematic images they promoted. Such projection/reflection conundrums point to the need for a richer and more nuanced appreciation of the dynamics of Cold War culture and politics in Britain, one which specifically challenges the conventional understanding of the evolution and nature of the post-1945 anti-Soviet consensus.

Notes on the Text

Introduction 1.

2.

3.

The literature on Soviet cinema is wide-ranging. For recent analyzes in English see Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (eds), The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema Documents, 1896–1939 (Cambridge, MA, 1988); Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (eds), Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema (London, 1991); Anna Lawton (ed.), The Red Screen: Politics, Society and Art in Soviet Cinema (London, 1992); Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917–1953 (Cambridge, 1992); Dmitry Shlapentokh and Vladimir Shlapentokh, Soviet Cinematography, 1918–1991: Ideological Conflict and Social Reality (New York, 1993); Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (London, 1998); Richard Taylor and Derek Spring (eds), Stalinism and Soviet Cinema (London, 1993). For general accounts of Hollywood’s representation of political and social affairs see, for instance, Kevin Brownlow, Behind the Mask of Innocence: Sex, Violence, Prejudice, Crime: Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era (Los Angeles, 1990); Philip Davies and Brian Neve (eds), Cinema, Politics and Society in America (Manchester, 1981); Leif Furhammar and Folke Isaksson, Politics and Film (London, 1971). On American cinema and McCarthyism see Nora Sayre, Running Time: Films of the Cold War (New York, 1982); Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (London, 1979); Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (New York, 1997); Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names (New York, 1980). Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War (London,

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4.

5.

6.

1994); Paul Swann, The Hollywood Feature Film in Post-War Britain (London, 1987); Thomas H. Guback, ‘Hollywood’s international market’ in Tino Balio (ed.), The American Film Industry (London, 1976), pp. 387–409; Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (London, 1997). The literature on the diplomatic, military, economic and political dimensions of this period of the Cold War – often referred to as the ‘first Cold War’ – is vast. Recent publications incorporating available Western, Soviet and Chinese documentation include John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford, 1997); Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA, 1996); Vojtech Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (Oxford, 1996); and the bulletins and working papers of the Cold War International History Project, Washington DC. The other period of sustained tension between East and West was between 1979 and 1985 – the ‘second Cold War’ – by which point the cinema’s influence had waned considerably, chiefly in favour of television. Cinema attendance figures in Britain reached their zenith in the five years after 1945, with some 30 million out of a population of almost 51 million attending the cinema each week. In 1950 the average man and woman in Britain went to ‘the pictures’ 28 times a year and British cinema attendance represented more than ten per cent of the world total. Audiences tailed off thereafter but did not plummet like those in the United States; there were 1.6 billion cinema admissions in 1946, 501 million in 1960 and 357 million in 1963. The working class accounted for 84 per cent of the adult audience in 1954 but, with the exception of radio, no other medium competed with the cinema in terms of its ability to permeate so widely through different classes, regions, sexes and age groups. By the mid-1960s the cinema and radio had been superseded by television: there were fewer than 800,000 television licences in 1951 and close to 11 million in 1960. In 1963 there were 2,181 cinemas nationwide, compared with 4,709 in 1946. Stuart Laing, Representations of Working Class Life, 1957–1964 (London, 1986), pp. 109–11; John Spraos, The Decline of the Cinema: An Economist’s Report (London, 1962), p. 14; J. Stacey, Star Gazing (London, 1994), p. 83; Swann, The Hollywood Feature Film in Post-War Britain, p. 6. Apart from a small number of articles or chapters focusing mainly on individual films (referred to elsewhere in this study), the Cold War has attracted little interest among historians of British cinema. This is despite the large number of studies on the British cinema covering the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Nicholas Pronay recently calculated that of the 3,866 films made in and licensed for public exhibition in Britain between 1948 and 1985, only 92 (2.4 per cent) related to the Cold War. This ‘miniscule’ number was, in his opinion, merely a ‘source for illustration’ rather than a serious body of ‘evidence’ for historians of either British cinema or the Cold War. Nicholas

Notes on the Text

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

Pronay, ‘British film sources for the Cold War: The disappearance of the cinema-going public’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 13, no 1, 1993, pp. 7–17. Peter Weiler, British Labour and the Cold War (Stanford, CA, 1988), especially pp. 189–229. See also Jonathan Schneer, Labour’s Conscience: The Labour Left, 1945–51 (Boston, MA, 1988) and Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, 1948–1977 (Stroud, 1998). Richard Thurlow, The Secret State: British Internal Security in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1994), pp. 285–6. For the purpose of this study, a Cold War film is defined as any film that portrayed, or evoked, something relating to the conflict, irrespective of genre. A film is categorized as British if made in the country. Britain was much the biggest overseas Hollywood market after the Second World War, a market made all the more important by the American film industry’s reliance on exports to cover a diminishing internal market (due principally to television) and the effective closure of large parts of the Communist World. In 1951, for instance, Hollywood accounted for 70 per cent of all films shown in Britain. For further details see Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War, p. 249; Swann, The Hollywood Feature Film in Post-War Britain. Russell E. Shain, ‘Hollywood’s Cold War’, Journal of Popular Film, vol. 3, no 4, 1974, pp. 334–50, 365–72.

Chapter 1 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 532–3; P.M.H. Bell, John Bull and the Bear: British Public Opinion, Foreign Policy and the Soviet Union, 1941–45 (London, 1990), pp. 70–3. Asquith’s father was H.H. Asquith, Liberal prime minister 1908–16. R.J. Minney, Puffin Asquith: The Biography of the Honourable Anthony Asquith: Aristocrat, Aesthete, Prime Minister’s Son and Brilliant Film Maker (London, 1973), pp. 90–91, 105; item 1, Anthony Asquith collection, British Film Institute Library (hereafter BFI Library); James Chapman, The British At War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939–1945 (London, 1998), pp. 77–8. Mike Raphael, ‘“The Demi-Paradise” of British film propaganda about Russia, 1941-43’, unpublished MA thesis, Polytechnic of Central London, 1981, pp. 9, 14, 17; Minney, Puffin Asquith, pp. 107-8. Bell, John Bull, pp. 48–9; P.M.H. Bell and Ralph White, Images of the Soviet Union at War, film, with accompanying booklet, Inter-University History Film Consortium, London, 1990. Draft speech by Balcon, October 1945, G/100, Michael Balcon collection, BFI Library.

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7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15

16.

17.

18.

Frances Thorpe and Nicholas Pronay, British Official Films in the Second World War: A Descriptive Catalogue (Oxford, 1980), p. 119; Chapman, The British At War, pp. 202, 241–2; Robert Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1939–1948 (London, 1989), pp. 206–7. Lenin, cited in Shlapentokh and Shlapentokh, Soviet Cinematography, p. 21. Rachael Low, The History of British Film, vol. II: The History of the British Film, 1906–1914 (London, 1997), pp. 23, 32. Keith Jeffrey and Peter Hennessy, States of Emergency: British Governments and Strikebreaking since 1919 (London, 1983), pp. 5–7, 58; Raymond Challinor, The Origins of British Bolshevism (London, 1977), pp. 195–278. The Times, cited in Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: From the Crimea to the Falklands: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth Maker (London, 1989), p. 149; James Klugmann, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, vol. I: Formation and Early Years, 1919–1924 (London, 1980), pp. 78–87. These included Horace Wykeham Can Newte, The Red Fury: Britain under Bolshevism (London, 1919); John Cournos, London under the Bolsheviks (London, 1920); and Charles Ross, The Fly-by-nights (London, 1921). For a fuller listing, see Anthony G. Cross, The Russian Theme in English Literature: From the Sixteenth Century to 1980 (Oxford, 1985). Nicholas Reeves, Official British Film Propaganda during the First World War (London, 1986); Michael Sanders and Philip M. Taylor, British Propaganda during the First World War, 1914–1918 (London, 1982), pp. 124–30. Low, The History of the British Film, 1906–1914, pp. 86–7. Public Record Office [hereafter PRO] CAB 27/83 Government Publicity Committee report, 12 July 1921; Jeffrey and Hennessy, States of Emergency, pp. 10–39, 53–4, 66. Rachael Low, The History of British Film, vol. IV: The History of the British Film, 1918–1929 (London, 1997), pp. 156–99; Rachael Low, The History of British Film, vol. VII: The History of the British Film, 1929–1939: Film Making in 1930s Britain (London, 1997), pp. 115–270; Stephen G. Jones, The British Labour Movement and Film, 1918–1939 (London, 1987), pp. 13–17. Low, The History of the British Film, 1906–1914, pp. 84–90; Nicholas Pronay, ‘The political censorship of films in Britain between the wars’ in Nicholas Pronay and D.W. Spring (eds), Propaganda, Politics and Film, 1918–1945 (London, 1982), p. 112; James C. Robertson, The British Board of Film Censors: Film Censorship in Britain, 1896–1950 (London, 1985), p. 18. James C. Robertson, The Hidden Cinema: British Film Censorship in Action, 1913–1972 (London, 1989), pp. 155–6; Neville March Hunnings, Film Censors and the Law (London, 1967), pp. 408–9; Robertson, Film Censorship in Britain, pp. 18, 21–2. Robertson, Film Censorship in Britain, pp. 22–3.

Notes on the Text 19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

Robertson, The Hidden Cinema, pp. 27–31, 33–6; Temple Wilcox, ‘Soviet films, censorship and the British government: A matter of the public interest’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 10, no 3, 1990, pp. 275–92; Robertson, Film Censorship in Britain, p. 35. Jeffrey Richards, ‘The British Board of Film Censors and content control in the 1930s: Images of Britain’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 1, no 2, 1981, pp. 95–116; Jeffrey Richards, ‘The British Board of Film Censors and content control in the 1930s: Foreign affairs’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 2, no 1, 1982, pp. 43–5. See BBFC Scenario Reports (BFI Library): A Soviet Marriage (1931/38), The Red Light (1931/39), Things I Remember (1932/43), Soviet (1933/139, 202), Sabotage (1933/155), The Rumour (1933/216), Red Square (1934/274), Machines (1934/289). Steve Nicholson, British Theatre and the Red Peril: The Portrayal of Communism, 1917–1945 (Exeter, 1999), pp. 10–26 especially. See, for instance, Brownlow, Behind the Mask of Innocence, pp. 442–62; Furhammar and Isaksson, Politics and Film, pp. 203–4. Stephen White, Britain and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Study in the Politics of Diplomacy, 1920–1924 (London, 1979); Michael Hughes, Inside the Enigma: British Officials in Russia, 1900–1939 (London, 1997). D.L. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy (Oxford, 1988), pp. 230–2; McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, pp. 527–8. Bioscope, 13 February 1919. As a measure of the sensitivity surrounding cinematic depictions of the USSR in this period, The Times condemned this film as a reckless attack on Tsarism. Robertson, Film Censorship in Britain, pp. 21–2. Challinor, The Origins of British Bolshevism, pp. 171–3. Robertson, Film Censorship in Britain, pp. 25–6. Rachael Low, Film-making in 1930s Britain (London, 1985), p. 69. Ibid., pp. 68–9, 71–2; Richards, ‘The British Board of Film Censors and content control in the 1930s: Foreign affairs’, pp. 39–48. BBFC Scenario Reports, 1933/236, BFI Library; Richards, ‘The British Board of Film Censors and content control in the 1930s: Foreign affairs’, pp. 39–48. Kinematograph Weekly, 18 April 1940. On this conservatism see Jeffrey Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1930-1939 (London, 1984); Roy Armes, A Critical History of the British Cinema (London, 1978); Tony Aldgate, ‘Comedy, class and containment: The British domestic cinema of the 1930s’ in James Curran and Vincent Porter (eds), British Cinema History (London, 1983), pp. 259–64; Tony Aldgate, ‘Ideological consensus in British feature films, 1935-47’ in K.R.M. Short (ed.), Feature Films as History (London, 1981), pp. 94–112; Stephen C. Shafer, British Popular Films, 1929–1939: The Cinema of Reassurance (London, 1997).

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British Cinema and the Cold War 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

Karol Kulik, Alexander Korda: The Man Who Could Work Miracles (London, 1990); Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace, pp. 44, 136–7. BBFC Scenario Reports, 1935/395, 395a, BFI Library. David Parkinson (ed.), Mornings in the Dark: The Graham Greene Film Reader (Manchester, 1993), p. 224. Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace, p. 230. Bioscope, 3 July 1924; Low, The History of the British Film, 1918-1929, pp. 122–3. Bioscope, 16 January 1929 and 22 January 1930. Christopher Andrew, Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (London, 1987), pp. 425–79. Film publicity material, Box 19, James Anderson collection, BFI Library; Picturegoer, vol. 14, no 81, September 1927, pp. 12–13. Robertson, Film Censorship in Britain, p. 67. Andrew, Secret Service, p. 465. Tyrrell was one of the pioneers in Britain of the concept of cultural propaganda and of news as a new addition to the conduct of diplomacy. He was one of the founding fathers of the Foreign Office News Department, and acted as the chairman of the British Council between 1934 and 1936. Nicholas Pronay, ‘The political censorship of films in Britain between the wars’, pp. 113–15, 121–2; Philip M. Taylor, ‘British official attitudes towards propaganda abroad 1918-39’ in Pronay and Spring (eds), Propaganda, Politics and Film, 1918–1945, pp. 39–40. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, pp. 54, 529. This argument is further elaborated upon in Armes, A Critical History of the British Cinema, pp. 113 ff. For more on ‘quota quickies’, the crop of low-budget, low-quality films produced in Britain in the late 1920s through the 1930s in order to meet the requirements of the 1927 Cinematograph Act, see Lawrence Napper, ‘A despicable tradition? Quota quickies in the 1930s’ in Robert Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book (London, 1997), pp. 37–47. Picturegoer, 16 March 1935; Kinematograph Weekly, 28 May 1936; Monthly Film Bulletin, 30 May 1936. See, especially, Rachael Low, The History of British Film, vol. VI: The History of the British Film 1929–1939: Films of Comment and Persuasion (London, 1997). Jones, The British Labour Movement and Film; Bert Hogenkamp, Deadly Parallels: Film and the Left in Britain, 1929–1939 (London, 1986). Jones, The British Labour Movement and Film, pp. 166–7. Hogenkamp, Deadly Parallels, pp. 82–122; Jones, The British Labour Movement and Film, pp. 168–72. Hogenkamp, Deadly Parallels, pp. 18-19, 176-8, 180-2; Jones, The British Labour Movement and Film, pp. 154–7; T.J. Hollins, ‘The Conservative party and film propaganda between the wars’, English Historical Review, vol. 96, April 1981, pp. 359–69.

Notes on the Text 52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

57.

58.

59. 60. 61.

62.

63. 64. 65.

66.

Jones, The British Labour Movement and Film, pp. 154–5; Hogenkamp, Deadly Parallels, pp. 34–5. Jones, The British Labour Movement and Film, pp. 181–3. Hogenkamp, Deadly Parallels, pp. 130–1, 152. For the debate surrounding the cinema’s propaganda role during the war, and the conflict’s impact on the British film industry, see Basil Wright, The Long View: An International History of the Cinema (London, 1976), pp. 193–206; Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Britain Can Take It: British Cinema in the Second World War (Oxford, 1986); Clive Coultass, Images for Battle: British Film and the Second World War, 1939–1945 (London, 1989); Philip M. Taylor (ed.), Britain and the Cinema in the Second World War (Basingstoke, 1988); Chapman, The British At War; Murphy, Realism and Tinsel. Geoff Hurd, ‘Notes on hegemony, the war and the cinema’ in Geoff Hurd (ed.), National Fictions: World War Two in British Films and Television (London, 1984), p. 17. Michael Balcon, Michael Balcon Presents… A Lifetime of Films (London, 1969), pp. 41–2; John Ellis, ‘Made in Ealing’, Screen, vol. 16, Spring 1975, p. 119; John Ellis, ‘Art, culture and quality’, Screen, Autumn 1978, pp. 42–7. Raphael, ‘“The Demi-Paradise” of British film propaganda about Russia, 1941–43’, pp. 19–21; Geoffrey Macnab, J. Arthur Rank and the British Film Industry (London, 1994) pp. 121–31. Macnab, J. Arthur Rank, pp. 6, 11, 31–2. Ibid., pp. 4, 34, 116. The British Film Industry: a Report on its History and Present Organisation, with Special Reference to the Economic Problems of British Feature Film Production (London, 1952); James Park, The Lights That Failed (London, 1990), pp. 75–87; Macnab, J. Arthur Rank, pp. 164, 170, 189. By 1950 the Board of Trade was supporting the NFFC to the tune of £6 million. PRO CAB 128/17 CM(50)16, 30 March 1950. Board of Trade, Tendencies to Monopoly in the Cinematograph Films Industry (the Palache Report) (London, 1944); Macnab, J. Arthur Rank, pp. 45–6, 197. John Hill, Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema, 1956–1963 (London, 1986), p. 37; Macnab, J. Arthur Rank, p. 209. Paul Swann, The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926–1946 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 168, 172. Reports on Soviet Film Agency, files 178–9, 1941–2, and MontaguBeaverbrook correspondence, file 311a, July–October 1942, Ivor Montagu collection, BFI Library. Documentary News Letter, vol. 3, no 4, April 1942, p. 63; Raphael, ‘“The Demi-Paradise” of British film propaganda about Russia, 1941–43’, pp. 18–19; ACTT, Action! Fifty Years in the Life of a Union (London, 1983), pp. 19–23.

203

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68.

69.

70.

71.

72.

73.

74.

75. 76.

V. Porter and C. Litewski, ‘The Way Ahead: Case study of a propaganda film’, Sight and Sound, vol. 50, no 2, Spring 1981, p. 110; Chapman, The British At War, p. 219; Raphael, ‘“The Demi-Paradise” of British film propaganda about Russia, 1941–43’, pp. 18–19; Bell, John Bull, passim. N. Rattigan, ‘The Demi-Paradise and images of class in British wartime films’ in W.W. Dixon (ed.), Re-Viewing British Cinema, 1900–1992: Essays and Interviews (New York, 1994), pp. 83–93; Jeffrey Richards, ‘National identity in British wartime films’ in Taylor (ed.), Britain and the Cinema in the Second World War, pp. 50–2. Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (New York, 1987), pp. 185–221; Sayre, Running Time, pp. 57–78; David Culbert (ed.), Mission to Moscow (Madison, WI, 1980). Bell, John Bull, pp. 6–7; Aldgate and Richards, Britain Can Take It, pp. 277–98; Ian Christie, Arrows of Desire: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (London, 1994), p. 52; K.R.M. Short, ‘The White Cliffs of Dover: Promoting the Anglo-American alliance in World War Two’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 2, no 1, 1982, pp. 3–25. The first use of the term ‘Cold War’ is commonly attributed to Democratic Party grandee Bernard Baruch, in a speech before the legislature of the state of South Carolina in April 1947. H.B. Swope, former editor of the New York World, had suggested the term to him. Duncan Towson, A Dictionary of Contemporary History: 1945 to the Present (Oxford, 1999), p. 81. On this see David Reynolds (ed.), The Origins of the Cold War in Europe: International Perspectives (New Haven, 1994), pp. 77–95; John Kent, British Imperial Strategy and the Origins of the Cold War (Leicester, 1993); Peter Weiler, ‘Britain and the first Cold War: Revisionist beginnings’, Twentieth Century British History, vol. 9, no 1, 1998, pp. 127–38; Sean Greenwood, Britain and the Cold War, 1945–1991 (London, 2000). Greenwood, Britain and the Cold War, pp. 32–7. For the debate within the labour movement concerning foreign affairs post-1945, including the ‘third force’, see Weiler, British Labour and the Cold War; Schneer, Labour’s Conscience; Dan Keohane, Labour Party Defence Policy Since 1945 (Leicester, 1993), pp. 1–25. Reynolds (ed.), The Origins of the Cold War in Europe, pp. 83–7; John Zametica, ‘Three letters to Bevin: Frank Roberts at the Moscow embassy 1945-6’ in John Zametica (ed.), British Officials and Foreign Policy, 1945–1950 (Leicester, 1990), pp. 39–97. Reynolds (ed.), The Origins of the Cold War in Europe, pp. 77–95; Greenwood, Britain and the Cold War, pp. 38–72. PRO FO 371/56885/N6092/5169/38G Memorandum on ‘AntiCommunist Propaganda’ by Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, assistant under-secretary superintending information departments, for Russia Committee, 15 May 1946; Ray Merrick, ‘The Russia Committee of the British Foreign Office

Notes on the Text

77.

78.

79. 80.

81.

82.

83.

and the Cold War, 1946–47’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 20, 1985, pp. 453–68. Francis Williams, Nothing So Strange (London, 1970), pp. 217–23; PRO FO 371/47882/N4919 Frank Roberts, British minister at the Moscow embassy, to Christopher Warner, head of the Northern Department, 25 April 1945; FO 371/56736/N4157 Roberts to Foreign Office, 18 March 1946. Donald McLachlan, In the Chair: Barrington-Ward of The Times (London, 1971), pp. 250–1; Richard Cockett, ‘“In wartime every objective reporter should be shot’’: The experience of British press correspondents in Moscow, 1941–5’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 23, 1988, pp. 528–9; PRO FO 371/56886/N9930/5169/38G Minutes of Russia Committee Publicity Sub-Committee meeting, 29 July 1946; ibid., FO 371/56886/N1064/ 5169/38G minutes of Russia Committee meeting, 13 August 1946. Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, pp. 125–37. PRO CAB 129/23 CP(48) 8, 6, 7 Memorandum by Bevin on ‘Future Foreign Publicity Policy’, and interconnected papers, ‘The First Aim of British Foreign Policy’ and a ‘Review of Soviet Policy’, 8 January 1948; Foreign and Commonwealth Office Library and Records Department, IRD: Origins and Establishment of the Foreign Office Information Research Department 1946–48 (London, 1995), pp. 4–6. On the extent of the IRD’s activities between 1948 and 1977, when the organization was closed down by Labour Foreign Secretary David Owen, see Lashmar and Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War; Lyn Smith, ‘Covert British propaganda: The Information Research Department, 1947–77’, Millennium, vol. 9, no 1, Spring 1980, pp. 67–83; W. Scott Lucas and C. J. Morris, ‘A very British crusade: The Information Research Department and the beginning of the Cold War’ in Richard Aldrich (ed.), British Intelligence, Strategy and the Cold War (London, 1992), pp. 85–110; Richard Fletcher, ‘British propaganda since World War Two – A case study’, Media, Culture and Society, vol. 4, no 2, April 1982, pp. 97–109; Wesley Wark, ‘Coming in from the cold: British propaganda and the Red Army defectors, 1945–52’, International History Review, vol. 9, no 1, February 1987, pp. 48–72; Susan L. Carruthers, ‘A red under every bed? Anti-Communist propaganda and Britain’s response to colonial insurgency’, Contemporary Record, vol. 9, no 2, Autumn 1995, pp. 294–318; Tony Shaw, ‘The Information Research Department of the British Foreign Office and the Korean War, 1950–1953’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 34, no 2, April 1999, pp. 263–81. William Crofts, Coercion or Persuasion? Propaganda in Britain after 1945 (London, 1989); Elizabeth Sussex, The Rise and Fall of British Documentary (London, 1975), pp. 161–92. For Fleet Street’s treatment of the Cold War between 1945 and 1949 see Tony Shaw, ‘The British popular press and the early Cold War’, History,

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84. 85.

86.

87. 88. 89.

90.

91.

92. 93.

vol. 83, no 269, 1998, pp. 66–85; Alan J. Foster, ‘The British press and the coming of the Cold War’ in Anne Deighton (ed.), Britain and the First Cold War (New York, 1990), pp. 11–31. The relationship between the BBC and government concerning foreign and defence policies during this period is examined by Anthony Adamthwaite, ‘“Nation shall speak peace into nation”: The BBC’s response to peace and defence issues, 1945–58’, Contemporary Record, vol. 7, no 3, 1993, pp. 557–77. For details of Conspirator see Chapter 2. Monthly Film Bulletin, 31 March 1947, 30 September 1947 and 31 July 1948. Monthly Film Bulletin, April 1947, p. 35. Soviet imports included The End of an Aggressor (Alexander Zarkhy and Josph Heifitz), Military Secret (Vladimir Legoshin) and The Ural Front (Sergei Gerasimov). See Monthly Film Bulletin, 30 September 1946 (p. 128), 30 April 1946 (pp. 50–2), 20 February 1946 (p. 23). Nicholas Pronay, ‘The British post-bellum cinema: A survey of the films relating to World War Two made in Britain between 1945 and 1960’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 8, no 1, 1988, pp. 41–2; Terry Lovell, ‘Frieda’ in Geoff Hurd (ed.), National Fictions, pp. 30–4; Charlotte Brunsdon and Rachel Moseley, ‘“She’s a foreigner who’s become a British subject”: Frieda’ in Alan Burton, Tim O’Sullivan and Paul Wells (eds), Liberal Directions: Basil Deardon and Post-war British Film Culture (Trowbridge, 1997), pp. 129–36. David Quinlan, British Sound Films: The Studio Years, 1928–1959 (London, 1984), p. 246. BBFC Scenario Reports, Dress Optional, 1949/11, 11a, February–March 1949, BFI Library. Daniel J. Leab, ‘The Iron Curtain (1948): Hollywood’s first Cold War movie’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 8, no 2, 1988, pp. 153–188; Robertson, Film Censorship in Britain, p. 173. H.C. Debs., 5th Series, vol. 453, cols. 1178–9, 14 July 1948; H.C. Debs., 5th Series, vol. 454, cols. 227–8, 20 July 1948; Lashmar and Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, pp. 21–8; Christopher Mayhew, A War of Words: A Cold War Witness (London, 1998). Tom Harrison, ‘British opinion moves towards a new synthesis’, Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 2, no 3, 1947, pp. 327–41; George Gallup (ed.), The Gallup International Public Opinion Polls: Great Britain 1937–1975, vol. 1: 1937–1964 (New York, 1976), p. 132; Shaw, ‘The British popular press and the early Cold War’, pp. 66–85. CP/IND/MONT/9/1 Film Section Committee minutes, Ivor Montagu papers, National Museum of Labour History. Kinematograph Weekly, 23 June 1959; CP/IND/MONT/9/1 Letter from Ivor Montagu to editor of Kinematograph Weekly, 4 July 1949, Ivor Montagu papers, National Museum of Labour History.

Notes on the Text 94. 95.

96.

97. 98.

99.

100. 101. 102.

103. 104.

105.

SCR 1965 Annual Report, CP/IND/MONT/9/2, Communist Party Archive, National Museum of Labour History. See, for example, Marcia Landy, British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930–1960 (Princeton NJ, 1991), pp. 182–3; Lynette Carpenter, ‘“I never knew the old Vienna”: Cold War politics and The Third Man’, Film Criticism, vol. 11, Fall–Winter 1987, pp. 56–65. The Third Man won the golden palm (first prize) at the 1949 Cannes Film Festival, Reed was nominated for an Oscar for Best Director, and Robert Krasker received one for Best Photography. Reed won the British Film of the Year Award for the third year running, following Odd Man Out (1947) and The Fallen Idol (1948). The Third Man was the top film at the British box-office for 1949. Anton Karas’s zither score conquered the hit parade as ‘Harry Lime’s Theme’, selling four million copies in Britain alone. Robert F. Moss, The Films of Carol Reed (London, 1987), pp. 179, 189–90; Murphy, Realism and Tinsel, p. 245. In a poll of the British film trade, published by the British Film Institute in September 1999, The Third Man was voted the best British film of all time. Guardian, 23 September 1999, p. 3. Michael Shelden, Graham Greene: The Man Within (London, 1994), pp. 318–19, 324; Kulik, Alexander Korda, pp. 256–8. Anthony Glees, The Secrets of the Service: British Intelligence and Communist Subversion 1939–51 (London, 1987), pp. 150–2, 197–9, 271–83. Graham Greene, Ways of Escape (London, 1980), passim; Shelden, Graham Greene, pp. 310–16, 321–3; Charles Drazin, In Search of The Third Man (London, 1999), passim. Shelden, Graham Greene, pp. 310–16, 324; Moss, The Films of Carol Reed, p. 189. Moss, The Films of Carol Reed, pp. 186–7. See, for instance, the selection of reviews in Edgar Anstey, Roger Manvell, Ernest Lindgren and Paul Rotha (eds), Shots in the Dark (London, 1951), pp. 90–7; Moss, The Films of Carol Reed, p. 179; Monthly Film Bulletin, 30 September 1949, p. 159. Murphy, Realism and Tinsel, pp. 146–67. Swann, The British Documentary Film Movement, pp. 150–73; Sussex, The Rise and Fall of British Documentary, pp. 112–60; Thorpe and Pronay, British Official Films in the Second World War, p. 7; Nicholas Pronay, ‘The newsreels: the illusion of actuality’ in Paul Smith (ed.), The Historian and Film (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 95–119. Pronay makes the point that newsreels had lost some of their credibility during the war because of the MOI’s tight censorship and the ‘rota’ system, which restricted the cameramen’s access to events. This made the newsreels depressingly similar and instilled a degree of distrust among audiences. PRO CAB 129/23 CP(48) 8 Memorandum by Bevin on ‘Future Foreign Publicity Policy’, 8 January 1948.

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British Cinema and the Cold War 106. PRO FO 953/1051/P1011/94 Memorandum on ‘Information, Propaganda and the Cold War’, produced by D.R. Hay-Neave for the Overseas Information Services (Official) Committee, 17 November 1951. 107. PRO INF 6/555 Berlin Airlift. 108. PRO CAB 124/75, 79, 595, 1109 Publicity for defence services, rearmament and NATO, 1948-51; FO 953/4J Anglo-American relations, 1947. 109. PRO FO 953/127/P8894 Brief for meeting of European Recovery Programme Information Policy Group, annex E: ‘Films and E.R.P.’, 1 November 1948. 110. Ibid.; Macnab, J. Arthur Rank, p. 171. 111. Howard Thomas, ‘The future of the newsreel’, British Kinematography, August 1950, pp. 53–5. 112. Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the UK: vol. 4: Sound and Vision (Oxford, 1979), p. 597; Geoffrey Cox, See it Happen: The Making of ITN (London, 1983), pp. 5–9. The BBC transmitted its own television Newsreel between January 1948 and July 1954. Initially designed to be an entertaining supplement to radio news bulletins, its ‘news’ element soon increased substantially. The number and range of BBC television documentaries also grew, including a series on the Korean War presented by Christopher Mayhew. In the early 1950s, Mayhew became a highly experienced television journalist, thus strengthening the BBC’s links with the IRD. Briggs, Sound and Vision, pp. 591, 662. For an analysis of the BBC’s television Newsreel during the Korean War see Howard Smith, ‘The BBC television newsreel and the Korean war’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 8, no 3, 1988, pp. 227–52. Smith shows how all newsreels, including the BBC’s, strongly supported the UN’s cause during the conflict. 113. Peter G. Boyle, The Origins of the Cold War, 1945–50 (Inter-University History Film Consortium, Archive Series no 2, 1976), p. 3; Nicholas Pronay, ‘British newsreels in the 1930s: 2. Their policies and impact’, History, vol. 57, no 189, February 1972, pp. 63–72. 114. G.F. Sanger, ‘Propaganda and the newsreel’, Sight and Sound, vol. 15, no 9, Autumn 1946. 115. Nicholas Pronay, ‘The news media at war’ in Pronay and Spring (eds), Propaganda, Politics and Film, p. 193; Boyle, The Origins of the Cold War, p. 3. 116. Boyle, The Origins of the Cold War, p. 4. 117. The Origins of the Cold War 1945–50, CD-ROM (based on an original compilation by Peter Boyle, Inter-University Film Consortium/British Universities Film and Video Council, 1999, commentary by John Young and Jerry Kuehl). 118. PRO FO 1110/50/PR230/G P.F.D. Tennant to Ralph Murray, 16 April 1948, and Minute, 6 October 1948; FO 1110/50/864 Minute by P. McLaren, 12 November 1948.

Notes on the Text 119. Boyle, The Origins of the Cold War, p. 13. ‘War in Korea’: Gaumont-British News, Library no 1732, issue date, 10 August 1950. See also John Bourne and W. Scott Lucas, Britain and the Korean War (Inter-University History Film Consortium Archive Series, no 5, 1992). 120. Robert Hewison, In Anger: Culture in the Cold War, 1945–1960 (London, 1981), pp. ix–x.

Chapter 2 1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

The Listener, 3 August 1950, pp. 147–8. Alan R. Booth, ‘The development of the espionage film’, Intelligence and National Security, vol. 5, no 4, October 1990, pp. 136–43; Tom Ryall, Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema (London, 1986); Aldgate and Richards, Britain Can Take It, pp. 96–137; Penelope Houston, Went the Day Well? (London, 1992). Richard J. Aldrich (ed.), Espionage, Security and Intelligence in Britain 1945–1970 (Manchester, 1998), pp. 1–2. Landy, British Genres, pp. 29–30. Conspirator was the first film Saville had made in Britain for ten years. H. Mark Glancy, ‘Hollywood and Britain: MGM and the British “quota” legislation’ in Jeffrey Richards (ed.), The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema 1919–1939 (London, 1998), pp. 57–74; Victor Saville’s unpublished memoirs, vol. 2, pp. 206–8, Victor Saville collection, BFI Library. Daniel J. Leab, ‘How red was my valley: Hollywood, the Cold War film, and I Married A Communist’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 19 (1984), pp. 62–4; Sayre, Running Time, pp. 64–5. Leab, ‘How red was my valley’, p. 64; Shain, ‘Hollywood’s Cold War’, pp. 334–50, 365–72. For the troubled financial state in which MGM found itself in the late 1940s, and the dominance Mayer imposed on his studio, see H. Mark Glancy, ‘MGM film grosses, 1924–1948: The Eddie Mannix ledger’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 12, no 2, 1992, pp. 127–44. Sayre, Running Time, p. 79; Leab, ‘How red was my valley’, p. 65; D.W. Ellwood, ‘The 1948 elections in Italy: A Cold War propaganda battle’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 13, no 1, 1993, pp. 21, 26–7. Monthly Film Bulletin, February–March 1950, p. 31. New York Times, 10 December 1948, p. 5. On blacklisting see Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood. Cross, The Russian Theme in English Literature, p. 78; Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, p. 281; Sayre, Running Time, pp. 64–5. Slater’s novel was titled The Conspirator.

209

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British Cinema and the Cold War 12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

Kinematograph Weekly, 4 August 1949; Variety, 3 August 1949. Leab, ‘How red was my valley’, pp. 59–88. Willie Thompson, The Good Old Cause: British Communism 1920–1991 (London, 1992), p. 78; Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour in Power, 1945–1951 (Oxford, 1984), p. 295. For a full analysis of the strength of domestic communism in post-war Britain, and the response of the authorities and press towards it, see Phillip Deery, ‘“The secret battalion”: Communism in Britain during the early Cold War’, Contemporary British History, vol. 13, no 4, Winter 1999, pp. 1–28; Richard Thurlow, The Secret State, pp. 279–93; John Callaghan, The Far Left in British Politics (Oxford, 1987), pp. 161–73. Peter Hennessy and Gail Brownfeld, ‘Britain’s Cold War security purge: The origins of positive vetting’, The Historical Journal, vol. 25, no 4, 1982, pp. 965–73; David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York, 1978), pp. 487–520 especially. John P. Rossi, ‘The British response to McCarthyism, 1950–54’, MidAmerica: An Historical Review, vol. 70, no 1, 1988, p. 5. David Caute, Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life (Oxford 1994), pp. 113–164; Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, pp. 399–429. See Chapter 7 for details of the blacklistees’ activities in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. Weiler, British Labour and the Cold War, p. 228; R. Whitaker, ‘Fighting the Cold War on the home front: America, Britain, Australia and Canada’, Socialist Register, 1984, pp. 23–43; Hennessy and Brownfeld, ‘Britain’s Cold War security purge’, pp. 965–73. PRO CAB 130/71/GEN377 Committee on Subversive Activities’ minutes, August–September 1951; John C. Tibbets, ‘After the fall: Revisiting the Cold War – A report on the XVIIth IAMHIST conference, 25–31 July 1997, Salisbury, MD’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 18, no 1, 1998, p. 116; Hennessy and Brownfeld, ‘Britain’s Cold War security purge’, pp. 965–73. Steve Parsons, ‘British “McCarthyism” and the intellectuals’ in Jim Fyrth (ed.), Labour’s Promised Land? Culture and Society in Labour Britain 1945–1951 (London, 1995), pp. 225–46. Hewison, In Anger, pp. 30–1. Victor Saville’s unpublished memoirs, vol. 2, pp. 206–8, Saville collection, BFI Library. The 1940s represented a violent era in the history of relations between Britain and Irish republicanism. On this, and the IRA’s links with the Third Reich, see Tim Pat Coogan, The I.R.A. (London, 1987), pp. 247–79. Daily Herald, 29 July 1949; Monthly Film Bulletin, vol. 16, no 188, 31 August 1949. Monthly Film Bulletin, vol. 18, no 207, April 1951. Landy, British Genres, pp. 35–6, 185–6.

Notes on the Text 28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

34. 35. 36.

37.

Chapman, The British at War, pp. 102–3; Landy, British Genres, pp. 35–6; Jeffrey Richards and Anthony Aldgate, The Best of British: Cinema and Society, 1930–1970 (Oxford, 1983), pp. 75–86. The Cinema Studio, October 1951, p. 11; author’s interviews with Roy Boulting, 30 March and 5 May 1998. Jones, The British Labour Movement and Film, pp. 59–88; author’s interviews with Roy Boulting, 30 March and 5 May 1998; letter from General Secretary of British Film Producers Association to Michael Balcon, head of Ealing Studios, 28 November 1947, G15, and speech by Balcon ‘Thirty Years of Film-Making’, dated 26 May 1949, G/98a, Michael Balcon collection, BFI Library. H.C. Debs., 5th Series, vol. 478, col. 36, 24 July 1950; H.C. Debs., 5th Series, vol. 489, cols. 500–2, 20 June 1951; H.C. Debs., 5th Series, vol. 511, col. 170, written answers, 19 February 1953; Justin Davis Smith, The Attlee and Churchill Administrations and Industrial Unrest, 1945–55: A Study in Consensus (London, 1990), p. 17–31. The Portsmouth incident continued to be used as evidence of communist sabotage. See, for instance, John Baker White, Sabotage is Suspected (London, 1957). I am grateful to David Turner for pointing out this source. PRO PREM 8/1525 ‘Overseas Operations (Security of Forces) – defeat of a Bill’, 1950; PREM 8/1525 memorandum from the prime minister on ‘Overseas Operations (Security of Forces) Bill’, 15 November 1950; FO 371/86762/NS1053/28/G Russia Committee informed of Cominform’s sabotage strategy by the IRD, 10 October 1950; CAB 130/64/GEN336/1 draft broadcast by Minister of Labour and National Service, George Isaacs, 23 September 1950; Peter Wilby, ‘Conspiracy obsessed the Attlee cabinet’, The Sunday Times, 4 January 1981. PRO PREM 8/1275 Philip Noel-Baker to Attlee, 3 August 1950; cabinet minutes, CM (50) 54th conclusions, 16 August 1950, extract in same file; Davis Smith, A Study in Consensus, p. 50. When interviewed by the author in March 1998, Boulting claimed that this sub-plot was based on the postwar revelation that British intelligence had learned during the Second World War of a Nazi plan to disrupt London’s electricity supply as a prelude to invasion. Raymond Durgnat, Mirror for England (London, 1970), p. 70. See Chapter 5. The threat posed by communism to the family was also a central theme in Hollywood movies during this period, perhaps the best known being Leo McCarey’s My Son John (1952). See Sayre, Running Time, pp. 94–9; Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and to Love the Fifties (London, 1984), pp. 165–6. A scene towards the beginning of the film, in which Mansfield acts as legal adviser to the dockers’ union in defence against newspaper allegations of subversives within its ranks, might have been seen by some viewers as having

211

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38.

39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

having parallels with the Old Bailey trial of seven Liverpool dockers accused of conspiring to organize illegal strikes in April 1951. This had aroused considerable public interest, not least because the defence of the dockers was undertaken by MP Sidney Silverman, a prominent Labour left-winger, who turned the case successfully into a campaign for the abolition of Order 1305, the government’s ban on strikes dating from 1940. See Davis Smith, A Study in Consensus, pp. 29–30. Phillips to Shawcross, 16 May 1951, GS/Film/52, Box 16, General Secretaries’ Papers, Labour Party Archive, National Museum of Labour History; Shawcross’s reply, 28 May 1951, GS/Film/53; Daily Worker, 5 May 1951; H.C. Debs., 5th Series, vol. 488, col. 393–4, 31 May 1951, Tom Driberg’s question to Shawcross concerning the film I Spy Strangers, a proposed early title for High Treason. Daily Worker, 5 May 1951; Daily Express, 4 October 1951; New York Times, 28 October 1951. High Treason press book, BFI Library; Davis Smith, A Study in Consensus, pp. 29–30, 69–81; Douglas Hyde, I Believed (London, 1951); PRO FO1110/277/2919/G Ralph Murray of the IRD to C.F.A. Warner, 13 August 1949; PRO CAB 130/71/GEN377 Committee on Subversive Activities minutes, August–September 1951; Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain 1945–1951 (London, 1992), p. 409; Nigel West, M.I.5. 1945–72: A Matter Of Trust (London, 1982), pp. 46–52. Stephen Guy, ‘High Treason (1951): Britain’s Cold War fifth column’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 13, no 1, 1993, pp. 35–47; Monthly Film Bulletin, vol. 18, no 214, November 1951; Sayre, Running Time, pp. 86–91. The Times, 29 October 1951; Monthly Film Bulletin, vol. 18, no 214, November 1951; Manchester Guardian, 25 October 1951. Evening Standard, 25 October 1951; Monthly Film Bulletin, vol. 18, no 214, November 1951. Phillips to Shawcross, 16 May 1951, GF/Film/52, Box 16, General Secretaries’ Papers, Labour Party Archive, National Museum of Labour History. On the Cold War as an ‘international civil war’ see Ralph Miliband and Marcel Liebman, ‘Reflections on anti-Communism’, Socialist Register, 1984, pp. 11–12. Geoffrey Household, Rough Shoot (London, 1951). Ambler had helped bring the political thriller to maturity in the 1930s, crafting a series of popular novels that were marked out by their verisimilitude and implicit left-wing stance. See Ralph Harper, The World of the Thriller (London, 1974), pp. 32–3. See, for example, Monthly Film Bulletin, vol. 20, no 231, April 1953. Jeffrey Richards, Thorold Dickinson: The Man and his Films (London, 1986), pp. 151–8; Charles Barr, Ealing Studios (London, 1977), p. 147. Richards, Thorold Dickinson, p. 156.

Notes on the Text 51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65.

66.

67.

68.

Ibid., pp. 15–62; George Perry, Forever Ealing (London, 1981), pp. 152–3. Atomic City centred on the kidnapping of a leading atomic scientist’s young son and the FBI’s successful rescue of the boy. Monthly Film Bulletin, June 1952, p. 78. For Churchill’s approval of The Sound Barrier as a means of flying the flag for British post-war technical expertise see PRO PREM 11/123 Churchill’s correspondence with Alexander Korda, mid-1952. Monthly Film Bulletin, December 1954. Picturegoer and Film Weekly, 7 June 1952; film scrapbook, item 29, Anthony Asquith collection, BFI Library. Daily Film Renter, 14 January 1953; Catholic Herald, 30 January 1953; Kinematograph Weekly, 15 January 1953; Daily Mirror, 30 January 1953; What’s On, 29 January 1953. Aldrich (ed.), Espionage, Security and Intelligence, pp. 59–75. David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema (London, 1975), p. 258. Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story (New York, 1990), pp. 426–7. The contours of the ‘Cinema of Empire’ are set out in Jeffrey Richards, Visions of Yesterday (London, 1973), pp. 2–220. Kulik, Alexander Korda, pp. 135–7. Richards, Visions of Yesterday, pp. 5, 122; Landy, British Genres, pp. 112–3. Richards, Visions of Yesterday, p. 123; Landy, British Genres, pp. 113–5. For the motives behind, and advertising of, Ealing’s Eureka Stockade, Where No Vultures Fly, West of Zanzibar and The Overlanders (set in wartime Australia, directed by Harry Watt and released in 1946) see Michael Balcon’s collection (G/1–2, G/16, G/67,G98), BFI Library and Perry, Forever Ealing, pp. 106, 151–2. The Victorian Branch of the Royal Empire Society awarded Watt its first Australian Film Trophy for The Overlanders in 1947 (G/16, Michael Balcon collection). Richards, Visions of Yesterday, pp. 119–22; Landy, British Genres, pp. 113–5. Richards, Visions of Yesterday, pp. 214–6. Richards, Visions of Yesterday, pp. 130–3, 136, 203, 206. Raymond Durgnat (Mirror for England, p. 82) refers to North West Frontier as an ‘elegiac farewell to Empire’. Richards, Visions of Yesterday, p. 5; Susan Carruthers, ‘Two faces of 1950s terrorism: The film presentation of Mau Mau and the Malayan Emergency’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, vol. 6, no 1, Spring 1995, pp. 17–43. Susan L. Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media and Colonial Counter-Insurgency, 1945–1960 (London, 1995); Jeffrey Richards, Thorold Dickinson and the British Cinema (Lanham, MD, 1997), pp. 97–121. PRO FO 953/481/P4708 Minute by R.L. Speaight, 28 May 1949; CAB 130/37/GEN231/4 memorandum on ‘Anti-Soviet and Pro-British Colonial Propaganda’, 16 June 1949.

213

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British Cinema and the Cold War 69. 70.

71.

72.

73. 74.

75.

76. 77. 78.

Gaddis, We Now Know, pp. 152–88. Like James Ramsay Ullman’s novel of the same title, from which Jill Craigie produced a screenplay, Windom’s Way was set in a fictional jungle village somewhere in South East Asia. However, the Monthly Film Bulletin (February 1958, p. 17) was not alone in assuming that the film’s story was based on events in Malaya. PRO FO1110/297/PR23/3 Ralph Murray, IRD, to K.W. Blackburne, director Colonial Office Information Services, 12 April 1950; PRO FO1110/297/PR23/40 David Crichton, commissioner-general for UK in South-East Asia, to Murray, 9 March 1950. Anthony Aldgate, ‘Creative tensions: Desert Victory, the Army Film Unit and Anglo-American rivalry, 1943–5’ in Taylor (ed.), Britain and the Cinema in the Second World War, pp. 144–67. Macdonald had initially approached the Colonial Office for financial assistance with Operation Malaya. General Sir Gerald Templer, British High Commissioner and Director of Operations in Malaya, welcomed the project but refused to support such commercial ventures. This appeared to have had no effect on the final production, materially or politically. See PRO CO 1022 ‘Note of a Meeting on Information Services’, held in Colonial Office, June 1952. Carruthers, Hearts and Minds, pp. 113–6. Carruthers correctly points out in ‘Two faces of 1950s terrorism’ (pp. 22–4) that, in contrast with S.C. George’s 1951 book of the same title, Annakin’s The Planter’s Wife failed explicitly to identify the bandits as communists, and that this was criticized by several commentators on the grounds of possibly confusing the audience (see, for example, Daily Express, 19 September 1952, p. 6). Nevertheless, producer John Stafford stated publicly that the film was intended to ‘help make the American people as a whole more aware of the part Britain is playing against Communism in the Far East’ (Rank publicity release for The Planter’s Wife, BFI Library). For what it is worth, when writing his autobiography years later, Jack Hawkins had no doubts that Jim Fraser was fighting communist guerrillas, and it is likely many viewers would have seen things the same way. Jack Hawkins, Anything for A Quiet Life (London, 1973), pp. 100–1. Films and Filming, vol. 4, no 5, February 1958, p. 26; Durgnat, Mirror for England, p. 81. It should be noted that Malaya was granted its independence in 1957. Furhammar and Isaksson, Politics and Film, p. 206. Carruthers, Hearts and Minds, pp. 128–9, 167–70. The minutes of a meeting of Kenya’s Director of Operations’ Committee in August 1953 stated that all possible support should be lent to newsreel operators and Rank and other companies attempting to make ‘reasonable feature films’. Cited in Carruthers, ‘Two faces of 1950s terrorism’, p. 36. The filming of any major production in the region was difficult without government approval.

Notes on the Text 79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84.

85. 86. 87. 88.

89. 90. 91.

92. 93. 94.

Carruthers, Hearts and Minds, pp. 156–65. Films and Filming, vol. 1, no 6, March 1955; Monthly Film Bulletin, March 1955.. Films and Filming, vol. 1, no 6, March 1955. Government figures calculated that by the end of the emergency a total of 32 white civilians had been killed by Mau Mau, compared with 1,821 African victims. According to official estimates, over 10,000 Mau Mau were killed by the security forces between 1952 and 1956. Carruthers, ‘Two faces of 1950s terrorism’, pp. 26, 39 (note 28). Thompson, The Good Old Cause, p. 97; Daily Worker, 22 and 31 October 1952; Carruthers, ‘Two faces of 1950s terrorism’, p. 36. These included Follow That Horse (Alan Bromly, 1959), The Man in the Middle (Peter Bourne, 1959), The 39 Steps (Ralph Thomas, 1959), The Breaking Point (Lance Comfort, 1960), Suspect (John and Roy Boulting, 1960), The Angry Silence (Guy Green, 1960), The Sinister Man (Clive Donner, 1961), Master Spy (Montgomery Tully, 1962), The Traitors (Robert Tronson, 1962), Shadow of Fear (Ernest Morris, 1963), Echo of Diana (Ernest Morris, 1963), Ring of Spies (Robert Tronson, 1963), Dead Man’s Evidence (Francis Searle, 1963). Christopher Booker, The Neophiliacs (London, 1969), p. 186. Fienburgh’s book had been published in 1959, shortly after his death in a road accident. Durgnat, Mirror for England, pp. 68–9; Robert Murphy, Sixties British Cinema (London, 1992), pp. 52–3. Brian McFarlane, Sixty Voices: Celebrities Recall the Golden Age of British Cinema (London, 1992), p. 39; Macnab, J. Arthur Rank, pp. 201, 218–9; Vincent Porter, ‘Methodism and the market place’ in Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book, pp. 122–32. Murphy, Sixties British Cinema, p. 54; Monthly Film Bulletin, March 1961. Murphy, Sixties British Cinema, p. 220. In November 1962, John Vassall, a Foreign Office clerk blackmailed into spying for the USSR, was convicted. This was followed by the conviction of the double agent George Blake, who had betrayed many operatives behind the Iron Curtain. In January 1963 Kim Philby reached the safety of the USSR, for which he had been working for many years. News of the affair between War Minister John Profumo and model Christine Keeler, who was simultaneously involved with Soviet intelligence officer Eugene Ivanov, broke later in the year. Lord Denning’s report into the Profumo affair was the first time the existence of MI5 was officially acknowledged by name. Richard Thurlow, The Secret State, p. 298. Geoff Brown, Launder and Gilliat (London, 1977), pp. 148–9. Films and Filming, vol. 10, no 8, May 1964. Brown, Launder and Gilliat, p. 149; Kinematograph Weekly, 2 April 1964, p. 16; Motion Picture Herald, 8 July 1964, p. 84.

215

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British Cinema and the Cold War 95. 96.

97. 98. 99. 100.

101. 102.

103. 104.

105. 106. 107.

108.

West, A Matter Of Trust, p. 115. See, for example, James Chapman, Licence To Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (London, 1999); John Brosnan, James Bond in the Cinema (London, 1972); Kingsley Amis, The James Bond Dossier (London, 1965; Open University Audio Tape, James Bond Case Study (Open University, 1977). Janet Woollacott, ‘The James Bond films: Conditions of production’ in Curran and Porter (eds), British Cinema History, p. 218. Chapman, Licence To Thrill, pp. 88–9; Andrew Lycett, Ian Fleming (London, 1996), pp. 393, 406. Chapman, Licence To Thrill, pp. 93, 101–2, 133, 200–29. Bulldog Drummond and Richard Hannay were the literary creations of ‘Sapper’ (H.C. McNeile) and John Buchan respectively. John Cawelti and Bruce Rosenberg (The Spy Story [Chicago, 1987], p. 50) argue that the Bond movies followed the standard plot formula originally laid down by John Buchan in his classic 1913 novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps: the hero embarking on his mission; entering enemy territory; entrapped; escaping; and finally defeating the enemy. See also Michael Denning, Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller (London, 1987). Sellar, Best of British: A Celebration of Rank Film Classics (London, 1987), p. 64. Le Carré’s work was lent authenticity by his one-time work for British intelligence. On this and the film version of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold see Booth, ‘The development of the espionage film’, pp. 150–2. Murphy, Sixties British Cinema, pp. 222–7; Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing, pp. 346–7. Susan L. Carruthers, ‘The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and the Cold War brainwashing scare’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 18, no 1, 1998, pp. 75–94; Stephen Badsey, The Manchurian Candidate (Trowbridge, 1998). Murphy, Sixties British Cinema, p. 221. Funeral in Berlin (Guy Hamilton, 1966) and Billion Dollar Brain (Ken Russell, 1967). The consensus among historians and commentators is that the majority of Hollywood’s crude anti-communist films pleased neither the public nor critics in the United States, and that they did badly at the box-office. See Biskind, Seeing is Believing, pp. 3, 162; Karel Reisz, ‘Hollywood’s antired boomerang’, Sight and Sound, vol. 22, no 3, January–March 1953, pp. 132–37, 148; Leab, ‘How red was my valley’, p. 82; Leab, ‘The Iron Curtain’, p. 177. CPGB membership, for instance, was a meagre 34,000 in 1963. Thompson, The Good Old Cause, p. 121.

Notes on the Text Chapter 3 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

Michael Balcon, speech at Rank convention, April 1946, G/100, Michael Balcon collection, BFI Library. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (London, 1980), p. 75. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London, 1994), pp. 373–5. See, for example, Hixson, Parting the Curtain and Baruch Hazan, Soviet Impregnational Propaganda (Ann Arbor, MI, 1982). Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, p. 374. Unlike its ‘Iron’ namesake, the ‘Bamboo Curtain’ has no clear origins in Cold War terminology. However, it was in common usage in the West by the mid-1950s as shorthand for the physical and ideological barrier to movement across the borders of the People’s Republic of China. See Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (London, 1990), pp. 627–33. On the importance British official propagandists attached to the use of these and other words from an early stage in the ‘first Cold War’ see inter-departmental memorandum, dated 7 April 1949, PRO FO 1110/192/1314/G. Ralph Murray, IRD head, minuted: ‘The persistent use of particular words or phrases to convey a meaning is an elementary step in any organized publicity’. Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood, the Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at the Movie-Makers (London, 1951), p. 13. Monthly Film Bulletin, September 1957, p. 113; Films and Filming, vol. 3, no 12, p. 27; Sight and Sound, vol. 26, no 4, Spring 1957, p. 209; Monthly Film Bulletin, May 1957, p. 57. PRO FO 975 file. Lashmar and Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, pp. 35, 50. Ibid., p. 29; FO 1110/40 IRD Paper, ‘Points of Resemblance Between Fascism and Communism’, April 1948. PRO 975 file, IRD ‘Factual Background’ papers, dated 1948. See, for example, A Student of Soviet affairs: How Did the Satellites Happen? A Study of the Soviet Seizure of Eastern Europe (Batchworth Press, London, 1952). Batchworth Press formed part of the IRD’s discreet publishing operation, fronted by the former Sunday Express film critic, Stephen Watts. See Lashmar and Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, pp. 100–1 for details. On the debate as to whether the sovietization of Eastern Europe was planned by Stalin from an early stage see Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War and Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity. PRO FO1110/227/2919/G Progress report on the IRD by Ralph Murray, to C.F.A. Warner, 13 August 1949, p. 10. Lashmar and Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, pp. 13, 24.

217

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British Cinema and the Cold War 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

33. 34. 35.

PRO FO1110/227/2919/G Minute by Mayhew on the IRD’s progress report, 28 September 1949. PRO 371/86757/NS1052/72/G Memorandum by Russia Committee on ‘Western Measures to Counter Soviet Expansion’, 14 July 1950. Shaw, ‘The Information Research Department of the British Foreign Office and the Korean War’. Brown, Launder and Gilliat, pp. 125–6. See, for instance, Daily Herald, 21 August 1950, p. 6. Les K. Adler and Thomas G. Paterson, ‘Red fascism: The merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American image of totalitarianism, 1930s–1950s’, American Historical Review, vol. 75, no 4, April 1970, pp. 1046–64; Lashmar and Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, p. 33. Brown, Launder and Gilliat, pp. 125–6; Sight and Sound, January 1950, pp. 10–12. Brian Connell, Knight Errant: A Biography of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr (London, 1955), pp. 217, 239, 241. On the social and political purges in Eastern Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s see, for example, Richard Crampton, Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century (London, 1994), pp. 261–74. Daily Film Renter, 14 April 1950; Kinematograph Weekly, 20 April 1950; Variety, 26 April 1950; Anstey et al. (eds), Shots in the Dark, pp. 172–4. Landy, British Genres, pp. 184–5; Marcia Landy, ‘Melodrama and Femininity in World War Two British Cinema’ in Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book, pp. 79–89. McFarlane, Sixty Voices, p. 19. Milton Leitenberg, ‘New evidence on the Korean War biological warfare allegations: Background and analysis’, Cold War International History Project Bulletin, no 11, Winter 1998, p. 189; Kathryn Weathersby, ‘Deceiving the deceivers: Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, and the allegations of bacteriological weapons use in the Korea’, Cold War International History Project Bulletin, no 11, Winter 1998, pp. 176–85. Monthly Film Bulletin, March 1958, p. 36. Hollywood productions involving biological weapons included The Whip Hand (William Cameron Menzies, 1951) and Brink of Hell (Mervin LeRoy, 1956). David Shears, The Ugly Frontier (London, 1970); Dennis L. Bark and David R. Gress, A History of West Germany, vol. 1: From Shadow to Substance 1945–1963 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 320–3, 462–70. Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London, 1999), pp. 175–7. See Chapter 4 for more on the British Society for Cultural Freedom. Nicholas Wapshott, The Man Between: A Biography of Carol Reed (London, 1990), p. 257. Variety, 30 September 1953. Moss, The Films of Carol Reed, p. 206.

Notes on the Text 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

Wapshott, The Man Between, pp. 260–1. Ibid., p. 260. Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity, pp. 168–90. Moss, The Films of Carol Reed, pp. 206–7. Among the critics only Dilys Powell, who had recently visited Berlin, pointed out the bizarre nature of the film’s ending bearing in mind the Berliners’ freedom to move from one part of the city to another. Sunday Times, 27 September 1953 Reed believed that Mason’s association in the public mind with Rommel would act in the film’s favour, though it is unclear whether there were ideological reasons behind this. Wapshott, The Man Between, p. 259. Gaddis, We Now Know, pp. 113–51; David E. Murphy, Sergei A. Kondrashev and George Bailey, Battleground Berlin: CIA versus KGB in the Cold War (London, 1997). Wapshott, The Man Between, pp. 258–65. Harry Kurnitz mainly wrote the film’s script, based on a Walter Ebert novel. Cited in ibid., p. 267. Ibid., pp. 267–8; Observer, 27 September 1953; Manchester Guardian, 23 September 1953. Clive Hirschhorn, The Films of James Mason (London, 1975), pp. 110–111; Daily Herald, 25 September 1953; Star, 25 September 1953. Wapshott, The Man Between, p. 268. Christian F. Ostermann, The United States, the East German Uprising of 1953, and the Limits of Rollback, Cold War International History Project Working Paper, no 11, December 1994. Monthly Film Bulletin, March 1955, p. 38; Monthly Film Bulletin, February 1956, p. 111; Monthly Film Bulletin, September 1961, pp. 129–30; Monthly Film Bulletin, June 1960; Eva Bartok, Worth Living For (London, 1959). George Urban, Radio Free Europe and the Pursuit of Democracy: My War Within the Cold War (London, 1997), pp. 211–47; Hixson, Parting the Curtain, pp. 82–6. See Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Post-war Britain (London, 1997), pp. 86–115; John Elsom, Cold War Theatre (London, 1992), especially pp. 13–60; Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?; Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War (Chicago, 1993); Herbert Lottman, The Left Bank: Writers, Artists and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War (Boston MA, 1982); Howard Smith, ‘Have they changed at all? The portrayal of Germany in BBC television programmes, 1946–1955’ in Gary Rawnsley (ed.), Cold War Propaganda in the 1950s (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 145–63; Iverach McDonald, The History of The Times, vol. V: Struggles in War and Peace, 1939–1966 (London, 1984), especially, pp. 174–7, 253–7; Hewison, In Anger, especially pp. 1–36. PRO FO 953/145/P3135 Minute by C.F.A. Warner, 1 March 1948; Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 279–82.

219

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British Cinema and the Cold War 53.

54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

64. 65. 66.

David S. Foglesong, ‘Roots of “liberation”: American images of the future of Russia in the early Cold War, 1948–1953’, International History Review, vol. 21, no 1, March 1999, pp. 65–71; Lashmar and Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, p. 33; Hixson, Parting the Curtain, pp. 42, 64, 83, 93–4, 122; Michael Nelson, War of the Black Heavens: The Battles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War (Syracuse, NY, 1997), passim. For the impact of the Cold War on the Christian Church see Owen Chadwick, The Penguin History of the Church, vol. 7: The Christian Church in the Cold War (London, 1993). Films and Filming, vol. 1, no 2, September 1955, p. 13. Sayre, Running Time, pp. 206–10. Raymond Durgnat, Films and Filming, vol. 10, no 7, April 1964, pp. 9–14. Martin Luther was produced by American Louis de Rochement and was a critical and financial success worldwide. Author’s correspondence with Borden Mace, President of RD-DR Corporation (owned by de Rochement) in 1950s, 28 March 1998. For more on de Rochement’s politics and his role in the making of Animal Farm (Halas and Batchelor, 1954) see Chapter 4. Foglesong, ‘Roots of “liberation”’, p. 69. Monthly Film Bulletin, April 1962, p. 51. Ferenc A. Vali, Rift and Revolt in Hungary (Cambridge, MA, 1961), pp. 65–6. PRO FO1110/167–8 files; A Student of Soviet Affairs, How Did the Satellites Happen?, pp. 163–4, 166. Daniel L. Watson, ‘“A Europe worthy of Mindszenty”: Catholic “martyrs and heroes” in American and West European Cold War culture’, p. 2, paper submitted as part of the ‘Cold War Culture: Film, Fact and Fiction’ conference, Indiana University, 18–21 February 1999; Chadwick, The Christian Church in the Cold War, p. 70. Stefan Wyszynski, Catholic Primate of Poland 1949–81, was arrested and confined to various monasteries in 1953 following protests against the communist regime. Although he was allowed to resume his office in 1956, he remained a forceful critic of communist policy until his death. Aloysius Stepanic, Primate of Croatia 1937–60, was imprisoned by the Tito regime between 1946 and 1951 on charges of wartime collaboration with Germany. Made a cardinal by Pope Pius XII in 1952, he declined to go to Rome to receive his red hat for fear that he would not be allowed to re-enter Yugoslavia. Chadwick, The Christian Church in the Cold War, pp. 60–72. Watson, ‘“A Europe worthy of Mindszenty”’, p. 1. Ibid., pp. 3–4. Karel Reisz, ‘Hollywood’s anti-red boomerang’, p. 132; Monthly Film Bulletin, December 1950, pp. 185–6. Treason’s title in the United States was Guilty of Treason.

Notes on the Text 67. 68.

69. 70.

71.

72.

73.

74. 75. 76.

77.

78.

79.

80.

81.

Quinlan, British Sound Films, pp. 225–6. Kenneth Von Gunden, Alec Guinness: The Films (London, 1987), pp. 80–5; Alec Guinness, Blessings in Disguise (London, 1985), pp. 38–49; obituary of Glenville, Daily Telegraph, 10 June 1996, p. 21. This is at odds somewhat with Mindszenty’s marginal role in the anti-Nazi resistance movement and his land-loving conservatism. Shell Magazine, May 1955; Susan L. Carruthers, ‘“Not just washed but dry-cleaned”: Korea and the “brainwashing” scare of the 1950s’ in Rawnsley (ed.), Cold War Propaganda in the 1950s, pp. 47–66. Monthly Film Bulletin, September 1954, p. 134; Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1956, p. 6; Monthly Film Bulletin, March 1956, p. 31; Tony Aldgate, ‘The appliance of science: The Mind Benders’ in Burton et al., Liberal Directions, pp. 213–21; Carruthers, ‘The Manchurian Candidate’. Variety, 27 April 1955; Motion Picture Herald, 17 December 1955; Daily Mirror, 22 April 1955; Daily Express, 22 April 1955; Sunday Graphic, 24 April 1955. Monthly Film Bulletin, June 1955, p. 85; The Times, 25 April 1955; Times Educational Supplement, 6 May 1955; Sunday Express, 24 April 1955; New Yorker, 17 December 1955. Daily Worker, 23 April 1955; Kinematograph Weekly, 14 April 1955. Daily Telegraph, 12 December 1955; Von Gunden, Alec Guinness, p. 80. Columbia marketing material, The Prisoner micro-jacket, BFI Library; Vali, Rift and Revolt in Hungary, pp. 316, 335–7; J. Mindszenty, Memoirs (New York, 1974), pp. 210–11, 235. Mindszenty died in Vienna in 1975. Frederick Barghoorn, Soviet Foreign Propaganda (Princeton, NJ, 1962) and The Soviet Cultural Offensive (Princeton, NJ, 1960); Hazan, Soviet Impregnational Propaganda, pp. 53–73. London’s Film Society was cofounded by Ivor Montagu in 1925 to show important films from overseas and to act as a forum for discussion. The society became a major medium for the dissemination of Soviet films, often making cuts to films at the behest of the BBFC. See Film Society collection, BFI Library. Shlapentokh and Shlapentokh, Soviet Cinematography, pp. 75–82, 121–5; Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, pp. 209–46; Nina Hibbin, Screen Series: Eastern Europe – An Illustrated Guide (London, 1969). Graham Roberts, ‘A cinema of suspicion or a suspicion of cinema: Soviet film 1945–53’ in Rawnsley (ed.), Cold War Propaganda in the 1950s, pp. 105–24. Between 1946 and 1953, according to the Catalog of Soviet Feature Films, the USSR produced a total of 165 films. Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, p. 227. Bert Hogenkamp, ‘The sunshine of socialism: The CPGB and film in the 1950s’ in Andy Croft (ed.), A Weapon in the Struggle: The Cultural History of the Communist Party of Great Britain (London, 1998), pp. 193–4, 197. Ralph Bond, ‘Films’, Arena, vol. 2, no 8, June–July 1951, pp. 48–9; Daily Worker, 15 April 1952.

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British Cinema and the Cold War 82. 83. 84. 85.

Daily Worker, 15 April 1952. Hogenkamp, ‘Sunshine of socialism’, pp. 192–3. Ibid., p. 195. Author’s interview with Stanley Forman, managing director of Plato Films Ltd, 12 March 1998. 86. Author’s correspondence with Charles Cooper, founder of Contemporary Films Ltd, 20 April 1998; Hogenkamp, ‘Sunshine of socialism’, pp. 196–7. 87. Monthly Film Bulletin, August 1952, p. 109; Monthly Film Bulletin, November 1954, p. 156. 88. Monthly Film Bulletin, October 1956, p. 124; Monthly Film Bulletin, August 1956, p. 106; Monthly Film Bulletin, March 1958, p. 39. For more on Soviet cinema post-Stalin see Josephine Woll, Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw (London, 2000). 89. Films and Filming, vol. 2, no 5, February 1955, p. 18. 90. Author’s interview with Stanley Forman, 12 March 1998. 91. Files 225 and 287, Ivor Montagu collection, BFI Library. For further details see Chapter 7. 92. PRO PREM 8/1411/CP(51)86 Memorandum by Morrison, 19 March 1951; Brook, cabinet secretary, to Attlee, 28 March 1951; Morrison to Attlee, 6 April 1951; CP(51)102 Memorandum by Home Secretary Chuter Ede, 9 April 1951; Cabinet conclusions, CM(51) 27th Meeting, 12 April 1951; Cabinet minutes, CM(51) 30th Meeting, 23 April 1951; Bert Hogenkamp, ‘Not quite prepared for Always Prepared: Herbert Morrison and the film of the 1950 East Berlin youth rally’, Contemporary British History, vol. 12, no 1, Spring 1998, pp. 131–8. 93. Author’s interview with Stanley Forman, 12 March 1998. 94. Hogenkamp, ‘Sunshine of socialism’, p. 202. 95. Ibid., p. 201. 96. See, for example, Manchester Guardian, 30 January 1956, p. 4, review of a week of Soviet films shown at London’s Scala Theatre. 97. PRO FO 1110/277/112 Memorandum by Christopher Mayhew, undated but 1949; FO 953/1051/P1011/94 paper on ‘Information, Propaganda and the “Cold War”’ by D.R. Hay-Neave, 17 November 1951. 98. Murphy, Sixties British Cinema, p. 31; Durgnat, Mirror for England, p. 140; Geoff Brown, ‘Paradise found and lost: The course of British realism’ in Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book, pp. 187–97. 99. Vernon Bogdanor and Robert Skidelsky (eds), The Age of Affluence, 1951–1964 (London, 1970), p. 12. 100. Sayre, Running Time, p. 99. 101. Barr, Ealing Studios, pp. 22, 29; Vincent Porter, ‘The context of creativity: Ealing studios and Hammer films’ in Curran and Porter (eds), British Cinema History, pp. 182–93; article written by Balcon on ‘the responsibilities of cinema’, undated but 1946, G/100, Michael Balcon collection, BFI Library; Macnab, J. Arthur Rank, pp. 110–15.

Notes on the Text 102. Barr, Ealing Studios, p. 9. 103. Kinematograph Weekly, 11 January 1945, p. 163. 104. Scott of the Antarctic files, G/79, G81–2, Michael Balcon collection, BFI Library; Barr, Ealing Studios, p. 77; Perry, Forever Ealing, pp. 107–9. 105. Durgnat, Mirror for England, pp. 16–19, 36–9, 44; Perry, Forever Ealing, pp. 112–18, 143–6, 156–9; Barr, Ealing Studios, 98–107; Richards and Aldgate, The Best of British (1983), pp. 99–114. David Lean directed Great Expectations (1947) and Oliver Twist (1948). Genevieve was not made at Ealing but qualifies as a semi-Ealing production because of Cornelius’s direction and Balcon’s influence on the film via his membership of the board of the Rank Organization, the film’s production company. 106. Michael Balcon, A Lifetime of Films, p. 179; Barr, Ealing Studios, p. 189. The Divided Heart was a serious look at the situation faced by post-war refugees centred around two mothers – one German, the other Yugoslavian – caught in a tug-of-war over a child. While East–West relations do not figure prominently, sympathy is elicited for the German father imprisoned by the Soviets after the war and the West’s judicial system in post-war Germany is legitimated. 107. Bacon to Somervell at Board of Trade, July 1949, H/93; correspondence between Balcon and, Labour Party secretary, Morgan Phillipps, 1947–9, G/38, Michael Balcon collection, BFI Library. 108. Balcon’s draft speech for a Foyle’s luncheon, 24 May 1949, G/98, Michael Balcon collection, BFI Library. 109. Correspondence between Balcon and Clarke, August 1955, H/80, Michael Balcon collection, BFI Library. 110. Richards and Aldgate, The Best of British (1983), p. 103. 111. Balcon, A Lifetime of Films, p. 159. 112. Perry, Forever Ealing, pp. 10, 111–12. 113. Richard Winnington of the News Chronicle, cited in Barr, Ealing Studios, p. 58. 114. Reisz, ‘Hollywood’s anti-red boomerang’, pp. 132–7, 148. 115. Rossi, ‘The British response to McCarthyism’, p. 12; Monthly Film Bulletin, July 1952, p. 92; Monthly Film Bulletin, August 1952, p. 113; Monthly Film Bulletin, September 1952, p. 127; Monthly Film Bulletin, May 1952, p. 67. 116. ‘The persistent discontinuities of Europe, including the separation of its past into its western and its eastern streams, are a matter of well-established, if controversial, record’. Z.A.B. Zeman, The Making and Breaking of Communist Europe (Oxford, 1991), p. 15.

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8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

Cited in Walter LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War 1945–1996 (New York, 1997), p. 147. Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (London, 1992), p. 16. George Woodcock, Twentieth Century Fiction (London, 1983), p. 508. Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel (London, 1993), p. 236. Ibid., p. 238. Peter Lewis, George Orwell: The Road to 1984 (London, 1981), p. 1. The American Dial Press, for example, famously rejected Animal Farm in 1944 on the grounds that ‘it was impossible to sell animal stories in the USA’. Cited in Crick, George Orwell, p. 460. Ibid., p. 458. Ibid., pp. 455–6. Bradbury, The Modern British Novel, p. 282. Crick, George Orwell, pp. 450–2, 488; Jeffrey Meyers, A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell (London, 1975), p. 131. Crick, George Orwell, pp. 488–92. PRO FO 1110/319/PR48/82/G Roderick Parkes to Ralph Murray, 25 October 1950; Guardian, 1 July 1996, p. 1; FO1110/221/PR3361 V. Puachev to George Orwell, 24 June 1949; Crick, George Orwell, p. 536. PRO FO1110/189/PR1135/G Minutes by Celia Kirwan, 30 March and 6 April 1949. Three years earlier, Kirwan, who was Arthur Koestler’s sisterin-law, had turned down Orwell’s proposal of marriage. Crick, George Orwell, pp. 483–4. Ibid.; Michael Shelden, Orwell: The Authorized Biography (London, 1991), p. 468. Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Post-War Europe (New York, 1989), pp. 15–16; Crick, George Orwell, p. 17; Independent on Sunday, 14 July 1996, p. 10. PRO FO1110/365/PR127/9 Ralph Murray circular to overseas information officers, 11 December 1950; FO1110/392/PR32/14/51/G and FO1110/392/PR32/89/G for details of the cartoon strip’s production and distribution in 1951; FO 1110/359/PR110/5/G Adam Watson’s report on the IRD’s work and the importance attached to cartoons as propaganda, 15 February 1950. PRO FO1110/392/PR34/41/51 IRD circular, 25 April 1951. Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared – The Early Years of the CIA (New York, 1995), pp. 29–30; Harry Rositzke, The CIA’s Secret Operations (New York, 1977), pp. 149–54; John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (London, 1988), pp. 198–202, 216–24. Thomas, The Very Best Men, pp. 32–3, 63; Howard Hunt, Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent (London, 1975), p. 70; Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 40–1.

Notes on the Text 21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

Thomas, The Very Best Men, p. 33. Howard Hunt, Undercover, p. 70; letter from Borden Mace, President of RD-DR Corporation during the making of Animal Farm, to author, 28 March 1998. For more on Alsop’s role for the CIA in Hollywood see Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 290–3. Ranelagh, The Agency, pp. 218–20 Hixson, Parting the Curtain, pp. 14–16; Foreign Relations of the United States [hereafter FRUS], vol. 1, 1951 (Washington DC, 1979), pp. 144–5, Report to the President by the National Security Council [NSC], 8 August 1951: ‘Status and Timing of Current US Programs for National Security’; FRUS, vol. 1, 1951 (Washington DC, 1979), p. 925, ‘Study Prepared by the Department of State: The Information Program’, 8 August 1951. FRUS, vol. 1, 1951 (Washington DC, 1979), p. 948, ‘Study Prepared by the Department of State: The Information Program’, 12 October 1951. Scott Lucas, ‘Campaigns of truth: The Psychological Strategy Board and American ideology, 1951–1953’, International History Review, vol. 18, no 2, May 1996, pp. 285–6; Thomas Sorenson, The Word War: The Story of American Propaganda (New York, 1968), p. 55; Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 91, 131–3. Incorporated in 1949, the National Committee for a Free Europe was a CIA front organization that encouraged Eastern European émigrés to promote democratic rights in their respective countries. Zanuck was production chief at Twentieth Century Fox until 1956. Reagan was a leading spokesman for the Free Europe Committee’s fundraising arm, Crusade for Freedom. The USIA was created in 1953 and, among other things, sponsored hardhitting anti-communist films calculated to expose communist lies. See USIA report on film propaganda, 19 January 1954, [US] D[eclassified] D[ocument] R[eference] S[ystem], Washington DC, 1976, fiche issued 1986, doc. no. 893. Daily Film Renter, 28 November 1951; letter from Borden Mace to author, 28 March 1998. Letter from Borden Mace to author, 28 March 1998; contract for Animal Farm between RD-DR Corporation and Halas and Batchelor Cartoon Films Ltd, 19 November 1951, Halas and Batchelor Collections, London. Thomas, The Very Best Men, p. 33. James Agee, Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments by James Agee (London, 1963), pp. 242–4 for reviews of 13 Rue Madeleine (Henry Hathaway, 1946) and Boomerang (Elia Kazan, 1947); Ephraim Katz, The International Film Encyclopedia (Basingstoke, 1994), p. 358. Raymond Fielding, The March of Time 1935–1951 (New York, 1978), p. 283; Christian Science Monitor, 30 December 1950; Saturday Evening Post, 29 March 1952; de Rochement information folder in Animal Farm archive, Halas and Batchelor collection, Southampton Institute’s

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33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

39. 40.

41. 42.

43.

44.

International Animation Research Archive (hereafter SIIARA). Grierson was the most important figure in the British documentary film movement of the 1930s. See Ian Aitken, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (London, 1990). Letter from Borden Mace to author, 28 March 1998; Fielding, The March of Time, pp. 35–6; Eugene Lyons, ‘Louis de Rochement: Maverick of the movies’, Reader’s Digest, July 1949. Letter from Borden Mace to author, 28 March 1998; review of Crime of the Century (British title of Walk East on Beacon), Monthly Film Bulletin, September 1952. Production records, Animal Farm archive, Halas and Batchelor collection, SIIARA. Paul Wells, ‘Dustbins, democracy and defence: Halas and Batchelor and the animated film in Britain 1940-1947’ in Pat Kirkham and David Thoms (eds), War Culture: Social Change and the Changing Experience in World War Two (London, 1995), pp. 61–72; Denis Gifford, British Animated Films, 1895–1985 (London, 1987), pp. 117–31. Wells, ‘Dustbins, democracy and defence’, pp. 62-5; Elaine Burrows, ‘Live action: A brief history of British animation’ in Charles Barr (ed.), All Our Yesterdays (London, 1986), pp. 272-85. Wells, ‘Dustbins, democracy and defence’, pp. 70–1. Chancellor of the Exchequer Stafford Cripps was so pleased with Robinson Charley, which explained Britain’s economic problems, that he showed it to Ambassador Averill Harriman, head of the ECA’s Paris headquarters, who took a copy to New York, where de Rochement saw it. Yorkshire Evening Post, 15 December 1951. COI Review: Documentary Films (London, 1948), p. 28. Albert Hemsing, ‘The Marshall plan’s European film unit 1948–1955: A memoir and filmography’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 14, no 3, 1994, pp. 269–97; John Halas’s unpublished autobiography, pp. 18–19, Halas and Batchelor Collections, London. Karl Cohn, ‘Toontown’s reds: HUAC’s investigation of alleged communists in the animation industry’, Film History, vol. 5, no 2, 1993, pp. 190–203. John Halas’s unpublished autobiography, Halas and Batchelor Collections, London, p. 19; production records, Animal Farm archive, Halas and Batchelor collection, SIIARA; author’s correspondence with Harold Whitaker, Stroud-based animator of Animal Farm, 25 February 1998. Roger Manvell, The Animated Film: With Pictures from the Film ‘Animal Farm’ by Halas and Batchelor (London, 1954), p. 5. Halas and Batchelor had made Handling Ships, an hour-long instructional film for the Admiralty in 1945, but showings of this first feature-length animated film made in Britain were restricted to naval personnel. Production records, Animal Farm archive, Halas and Batchelor collection, SIIARA; Manvell, The Animated Film, pp. 5, 11.

Notes on the Text 45.

46.

47

48. 49.

50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

57.

Tabulation of Animal Farm characters, photographs of rough storyboard and synopsis, Animal Farm archive, Halas and Batchelor collection, SIIARA. Contract for Animal Farm between RD-DR Corporation and Halas and Batchelor Cartoon Films Ltd, 19 November 1951, Halas and Batchelor Collections, London; letter from Borden Mace to author, 28 March 1998. Notes on discussion of script changes, September and October 1951, and on changes made in dialogue and timing, September 1952, Animal Farm archive, Halas and Batchelor collection, SIIARA. Halas’s unpublished autobiography, Halas and Batchelor Collections, London, p. 18. Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy, pp. 61, 77, 145–6; Fredric Warburg, All Authors are Equal (London, 1973), pp. 154–7; author’s correspondence with Daniel Bell and Melvin J. Lasky, CCF members in 1950s, September and November 1997; Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 109–11. In 1952, the chairman of the British Society for Cultural Freedom was Harman Grisewood, controller of the BBC’s Third Programme; Goodwin was editor of the journal Twentieth Century and would later become a Features and Drama director at the BBC. Tosco Fyvel, the editor of Tribune, was a member of the CCF steering committee and an important link man to the British Society. The British Society ceased to function in 1953, though not before Warburg had played a significant role in helping to establish and publish the CCF’s pre-eminent magazine, Encounter. By 1958 this journal had a circulation of almost 16,000, larger than any comparable monthly review in the English language. Warburg, All Authors are Equal, pp. 154–7; Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 109–11, passim. Letter from John Halas to Warburg, 12 November 1952, Animal Farm archive, Halas and Batchelor collection, SIIARA. Crick, George Orwell, pp. 560, 567. Secker and Warburg published an illustrated edition of Animal Farm based on the film in 1954. Daily Film Renter, 28 November 1951. De Rochement’s letter to Halas and Batchelor, 1 December 1952, Animal Farm archive, Halas and Batchelor collection, SIIARA. FRUS, vol. 1, 1951 (Washington DC, 1979), pp. 58–60, Directive by the President to the Secretary of State (Acheson), Secretary of Defence (Marshall) and Director of Central Intelligence (Smith), 4 April 1951. FRUS, vol. 1, 1951 (Washington DC, 1979), pp. 178–80, Paper approved by the PSB, 28 September 1951: ‘Role of PSB under 4/4/51 Presidential Directive’; Lucas, ‘Campaigns of truth’, pp. 279–302; Hixson, Parting the Curtain, pp. 17-19. Department of State Bulletin, 18 February 1952; FRUS, vol. 1, 1951 (Washington DC, 1979), pp. 948, 957–9, Study prepared by the Department of State, 12 October 1951: ‘The Information Program’, and

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58. 59.

60.

61.

62. 63.

64.

65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70.

memorandum to the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs (Barrett), 13 November 1951. Turner Shelton, Motion Picture Service, to Cecil B. De Mille, 11 May 1953, cited in Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, p. 289. Memorandum on impact of US commercial films abroad sent by Irwin to Craig, 13 October 1952, DDRS 1989, 562; Memorandum from John Sherman to PSB director concerning Capra movie idea, 7 September 1951, DDRS 1996, 514; White House minute raising possibility of Capra making a Cold War movie, 20 March 1952, DDRS 1990, 555; Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 289–90. For the support given by the CIA in this period to Abstract Expressionism, the American avant-garde, in order to enhance American cultural prestige abroad, see Stonor Saunders, pp. 252–78. Wallace Carroll during this period was acting assistant director of the PSB’s Office of Plans and Policy and executive news editor of the Winston-Salem NC, Journal and Sentinel. Carroll believed that it was the PSB’s ‘manifest destiny’ to ignite a campaign whose ultimate objective was the ‘rollback of Soviet power’. For this and the PSB’s priorities in early 1952 see Hixson, Parting the Curtain, pp. 18–19; Carroll’s suggestions of how to make PSB more effective, 12 September 1951, DDRS 1991, 1683; Carroll’s procedures for PSB panels, 22 January 1952, DDRS 1992, 1691. Richard Hirsch, PSB, to Tracy Barnes, ‘Comment on “Animal Farm” script’, 23 January 1952, PSB Index Files 062.2, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri. Lucas, ‘Campaigns of Truth’, p. 290. This emphasis on the simplicity of the propaganda message also surfaced in January 1952 during the PSB’s consideration of an enhanced role for literature as an anti-communist weapon. Cleverly distributed, clearly written and effectively subsidized, ‘a literature of counter-ideology’ would spell out ‘the lie inherent in Soviet propaganda’. Godel to Barnes, 14 January 1952, DDRS 1991, 1113. Sallie Pisani, The CIA and the Marshall Plan (Edinburgh, 1991), pp. 132–3. Tracy Barnes, PSB deputy director, had formerly been on the OPC payroll and was a personal friend of Frank Wisner’s since his days as a Wall Street lawyer in the 1930s. See Thomas, The Very Best Men, pp. 83–4. George Orwell, Animal Farm (Harmondsworth, 1980), p. 88. Ibid., p. 120. Patrick Murray, Companion to Animal Farm (Dublin, 1985), p. 39; Crick, George Orwell, p. 451. Manvell, The Animated Film, p. 19; script change discussions, March and November 1952, Animal Farm archive, Halas and Batchelor collection, SIIARA; author’s correspondence with Vivien Halas, February 1998. Northern Echo, 12 January 1955; The Times, 17 March 1953. Letter from Borden Mace to author, 28 March 1998.

Notes on the Text 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76.

77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

93. 94.

John Halas’s unpublished autobiography, Halas and Batchelor Collections, London. Kinematograph Weekly, 13 January 1955. Encounter, vol. 4, no 3, March 1955. New York Daily News, cited in Yorkshire Evening Post, 10 January 1955; Catholic Herald, cited in Films and Filming, vol. 1, no 6, March 1955; Daily Mail, 12 January 1955; Daily Worker, 15 January 1955. Tablet, 22 January 1955. Glasgow Herald, 12 January 1955. For the subtle tactical changes which Eisenhower’s strategy of indirectly ‘liberating’ the Eastern European satellites underwent during the mid-1950s see Saki Dockrill, Eisenhower’s New Look National Security Policy, 1953–1961 (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 149–67. The Times, 11 February 1955. Universe, 21 January 1955. Sol Stein, ACCF executive director, letter to Paris Theater manager, 5 January 1955; Stein memorandum concerning discount coupons for Animal Farm, 11 January 1955; Murray Baron circular to trade unions, 17 January 1955; Borden Mace letter to Stein concerning MGM distribution, 14 January 1955: Box 8, folder 2, ACCF archives, Tamiment Library, New York University. Whitaker’s letter to author, 25 February 1998. Author’s interview with Whitaker, 7 April 1998. Daily Film Renter, 24 November 1954; Ralph Stevenson, Animation in the Cinema (London, 1967), p. 81. John Baxter, Science Fiction in the Cinema (London, 1979), p. 99. International newspaper cuttings scrapbook, Animal Farm archive, Halas and Batchelor collection, SIIARA. Le Figaro, 20 January 1955. Hunt, Undercover, p. 70; Hixson, Parting the Curtain, pp. 87–119. John Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of ‘St. George’ Orwell (New York, 1989), pp. 382–98. Warburg, All Authors are Equal, pp. 114–15. Bradbury, The Modern British Novel, p. 284; Lewis, George Orwell, p. 112. Crick, George Orwell, pp. 563–70, 603–4; Shelden, Orwell, pp. 470–4. Nineteen Eighty-Four had evolved in Orwell’s mind over many years but was written principally between late 1947 and Spring 1949. Despite being suppressed by the authorities, Nineteen Eighty-Four (and Animal Farm) did circulate in the Communist World. Both books became acquired reading for dissidents and émigrés. See Dan Jacobsen, ‘The Invention of “Orwell”’, Times Literary Supplement, 21 August 1998, p. 3. Donald McCormick, Approaching 1984 (London, 1980), pp. 12–13; Crick, George Orwell, pp. 564–5, 568. Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Post-war Britain, pp. 99, 102.

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British Cinema and the Cold War 95.

96.

97.

98. 99. 100. 101.

102. 103. 104.

105.

106. 107.

Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputation, p. 274. This one-hour play starring Eddie Albert as Winston Smith and Lorne Greene as O’Brien reached a viewing audience of 8.7 million homes, stayed close to the novel and did well with the critics. BBC Written Archive Centre (hereafter BBC WAC) T5/362/1 Television Drama 1984 (1954), File 1; Manchester Guardian, 14 December 1954. The BBC’s Third Programme had adapted Animal Farm in 1947 and 1952, and Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1950. BBC WAC T5/362/2 Television Drama 1984 (1954), File 2; BBC WAC Press Cuttings P6555, Book 14a Television Programmes, 1953–4; BBC WAC Transcript of Panorama, 15 December 1954; Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputation, pp. 274–80. Daily Express, 14 December 1954; Observer, 19 December 1954; Socialist Leader, 25 December 1954; Daily Mail, 18 December 1954. Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputation, p. 281; The Times, 15 December 1954. Daily Film Renter, 23 December 1954; Daily Mail, 22 December 1954; News Chronicle, 4 July 1955; Daily Herald, 5 August 1955. Douglas Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System (Basingstoke, 1986), p. 132; David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London, 1985), p. 333. Rathvon was president of RKO between 1943 and 1948 until his dismissal by the studio’s new owner, Howard Hughes. In 1949 he formed N. Peter Rathvon and Company to finance motion picture production, setting up headquarters in Europe in 1951. Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, pp. 330–1, 335, 337–8. Charles E. Johnson to PSB senior staff, DDRS, 1991, 550; Sunday Citizen, 14 October 1962. Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy, pp. 48–9, 159–70; Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill, 1987), pp. 268–78; Michael Ciment, Kazan on Kazan (London, 1973), pp. 83–101; Stein’s letter to Sidney Kingsley, 28 March 1955, Box 8, folder 8, ACCF archives, Tamiment Library, New York University. Kazan had notoriously ‘named names’ at HUAC hearings in 1952. Biskind, Seeing is Believing, pp. 169–70. Darkness at Noon, 1954–5, Box 8, folder 8; Nightmare in Red, 1956, Box 8, folder 19; The Wages of Fear, 1955, Box 14, folder 8: ACCF archives, Tamiment Library, New York University. Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy, pp. 71–2; Sidney Hook, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1987), pp. 423–31. Wald, New York Intellectuals, pp. 268–71; William O’Neill, A Better World: The Great Schism – Stalinism and the American Intellectuals (New York, 1982), pp. 305–6; Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (Oxford, 1986), pp. 259–73, 371. Stein was

Notes on the Text

108.

109.

110. 111. 112.

113 114. 115. 116. 117.

118.

119. 120.

ACCF executive director 1953–6, and a member of the Executive Committee of American Friends of Captive Nations. From 1951–3 he had acted as an ideological adviser to the Voice of America in the US State Department. Stein’s letter to Rathvon, 31 January 1955, Box 4, folder 11, ACCF archives, Tamiment Library, New York University; Stein’s correspondence with author, 28 April 1998. Daily Mail, 22 December 1954. The ‘X’ certificate, denoting a film restricted to those who were eighteen years old and over, had been introduced in 1951. Daily Herald, 5 August 1955; Shelden, Orwell, p. 468; Michael Redgrave, In My Mind’s Eye: An Autobiography (London, 1983), pp. 135–43. 1984 microjacket, BFI Library, London. For the links between Nineteen Eighty-Four and James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941), which prophesied a tripartite division of the world, each unit ruled by a self-elected oligarchy, see Crick, George Orwell, pp. 494, 566; Hewison, In Anger, p. 43. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Harmondsworth, 1973), pp. 150 ff. Stein’s letter to Rathvon, 31 January 1955, Box 4, folder 11, ACCF archives, Tamiment Library, New York University. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, pp. 204, 211. Ibid., p. 59; Shelden, Orwell, pp. 476–8. Stein’s letter to Rathvon, 31 January 1955, Box 4, folder 11, ACCF archives, Tamiment Library, New York University. Stein recommended that the film end with Winston Smith dreaming of other rebellious lovers and, counting his fingers, knowing that two plus two still made four despite O’Brien’s torturing. The ending of the film released in the United States corresponded with Orwell’s book, with Winston and Julia estranged and the two of them having learned to love Big Brother. Owing to the lack of production records, it is not entirely clear why two endings with different messages were made. It seems that the BBC flap prompted Columbia Pictures, the distributors, to shoot two endings, one faithful to the novel and the other more hopeful. The latter was also intended for the American market but was switched despite the director’s protests. For a (positive) review of the American version see New York Times, 1 October 1956. For the decisions on the two endings see The Times, 10 March 1957, p. 7. Daily Mail, 27 February 1956. Orwell did admit to his writer friend Julian Symons in February 1949 that he had ‘ballsed it [Nineteen Eighty-Four] up rather, partly owing to being so ill while writing it’, but he adamantly refused to see publishers make changes to his manuscript. Crick, George Orwell, pp. 551, 554. On Blair’s reaction see Daily Mail, 22 December 1954 and 1 March 1956; Sight and Sound, vol. 53, no 2, Spring 1984.

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British Cinema and the Cold War 121. Daily Telegraph, 2 March 1956; Monthly Film Bulletin, vol. 23, no 267, April 1956. 122. Sight and Sound, vol. 25, no 4, Spring 1956; The Times, 1 March 1956; Sight and Sound, vol. 27, no 6, Autumn 1958. 123. Daily Film Renter, 24 February 1956; Daily Telegraph, 2 March 1956. 124. News Chronicle, 2 March 1956; The Star, 2 March 1956; Sunday Times, 4 March 1956; Monthly Film Bulletin, vol. 23, no 267, April 1956. 125. Daily Sketch, 2 March 1956. 126. Sunday Express, 4 March 1956. 127. Daily Herald, 2 March 1956; Daily Mail, 1 March 1956. 128. Evening Standard, 1 March 1956. 129. Sight and Sound, vol. 53, no 2, Spring 1984; New Statesman and Nation, 10 March 1956. 130. The Times, 15 November 1983. 131. Quoted in Hewison, In Anger, p. 27. 132. Orwell, cited in Bradbury, The Modern British Novel, p. 236. 133. George Orwell, The Orwell Reader: Fiction, Essays and Reportage by George Orwell (New York, 1955), pp. 367–79. 134. George Orwell, ‘Toward European unity’, Partisan Review, July–August 1947, reproduced in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. IV: In Front of Your Nose 1945–50 (London, 1968), pp. 370–6. 135. For the development of Orwell’s image as a modern-day prophet see Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputation. 136. Ibid., pp. 282–3. 137. Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 284–6. 138. For further insights see, for example, Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War, pp. 222–71 and Swann, The Hollywood Feature Film in PostWar Britain.

Chapter 5 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

Gaddis, We Now Know, p. 258. Italics in original. Cited in Spencer R. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (London, 1988), p. 106. Sayre, Running Time, p. 4. On the media coverage of the Cuban missile crisis see Montague Kern, Patricia W. Levering and Ralph B. Levering, The Kennedy Crises: The Press, the Presidency and Foreign Policy (Chapel Hill, 1983), pp. 126–7; Cox, See it Happen, pp. 138–151. John Minnion and Philip Bolsover, The CND Story (London, 1983), p. 11. Weart, Nuclear Fear, pp. 103–5; Daily Express, 5 September 1945.

Notes on the Text 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

‘A Report on Public Reactions to the Atom Bomb’, 23 August 1945, cited in Minnion and Bolsover, The CND Story, p. 11. Mick Broderick, Nuclear Movies (London, 1991), pp. 6, 60–3. The Beginning or the End? was carefully censored by the Pentagon and deliberately falsified the historical record in suggesting that the Enola Gay dropped warning leaflets for ten days over Japan before delivering its pestilent cargo over Hiroshima. It also created the misleading impression that the Japanese were near to completing their own atomic bomb. Quinlan, British Sound Films, pp. 233, 225, 206, 204. Margaret Gowing, Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy 1945–1952, vol. 1: Policy Making (London, 1974), p. 55. Margaret Gowing, Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy 1945–1952, vol. 2: Policy Execution (London, 1974), pp. 116–26; Ruth Bradon, The Burning Question: The Anti-Nuclear Movement since 1945 (London, 1987), pp. 21–22; Weart, Nuclear Fear, p. 125. Adamthwaite, ‘“Nation shall speak peace into nation”’, p. 563. Ibid., pp. 557–77; Peter Hennessy, What the Papers Never Said (London, 1985), pp. 17–29. Stephen Guy, ‘“Someone presses a button and it’s good-bye Sally”: Seven Days to Noon (1950) and the threat of the atomic bomb’ in Alan Burton, Tim O’Sullivan and Paul Wells (eds), The Family Way: The Boulting Brothers and British Film Culture (Trowbridge, 2000), pp. 143–54. Gowing, Policy Making, p. 4. Gowing, Policy Execution, pp. 137–53; H. Montgomery Hyde, The Atom Bomb Spies (London, 1980), pp. 93–142. PRO PREM 8/1547 Sir Norman Brooke, cabinet secretary, to prime minister, 12 July 1951. Minnion and Bolsover, The CND Story, p. 11; John Jenks, ‘Fight against peace? Britain and the World Peace Council’, paper submitted as part of the Institute of Contemporary British History conference on ‘Britain and the Cold War’, Institute of Historical Research, London, 15–18 July 1997. Sight and Sound, January 1951; Daily Express, 15 September 1950; Maurice Speed, Film Review 1951–1952 (London, 1951–2), p. 101. Landy, British Genres, pp. 404–5. Weart, Nuclear Fear, pp. 117–27; Bradon, The Burning Question, pp. 10–20. Escape Route (Seymour Friedman and Peter Graham-Scott, 1952); The Man in the Road (Lance Comfort, 1956); They Can’t Hang Me (Val Guest, 1955); Front Page Story (Gordon Parry, 1954). Jenks, ‘Fight against peace?’; Lashmar and Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, pp. 13–15. PRO INF 6/418 Wing To Wing; Monthly Film Bulletin, February 1952. Gowing, Policy Execution, pp. 129–30; PRO INF 6/1952 Harwell (1952); INF 6/1181 Atoms at Work (1952).

233

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British Cinema and the Cold War 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

Dockrill, Eisenhower’s New-Look National Security Policy, p. 133; Weart, Nuclear Fear, p. 163. Adamthwaite, ‘“Nation shall speak peace into nation”’, p. 572. Gowing, Policy Execution, pp. 497–8. Monthly Film Bulletin, vol. 19, no 226, November 1952 and vol. 19, no 227, December 1952. The first cinematic appearance by the Goons (Michael Bentine, Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers) was in Let’s Go Crazy, directed by Alan Cullimore, in 1951. Daily Herald, 21 November 1952; Daily Express, 5 November 1952; Daily Film Renter, 22 October 1952. Nicholas Pronay, ‘The British post-bellum cinema: A survey of the films relating to World War Two made in Britain between 1945 and 1960’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 8, no 1, 1988, pp. 39–54; Roger Manvell, Films and the Second World War (London, 1974). According to Pronay’s calculations, 83 war-themed films were made in Britain between 1945 and 1960. Gary Wills, John Wayne: The Politics of Celebrity (London, 1997), p. 154. Gilbert, quoted in John Ramsden, ‘Refocusing the “people’s war”: British war films of the 1950s’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 33, no 1, January 1998, p. 59. Raymond Durgnat, Films and Filming, vol. 10, no 7, April 1964, pp. 9–14. McFarlane, Sixty Voices, p. 156. Ibid. Escapade press book, BFI Library; Durgnat, Mirror for England, p. 86. The Geneva Summit produced nothing of importance except goodwill. Eisenhower’s mutual aerial inspection proposal, called ‘Open Skies’, was stillborn. See Dockrill, Eisenhower’s New-Look National Security Policy, pp. 139 ff. Minnion and Bolsover, The CND Story, pp. 20–2; Lawrence Wittner, Resisting the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1954–1970 (Stanford CA, 1997), p. 192; Margaret Dickinson (ed.), Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945–1990 (London, 1999), p. 31. Lindsay Anderson, ‘Get Out and Push!’ in Tom Maschler (ed.), Declaration (London, 1957), pp. 159–60. Elizabeth Sussex, Lindsay Anderson (London, 1969), pp. 38–9; Monthly Film Bulletin, April 1959, pp. 49–50. Sight and Sound, vol. 28, no 2, Spring 1959, p. 89; Dickinson (ed.), Rogue Reels, p. 31. The United States and USSR exploded thermonuclear devices in 1952 and 1953 respectively. The first British thermonuclear tests were carried out at Christmas Island in 1957 and the results partially reported in the press. These tests enabled hydrogen bombs to be deployed in 1961. John Baylis, Ambiguity and Deterrence: British Nuclear Strategy, 1945–1964 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 260–8; Monthly Film Bulletin, vol. 5, no 3, November 1958 and vol. 6, no 2, November 1959.

Notes on the Text 43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

Southend Times, 5 August 1959, in The Mouse that Roared scrapbooks, items 90–1, Carl Foreman collection, BFI Library. Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (London, 1996), pp. 146–50. Foreman had in fact quit the CPUSA in 1942. Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Cinema, pp. 186–7. Subsequent Foreman productions included The Guns of Navarone (J. Lee Thompson, 1961), The Victors (also directed by Foreman, 1963) and Born Free (James Hill, 1965). News Chronicle, 17 July 1959; Daily Worker, 23 July 1959; Liverpool Daily Post, 11 August 1959; Reynolds News, 19 July 1959; Tribune, 24 July 1959; Films and Filming, vol. 5, no 11, August 1959. A King in New York is analyzed in Chapter 7. The Mouse that Roared scrapbooks, items 90–1, Carl Foreman collection, BFI Library; Films and Filming, vol. 9, no 9, June 1963. On Kubrick, see John Baxter, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (London, 1997). On Dr Strangelove see Gary K. Wolfe, ‘Dr Strangelove, Red Alert, and the patterns of paranoia in the 1950s’, Journal of Popular Film, vol. 5, no 1, 1976, pp. 56–67; Lawrence Suid, ‘The Pentagon and Hollywood: Dr Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’ in John E. O’Connor and Martin A. Jackson (eds), American History/American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image (New York, 1979), pp. 219–35; George W. Linden, ‘Dr Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’ in Jack Shaheen (ed.), Nuclear War Films (Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois, 1978), pp. 58–67. Gaddis, We Now Know, pp. 230, 231, 258, 272. Sight and Sound, vol. 33, no 1, Winter 1963–4, pp. 37–8. Baxter, Kubrick, pp. 165–6. Suid, ‘The Pentagon and Hollywood’; Baxter, Kubrick, pp. 181–2. The knowledge that Dr Strangelove and Fail Safe, two films about accidental nuclear war, were being made, moved General Curtis LeMay, head of the American Strategic Air Command (SAC), to encourage Sy Bartlett to make Gathering Eagles (1963). Like Strategic Air Command (Anthony Mann, 1955), this film was designed to show the Air Force as the major deterrent to communist domination of the world, doing its job in a responsible manner. George C. Scott’s Buck Turgidson in Dr Strangelove was a caricature of LeMay. Once Dr Strangelove was finished, the Pentagon prevailed upon Columbia to add an on-screen statement giving the official American government view that such were the checks and balances built into the SAC’s fail-safe system, that an accident like the one depicted in the film could never take place. Gaddis (We Now Know, pp. 272–3) argues that in this respect Kubrick was half right. ‘The problem was not so much that some rogue military commander might try to start a nuclear war. It lay, rather, in the mundane but potentially risky set of conditions that can arise when any large military operation goes on heightened alert.’

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British Cinema and the Cold War 53.

54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72.

73.

Baxter, Kubrick, pp. 170–98. George wrote under the pseudonym Peter Bryant. Two Hours to Doom had been recommended to Kubrick by Alastair Buchan, head of the London-based think-tank the Institute of Strategic Studies. Kubrick dropped the book’s optimistic ending. John Trevelyan, What the Censor Saw (London, 1973), p. 87. Baxter, Kubrick, p. 166. These works included On Thermonuclear War (1960), written by the high priest of American nuclear scholasticism, Rand Corporation strategist Herman Kahn. On publication, at least one reviewer misread this book as satire, owing to its references to ‘wargamism’ and a ‘doomsday machine’. See H.W. Brands, The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War (New York, 1993), pp. 73–5. Suid, ‘The Pentagon and Hollywood’, pp. 231–2. Daily Herald, 29 January 1964; Sunday Telegraph, 2 February 1964. Observer, 2 February 1964. Baxter, Kubrick, p. 193; Suid, ‘The Pentagon and Hollywood’, pp. 232–3. Sunday Telegraph, 2 February 1964. Jeffrey Richards, ‘Things to Come and science fiction in the 1930s’ in I.Q. Hunter (ed.), British Science Fiction Cinema (London, 1999), pp. 16–32. These included High Treason (Maurice Elvey, 1929), The Tunnel (Elvey, 1935) and The Man Who Could Work Miracles (Lothar Mendes, 1937). See, for example, Bill Warren, Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties (2 vols, Jefferson, NC, 1982 and 1986). Weart, Nuclear Fear, pp. 1–74. William B. Breuer, Race to the Moon: America’s Duel with the Soviets (London, 1993); Bruce Rux, Hollywood and the Aliens (London, 1997). According to Baxter (Science Fiction, p. 103), this ‘golden age’ began with Universal’s Destination Moon (Irving Pichel, 1950), produced by George Pal, and based on a Robert A. Heinlein story. This was the first space film to be made in colour. See also Roy Pickard, Science Fiction in the Movies: An A–Z (London, 1978), pp. 24–5. Brian Murphy, ‘Monster movies: They came from beneath the fifties’, Journal of Popular Film, vol. 1, no 1, Winter 1972, pp. 31–44. Baxter, Science Fiction, p. 99. Ian Conrich, ‘Trashing London: The British colossal creature film and fantasies of mass destruction’ in Hunter (ed.), British Science Fiction Cinema, pp. 88–98. Baxter, Science Fiction, p. 9. Charles Derry, Dark Dreams: A Psychological History of the Modern Horror Film (Cranbury, NJ, 1973). David Pirie, A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema, 1946–1972 (London, 1973); Porter, ‘The context of creativity’ in Curran and Porter (eds), British Cinema History, pp. 179–207. Landy, British Genres, pp. 394–5.

Notes on the Text 74. 75.

76. 77.

78. 79.

80. 81.

82. 83.

84. 85.

Monthly Film Bulletin (July 1953, p. 110) called it ‘a poor man’s version of The Net’. The BBC serial, The Quatermass Experiment, ran from 18 July to 22 August 1953, starring Reginald Tate as Quatermass. See BBC WAC, T5/418 Plays General and Drama, 1953; Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the UK: vol. 5, Competition (Oxford, 1995), p. 192. Quatermass subsequently appeared in two more BBC serials: Quatermass II (1955, played by John Robinson) and Quatermass and the Pit (1958–9, played by Andre Morrell). In New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (London, 1961), Kingsley Amis rated the television serials as ‘the most adult science fiction likely to be encountered on a screen of any size’ (p. 11). Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, pp. 28–9. Baxter (Science Fiction, p. 97)) rated Wordsworth’s playing ‘one of the finest performances since [Boris] Karloff ’s triumphs of the Thirties’. Despite this, Baxter saw the third film in the series, Quatermass and the Pit (Roy Ward Baker, 1967), as superior: ‘a powerful statement of the evil and good that can lie in science, and a thriller of impressive skill’ (p. 97). This film is not analyzed here because it falls outside my frame of reference. Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, p. 34. Gaddis, We Now Know, p. 225. The BRAVO test yielded 15 megatons, three times more than expected. Twenty-eight Americans and 236 Marshall Islanders were exposed, as was the crew of a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon. By the time they returned to Japan, a fortnight later, most of the crew were ill and one subsequently died. For the impact of these, and other H-bomb tests around the same point, on Britain’s civil defence officials see Duncan Campbell, War Plan UK: The Truth about Civil Defence in Britain (London, 1982), pp. 117–9. Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, p. 31. Stuart Samuels, ‘The age of conspiracy and conformity: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)’ in O’Connor and Jackson (eds), American History/American Film, pp. 203–17; Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, pp. 31, 36. While Invasion of the Body Snatchers was released first, Kneale had written the script for Quatermass II before Siegel. Both films were made independently of one another. Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, pp. 35–8. In a different form, the food chain theme also emerged in other science fiction films of the period, such as The Time Machine (George Pal, 1960), based on H.G. Wells’s novel, in which the villainous subterranean Morlocks prey on the Eloi tribe in a distant, post-apocalyptic future. Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, pp. 37–8. Five (Arch Oboler, 1951), The Day The World Ended (Roger Corman, 1955), On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959) and, possibly, Above and Beyond (Melvin Frank and Norman Panama, 1952) were the only Hollywood productions of the 1950s to deal with what happens after the

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British Cinema and the Cold War Bomb explodes. For brief details see Broderick, Nuclear Movies, pp. 65–91. For the suppression by the American authorities of documentary footage of the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, shot by a Japanese film crew in August 1945, see Erik Barnouw, ‘The Hiroshima-Nagasaki Footage: A report’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 2, no 1, 1982, pp. 91–100. The footage was eventually released to the public in 1970. 86. Frank Bamping, ‘Warning for the world’, Films and Filming, vol. 1, no 8, May 1955. Children of Hiroshima (Kaneto Shindo), based on Arata Osada’s bestselling book, told of a young teacher returning to Hiroshima seven years after the bomb. Flashbacks showed the bomb and its immediate aftermath. Contemporary footage highlighted the emotional trauma and physical disfigurement suffered by the inhabitants. On the Godzilla phenomenon see Chon A. Noriega, ‘Godzilla and the Japanese imagination: When Them! is U.S.’ in Mick Broderick, Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film (London, 1996), pp. 55–71. 87. Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, p. 39. 88. Lawrence J. Vale, The Limits of Civil Defence in the USA, Switzerland, Britain and the Soviet Union (London, 1987), p. 222. 89. Ibid., pp. 125–33; Campbell, War Plan UK, pp. 120–3; R.D. Wormald and J.M. Young, Civil Defence Questions Answered (London, 1955); Advising the Householder on Protection against Nuclear Attack (London, 1963). 90. PRO INF 6/37 The Waking Point (1951); HO 322/14 Home Secretary Chuter Ede to Attlee, 4 July 1950; The Facts about Civil Defence (Municipal Journal, London, 1950); J.O. Baker, Civil Defence and You (London, 1951). 91. Civil Defence Corps Training Memoranda (London, 1949–63); PRO INF 6/37 The Waking Point. 92. Campbell, War Plan UK, pp. 113–9; PRO INF 6/37 The Waking Point. 93. Film User, vol. 6, no 67, May 1952, p. 242; Today’s Cinema, vol. 77, no 6367, 26 October 1951, p. 9. 94. For the ‘scientific’ basis of the country’s civil defence measures, centred around the Civil Defence Staff College at Sunningdale, see, for example, The Facts about Civil Defence (London, 1950). 95. Weart, Nuclear Fear, p. 136. 96. Nuclear Weapons (London, 1956); The Hydrogen Bomb (London, 1957); Advising the Householder on Protection against Nuclear Attack (London, 1963). 97. Campbell, War Plan UK, pp. 117–20; Minnion and Bolsover, The CND Story, p. 15. 98. I.Q. Hunter, ‘The Day the Earth Caught Fire’ in Hunter (ed.), British Science Fiction Cinema, pp. 100-1. 99. Ibid., pp. 99-112; Kinematograph Weekly, 16 November 1961. 100. Monthly Film Bulletin, December 1961, p. 164; Baxter, Science Fiction, p. 161.

Notes on the Text 101. Sayre, Running Time, p. 185. 102. Trevelyan, What the Censor Saw, pp. 86–7; Mark Hall, ‘The Day the Earth Caught Fire’ in Shaheen (ed.), Nuclear War Films, pp. 39–45. 103. Paul Gardner, ‘The horror that shook the British Isles’, New York Times, 3 April 1966, section 2, p. 19. 104. Ibid.; S.M.J. Arrowsmith, ‘Peter Watkins’ in G.W. Brandt (ed.), British Television Drama (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 217–38; BBC WAC T56/266/1-2 The War Game, Research files. 105. BBC WAC T56/266/1–2 The War Game, Research files. 106. Cited in Arrowsmith, ‘Peter Watkins’, p. 227. 107. BBC WAC T56/265/1 The War Game post-production script. 108. BBC WAC T16/679/1 TV policy The War Game file 1a (1963–5). 109. See, for example, Jack G. Shaheen, ‘The War Game’ in Shaheen (ed.), Nuclear War Films, pp. 109–115; Briggs, Competition, pp. 531–6; Michael Tracey, ‘Censored: The War Game story’ in Crispin Aubrey et al. (eds), Nukespeak: The Media and the Bomb (London, 1982), pp. 38–54; Patrick Murphy, ‘The film the BBC tried to bury’, New Statesman, 22 August 1997, pp. 22–4. 110. A fuller picture of this controversy can be told following the release of much of the relevant documentation, at the BBC WAC, in 1996. See BBC WAC T16/679/1 TV policy The War Game files 1a (1963–5) and 1b (1966–68); Daily Telegraph, 1 January 1996, p. 94; Guardian, 1 January 1996, p. 7. 111. BBC WAC T16/679/1 TV policy The War Game file 1b (1966–8). The BBC’s own estimate of the voluminous press reaction, following the first showing at the National Film Theatre in February 1966, was 80 per cent editorial support for the BBC’s ban. This is endorsed by Tracey, ‘Censored’, pp. 39–43. 112. BBC WAC T16/679/1 TV policy The War Game files 1a (1963–5) and 1b (1966-68); Baxter, Science Fiction, op. cit., p. 168. 113. Daily Sketch, 9 February 1966. 114. BBC-BFI agreement, 24 February and Watkins’ criticism, 25 February 1966: BBC WAC T16/679/1 TV policy The War Game file 1b (1966–8). 115. Basil Wright, The Long View, pp. 554–5; Radio Times, 27 July 1985, pp. 3–5. 116. Ibid.; Arrowsmith, ‘Peter Watkins’, p. 218. 117. Arrowsmith, ‘Peter Watkins’, p. 228. 118. Suid, ‘The Pentagon and Hollywood’, p. 223. 119. For a comparison of British and American nuclear disarmament lobbies in the 1950s and 1960s see Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, pp. 41–60, 184–209, 241–64. The United States’ largest anti-nuclear organization was the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, or SANE, formed in 1957. Hollywood’s own SANE ‘chapter’ drew support from, among others, actors Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, Anthony Quinn and Shirley MacLaine.

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British Cinema and the Cold War 120. Devil Girl From Mars (David Macdonald, 1954) and Stranger From Venus (Burt Balaban, 1954) were both British productions. For the potential influence of science-fiction material see, for example, William Sims Bainbridge, Dimensions of Science Fiction (London, 1986), pp. 151–71. 121. See, for instance, Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, pp. 30–1; Peter Hutchings, ‘“We’re the martians now”: British sf invasion fantasies of the 1950s and 1960s’ in Hunter (ed.), British Science Fiction Cinema (London, 1999), pp. 33–47. 122. Adamthwaite, ‘“Nation shall speak peace into nation”’, pp. 557–77.

Chapter 6 1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

PRO BT 64/4466 Ince to Sir John Woods, Board of Trade, 17 March 1950. Richards and Aldgate, The Best of British (1983), pp. 115–30; Richards, ‘The British Board of Film Censors and content control in the 1930s: Images of Britain’, pp. 95–116. Jones, The British Labour Movement and Film, pp. 24–5; Robertson, Film Censorship in Britain, 1896–1950, p. 86. Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace, p. 323. Pronay, ‘The political censorship of films in Britain between the wars’, pp. 98–125. The Right To Strike, produced by British-Super Films, was a film version of a successful West End stage play by Ernest Hutchinson which appeared at the Garrick Theatre in September 1921. The railway workers in a manufacturing town are persuaded to strike by a professional agitator and then kill a young doctor who organizes a transport service. The doctors of the town declare their intention of going on strike also. When the wife of one of the strike leaders falls seriously ill, she is saved by one of the hitherto militant doctors, and the dispute comes to an end. See Bioscope, 30 August 1923, p. 60. For details of the play see Nicholson, British Theatre and the Red Peril, pp. 33–9. BBFC Scenario Report 1932/58, BFI Library. See also BBFC Scenario Report 1934/289 Machines, script of a stage play by Reginald Berkeley, submitted by Gaumont-British, BFI Library. BBFC Scenario Report 1933/209, BFI Library. Peter Stead, ‘The people as stars: Feature films as national expression’ in Taylor (ed.), Britain and the Cinema in the Second World War, p. 73; Aldgate and Richards, The Best of British (1983), pp. 116–7. Hennessy, Never Again, pp. 119–182; Morgan, Labour in Power. For a revisionist angle on the creation of the comprehensive welfare state in Britain during and after 1945 see Correlli Barnett, The Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation (London, 1986). Robert Taylor, The Trade Union Question in British Politics: Government and Unions since 1945 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 4, 10.

Notes on the Text 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32.

Crofts, Coercion or Persuasion? Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., pp. 21–2, 38. Ibid., pp. 60–1. PRO INF 6/400 A Yank Comes Back (1948). H.C. Debs., 5th Series, vol. 461, cols. 944–5, 15 February 1949. PRO INF 6/34 Over To You (1951) Crofts, Coercion or Persuasion?, p. 60; Wells, ‘Dustbins, democracy and defence’, pp. 61–72. R.E. Tritton, director of COI Films Division, to Michael Balcon, 30 July 1947, G/20, Michael Balcon collection, BFI Library. PRO INF 6/76 They Gave Him The Works (1948); H.C. Debs., 5th Series, vol. 453, cols. 1006–7, 13 July 1948. Aldgate and Richards, The Best of British (1983), pp. 75–86. Correspondence between Filippo del Giudice, founder of Pilgrim Pictures, and Miles, and draft script of Chance of a Lifetime, files 21–9, 34.3, del Giudice collection, BFI Library; McFarlane, Sixty Voices, p. 168; Stead, ‘The people as stars’, pp. 47–8; Chris Bryant, Stafford Cripps: The First Modern Chancellor (London, 1997), pp. 385–7. Richards, ‘The British Board of Film Censors and content control in the 1930s: Images of Britain’, pp. 111–2. Del Giudice-Miles correspondence, files 21–9, del Giudice collection BFI Library; Sight and Sound, vol. 19, no 3, May 1950, pp. 123–4. Scope, May 1950, pp. 124–6; McFarlane, Sixty Voices, p. 168. PRO BT 64/4466 Bernard Miles to Harold Wilson, 4 January 1950. PRO BT 64/4466 Bernard Miles to Harold Wilson, 4 January 1950; film selection committee minutes, 7 February 1950; Board of Trade to Sir Arthur Jarratt, British Lion, 8 February 1950. PRO BT 64/4466 Ince to Sir John Woods, Board of Trade, 17 March 1950. PRO BT 64/4466 Undated minute by Board of Trade official in response to Ince’s letter; R.S. Stansfield, Lord President’s Office, to Sir George Schuster, Board of Trade, 4 March 1950; A.S. Golt, Board of Trade, to Lord President’s Office, 22 March 1950. H.C. Debs., 5th Series, vol. 466, cols. 982–3, 1789, 4 July 1949; PRO LAB 10/833 Isaacs’s press release, 26 May 1949; The Times, 5 July 1949, p. 4. Known formally as the Freedom and Democracy Trust, the Freedom First Committee was formed in 1948 by trade union leaders with the goal, as its first newsletter stated, ‘of unmasking Communism, to prevent the election of Communists to more executive offices in the unions, and to rid the unions of Communist representatives in any official capacity’. For details of the encouragement given the Committee by Labour government leaders and the links forged with the IRD see Weiler, British Labour and the Cold War, pp. 216–9; Lashmar and Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, p. 110.

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British Cinema and the Cold War 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48.

49.

50. 51.

PRO 64/4466 Isaacs to Wilson, 31 March 1950; Sir Cuthbert Clegg to Wilson, 6 April 1950. PRO CAB 128/17 CM (50) 19th conclusions, 6 April 1950. PRO 64/4466 Undated Board of Trade document ‘Power to Require the Exhibition of Particular Films’; Morrison to Isaacs, 21 April 1950. PRO BT 64/4466 Film selection committee minutes, 7 February 1950. Chance of a Lifetime was the fifth film to have come before the selection committee. Durgnat, Mirror for England, pp. 69–70. Richard Winnington in the News Chronicle, 28 April 1950; Sight and Sound, vol. 19, no 9, 1951, pp. 349–50. Daily Mail, 28 April 1950; The Times, 1 May 1950; Monthly Film Bulletin, March–April 1950, p. 43; Montagu to Miles, 4 December 1948, p 317, Bernard Miles collection, BFI Library; World News and Views, vol. 30, no 24, 17 June 1950. Sight and Sound, vol. 19, no 9, 1951, pp. 349–50. McFarlane, Sixty Voices, p. 168. Michael Sissons and Philip French (eds), Age of Austerity, 1945–1951 (London, 1963), p. 9. Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, ‘Bread and circuses? The Conservatives in office, 1951–1964’ in Bogdanor and Skidelsky (eds), The Age of Affluence, p. 55. Arthur Marwick, British Society since 1945 (Harmondsworth, 1982), pp. 114–87; Bill Williamson, The Temper of the Times: British Society since World War Two (Oxford, 1990), pp. 123–56; Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (Glencoe, IL, 1960). Marwick, British Society since 1945, pp. 36–7, 118, 121. Macmillan, July 1957, cited in David Childs, Britain since 1945: A Political History (London, 1997), p. 80. Harriet Jones and Michael Kandiah (eds), The Myth of Consensus: New Views on British History, 1945–64 (Basingstoke, 1996); Paul Addison, ‘British historians and the debate over the “post-war consensus”’ in William Roger Louis (ed.), More Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain (London, 1998), pp. 255–64. Childs, Britain since 1945, p. 80; Jim Tomlinson, ‘Conservative modernization 1960–64: Too little, too late?’, Contemporary British History, vol. 11, no 3, Autumn 1997, pp. 18–38. Marwick, British Society since 1945, pp. 38–48, 126, 158. Michael Shanks, The Stagnant Society (Harmondsworth, 1961) and the collection of essays edited by Arthur Koestler, Suicide of a Nation (London, 1963), were joined by Brian Magee’s The New Radicalism (London, 1962) and Rex Malik’s What’s Wrong with British Industry? (Harmondsworth, 1964). Cited in Marwick, British Society since 1945, p. 126. Childs, Britain since 1945, pp. 75–8; Alec Cairncross, The British Economy since 1945 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 90–133; Jim Tomlinson, ‘Inventing decline:

Notes on the Text

52.

53. 54.

55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66.

The falling behind of the British economy in the post-war years’, English Historical Review, vol. 49, no 4, 1996, pp. 731–57; J.W. Durcan, W.E.J. McCarthy and G.P. Redman, Strikes in Post-War Britain (London, 1983), pp. 58–131. Childs, Britain since 1945, pp. 77–9; Lord Donovan, Report of Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations 1965–1968 (Cmnd. 3623, London, 1968). Childs, Britain since 1945, p. 77. The End of the Road (Wolf Rilla, 1954), Jacqueline (Roy Baker, 1956), Innocent Meeting (Godfrey Grayson, 1958), The Battle of the Sexes (Charles Crichton, 1959). Durgnat, Mirror for England, pp. 67–8. His Excellency, Box 2, Film Publicity Material collection, BFI Library; Hal Mason to Michael Balcon, 30 November 1950, G/122, Michael Balcon collection, BFI Library. Dorothy and Campbell Christie had written the play. Monthly Film Bulletin, March 1952, p. 30. Aldgate and Richards, Best of British (1983), pp. 105–6; Porter, ‘The context of creativity, p. 189. Monthly Film Bulletin, March 1952, p. 30. Barr, Ealing Studios, pp. 8–9, 61. Philip Kemp, Lethal Innocence: The Cinema of Alexander Mackendrick (London, 1991), pp. 46–8. Aldgate and Richards, Best of British (1983), pp. 109. McFarlane, Sixty Voices, p. 66. Kemp, Lethal Innocence, p. 46. Kemp quotes Mackendrick’s own explanation of his motives for making the film, dating from 1953: ‘It wasn’t intended to be a satire only at the expense of Industry… Each character in the story was intended as a caricature of a separate political attitude, covering the entire range from Communist, through official Trades Unionism, Romantic Individualism, Liberalism, Enlightened and Unenlightened Capitalism, to Strong-arm Reaction.’ Barr, Ealing Studios, p. 145; Aldgate and Richards, Best of British (1983), pp. 99–114. Kemp, Lethal Innocence, pp. 51–2. Immediately before starting work on The Man in the White Suit, Mackendrick had been discussing the idea of dealing in a comic fashion with the moral issues surrounding the invention of nuclear weapons with his cousin, Roger MacDougall. It was the latter’s draft play that provided the basis for The Man in the White Suit (see Box 3, Film Publicity Material collection, BFI Library). The nuclear theme was dropped (it is highly unlikely Balcon would have allowed such a film to be made at Ealing in any case), but the ambiguity of scientific ‘progress’ was at the core of Alec Guinness’s role. Stuart Stock and Kenneth von Grunden include The Man in the White Suit among their Twenty All-Time Great Science Fiction Films (New York,

243

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British Cinema and the Cold War

67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

1982, p. 50) as ‘one of the most mature, enjoyable and intelligent SF films ever made.’ Barr (Ealing Studios, p. 142) describes one particular scene, in which Kierlaw resorts to prostitution to secure Stratton’s invention, as expressing ‘a vision of the logic of capitalism as extreme as anything in Buñuel or Godard’. Kemp, Lethal Innocence, pp. 61–2. Anthony Howard, ‘We are the masters now’ in Sissons and French (eds), The Age of Austerity, p. 31. Manchester Guardian, 11 August 1951; Time and Tide, 18 August 1951; Monthly Film Bulletin, September 1951, p. 326. Barr, Ealing Studios, p. 137. Barr (Screen, Summer 1974, p. 140) rated it ‘perhaps the most intelligent of British films [and] certainly one of the most complex’. Few commentators picked up on the dark side of Stratton’s character and the film’s original nuclear sub-text. Porter (‘The context of creativity’, p. 189) suggests that The Man in the White Suit was part of the consensual Ealing approach, in this case labour and capital uniting in opposition to idealism. Kemp, Lethal Innocence, p. 65; Ian Green, ‘Ealing: in the comedy frame’ in Curran and Porter (eds), British Cinema, p. 297. Kemp, Lethal Innocence, p. 65. Aldgate and Richards, Best of British (1983), p. 120; Marwick, British Society since 1945, p. 18. Monthly Film Bulletin, vol. 26, no 309, October 1959, p. 133. Hill, Sex, Class and Realism, pp. 147–9. Aldgate and Richards, Best of British (1983), p. 127. Author’s interview with Roy Boulting, 6 March 1998. Roger Lewis, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (London, 1994), p. 382. For the increasingly complex nature of trade union and labour politics post-1945, and an analysis of the myriad causes of industrial disputes in the post-war decades, see Davis Smith, A Study in Consensus (Pinter, London, 1990) and Durcan et al, Strikes in Post-war Britain. Perhaps the most enduring example of the media’s caricaturing of shop stewards was Miriam Karlin’s militant Paddy in BBC Television’s situation comedy The Rag Trade. This ran between 1961 and 1963, and reappeared for a fourth and fifth series in 1977 and 1978 on London Weekend Television. Jeff Evans, The Guinness Television Encyclopedia (Enfield, 1995), p. 433. McFarlane, Sixty Voices, p. 56. Author’s interview with Roy Boulting, 6 March 1998; Daily Worker, 15 August 1959; News Chronicle, 11 December 1959. Aldgate and Richards, Best of British (1983), p. 128. Manchester Guardian, 15 August 1959. Alexander Walker, Hollywood, England (London, 1974), pp. 102–3; Hill, Sex, Class and Realism, pp. 39–40.

Notes on the Text 87. 88. 89.

90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

Author’s interview with Bryan Forbes, 25 February 1998; Walker, Hollywood, England, p. 96. Bryan Forbes, Notes for a Life (London, 1974), p. 279. Ibid.; McFarlane, Sixty Voices, pp. 68–9, 86; author’s interview with Bryan Forbes, 28 February 1998. Coincidentally, around the same time, novelist John Osborne was writing a similar film script for Tony Richardson, the director of Look Back in Anger (1959). See Janet Moat, ‘The Aileen and Michael Balcon special collection: An introduction to British cinema history, 1929–1960’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 16, no 4, 1996, p. 572. Author’s interview with Bryan Forbes, 25 February 1998. Walker, Hollywood, England, pp. 97–8; Forbes, Notes for a Life, p. 280. Author’s interview with Bryan Forbes, 25 February 1998. Sight and Sound, vol. 29, no 2, Spring 1960, p. 89; Jewish Chronicle, 11 March 1960. McFarlane, Sixty Voices, p. 86; Wolverhampton Express and Star, 30 April 1960; Yorkshire Post, 24 March 1960. Walker, Hollywood, England, pp. 98–9. PRO PREM 11/921 Memorandum by Walter Monckton, Minister of Labour, 2 June 1955 and subsequent cabinet discussions; PREM 11/1238 Official Committee on Communism (Home) to Prime Minister (Eden), undated but 1956; PREM 11/3547 Prime Minister (Macmillan) to Ministry of Labour, 15 August 1960; H.L. Debs., 5th Series, vol. 219, cols. 163–75, 29 October 1959. See, for example, PRO INF 6/803 A British Trade Union (COI/Anvil Films, 1954); INF 6/1049 Industrial Relations (COI, 1958). Lashmar and Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, pp. 105–12. Phoenix House was in 1956 sponsored by the IRD to publish Background Books. Childs, Britain since 1945, p. 77; Durcan et al., Strikes in Post-war Britain, p. 403. Walker, Hollywood, England, p. 99. Hill, Sex, Class and Realism, pp. 140–1. Kinematograph Weekly, no 2735, 3 March 1960; Picture Show and Film Pictorial, 19 March 1960; Birmingham Evening Despatch, 22 April 1960; Films and Filming, vol. 6, no 7, April 1960. Films and Filming, vol. 10, no 8, May 1964, p. 13; Forbes, Notes for Life, p. 280; McFarlane, Sixty Voices, p. 86. Daily Telegraph, 12 March 1960. Daily Mail, 11 March 1960; Evening Standard, 10 March 1960; Essex Chronicle, 18 March 1960. Sunday Times, 13 March 1960; Daily Mirror, 11 March 1960. Reynolds News, 13 March 1960; Tribune, 11 March 1960; Sight and Sound, vol. 29, no 2, Spring 1960, p. 89. Sayre, Running Time, pp. 151–72. Daily Worker, 12 March 1960.

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British Cinema and the Cold War 109. Daily Telegraph, 29 April 1960; Daily Mail, 14 April 1960; Yorkshire Evening News, 24 May 1960. 110. News Chronicle, 16 May 1960; Sunday Despatch, 17 April 1960. 111. Walker, Hollywood, England, p. 101; Daily Herald, 29 April 1960. 112 Walker, Hollywood, England, p. 100. 113. Manchester Guardian, 25 September 1962, cited in Walker, Hollywood, England, p. 68. See also Hill, Sex, Class and Realism; John Hill, ‘Working class realism and sexual reaction: Some theses on the British “New Wave”’ in Curran and Porter (eds), British Cinema History, pp. 303–11; Erik Hedling, Lindsay Anderson: Maverick Film-Maker (London, 1998). 114. Hill, Sex, Class and Realism, p. 141. 115. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was published in 1958 by W.H. Allen, and directed for the cinema screen by Karel Reisz. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner was published in 1959 by W. H. Allen, and directed for the cinema screen by Tony Richardson. For a general account of the liberalization of the British film industry in the late 1950s and early 1960s see Anthony Aldgate, Censorship and the Permissive Society: British Cinema and Theatre, 1955–1965 (Oxford, 1995). 116. Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, p. 114, cited in Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Post-war Britain, p. xviii. Sinfield sees Sillitoe’s Seaton as representing that part of society that would sooner turn on the English upper classes than fight the Soviets. 117. Aldgate, Censorship and the Permissive Society, pp. 89–119. 118. Ibid., pp. 90–7. 119. Ibid., p. 99. 120 Ibid., pp. 89–104; Aldgate and Richards, Best of British (1983), pp. 131–145. For Sillitoe’s links with the New Left, and his other novels during this period, see Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Post-war Britain, pp. 138–9, 257–60. 121. Sayre, Running Time, p. 50; Leonard Quart and Albert Anster, ‘The working class goes to Hollywood’ in Davies and Neve (eds), Cinema, Politics and Society in America, pp. 163–75. 122. Durcan et al., Strikes in Post-War Britain, p. 58. 123. Childs, Britain since 1945, p. 78. 124. Macmillan on television, 9 October 1959, cited in Booker, The Neophiliacs, p. 129.

Chapter 7 1. 2.

Lindsay Anderson, ‘Get Out and Push!’, pp. 159–60. Shlapentokh and Shlapentokh, Soviet Cinematography, pp. 127–72; Sayre, Running Time, pp. 173–88.

Notes on the Text 3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

Reisz, ‘Hollywood’s anti-red boomerang’, p. 3; Films and Filming, vol. 1, no 5, February 1955, p. 3. Sight and Sound, vol. 24, no 2, October–December 1954, p. 90; Films and Filming, vol. 1, no 2, November 1954, p. 18; Monthly Film Bulletin, vol. 21, no 249, October 1954, p. 145. McFarlane, Sixty Voices, p. 119; The Young Lovers Press Book, BFI Library. Tabori and Robin Estridge received the British Film Academy Award for best screenplay, and the British Film Critics Circle made a special award to Asquith for direction. Minney, Puffin Asquith, p. 154. Durgnat, Mirror for England, p. 86. Havelock-Allan originally wanted the film made in ‘the stark, realistic style that Americans were good at’, with Mark Robson directing and James Stewart in the lead role, but he was over-ruled by Rank. McFarlane, Sixty Voices, p. 119. Films and Filming, vol. 1, no 2, November 1954, p. 18. Films and Filming, vol. 2, no 12, September 1956, pp. 20–21 and vol. 3, no 1, October 1956, p. 25. On Khrushchev’s interpretation of ‘peaceful coexistence’ see S.J. Ball, The Cold War: An International History, 1947–1991 (London, 1998), pp. 66–74. Andrew Shonfield, British Economic Policy Since the War (Harmondsworth, 1958); David Reynolds, Britannia Overruled: British Policy and World Power in the 20th Century (London, 1991), pp. 210–13. In 1955 Germany was spending 4.1 per cent of national income on defence, Japan 1.8 per cent and Britain 8.2 per cent. Only the United States and USSR spent more. The Sandys White Paper of April 1957 brought major changes in Britain’s defence posture mainly in order to save money, and resulted in the phasing out of conscription in 1960 and a reorientation towards nuclear deterrence. This met with strong opposition from the anti-nuclear lobby. John Russell Taylor, Anger and After (Harmondsworth, 1963), pp. 37–58; Dominic Shellard, British Theatre since the War (New Haven, CO, 1999), pp. 56-7; Aldgate, Censorship and the Permissive Society, pp. 63–88. Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Post-war Britain, pp. 261; Taylor, Anger and After, pp. 100–125; Elsom, Cold War Theatre, pp. 33–6. Gallup (ed.), The Gallup International Public Opinion Polls, pp. 232–3, 493, 628. Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present (London, 1999), pp. 173–4; author’s interviews with Roy Boulting, 30 March and 5 May 1998. Monthly Film Bulletin, April 1959, p. 42; Films and Filming, vol. 5, no 7, April 1959, pp. 21–2. H.C. Debs., 5th Series, vol. 609, col. 25, 13 July 1959; Harold Macmillan, Pointing the Way, 1959–1961 (London, 1972), pp. 61–115; Neya Zorkaya, The Illustrated History of the Soviet Cinema (New York, 1989), p. 224.

247

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British Cinema and the Cold War 19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

Richard Stites, ‘Heaven and hell: Soviet propaganda constructs the world’ in Rawnsley (ed.), Cold War Propaganda in the 1950s, pp. 88–9; Hixson, Parting the Curtain; Hazan, Soviet Impregnational Propaganda. Monthly Film Bulletin, December 1959, p. 158. Cross, The Russian Theme in English Literature, pp. 79–80. Greene, Ways of Escape, pp. 204–6, 214; Graham Greene, The Tenth Man (New York, 1985), pp. 19–20; Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana (The Collected Edition, London, 1970), p. viii; Marie-Francoise Allan, The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene (Harmondsworth, 1984), p. 100. ‘Nobody to Blame’ was to be set in pre-war Estonia. Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1960, p. 4; Sight and Sound, vol. 29, no 1, Winter 1959/1960, p. 35; Films and Filming, vol. 6, no 5, February 1960. Moss, The Films of Carol Reed, p. 227. Ibid. Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood; McGilligan and Buhle, Tender Comrades; Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names. Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, pp. 398–403. Many of the Hollywood blacklistees, including those who came to Britain, were radicals or (former) members of the CPUSA. However, the communist influence in Hollywood between 1930 and 1950 in terms of film output was nil. See Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood. According to the official HUAC report, Scott was identified in 1951 as a communist by Edward Dmytryk, a co-defendant and the director of most of his films. Stewart had been a member of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in the 1930s, an organization that was adjudged during the McCarthy period to have been a cover-up for a communist cell. Koch wrote radio scripts in the 1930s, including the famous Orson Welles broadcast of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds in October 1938. Jack L. Warner, at whose studios Mission to Moscow was made, blamed Koch for the pro-Soviet aspects of the film during the HUAC hearings. Sayre, Running Time, pp. 57–62, 83–4. On Losey’s The Boy with the Green Hair see Caute, Joseph Losey, pp. 86–90, 278–81, 472–4. Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 134; Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, pp. 403–7. Caute, Joseph Losey, pp. 113–115. Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, pp. 398–407. The blacklistees formed a tight-knit community in Britain, often working on the same films. Thus Foreman and Koch acted, pseudonymously, as screenwriters on Losey’s The Sleeping Tiger (1954) and The Intimate Stranger (1956) respectively. Koch’s other British films were The Greengage Summer (Lewis Gilbert, 1961), The War Lover (Philip Leacock, 1962) and 633 Squadron (Walter Grauman, 1964). Foreman became president of Britain’s Writers Guild in 1968 and was awarded the title Commander of the British Empire in 1970, before returning to the United States in 1975.

Notes on the Text 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

Caute, Joseph Losey, pp. 129–30. Roger Manvell, Chaplin (London, 1974), pp. 197–9, 204–9; Sayre, Running Time, p. 22. Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, pp. 384–5. For an assessment of Chaplin’s political beliefs in the late 1940s see Charles J. Maland, ‘A documentary note on Charlie Chaplin’s politics’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 5, no 2, 1985, pp. 199–208. Maland categorizes Chaplin as a ‘progressive’ liberal who, in contrast with the ‘anti-Stalinists’, refused to denounce Russia, believing that to do so would be to encourage warmongers. Manvell, Chaplin, p. 213; Charles J. Maland, Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image (Guildford, CO, 1989), p. 318. Monthly Film Bulletin, October 1957, p. 123. Sight and Sound, vol. 27, no 2, Autumn 1957, pp. 78–9. Manvell, Chaplin, pp. 215–17 McCarthy died in May 1957. For details of the senator’s rapid political and personal demise following his allegations in 1954 that the US army was riddled with communists see Richard M. Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (Oxford, 1990), pp. 138–42. David Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art (London, 1992), p. 591; Robert Cole, Propaganda in Twentieth Century War and Politics: An Annotated Bibliography (Pasadena, CA, 1996), pp. 60, 226, 328. Chaplin returned to the United States in 1972 to accept a second special Academy Award for ‘the incalculable effect he has had on making motion pictures the art form of this century’. He was knighted in 1975, two years before his death. Caute, Joseph Losey, pp. 37–98. On Brecht see Elsom, Cold War Theatre, pp. 37–48. Caute, Joseph Losey, pp. 99–111; James Palmer and Michael Riley, The Films of Joseph Losey (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 4–5. Among the detailed accounts of Losey’s life and work are Colin Gardner, Time Without Pity: Immanence and Contradiction in the Films of Joseph Losey (forthcoming); Caute, Joseph Losey; Palmer and Riley, The Films of Joseph Losey; Michael Ciment, Conversations with Losey (London, 1985); Tom Milne (ed.), Losey on Losey (London, 1967); James Leahy, The Cinema of Joseph Losey (London, 1967). Caute, Joseph Losey, pp. 113–38. Between 1954 and 1960 Losey directed six features: The Sleeping Tiger (1954), The Intimate Stranger (1956), Time Without Pity (1957), The Gypsy and the Gentleman (1958), Blind Date (1959) and The Criminal (1960). Colin Gardner, ‘The finger of guilt: Joseph Losey and the Hollywood blacklist in England, 1952–59’, pp. 1–5, paper submitted as part of the ‘Cold War Culture: Film, Fact and Fiction’ conference, Indiana University, 18–21 February 1999. The American title for The Intimate Stranger was Finger of Guilt.

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British Cinema and the Cold War 48. 49.

50. 51.

52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

57.

58.

59.

60.

Ibid., p. 6; Caute, Joseph Losey, pp. 131–8. The atomic disaster script would surface as SOS Pacific, directed by Guy Green in 1959 and starring Eddie Constantine and Richard Attenborough. Monthly Film Bulletin, vol. 6, no 2, November 1959; Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 134; Gardner, ‘Finger of guilt’, p. 6. Gardner, ‘Finger of guilt’, p. 8. In 1960 the director of Exodus (1960), Otto Preminger, announced that one of the ‘Hollywood Ten’, Dalton Trumbo, had been the film’s scriptwriter and that his name would appear on screen. Stanley Kramer similarly cited Nedrick Young for Inherit the Wind (1960). These wellpublicized creditings proved to be an important watershed in encouraging exiled blacklistees to return to Hollywood and to work without false names. In the short term, however, it caused panic and a backlash among some on the American political right. Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, pp. 418–21; Caute, Joseph Losey, pp. 131–8. Caute, Joseph Losey, pp. 135–8. For instance, the film fails to get even a mention in the account of Losey’s work in Gene D. Phillips, Major Film Directors of the American and British Cinema (London, 1990), pp. 193–208. Porter, ‘The context of creativity’, p. 199; Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, p. 137. Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 142; Gardner, Time Without Pity, pp. 308–9. Losey, in Milne (ed.), Losey on Losey, pp. 32–3; Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, pp. 196, 204. Losey’s original title was ‘The Brink’, which alluded to the risks posed by nuclear developments, but this was over-ruled by Hammer. Annotated script of The Damned, item 8, Joseph Losey collection, BFI Library. Losey saw Weymouth as a contrast of decayed gentility and modern vulgarity. Losey seems to have confused Portland Bill in Dorset, close to Weymouth, where there was an underwater weapons establishment, with Porton Down in Wiltshire, the site of the MOD’s chemical and biological research establishment. Nevertheless, the bleak and wild nature of the Portland Bill landscape suited Losey’s depiction of children trapped in desolation. Caute, Joseph Losey, pp. 141–2. Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 198; Durgnat, Films and Filming, vol. 9, no 8, May 1963, pp. 24–5. Losey argued that Weymouth’s ‘teds’ ‘were the sons of the servants and the general workmen that maintained these resorts for the rich when they were still there. So now you have the children of the working class trying to recapture some kind of power out of past elegance by wearing Edwardian clothes.’ Ciment, p. 200. Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 195. A Clockwork Orange, the futuristic study of excessive mindless violence perpetrated by youth, was written by Anthony Burgess and published in 1962. For Kubrick’s film version see Baxter, Stanley Kubrick, pp. 231–67. Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 201.

Notes on the Text 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75.

76.

77.

78.

Ciment, Conversations with Losey, pp. 198, 201; Leahy, The Cinema of Joseph Losey, pp. 99–100; Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 284. Gardner, Time Without Pity, p. 313; Paul Mayersberg, ‘Contamination: Joseph Losey’s The Damned ’, Movie, no 9, May 1963, pp. 31–4. Leahy, The Cinema of Joseph Losey, p. 99. Porter, ‘The context of creativity, p. 199; Murphy, Sixties British Cinema, pp. 185, 313 (note 32); Losey interview, Movie, no 6, January 1963. Hammer cut the film from 100 to 87 minutes. Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 143; Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, p. 137. Sight and Sound, vol. 32, no 3, Summer 1963, pp. 143–4. Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 204. Daily Telegraph, 26 May 1963; Variety, 21 July 1965; Films and Filming, vol. 9, no 8, May 1963, pp. 24–5; Observer, 19 May 1963. Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 143. Herald Tribune, 25 July 1965, cited in Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 143. Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, p. 138. Monthly Film Bulletin, May 1951, pp. 259–60. The 1949 film was released by Mosfilm, with English subtitles. Nigel Mace, ‘British historical epics in the Second World War’ in Taylor (ed.), Britain and the Cinema in the Second World, pp. 101–20; Susan L. Carruthers, The Media at War (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 258–67. See, for instance, Ramsden, ‘Refocusing the “people’s war”’ and Pronay, ‘The British post-bellum cinema’. Other examples of this genre were Children of the Soviet Arctic (Mark Donskoi, 1946); The Turning Point (Friedrich Ermler, 1946); The Vow (Michail Chiaureli, 1946); Brave People (Konstantine Yudin, 1950) and Battle of Stalingrad (V. Petrov, 1949). Mira Liehm, The Most Important Art: East European Film after 1945 (London, 1977), p. 61; Taylor, Film Propaganda, pp. 99–122. The film was presented by the Mosfilm studio to Stalin on his seventieth birthday in December 1949 and was awarded the Stalin Prize (First Class) after its release in January 1950. Stalin was played, as usual, by fellow Georgian Mikhail Gelovani. Bulletin of the Film Section of the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR, September 1952, The Fall of Berlin microjacket, BFI Library; minutes of Film Section Committee, 13 February 1951, CP/IND/ MONT/9/1–2, Communist Party archive, National Museum of Labour History. PRO PREM 11/124 file; Evening News, 28 April 1952; Taylor, Film Propaganda, pp. 100, 111. For Churchill’s objections in late 1952 to a NBC television documentary series of the war at sea between 1939–45, and the BBC’s subsequent hiring of a British naval historian to provide an introduction to correct the pro-American perspective, see PRO PREM 11/408 Colville to B.E. Nicholls at the BBC, 27 October 1952.

251

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British Cinema and the Cold War 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

97.

98. 99.

PRO PREM 11/124 Colville to Churchill, 1 May 1952 and Arthur Watkins, BBFC secretary, to Colville, 6 May 1952; text of prologue drawn up between BBFC and FO, The Fall of Berlin microjacket, BFI Library. PRO PREM 11/124 Colville to Churchill, 1 May 1952. Daily Worker, 14 June 1952; Kinematograph Weekly, 8 May 1952; The Fall of Berlin microjacket, BFI Library. PRO PREM 11/124 Colville and Trevor-Roper correspondence, May 1952; Sight and Sound, vol. 22, no 1, July–September 1952, pp. 27–8. Daily Telegraph, 6 May 1952; Daily Mirror, 6 May 1952. Evening Standard, 8 May 1952; Daily Telegraph, 6 May 1952; John Ramsden, ‘How Winston Churchill became “the greatest living Englishman”’, Contemporary British History, vol. 12, no 3, Autumn 1998, pp. 1–40. Sunday Times, 11 May 1952; Evening Standard, 8 May 1952. Liehm, The Most Important Art, pp. 270–1; Hibbin, Screen Series: Eastern Europe – An Illustrated Guide. Manvell, Films and the Second World War, pp. 294–8; author’s interview with Stanley Forman, managing director of Plato Films Ltd, 12 March 1998. Liehm, The Most Important Art, pp. 88–9. Joris Ivens, The Camera and I (New York, 1974); author’s interview with Stanley Forman, managing director of Plato Films Ltd, 12 March 1998; Dickinson (ed.), Rogue Reels, pp. 221, 223. The English version of Peace Will Win was made by Louis Daquin and Ralph Bond. Typescript of film, item 276, Ivor Montagu collection, BFI Library. PRO FO 1110/461/PR130/1 Correspondence between Foreign Office and Board of Trade, July to August 1951. Hogenkamp, ‘Not quite prepared for Always Prepared ’, p. 133. Items 225, 273, 285 and 287, Ivor Montagu Collection, BFI Library. Daily Worker, 10 December 1951; The Times, 20 February 1952. Liehm, The Most Important Art, pp. 270–1; author’s interview with Stanley Forman, managing director of Plato Films Ltd, 12 March 1998. Tom Dewe Matthews, Censored (London, 1994), p. 141. Author’s interview with Stanley Forman, managing director of Plato Films Ltd, 12 March 1998; Liehm, The Most Important Art, pp. 270–1; Manvell, Films and the Second World War, pp. 294–8. Montagu, in Matthews, Censored, p. 142. Montagu’s inaccurate comment referred to Herbert’s Wilcox’s Dawn (1928) which was banned by the BBFC in the late 1920s at the behest of Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain, following an approach from the German government. See James C. Robertson, ‘Dawn: Edith Cavell and Anglo-German relations’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 4, no 1, 1984, pp. 15–28. Matthews, Censored, p. 142. Ibid.; Dickinson (ed.), Rogue Reels, pp. 220–1; author’s interview with Stanley Forman, managing director of Plato Films Ltd, 12 March 1998. Plato was disappointed by the lack of support it received from DEFA to

Notes on the Text

100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

fight the libel case, and was ultimately forced to change its name into Educational and Television Films Ltd in order to escape further legal proceedings. Dickinson (ed.), Rogue Reels, pp. 20, 219; Kevin Morgan, Harry Pollitt (Manchester, 1993), pp. 155–84. Cooper, in Dickinson (ed.), Rogue Reels, p. 215. Hogenkamp, ‘The sunshine of socialism’, p. 204. Cited in Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Post-war Britain, p. 96. Hill, Sex, Class and Realism, p. 50. Ibid., p. 43. Dickinson (ed.), Rogue Reels, p. 31. Dickinson (ed.), Rogue Reels, pp. 28, 31–2.

Conclusion 1. 2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

Paul Babitsky and John Rimberg, The Soviet Film Industry (New York, 1955), pp. 206–7; Sayre, Running Time, pp. 341–2. David Lodge, The Picturegoers (Harmondsworth, 1993; first published in 1960), pp. x, 75. Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans have Loved, Hated and Transformed American Culture since World War Two (New York, 1997), p. 282. Cohen, in reference to the ‘agenda-setting’ of the press, cited in J. Van Ginneken, Understanding Global News: A Critical Introduction (London, 1998), p. 87. For more on the media’s, and the political right’s, role as a ‘primary definer’ of political issues see Stuart Hall, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London, 1978), pp. 57–62. Elsom, Cold War Theatre, p. 11.

253

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Unpublished Material British Film Institute Library, London, UK BBFC Scenario Reports 1930–39, 1941, 1946–49 Collections: James Anderson, Anthony Asquith, Michael Balcon, Filippo del Giudice, Film Society, Carl Foreman, Joseph Losey, Bernard Miles, Ivor Montagu, Victor Saville Miscellaneous press books and scripts Public Record Office, London, UK BT 64: Board of Trade, Films Section CAB 21: Cabinet Office, Registered Papers CAB 27: Cabinet Committees, General Series CAB 124: Lord President of the Council Files CAB 128: Cabinet Conclusions CAB 129: Cabinet Memoranda CAB 130: Cabinet Committees, Ad Hoc Committees CO 1022: Colonial Office, South East Asia Department Correspondence CO 1027: Colonial Office, Information Department Correspondence INF 6: Central Office of Information, Films Division Production Files INF 12: Central Office of Information, Registered Files FO 371: Foreign Office, General Political Correspondence FO 953: Foreign Office, Information Departments FO 975: Foreign Office, Information Research Department Reports FO 1110: Foreign Office, Information Research Department Correspondence HO 322: Home Office, Civil Defence Files LAB 10: Ministry of Labour, General Correspondence PREM 8: Prime Minister’s Correspondence and Papers PREM 11: Prime Minister’s Correspondence and Papers BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham, UK P6555: Television Programmes, Press Cuttings T5: Television Plays, General and Drama Files T16: Television Policy – The War Game T56: Television Research – The War Game

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Bibliography National Museum of Labour History, Manchester, UK CPGB Papers Labour Party Papers Ivor Montagu Papers Halas and Batchelor Collection Ltd., London, UK Halas and Batchelor Collections Southampton Institute International Animation Research Archive, Southampton, UK Halas and Batchelor Collection Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri, USA Psychological Strategy Board Records Tamiment Library, New York University, New York, USA American Committee for Cultural Freedom Records

Published Document Sources Foreign Relations of the United States (GPO, Washington, DC, 1979–1999) IRD: Origins and Establishment of the Foreign Office Information Research Department, 1946–48 (Foreign and Commonwealth Office Library and Records Department, London, 1995) Parliamentary Debates: House of Commons and House of Lords, 5th Series (Hansard) Report of Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations, 1965–1968, Cmnd. 3623 (HMSO, London, 1968) Tendencies to Monopoly in the Cinematograph Films Industry (Board of Trade, London, 1944) The British Film Industry: A Report on its History and Present Organization, with Special Reference to the Economic Problems of British Feature Film Production (Political and Economic Planning, London, 1952) United States Declassified Document Reference System (GPO, Washington DC, 1988–1996)

Newspapers and periodicals Birmingham Evening Despatch; Catholic Herald; Daily Express; Daily Herald; Daily Mail; Daily Mirror; Daily Sketch; Daily Telegraph; Daily Worker; Encounter; Essex Chronicle; Evening News; Evening Standard; Le Figaro; Glasgow Herald; The Guardian; Jewish Chronicle; The Listener; Liverpool Daily Post; Manchester Guardian; New Statesman and Nation; New York Times; New Yorker; News Chronicle; Observer; Reader’s Digest; Reynolds News; Socialist Leader; Southend

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British Cinema and the Cold War Times; Spectator; The Star; Sunday Despatch; Sunday Graphic; Sunday Express; Sunday Times; The Times; Times Educational Supplement; Tribune; World News and Views; Wolverhampton Express and Star; Yorkshire Evening Post

Film Journals and Trade Papers Arena; Bioscope; The Cinema; The Cinema Studio; Daily Film Renter; Documentary News Letter; Film Criticism; Films and Filming; Kinematograph Weekly; Monthly Film Bulletin; Motion Picture Herald; Movie; Picturegoer; Screen; Sight and Sound; Today’s Cinema; Variety; What’s On

Books and Monographs Published in London unless stated otherwise ACTT, Action! Fifty Years in the Life of a Union (Pear Publications, 1983) Agee, James, Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments by James Agee (Peter Owen, 1963) Aitken, Ian, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (Routledge, 1990) Aldgate, Anthony, Censorship and the Permissive Society: British Cinema and Theatre, 1955–1965 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995) ——— and Richards, Jeffrey, Britain Can Take It: British Cinema in the Second World War (Blackwell, Oxford, 1986) ——— and Richards, Jeffrey, Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present (I.B.Tauris, 1999) Aldrich, Richard (ed.), British Intelligence, Strategy and the Cold War, 1945–51 (Frank Cass, 1992) ——— (ed.) Espionage, Security and Intelligence in Britain 1945–1970 (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1998) Allan, Marie-Françoise, The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1984) Amis, Kingsley, The James Bond Dossier (Jonathan Cape, 1965) —— New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (Gollancz, 1961) Andrew, Christopher, Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (Sceptre, 1987) —— and Gordievsky, Oleg, KGB: The Inside Story (HarperCollins, 1990) Anstey, Edgar, Manvell, Roger, Lindgren, Ernest and Rotha, Paul (eds), Shots in the Dark (Allan Wingate, 1951) Armes, Roy, A Critical History of the British Cinema (Secker and Warburg, 1978) Aubrey, Crispin et al. (eds), Nukespeak: The Media and the Bomb (Comedia, 1982) Babitsky, Paul and Rimberg, John, The Soviet Film Industry (Praeger, New York, 1955)

Bibliography Badsey, Stephen, The Manchurian Candidate (Flicks Books, Trowbridge, 1998) Bainbridge, William Sims, Dimensions of Science Fiction (Harvard University Press, 1986) Baker, J. O., Civil Defence and You (Jordan and Sons, 1951). Balcon, Michael, Michael Balcon Presents… A Lifetime of Films (Hutchinson, 1969) Balio, Tino (ed.), The American Film Industry (University of Wisconsin Press, 1976) Ball, S.J., The Cold War: An International History, 1947–1991 (Macmillan, 1998) Barghoorn, Frederick, Soviet Foreign Propaganda (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1962) —— The Soviet Cultural Offensive (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1960) Bark, Dennis L. and Gress, David R., A History of West Germany, vol. 1: From Shadow to Substance 1945–1963 (Blackwell, Oxford, 1989) Barnett, Correlli, The Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation (Macmillan, 1986) Barr, Charles, Ealing Studios (Cameron and Taylor/David and Charles, 1977) —— (ed.), All Our Yesterdays (British Film Institute, 1986) Baxter, John, Science Fiction in the Cinema (The Tantivy Press, 1979) —— Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (HarperCollins, 1997) Baylis, John, Ambiguity and Deterrence: British Nuclear Strategy, 1945–1964 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995) Bell, Daniel, The End of Ideology (Free Press of Glencoe, Glencoe, 1960) Bell, P.M.H., John Bull and the Bear: British Public Opinion, Foreign Policy and the Soviet Union, 1941–45 (Edward Arnold, 1990) Biskind, Peter, Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and to Love the Fifties (Pluto, 1984) Blake, Robert and Louis, William Roger (eds), Churchill (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994) Bloom, Alexander, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1986) Bogdanor, Vernon and Skidelsky, Robert (eds), The Age of Affluence 1951–1964 (Macmillan, 1970) Booker, Christopher, The Neophiliacs (Collins, 1969) Bordwell, David, Staiger, Janet and Thompson, Kristin, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985) Bradbury, Malcolm, The Modern British Novel (Secker and Warburg, 1993) Bradon, Ruth, The Burning Question: The Anti-Nuclear Movement since 1945 (Heinemann, 1987) Brands, H.W., The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War (Oxford University Press, New York, 1993) Brandt, G.W. (ed.), British Television Drama (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981) Breuer, William B., Race to the Moon: America’s Duel with the Soviets (Praeger, 1993)

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British Cinema and the Cold War Briggs, Asa, The History of Broadcasting in the UK, vol. 4: Sound and Vision (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979) —— The History of Broadcasting in the UK, vol. 5: Competition (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995) Broderick, Mick, Nuclear Movies (McFarland, Jefferson, 1991) —— Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film (Kegan Paul, 1996) Brosnan, John, James Bond in the Cinema (The Tantivy Press, 1972) Brown, Geoff, Launder and Gilliat (British Film Institute, 1977) Brownlow, Kevin, Behind the Mask of Innocence: Sex, Violence, Prejudice, Crime – Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era (University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1990) Bryant, Chris, Stafford Cripps: The First Modern Chancellor (Hodder and Stoughton, 1997) Bullock, Alan, Ernest Bevin: Foreign Secretary, 1945–51 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1985) Burton, Alan, O’Sullivan, Tim and Wells, Paul (eds), Liberal Directions: Basil Dearden and Post-War British Film Culture (Flicks Books, Trowbridge, 1997) —— (eds), The Family Way: The Boulting Brothers and British Film Culture (Flicks Books, Trowbridge, 2000) Byrne, Paul, The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (Croom Helm, 1988) Cairncross, Alec, The British Economy since 1945 (Blackwell, Oxford, 1995) Callaghan, John, The Far Left in British Politics (Blackwell, Oxford, 1987) Campbell, Duncan, War Plan UK: The Truth about Civil Defence in Britain (Burnett Books, 1982) Carruthers, Susan L., Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media and Colonial Counter-Insurgency 1945–1960 (Leicester University Press, Leicester, 1995) —— The Media at War (Macmillan, 2000) Caute, David, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1978) —— Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1994) Cawelti, John and Rosenberg, Bruce, The Spy Story (Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1987) Ceplair, Larry and Englund, Steven, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (University of California Press, 1979) Chadwick, Owen, The Penguin History of the Church, vol. 7: The Christian Church in the Cold War (Penguin, 1993) Challinor, Raymond, The Origins of British Bolshevism (Croom Helm, 1977) Chapman, James, The British At War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939–1945 (I.B.Tauris, 1998) —— Licence To Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (I.B.Tauris, 1999) Childs, David, Britain since 1945: A Political History (Routledge, 1997)

Bibliography Christie, Ian, Arrows of Desire: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (Faber, 1994) Ciment, Michael, Kazan on Kazan (Secker and Warburg, 1973) —— Conversations with Losey (Methuen, 1985) Cohen, Stanley, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (Blackwell, Oxford, 1980) Cole, Robert, Propaganda in Twentieth Century War and Politics: An Annotated Bibliography (Scarecrow Press, Pasadena, 1996) Coleman, Peter, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Post-War Europe (The Free Press, New York, 1989) Coogan, Tim Pat, The IRA (Collins, 1987) Connell, Brian, Knight Errant: A Biography of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr (Hodder and Stoughton, 1955) Coultass, Clive, Images for Battle: British Film and the Second World War 1939–1945 (Associated University Presses, 1989) Cox, Geoffrey, See it Happen: The Making of ITN (Bodley Head, 1983) Crampton, Richard, Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century (Routledge, 1994) Crick, Bernard, George Orwell: A Life (Penguin, 1992) Croft, Andy (ed.), A Weapon in the Struggle: The Cultural History of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Pluto, 1998) Crofts, William, Coercion or Persuasion? Propaganda in Britain after 1945 (Routledge, 1989) Cross, Anthony G., The Russian Theme in English Literature (William A. Meeuws, Oxford, 1985) Culbert, David (ed.), Mission to Moscow (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1980) Curran, James and Porter, Vincent (eds), British Cinema History (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983) Darke, Bob, The Communist Technique in Britain (Collins, 1953) Davies, Philip and Neve, Brian (eds), Cinema, Politics and Society in America (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1981) Deighton, Anne (ed.), Britain and the First Cold War (Macmillan, 1990) Denning, Michael, Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987) Derry, Charles, Dark Dreams: A Psychological History of the Modern Horror Film (Dutton, Cranbury, 1973) Dickinson, Margaret (ed.), Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945–1990 (British Film Institute, 1999) Dixon, W.W. (ed.), Re-Viewing British Cinema, 1900–1992: Essays and Interviews (SUNY, New York, 1994) Dockrill, Saki, Eisenhower’s New Look National Security Policy, 1953–1961 (Macmillan, 1996) Drazin, Charles, In Search of The Third Man (Methuen, 1999)

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British Cinema and the Cold War Durcan, J.W., McCarthy, W.E.J., and Redman, G.P., Strikes in Post-war Britain (Allen and Unwin, 1983) Durgnat, Raymond, Mirror for England (Faber, 1970) Elsom, John, Cold War Theatre (Routledge, 1992) Evans, Jeff, The Guinness Television Encyclopedia (Guinness, Enfield, 1995) Fielding, Raymond, The March of Time, 1935–1951 (Oxford University Press, New York, 1978) Forbes, Bryan, Notes for a Life (Everest Books, 1974) Fried, Richard M., Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990) Furhammar, Leif and Isaksson, Folke, Politics and Film (Studio Vista, 1971) Fyrth, Jim (ed.), Labour’s High Noon: The Government and the Economy, 1945– 1951 (Lawrence and Wishart, 1993) —— (ed.), Labour’s Promised Land? Culture and Society in Labour Britain 1945–1951 (Lawrence and Wishart, 1995) Gaddis, John Lewis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997); Gallup, George (ed.), The Gallup International Public Opinion Polls: Great Britain 1937–1975, vol. 1: 1937–1964 (Random House, New York, 1976) Gardner, Colin, Time Without Pity: Immanence and Contradiction in the Films of Joseph Losey (forthcoming) George, S.C., Planter’s Wife (Jarrolds, 1951) Gifford, Denis, The British Film Catalogue, 1895–1985: A Reference Guide (David and Charles, London, 1986) —— British Animated Films, 1895–1985 (MacFarlane and Co., 1987) Glees, Anthony, The Secrets of the Service: British Intelligence and Communist Subversion, 1939–51 (Jonathan Cape, 1987) Gomery, Douglas, The Hollywood Studio System (Macmillan, 1986) Gowing, Margaret, Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy, 1945–1952, vol. 1: Policy Making (Macmillan, 1974) —— Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy, 1945–1952, vol. 2: Policy Execution (Macmillan, 1974) Greene, Graham, Ways of Escape (Bodley Head, 1980) —— The Tenth Man (Bodley Head, New York, 1985) —— Our Man in Havana (The Collected Edition, Bodley Head, 1970) Greenwood, Sean, Britain and the Cold War, 1945–1991 (Macmillan, 2000) Guilbaut, Serge, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993) Guinness, Alec, Blessings in Disguise (Fontana, 1985) Hall, Stuart, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (Macmillan, 1978) Harper, Ralph, The World of the Thriller (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) Hawkins, Jack, Anything for A Quiet Life (Elm Tree, 1973)

Bibliography Hazan, Baruch, Soviet Impregnational Propaganda (Ardis, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1982) Hedling, Erik, Lindsay Anderson: Maverick Film-Maker (Cassell, 1998) Hennessy, Peter, Never Again: Britain 1945–1951 (Jonathan Cape, 1992) —— What the Papers Never Said (Portcullis Press, 1985) Hewison, Robert, In Anger: Culture in the Cold War, 1945–1960 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981) Hibbin, Nina, Screen Series: Eastern Europe – An Illustrated Guide (A. Zwemmer, 1969) Hill, John, Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema, 1956–1963 (British Film Institute, 1986) Hirschhorn, Clive, The Films of James Mason (LSP Books, 1975) Hixson, Walter L., Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (Macmillan, 1997) Hobsbawm, Eric, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (Michael Joseph, 1994) Hogenkamp, Bert, Deadly Parallels: Film and the Left in Britain, 1929–1939 (Lawrence and Wishart, 1986) Hook, Sidney, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the Twentieth Century (Harper and Row, New York, 1987) Household, Geoffrey, Rough Shoot (Corgi, 1951) Houston, Penelope, Went the Day Well? (British Film Institute, 1992) Hughes, Michael, Inside the Enigma: British Officials in Russia, 1900–1939 (Hambledon, 1997) Hunnings, Neville March, Film Censors and the Law (Allen and Unwin, 1967) Hunt, Howard, Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent (W.H. Allen, 1975) Hunter, I.Q. (ed.), British Science Fiction Cinema (Routledge, 1999) Hurd, Geoff (ed.), National Fictions: World War Two in British Films and Television (British Film Institute, 1984) Hyde, Douglas, I Believed: The Autobiography of a Former British Communist (Heinemann, 1950) Hyde, H. Montgomery, The Atom Bomb Spies (Hamish Hamilton, 1980) Inglis, Fred, The Cruel Peace: Living Through the Cold War (Aurum Press, 1992) Ivens, Joris, The Camera and I (International Publishers, New York, 1974) Jarvie, I.C., Towards a Sociology of the Cinema (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) Jeffrey, Keith and Hennessy, Peter, States of Emergency: British Governments and Strikebreaking since 1919 (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983) Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri, The CIA and American Democracy (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1989) Jones, Harriet and Kandiah, Michael (eds), The Myth of Consensus: New Views on British History, 1945–64 (Macmillan, 1996) Jones, Stephen G., The British Labour Movement and Film, 1918–1939 (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987) Katz, Ephraim, International Film Encyclopedia (Macmillan, 1994)

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British Cinema and the Cold War Kemp, Philip, Lethal Innocence: The Cinema of Alexander Mackendrick (Methuen, 1991) Kenez, Peter, Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917–1953 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992) Kent, John, British Imperial Strategy and the Origins of the Cold War (Leicester University Press, Leicester, 1993) Keohane, Dan, Labour Party Defence Policy since 1945 (Leicester University Press, Leicester, 1993) Kern, Montague, Levering, Patricia W. and Levering, Ralph B., The Kennedy Crises: The Press, the Presidency and Foreign Policy (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1983) Kirkham, Pat and Thoms, David (eds), War Culture: Social Change and the Changing Experience in World War Two (Lawrence and Wishart, 1995) Kitchen, Martin, British Policy Towards the Soviet Union during the Second World War (Macmillan, 1986) Klugmann, James, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, vol. I: Formation and Early Years, 1919–1924 (Lawrence and Wishart, 1980) Knightley, Phillip, The First Casualty: From the Crimea to the Falklands: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth Maker (Pan, 1989) Koestler, Arthur, Suicide of a Nation (Hutchinson, 1963) Koppes, Clayton R. and Black, Gregory D., Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (The Free Press, New York, 1987) Kulik, Karol, Alexander Korda: The Man Who Could Work Miracles (W.H. Allen, 1975) LaFeber, Walter, America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945–1996 (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1997) Laing, Stuart, Representations of Working-Class Life, 1957–1964 (Macmillan, 1986) Landy, Marcia, British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930–1960 (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1991) Lashmar, Paul and Oliver, James, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, 1948–1977 (Sutton, Stroud, 1998) Lawton, Anna (ed.), The Red Screen: Politics, Society and Art in Soviet Cinema (Routledge, 1992) Leahy, James, The Cinema of Joseph Losey (A. Zwemmer, 1967) LeMahieu, D.L., A Culture for Democracy (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988) Levin, Bernard, The Pendulum Years (Pan, 1970) Lewis, Peter, George Orwell: The Road to 1984 (Heinemann, 1981) Lewis, Roger, The Life and Times of Peter Sellers (Century, 1994) Liehm, Mira, The Most Important Art: East European Film after 1945 (University of California Press, 1977) Lodge, David, The Picturegoers (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1993) Lottman, Herbert, The Left Bank: Writers, Artists and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War (Heinemann, 1982)

Bibliography Louis, William Roger (ed.), More Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain (I.B.Tauris, 1998) Low, Rachael, The History of British Film, vol. II: The History of the British Film, 1906–1914 (Routledge, 1997) —— The History of British Film, vol. IV: The History of the British Film, 1918– 1929 (Routledge, 1997) —— The History of British Film, vol. VI: The History of the British Film, 1929– 1939 – Films of Comment and Persuasion (Routledge, 1997) —— The History of British Film, vol. VII: The History of the British Film, 1929– 1939 – Film Making in 1930s Britain (Routledge, 1997) Lycett, Andrew, Ian Fleming (Phoenix, 1996) Macdonald, Kevin, Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter (Faber, 1994) Macnab, Geoffrey, J. Arthur Rank and the British Film Industry (Routledge, 1994) Magee, Brian, The New Radicalism (Secker and Warburg, 1962) Maland, Charles J., Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1989) Malik, Rex, What’s Wrong with British Industry? (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1964) Manvell, Roger, The Animated Film: With Pictures from the Film ‘Animal Farm’ by Halas and Batchelor (Sylvan Press, 1954) —— Films and the Second World War (J.M. Dent, 1974) —— Chaplin (Hutchinson, 1974) Marwick, Arthur, British Society since 1945 (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1982) Maschler, Tom (ed.), Declaration (MacGibbon and Kee, 1957) Mastny, Vojtech, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996) Matthews, Tom Dewe, Censored (Chatto and Windus, 1994) Mayhew, Christopher, Time to Explain (Hutchinson, 1987) —— A War of Words: A Cold War Witness (I.B.Tauris, 1998) McCormick, Donald, Approaching 1984 (David and Charles, 1980) McDonald, Iverach, The History of The Times, vol. V: Struggles in War and Peace, 1939–1966 (Times Books, 1984) McFarlane, Brian, Sixty Voices: Celebrities Recall the Golden Age of British Cinema (British Film Institute, 1992) McGilligan, Patrick and Buhle, Paul, Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (St Martin’s Griffin, New York, 1997) McKibbin, Ross, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998) McLachlan, Donald, In the Chair: Barrington-Ward of The Times (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971) Meyers, Jeffrey, A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell (Thames and Hudson, 1975) Milne, Tom (ed.), Losey on Losey (Secker and Warburg, 1967)

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British Cinema and the Cold War Minney, R.J., Puffin Asquith: The Biography of the Honourable Anthony Asquith – Aristocrat, Aesthete, Prime Minister’s Son and Brilliant Film Maker (Leslie Frewin, 1973) Minnion, John and Bolsover, Philip, The CND Story (Allison and Busby, 1983) Morgan, Kenneth O., Labour in Power, 1945–1951 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1984) Morgan, Kevin, Harry Pollitt (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1993) Moss, Robert F., The Films of Carol Reed (Macmillan, 1987) Murphy, David E., Kondrashev, Sergei A. and Bailey, George, Battleground Berlin: CIA versus KGB in the Cold War (Yale University Press, 1997). Murphy, Robert, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1939–1948 (Routledge, 1989) —— Sixties British Cinema (British Film Institute, 1992) —— (ed.), The British Cinema Book (British Film Institute, 1997) Murray, Patrick, Companion to Animal Farm (The Educational Press, Dublin, 1985) Navasky, Victor S., Naming Names (John Calder, New York, 1982) Nelson, Michael, War of the Black Heavens: The Battles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War (Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 1997) Nicholson, Steve, British Theatre and the Red Peril: The Portrayal of Communism, 1917–1945 (Exeter University Press, Exeter, 1999) O’Connor, John E. and Jackson, Martin A. (eds), American History/American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image (Ungar, New York, 1979) O’Neill, William, A Better World: The Great Schism – Stalinism and the American Intellectuals (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1982) Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973) —— The Orwell Reader: Fiction, Essays and Reportage by George Orwell (Harvest/Harcourt Brace Javonovich, New York, 1955) Orwell, Sonia and Angus, Ian (eds), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. IV: In Front of Your Nose, 1945–50 (Secker and Warburg, 1968) Palmer, James and Riley, Michael, The Films of Joseph Losey (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993) Park, James, The Lights That Failed (British Film Institute, 1990) Parkinson, David (ed.), Mornings in the Dark: The Graham Greene Film Reader (Carcanet, Manchester, 1993) Pells, Richard, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated and Transformed American Culture since World War Two (Basic Books, New York, 1997) Perry, George, Forever Ealing (Pavilion/Michael Joseph, 1981) Phelps, Guy, Film Censorship in Britain (Gollancz, 1975) Phillips, Gene D., Major Film Directors of the American and British Cinema (Associated University Presses, 1990) Pickard, Roy, Science Fiction in the Movies: An A–Z (Frederick Muller, 1978) Pirie, David, A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema, 1946–1972 (Gordon Fraser, 1973)

Bibliography Pisani, Sallie, The CIA and the Marshall Plan (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1991) Powdermaker, Hortense, Hollywood, the Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at the Movie-Makers (Secker and Warburg, 1951) Pronay, Nicholas and Spring, D.W. (eds), Propaganda, Politics and Film 1918–1945 (Macmillan, 1982) Quinlan, David, British Sound Films: The Studio Years, 1928–1959 (Batsford, 1984) Ranelagh, John, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (Sceptre, 1988) Rawnsley, Gary (ed.), Cold War Propaganda in the 1950s (Macmillan, 1999) Redgrave, Michael, In My Mind’s Eye: An Autobiography (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983) Reeves, Nicholas, Official British Film Propaganda during the First World War (Croom Helm, 1986) Reynolds, David (ed.), The Origins of the Cold War in Europe: International Perspectives (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1994) —— Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942–1945 (HarperCollins, 1995) —— Britannia Overruled: British Policy and World Power in the 20th Century (Longman, 1991) Richards, Jeffrey, Visions of Yesterday (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973) —— The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain 1930–1939 (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984) —— Thorold Dickinson: The Man and his Films (Croom Helm, 1986) —— Thorold Dickinson and the British Cinema (Scarecrow Press, Pasadena, 1997) —— (ed.), The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema, 1919–1939 (I.B.Tauris, 1998) —— and Aldgate, Anthony, The Best of British: Cinema and Society, 1930–1970 (Blackwell, Oxford, 1983) Robertson, James C., The British Board of Film Censors: Film Censorship in Britain, 1896–1950 (Croom Helm, 1985) —— The Hidden Cinema: British Film Censorship in Action, 1913–1972 (Routledge, 1989) Robinson, David, Chaplin: His Life and Art (Grafton, 1992) Rodden, John, The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of St. George’ Orwell (Oxford University Press, New York, 1989) Rositzke, Harry, The CIA’s Secret Operations (Reader’s Digest Press, New York, 1977) Rux, Bruce, Hollywood and the Aliens (Frog Ltd, 1997) Ryall, Tom, Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema (Croom Helm, 1986) Sanders, Michael and Taylor, Philip M., British Propaganda during the First World War, 1914–1918 (Macmillan, 1982) Sayre, Nora, Running Time: Films of the Cold War (Dial Press, New York, 1982) Schneer, Jonathan, Labour’s Conscience: The Labour Left, 1945–51 (Unwin Hyman, Boston, MA, 1988)

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British Cinema and the Cold War Sellar, Maurice, Best of British: A Celebration of Rank Film Classics (Sphere Books, 1987) Shafer, Stephen C., British Popular Films, 1929–1939: The Cinema of Reassurance (Routledge, 1997). Shaheen, Jack (ed.), Nuclear War Films (Southern Illinois Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1978) Shanks, Michael, The Stagnant Society (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1963) Shears, David, The Ugly Frontier (Chatto and Windus, 1970) Shelden, Michael, Graham Greene: The Man Within (Heinemann, 1994) —— Orwell: The Authorized Biography (Minerva, 1991) Shellard, Dominic, British Theatre since the War (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1999) Shils, Edward, The Torment of Secrecy (Heinemann, 1956) Shlapentokh, Dmitry and Shlapentokh, Vladimir, Soviet Cinematography, 1918–1991: Ideological Conflict and Social Reality (Aldine De Gruyter, New York, 1993) Shonfield, Andrew, British Economic Policy since the War (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1958) Short (ed.), K.R.M., Feature Films as History (Croom Helm, 1981) Sinfield, Alan, Literature, Politics and Culture in Post-War Britain (Athlone Press, 1997) Sissons, Michael and French, Philip (eds), Age of Austerity, 1945–1951 (Hodder and Stoughton, 1963) Smith, Justin Davis, The Attlee and Churchill Administrations and Industrial Unrest, 1945–55: A Study in Consensus (Pinter, 1990) Sorenson, Thomas, The Word War: The Story of American Propaganda (Harper and Row, New York, 1968) Spence, Jonathan, The Search for Modern China (Hutchinson, 1990) Spraos, John, The Decline of the Cinema: An Economist’s Report (Allen and Unwin, 1962) Stacey, J., Star Gazing (Routledge, 1994) Stock, Stuart and von Grunden, Kenneth, Twenty All-Time Great Science Fiction Films (Arlington House, New York, 1982) Stonor Saunders, Frances, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (Granta, 1999) Sussex, Elizabeth, The Rise and Fall of British Documentary (University of California Press, 1975) —— Lindsay Anderson (Studio Vista, 1969) Swann, Paul, The Hollywood Feature Film in Post-War Britain (London, 1987) —— The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926–1946 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989) Taylor, John Russell, Anger and After (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1963) Taylor, Philip M. (ed.), Britain and the Cinema in the Second World War (Macmillan, 1988)

Bibliography Taylor, Richard, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (I.B.Tauris, 1998) —— and Christie, Ian (eds), The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema Documents, 1896–1939 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1988) —— and Christie, Ian (eds), Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema (Routledge, 1991) —— and Spring, Derek (eds), Stalinism and Soviet Cinema (Routledge, 1993) Taylor, Richard, and Young, Nigel, Campaigns for Peace: British Peace Movements in the Twentieth Century (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1987) Taylor, Robert, The Trade Union Question in British Politics: Government and Unions since 1945 (Blackwell, Oxford, 1993) Thomas, Evan, The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared – The Early Years of the CIA (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1995). Thompson, Willie, The Good Old Cause: British Communism, 1920–1991 (Pluto, 1992) Thomson, David, A Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema (Secker and Warburg, 1975) Thorpe, Frances and Pronay, Nicholas, British Official Films in the Second World War: A Descriptive Catalogue (Clio Press, Oxford, 1980). Thurlow, Richard, The Secret State: British Internal Security in the Twentieth Century (Blackwell, Oxford, 1994) Towson, Duncan, A Dictionary of Contemporary History: 1945 to the Present (Blackwell, Oxford, 1999) Trevelyan, John, What the Censor Saw (Joseph, 1973) Urban, George, Radio Free Europe and the Pursuit of Democracy: My War within the Cold War (Yale University Press, 1997) Vale, Lawrence J., The Limits of Civil Defence in the USA, Switzerland, Britain and the Soviet Union (Macmillan, 1987) Vali, Ferenc A., Rift and Revolt in Hungary (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1961) Van Ginneken, Jaap., Understanding Global News: A Critical Introduction (Sage, 1998) Von Gunden, Kenneth, Alec Guinness: The Films (McFarland and Co., 1987) Wagnleitner, Reinhold, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War (University of North Carolina Press, 1994) Wald, Alan M., The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the AntiStalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1987) Walker, Alexander, Hollywood, England (Michael Joseph, 1974) Wapshott, Nicholas, The Man Between: A Biography of Carol Reed (Chatto and Windus, 1990) Warburg, Fredric, All Authors are Equal (Hutchinson, 1973) Warren, Bill, Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties, 2 vols (McFarland, Jefferson, 1982 and 1986)

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British Cinema and the Cold War Weart, Spencer R., Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Harvard University Press, 1988). Weiler, Peter, British Labour and the Cold War (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1988) West, Nigel, M.I.5., 1945–72: A Matter Of Trust (Coronet, 1982) White, Stephen, Britain and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Study in the Politics of Diplomacy, 1920–1924 (Macmillan, 1979) Whitfield, Stephen J., The Culture of the Cold War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) Williams, Francis, Nothing So Strange (Cassell, 1970), Williamson, Bill, The Temper of the Times: British Society since World War Two (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990) Wills, Gary, John Wayne: The Politics of Celebrity (Faber, London, 1997) Wittner, Lawrence, Resisting the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement 1954–1970 (Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1997) Woll, Josephine, Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw (I.B.Tauris, 2000). Woodcock, George, Twentieth Century Fiction (Macmillan, 1983) Wormald, R.D. and Young, J.M., Civil Defence Questions Answered (Jordan and Sons, 1955) Wright, Basil, The Long View: An International History of the Cinema (Paladin, 1976) Zametica, John (ed.), British Officials and Foreign Policy, 1945–1950 (Leicester University Press, Leicester, 1990) Zeman, Z.A.B., The Making and Breaking of Communist Europe (Blackwell, Oxford, 1991) Zorkaya, Neya, The Illustrated History of the Soviet Cinema (Hippocrene Books, New York, 1989) Zubok, Vladislav and Pleshakov, Constantine, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996)

Articles Adamthwaite, Anthony, ‘“Nation shall speak peace into nation’’: The BBC’s response to peace and defence issues, 1945–58’, Contemporary Record, vol. 7, no 3, 1993, pp. 557–77 Adler, Les K. and Paterson, Thomas G., ‘Red fascism: The merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American image of totalitarianism, 1930s–1950s’, American Historical Review, vol. 75, no 4, April 1970, pp. 1046–64 Barnouw, Erik, ‘The Hiroshima-Nagasaki Footage: A report’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 2, no 1, 1982, pp. 91–100 Booth, Alan R., ‘The development of the espionage film’, Intelligence and National Security, vol. 5, no 4, October 1990, pp. 136–60 Carpenter, Lynette, ‘“I never knew the old Vienna”: Cold War politics and The Third Man’, Film Criticism, vol. 11, Fall–Winter 1987, pp. 56–65

Bibliography Carruthers, S.L., ‘A red under every bed? Anti-Communist propaganda and Britain’s response to colonial insurgency’, Contemporary Record, vol. 9, no 2, Autumn 1995, pp. 294–318 —— ‘Two faces of 1950s terrorism: The film presentation of Mau Mau and the Malayan Emergency’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, vol. 6, no 1, Spring 1995, pp. 17–43 —— ‘The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and the Cold War brainwashing scare’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 18, no 1, 1998, pp. 75–94 Cockett Richard, ‘“In wartime every objective reporter should be shot’’: The experience of British press correspondents in Moscow, 1941–5’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 23, no 4, October 1988, pp. 515–30 Cohn, Karl, ‘Toontown’s reds: HUAC’s investigation of alleged Communists in the animation industry’, Film History, vol. 5, no 2, 1993, pp. 190–203 Coultass, Clive, ‘British feature films and the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 19, 1984, pp. 7–22 Deery, Phillip, ‘“The secret battalion”: Communism in Britain during the early Cold War’, Contemporary British History, vol. 13, no 4, Winter 1999, pp. 1–28 Ellwood, D.W. ‘The 1948 elections in Italy: A Cold War propaganda battle’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 13, no 1, 1993, pp. 19–33 Fletcher, Richard, ‘British propaganda since World War Two – A case study’, Media, Culture and Society, vol. 4, no 2, April 1982, pp. 97–109 Foglesong, David S., ‘Roots of “liberation”: American images of the future of Russia in the early Cold War, 1948–1953’, International History Review, vol. 21, no 1, March 1999, pp. 57–79 Glancy, H. Mark, ‘MGM film grosses, 1924–1948: The Eddie Mannix ledger’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 12, no 2, 1992, pp. 127–44 Guy, Stephen, ‘High Treason (1951): Britain’s Cold War fifth column’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 13, no 1, 1993, pp. 35–47 Harrison, Tom, ‘British opinion moves towards a new synthesis’, Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 2, no 3, 1947, pp. 327–41 Hemsing, Albert, ‘The Marshall plan’s European film unit 1948–1955: A memoir and filmography’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 14, no 3, 1994, pp. 269–97 Hennessy, Peter and Brownfeld, Gail, ‘Britain’s Cold War security purge: The origins of positive vetting’, The Historical Journal, vol. 25, no 4, 1982, pp. 965–73 Hogenkamp, Bert, ‘Not quite prepared for Always Prepared: Herbert Morrison and the film of the 1950 East Berlin youth rally’, Contemporary British History, vol. 12, no 1, Spring 1998, pp. 131–8 Hollins, T. J., ‘The Conservative party and film propaganda between the wars’, English Historical Review, vol. 96, April 1981, pp. 359–69 Leab, Daniel J., ‘How red was my valley: Hollywood, the Cold War film, and I Married A Communist’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 19, 1984, pp. 59–88 —— ‘The Iron Curtain (1948): Hollywood’s first Cold War movie’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 8, no 2, 1988, pp. 153–188

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British Cinema and the Cold War Leitenberg, Milton, ‘New evidence on the Korean War biological warfare allegations: Background and analysis’, Cold War International History Project Bulletin, no 11, Winter 1998, pp. 185–199 Lucas, Scott W., ‘Campaigns of truth: The Psychological Strategy Board and American ideology, 1951–1953’, International History Review, vol. 18, no 2, May 1996, pp. 279–302 Maland, Charles J., ‘A documentary note on Charlie Chaplin’s politics’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 5, no 2, 1985, pp. 199–208 Merrick, Ray, ‘The Russia committee of the British Foreign Office and the Cold War, 1946-47’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 20, 1985, pp. 453–68 Miliband, Ralph and Liebman, Marcel, ‘Reflections on anti-Communism’, Socialist Register, 1984, pp. 1–22 Moat, Janet, ‘The Aileen and Michael Balcon special collection: An introduction to British cinema history, 1929–1960’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 16, no 4, 1996, pp. 565–575 Murphy, Brian, ‘Monster movies: They came from beneath the fifties’, Journal of Popular Film, vol. 1, no 1, Winter 1972, pp. 31–44 Ostermann, Christian F., The United States, the East German Uprising of 1953, and the Limits of Rollback, Cold War International History Project Working Paper, no 11, December 1994 Pronay, Nicholas, ‘British newsreels in the 1930s: 2. Their policies and impact’, History, vol. 57, no 189, February 1972, pp. 63–72 —— ‘British film sources for the Cold War: The disappearance of the cinemagoing public’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 13, no 1, 1993, pp. 7–17 —— ‘The British post-bellum cinema: A survey of the films relating to World War Two made in Britain between 1945 and 1960’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 8, no 1, 1988, pp. 39–54 Ramsden, John, ‘Refocusing the “people’s war”: British war films of the 1950s’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 33, no 1, January 1998, pp. 35–64 —— ‘How Winston Churchill became “the greatest living Englishman”’, Contemporary British History, vol. 12, no 3, Autumn 1998, pp. 1–40 Richards, Jeffrey, ‘The British Board of Film Censors and content control in the 1930s: Foreign affairs’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 2, no 1, 1982, pp. 39–48 —— ‘The British Board of Film Censors and content control in the 1930s: Images of Britain’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 1, no 2, 1981, pp. 95–116 Robertson, James, ‘British film censorship goes to war’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 2, no 1, 1982, pp. 49–64 —— ‘Dawn: Edith Cavell and Anglo-German relations’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 4, no 1, 1984, p. 15–28 Rossi, John P., ‘The British response to McCarthyism, 1950–54’, Mid-America: An Historical Review, vol. 70, no 1, 1988, pp. 5–18

Bibliography Shain, Russell E., ‘Hollywood’s Cold War’, Journal of Popular Film, vol. 3, no 4, 1974, pp. 334–50, 365–72. Shaw, Tony, ‘The Information Research Department of the British Foreign Office and the Korean war, 1950–1953’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 34, no 2, April 1999, pp. 263–81 —— ‘The British popular press and the early Cold War’, History, vol. 83, no 269, 1998, pp. 66–85 Short, K.R.M., ‘The March of Time, Time Inc. and the Berlin blockade 1948–1949’: Selling Americans on the “new” Democratic Germany’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 13, no 4, 1993, pp. 451–68 —— ‘The White Cliffs of Dover: Promoting the Anglo-American alliance in World War Two’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 2, no 1, 1982, pp. 3–25 Smith, Howard, ‘The BBC television newsreel and the Korean War’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 8, no 3, 1988, pp. 227–52 Smith, Lyn, ‘Covert British propaganda: The Information Research Department, 1947–77’, Millennium, vol. 9, no 1, Spring 1980, pp. 67–83 Tomlinson, Jim, ‘Conservative modernization 1960–64: Too little, too late?’, Contemporary British History, vol. 11, no 3, Autumn 1997, pp. 18–38 —— ‘Inventing decline: The falling behind of the British economy in the postwar years’, English Historical Review, vol. 49, no 4, 1996, pp. 731–57 Wark, Wesley, ‘Coming in from the cold: British propaganda and the Red Army defectors, 1945–52’, International History Review, vol. 9, no 1, February 1987, pp. 48–72 Weathersby, Kathryn, ‘Deceiving the deceivers: Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, and the allegations of bacteriological weapons use in the Korea’, Cold War International History Project Bulletin, no 11, Winter 1998, pp. 176–85 Weiler, Peter, ‘Britain and the first Cold War: Revisionist beginnings’, Twentieth Century British History, vol. 9, no 1, 1998, pp. 127–38 Wenden, D.J. and Short, K.R.M., ‘Winston Churchill: Film fan’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 11, no 3, 1991, pp. 197–214 Whitaker, R., ‘Fighting the Cold War on the home front: America, Britain, Australia and Canada’, Socialist Register, 1984, pp. 23–43 Willcox, Temple, ‘Soviet films, censorship and the British government: A matter of public interest’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 10, no 3, 1990, pp. 275–92 Wolfe, Gary K., ‘Dr. Strangelove, Red Alert, and the patterns of paranoia in the 1950s’, Journal of Popular Film, vol. 5, no 1, 1976, pp. 56–67

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British Cinema and the Cold War Conference Papers and Unpublished Theses Gardner, Colin, ‘The finger of guilt: Joseph Losey and the Hollywood blacklist in England, 1952–59’, ‘Cold War Culture: Film, Fact and Fiction’ conference, Indiana University, Bloomington, 18–21 February 1999 Jenks, John, ‘Fight against peace? Britain and the World Peace Council’, Institute of Contemporary British History conference on ‘Britain and the Cold War’, Institute of Historical Research, London, 15–18 July 1997 Raphael, Mike ‘“The Demi-Paradise” of British film propaganda about Russia, 1941–43’, unpublished MA thesis, Polytechnic of Central London, 1981 Daniel L. Watson, ‘“A Europe worthy of Mindszenty”: Catholic “martyrs and heroes” in American and West European Cold War culture’, ‘Cold War Culture: Film, Fact and Fiction’ conference, Indiana University, Bloomington, 18–21 February 1999

Film Index Accident 181 Action of the Tiger 65 Alien Orders 40, 52 Always Prepared 84, 189 The Angry Silence 160–6, 169 Animal Farm 4, 92–104, 107, 108, 114 The Atomic City 47 Atoms at Work 120 Atoms for Peace 83 The Barefoot Contessa 108 The Battle of the River Plate 121 The Battle of the Somme 11 Battleship Potemkin 13 The Beginning or The End? 17 Behemoth the Sea Monster 27 Berlin Airlift 30 Beyond Mombasa 55–6 Beyond the Curtain 75 Bhowani Junction 51 The Big Family 83 Billy Liar 166 Blind Date 181–2 The Blue Lamp 87 The Blue Peter 79 The Boy with the Green Hair 177, 181 The Builders 20 Carleton-Browne of the FO 174–5, 191 Carry on Spying 176 Carve Her Name with Pride 121–2 Casablanca 177 Castle Sinister 26 Chance of a Lifetime 147–51, 154 Charley (animation series) 95 Children of Hiroshima 132 Children of the Damned 183 Circle of Deception 122 A Clockwork Orange 184 The Colditz Story 121 Conspirator 26, 36–40, 43, 173 Council of the Gods 84, 189 Counterblast 26 The Cruel Sea 87

The Dam Busters 106 The Damned 182–6, 191, 194 Dawn Guard 41 The Day the Earth Caught Fire 135–6 The Day the World Ended 132, 237 (n85) The Deadly Affair 60 The Death of Michael Turbin 5 The Demi-Paradise 7–9, 23, 33, 176 The Desert Fox 73 The Desert Rats 73 Desert Victory 53 The Devil Never Sleeps 77 Dick Barton at Bay 40 Dick Barton Strikes Back 40, 117 The Divided Heart 87 Dr. No 59, 60, 125 Dr. Strangelove 115, 116, 121, 124–6, 132, 194 Doss House 143 Down Among the Z Men 121 Dracula 128 Dunkirk 87 The Entertainer 166, 174 Escapade 122 Escape Route 119 Eureka Stockade 51 Eyes That Kill 26, 117 Fail Safe 126 The Fall of Berlin 187–8 The Fallen Idol 28 Fame is the Spur 41, 147 Fires Were Started 29 The Flight Commander 18–19, 36 Flight from Vienna 75 Forbidden Territory 15–16 Frieda 26, 87 Friends and Neighbours 175–6 From Russia With Love 59, 60 Front Page Story 120 The Gamma People 79 Genevieve 87 The German Story 190 The Go-Between 181 Godzilla 132

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Goldfinger 60 Good-bye, Mr. Chips 37 The Great Dictator 180 The Guinea Pig 41 Hard Steel 143 Harwell 120 The Hidden Secret 89 Highly Dangerous 9, 69–70, 76 High Noon 123 High Treason 40–5, 58, 163 His Excellency 154–5, 169 Holiday on Sylt 190 Hyde Park 19 I’m All Right, Jack 158–60, 168, 169 I Was A Communist for the FBI 45, 194 Ice Cold in Alex 121 If I Were Rich 19 In Which We Serve 21 The Inspecting General 83 The Intelligence Men 176 The Intimate Stranger 181 Invasion of the Body Snatchers 130, 131 The Ipcress File 61–2, 194 The Iron Curtain 26–7, 38, 45 The Iron Petticoat 173 Jubilee 20 The Key 123 Khartoum 51 Kind Hearts and Coronets 155 A Kind of Loving 166 A King in New York 123, 178–80 Knight Without Armour 16–17 La Grande Illusion 123 The Lady Vanishes 35 The Ladykillers 156 The Land of Mystery 15 The Last Post 17–18 The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp 21 Limelight 179 Lisbon Story 117 The Little Red Monkey 49

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British Cinema and the Cold War The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner 166–7 The Long Shadow 75 Look Back in Anger 174 The Looking Glass War 60 The Lost People 78 Love on the Dole 21, 148 M 180 The Magic Box 41 The Man Between 29, 70–4, 176 The Man in the Road 119 Man in the White Suit 155–8, 168 The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk 70 The Manchurian Candidate 61, 79 Maniac 185 March to Aldermaston 123, 192 Martin Luther 76 The Master Plan 79 Master Spy 57 Men of Two Worlds 50, 52 Millions Like Us 21, 147 The Mind Benders 79 Mission to Moscow 24, 177 Monsieur Verdoux 178–9 Moscow and Muscovites 83 Mother 13 The Mouse on the Moon 124 The Mouse that Roared 123–4 The Net 47–8, 173 The Next of Kin 35 Nicholas Nickleby 87 Night Boat to Dublin 117 Night People 194 Nightmare in Red (television documentary) 107 Nine Hours to Rama 50 1984 (feature film) 104–114 1984 (television play) 105–6, 107 1914 11 Ninotchka 37 No Love For Johnnie 57–8, 59 North West Frontier 51 On the Beach 136 On the Waterfront 165 100 Million Women 9 Operation Malaya 52, 53 Operation Teutonic Sword 190 Orders to Kill 122

Our Film 23 Our Man in Havana 176–7 Over to You 146 Pacific Destiny 51 Passport to Pimlico 87, 123 Paul Temple’s Triumph 40 Peace Will Win 189 Phantom From 10,000 Leagues 132 The Philadelphia Story 177 The Planter’s Wife 52, 54, 55 The Prisoner 77–81 Private Angelo 122 The Quatermass Experiment 4, 128–9 Quatermass II 128, 129–32 A Real Bloke 143 The Red Danube 37 Red Planet Mars 76 Red Snow 89 Reveille 17 Ring of Spies 57, 58–9 Road to Hell 20 Robinson Charley 146–7 Rockets Galore 123 Rome Express 26 Rough Shoot 46 Russia – The Land of Tomorrow 15 SOS Pacific 123 Safari 55–6 Sanders of the River 50 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning 166–7 Scott of the Antarctic 87, 147 Sea of Sand 160 Secret People 47 The Seekers 51 The Servant 181 Seven Days to Noon 44, 117–19, 129 The Shipbuilders 143 Simba 55–6 Sink the Bismarck! 122 Sleeping Car to Trieste 26 Song of Russia 37 Song of the Rivers 190 The Sound Barrier 47 Spaceways 128 The Spy Who Came in from the Cold 60

State Secret 9, 67–9 The Steel Fist 89 Storm over Asia 186 The Strange World of Planet X 127 Target for Tonight 29 A Taste of Honey 166 Tawny Pipit 9, 148 The Team from Our Street 83 The Teckman Mystery 47 Teheran 26 The Ten Commandments 76 The Thing 127 The Third Man 4, 27–9, 69, 71, 72, 176, 177 The 39 Steps 35 The Titfield Thunderbolt 87 Them! 127 They Can’t Hang Me 119–20 They Gave Him the Works 147 They Have a Native Land 194 Things to Come 126 Top Secret 120–1 The Traitors 57 Treason 78 The Trollenberg Terror 127 Village of the Damned 183 The Wages of Fear 107 The Waking Point 133–4 Walk East on Beacon 95 The War Game 116, 136–41 Waterloo Road 21 The Way to the Stars 24 Welcome Mr. Washington 24 Went the Day Well? 35 West of Zanzibar 51 What a Life 146 Where No Vultures Fly 51 Whisky Galore 87 Windom’s Way 52–4 Wing to Wing 120 Woman on Pier 13 38 X the Unknown 129 Yangtse Incident 65 A Yank at Oxford 37 A Yank Comes Back 146 You Only Live Twice 60 The Young Lovers 172–3, 191 Zarak 51

General Index Aaronovitch, Sam 82 Adam, Ken 125 Adenauer, Konrad 152 Admiralty 87 Agee, James 95 Air Ministry 44 Albania 61, 66 Aldgate, Anthony 142, 158 Alexander, King (of Yugoslavia) 190 All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS) 27 Allied Film Makers 160 Alsop, Carleton 94 Ambler, Eric 46, 69, 70, 181 American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF) 103, 106 American Legion 178, 182 Anderson, Lindsay 122–3, 170, 171, 191, 192 Anderson, Michael 65–6, 106, 112 Animal Farm (novel) 4, 92–104, 109, 114 Annakin, Ken 51, 54 Arrowsmith, S.M.J. 139–40 Asher, Robert 176 Askey, Arthur 175 Asquith, Anthony 8, 9, 23, 24, 47, 122, 172–3, 177 Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC) 13, 31, 106, 148 Association of CineTechnicians (ACT) 23, 41, 177 Association of Cinematograph and Television Technicians (ACTT) 159 Atlas Film 20 Attenborough, Richard 158, 160–6 Attlee, Clement 2, 3, 22, 31, 35, 42, 52, 117, 120, 145, 159 Australia 46, 51, 106, 120 Austria 28–9 Aylmer, Felix 7

Baker, Roy 9, 69, 70 Baker, Stanley 182 Balcon, Michael 9, 22, 37, 47, 63, 86–9, 135, 154, 155, 156, 158 Barnes, Tracy 99 Barr, Charles 156 Barry, Wesley 89 Barthou, Louis 190 Bartok, Eva 75 Barzman, Ben 181 Basehart, Richard 181 Batchelor, Joy 95–104, 146 Baxter, John (author/critic) 103, 127 Baxter, John (director) 21, 142–3 Beaver Productions 160 Beaverbrook, Lord 11 Beckwith, Reginald 175 Bell, P.M.H. 9 Bennett, Compton 75 Benson, Sally 38 Berlin 49, 70–4, 84, 103, 121, 136, 137, 164, 187–8, 189 blockade 24, 30, 32, 70 Bernard, James 118 Bevin, Ernest 24, 25, 27, 30, 31, 33 blacklisting, see Hollywood Blair, Sonia 94, 98, 105, 111 Bloom, Claire 71 Board of Trade 27, 44, 88, 148, 149, 150, 189 Bogarde, Dirk 55 Bogolyepov, D. 83 Boland, Bridget 77, 78 Bolshakov, Ivan 82 Bolshevik Revolution 3, 15, 17, 33, 92, 170–71 Bolshevism 10, 11, 14, 15, 17, 18 Bond films 189 Bond, James 57, 59–60, 125 Bond, Ralph 23, 41, 177 Booker, Christopher 56–7 Boulting, John 41, 117–19, 147, 158–60, 174–5 Boulting, Roy 40–5, 117–19, 147, 158–60, 174–5 Box, Betty 57, 58

275

Box, Sidney 181 Boyle, Peter 32 Bradbury, Malcolm 92 Braine, John 122 ‘brainwashing’ 61, 79, 104, 110 Brando, Marlon 165 Brecht, Bertold 180, 181, 188 British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 22, 26, 45, 84, 107, 125, 132, 134, 136, 143, 147, 148, 154, 167, 171, 176, 185, 187, 189, 190, 195 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 25, 31, 39, 42, 76, 105–6, 112, 136–41, 151, 163 British Employers’ Confederation 150 British Film Institute (BFI) 138–9, 178 British Lion 135, 148, 149, 161 British Movietone 21, 30, 31 British Peace Committee 118 British Society for Cultural Freedom 70, 98 British-Soviet Friendship Society 83 British Transport Commission 181 Broccoli, Cubby 60 Brooke-Wilkinson, Joseph 13 Bryan, Joseph 93–4 Bulganin, Nikolay 179 Bulgaria 84 Burchett, Peter 117 Burgess, Guy 45, 95 Burke, Alfred 161, 162 Burn, Oscar 26 Bushell, Anthony 16 Caine, Michael 61–2 Calvert, Phyllis 48 Campaign for Cultural Freedom (CCF) 98, 102, 103, 107 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 118, 122–3, 125, 136, 139, 191, 192

276

British Cinema and the Cold War Canada 26 Cannes Film Festival 81 Capra, Frank 99 Carey, Macdonald 184 Carmichael, Ian 158, 159 Carney, George 19 Carreras, James 128, 182 Carreras, Michael 185 Carroll, Wallace 99 Carruthers, Susan 52 Carstairs, John Paddy 26 Cartier, Rudolph 105 Cary, Joyce 47 Castro, Fidel 176 Catholic Church/Catholicism 77–81, 164 Catholic Herald 102 Catholic War Veterans 178 Cavalcanti, Alberto 35, 87, 176 Cavell, Edith 190 censorship 3, 13, 14, 20, 117, 120, 132, 136–40, 168, 191, 194 see also British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) Central Office of Information (COI) 25, 32 Films Division 25, 30–31, 95, 133–4, 145, 147 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 1, 49, 75–6, 93, 96, 98, 104 Chamberlain, Neville 190 Chaplin, Charlie 123, 178–80 Chaplin, Michael 179 Chatto, Tom 131 Chiaureli, Michail 187 Childs, David 153 China/Chinese 18, 49, 52, 53, 65, 66, 70, 77, 79, 82, 83, 84, 110 Christianity 51, 64, 75–81, 100, 119, 129 Christiansen, Arthur 135 Churchill, Winston 8, 32, 65, 101, 116, 119, 144, 186, 187–8, 196 Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association (CEA) 12, 192 Citrine, Lord 42 Clark, Dane 69 Clarke, T.E.B. 88 Clews, John 98 Clouzot, H.G. 107 Cohen, Bernard 196 Cohen, Stanley 63 Cohn, Harry 99

Cole, George 120 Cole, Sidney 41, 156, 177 Colonial Office 40, 52 Columbia 55, 78, 81, 123, 125, 126, 181, 182, 185 Comintern 9, 99 Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives (HUAC) 37, 38, 39, 89, 96, 106, 123, 179, 180–81, 182, 195 Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) 25, 42, 43, 45 Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) 4, 11, 15, 39, 42, 45, 56, 58, 147, 150, 159, 163, 191 and film propaganda 20–21, 23, 81–5, 186–91 Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) 105 Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) 181 Conservative Party 120, 147 and film propaganda 20–21, 31 Contemporary Films Ltd. 83, 84, 123, 189, 191 Cooper, Charles 83, 191 Cooper, George 175 Cornelius, Henry 87, 123 Cortesa, Valentina 47 Cotten, Joseph 27–8 Courtenay, Tom 167 Coward, Noel 21, 176 Cox, Vivian 81 Craig, Michael 160, 162 Crichton, Charles 87 Crick, Bernard 104 Cripps, Stafford 146 Crist, Judith 185 Crofts, William 145 Cronyn, Hume 106 Crosland, Anthony 151 Crown Film Unit (CFU) 25, 29, 40, 120, 145 Crutchley, Rosalie 57 Cuba 136, 176–7 Cuban missile crisis 60, 116, 125, 140 Cukor, George 51, 177 Curtiz, Michael 24, 177 Cushing, Peter 105 Czechoslovakia 24, 28, 66, 84, 187

DEFA 84, 188, 189 Daily Express 80, 117, 135 Daily Film Renter 112, 121 Daily Herald 25, 40, 125 Daily Mail 102, 105, 118, 165 Daily Mirror 74, 80, 165, 188 Daily Sketch 112, 139 Daily Telegraph 74, 112, 164, 185, 188 Daily Worker 74, 80, 102, 124, 159, 165 Darkness at Noon (novel) 80, 106 Darnborough, Antony 48 Davis, John 58 Day Lewis, Cecil 93 de Gaulle, Charles 152 de Grunwald, Anatole 8 de la Roche, Catherine 76, 77 De Mille, Cecil B. 76, 94 de Rochement, Louis 94–104 Dearden, Basil 51, 79, 87 Dehn, Paul 118 Deighton, Len 61 Denham, Maurice 96 Denham Studios 22, 23 Department of Information 11 Department for Film Propaganda to Neutral Nations 13 Derry, Charles 128 Deutsch, Oscar 13 Deutscher, Isaac 106 Deutsches Theater 188 Dickinson, Desmond 72 Dickinson, Thorold 35, 47, 50 Dietrich, Marlene 16 Disney, Walt 95, 96, 99, 102 Dixon, Campbell 164 Dmytryk, Edward 106 documentaries 2, 9, 25, 29–31, 40, 53–4, 83, 84, 114, 117, 123, 189, 190 documentary film movement 23 Donald, James 48 Donat, Robert 16 Donlevy, Brian 129–32 Douglas, Gordon 45, 127 Dovzhenko, Alexander Petrovich 2 Driscott, Leslie 24 Dulles, John Foster 91, 114, 173 Durbridge, Francis 40 Durgnat, Raymond 43, 54, 122, 173, 185

General Index Eady Fund 23 Ealing Studios 9, 22, 47, 51, 63, 64, 86–9, 90, 123, 147, 154, 155, 156, 158, 181 East Germany/German Democratic Republic (DDR) 70, 72, 84, 181, 188–90 Economic Information Unit (EIU) 145–6, 150 Eisenhower, Dwight 103, 120, 129 Eisenstein, Sergei 2, 13, 137 Eisler, Gerhardt 181 Eisler, Hans 181, 189 Electrical Trades Union 163 Eliot, T.S. 92 Elstree Studios 13, 36, 106 Elvey, Maurice 18 Encounter 70, 102 Essex Chronicle 165 European Cooperation Administration (ECA) 95 European Recovery Programme (ERP) 31 Evening Standard 112–3, 165, 188 Faintsimmer, A. 194 Fairbanks, Douglas Jr 67–8, 75 Fairchild, William 48 Farben, I.G. 189 Farr, Finis 94 Faye, Randall 19 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 95, 119 Federal Theater Project 180 Federation of Workers’ Film Societies 20 Feist, Felix 78 Feyder, Jacques 16 Field, Shirley Ann 184 Fienburgh, Wilfred 57 Film Society 81 Film User 134 Films and Filming 59, 76, 124, 172 Finch, Peter 54, 57–8 Finney, Albert 167 First World War 11, 12, 13, 18, 169 Fisher, Terence 128 Fleischer, Max 95 Fleming, Ian 57, 60 Flemyng, Robert 182 Forbes, Bryan 160–6 Ford, John 114

Forder, Walter 26 Foreign Office 14, 18, 19, 25, 27, 30, 71, 85–6, 174, 187, 189 Foreman, Carl 123, 177, 178 France 152, 181 Franco, General 68 Frank, Charles 26 Frankenheimer, John 61, 79 Franklin, Harry S. 89 ‘Free Cinema’ movement 122, 192 Freedom First Committee 150 French, Philip 185 Frend, Charles 87 Freshman, William 26 Friends of Soviet Russia 15, 20 Frink, Elizabeth 184 Fuchs, Klaus 118 Fuller, Samuel Furie, Sidney J. 61 Gable, Clark 94 Gaddis, John Lewis 115, 116 Gainsborough Studios 22, 143 Gallacher, Willie 147 Gandhi, Mahatma 50 Garbo, Greta 37 Gardner, Colin 181–2 Gardner, Eva 51 Gaumont-British Picture Corporation (GBPC) 13, 18, 21, 22, 31–2, 143 General Film Distributors (GFD) 22 Genn, Leo 56 George, Peter 125 Germany 7, 11, 26, 51, 68, 73, 76, 87, 100, 163, 171, 187, 194 see also East Germany and West Germany Gilbert, Lewis 60, 121 Gilliat, Sidney 9, 21, 58, 67, 68, 147 Gilling, John 79 Glasgow Herald 103 Glenville, Peter 77, 78 Gollancz, Victor 98 Goodwin, Michael 98 Goring, Marius 69 Gouzenko, Igor 26 Granger, Stewart 51 Grayson, Godfrey 40, 117 Green, Guy 123, 160 Green, Nigel 61 Greene, Graham 17, 28, 176

Greenpark Productions 147 Greenwood, Walter 148 Gregson, Richard 160 Grey, Richard 26, 117 Grierson, John 95, 194 Griffin, Cardinal 81 Griffith, Kenneth 42–4 Grigoryev, Roman 83 Grissell, Wallace A. 89 Gromyko, Andrei 45 Guest, Val 4, 128–32, 135–6 Guinness, Alec 78–81, 156, 157, 176 Gunn, Gilbert 127 Halas, John 95–104, 146 Hamer, Robert 154–5 Hamilton, Guy 60, 121 Hammer Productions 128–32, 182, 185, 186 Hanna, J.C. 143 Harvey, Frank 41 Harvey, Laurence 61 Hathaway, Henry 73 Havelock-Allan, Anthony 173 Hawkins, Jack 54, 67–8, 78–80 Hayden, Sterling 124 Heifits, Joseph 83 Hepburn, Audrey 47 Hepburn, Katharine 173 Herald Tribune 185 Hewison, Robert 33 Hibbin, Nina 165 Hickox, Douglas 127 Hill, John 158, 164, 192 Hilton, James 16 Hiroshima 115, 117, 123, 126 Hitchcock, Alfred 35, 46, 69 Hitler, Adolf 9, 32, 40, 47, 67, 73, 119, 121, 182, 188, 190, 193 Hobsbawm, Eric 65 Hoggart, Richard 158 Holden, William 77 Holiday Film Productions 106 Holloway, Stanley 58 Hollywood 2, 4, 14, 22, 24, 37, 38, 39, 45, 62, 76, 79, 82, 86, 89, 94, 95, 101, 103, 106, 114, 117, 121, 123, 125, 126, 132, 143, 146, 168, 171, 172, 177, 180, 181, 187, 188, 191, 194, 195, 196 and blacklisting 39, 122, 123, 171, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182

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British Cinema and the Cold War ‘Hollywood Ten’ 106, 177 Home Office 13, 14, 27, 61, 133 Hoover, J. Edgar 95 Hope, Bob 173 Hopper, Jerry 47 Hordern, Michael 54 Horner, Harry 76 Hornsby, Lex 145–6 Household, Geoffrey 46 Houston, Penelope 161, 180 Howard, Anthony 156 Howard, Trevor 29 HUAC, see Committee on UnAmerican Activities of the House of Representatives Hughes, Howard 38 Hughes, Ken 49 Hungary 75, 77–81, 170, 191 Huntingdon, Lawrence 117 Hurst, Brian Desmond 55 Illing, Peter 51, 175 Ince, Sir Godfrey 142, 149 Independent Labour Party Arts Guild 20 Independent Television News 31 India 24, 51 Information Policy Department (IPD) 30, 32 Information Research Department (IRD) 2–3, 25, 27, 30, 32, 42, 66–7, 70, 75–6, 77, 93, 98, 150, 163, 195 Irish Censorship Board 81 Irish Republican Army (IRA) 40, 47 Isaacs, George 150 Italy 37, 81, 170 Ivens, Joris 189, 190 Jaldati, Lin 188 Japan 52, 54, 116, 132 Jennings, Humphrey 29 Johns, Glynis 67 Johns, Mervyn 181 Johnson, Nunnally 194 Jones, Barry 117 Jones, Stephen 142 Judd, Edward 135 KGB 49 Karas, Anton 28 Kavanagh, Denis 75 Kazan, Elia 106, 165

Keen, Geoffrey 154, 161 Kemp, Philip 156 Kennan, George 196 Kennedy, John F. 116, 127 Kenya 51, 52, 55–6 Khrushchev, Nikita 82, 116, 127, 161, 173, 175, 179 Kinematograph Weekly 38, 81, 102, 136 Kino 20, 21 Kirwan, Celia 93 Kneale, Nigel 105 Knight, Damon 128 Knight, David 172 Knowles, Bernard 75 Knox, Alexander 183 Koch, Howard 177, 178, 181 Koestler, Arthur 80, 106, 152, 153 Korda, Alexander 16, 22, 27, 28, 50, 70–2, 126 Korean War 32, 42, 67, 70, 79, 133, 174 Kossoff, David 59 Kramer, Stanley 135, 177 Kruger, Hardy 181–2 Kubrick, Stanley 115, 116, 124–6, 184 Labour Party 41, 42, 44, 45, 57, 58, 87, 105, 147, 163, 166 and film propaganda 20–21, 88 Lampell, Millard 181 Landy, Marcia 41, 119, 128 Lang, Fritz 180 Larsen, Roy E. 94 Launder, Frank 21, 58, 147 Lawrence, H.L. 182 Lawrence, Quentin 127 Le Carré, John 60 Leacock, Philip 122 Leader, Anton M. 183 Leahy, James 184 Lean, David 21, 47, 87 Lee, Bernard 58, 161 Lee, Jack 122 Leigh, Janet 55 Lenin, Vladimir I. 2, 10, 12, 15, 63, 68, 74, 99 Leslie, S.C. 146 Lester, Richard 124 Life 105 Lindfors, Viveca 183 Littlewood, Joan 174 Liverpool Daily Post 124

Lloyd, Selwyn 175 Lloyd George, David 11, 12 Loach, Ken 166 Lockwood, Margaret 69 Lodge, David 196 Lom, Herbert 46, 48 London Co-operative Society 20 London County Council 190 London Film Company 11 London Films 16 London Independent 78 Lonsdale, Gordon 59 Lord Chamberlain’s Office 14 Lord President’s Office 145, 150 Losey, Joseph 177, 178, 180–86 Lott, Barbara 134 Lourié, Eugene 127 Low, Rachael 11 Lubitsch, Ernst 37 Ludwig, Edward Lumet, Sidney 60, 126 MGM 36, 37, 99, 103, 117, 173 MI5 25, 38, 44, 45, 46, 59, 61, 84, 119, 163 MI6 25, 28, 49, 59, 84, 176 McCarey, Leo 77 McCarthy, Joseph, and McCarthyism 2, 39, 83, 89, 95, 105, 165, 173, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182 McCrea, Joel 46 Macdonald, David 53 MacDonald, Ramsay 147 MacDougall, Roger 122, 124 MacKay, Barry 16 Mackendrick, Alexander 87, 155–8 McKern, Leo 135 Maclean, Donald 45, 95 Macmillan, Harold 58, 152, 169, 190 Maetzig, Kurt 189 Maisky, Ivan 9 Majdalany, Fred 188 Malaya 40, 52–4, 55 Malayan Film Unit (MFU) 52, 53, 54 Manchester Guardian 156–7, 160, 166 Mango, Alec 127 Mankiewicz, Joseph L. 107 Mankowitz, Wolf 135

General Index Mann, Stanley 124 Mao, Tse-Tung 50, 52, 65 Marshall, George 55 Marshall Plan 24, 31, 96, 146 Marwick, Arthur 158 Maschwitz, Eric 49 Maslyukov, A. 83 Mason, James 71, 73 Mass Observation 117, 151, 195 Masses Stage and Film Guild 19–20 Mature, Victor 55 Mau Mau 52, 55–6 Maxwell, Peter 75 Mayer, Louis B. 37 Mayhew, Christopher 27, 67 Melford, Jack, 19 Melina Productions 135 Melly, George 122 Meredith, Burgess 146 Miles, Bernard 9, 148–51 ‘Militant Liberty’ campaign 114, 195 Mills, John 122 Milne, Tom 124 Mindszenty, Jószef 77–81 Ministry of Defence 61 Ministry of Information (MOI) 8, 9, 12, 23, 24, 25, 28, 35, 66, 86, 92, 95, 195 Ministry of Labour 142, 145, 149, 150 Mitchell, Julien 148 Montagu, Elizabeth 28 Montagu, Ivor 27, 41, 82, 83, 84, 151, 189, 190 Montgomery, Bernard 187 Montgomery, Robert 106 Monthly Film Bulletin 40, 155, 157, 180 More, Kenneth 149 Morecambe, Eric 176 Morrell, André 105 Morrison, Herbert 84, 147, 150 Mosley, Leonard 118 Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals 168 Motion Picture Service (MPS) 98–9 Muggeridge, Malcolm 70 Murphy, Brian 127 Murphy, Robert 58 Mussolini 47

National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) 105, 107 National Coal Board 147 National Committee for a Free Europe 94 National Film Finance Corporation (NFFC) 22, 44, 88, 161 National Provincial Bank 160 Neame, Ronald 54 Neff, Hildegard 71 Nevinson, Nancy 59 New Era Film Club 83, 84 New Left movement 192 New Statesman 74, 163 New Wave film movement 58, 89, 160, 166–7 New York Daily News 102 New Yorker 38 New Zealand 51 News Chronicle 88, 124 newsreels 2, 20, 23, 29, 31–3, 53, 54, 55, 118, 123, 133, 145, 193 Nicholls, Anthony 42 Nickols, Louis B. 95 Nineteen Eighty-Four (novel) 4, 80, 92, 93, 98, 104–114 Noel-Baker, Philip 42 Norman, Leslie 87, 128 Normanbrook, Lord 138 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 24, 32, 95, 105, 120, 190 Number Ten Press Office 25 Nyby, Christian 127 O’Brien, Edmund 107, 109, 111 O’Casey, Sean 93 Observer 126, 137, 152, 177, 185 Odeon Theatres 13, 22, 47, 149 Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) 93–5, 96, 98, 99 Olivier, Laurence 7, 8, 9, 174 Open Road Films 123 Orwell, George 4, 80, 91–114, 184 Osborne, John 174 Palache report 23 Palestine 24 Panorama 163 Paramount 47, 182 Paramount News 31–2 Parker, Cecil 154

Parrish, Robert 46 Parry, Gordon 175 Parsons, Daniel 161 Partisan Review 105 Pathé 31 Paul, Fred 143 Pearson, George 17 Peck, Gregory 194 Pells, Richard 196 Penguin Books 88 Penney, William Petrov, Boris L. 89 Petrov, Vladimir 83 Philby, Kim 28–9 Phillips, Morgan 44 Phoenix House 163 Pichel, Irving 76 Pickens, Slim 132 Picture Post 88 Pierson, Frank R. 60 Pilgrim Pictures 148 Pinewood Studios 22, 47, 54 Pinter, Harold 181 Pirie, David 129 Plato Films Ltd. 83, 84, 188–90 Pleasence, Donald 57 Poland 16, 77 Pontecorvo, Bruno 118 Porter, Vincent 185 Portland affair 58 Portman, Eric 154 Poselsky, Josif 83 Powdermaker, Hortense 65 Powell, Michael 21, 121 Pravda 105 Presle, Micheline 182 Pressburger, Emeric 21 Price, Dennis 158 Priestley, J.B. 39, 93 Profumo affair 58 Progressive Film Institute 83 Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) 98–9, 106 Pudney, John 48 Pudovkin, Vsevolod 2, 13, 186 RKO Radio Pictures 38, 101, 106 Radford, Basil 148 Radio Free Europe 76 Rahv, Philip 105 Raker, Hugh 79 Rand, Ayn 168 Rank, J. Arthur 22, 86 Rank Organization 31, 45, 54, 55, 57, 58, 76, 126, 148, 149, 151, 160

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British Cinema and the Cold War Rathvon, Peter 106–7, 110, 112 Ratoff, Gregory 37 Read, Herbert 122 Reagan, Ronald 94 Red Army 9, 16, 73, 178, 187 Redgrave, Michael 107, 108, 111 Reed, Carol 4, 27–8, 70–4, 176–7 Reed, John 96 Reed, Oliver 184 Reisz, Karel 89, 172 Reith, Lord 151 Religious Film Society 22 Relph, Michael 123 Renoir, Jean 123 Reynolds News 105, 124, 165 Rheinefath, Heinz 190 Rhodes, Chris 75 Richards, Aubrey 61 Richards, Jeffrey 52, 142 Richardson, Tony 166 Rilla, Wolf 51, 79, 183 Ritt, Martin 60 Robertson, James 13, 143 Robeson, Paul 93 Robson, Mark 50 Rogers, Maclean 40, 121 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 101, 187 Rosen, Phil 15 Rothermere, Lord 31, 87 Royal Air Force (RAF) 187 Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society 20 Royal Court Theatre 174 Russell, Bertrand 192 Russia Committee 25 Saltzman, Harry 60, 61 Sandground, Maurice 15 Saturday Evening Post 123 Saunders, Charles 9 Saville, Victor 26, 36–7, 39 Sayre, Nora 86 Schenk, Nicholas 99 Schlesinger, John 166 Schroeder, Ernest 71 Scope 148 Scott, Adrian 106, 177, 178, 181 Second World War 2, 41, 50, 62, 93, 100, 109, 118, 126, 128, 134, 147, 167, 168, 169, 171, 176, 178, 195 films about 54, 86, 87, 100, 121–2, 178, 186–9 films during 8–9, 21–4, 29–30, 35, 86, 143

Seiber, Matyas 96 Sellar, Maurice 60 Sellers, Peter 123, 125, 158–9 Shaw, Harold 15 Shawcross, Sir Hartley 44 Shenson, Walter 123 Shepperton Studios 125, 178 Shils, Edward 115 Shostakovich, Dmitri 179 Shulman, Milton 112 Shurey, Dinah 17 Siddons, Colin 82–3 Sidney, George 37 Siegel, Don 130 Sight and Sound 118, 124, 161, 180 Sillitoe, Alan Sinfield, Alan 105, 166–7 Slater, Humphrey 38 Slater, John 133–4 Smolka/Smollett, Peter 28 Socialist Film Council (SFC) 20 Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR (SCR) 27, 187 Society of Friends of the Soviet Cinema (ODSK) 10 Soskin, Paul 41 Southern, Terry 125 Soviet Film Agency 9, 23, 82, 186 Soviet Ministry of Culture 1 Soviet Union (USSR) 1, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20, 24, 25, 27, 29, 33, 38, 39, 41, 45, 49, 51, 52, 59, 60, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 74, 76, 81, 88, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 109, 110, 112, 113, 118, 119, 120, 124, 133, 135, 167, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 187, 191, 192 and film industry 2, 10, 20, 23, 26, 38, 82, 186, 187–9, 194, 195 Sovkino 10 Spain 68 Spanish Civil War 21, 41, 92 Speidel, Hans 190 Squire, Ronald 16 Stalin, Josef/Stalinism 2, 3, 16, 23–4, 25, 32, 46, 66, 67, 68, 72, 74, 79, 82, 83, 88, 93, 100, 101, 106, 110, 113, 119, 173, 187

State Department 2, 37, 49, 71, 93, 98, 177, 196 Steele, Austin 175 Stein, Paul 26, 117 Stein, Sol 106–7, 110, 112 Stepanic, Cardinal 77 Sterling, Jan 108, 111 Stewart, Donald Ogden 122, 177 Strategic Air Command (SAC) 124 Suid, Lawrence 140 Sunday Express 112 Sunday Graphic 80 Sunday Telegraph 125 Sunday Times, The 165, 188 Supply and Transport Committee (STC) 12 Sylvester, William 59 Tablet 102 Tabori, George 173 Taylor, Elizabeth 38 Taylor, Gilbert 125 Taylor, Robert 38 Tedder, Marshal 30 Thamar, Tilda 175 Thesiger, Ernest 156, 157 Thomas, Evan 182 Thomas, Gerald 176 Thomas, J. Parnell 37 Thomas, Ralph 57, 173 Thomas, Terry 174 Thompson, J. Lee 51, 121 Thorndike, Andrew 190 Thorndike, Annelie 190 Thurlow, Richard 3 Time 105 Time and Tide 157 Times, The 28, 103, 129–30 Tito, Marshal 68 Toone, Geoffrey 71 Townsend, Leo 181 Toye, Wendy 47 Trades Union Congress (TUC) 2, 42, 150, 163, 165 Trend, Sir Burke 138 Trevelyan, John 125, 136, 190 Trevor-Roper, Hugh 188 Tribune 92, 124, 165 Tronson, Robert 57 Trotsky, Leon 99 Truman, Harry S. 39, 94, 117 Truman Plan 24 Tully, Montgomery 57 Twentieth Century Fox 94 Two Cities 47

General Index Tynan, Kenneth 137 Tyrrell, Sir William 18–19, 202 (n42) Tyzack, Margaret 59 UFA Studios 187 US Air Force 125 US Information Agency (USIA) 94, 106, 107, 113 US Information Service (USIS) 99 United Nations 66, 68, 101, 120, 127 United States 24, 30, 33, 49, 75, 76, 78, 81, 82, 88, 89, 92, 93, 95, 99, 101, 104, 106, 108, 109, 110, 113, 114, 125, 130, 135, 140, 146, 171, 177, 179, 180, 182, 186, 195 Universal 31 Universe 103 Ustinov, Peter 122 Valli, Alida 28 Variety 38, 182, 185 Vatican 81 Verity, Terence 108 Versois, Odile 172 Vertov, Dziga 2 Vietnam 137 Waescher, Aribert 72 Wain, John 176

Walker, Alexander 163 Walker, Norman 143 War Office 11, 44 Warburg, Fredric 98 Ward, Penelope 7, 8 Warner, Jack 87, 129 Warner Brothers 37 Watson, Daniel L. 77 Watkins, Peter 116 Watt, Harry 29, 51 Wayne, John 114 Weart, Spencer R. 134 Weidenfeld, Lord 98 Weiler, Peter 3 Welles, Orson 27–9, 93 Wellman, William 26 West Germany/Federal Republic of Germany (FDR) 75, 152, 153, 189–90 Weymouth 183–4 Wheatley, Dennis 15 Whicker, Alan 161 Whitaker, Harold 103 Whitehead, Will 165 Wibberley, Leonard 123 Wigmore Films 81 Wilcox, Herbert 70 Wilde, Cornel 55 Williams, Francis 25 Willman, Noel 48 Wills, Gary 121 Wilson, Harold 27, 148, 150 Windscale 120

Wise, Ernie 176 Wise, Robert 73 Wisner, Frank 93 Wolff, Lothar 95–6, 98 Woodcock, George 113 Woodfall Productions 167 Woods, Sir John 149 Wordsworth, Richard 128–9 Worker, Adrian 55 Workers’ Camera Club 20 Workers’ Film and Photo League (WFPL) 20, 21 Workers’ Film Association (WFA) 20 Workers’ International Relief 20 Workers’ Theatre Movement 20 World Peace Council/Congress 179, 189 Wyatt, Woodrow 163 Wynne, Greville 59 Wynne, Sidney 31 Wyszinski, Cardinal 77 Young, Terence 51, 55, 59, 65 Yudin, Konstantin 83 Yugoslavia 68, 190 Zampi, Mario 120 Zanuck, Darryl F. 94 Zetterling, Mai 26, 87 Zhdanov, Andrey 82 Zinneman, Fred 123

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