Picturing home: Domestic life and modernity in 1940s British film 9781526138217

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Picturing home

STUDIES IN

POPULAR CULTURE General editor: Professor Jeffrey Richards

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Already published Dancing in the English style: consumption, Americanisation, and national identity in Britain, 1918–50 Allison Abra Christmas in nineteenth-century England Neil Armstrong Healthy living in the Alps: the origins of winter tourism in Switzerland, 1860–1914 Susan Barton Working-class organisations and popular tourism, 1840–1970 Susan Barton Leisure, citizenship and working-class men in Britain, 1850–1945 Brad Beaven Leisure and cultural conflict in twentieth-century Britain Brett Bebber (ed.) Leisure cultures in urban Europe, c.1700–1870: a transnational perspective Peter Borsay and Jan Hein Furnée (eds) British railway enthusiasm Ian Carter Railways and culture in Britain Ian Carter Time, work and leisure: life changes in England since 1700 Hugh Cunningham Darts in England, 1900–39: a social history Patrick Chaplin Holiday camps in twentieth-century Britain: packaging pleasure Sandra Trudgen Dawson History on British television: constructing nation, nationality and collective memory Robert Dillon The food companions: cinema and consumption in wartime Britain, 1939–45 Richard Farmer Songs of protest, songs of love: popular ballads in eighteenth-century Britain Robin Ganev Heroes and happy endings: class, gender, and nation in popular film and fiction in interwar Britain Christine Grandy Women drinking out in Britain since the early twentieth century David W. Gutzke The BBC and national identity in Britain, 1922–53 Thomas Hajkowski From silent screen to multi-screen: a history of cinema exhibition in Britain since 1896 Stuart Hanson Juke box Britain: Americanisation and youth culture, 1945–60 Adrian Horn Popular culture in London, c. 1890–1918: the transformation of entertainment Andrew Horrall Inventing the cave man: from Darwin to the Flintstones Andrew Horrall Popular culture and working-class taste in Britain, 1930–39: a round of cheap diversions? Robert James The experience of suburban modernity: how private transport changed interwar London John M. Law Amateur film: meaning and practice, 1927–1977 Heather Norris Nicholson Films and British national identity: from Dickens to Dad’s Army Jeffrey Richards Cinema and radio in Britain and America, 1920–60 Jeffrey Richards Looking North: Northern England and the national imagination Dave Russell The British seaside holiday: holidays and resorts in the twentieth century John K. Walton Politics, performance and popular culture in the nineteenth century Peter Yeandle, Katherine Newe and Jeffrey Richards

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Picturing home

Domestic life and modernity in 1940s British film

HOLLIE PRICE

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Hollie Price 2021 The right of Hollie Price to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

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www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 3820 0 hardback First published 2021 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Front cover – This Happy Breed, David Lean 1944, ITV/Shutterstock

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

STUDIES IN

POPULAR CULTURE

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There has in recent years been an explosion of interest in culture and cultural studies. The impetus has come from two directions and out of two different traditions. On the one hand, cultural history has grown out of social history to become a distinct and identifiable school of historical investigation. On the other hand, cultural studies has grown out of English literature and has concerned itself to a large extent with contemporary issues. Nevertheless, there is a shared project, its aim, to elucidate the meanings and values implicit and explicit in the art, literature, learning, institutions and everyday behaviour within a given society. Both the cultural historian and the cultural studies scholar seek to explore the ways in which a culture is imagined, represented and received, how it interacts with social processes, how it contributes to individual and collective identities and world views, to stability and change, to social, political and economic activities and programmes. This series aims to provide an arena for the cross-fertilisation of the discipline, so that the work of the cultural historian can take advantage of the most useful and illuminating of the theoretical developments and the cultural studies scholars can extend the purely historical underpinnings of their investigations. The ultimate objective of the series is to provide a range of books which will explain in a readable and accessible way where we are now socially and culturally and how we got to where we are. This should enable people to be better informed, promote an interdisciplinary approach to cultural issues and encourage deeper thought about the issues, attitudes and institutions of popular culture.

Jeffrey Richards

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For Beryl and Terence Price

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Contents

List of figures General editor’s foreword Acknowledgements

viii xi xiii

Introduction: ‘’Mid pleasures and palaces’ 1 1 ‘Tea Table Politics’: mapping the industrial working-class home 21 2 Pastoral images: capturing ‘A Landscape from Within’ 69 3 Dream palaces: transforming the domestic interior 123 4 Interior lives: imagining private visions of home 173 Conclusion: ‘The best of both worlds’ 218 Bibliography Index

224 239

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List of figures

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Sarah Price at home in Cippenham (c.1947) The First of the Few The First of the Few Tea Table Politics, Daily Herald (April 1937). Photograph: Harold Tomlin © National Portrait Gallery, London Love on the Dole Love on the Dole Love on the Dole The Miner Where He Once Worked …, Picture Post (11 February 1939). Photograph: Tim Gidal © Mirrorpix, Getty Images Their First Meal In The New Home, Picture Post (11 February 1939). Photograph: Tim Gidal © Mirrorpix, Getty Images Love on the Dole It Always Rains on Sunday An East End Home, Picture Post (15 October 1938). Photograph: Humphrey Spender © Mirrorpix, Getty Images It Always Rains on Sunday The Doomed East End, Picture Post (9 March 1946). Photograph: Charles Hewitt and Bill Brandt © Mirrorpix Metro-land booklet (1921). © TfL from the London Transport Museum collection This Happy Breed The Ideal Home (July 1937). Guy Lipscombe © Future Publishing, The British Library Board, LON 255 This Happy Breed The Captive Heart

2 5 7 25 27 28 32

37 38 42 46 54 56 60 71 77 81 88 93

List of figures

20 21 22

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23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42

43

The Captive Heart The Room by John Worsley, Only Ghosts Can Live (1945). © The British Library Board W17/8307 Berkeley Easy Chairs and Settees advertisement, Picture Post (14 October 1944). © Mirrorpix The Captive Heart Homes on Chiswick Mall, Ideal Home (July 1946). © Future Publishing, The British Library Board LON 68 Spring in Park Lane Artist’s impression of the Grand Hall at the Ideal Home Exhibition (1949). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Spring in Park Lane Airborne sectional upholstery advertisement, Daily Mail Film Award Annual (1948) Design for Living, Picturegoer (29 January 1949). BFI Reuben Library, Copyright © Rebellion Publishing IP Ltd, All Rights Reserved. Used with Permission The Glass Mountain The Glass Mountain The Glass Mountain Brief Encounter Brief Encounter ‘Doc’, Modern Woman (February 1936). © Future Publishing, The British Library Board LON 472 Cozy Stoves advertisement, Modern Woman (January 1938). The British Library Board LON 561 Brief Encounter The Small Back Room Jelks Furnishings advertisement, Picture Post (29 October 1938). © Mirrorpix The Small Back Room ‘Trick in Hearts’, Modern Woman (February 1938). Illustration by Fred Purvis © Future Publishing, The British Library Board LON 561 ‘You’re in love, but is he?’, Modern Woman (November 1938). Photograph: Black Star © Future Publishing, The British Library Board LON 561 The Small Back Room

94 101 104 107 114 128 137 143 155

159 161 161 163 180 182 186 187 188 197 199 202

203

205 207

ix

x

List of figures

Sposs furniture dressing advertisement, Woman and Home (May 1946). The British Library Board LON 571 45 Brasso and Reckitt’s advertisement, My Home (May 1945). The British Library Board LON 148

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209 220

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General editor’s foreword

Challenging a view of British films of the 1940s as static and inert, Hollie Price sets out to examine how the treatment of domestic life in the films of that decade engaged with the interwar past and articulated a vision of the postwar future by achieving a dynamic merger of the traditional and the modern. In a carefully nuanced analysis, she argues that films were continually negotiating competing ideas such as privacy and community, past and future, romance and realism, consumerism and national identity. Inter-disciplinary and inter-textual, her study situates films in the broader cultural context by reference to women’s magazines, advertisements, catalogues and middlebrow feminine fiction. Essentially Price provides four sets of double case studies on different aspects of the domestic to advance her argument. She examines the industrial working-class home in social realist dramas Love on the Dole and It Always Rains on Sunday in the context of Mass-Observation surveys and Picture Post photo-essays, arguing that they are seen through the prism of middlebrow values. Looking at This Happy Breed and The Captive Heart, she explores the persistence of rural imagery in suburban homes and the domestication of a prisoner-of-war camp by the cultivation of gardens. The escapist imagery of the postwar home, influenced by glamorous Hollywood visions of domesticity and modern consumer culture as expressed in the Ideal Home Exhibition is the focus of her discussion of Spring in Park Lane and The Glass Mountain. The symbiosis between the Ideal Home Exhibition and British cinema is underlined by the recreation of film set interiors at the Exhibition and illustrations of the homes of the stars. As Price points out, postwar film culture regularly promoted the idea of happily married film couples – Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray, Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, Laurence Olivier and Vivien

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General editor’s foreword

Leigh, Jimmy Hanley and Dinah Sheridan – often depicted in circumstances of comfortable domesticity. But there was a dark side to the idea of home with the recognition of the suburban discontent, psychological upset and anxiety about the future highlighted in Brief Encounter and The Small Back Room. Hollie Price’s close reading of her chosen films in which she analyses camerawork, editing, set design and framing to demonstrate the practical realisation of her thesis confirms the book as a welcome re-evaluation of 1940s cinema and the excavation of its hidden depths. Jeffrey Richards

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Acknowledgements

This book has benefited immeasurably from the academic rigour, expertise and inspiration of friends and colleagues in the Film Studies department at Queen Mary, University of London. I’m grateful to many people I’ve worked with there, past and present, and would particularly like to thank Lucy Bolton, Sue Harris, Pauline Small, Guy Westwell, Adrian Garvey and Lisa Duffy for their support with this research project over the years. Many thanks to Queen Mary for the financial support that initially made the project possible and to Annette Kuhn and Alasdair King for helping  me develop it. I’d especially like to thank Annette as it is very much due to her enthusiasm and encouragement that this book has come together. It has been a while coming and the chapters have been presented at a number of conferences and in public talks, notably at Screen, British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies and the Institute of Historical Research’s Film History seminar series. They have benefited greatly from the insight, suggestions and support of Sarah Street and Lawrence Napper, and of Christine Geraghty, Sue Harper and Mark Glancy at conference presentations. Any errors or omissions are my own, but thank you to Nick Jones, Adam Whybray and Hannah McCarthy (and others above) for reading chapters in various states. I’d like to thank the anonymous reviewers who offered valuable insights on draft versions. Thanks also to Edinburgh University Press for allowing me to publish some of the same material from ‘“A Somewhat Homely Stardom”: Michael Denison, Dulcie Gray and Refurnishing Domestic Modernity in the Postwar Years’, in the Journal of British Cinema and Television 12.1 (2015), and to editors Andrew Spicer and Melanie Williams for their guidance and advice on the article.

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xiv

Acknowledgements

I’m especially grateful to the many librarians and library assistants who have helped with my research – particularly at the British Library and the British Film Institute (BFI) Reuben Library. Thanks also to those who allowed me to use the special collections at the BFI and the collections in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s (V&A) Archives of Art and Design and Theatre and Performance Department, the Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture and the Museum of the Home (formerly the Geffrye Museum of the Home). Illustrations from this research have been included with support from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Finally, thank you to my students at Queen Mary in recent years – you’re the best, and our weekly conservations about film have done wonders for my academic work and wellbeing. As always, thank you to my friends and my family – and especially to Pete.

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Introduction: ‘’Mid pleasures and palaces’

O

ne of my grandfather’s photograph albums evidences some of the social transformations that characterised life in mid-twentiethcentury Britain. While a number of photographs indicate disruptions to everyday life – from wartime injuries to postwar service in Egypt and Palestine – a sense of conservative stability is also apparent. In the late 1940s, his parents are pictured in their three-bedroom council house in Cippenham, Slough. In one photograph, his mother, Sarah Ann Price, perches on the edge of an armchair in front of a hearth and with cards arranged on the dresser behind her (Figure 1). Despite the postwar setting, the furnishings are worn-looking and in an interwar style. Next to the photograph, the album quotes two lines from a song popular in wartime. ’Mid pleasures and palaces tho’ we may roam. Be it e’er so humble, there’s no place like home.

These words articulate the prewar stability of the home to which Grandad hoped to return in the late 1940s. However, this return to the home was also bound up with a sense of a brighter future life anticipated in postwar Britain. Amati, the house in Slough to which my grandparents, Terence and Beryl, moved in 1952, emblematised this dual attitude: the house’s Tudorbethan-style beams, pebble-dashing and the name of their road – Shaggy Calf Lane – emphasised a rural, shared past while it was simultaneously a modern family home complete with bathroom, back garden and garage. In close proximity to the light industries and evidence of a consumer society developing along the Bath Road since the 1930s, this homely idyll represented a wider sense of suburban compromise: David Matless describes Slough as the ‘archetype of anti-settlement’, suggesting that for

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Sarah Price at home in Cippenham (c.1947)

preservationists ‘the suburb becomes an English predicament, a site not of pleasant town-and-country blend but an indeterminate place’.1 As often noted, for intellectuals, the suburb was a site of stagnation, turning inwards and a deeply unmodern construction of private life. Matless notes: For John Betjeman in his 1937 poem ‘Slough’, this ‘mess they call a town’ was of a different class to the leafy suburbia he would elsewhere hymn. Here food was tinned, nature expelled and futures mortgaged, and wives dyed their hair peroxide. Slough ‘isn’t fit for humans now’, but still people live here, lulled into insensitivity by their sham of a settlement.2

Perhaps oddly, my grandparents always delighted in repeating ‘come friendly bombs’, evidently not taking such derision too seriously.3 Stemming from the expansion of suburbia in the interwar years and the growth of the middle class, their house was part of a culture in which the home negotiated boundaries between prewar and postwar, traditional and modern, private and public. This book explores how the depiction of domestic life in British feature films of the period engaged with the same dynamics, as part of a structure of feeling which re-imagined modernity and exhibited an indigenous form of modernism. By uncovering archival evidence of representations of domestic life across a range of media and drawing on interdisciplinary

Introduction

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research in middlebrow literature, domestic modernity and suburban culture, I examine how the treatment of domestic life in 1940s British films engaged with the interwar past, but in doing so also laid claim to a vision of the postwar future. Lawrence Napper’s analysis of interwar British cinema and middlebrow culture describes the suburbs as ‘the middlebrow place par excellence’: as a site exemplifying the ever-tricky-to-pin-down definition of the middlebrow as ‘in-between’ or characterised by ‘balance’ – famously described by Virginia Woolf as ‘neither one thing nor the other […] betwixt and between’.4 Napper highlights how suburban homes were at once modern – ‘with bathrooms, indoor plumbing, electric lighting and gas-fuelled kitchens’ – while ‘much of the aesthetic of the suburbs, and the cultural tastes of their inhabitants, emphasized continuity with the past rather than a separation from it’.5 Design historian Deborah Sugg Ryan similarly suggests that The suburban house displayed a series of polarities, yet negotiated a space between them. These oppositions include modernity and nostalgia; urban and rural; past and future; masculine and feminine; culture and nature; public and private. Suburban Modernism was the middle ground where such polarities could come together; contradictions are intrinsic to it.6

Through an examination of these polarities, this book explores how the depiction of domestic life onscreen in the 1940s represented a contemporary engagement with this nuanced, often contradictory, vision of modernity, which was closely associated with the domestic sphere and was made popular in connection with suburbia in the 1930s. I argue that a selection of feature films from the 1940s, often considered a ‘golden age’ in national cinema, can be re-positioned ‘’mid pleasures and palaces’. Covering a variety of portraits of domestic life, the book includes new interpretations of ‘quality films’ often considered as part of an established, academic canon of British cinema, including Cineguild’s This Happy Breed and Brief Encounter (d. David Lean, 1944 and 1945) and Ealing Studios’ It Always Rains on Sunday (d. Robert Hamer, 1947) and The Captive Heart (d. Basil Dearden, 1946).7 It also extends work on hugely popular films that are more commonly labelled ‘middlebrow’, including the ever-blossom-filled Spring in Park Lane (d. Herbert Wilcox, 1948) and drama The Glass Mountain (d. Henry Cass, 1949). Taking an interdisciplinary and intertextual approach, I analyse the depiction of domestic scenes in this selection of films alongside photo-essays exploring the industrial

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working-class home in Picture Post magazine; illustrations of peaceful interiors with the countryside close by in Ideal Home magazine, advertisements and furniture catalogues; escapist, magical and aspirational exhibits at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition; and the vividly illustrated stories accompanied by domestic advice published in Modern Woman magazine. Each of the four chapters examines a different mode of address that shaped the depiction of domestic life in 1940s films: modes balancing realism and romanticism, pastoralism and preservation, escapism and restraint, and melodrama and modernism. By focusing closely on these visual modes of address, the chapters build on Napper’s ground-breaking work on British cinema and middlebrow culture as I argue that the pictorial depiction of domestic life in films in this period conveys their middlebrow status by visually demonstrating a sense of balance and ‘in-between-ness’.8 Furthermore, I contend that this sense of balance is not simply demonstrative of the purportedly static, inert style of British cinema. Instead, each mode of address is defined by the constant, dynamic negotiation of competing ideas and ideals, including the negotiation of privacy and community, past and future, consumerism and Englishness, inner and outer wellbeing. This book therefore explores how the homes pictured in British films in this period created visual narratives demonstrative of a dynamic engagement with modernity in the 1940s. With these aims in mind, the remainder of this introduction establishes the central themes of the study: the pictorial style of British films in the 1940s (with particular reference to 1942 film The First of the Few), modernity and the middlebrow in 1930s culture, and the four modes of address in question. The First of the Few In The First of the Few, Leslie Howard directs and stars as R. J. Mitchell, the designer of the Spitfire. In an early scene, set before the war, Howard’s central character returns home disconsolate about the rejection of his first designs in favour of old, traditional models. With a cheery ‘Hallo Mitch’ from his friend, RAF Squadron Leader Geoffrey Crisp (David Niven), Mitchell crosses the front lawn to his country cottage. His movement is dwarfed by his domestic surroundings. In the background, his home stands framed by trees and flowerbeds, a garden wall stretches off to the right with only the sky visible beyond. In the foreground, the stone patterned wall, climbing plants and stone-topped gate-posts provide emphatic visual

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Introduction

The First of the Few

reminders of the house’s pastoral setting. In contrast to the dejected mood of Mitchell, the framing of the shot by the garden walls, the details of the house just visible in the background and the sweeping, pictorial, painterly appearance of the scene emphasise the static, reliable world of the home into which Mitchell wanders (Figure 2). As the white picket-post gate swings closed behind him and the countryside sounds of birdsong greet his return from the city, the film cuts to a table laid for tea in the garden, where Mitchell’s wife, Diana (Rosamund John), and Geoffrey await his news. Diana duly pours, prompting Mitchell’s contented response of ‘ah, tea!’: the everyday setting of the tea table and the tranquil garden conveys the expected rituals of his return home. The camera tracks in from a distanced shot of the tea party to a closer shot of the corner of the tea table, giving the impression of an inquisitive, peering look to establish a close-up vision of the everyday. The observational style, combined with the use of found footage of Spitfires in other scenes, confirms The First of the Few as exemplary of a unique brand of realism which had revitalised the British film industry in wartime. As Andrew Higson notes, British films had become heavily influenced by the style and

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ideology with which the documentary movement of the 1930s had scrutinised the relationship between private and public: ‘melodramas of everyday life’ and their distinctive mode of stressing ‘the distanced and objective point-of-view’ constructed the private, the domestic and the everyday as part of a wartime conception of national identity.9 Under the guidance of the Ministry of Information, which advocated a realist style of fiction filmmaking to promote a shared consensus of ‘national values’, home and domestic life became ‘intensely charged expressions’ of stoicism, stability and nationhood at a time when the real homes of cinema audiences had become sites of danger, discomfort or simply memory during a period of wartime displacement.10 While the distanced view of the tea table in Mitchell’s garden attests to this realist emphasis on home and national identity, it also embodies a pictorial aesthetic: a style which ‘organizes and displays the landscape as precisely something to be looked at’.11 As in the first moments of Mitchell’s return, the angle of the camera frames the tea table against the static background scenery. Filmed on a sound stage, the lawn, the speckled stone wall and the cloud-dotted sky behind the tea party retain the look of a watercolour painting (Figure 3). Designed by art director Paul Sheriff, the film’s backgrounds were painted by W. Percy Day, whose matte paintings featured in other prestige wartime films including In Which We Serve (d. David Lean and Noël Coward, 1942) and Henry V (d. Laurence Olivier, 1944). Such pictorial-style depictions of home recur throughout The First of the Few, conveying the home as a rural idyll. These include a brief scene in which Crisp finds Mitchell at work in one of his flowerbeds and (perhaps most famously) a shot from one of the final sequences in the film that frames Mitchell with the garden wall and sweeping lawns in the background, with his planes flying overhead. A number of film historians have noted that such domestic scenes belong to a stuffy, middlebrow and backwards-looking depiction of society that was useful in creating an image of wartime consensus. Neil Rattigan, for example, contrasts scenes in Mitchell’s ‘rural-idyllic cottage’ in The First of the Few with documentary sequences, with the suggestion that its construction of domestic life is testament to ‘a middle-class conception of England, and in keeping with the project of nearly all the films of the period, ignores, for the most part, the social realities of Britain’.12 Alan Lovell observes a similar rendering of home life in In Which We Serve, which intersperses documentary footage of sea battles with scenes set in the

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Introduction

The First of the Few

crew members’ homes. Lovell suggests that, in these domestic scenes, realist ‘conviction disappears’ to be replaced by catchphrases and ‘a “quaint” quality’.13 Popular with middle-class audiences (as demonstrated by a study of cinema-going undertaken by Mass-Observation in 1943, which notes The First of the Few and In Which We Serve as favourites), the appeal of the middle-class, even suburban, qualities of films has historically been denigrated in academic study as, in the words of Matthew Sweet, ‘strictly for Little Englanders, nostalgia bores and Bakelite-sniffers – people who felt warm inside when they saw John Mills in naval stripes, Jack Hawkins in an Aran sweater’ and a ‘Little England’ of private, suburban homes and back gardens.14 In terms of their contemporary release, the setting of the British film studios ‘just beyond London’s outer suburbs in the leafy Home Counties’ reinforced this onscreen engagement with a cosy ‘Little England’.15 Shot at Denham Studios, The First of the Few explored rural and domestic themes with which the British studios were already closely associated. In press releases, magazines and books for film fans, Denham and many of the other film studios were often portrayed as quiet villages.16 In Denham Village, for example, John Mills lived in a cottage near to

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David Lean’s and was pictured in Picture Post magazine playing with his children in the garden.17 The First of the Few’s display of domestic life as a static composition embodies the middle-class, suburban outlook associated with the British film industry. Much as the ‘domestic’ label has characterised readings of British cinema, this pictorial aesthetic has been taken as a sign of its lack of visual appeal. Jeffery Richards’ study of cinema in the 1930s, for example, explores the general audience preference for the glamour of American cinema over the middle-class ‘“lifeless”’ quality of British films.18 However, Richards adds further caveats to this evidence, suggesting that there was increasing demand for British films, ‘though this may in part reflect the rise in cinema-going among the middle classes, who were predisposed towards the British film. But the label of “awfulness” stuck.’19 Likewise, Raymond Durgnat’s study of British cinema suggests that ‘in British middle-class culture […] the style, far from being vehement to the point of hysteria, is underplayed to the point of inertia’.20 As part of a wave of studies in the 1990s and 2000s that repositioned British films as worthy of critical study, Andrew Higson noted that ‘British cinema is often characterized as a cinema of restraint, a cinema that lacks visual interest’.21 Contributing to this field, I focus on re-evaluating the ‘lifelessness’, ‘inertia’ and ‘restraint’ characteristic of the appearance of domestic life in 1940s British films by resituating their depictions of home within a more nuanced historical understanding of modernity. This book builds on work which has reassessed and re-contextualised the pictorial aspects of British cinema. For instance, in Stella Hockenhull’s analysis of neo-romantic landscapes in British cinema, she follows an established line of thought in British film studies regarding the status of film as a pictorial art form: a ‘pictorialist tradition’ labelled as such in earlier accounts by Higson and Christine Gledhill.22 Andrew Higson’s analysis of 1980s and 1990s English heritage films suggests that a pictorial mode of address is a characteristic of their ‘middle-brow version of quality, pitched somewhere between modernism and the more high-brow elements of art cinema on the one hand, and low-brow popular culture on the other’.23 Christine Gledhill suggests that the pictorial style of British films of the 1920s and 1930s was influenced by a set of characteristics – notably, a changed experience of public and private spheres, the restraint indicative of ‘middle-class hegemony’, and an engagement with modernity which had previously defined nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century

Introduction

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theatre and popular culture.24 By focusing on images of domestic life and a form of modernity associated with the suburbs, I expand and refine these conceptions of the pictorial aesthetics of British cinema – as indicative of a negotiation of public and private, a reconciliation of past and future, and the middlebrow. Middlebrow culture and modernity in the suburbs

‘Middlebrow’ is a slippery term, and it is most frequently used to indicate an ‘in-between’ status, a sense of ‘balance’ or a ‘tendency […] to blur boundaries’.25 Virginia Woolf ’s definition and inflammatory denigration of the middlebrow suggests that: They are neither one thing nor the other. They are not highbrows, whose brows are high; nor lowbrows, whose brows are low. Their brows are betwixt and between. They do not live in Bloomsbury which is on high ground; nor in Chelsea, which is on low ground. Since they must live somewhere presumably, they live perhaps in South Kensington, which is betwixt and between.26

Whereas Woolf attacks her contemporary ‘middlebrows’, including notoriously J. B. Priestley (albeit without naming him), interdisciplinary scholarly research has sought to reposition middlebrow literature and culture as representing an important engagement with modernity. The term modernity is traditionally defined as the period of rapid social and cultural change from the 1870s to the 1930s (and sometimes the 1940s) with reference to the public spaces of the street, the arcade or the department store. However, its reassessment as a certain ‘attitude’ by Michel Foucault or ‘a mode of vital experience’ by Marshall Berman proves useful to a historical understanding of social and cultural constructions of modernity.27 In the 1930s and 1940s, Walter Benjamin presented a nuanced understanding of this ‘attitude’ or ‘mode of vital experience’, introducing a number of ideas that are pertinent to this book. Benjamin’s exploration of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century modernity is characterised by a changed relationship between the private domestic interior and the public sphere. For example, in his analysis of Parisian shopping arcades in his unfinished Passagenwerk (Arcades Project), Benjamin states: ‘the domestic interior moves outside […] the street becomes room and the room becomes street’.28 He demonstrates how interior life was projected into the public sphere, as images in shop windows but also in the walkways between the

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shops that had become interiors in themselves, emphasising that the emergence of the interior was ‘bound up with its meaning being equally spatial and image based’.29 Furthermore, rather than focusing relentlessly on the future, Benjamin’s notion of the ‘dialectical image’ is a historical moment in which ‘the true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.’30 Theodor Adorno’s reading of Benjamin’s work defines his ‘dialectical image’ as a ‘presentation of the modern as at once the new, the already past and the ever-same’, thus indicating a role of the past in a vision of the present, and in Benjamin’s conception of modernity.31 These ideas – the emergence of the domestic interior and the ‘dialectical image’ – have since resurfaced in studies of middlebrow culture, which have used similar concepts to re-evaluate historically specific ‘meanings of modernity’.32 In one strand of research, the growing suburbs, the increasing consumer power of the lower-middle and middle classes and the rise in home ownership between the wars were accompanied by dramatic changes in domestic lifestyle and a conception of modernity established in accordance with the private spaces of the home. Alison Light’s landmark study of middlebrow literature suggests that ‘the pleasures of home life were at the centre of the national stage in the interwar years’, describing ‘a modernity which was felt and lived in the most interior and private of places’.33 Following in Light’s footsteps, a host of studies in twentieth-century literature and culture – including work by Judy Giles, Adrian Bingham, Mica Nava and Wendy Gan – resituate an experience of modernity in the private sphere of the home.34 Judy Giles emphasises that in the first half of the twentieth century ‘for millions of women […] the parlour and the suburb rather than the city were the physical spaces in which they experienced the effects of modernization’.35 Launched between 1920 and 1945, a new range of women’s magazines constructed housewives and mothers as skilled professional and domestic experts, homes as governed with a sense of scientific economy and labour-saving devices as demonstrative of discourses of consumerism and efficiency: all of which have been labelled ‘potent symbols of modernity’.36 In another strand, it has been suggested that this conception of suburban modernity did not negate associations with the past, and instead emphasised them. A number of studies of British literature and culture have revised the idea that the middlebrow is straightforwardly backwards-looking. Light suggests an emphasis on modernity in middlebrow literature, which was

Introduction

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‘janus-faced, it could simultaneously look backwards and forwards; it could accommodate the past in the new forms of the present’: she casts this as a ‘conservative embracing of modernity’.37 The new designs of suburban homes with their ‘gables, pitched roofs, lattice windows, half-timber, leaded lights and cosy porches’ – influenced by country cottage style – presented a middle ground between a mythical, rural and ‘inherently imperial’ past and an up-to-date future.38 Sugg Ryan’s recent analysis of suburban modernism and the interwar home details the ‘tensions between the longings for the past and the aspirations for the future displayed in interwar suburbia […] the suburban interwar homeowner travelled between Tudor times and modern times’.39 This book builds on these two strands of the ‘betwixt and between’. Covering both the Second World War and immediate postwar years, I analyse films made in a period of social transition. The outbreak of the war and its social upheavals (including evacuation, women’s war work and mobilisation) significantly altered the realities of home life and the ways in which domesticity figured in popular wartime culture. Nevertheless, this conception of modernity – linked with the home and the past – found a new place as a particularly potent narrative for imagining the postwar future. During the war, interwar images of domestic modernity found new meaning. And, after the end of the war in 1945, the ‘home and its inhabitants’ continued to be positioned as both emblematic of the prewar past and as ‘the symbolic, and actual, centre for postwar reconstruction’.40 Research in postwar social history has foregrounded how the negotiation of past and future continued in this period. For example, Claire Langhamer persuasively argues that there was ‘a simultaneous “looking backwards” and “looking forwards”’ – terms used by Light to define the conservative nature of modernity in the interwar years – when it came to the postwar home.41 Langhamer notes that: The new was sometimes not quite that new. In a number of ways it was dreams and aspirations first formulated in the 1930s which were realized in the 1950s. More specifically, pre-existing demographic trends framed and fuelled the desire for, and possibility of, a more home-centred way of life whilst ‘modern’ domesticity pre-dated the end of the war.42

Images of the modern home in popular culture emphasised, on one hand, a sense of tradition, and on the other hand, a ‘sense of crusading idealism’, ‘a feeling of involvement in national affairs’ and a look to the future

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in the forward-looking agenda of official discourses surrounding design and rehousing policies.43 In terms of the former, the fall in middle-class standards of living resulting from the continuing austerity conditions of the postwar years only added to the vivacity of the dream of the prewar home. Postwar images of home looking back to former domestic conditions – in magazines, exhibitions and advertisements – showcase this continued engagement with home as symbolic of the hopes for a conservative, backwards-looking modernity. In 1944, for example, the Daily Mail Book of Post-War Homes included an advertisement for Hoover that used the past as a means to imagine future domestic conditions. The slogan stated: ‘postwar as pre-war for the ideal home, be it castle or cottage’.44 On the level of rebuilding, Paul Addison suggests that the tone of the 1940s planning schemes was ‘suburban and even traditional’.45 According to Nick Bullock, ‘reconstruction was not just about building “a nobler” world. Planning for the future was inseparably mingled with the desire for continuity with the past’.46 Similarly, Harriet Atkinson’s study of the importance of place to the 1951 Festival of Britain suggests that ‘home in the Festival became an important locus for what it meant to be modern and British, while at the same time holding tight to things from the past’.47 As such, the festival represented what Robert Hewison describes as ‘a lightweight framework for yet another exploration of Deep England’ and Paul Rennie dubbed ‘a kind of national village fete’.48 Interwar suburban modernity has often been considered a phenomenon separate from postwar movements. However, the way in which some of the representations of home in the late 1940s negotiated private conceptions of home and national community suggests a debt to the promotion of modern domesticity in the interwar years. The Britain Can Make It design exhibition in 1946, the first postwar Ideal Home Exhibition in 1947 and the Festival of Britain in 1951 leveraged the hopeful idea of a ‘New Jerusalem’ into the home and presented domestic ‘palaces’ as part of the postwar re-envisioning of the country and a re-working of what ‘modern’ meant.49 At the festival, domestic interiors were situated as part of a refashioning of British citizens’ modern private and national identities. The Homes and Gardens pavilion featured rooms designed to solve particular problems for the modern family: the Festival Pattern group based their new domestic designs on molecular structures, exhibiting the influence of new scientific ideas. While simultaneously building on prewar

Introduction

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ideas and an image of ‘Deep England’, the furniture on display emphasised bright colours, new shapes and efficient planning, and was thus tailored to the ‘clean, orderly and modern’ vision of the British home presented for the vast crowds who visited the festival. The popular postwar imagining of the home exhibited the conservative modernity developed in interwar suburbia as well as a distinctive re-imagining of the themes central to visual culture surrounding the prewar home. Domestic life in 1940s British films

Picturing home was a preoccupation that infiltrated a wide range of different cultural media and was part of a specific ‘structure of feeling’ or a ‘common experience of modernity’ closely associated with, and constructed alongside, the suburban home.50 This book’s chapters contextualise the different visual modes used to construct domestic life onscreen in relation to extra-cinematic culture: from explorations of industrial working-class homes in Picture Post magazine to the dream spaces of the Ideal Home Exhibition – as well as sources more closely related to the film industry itself, including film magazines and promotional materials. In doing so, it draws on interdisciplinary, intertextual approaches of feminist scholarship exploring British cinema by critically positioning films in relation to a ‘wider circulation of discourses, images and narratives’.51 Exemplary of this field, Antonia Lant suggests that ‘to convey the texture of the wartime reading of films, to give a sense of the three-dimensional lattice that any wartime film inhabits, […] while positing films as its central texts, [she] investigates the welter of other materials that adhere to them: cartoons, advertisements, diaries, memoirs, articles, reviews, and so on’.52 Numerous studies of British film have since furthered this approach by analysing film texts with a close focus on their aesthetic style while keeping a wealth of other cultural discourses in play, and the chapters in this book build on studies re-evaluating the visual appeal of British cinema – in terms of genre, urban settings, rural landscapes, colour, set design and stardom – with the aim of resituating film aesthetics in relation to a ‘welter of other materials’ and examining British cinema’s engagement with interwar constructions of domestic life and modernity.53 Chapter 1 examines depictions of the industrial working-class home in British social realist films, focusing specifically on the recurring motif of the tea table. As part of the growing trend for social investigation in

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the 1930s, working-class homes were rigorously mapped – by MassObservation (founded in 1937), by George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and in Picture Post magazine (first published in 1938), which showcased a new style of candid photography. I explore how such images of domesticity professed a level of social realism, illuminating the realities of everyday life in the working-class home. The chapter expands on existing analysis of British realist aesthetics – focusing on Love on the Dole (d. John Baxter, 1941) and It Always Rains on Sunday – by contextualising the visual spectacle of the working-class home in these two films in relation to the earlier culture of social investigation, focusing on a close analysis of photo-essays published in Picture Post in the 1930s. By examining onscreen constructions of ‘tea table politics’, I suggest that both films map everyday domesticity in a middlebrow style that combines realism with more romanticised conceptions of the working-class home, projecting idealised notions of respectability, reform and community. Chapter 2 explores the influence of rural imagery on the depiction of the home in 1940s films. With the rapid expansion of the suburbs in the 1920s and 1930s, domestic life was promoted with an emphasis on idyllic, pastoral settings. The designs of new suburban homes presented a middle ground between a mythical, rural past and a transformed, modern future. In keeping with the newly created suburbs, contemporary advertisements and aspirational monthly home magazines such as Ideal Home (founded in 1920), Homes and Gardens (1919) and My Home (1928) often framed domestic life in relation to rural landscapes. Through reference to this popular print culture – including magazines, furniture catalogues and colour books – this chapter extends current understanding of rural imagery in British film and culture by exploring two films that frame domestic life as a pastoral image. I focus on This Happy Breed, which constructs a family home in Clapham as a symbol of national consensus, and The Captive Heart, a postwar film largely set in the temporary homes and gardens of a prisoner-of-war camp. Focusing on colour and framing, I re-contextualise the depiction of domestic life in both films with reference to interwar modes of address negotiating a rural past simultaneously with a vision of future homes and communities. Chapter 3 explores the home’s endowment with escapist qualities in two postwar films that demonstrate cinema’s debt to the consumer culture that developed around the suburban home during the interwar years. The late-1930s consumerist transformation of domestic life was

Introduction

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notably influenced by Hollywood visions of domesticity and consumer culture, but presented a ‘specifically British or English version […] of commerce and culture’, tempered by an emphasis on tradition, restraint and Englishness.54 Building on existing research which considers the relationship between British film, domestic modernity and consumer culture, this chapter explores aspirational images of home in two postwar films: Spring in Park Lane, a light-hearted, part-musical romantic comedy set in the sprawling spaces of a grand London mansion, and The Glass Mountain (d. Henry Cass, 1949), which centres on the dreams of home and the romantic dalliances of a composer. These films offer visions of domestic transformation by constructing a particular kind of spatial experience and by conveying aspirational images of glamorous, and yet profoundly stable, domestic stardom. In so doing, both provide an escapist treatment of domestic life tempered by middle-class English restraint. The chapter contends that the films re-imagine the kind of domestic transformation that was promised by interwar consumer culture, and which came to be repurposed in peacetime for audiences facing the possibilities offered by postwar reconstruction. Chapter 4 considers the depiction of domestic life onscreen in the 1940s in terms of ideas concerning psychological wellbeing in the home. The development of suburbia saw an increased interest in studies of the psyche: prominent among these was the diagnosis of ‘suburban neurosis’, a condition supposedly suffered by women isolated in their suburban homes. At this time, melodramatic stories accompanied by dramatic illustrations of domestic life published in women’s magazines such as Modern Woman (first published in 1925) were a popular way of addressing the psychological significance of home. Charting subjective experiences, these stories destabilised the concept of home as comfortable and constant, instead conveying escape, insecurity and instability. Through an exploration of women’s magazines, this chapter focuses on the private visions of housewife and mother Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) in Brief Encounter, and backroom scientist Sammy Rice (David Farrar) in his London flat in The Small Back Room (d. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1949). I contend that these two films re-imagine a mode of address – balancing melodrama and modernism – used in the 1930s as a way of interrogating the instabilities of the modern home, thus illuminating a different side to domestic life and its ‘uncanny modernity’.

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Picturing home Historically, the innovative qualities of the cinematic medium have been linked to its treatment of domestic space, stressing the visual appearance of magical mobility and transformation associated with homes onscreen as indicative of their projection of modernity. For instance, Walter Benjamin’s study One-Way Street suggests ‘film does not present furniture and façades in completed forms for critical inspection, their insistent, jerky nearness alone being sensational’.55 Similarly, in an exploration of early twentieth-century film and fairy tales, which references magical cinematic visions of home, Kristian Moen describes ‘the development of cinema as a site of spectacular fantasy that responded to a context of modernity’ and as ‘conducive to showing the animate and transforming potentials of places and things’.56 In such accounts, the projection of domestic space is assumed to be modern due to its entanglement with the modernity of the cinematic medium, which showcases the ‘sensational’, ‘animate and transforming’ potential of the home. In other words, the ‘modernity’ conveyed by the home onscreen is connected with mobility and dynamism – with the transformation of an inanimate space into an animate one. By contrast, images of domestic life in this selection of British films did not so much showcase the transformative potential of cinema as present a ‘tamed’ magic through ‘the blending of movement and stillness’ that both Laura Mulvey and Annette Kuhn have described as uniquely cinematic.57 On one hand, I maintain a focus on the filmic construction of domesticity on the level of mise-en-scène and by other cinematic elements, including editing, cinematography and framing – stressing the ‘movement’ made possible by the medium in the same way as Benjamin or Moen. On the other hand, I also argue that domestic scenes in 1940s British films engaged with pictorial tropes – characterised by ‘stillness’ – developed in cultural discourses surrounding lower-middle- and middle-class suburbia which were used in non-cinematic media. As shown by each of the four modes of address examined in the chapters, the picturing of home negotiated a particular vision of modernity: one which was constructed alongside and within suburbia, and which balanced the implications of the privacy of domestic life against those public spheres of community and progress, rural iconographies of landscape, consumer culture and a preoccupation with interior visions of home. The depiction of home onscreen is characterised by a visual balancing act or compromise between a conception of domestic

Introduction

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life as private, traditional and comfortable and as public, progressive and modern. In highlighting these balanced modes of address, I uncover a different kind of dynamism and mobility to that ascribed to the depiction of the domestic, everyday and inanimate in cinema by Benjamin and Moen: a dynamic sense of balance that was illustrative of British cinema’s middlebrow engagement with modernity in the 1940s. Notes

1 D. Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion, 1998), pp. 35, 34. 2 Ibid., p. 35. 3 J. Betjeman, Continual Dew: A Little Book of Bourgeois Verse (London: John Murray, 1937), p. 4. 4 L. Napper, ‘Time and the Middlebrow in 1940s British Cinema’, in Sally Faulkner (ed.) Middlebrow Cinema (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 71–87, 74–5; R. M. Bracco, Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919–39 (Oxford: Berg, 1993), p. 12; V. Woolf, The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1942), pp. 179–80. 5 Napper, ‘Time and the Middlebrow’, pp. 74–5. 6 D. Sugg Ryan, Ideal Homes, 1918–1939: Domestic Design and Suburban Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), p. 60. 7 J. Ellis, ‘The Quality Film Adventure: British Critics and the Cinema, 1942–8’, in A. Higson (ed.) Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema (London: Cassell, 1996), pp. 66–93. 8 See also: L. Napper, British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2009). 9 A. Higson, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), pp. 177, 213, 276–7. 10 A. Moor, Powell and Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), p. 16. Also emphasised in A. Lant, Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 44. These connections between home and the war effort are reinforced in the film’s narrative, as Mitchell’s domestic life is profoundly affected by his contribution and his personal sacrifices for the war, connections which are most famously established in a later scene in which Mitchell waves to Crisp, flying the newest Spitfire model, from a wheelchair in his garden. 11 Higson, Waving the Flag, p. 53. 12 N. Rattigan, This Is England: British Film and the People’s War, 1939–1945 (London: Associated University Presses, 2001), pp. 54, 58–9. 13 A. Lovell, ‘The British Cinema: The Known Cinema?’, in Robert Murphy (ed.) The British Cinema Book (London: Palgrave Macmillan on behalf of the BFI, 2009), pp. 5–13, at p. 6. 14 J. Richards and D. Sheridan, Mass-Observation at the Movies (London:

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17

18

19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28

Routledge, 1987), p. 220; M. Sweet, Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema (London: Faber & Faber, 2005), p. 5. A. Kuhn, ‘Film Stars in 1930s Britain: A Case Study in Modernity and Femininity’, in Tytti Soila (ed.) Stellar Encounters: Stardom in Popular European Cinema (New Barnet: John Libbey Publishing, 2009), pp. 180–94, 191. For more on the early British film industry’s relationship with the suburbs, see: R-F. Lack, ‘“Local Film Subjects”: Suburban Cinema, 1895–1910’, in P. Hirsch and C. O’Rourke (eds) London on Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 15–26. The Film Book Club’s Stars by Day: A Tour in Words and Pictures of the British Film Studios (1947) describes ‘clever attempts at camouflage with lawns, trees and flower-gardens’ at the studios: ‘the green-painted roofs of Denham […] loom up large in the beautiful wooded Buckinghamshire countryside’. R. Stannage, Stars by Day (London: The Film Book Club, 1947), p. 25. As pictured in S. Lee, British Film Stars at Home (London: Findon Publications, 1947), n.p; ‘He plays what she writes’, Picture Post (4 August 1945), pp. 22–3; The neighbourly proximity of Mills and Lean is mentioned in G. D. Phillips, Beyond the Epic: The Life and Films of David Lean (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), p. 67. J. Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in 1930s Britain (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010). Richards quotes a twenty-five-year-old male respondent from J. P. Mayer’s sociological study British Cinemas and Their Audiences (1948): ‘I disliked British films. There [sic] were always so “lifeless”’, p. 30. Ibid. R. Durgnat, A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence (London: Palgrave Macmillan on behalf of the BFI, 2011, first pub. 1970), p. 6. A. Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama since 1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 40. S. Hockenhull, Aesthetics and Neo-Romanticism in Film: Landscapes in Contemporary British Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), pp. 2, 24. Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema, p. 8. C. Gledhill, Reframing British Cinema, 1918–1928: Between Restraint and Passion (London: BFI, 2003), pp. 20, 19, 31, 51. Bracco, Merchants of Hope, p. 12; Napper, ‘Time and the Middlebrow’, p. 72. Woolf, The Death of the Moth, pp. 179–80. M. Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 32–50, at p. 39; M. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), p. 15; J. Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2004), pp. 5–6. W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, translation by H. Eiland and K. Mclaughlin

Introduction

29 30

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31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43

44

45 46

47 48

(Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 406; Penny Sparke and Charles Rice have emphasised ‘the emergence of the interior’ as a key idea in Benjamin’s examination of modernity. P. Sparke, The Modern Interior (London: Reaktion, 2008), pp. 12–13; C. Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 3–4, 19. Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, p. 19. W. Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in H. Arendt (ed.) Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999, first pub. 1942), pp. 245–55, at p. 247. Theodor Adorno, quoted in A. Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), p. 51. M. J. Daunton and B. Rieger (eds) Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late Victorian Era to World War II (Oxford: Berg, 2001), p. 4. A. Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 10. Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb; A. Bingham, Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); M. Nava and A. O’Shea, Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity (London: Routledge, 1996); W. Gan, Women, Privacy and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century British Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb, p. 11. Sugg Ryan, Ideal Homes, pp. 134, 84–5. Light, Forever England, pp. 10, 11. M. Pugh, ‘We Danced All Night’: A Social History of Britain between the Wars (London: Vintage Books, 2008). p. 71; Sugg Ryan, Ideal Homes, p. 141. Sugg Ryan, Ideal Homes, pp. 19, 168. C. Langhamer, ‘The Meanings of Home in Postwar Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History 40:2 (2005), 341–62, at p. 342. Ibid., p. 343; Light, Forever England, pp. 10–11. Langhamer, ‘The Meanings of Home’, pp. 342–3. M. Sissons and P. French (eds) Age of Austerity, 1945–51 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1963), p. 9. Hoover advertisement in M. Pleydell-Bouverie, Daily Mail Book of Post War Homes: Based on the Ideas and Opinions of the Women of Britain (London: Daily Mail, Ideal Home Exhibition Dept of Associated Newspapers Ltd., 1944), p. 172. P. Addison, Now the War Is Over: A Social History of Britain 1945–51 (London: Pimlico, 1995), p. 72. N. Bullock, Building the Post-War World: Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Britain (London: Routledge, 2002), J. B. Priestley’s Postscripts (1940) quoted, p. 6. H. Atkinson, The Festival of Britain: A Land and Its People (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012), p. 187. R. Hewison, Culture and Consensus: England, Art and Politics since 1940

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50

51

52 53 54 55 56 57

(London: Methuen, 1995), p. 59; P. Rennie, Festival of Britain 1951 (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2007), p. 9. C. Barnett, The Lost Victory: British Dreams, British Realities, 1945–1950 (London: Faber & Faber, 2011), p. 1; B. Conekin, ‘“Here is the Modern World Itself ”: The Festival of Britain’s Representations of the Future’, in B. Conekin, F. Mort and C. Waters (eds) Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945–1964 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1999), pp. 228–46, at p. 238. R. Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1965), pp. 64–6. Domestic modernity has also been denoted as a ‘structure of feeling’ in Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb, p. 6. Alan O’Shea similarly proposes the need to address an ‘English engagement’ with modernity as a ‘structure of feeling’, which, drawing on Berman’s definition, he identifies as a ‘common experience of modernity’. A. O’Shea, ‘English Subjects of Modernity’, in M. Nava and A. O’Shea (eds) Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 7–37, at p. 8. C. Gledhill and G. Swanson (eds) Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and British Cinema in the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 1. Lant, Blackout, p. 12. Ibid. B. Conekin, F. Mort and C. Waters (eds) Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945–1964 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1999), p. 19. W. Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, translation by J. A. Underwood (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 89. K. Moen, Film and Fairy Tales: The Birth of Modern Fantasy (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), pp. xvii, 90. M. Nava, ‘Modernity Tamed? Women and the Rationalisation of Consumption in the Interwar Period’, Australian Journal of Communication 22:2 (1995), 1–19; A. Kuhn, Ratcatcher (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan on behalf of the BFI, 2008), p. 10; L. Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2006), p. 31.

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‘Tea Table Politics’: mapping the industrial working-class home

D

uring the 1940s, the tea table became a common trope in films focusing on industrial working-class characters and setting out realist-style depictions of their homes. Influenced by the iconography and ideals of the documentary movement, a number of films released in wartime and the postwar years mapped the living conditions of industrial workers using images of domestic life – particularly centring on the kitchen-living room used variously for meals, study and family gatherings. An early example, The Stars Look Down (d. Carol Reed, 1940), features establishing and close-up shots of a miner’s breakfast being laid in a cramped kitchen-living room, in contrast with the tea and cake surveyed with unease in the parlour of the middle-class home to which scholarship-boy son Davey (Michael Redgrave) later moves. In The Proud Valley (d. Pen Tennyson, 1940), the table is a site of community in a Welsh mining village, symbolising the acceptance of David Goliath (Paul Robeson), a black worker and an outsider to the village, into the family home. In the later postwar film Blue Scar (d. Jill Craigie, 1949), a miner’s dinner at a table in front of the fire is part of a domestic setting characterised by daily routine and close-knit family life – as his son is washed in a tin bath at his feet. Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life … (1957) marked the ‘good table’ as a key indicator of the respectability of a working-class household.1 In these films, the tea table in the mining home is represented as a stronghold of upright working-class values, including respectability, in the face of otherwise difficult aspects of daily home and work life. The onscreen image of the working-class table was more than simply a matter of authenticity of mise-en-scène. This everyday space was constructed to convey middle-class ideals of family life, habits and community, often portraying the industrial working-class home with a sense of romanticism.

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In Andrew Higson’s examination of British social realism, and Samantha Lay’s later study drawing on Higson, both detect a characteristic tension – between an observational address and a ‘fascinated gaze, which could render exotic and romanticize’ – in the depiction of working-class life in interwar documentaries.2  This chapter further queries the tension between realism and romanticism that shaped working-class homes onscreen by resituating it as a mode of address developed by an earlier popular culture of social investigation in the 1930s.3 At this time, images of working-class domestic life were perpetuated in a variety of forms, mapping everyday living conditions and material circumstances for lower-middle and middle-class audiences as part of an image of modernity. By contextualising the depiction of domestic life in two films in relation to this interwar culture of social investigation, their realist address can be identified as part of a middlebrow cultural construction of industrial working-class domesticity articulating progressive ideas of the modern home and society. Realism and romanticism The growth of suburbia in the interwar years offered working-class people the opportunity to achieve social distinction by owning their homes for the first time. Nicola Humble emphasises that the suburbs were an important site for this ‘significant national transformation’, which ‘changed the lives of millions of people in the years between the wars by providing them with electricity, gas, bathrooms, and indoor lavatories’.4 Alongside this emphasis on private aspirations, the ‘so-called private’ homes of suburbia harboured an interest in ideas of community, social democracy and reform – in other words, a concern with the public.5 Humble suggests that ‘in the years after the First World War, the middle-class became increasingly self-conscious. Its members began to question their own identity, the role of their class and its future in the nation’.6 Similarly, Tom Jeffery notes that the rise of the ‘technological class’ was part of ‘a resurgence in lower-middle-class radicalism as war approached’ as ‘black-coated’ workers also moved to the left.7 In a growing trend for social investigation, industrial workingclass living conditions were mapped with an emphasis on these progressive impulses, conveying middle-class ideals of reform, domestic improvement and community. Mass-Observation, set up in 1937 by anthropologist Tom Harrisson, poet Charles Madge and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings,

‘Tea Table Politics’

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was a particularly influential part of this trend. An organisation dedicated to documenting the everyday life of the nation, it undertook directives exploring British homes, which included, for example, a survey in 1937 examining the objects and decorations kept and displayed on mantelpieces.8 Mass-Observation’s findings were published as Penguin Specials and disseminated as part of over a thousand local Left Book Club groups, and particularly in the suburbs and at lower-middle-class workplaces.9 Also published for the Left Book Club, J. B. Priestley’s English Journey: being a rambling but truthful account of what one man saw and heard and felt and thought during a journey through England during the autumn of the year 1933 (1934) detailed the material conditions of working-class life in the industrial North, including ‘fried-fish shops and dingy pubs’, and George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) studied working-class life in Yorkshire and Lancashire, interrogating the domestic lives of industrial working-class families with whom Orwell stayed during his investigation.10 The first section of Wigan Pier details the difficulties of unemployment and the grim realities of domestic life for Mr and Mrs Brooker. The state of the table is central to one particularly vivid exploration of their home: In front of the fire there was always a line of damp washing, and in the middle of the room was the big kitchen table at which the family and all the lodgers ate. I never saw this table completely uncovered, but I saw all its various wrappings at different times. […] I used to get to know the individual crumbs by sight and watch their progress up and down the table from day to day.11

This detailed attention to the topography of the table top – including its layers of different cloths and its ever-present crumbs – provides a tactile re-imagining of these spaces for the reader. In Orwell’s depiction of the unemployed man’s table, his tone is an accusatory one: the repetition of phrases including ‘there was always’, ‘I never saw this table’ and ‘I used to get to know the individual crumbs’, and sensory details including the ‘coarse’ and ‘sticky’ fabrics, evoke a particularly middle-class revulsion at these unsavoury conditions and thus the need for reform. By contrast, in the homes belonging to employed workers, Orwell notes that ‘the memory of working-class interiors […] reminds me that our age has not been an altogether bad one to live in’.12 Having detailed the conditions of the kitchen-living room table as if at a distance, from a middleclass point of view, he optimistically reminds the reader that the unique working-class culture belongs to ‘our age’ – an age shared by the imagined

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audience. This connection to the reader – and its implicit understanding of a striving for respectability and good living conditions – constructs the industrial working-class home according to a romanticised sense of shared community and the need for future improvement. Orwell’s study can be identified as middlebrow through its balance of realism – with its attention to the material conditions of unemployed life and the authentic depiction of working-class struggle – with romanticism, emphasised by his implication of the lower-middle- and middle-class reader in the social investigation of these intimate scenes. The industrial working-class home was effectively constructed as a spectacle – a composition which draws attention to the act of spectatorship – by making the suburban readership complicit in his social investigation of living conditions. New technologies and a rising interest in ‘candid’ photography also enabled photographs of the intimate, everyday locales of the working-class home to negotiate this dynamic.13 For instance, in 1937 the Daily Herald published Harold Tomlin’s photograph of a working-class home alongside the caption ‘Tea Table Politics’. The photograph shows Labour MP Richard Crossman visiting the Robbins family in their home – ostensibly in the middle of a meal, in front of a large, Victorian-style hearth decorated with the large vases traditional to the working-class living room (Figure 4). The photograph of a private family scene draws attention to the realist view of everyday life on offer: the surface of the table laid for tea as a potent symbol of intimacy, ritual and community. However, as Deborah Frizzell and others have shown, there was some disjunction between ‘candid’ shots and ‘composed and atmospheric, almost pictorialist’ photographs which conveyed a particular set of ideas or constructs at this time as part of this ‘enrolment’.14 Photographs of the intimate, everyday locales of the working-class home ‘enrolled’ the viewer in a ‘politics of vision’ at the heart of which was an implicit understanding of a striving for respectability and good living conditions. The arrangement of the Robbins family around the table and the position of the camera (maintained at Crossman’s eye level) in Tomlin’s photograph emphasise a more formal composition drawing attention to the spectacle of the family around the bright, communal table. As such, it highlights the respectability and cleanliness of the Robbinses’ home lives and thus indicates the conditions of social reform that Crossman offered. By evoking these middle-class ideals of ritual, respectability and reform, the photograph of the everyday tea table stands as a modern ‘manifestation

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‘Tea Table Politics’

Tea Table Politics, Daily Herald (April 1937)

of a middlebrow politics’, in an address to the observer comparable to the middlebrow construction put forward by Orwell.15 Constructing ‘a space of representation’ or a ‘politics of vision’ – terms used in studies of photography – but what I consider as constructing a specifically middlebrow address concerned with realism and romanticism, photographs in this style constructed a narrative which combined an observational attention to material details with an idea of the relationship between private home and community that was optimistic and forward-looking.16 The rest of this chapter takes up the balance between realism and romanticism evidenced here by exploring the treatment of industrial working-class homes in Love on the Dole (d. John Baxter, 1941), a film originally proposed in the late 1930s but not made until the early years of the war due to its ‘sordid’ representation of working-class conditions, and It Always Rains on Sunday (d. Robert Hamer, 1947), a much-celebrated fictional depiction of the East End of London in the immediate postwar years.17 Expanding on existing analysis of these films, I contextualise the visual spectacle of the working-class home onscreen in relation to this earlier culture of social investigation, focusing particularly on photo-essays exploring the same theme in Picture Post magazine in the 1930s. Through onscreen constructions of ‘tea

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table politics’, these films presented middlebrow constructions of home, conveying the material conditions of working-class life while also highlighting romanticised concerns of respectability, reform and community.

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Love on the Dole Love on the Dole charts the life of the working-class Hardcastle family – Mr and Mrs Hardcastle (‘Father’ and ‘Mother’/George Carney and Mary Merrall) and their children Sal (Deborah Kerr) and Harry (Geoffrey Hibbert) – as they cope with unemployment in the northern industrial district of Hankey Park, Salford. The film’s opening moments introduce this setting as a recollection of ‘one of the darker pages of our industrial history’: a description presented as an intertitle against a background shot of a black sky of looming clouds. With a band of sunlight just visible in the distance, the description reads: On the outskirts of every city, there is a region of darkness and poverty where men and women for ever strive to live decently in the face of overwhelming odds never doubting that the clouds of depression will one day be lifted. Such a district was Hankey Park in March, 1930.

In this statement, the film evokes a public setting by suggesting that these conditions exist ‘on the outskirts of every city’. While the intertitle ‘Hankey Park in March, 1930’ remains visible, the background dissolves to a crane shot, which moves down over a grim landscape of smoking industrial chimneys, row upon row of terraced houses, a church and factory buildings (Figure 5) and into one of many rows of housing: a dark street on which the Hardcastles’ home – to which Love on the Dole repeatedly returns – is located. Shifting from industrial townscape to everyday and domestic space, the opening crane shot fades to a high-angle view of Mrs Hardcastle in her back yard.18 The camera lingers, taking in details including a ladder leaning on the yard wall and items of clothing hanging on a line. Accompanied by the sound of shovelling coal, the camera tilts up to show the series of yards beyond Mrs Hardcastle’s, providing a glimpse of women working, a row of tin baths and a number of washing lines, implying a shared struggle with conditions. With a fade to the inside of the family home, Mrs Hardcastle enters with the coal; the camera pans past a row of plates in a drying rack and a central table laid for breakfast to the central hearth in the family’s

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‘Tea Table Politics’

Love on the Dole

kitchen-living room. By the light of a candle in the foreground (but also with dim studio lighting from above), Mrs Hardcastle shovels coal into the grate as a medium shot establishes a view of the material details of the Hardcastles’ home. The room is furnished with an assortment of ornaments, vases and everyday objects on the mantel, small items of washing hanging over the grate and a wooden chair next to the blackened hearth: a careful, detailed image of the industrial working-class home (Figure 6). Constructed as an observational view of the spaces of a private family home, this mode of address engages with working-class milieus in the style of social investigation found in 1930s newspapers, books and magazines and as part of the promotion of rehousing schemes. The state of community, economic circumstances and the issue of social progress are conveyed through an examination of the everyday rituals and struggles of workingclass domestic life. The tensions in the realist aesthetic – between the material reconstruction of the home and the implication of wider themes of social investigation – recast the interior of the Hardcastles’ home as a particular kind of spectacle: a space in which the aesthetic value of the scene is foregrounded as a visual narrative specifically characterised by tensions between realist authenticity and reform.

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Love on the Dole

Many studies of Love on the Dole have followed in the footsteps of the British Board of Film Censors’ (BBFC) 1936 scenario reports on the film, one of which called it a ‘very sordid story, in very sordid surroundings’, detailing the ‘shabbiness’, ‘claustrophobia’ and ‘visual chaos’ of the film’s working-class interiors.19 However, Stephen Constantine’s examination of the 1933 novel by Walter Greenwood (from which Baxter’s film was adapted) and stage version suggests that What Love on the Dole had done was to present to a sensitive audience a picture of working people neither militant nor pauperized nor hopelessly degraded by extremes of poverty. Instead as personified by the Hardcastles it was a working-class striving to maintain what in middle-class eyes as well as their own were respectable and civilised standards.20

Drawing on this line of thought, Sarah Street’s analysis of a ‘dominant middle-class discourse on unemployment’ in the 1930s as an ‘important context’ for Love on the Dole shows a level of departure from other, more limited views of the film’s portrayal of domestic life and its ‘sordid’ surroundings.21 By resituating the film’s construction of domesticity in ‘a dominant middle-class discourse on unemployment’, I propose that the realist modes of addressing the domestic mise-en-scène can be understood

‘Tea Table Politics’

as constructing a visual compromise between authenticity, reform and spectacle that was in keeping with the 1930s culture of social investigation. Tea table realism

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Andrew Higson’s classification of the industrial landscape in ‘“kitchen sink”’ films of the 1960s as a ‘visual pleasure’ is particularly helpful in unpicking the realist treatment of domesticity in Love on the Dole.22 Focusing on landscape and townscape shots – ‘expansive shots of rural or urban scenery’ – Higson revises the assumption that ‘British cinema, particularly “realist” cinema, is not usually noted for its visual pleasure’ by identifying the tensions at work in the aesthetic appearance of the everyday in these films.23 Higson’s definition of these tensions as different ‘realisms’  – ‘surface’, ‘moral’ and ‘poetic’ – provides a framework within which to examine the opening sequence of Love on the Dole.24 This sequence introduces the Hardcastle family, the economic conditions which characterise the film’s narrative and the Hardcastles’ preoccupation with these circumstances as they impinge on their home life. In the sequence, the aesthetic treatment of a central tea table in the family’s kitchen-living room maps these narrative ideas onto the domestic mise-en-scène. I suggest that the realist modes labelled by Higson in relation to the landscape or townscape also characterise the aesthetic construction of the domestic sphere in Love on the Dole. Higson defines ‘surface realism’ as ‘an iconography which authentically reproduces the visual and aural surfaces of the “British way of life”’.25 With an emphasis on ‘“authenticity”’, Higson notes the influence of the documentary movement on ‘place’ as a ‘“sign of reality”’, suggesting that the ‘kitchen sink’ films were shaped by ‘a particular mode of looking as observation, a belief that we can see the real, in images which document the social condition of the people who inhabit a landscape’.26 In Love on the Dole, the opening domestic sequence evidences this attention to detail in its authentic recreation of the industrial working-class home. Mr Hardcastle’s return from his shift in the mines evokes the visual trope of the coalblackened miner returning home for tea, an image made iconic by social investigation photographs, literature and documentaries throughout the first half of the twentieth century. John Baxter’s previous films Doss House (1933) and Say It with Flowers (1934) had established his reputation for recreating working-class

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environments, including the sparse interiors of doss houses and communal market spaces.27 The promotion and discussion of Baxter’s films acknowledged his experience of both living in such environments and investigating them from the point of view of an outsider. Kinematograph Weekly suggested that ‘his childhood experiences of the industrial North  […] gave him insight into the working-class’, and in January 1934 Film Pictorial noted that ‘Baxter has the simplest of tastes – there’s nothing he enjoys better than sausages and fried onions for his midday meal – [and] is apt to disappear between pictures collecting local colour for the next one. What he doesn’t know about doss houses isn’t worth knowing.’28 Adapted from Greenwood’s 1933 novel – which is now regarded as successfully getting to grips with the effects of the depression ‘from within’ – Baxter’s film version of Love on the Dole explores home, pub and factory settings created with close attention to features of mise-en-scène, including factory chimneys, street signs, the brick alleyways of terraced houses and smokefilled billiard rooms, as well as weaving in documentary-style footage of industrial labour.29 A 1940 Kinematograph Weekly review of R. Holmes Paul’s set design for the film shows fascination with the construction of this environment and its industrial setting: Across one corner of the set hung a line of washing flapping in the breeze (supplied by a wind machine), while at one side a garbage bin had apparently been kicked over and spread its contents over the narrow pavement. Fish and chips, potato peel and several of the more noisome varieties of garbage nearby lifted the roof when the arcs were turned on for the scene.30

The appearance of the domestic surroundings evokes the authenticity of an industrial working-class habitat through the use of documentary-style and observational shots. In this early sequence, the film cuts from the medium shot – observing the scene from a careful distance in the corner of the room – to a closer shot of Mrs Hardcastle as she tends the fire in the hearth. Constructed in the studio, the back grate in the hearth and the surrounding ornaments on the mantel convey a recognisable and authentic working-class setting. The view over the table – a mug and the edge of the table obscure the foreground of the shot – quite literally constructs ‘surface realism’ using this everyday, domestic surface. As the camera peers at the objects on the table from a distance in the corner of the room, the opening sequence draws attention to its observational mode of address. This leads us to Higson’s definition of ‘moral

‘Tea Table Politics’

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realism’, which he notes as involving ‘a moral commitment to a particular set of social problems and solutions, a particular social formation’ and, for the documentarists, focused on ‘the dignity of the working man’.31 Following the shift from the grim industrial conditions of the external landscape in Hankey Park, the observation of Mrs Hardcastle’s kitchen routines conveys a sense of her personal strength and everyday ‘dignity’ in the face of these conditions. Higson further notes that the elements he observes in the aesthetic construction of realism do not necessarily depart from the narrative: rather, as a ‘more or less unobtrusive’ style, ‘surface and moral realism […] work over the text of classical narrative realism’.32 In the opening sequence, Mrs Hardcastle unfolds a newspaper to start the fire and the camera tracks in to its headline ‘Trade Boom is Coming – Latest figures show big swing to better times’. The ‘moral realist’ understanding of the respectable appearance of the home – and the possibility of its downfall – is set against the decline in economic conditions. As the narrative continues to follow the worsening economic conditions in Hankey Park and the family struggle to stay afloat, this observational mode becomes a sympathetic eye on their home as a bastion of respectability and personal endurance as the family strive to maintain their former routines, even as the ornaments on the mantelpiece and the items of crockery on the dresser dwindle to the bare necessities. The way in which the view over the table draws attention to both ‘surface realism’, with a focus on the authenticity of the living environment, and ‘moral realism’, with the observational mode, also suggests a further tension at work. Indeed, Higson describes ‘the overwhelming “visibility” of certain shots precisely as views through a camera’.33 The self-conscious act of observation, the ‘visibility’ of the investigation of the Hardcastles’ home, creates a certain visual appeal which is closely related to its ‘surface’ and ‘moral’ realist addresses. Higson’s analysis of townscape shots – with the recurring motif of ‘That Long Shot of Our Town from That Hill’, a term first coined by documentary filmmaker John Krish in 1963 – suggests a ‘perfect conjunction of surface realism and moral realism, a conjunction which in fact transcends ordinariness, which makes the ordinary strange, beautiful – poetic’.34 Further to this, Higson defines ‘poetic realism’ as foregrounding ‘the aesthetic work of the text’ through particular composition of the space so that ‘shots can be read as spectacle, as a visually pleasurable lure to the spectator’s eye’.35 Later in Love on the Dole’s opening sequence, the ‘spectacular’ role of the tea table becomes dramatically more apparent

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Love on the Dole

as Mr Hardcastle is washed in a tin bath in front of the fire. From a low angle on the opposite side of the table from the hearth, the position of the table to form a black bar across the foreground of the scene (with jugs and various items of crockery still just visible on top) preserves Mr Hardcastle’s modesty while presenting a visually striking spectacle (Figure 7). As part of the spectacle, the visual and aural surfaces of everyday domestic life are constructed through the popular motif of the miner being bathed in front of the fire. Visually reinforced by the looming barrier of the table, Mrs Hardcastle’s comment – ‘I ought to sieve this, there’s enough coal on y’back to last us a week’ – emphasises the meagre living conditions of the family. The chiaroscuro lighting draws attention to the stark whiteness of Mr and Mrs Hardcastle, the jugs on the table and the forbidding appearance of the side and legs of the table in the foreground. The framing of this scene in a pictorial style constructs a ‘poetic’ image of this everyday activity, in which the ordinary table and kitchen-living room scene ‘transcend ordinariness’ and seem ‘strange, beautiful’. As the film cuts to a closer medium shot of the husband and wife, the bright appearance of Mr Hardcastle’s white upper half (in contrast to the grime left on his face and the dark surroundings of the room) is a continuation of this ‘poetic’ spectacle. The image

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of Mr Hardcastle being washed draws on an iconography evidenced in investigative photography and in the documentary movement in the 1930s, which negotiated the visual appeal of industrial workers’ bodies as part of their construction of ‘the dignity of the working man’.36 The visual appeal of this scene in the kitchen therefore also constructs the ‘moral’, exploratory or investigative imperative of the documentary movement. ‘Intensified by the moral demand that the spectator investigate the image, almost against the grain of the narrative’, a ‘tension’ between ‘surface’ authenticity, ‘moral’ imperative and the ‘poetic’ spectacle defined in Higson’s account is provoked in this instance by the visual barrier of the dark table across the frame: the spectator is forced to directly examine the appearance of the table itself and the characters, ornaments and everyday surroundings of the room lit brightly in the background beyond.37 The negotiation of the material details of the kitchen-living room, the observational mode of address and the striking appearance of the black table bisecting the frame stress a balancing act between realism, reform and ‘poetic’ spectacle that was a distinguishing part of social investigation culture in the interwar period. Indeed, Higson’s account points to ‘the voyeurism of one class looking at another’ and the influence of MassObservation’s promotion of ‘an anthropology of our own people’, with its suggestion of ‘the otherness’ of ordinary, everyday aspects and the ‘pictorialism’ of the realist spectacle, in the 1930s.38 Love on the Dole’s director, Baxter, himself had actively participated in this trend. His tour of homeless shelters was published in the Evening Standard in 1934 and journalist and film critic Ernest Betts describes Baxter’s tour through the ordinary material details of a doss house, as follows: Down below there was an interesting collection of doss-house types. A man in a bowler hat, with a stub pipe, was reading a thriller at the table. Some were playing cards. There were very old men, still and thoughtful, and young bloods in caps and pullovers, reading the betting news.39

He suggests, however, that ‘Mr Baxter viewed this kind of “glamour” with pleasure. I could see the camera angles racing in his mind.’40 In the same trend of social investigation and with specific regard for ‘another Britain, the Britain of the old heavy industries’, Picture Post magazine – extremely popular in the late 1930s (with its first issue selling 705,954 copies in 1938) and throughout the 1940s – also featured striking images of working-class everyday life in photo-essay formats.41 Influenced by the

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‘otherness’ of ordinariness explored by Mass-Observation, its images of everyday life emphasised ‘spectacular’ views of the quotidian using new, candid camera technology and the European modernist approaches of émigré photographers. Tensions between ‘the drabness of the settings (the “kitchen sink”) and their “poetic” quality, between “documentary realism” and “romantic atmosphere”, and between social problem and pleasurable spectacle’ in Love on the Dole encapsulate a sense of compromise characteristic of suburban culture.42 According to Gavin Weightman, Picture Post’s readership was provided mainly by ‘the new middle-class suburbs that had been built between the wars’.43 Further to this, journalist Keith Waterhouse suggests that many of Picture Post’s articles capture a middlebrow standpoint on the industrial working-class which invoked the aromas of ‘a suburban avenue on a spring Sunday morning’.44 The left-liberal politics of the magazine’s editors lent a progressive flavour to the images of everyday working-class life and, by utilising the photo-essay format, they were able to construct narratives using arrangements of photographs and accompanying text. By combining an observational attention to the material details of workingclass home life with a romanticised vision of the modern relationship between private home and public community, these photo-essays created visual narratives with a middlebrow standpoint and which suited the expectations of the magazine’s suburban lower-middle- and middleclass readership. The film’s construction of the Hardcastles’ home as an authentic working-class place, as a bastion of respectability and as a ‘poetic’ spectacle conveys a middlebrow set of aims and ideals showcased in Picture Post in the interwar period. Examining the magazine’s explorations of the minutiae of industrial working-class home life allows the tea table scenes in Love on the Dole to be contextualised as a development of such visual narratives and thus as re-imagining an interwar vision of suburban modernity. From ‘sordid’ street to bright home In the late 1930s, a series of Picture Post articles entitled ‘Unemployed!’ investigated the lives of unemployed workers in the aftermath of the Great Depression and the slump of heavy industries, using photo-essays to convey their daily routines and living conditions. In the first of the series in 1939, one photograph shows the family of an unemployed man, Alfred Smith in Peckham, eating dinner at a crowded dinner table. Its candid

‘Tea Table Politics’

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style shows one of the children ravenously eating his dinner. Shot from a slightly high angle, the table is cluttered with dinner plates, cups of tea, a bottle of milk, and knives and forks. With a focus on ‘surface realism’, this view stresses the spots of grease on the tablecloth, the worn wallpaper and the empty shelves in the background. Reinforced by the caption – which explains ‘They sit down to the chief meal of the day – boiled fish, dry bread, tea. This is their largest room’ – the photograph emphasises the personal endurance of the subjects, the continued trials of home-making due to the difficulties of slum conditions and the shared communal space of Alfred’s home.45 However, it is not simply the private community of the family pictured that is at stake here but the ‘moral realist’ implications of a wider, even a national community. Just as the view over the table top in the opening domestic scene in Love on the Dole calls attention to itself, Picture Post’s candid view of the children eating hungrily, the state of the table cloth and the description of their ‘largest room’ is a ‘compositional device’ designed to create an ‘emotional response’ in the magazine reader.46 The shift to domestic, intimate spaces made by photography of this period is, for Gillian Rose, evidence of an engagement with ideas concerning possibilities for reform and democratic community. Rose suggests that photographers entered houses partly because new camera technologies had only relatively recently allowed candid interior shots, but also because often it was housing conditions, especially overcrowding, that documentarists blamed for the social distress of poor areas rather than the deviance of their inhabitants. [Humphrey] Spender, for example, photographed bedrooms and kitchens ‘as evidence that bad living conditions contributed to juvenile crime and delinquency’ […], thereby making these sorts of interior locations part of the ‘public’ in ways that they had not been before.47

In this case, the already communal table is made ‘“public”’ as witness to the ‘bad living conditions’ endured as a part of family life. The photograph shows that, in keeping with middle-class standards of respectability, everyday rituals of eating together persevere; the need for reform is therefore sanctioned by the visual suggestion that this is a ‘good’, respectable working-class family.48 While the photograph offers an authentic view of the family’s private domestic routines, its position alongside text describing unemployed life and other photographs of Alfred’s struggle, seen with many other men like him, ensures that the article is a statement of a greater social problem. Following trends in photo-journalism established

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in illustrated magazines in the 1920s, editor Stefan Lorant carefully laid out and often juxtaposed contrasting photographs in order to create the ‘third effect’ and elicit an emotional response using the visual narrative.49 Viewed  as a whole, the article thus creates an account of daily life for unemployed workers from the labour exchange queue to the tea table, and in which the reader is emphatically enrolled. Picture Post’s ‘Unemployed!’ series captured the downcast mood of its subjects but simultaneously emphasised the exotic, otherness of the ‘Britain of the old Heavy Industries’, aided by the photographs in the German expressionist style of the 1920s and 1930s.50 Expressionist photographs of the working-class home – with a particular focus on the tea table juxtaposed with dark, threatening external conditions – conveyed respectability and community while also simply providing a sense of spectacle or poetic ‘atmosphere’.51 Lynda Nead’s examination of the photographs published in Picture Post describes an ‘atmosphere generated through the material textures on the page’.52 For example, Alfred’s life on the dole is captured in a series of photographs characterised by a stark, dramatic use of chiaroscuro and the evocation of the sensory, material landscape which surrounds him. The opening photograph shows the dole queue with a row of be-capped men in their black suits standing on a contrasting, bright pavement. At the labour exchange, stark white lights offer a hazy glow above the clerks working at their desks in shadow. A photograph of Alfred walking away from the camera, with his hands in his pockets – framed in an empty, grey fogbound street with his dog – is captioned: ‘The Picture of Our Time: Alone, Walking for Miles, Trying to Find a Job’.53 Through these images, the article thus offers a combination of ‘surface’, ‘moral’ and ‘poetic’ realism, with its attention to Alfred’s family’s material circumstances, connection to ‘our time’ and its atmospheric sensibility. A later instalment of the ‘Unemployed!’ series follows Nathan Turner, a coalminer from Durham. One photograph in the sequence shows Nathan in silhouette standing on the top of a pile of rubble and looking down on a landscape of smoking chimneys, slag heaps and smog (Figure 8).54 This is an early forerunner of the ‘That Long Shot of Our Town from That Hill’ and redolent of the opening sequence of Love on the Dole. The Picture Post article, like Love on the Dole, therefore suggests working-class authenticity, the ‘moral’ implication of a miner facing his old town and a ‘poetic’ sense of spectacle. Nathan is also pictured arriving at a new housing scheme in Reading, where he will take up employment in one of the light industries

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The Miner Where He Once Worked …, Picture Post (11 February 1939)

newly established in the South East. As part of its reform-narrative, the article covers specific aspects of his everyday life: his family moving out of their home, their journey to a new house, and around the table in their new home. The article describes the family’s new home: ‘no slums or slagheaps here, but trees and fields. The house has three bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom – luxury to the Turners.’55 Unlike the photograph of the Smiths at their crowded table or the bleak industrial landscape, the photograph of the interior of the Turners’ new home has been composed to stress cleanliness, light and space, using a medium shot (Figure 9). The Turners’ table is constructed as a spectacle of working-class life but also, more specifically, as a spectacle demonstrative of the sensory improvements and visual allure frequently used to construct images of the modern home elsewhere in middle-class culture. Photographs of bright, clean homes were often used to illustrate articles on rehousing schemes and modernist design principles in the domestic interior, such as light, air and dust- and clutter-free domestic environments. The Turners’ move from a smog-bound industrial landscape to a new, bright home promotes the ‘spectacular’, ‘poetic’ image of the hygienic

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Their First Meal In The New Home, Picture Post (11 February 1939)

domestic environment with which ‘moral’ issues of citizenship were closely associated. James Mansell argues that, demonstrative of the shift away from the cramped Victorian style of domesticity, the sensory re-imagining of the home between 1930 and 1950 was central to a formulation of domestic modernity.56 In the late 1930s, advertisements and magazine articles emphasised the connection between the ‘moral’ value of the home and its role as a clean, bright, and thus sensory, spectacle. The promotion of gas to replace coal (‘soot and smuts!’ and ‘old-fashioned smoking fires’) was widespread, particularly in Picture Post.57 For instance, an advertisement for the British Electrical Development Association, with the slogan ‘Beautifully cooked, mother’, featured a family sitting down for dinner in their bright, modern kitchen.58 The brightly lit kitchen table and surrounding room, with the cheery familial community and a large window in the background, creates a spectacle and conveys ideas about cleanliness and even citizenship in doing so: as Christina Atha argues, contemporary design reform literature promoted functional, modernist designs in the home as a means of creating good citizens of a democratic community.59

‘Tea Table Politics’

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In  1939, an advertisement for British Commercial Gas proclaimed: ‘Smoke is going! Whitehall joins in the fight for cleaner cities and healthier citizens.’60 Rather than simply being characterised by realist impulses related closely to a depiction of industrial workers, the visual narratives in Picture Post were also picking up on tensions between spectacle, health and citizenship that were emphasised as part of the promotion of the modern home in the late 1930s. A comparable shift – from ‘sordid’ street to bright home – shapes the realist aesthetic of domestic sequences in Love on the Dole. In the first of these sequences, immediately following the opening shots of the dark industrial landscape, the dim shots of the kitchen-living room and the visually dramatic shot of Mr Hardcastle’s bath, Sal and Harry come down the stairs of the family’s terraced house. The camera pans across the room to follow them to the sink, where they wash their faces; the ornaments on the mantel, the washing and other icons of the working-class living room, including a copper in the corner, indicate the film’s continuing attention to ‘surface realism’. With these details, as in Picture Post’s capturing of the material everyday, the ‘authentic’ visual details of the working-class home are evoked. A medium close-up of Sal and Harry washing in the sink further emphasises the cramped conditions of the home. While these elements of the film’s mise-en-scène attest to an iconography of traditional industrial working-class life, the ensuing depiction of the tea table also conveys a particular conjunction of ‘moral’ and ‘poetic’ realism, as similarly negotiated by the images of the Turners’ new home in Picture Post and the modern home of the British Electrical Development Association advertisement. Beginning from a shot framing Mr Hardcastle closely in relation to the hearth, the camera tracks backwards to show the family sitting down for breakfast; Mrs Hardcastle remains standing to brew the tea and Sal slices the loaf. In contrast to the close tracking of the children at the sink, and the line of grimy yards established in the film’s opening moments, the family is framed in a medium shot which draws attention to their spacing around the table, the bright white crockery and the neat table cloth in the midst of the cluttered room. The composition of this shot articulates two narratives. On one hand, the medium shot of the family around the table – in front of the hearth – constructs an image of traditional working-class domesticity in difficult surroundings, in contrast to the bright spectacle of the kitchen, complete with a large window, clean surfaces and white walls, seen in the British Electrical

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Development Association advertisement. On the other hand, the framing of the scene – including, notably, the bright crockery – demonstrates some visual congruence with the image of bright, middle-class domesticity, hinting at the reform-narratives conveyed by the advertisement and by Picture Post. Like the relationship between the spectacle of clean, bright domesticity and the moral concerns related to health and citizenship demonstrated in 1930s culture, these images of the Hardcastle family construct them as hopeful figures in an otherwise dark, depressing industrial landscape characterised by economic and social decline.61 The framing of the family around the table simultaneously conveys the need for reform and acts as a reminder of other reform-narratives, which entailed surface realism but also the moral spectacle of the modern home. The way in which the tea table is framed both reinforces narrative developments surrounding the family’s struggle and conveys an engagement with middlebrow concerns. In this scene, a medium close-up of Mr Hardcastle as he shaves an egg into smaller portions and an extreme close-up of the egg itself indicate the level of hardship with which the family are forced to cope. The scene cuts to a closely framed two-shot of Harry and Mr Hardcastle sitting at a far corner of the table as they talk about the possibility of a new suit for Harry. The assortment of items – the sugar pot, salt and pepper and various mugs on the table – now appears in the foreground, partially obscuring the background. Once more, the construction of this domestic sequence emphasises both the everyday selection of items on the table and the act of spectatorship, implicating the audience in the image of familial community. This poetic realist construction reinforces the issue of respectability at stake in the conversation about a new suit. While Harry requires a new suit ‘to go out on Sundays’, Mr Hardcastle’s negative view of weekly payments to the Good Samaritans clothing club – which provides provident cheques to allow friends and neighbours to pay for items and pawns items on commission – is also made clear. Although the family have been forced to share one egg between them, the table is laid with two clean plates each and an entire dinner service. The table has been set for the sake of respectability and a ‘tenacious clinging to habits and customs [which also characterises] Walter Greenwood’s novel’.62 Thus, the realist treatment of the breakfast table as a ‘poetic’ spectacle is part of the film’s engagement with issues of the Hardcastles’ maintenance of past standards of respectability. Stephen Constantine and Caroline Levine similarly note the original novel’s emphasis on respectability – ‘a value that could never ruffle

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middle-class complacency’ – as the reason for its popularity.63 In the film version, this middle-class narrative is conveyed by the visual politics of the tea table. Medium shots framing the family around the table in the centre of the room offer a spectacle of working-class life as expressing ‘respectability’ and engaging with the possibilities of the modern home. Towards the end of the scene, as a horn in the distance sounds to mark the beginning of work hours, Sally and Harry leave for work and a static shot once more frames Mrs Hardcastle at the bright white table. The sequence dissolves to a close-up of gravel outside and the chattering of the town’s women visiting the pawn shop, suggesting the fragility of the orderly, domestic world of the working-class home in the face of increasingly difficult economic conditions. Later domestic scenes are similarly positioned as a contrast to such themes of domestic citizenship and respectability: Street’s account of the film’s censorship shows that both reviewers of the film’s scenario make a ‘middle-class’ distinction between the respectable Hardcastle family and their conniving neighbours.64 Led by Mrs Nattle (Iris Vandeleur), this group of women is associated with less respectable ways of making ends meet, which include running hire purchase schemes and drinking clubs. The film contrasts the communal nature of the Hardcastles’ home with the living room of Mrs Nattle, which is utilised as a site for the ladies’ purchase of alcohol during the day and, during the evening, for gatherings at which tarot cards or tea leaves are read. Although Mrs Nattle’s domestic life is constructed using some of the same elements of working-class domesticity as the Hardcastles’, these modes are subverted to convey the distinction between the two homes (and women). In the introduction to Nattle’s home, she enters a dark living room with her friend Mrs Dorbell (Maire O’Neill) and the camera pans across the room to show a cup, saucer and teapot left out on a sheet of newspaper on the table in front of the hearth. Situated in an observational style once more, as Mrs Dorbell calls for ‘the usual’, the camera tracks forwards to follow Mrs Nattle as she opens up her cupboard (to the left of the hearth) and finds a bottle. The track-forward mimics the earlier track into the newspaper headline as Mrs Hardcastle heats the fire in her kitchen-living room. In this scene, however, the medium close-up of Mrs Nattle at the cupboard shows her dramatically turn around to consider her acquaintance with suspicion. The women’s exaggerated facial expressions and music-hall performance style visually convey a departure from the respectable Hardcastles and the observational mode of address

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Love on the Dole

that characterises the film’s treatment of their home. Although the view of Mrs  Nattle’s living room again negotiates tensions between ‘surface’, ‘moral’ and ‘poetic realism’, its design – with an ornate black hearth and looming portrait of Queen Victoria – reflects how these women dwell on the lost ‘old days’ of the Victorian past and presents a deliberate counterpoint to the Hardcastles’ home with its implication of the values of domestic modernity (Figure 10). This contrast between respectability and the staid, Victorian past can be understood with reference to earlier middle-class objectives in design reform. In the years leading up to the release of Love on the Dole, leaflets and books focusing on design used contrasting photographs to express domestic reform, in a similar style to Picture Post’s visual narratives (and indeed, Picture Post’s reform-narratives were heavily influenced by design reform agendas).65 For example, a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) leaflet published in October 1937, titled Design in Everyday Things, features two photographs of different drawing rooms. The caption reads: The cluttered drawing room of the past, and a modern living-room, with dining-table that folds away. Our restless age calls for restfulness in the home. Victorian leisure and domestic staffs could cope with Victorian acquisitiveness and display. We cannot: and we travel lighter.66

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The photograph used to denote this ‘cluttered drawing-room’ shows a room furnished in Victorian fashions in the same style as Mrs Nattle’s home, with a variety of china figurines and jugs standing on a Welsh dresser in the background and cluttering a tea table in the foreground. The second image shows a sleek, plainer interior with a simple wooden table and chairs. Although the Hardcastles’ kitchen-living room is constructed to capture authentic details of industrial working-class life – particularly the traditional hearth in the background – the framing of the family’s table also functions as a middle-class departure from the Victorian iconography and looming fireplace in Mrs Nattle’s home. This connection between the Hardcastle family and middle-class values of respectability is made visually explicit on a number of occasions when Mrs Hardcastle visits Mrs Nattle: she appears at all times to be bathed in light in contrast to the cluttered, dark room and the other characters huddled around the fire. While the lighting imbues Mrs Hardcastle with a sense of respectability, optimism and the possibility of progress, the other ladies are seemingly condemned to a backwards-looking past. Imagining new homes

In an earlier scene, Sally Hardcastle and her beau Larry Meath (Clifford Evans) escape the confines of Hankey Park to an idyllic pastoral setting outside the town. At the top of a hill in the countryside, Sally tells Larry, a Labour activist: ‘I wish I knew more things like – about people like us, living like we do.’ In this statement, Sally articulates a will to investigate living conditions, which is demonstrated by the film’s treatment of industrial working-class milieus. Later on, in another table-top sequence – set in Larry’s home – the domestic interior once again functions as part of the film’s exploration of reform and respectability. As Sally worries about Harry’s news that his girlfriend is pregnant, she and Larry are framed in his sitting room: the central table this time is covered in books, reinforcing Larry’s belief in self-improvement, his interest in politics and his role as spokesman for social change. Meanwhile, Sally’s intentions for ‘clearing [her new home] up a bit’ and description of ‘that walnut table we’ve paid a deposit on’ indicate her aspirations for home-making. The relationship between Sally and Larry in the film articulates a middlebrow dynamic, combining a progressive ideology that stressed the need for investigation and change with an aspirational home-making culture.

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The re-imagined collaboration between social investigation and the 1930s iconography of the modern home also underpins the film’s realist aesthetic. Love on the Dole explores everyday environments of working-class domestic life with an eye to ‘surface’ and ‘moral realism’, and in doing so creates a ‘poetic’ spectacle which can be productively contextualised by the composition of industrial working-class domesticity in Picture Post magazine and in other contemporary explorations of the sensory, well-designed home. This analysis extends Higson’s label of ‘poetic realism’ into the home and considers it in relation to a middlebrow compromise between realism, reform and middle-class ideals. These aesthetic constructions of working-class domesticity provide a new reading for Love on the Dole as framing a specifically pictorial engagement with the ‘surfaces’, ‘morals’ and ‘poetry’ of industrial working-class domesticity. On Love on the Dole’s censorship, it can therefore be suggested that the Sunday Pictorial’s statement that ‘a novel about unemployment was one thing but a picture on the screen for all the world to see was obviously another’ (with the implication that the cinematic medium would prove particularly offensive) was in fact misplaced.67 Indeed, it is the very images of the central tea table in the Hardcastles’ home, and their engagement with other cultural representations of working-class domestic life, that visually convey middle-class ideals of respectability and community. In the film’s final scene, the Hardcastles’ economic downfall – made visually apparent in the framing of their now unkempt home – accompanies a call for ‘a new Britain’ in the closing intertitle: a quote from Labour MP and first Lord of the Admiralty A. V. Alexander, who said that ‘the film was about conditions which had now passed and would not be allowed to return’.68 Levine explains that, in 1940, ‘the sordid poverty of Love on the Dole […] had ceased to look like a subversive commentary on existing conditions and had become instead an image of a bygone era’.69 However, repositioning the visual politics of the working-class home as an engagement with an interwar vision of modernity illuminates a more nuanced understanding of the film’s relationship with the past. A loss of domestic ritual, community and routine is emphasised by the table strewn with rags and the empty mantel of the hearth in the background, ushering in the film’s more optimistic statement about the need to acknowledge past living conditions as a means of looking forward. In the same year that Love on the Dole was released, Picture Post launched ‘A Plan for Britain’, taking the same attitude  – expressing the need to reform slum conditions to create a radically altered society: a ‘New

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Jerusalem’.70 In this issue, the photograph of the Smith family’s tea time (first published in 1939 and examined earlier) was reprinted as an example of the conditions that would need to be improved upon as part of the ongoing call for modern homes. The spectacle of working-class domestic life in Love on the Dole – as an engagement with interwar modernity – could be similarly re-purposed, ‘strengthened’ and ‘enmeshed in newer wartime discourses’ within a call for a postwar ‘New Jerusalem’.71 It Always Rains on Sunday

Much as Love on the Dole centres on Mrs Hardcastle’s domestic routines and her family’s changing fortunes, It Always Rains on Sunday charts the Sunday rituals of working-class housewife Rose Sandigate (Googie Withers) and her family in their cramped terraced house in Bethnal Green. The ordinary events in the Sandigate home provide a point of return, routine and tension in the film’s central narrative, which focuses on the escape of a prison convict, Rose’s former lover Tommy Swann (John McCallum), and the subsequent search for him through the dank streets, dark pubs and bustling markets of London’s East End. In an early scene – set in the bedroom shared by Rose and her husband, George (Edward Chapman) – Rose’s discovery that her former lover has escaped prompts flashbacks to her first meeting with Tommy in a pub and a later trip to the countryside. Charles Barr describes the scene as follows: Sunday morning, rain, the News of the World. Rose is making up her face when George, from their bed, reads out an item about the escape of a Dartmoor prisoner, Tommy Swann. Startled, she looks in the mirror and summons up her memories: meeting Tommy a decade before, having a brief idyll with him, then hearing of his arrest. Back in the present, George asks her what’s for breakfast and she tells him ‘Haddock’.72

Dissolving from Rose’s reflection in her bedside mirror, Rose’s flashback to her first meeting with Tommy conveys the romance of her privately cherished memory. Described by Charlotte Brunsdon as ‘informed by romantic fiction and film […] a world of glances meeting across crowded rooms, low-cut dresses and engagement rings’, this pub scene is marked by highkey lighting, violin music, Tommy’s smart suit and Rose’s blonde hair.73 The couple’s first meeting is ‘clearly marked as Rose’s memory’, visually contrasting with her material, domestic reality characterised by ‘rain, the News of the World’ and ‘what’s for breakfast’.74 Dissolving back to Rose’s

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It Always Rains on Sunday

reflection in her bedroom mirror, an over-the-shoulder shot shows her pale appearance in contrast with the dark wooden frame of the mirror. The textured pattern of the tiles, faded 1930s-style wallpaper and the clothes hanging on the bedstead all convey the ‘drab reality’ of the family’s home, which draws attention to the departure from her dream world through its attention to the material realism of domesticity.75 The camera tracks back from the reflection so that George comes slowly into view. As he drinks the dregs of his tea, his position in the shot dominates one side of the frame (Figure 11). This positioning conveys Rose’s feelings of claustrophobia and containment in her domestic surroundings by tightly framing her next to her husband and the bedclothes behind her. Analysing this contrast between the bright escapism of the pub scene and ordinary domesticity, Barr suggests that ‘the enduring strength of the film is the way it exploits its story to compress the conflict of Rose’s life and soul into concrete dramatic images’ and her ‘opposing dreams and drab reality, passion and family routine’.76 While Barr focuses on Rose’s point of view and her personal visions of romance as contrasting with domesticity, I suggest that the film’s treatment of the domestic scene – as ‘concrete dramatic images’ – also conveys a visual kind of romance of its own, which

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is not necessarily restricted to the narrative consideration of Rose’s feelings of claustrophobia. Instead, the initial shot of Rose’s reflection in the mirror constructs a spectacle of domesticity, both with a chiaroscuro effect created by the contrast between Rose’s pale appearance and the dark frame of the mirror, and with the static framing of her abrupt return to domesticity, which emphasises a pictorial image of the working-class home. Using Andrew Higson’s definition of ‘poetic realism’ once more, this shot of an ordinary, domestic setting is composed as ‘strange, beautiful – poetic’.77 This framing of the scene provides a sense of the extraordinary and the spectacular embodied by material, domestic details and the film’s realist representation of the East End home. Barr’s distinction between narrative romance (with Rose’s daydream) and ‘drab’ domesticity (with her abrupt return) is therefore made more complex: the ‘concrete dramatic image’ conveys both tensions in the narrative and a visual politics emphasising the ‘poetic’ value of the ordinary and everyday. Along these lines, John Orr describes It Always Rains on Sunday as embodying a ‘romantic realist’ approach and suggests that a key part of this address is a ‘stylistically heightened exploration of the life-world’.78 Orr emphasises the visual politics of the everyday with a focus on Douglas Slocombe’s cinematography, the central position of the Sandigates’ ‘cramped terraced house with no bathroom’ and the ‘authenticity’ created in external street scenes.79 In this vein, the shots that follow in the mirror sequence further establish this ‘romantic realist’ address with a shift from the domestic interior to the East End streets outside. The distanced gaze continues to characterise the scene as the camera pans slowly across the room, dwelling on a mantelpiece of assorted porcelain ornaments and a stand of washing at the window. The exterior scene that follows uses a similarly fluid style of camera movement to establish an observational view of the working-class in Petticoat Lane market and a sense of authenticity attributable to the traditional East End community. A static view from the Sandigates’ bedroom window fades to black, before the sound of East End accents introduces a fade-in to a similarly fluid crane shot which establishes and moves into the bustling throng of people at the  market. The fluid pan and the shot of the window in the Sandigates’ room in the mirror sequence visually construct working-class domesticity in the same style as the Petticoat Lane market sequence. The film’s pictorial examination of domesticity as part of an ‘authentic’ vision of the East End creates a ‘romantic realist’ vision of working-class

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domesticity – as ordinary and yet simultaneously extraordinary. Quoting Thomas De Quincey from 1821, Brunsdon similarly notes the cultural construction of the East End in It Always Rains on Sunday as a ‘dull spectacle’, explaining that in cinema ‘the poverty of the East End has proved fascinatingly “other”, not ordinary at all’.80 My own analysis expands on the readings by Barr, Orr and Brunsdon to suggest that the engagement between ‘concrete dramatic images’ of working-class domesticity, ‘romantic realism’ and the ‘dull spectacle’ of the East End in It Always Rains on Sunday can be contextualised more specifically as a re-imagining of social investigation narratives focusing on the East End home in the 1930s. In this period, ‘concrete dramatic images’ of the East End – presented in the form of photo-essays in Picture Post – created visual narratives that constructed working-class domestic life with a middlebrow balance between realism and romanticism. Through an exploration of these photo-essays, I suggest that, as a representation of the East End made and released in the immediate postwar years, the ‘romantic realist’ visual narrative of It Always Rains on Sunday demonstrates an engagement with the interwar and wartime pasts in a way that addresses the contemporary postwar future. In the mirror sequence, the tracking movement of the camera backwards through the room and the slow pan towards the window – to the heightened sound of continuous rain – chart the dim surroundings of the bedroom, with its selection of ornaments on a mantelpiece and the lace curtains at the window, in a way that documents an unstable, old-fashioned world. At the time of its release in 1947, It Always Rains on Sunday dealt with a topical theme of postwar rehousing needs and the reconstruction of the East End (which was particularly badly hit by the Blitz).81 This fragile position for the East End home – at the heart of reconstruction and urban dispersal schemes – was charted by photographic narratives in Picture Post. Resituating It Always Rains on Sunday with regard to the aims of postwar reconstruction and the cultural significance of the East End home therein, I reconsider the ‘romantic realism’ of its domestic scenes as negotiating an aesthetic entanglement between interwar modes of addressing domestic life and those which continued to explore the same ideas in an uneasy postwar world. ‘Concrete dramatic images’ The opening sequence of It Always Rains on Sunday introduces the Sandigates’ home using a series of static observational realist-style images,

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which appear to document the surrounding streets as part of an authentic, although highly ‘poetic’, working-class landscape. First, an establishing shot of the Sandigates’ street, Coronet Grove, in the early morning cuts to a low-angle shot of the starkly lit bars of the closed gates to Whitechapel Underground Station. In an expressionist style (often attributed to Douglas Slocombe’s cinematography), the gates are flanked by an Underground map, a poster and a chalkboard sign, as a newspaper rustles along the pavement past a lone cat. To an ominous woodwind soundtrack, the film cuts to a claustrophobic shot of another part of a dark street, with a peeling poster on a damp brick wall and drops of rain as they begin to fall on a coal bunker. A dissolve introduces a policeman on the night-time beat, pulling on his cape – an early signal of the escaped convict narrative – and dissolves back to its former emphasis on sights of the material, everyday landscape of the street, with a repeated image of the bunker. Finally, there is a cut to a low-angle view of the rain-soaked bricks of the Sandigates’ house, obscured by a lamppost. Complemented by a score of more dramatic strings, George opens the blind at his window to see his daughter returning late at night in a car. With this shot, the film’s focus shifts from the material surroundings of the East End towards the family’s narrative. There is a cut to the interior of the house and a medium-close-up of George’s thoughtful expression: a pan follows him as he gets back into bed. A static medium shot of the room embodies another pictorial-style image of East End material authenticity, this time inside the home and woven more tightly into the film’s narrative. The crumpled sheets of the bed, the small shelf and the tie hanging beside it, the dressing table and the wash basin in the background are framed as an observational view of private, family life while indicating the cramped domestic world of the narrative. The pictorial framing of the scene – as a material landscape to be considered carefully – also emphasises an exploration of the East End as ‘other’ and unknown. The framing of the Sandigates’ home life evidences the relationship between the film’s romantic narrative and its realist agenda. During the war, under the influence of studio head Michael Balcon, Ealing Studios’ output shifted from films in a music-hall tradition ‘towards documentary “realism”’.82 In the postwar period, It Always Rains on Sunday was one of a group of Ealing films – notable others included Hue and Cry (d. Charles Crichton, 1947) and Pool of London (d. Basil Dearden, 1951) – which addressed London’s working-class culture in the same realist style. As such,

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John Collier’s contemporary study, A Film in the Making … Featuring “It Always Rains on Sunday” suggests that ‘photographic realism’ provides a basis for the film’s mode of address.83 Collier explains that ‘before a pencil was put to paper, [art director] Duncan Sutherland made intensive investigations. Petticoat Lane, Whitechapel, and a dozen other locations were visited in order to study the material.’84 This ‘photographic realist’ style is notable in a number of sequences throughout the film, particularly in scenes featuring Detective Sergeant Fothergill’s (Jack Warner) pursuit of Tommy Swann through a doss house, Petticoat Lane market, a boxing club and other places associated with authentic working-class East End life. However, in Art and Design in the British Film: A Pictorial Directory of British Art Directors and Their Work (1947), art director Edward Carrick also suggests that Sutherland ‘depends for so much of his effect on the way he dresses his sets which, after all, is the only visible part of a character’s personality’.85 The material details of the mise-en-scène serve a narrative function besides the creation of authenticity, mostly in the creation of a tension in the tight-knit community around the romantic narrative of Rose’s relationship with Tommy Swann, the missing convict. For example, Tommy’s escape is established using the headline ‘DARTMOOR ESCAPE’ in a newspaper. The following scene, set in the Sandigate home, features a close focus on the material culture of working-class life, charting the family relationships in relation to their cramped surroundings. From another medium shot of George and Rose’s bedroom, a cut to a close-up of Rose is followed by a tilt to her hand as she stretches and knocks on the wall to call for a cup of tea. Cutting to the other side of the wall, the camera pans downwards from a shot of film star images from magazines tacked onto the floral wallpaper to the black bars of another bedstead and the Sandigates’ two teenage daughters, Doris (Patricia Plunkett) and Vi (Susan Shaw). To the continuing sound of knocking from the other side of the wall and Rose’s call of ‘Doris! Your father wants a cup of tea!’, Doris gets up and Vi complains: ‘do you have to pull all the clothes off?!’. The camera tracks back from the bed and pans across the room to follow Doris getting up. It seems to pause to examine the material geography of the room, carefully observing the faded wallpaper, the pictures of film stars and the basin in the corner. This combination of close-ups, mobile framing and observational, distanced shots draws attention to the authentic realism of the working-class surroundings while also conveying the family’s everyday struggle with each other and with the difficult material environment inside

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their home. Later on in the film, domestic items – missing plates and hidden clothes – become key points of tension as Rose attempts to hide Tommy inside the house. At the time of its release, many critics remarked negatively on the sordid drama surrounding the spiv crime story. However, when noting its treatment of domestic life, a number also commented on the merits of the realist details of its mise-en-scène as an image of ‘lived in’ working-class domesticity.86 Dilys Powell’s review in the Sunday Times described ‘the grey streets, the music-shop, the pub, the market-stalls – these, indeed, are drawn in with some assurance’, also suggesting ‘something more: an amused, devoted attention to the tiny decorations of the everyday, to the chattering neighbour, the darts game and the black cat brushed with an exasperated gesture off the sofa-head. These trifles mark the difference between a studio set and the room lived in.’87 In the Daily Chronicle, Paul Dehn noted: What is extraordinary about this ordinary story is that the life, which the three principal players have breathed into the three principal characters has also been breathed by director Robert Hamer into their background. This bedroom lives, because of its eiderdown; that front-door, because of its postwar scaffolding; this wall, because it has a cat on it; that newspaper because the house-number has been pencilled on its top right hand corner.88

Beyond this, Collier suggests an ‘insistence on something more than photographic truth’.89 The camera’s movement in the morning sequence appears to chart the ‘concrete’ details of the Sandigates’ domestic life with an eye to establishing not only realism and the narrative, but a hidden quality to working-class life – worthy of close investigation – that stretches from the streets outside to interiors of the Sandigates’ home. In connection with its exploration of the East End home as a spectacle, this ‘photographic realist’ construction presents a middlebrow address, constructing this domestic space in relation to middle-class ideas of traditional community and respectability. Trevor Blackwell and Jeremy Seabrook suggest that the ‘preference for the concrete and the particular’ in the cultural representation of the working-class – as evidenced in the set design and cinematography of It Always Rains on Sunday – ‘does not stop at evoking the dense reality of everyday life, but sees in certain of its institutions and characteristics the embodiment of its underlying values’.90 When considered as part of a middlebrow ‘politics of vision’,

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‘space of representation’ and more specifically as balancing realism with romanticism, these ‘underlying values’ are constructed in order to convey middle-class values of respectability, community and traditional ways of life.91 Significantly, Collier describes a middle way between realism and respectability, as follows: The furnishing and dressing of the sets depicting the Sandigate household in the film are carefully arranged so that they are not caricatures either on the side of over-emphasising the weaknesses of such a place, or on the side of glamorising it. Thus, not all the crockery is ornate, chipped and oldfashioned. The modern working-class home, even in the grim surroundings of London’s East End, is not necessarily squalid.92

In this account, the Sandigates’ home was designed to convey a vision of respectable domesticity that would be a suitable for a middle-class audience. As such, the film’s portrait of the East End home demonstrates a balance between realism and showing the ‘weaknesses of such a place’, though without overemphasising and glamorising them, instead showing the ‘not necessarily squalid’ surroundings of ‘the modern working-class home’. In the late 1930s, as aforementioned, Picture Post magazine presented realist, photographic depictions of working-class domesticity as a visual engagement with ideas about reform, community and the modern home. In 1938, Picture Post explored the everyday sites and sights of East London, including, for example, an evening pint in the local pub in ‘Life in Lambeth Walk’, street cleaners beginning work in the early morning and tea vans in ‘London by Night’, and a display of fabrics in a shop in ‘Whitechapel’.93 Picture Post’s exploration of the material realities of the working-class home – as part of a middlebrow balance between an observational examination of the domestic everyday as a poetic spectacle, middle-class values and a conception of a modern, shared community – was articulated by ‘concrete dramatic images’ of the East End home and its surrounding milieus. For example, the tagline for William Cameron’s ‘Whitechapel’ article states: ‘“Picture Post” turned a cameraman [Humphrey Spender] loose in Whitechapel. He was to stay there as long as he pleased, and came back only when he had the whole character of Whitechapel in pictures.’94 Like the crane shot establishing the Petticoat Lane market scene in It Always Rains on Sunday, a photograph of a crowded street in Whitechapel  – cluttered with fabric awnings, lamps and tradesmen and housewives on the street – conveys the reader into this distinct, ‘other’ world. Cameron’s accompanying account reinforces a sense of investigation and exploration of an exotic

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territory for the lower-middle- or middle-class reader, who is advised that: ‘Stay up on the streets, and you will see that East London begins so suddenly that you might be passing from one country to another.’95 Depictions of domestic life later in the article are embedded in a visual narrative focused on capturing ‘pictures’ of the quotidian: a distinctive way of life, but also highlighting the connections between East End habits and habitats and those of the middle-class reader. Photographs of the streets outside – capturing the sale of a coat on a street corner, a ‘display of a trader’s wares’ and a scene depicting local children playing outside – draw attention to a material environment typical of the variety of East End life.96 Two photographs in the series show a ‘Family Tea in an East End Home’ and the same family on ‘Saturday Afternoon’. The captions explain: ‘Mother-in-charge of a family may very well have to feed a dozen – and most of them get in at different times on week-days’; and ‘it’s work for many, even on Saturday afternoon’.97 By capturing the same family in the same room at different times of the day as they go about their daily business, the photographs capture their routines as lived alongside the patterns of daily life in the streets and hobbies outside the home, including ‘Saturday evening in a dance hall’ or ‘the boxing audiences at Mile End open arena’.98 In the first photograph, of ‘Family Tea in an East End Home’, a slightly high-angle view emphasises the family crammed around the table as well as the surface of the table itself, which is laid with an assortment of teacups, toast and spreads, with dull patterned wallpaper in the background and a cloth hanging across a range in the corner. The second photograph, of ‘Saturday Afternoon’, is framed similarly to emphasise the cramped, material conditions of the home – with the table now being used for ironing (Figure 12). The attention to material surroundings in these two interior scenes, and in the series as a whole – the ironing, street signs, pub interiors, grimy aprons and a handwritten sign advertising the sale of ‘the Lambeth Walk brooch’ – not only indicate a state of deprivation but convey the material culture of the streets and homes of the East End.99 In the face of such material conditions, images of community are central to this middlebrow construction of working-class life. For example, Cameron’s article features photographs of a group of aproned women chatting together in the street as ‘they talk about life’ and a men’s meeting in the ‘Yiddisher Parliament’, an open square used routinely for these meetings.100 This is a theme reinforced by the image of the family sitting down together at tea time. In the ‘Saturday Afternoon’ photograph, the cramped

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An East End Home, Picture Post (15 October 1938)

conditions and the constant presence of the family are highlighted alongside the accompanying description of the ongoing round of domestic work to be done at the weekend. The caption concedes that, at the very least, their ‘work’ could be carried out in the comfort of ‘one’s own home, with one’s own family and friends around’, lending a romanticised sense of community to the everyday scene.101 Although inconvenient and reluctant in some respects, this working-class community is highlighted as part of an ‘other’ world of the East End characterised by links to a traditional past. Gavin Weightman suggests that, at a time of modernisation and slum clearance, ‘one explanation for the popularity of the Lambeth Walk is that there was a desire unconsciously to celebrate the passing of the old world of Victorian poverty in the 1930s, and a nostalgia for it’.102 In the ‘Whitechapel’ article, Cameron’s statement that ‘trades in East London tend to follow the medieaval custom of concentrating themselves in particular streets or quarters’ emphasises the old world of East End communities and customs.103 These image-based investigations of everyday life and the traditional communities in the East End convey a different world to the one inhabited by the reader. To mark out the idiosyncratic qualities of the photographs, Cameron contrasts East End tropes with middle-class life, by stating that ‘shopping in Whitechapel is not like shopping in the West End or the suburbs. It’s a matter of bargaining, done mainly in pavements.’104 Indeed, the article stresses the author’s background as ‘an East End schoolboy, East End factory hand’, suggesting that he can offer a view from within.105 However, any sense of the exotic attached to everyday life in the East End is then contrasted with points of similarity with middle-class culture. A caption accompanying one photograph of a bleak, empty street of terraced houses states (somewhat grandiosely) that: ‘human beings live here, grow up here and die here – in the same world as you and me’.106 In this way,

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‘Whitechapel’ constructs the East End as a kind of heterotopia – defined by Michel Foucault as an ‘other space […] capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’.107 Paul Newland describes ‘the emergence of the imagined ontological norms, “common experiences”, or structures of feeling […] of an English middle-class “community” through its apparent spatial opposition to this community’.108 The article’s positioning of domestic life in 1938 as part of a series of ‘concrete dramatic images’ of Whitechapel emphasises the distinctive qualities of material, everyday life in the East End and yet – through an evocation of community and the past – also emphasises a middle-class idea of shared, ‘common experiences’. This kind of visual narrative is re-imagined in It Always Rains on Sunday, with its construction of the East End home with one eye on authentic realism and another on the connections to and differences from the world of the middle class: notably, in the Sandigates’ kitchen-living room, the centre of the family’s Sunday routines. These intimate scenes are always preceded by an establishing shot of Coronet Grove and often accompanied by the sound of a train chugging past, motifs marking the idea of routine and a return to domesticity and domestic space. As the narrative inside the house unfolds, daily routines carry on in its immediate surroundings: the delivery of the morning newspaper, trains passing at regular intervals, one of the Sandigates’ neighbours digging in his front garden, a horse-drawn float delivering milk, a rug being shaken out of an upper-storey window and, finally, the empty street at night. The perseverance of these daily activities creates tension in the narrative, but also establishes the Sandigate home as part of a material landscape and a wider community. Throughout the film, as in the observational realist depiction of the routines of a day in the home in the ‘Whitechapel’ article, the Sandigates’ kitchen-living room is shown being used for a variety of domestic chores and pastimes – washing up after breakfast, washing clothes, bath time, peeling potatoes and sitting down for dinner. The geography of the Sandigates’ house – their use of the kitchen-living room throughout the day, and of the parlour (complete with antimacassars and china dog) for Mr Sandigates’ nap in the afternoon – presents a culturally recognisable working-class domestic topography. Further to this, however, a pictorial mode of address visually constructs these domestic routines as part of a ‘poetic’ spectacle – as if freezing the everyday scenes. In an early sequence in which Rose ponders Tommy’s escape and later finds

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It Always Rains on Sunday

him hiding in the Anderson shelter in the back yard, a static medium shot from a corner establishes a view of the whole family and their everyday surroundings (Figure 13). The Sandigate family are gathered around the table, all engaged in different tasks. Mr Sandigate reads the News of the World at the end of the table; Rose’s back is to the camera as she also reads a paper; Doris is at the kitchen sink drying some dishes; Vi paints her nails in an armchair; and the Sandigates’ young son, Alfie (David Lines), lingers by the hearth. The appearance of some of the characters – notably Vi in her armchair – at the edges of the frame both reinforces the observational realist style of the view and conveys the cramped, communal nature of the working-class kitchen-living room. The framing of the family in this way is key to the construction of Rose’s increasing tension in the home, but also its middlebrow engagement with the material life of East End domesticity. Pots and pans hang in the background, while George sits in front of the large hearth with its traditional, tasselled mantelpiece cover and assortment of ornaments. Objects left over from breakfast, littering the table, are positioned in the centre of the frame. Accompanied by the sounds of plates being washed up and the train passing outside, a close-up of George as he reads the News of the World and

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smokes his pipe draws attention to the sensory components of this everyday image: his woollen waistcoat, the creases in the newspaper and the smoke billowing from his pipe and into the room. As an extension of this intimate experience of the material everyday, the camera pans away to scan the surface of the table, populated by teacups, sugar bowl, plates and teapot. This close look at the everyday clutter of the kitchen-living room emphasises a gaze interested in the investigation of the Sandigates’ home. The shot marks a shift from the pictorial-style, establishing shot of the family around the table to a closer investigation. The movement of the camera as it surveys the clutter left from breakfast appears to record the minutiae of everyday sights and sounds as if to conserve the unique, material landscape and attendant attachments to community and the traditional past, as in Picture Post’s ‘Whitechapel’ article. Mapping ‘The Doomed East End’

Stressing Rose’s point of view, Barr suggests that It Always Rains on Sunday’s director, Robert Hamer, ‘shows people trapped in situations where their family and community and daily life have already had passion […] drained out of them’, stating that ‘Hamer is the Ealing director most aware of the [sense of] loss’.109 Simultaneously, however, alongside Rose’s feelings  of loss in the narrative, the observational realist exploration of the spectacle of East End domesticity draws attention to a competing, visual narrative, which emphasises a different sense of loss altogether. The film’s construction of working-class domesticity with an eye on middle-class ‘common experiences’ indicates a more complex negotiation of a wider, cultural understanding of loss focusing on working-class tradition and community. These themes are expressed with emphasis on prewar discourses but are also attuned to a more pressing sense of loss resulting from the changes wrought by the Second World War.110 In the sequence in which Rose discovers Tommy hiding in the Anderson shelter (itself evidence of the continuing presence of the war in the family’s domestic life), a medium close-up of the ‘ESCAPED CONVICT’ headline in George’s newspaper cuts to her pensive expression at one end of the table. Rose is evidently reminded of her past love; the focus on her expression and her framing in front of rows of crockery in the Welsh dresser in the background present a ‘concrete dramatic image’ emphasising her domestic confinement and her feelings of loss. While the shot mimics the style of the mirror sequence

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discussed earlier, the visible dilapidation in the room adds to the evocation of domestic struggle and is framed specifically as a legacy of war: another medium close-up from one corner of the breakfast table frames Rose, in visible discomfort, next to a broken windowpane in the back door. In this scene, Rose departs to fetch some old blackout material from the Anderson shelter to fix the break, but the camera stays inside the kitchen for a couple of seconds after she has left. Panning across the kitchen-living room  – from the patterned stained glass in the backdoor as she slams it, and across one side of the room – the camera records the neat order of plates drying in a rack, on the draining board and surrounding the kitchen sink: from a distanced survey, once more as if documenting a fragile site. Characterised by the possibility of its loss, this is an elegiac image of working-class domestic life. The kitchen-living room is presented as an image, endowed with a ‘static quality’, which in Blackwell and Seabrook’s analysis of the cultural representation of the working class indicates ‘a timeless immobilism from which indeed any movement could only be decline’.111 A number of other, static shots in the domestic interior – with the camera positioned behind Rose as she watches her family in fear of Tommy’s hiding place being discovered, or as she stands tensely at the kitchen sink – establish a view of the room focusing on her point of view and the creation of narrative tension. Meanwhile, the observational mode of exploring the workingclass home – as a dramatic image or as a poetic spectacle – continues to construct East End domesticity with a sense of romanticism. The aesthetic construction of the Sandigates’ home thus indicates a state of flux as it explores the material effects of the war while also focusing on capturing a traditional, prewar past. This engages with the same themes developed in Picture Post’s examinations of postwar society, where images of East End domesticity were often used to reference wartime memories of community, a loss of prewar domestic routines and a need for postwar reconstruction. In this context, Mark Clapson suggests that ‘the social cohesion of East London, the poorest district of the capital city, was admired by reformers who romanticised its response to the Blitz’.112 During the war, Picture Post featured a number of articles on the East End, casting the area as emblematic of communal resilience. For instance, in ‘East End at War’ in 1940, Bert Hardy’s photograph ‘Sitting down to tea in a house in the East End of London’ reused and resituated prewar iconography of the industrial working-class home as part of its vision of shared, wartime community.113 In the postwar years, photographs of East End homes in Picture Post became

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part of a more complex negotiation between prewar, wartime and contemporary narratives. On one hand, these images articulated ‘the residue of urban blight and muddle, left over from the Industrial Revolution’, which had been worsened by the effects of the Blitz.114 With the magazine’s owner, Edward Hulton, fully behind the Labour Party and its promise of five million new houses by this point, Picture Post continued to promote plans for a ‘New Britain’ and improved housing.115 These visual narratives were positioned as part of a ‘break’ from ‘the world of the 1930s’ and a hopeful vision of postwar reconstruction.116 With this in mind, in 1946, an article titled ‘The Doomed East End’ by Dr J. J. Mallon – a warden of Toynbee Hall with experience of living with East Enders – looked at the first steps of reconstruction in Stepney and Poplar according to the plans of London County Council (LCC). Photographs of East End life – taken by Charles Hewitt and Bill Brandt – presented evidence of the poverty of working-class conditions and thus indicated the need for rehousing. At the same time, these images conveyed the East End home as a symbol of a lost community. Following earlier articles in Picture Post linking the East End to a traditional past (in the 1938 description of ‘medieaval customs’ in Whitechapel, for example) and the tone of the LCC’s Plan (‘published in a blaze of publicity’ in 1943), which described ‘the invincible cheerfulness and neighbourliness of the Londoner [which] makes the best of these areas’ and ‘the urban co-operation and sturdy individualism of these London communities’, Mallon’s article and its accompanying photographs convey sympathy and respect for traditional working-class domestic life.117 The ‘Doomed East End’ title is illustrated with a photograph of sixty-year-old Mrs Michaels alone in her kitchen-living room in Stepney as she considers the plans for reconstruction. This is followed by a series of photographs depicting local routines and communal activities – in the markets, on doorsteps discussing the plans, working in the tailors’ shops in Brick Lane, and out at pubs, boxing matches and dancing lessons (Figure 14). The medium long shot of Mrs Michaels in her kitchen-living room is used to symbolise the heart of daily routines and material conditions in the East End explored throughout the article. Framed by a Welsh dresser crammed with an assortment of treasured china, by ornate vases and clocks on the mantel and by a large hearth hung with a thick velvet cover in her kitchen-living room, Mrs Michaels sits with a cup of tea in her apron. The accompanying caption reads: ‘In her spotless rooms she is surrounded by the household goods she has known for years. She would not wish to

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The Doomed East End, Picture Post (9 March 1946)

leave.’118 Drawing on the realist modes used to depict East End domesticity during the interwar and war years, this image of an intimate material life in the home illustrates Mallon’s elegiac descriptions of a unique community ‘that may disappear’.119 Through the static framing of images of the Sandigates’ home, It Always Rains on Sunday similarly points to this negotiation between future and past. This is perhaps most evident in a scene in which one of Rose’s neighbours – the elderly Mrs Watson (Edie Martin) – interrupts her attempt to move Tommy from the Anderson shelter to the house. With the creak of a window opening and a cheerful ‘Mornin’ Mrs Sandigate!’, a close-up of Rose’s fearful face cuts to a long shot of Mrs Watson at her window. A medium close-up emphasises the material details of this domestic scene: Mrs Watson in her pinny and cardigan, with a brooch in a Victorian style on her blouse, a pot-plant on the window-sill and the brickwork surrounding and drainpipe beneath her narrow window. Mrs Watson’s comment ‘nice weather for ducks and aspidistras!’ also suggests that this is an image

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of an old-fashioned ‘local London’ and traditional working-class life – Hoggart’s later account of working-class life uses the description ‘as oldfashioned as an aspidistra’.120 In contrast to the modern world of spivs and black-market dealing explored elsewhere in the film, Mrs Watson’s ‘woman in a pinny’ presents an image of a bygone working-class community.121 The pictorial mode in which the sequence is framed – with an emphasis on the ‘concrete’ details with which she is surrounded – constructs an image of Rose’s neighbour as if she is being captured and documented, and, in the style of Picture Post’s ‘The Doomed East End’, emphasises the fragility of an everyday sight which ‘may disappear’.122 Furthermore, this figure and framing of Mrs Watson evokes Picture Post’s recurrent use of the working-class matriarch as a figure for the tension between rehousing plans for the future and a past, traditional community.123 ‘Solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays’

Charles Barr’s study of Ealing Studios highlights resonances between George Orwell’s essay ‘England, your England’ (1941) and the studios’ output. He suggests that Orwell’s identification of characteristics of national character – namely, ‘the privateness of English life’ and ‘communal’, unofficial nature of ‘the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and “the nice cup of tea”’ – also ‘illuminates the Ealing spirit’.124 Orwell’s description of ‘solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays’ in his essay ‘The Lion and the Union’ (1941) offers an even more fitting embodiment of Ealing’s 1947 film.125 Orwell positions material conditions and ‘decencies of everyday life’ as part of a more sentimental examination of the ‘distinct and recognisable’ endurance that he attributes to ‘English civilisation’.126 In a similar way, It Always Rains on Sunday establishes images that demonstrate the material, ‘concrete’ elements of working-class domesticity in the East End, elements conveyed exactly by ‘Sunday morning, rain, the News of the World’, as a construction of a different set of ideals, emphasising both otherness as well as shared values of tradition and community. These realist constructions of everyday domesticity punctuate, present obstructions to and contrast with scenes more fitting to ‘romantic fiction and film’.127 However, reconsidered in a middlebrow context, the photographic realist images of domestic life in the film also convey a visual – often pictorial – romance of their own, emphasising points of similarity and difference from middle-class points of reference, including

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issues of community, tradition and reconstruction. Acknowledging the film’s engagement with domesticity, alongside the negotiation of past and future in ‘The Doomed East End’, thus allows It Always Rains on Sunday to be re-contextualised within a wider culture of conservative modernity from the interwar years, which was renegotiated in the postwar period. In the mirror sequence with which my analysis of It Always Rains on Sunday began, Rose’s flashback to her first meeting with Tommy features a shot of their escape to an idyllic countryside scene: a ‘concrete dramatic image’ in contrast with the drab routine of domesticity. However, from the interwar period onwards, pastoral images played a more complex role in representations of domestic life. For Picture Post during the war, the romance of everyday ‘home-making’ and traditional working-class communities in the East End was enmeshed with ideas surrounding the rural landscape.128 In September 1942, an article on ‘A Quiet Evening in a Riverside Pub’ describes The Prospect of Whitby public house in Wapping using florid, bucolic terms: The sun is setting behind Tower Bridge. You go down the narrow, flat winding streets of Wapping. On either side are the tall, flat warehouses that bore the first brunt of the blitz two years ago. In the air is the scent of spices and freshly crushed mustard from the mills by the wharves. It’s quiet in Wapping now. A couple of dockers on firewatch tramp along to a little pub in the bend of the road. You follow them – past the brick wall with the unexpected green ivy, past Pelican Stairs, with the tide lapping up the steps – and you turn in at the “Prospect of Whitby”.129

Like the construction of the East End home in Picture Post – as symbolic of both tradition and change – rural landscapes held a contentious position symbolic of the nuanced agendas and images linked with conservative modernity. With this in mind, the next chapter explores the pastoral landscape as a mode of address used to envision domestic life, and thus to re-imagine a 1930s construction of modernity. Notes 1 R. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments (London: Penguin Books, 1962, first pub. 1957), p. 37. 2 A. Higson, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), p. 192; S. Lay, British Social Realism: From Documentary to Brit Grit (London: Wallflower, 2002), p. 45.

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‘Tea Table Politics’

3 Higson contextualises the interwar work of the documentary movement as part of a broader field of ‘social documentation exploited in radio, painting, journalistic and literary writing, photojournalism and photography, social anthropology (e.g. Mass Observation), and so on’. Higson, Waving the Flag, p. 181. 4 N. Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 75. 5 J. Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2004), p. 6. 6 Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, p. 57. 7 T. Jeffery, ‘A Place in the Nation: The Lower Middle Class in England’, in R.  Koshar (ed.) Splintered Classes: Politics and the Lower Middle Classes in Interwar Europe (London: Holmes & Meier, 1990), pp. 70–96, at p. 71. 8 Mass-Observation, Report on Mantelpieces (1937), SxMOA1/3/7, MassObservation Archive. 9 See Jeffery, ‘A Place in the Nation’, p. 86. 10 J. B. Priestley, English Journey (London: William Heinemann, in association with Victor Gollancz, 1934), p. 262. 11 G. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Penguin Books, in association with Martin Secker & Warburg, 2001, first pub. 1937), p. 5. 12 Ibid., p. 109. 13 T. Hopkinson, Bert Hardy, Photojournalist (London: Gordon Fraser Gallery for Arts Council of Great Britain, 1975), p. 11. 14 D. Frizzell, Humphrey Spender’s Humanist Landscapes: Photo-Documents, 1932–1942 (New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art/Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1997), p. 38. Focusing on a 1936 exhibition of photographs of industrial working-class landscapes in Charing Cross station, Denis Linehan suggests an attempt ‘to enrol the visitor into the politics of vision and order that informed the responses of the state to the problems of reconstruction, and more particularly these depressed industrial regions’. D. Linehan, ‘A New England: Landscape, Exhibition and Remaking Industrial Space in the 1930s’, in D. Matless, B. Short and D. Gilbert (eds) Geographies of British Modernity: Space and Society in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), pp. 132–50, at p. 134. 15 N. Hubble, ‘Imagism, Realism, Surrealism: Middlebrow Transformations in the Mass-Observation Project’, in E. Brown and M. Grover (eds) Middlebrow Literary Cultures: The Battle of the Brows, 1920–1960 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 202–17, at p. 204. 16 G. Rose, ‘Engendering the Slum: Photography in East London in the 1930s’, Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Femininist Geography 4:3 (2010), 277–300, at pp. 277–8; Linehan, ‘A New England’, p. 134. 17 BBFC Scenario Report 1 (15 February 1936) on Love on the Dole, British Board of Film Censors Collection. 18 Kathryn and Philip Dodd suggest that this move from the public to the private was an ‘aesthetic convention’ used in documentaries focusing on working-class

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21 22

23 24 25 26 27

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homes. K. Dodd and P. Dodd, ‘Engendering the Nation: British Documentary Film, 1930–39’, in A. Higson (ed.) Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema (London: Cassell, 1996), pp. 38–50, at p. 41. P. Gillett, The British Working Class in Postwar Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 19; R. Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939–1949 (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 25; R. Mengham, ‘“Anthropology at Home”: Domestic Interiors in British Film and Fiction of the 1930s and 1940s’, in J. Aynsley and C. Grant (eds) Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Interior since the Renaissance (London: V&A Publications, 2006), pp. 244–55, at p. 244. S. Constantine, ‘Love on the Dole and its Reception in the 1930s’, Literature and History, 8 (1982), 232–47, quoted in S. Street, British Cinema in Documents (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 29. Caroline Levine explains that, for Constantine, the earlier versions of Love on the Dole ‘were not actually that radical at all: they were popular with middle-class audiences in the 1930s precisely because the plot merely emphasized a value that could never ruffle middle-class complacency – respectability’. C. Levine, ‘Propaganda for Democracy: The Curious Case of Love on the Dole’, Journal of British Studies 45:4 (2006), 846–74, p. 847n. Street, British Cinema in Documents, p. 29. A. Higson, ‘Space, Place and Spectacle: Landscape and Townscape in the “Kitchen Sink” Film’, in A. Higson (ed.) Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema (London: Cassell, 1996), pp. 136–56, at pp. 135–6. Higson refers to ‘kitchen sink’ films and ‘realism’ with reference to quotations from Walter Lassally and John Krish. Ibid., pp. 134–5. Ibid., pp. 136–7. Ibid., p. 136. Ibid., pp. 136, 141. Doss House – a crime film set in a boarding house for the unemployed and ‘down-and-out’ – made use of a number of realist tropes, including the opening intertitle and the observational mode of address later evidenced in Love on the Dole. Robert Shail describes the ‘semi-documentary’ style of Baxter’s work: ‘grounding their realism in sharply observed settings and characters’. R. Shail, British Film Directors: A Critical Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 26. Kinematograph Weekly (1941) referenced in P. Stead, Film and the Working Class: The Feature Film in British and American Society (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 130; Film Pictorial (27 January 1934) quoted in G. Brown with T. Aldgate, The Common Touch: The Films of John Baxter (London: National Film Theatre, 1989), p. 11. A. Davies, Leisure, Gender, and Poverty: Working-Class Culture in Salford and Manchester, 1900–1939 (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992), p. 9. ‘Love on the Dole: Baxter Working on Big Sets’, Kinematograph Weekly (5 December 1940), p. 23.

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31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

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Higson, ‘Space, Place and Spectacle’, pp. 136–7. Ibid., pp. 136, 148. Ibid., p. 150. Ibid., pp. 152–3, 137. Ibid., pp. 137, 134. ‘The splendour of male working-class bodies’ is a theme of 1930s documentaries examined in Dodd and Dodd, ‘Engendering the Nation’, pp. 44–5. Higson, ‘Space, Place and Spectacle’, p. 141. Ibid., pp. 143, 151–2. Aldgate, The Common Touch, p. 31. Ibid. L. Thompson, ‘1938’, in T. Hopkinson (ed.) Picture Post 1938–1950 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 23. Higson, ‘Space, Place and Spectacle’, p. 134. G. Weightman, ‘Picture Post’ Britain (London: Collins & Brown, 1991), p. 7. Keith Waterhouse quoted in M. Hallett, The Real Story of ‘Picture Post’ (Birmingham: ARTicle Press, 1994), n.p. S. Jacobson, ‘Unemployed!’, Picture Post (21 January 1939), p. 19. In their close analysis of Bill Brandt’s photographs of family homes for the Bournville Village Trust, Peter James and Richard Sadler draw attention to the rearrangement of objects on a family dining table, describing this as a ‘compositional device that, coupled with the lighting, does induce in the viewer that emotional response to the selected subject’. P. James and R. Sadler, Homes Fit for Heroes: Photographs by Bill Brandt, 1939–1943 (Stockport: Dewi Lewis in association with Birmingham Library Services, 2004), p. 91. Rose, ‘Engendering the Slum’, H. Spender ‘Lensman’: photographs 1932–52 (1987) quoted, p. 286. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, pp. 35–7. D. J. Marcou, All the Best: Britain’s Picture Post Magazine, Best Mirror and Old Friend to Many, 1938–57 (La Crosse: DigiCOPY, 2010), n.p. Thompson, ‘1938’, p. 23. L. Nead, The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-War Britain (London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2017), p. 1. Ibid., p. 2. S. Jacobson, ‘Unemployed!’, Picture Post (21 January 1939), p. 17. ‘Unemployed!’, Picture Post (11 February 1939), p. 45. Ibid., p. 47. J. Mansell, ‘Sound, Light and the Modern British Home, 1920–1955’, Domestic Imaginaries: Homes in Film, Literature and Popular Culture Symposium (University of Nottingham, January 2014).n.p. British Commercial Gas Association advertisement, Picture Post (10 December 1938), p. 3.

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58 British Electrical Development Association advertisement, Homes and Gardens (June 1939), p. lv. 59 C. Atha, ‘Dirt and Disorder: Taste and Anxiety in the Homes of the British Working Class’, in R. Schuldenfrei (ed.) Atomic Dwelling: Anxiety, Domesticity, and Postwar Architecture (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2012), pp. 207–26. 60 British Commercial Gas Association advertisement, Picture Post (25 February 1939), p. 7. 61 Related to the issue of citizenship, Caroline Levine examines Love on the Dole as ‘propaganda for democracy’. Levine, ‘Propaganda for Democracy’, p. 846. 62 Gillett, The British Working Class in Postwar Film, p. 24n. 63 Levine, ‘Propaganda for Democracy’, p. 847n. 64 Street, British Cinema in Documents, pp. 29–30. 65 Marcou, All the Best. n.p. 66 A. Bertram, Design in Everyday Things (London: British Broadcasting, Corporation, 1937), Plate IV. 67 N. Alexander, Sunday Pictorial (1 June 1941) quoted in J. Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in 1930s Britain (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 119–20. This is also discussed further in Street, British Cinema in Documents, p. 31. 68 R. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 425n. 69 Levine, ‘Propaganda for Democracy’, p. 857. 70 ‘A Plan for Britain’, Picture Post (4 January 1941), front cover. 71 S. O. Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 152. 72 C. Barr, Ealing Studios (London: Studio Vista, 1993), p. 68. 73 C. Brunsdon, London in Cinema: The Cinematic City since 1945 (London: BFI, 2007), p. 166. 74 Ibid.; Barr, Ealing Studios, p. 68. 75 Barr, Ealing Studios, p. 68. 76 Ibid., pp. 70, 68. In Christine Geraghty’s reading of It Always Rains on Sunday as one of a selection of postwar films concerned with women’s choices, she also emphasises that the audience follows the story from Rose’s point of view, positioned with her. C. Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’ (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 82–3. 77 Higson, ‘Space, Place and Spectacle’, p. 137. 78 J. Orr, Romantics and Modernists in British Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 45. 79 Ibid., pp. 45, 48. 80 Brunsdon, London in Cinema, pp. 161–2, 150. 81 As demonstrated by J. H. Forshaw and P. Abercrombie, County of London Plan (London: Macmillan, 1943), p. 4; P. Addison, Now the War Is Over: A Social History of Britain 1945–51 (London: Pimlico, 1995), pp. 70–7; M. Clapson, ‘Destruction and Dispersal: The Blitz and the “Break-up” of Working-Class

‘Tea Table Politics’

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83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108

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London’, in M. Clapson and P. J. Larkham (eds) The Blitz and Its Legacy: Wartime Destruction to Post-War Reconstruction (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2013), pp. 99–112. M. Duguid and K. McGahan, ‘From Tinsel to Realism and Back Again’, in M. Duguid, L. Freeman, K. M. Johnston and M. Williams (eds) Ealing Revisited (London: BFI, 2012), pp. 58–70, at p. 58. J. W. Collier, A Film in the Making … Featuring ‘It Always Rains on Sunday’ (London: World Film Publications, 1947), p. 64. Ibid., p. 65. E. Carrick, Art and Design in the British Film: A Pictorial Directory of British Art Directors and Their Work (London: Dennis Dobson, 1948), p. 120. D. Powell, ‘It Always Rains on Sunday’, Sunday Times (28 November 1947), p. 5. BFI Reuben Library, press cuttings file. Ibid. P. Dehn, ‘See It Twice’, Daily Chronicle (30 November 1947), p. 19. BFI Reuben Library, press cuttings file. Collier, A Film in the Making, p. 65. T. Blackwell and J. Seabrook, A World Still to Win: The Reconstruction of the Post-War Working Class (London: Faber & Faber, 1985), p. 25. Linehan, ‘A New England’, p. 134. Rose, ‘Engendering the Slum’, pp. 277–8. Collier, A Film in the Making, p. 65. A. Barber, ‘Life in the Lambeth Walk’, Picture Post (31 December 1938), pp. 47–53; ‘London by Night’, Picture Post (8 October 1938), pp. 19–23; W. Cameron, ‘Whitechapel’, Picture Post (15 October 1938), pp. 23–8. Cameron, ‘Whitechapel’, p. 23. Ibid., pp. 23–4. Ibid., pp. 24–5. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., pp. 25, 28. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., pp. 26, 24. Ibid., p. 25. Weightman, ‘“Picture Post’ Britain, p. 12. Cameron, ‘Whitechapel’, p. 28. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid. Ibid. p. 27. M. Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics 16:1 (1986), 22–7, at p. 25. P. Newland, The Cultural Construction of London’s East End: Urban Iconography, Modernity and the Spatialisation of Englishness (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963) quoted, p. 20. Barr, Ealing Studios, p. 69. For John Orr, the film’s ‘sense of time and place is vital. You feel the Blitz has taken a bettering from a distant enemy, as the Blitz and the war remain

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111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121

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124 125 126 127 128 129

something unspoken and working people try to pick up the pieces and get on with their lives’. Orr, Romantics and Modernists, p. 49. Blackwell and Seabrook, A World Still to Win, p. 27. Clapson, ‘Destruction and Dispersal’, p. 99. ‘East End at War’, Picture Post (28 September 1940), p. 13. Addison, Now the War Is Over, p. 70. N. Bullock, Building the Post-War World: Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Britain (London: Routledge, 2002), p. xiii. Weightman, ‘Picture Post’ Britain, p. 53. Addison, Now the War Is Over, p. 71; Cameron, ‘Whitechapel’, p. 24; Forshaw and Abercrombie, County of London Plan, p. 4. J. J. Mallon, ‘The Doomed East End’, Picture Post (9 March 1946). p. 9. Ibid. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, p. 217. Charlotte Brunsdon draws attention to the ‘symbolic resonance’ of the pinny, describing it as ‘a garment that testifies to an everyday life of undramatic labour, of clothes and parlours kept for best. Of a local London persisting in the macho imagination of the East End.’ Brunsdon, London in Cinema, pp. 152, 154. Mallon, ‘The Doomed East End’, p. 9. For example, Hilde Marchant, ‘The Story of Christmas Street’, Picture Post (21 December 1946), p. 30. includes a photograph of ‘Mrs Jones, One of the Oldest Inhabitants’, in her pinny, leaning out of her window in order to join in with the community on the street below. Barr, Ealing Studios, p. 90. G. Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (London: Secker & Warburg, 1941), pp. 11–12. Ibid. Brunsdon, London in Cinema, p. 166. J. Gardiner, Picture Post Women (London: Collins & Brown, 1993), p. 9. ‘A Quiet Evening in a Riverside Pub’, Picture Post (26 September 1942), p. 20.

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Pastoral images: capturing ‘A Landscape from Within’

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ymbolising consensus and national identity, pastoral landscapes shaped the depiction of domestic life in British 1940s films. Revisionist studies in film and cultural history have rejected the association of landscape and conservatism, instead suggesting that neo-romantic depictions of the British countryside – characteristic of the films of Powell and Pressburger and the documentaries of Humphrey Jennings – indicate an engagement with modernity.1 In an altogether different approach to landscape, films such as Quiet Wedding (d. Anthony Asquith, 1941), They Were Sisters (d. Arthur Crabtree, 1945) and Blithe Spirit (d. David Lean, 1945) present domestic settings in relation to a quaint natural landscape beyond. In prestige propaganda films such as The First of the Few (d. Leslie Howard, 1942), In Which We Serve (d. David Lean and Noël Coward, 1942) and The Demi-Paradise (d. Anthony Asquith, 1943), depictions of home in this style – reinforced by a pictorial, painterly aesthetic – conjured up a semimythical sense of British national identity, evoking closely woven connections between pastoral imagery and historical pageantry.2 Published in 1946, architectural critic J. M. Richards’ The Castles on the Ground: The Anatomy of Suburbia described the suburban domestic interior as ‘A Landscape from Within’.3 Richards compares the ordered domestic life within the house to the well-looked-after, neatly trimmed privet hedges and lawns in the gardens outside, detailing how The well-scrubbed floor is echoed in the well-mown lawn, the polished grate in the weeded gravel path, the Welsh dresser with its rows of gleaming plates in the vegetable bed where the purple sprouting broccoli is planted […] Care and cleanliness here recognise no difference between the house and its garden setting4

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Such images of home, characterised by a close proximity between domestic interiors and the leafy outdoors, were a defining feature of suburban modernity in the 1920s and 1930s, and continued to be re-imagined in 1940s films. By contextualising pastoral images of home in relation to interwar culture, this chapter illuminates how the depiction of domestic landscapes onscreen – settings imbued with both homely and rural iconography – was not simply backwards-looking, but instead embodied a cultural re-imagining of the modern home and national life. Pastoralism and preservation In the 1920s, the traditional designs of speculative suburban villas marked the new home-owning middle and lower-middle classes as ‘the heirs of Merrie England – a golden age of thatched cottages with roses round the door, of oxen roasted on the frozen Thames, and of Drake playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe’.5 House names such as ‘Acacia Villa’ or ‘The Hawthorns’ and the rise of gardening as a popular pastime reinforced a ‘rural affectation’.6 With the rapid expansion of the suburbs, domestic life was resituated in rural traditions characterised by what John Lowerson describes as ‘a nostalgia for a resurrected past, a rediscovery of yeoman roots, a search for a half-remembered countryside’.7 Deborah Sugg Ryan’s study of design in the suburban home highlights its popular vision of rural England, stemming from roots in the late nineteenth century, and the complementary mass appeal of historical pageants during the interwar years.8 Indeed, Helena Barrett and John Phillips emphasise that ‘the style chosen by builders – mock Tudor or ‘Jacobethan’ – satisfied a curious ambivalence towards the home among the middle classes of the day […] highly functional and modern in some respects, particularly in the kitchen and bathroom’, and yet also ‘cosy and cottage-like, much more rural in atmosphere than any previous speculative housing’: ‘a “beamed” cottage with rose-covered porch represented a return to a cosier and more secure age’.9 Although often derided for their backwards-looking vernacular architecture, the suburban developments of the interwar period may be viewed as demonstrating a ‘synthesis of contrasting values’, including modernist beliefs surrounding ‘the benefits of sunshine, fresh air and exercise’.10 Rural iconography – although used to indicate a return to an imagined past, a conservative sense of Englishness and the imperial history of a ‘Merrie England’ – was becoming part of a common language in visual culture

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employed to envision the future. For instance, published in a 1921 Metroland booklet, an image of a mock-Tudor mansion surrounded by flower beds, greenery and trees in the distance presents an idyllic image of rural suburbia (Figure 15).11 By 1937, an advertisement for ‘Rural Cottages’ in

Metro-land booklet (1921)

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suburbia mentioned a ‘rural retreat – picturesque … and yet thoroughly modern’, thereby drawing attention to the ideals of past and future, rural and modern which were being negotiated using a ‘picturesque’ or pictorial style of depicting domesticity in the interwar years.12 Rural iconography and a pictorial style of depicting home was particularly evident in monthly home magazines such as Ideal Home (published by Odhams Press and founded in 1920), Homes and Gardens (published by George Newnes Ltd. and founded in 1919) and My Home (Amalgamated Press, founded in 1928). Arthur Edwards suggests that Ideal Home catered to a ‘middle-class, principally feminine readership’, offering them ‘illustrated articles about half-timbered houses set in woodland glades’.13 He notes that ‘the illustrations in Ideal Home were always of individual houses, never of streets; the magazine was concerned with targets, rather than attainments, with the ideal home in its perfect garden, rather than the speculator’s “semi” in a suburban road’.14 Many photographs featured in the magazine stressed the relationship between domestic life and rural landscapes in the distance, through the ‘Romantic’ trope of the open doorway or window or the view through a hallway and into rooms beyond.15 The bright covers of Ideal Home in particular made use of this imagery, using paintings of glimpses through open doors into empty hallways, views of colourful gardens out of French windows, or simply images of houses from the garden outside with bright windows and an open front door. These images framed domesticity in relation to the rural landscape in order to emphasise a poetic sense of place, and to construct country homes as spaces for ‘spectator contemplation’ in a neo-romantic style.16 While tranquil images of empty living rooms, hallways with grandfather clocks, and French windows reinforced a sense of stillness, the use of doorways and windows to frame these compositions provided a sense of movement through these aspirational spaces of home. For example, in a 1937 Ideal Home article about the interior design of a converted farmhouse, a photograph taken from a high angle above the stairs, and others which use the wooden balustrades as a frame, create visually dramatic images and a sense of the house as a topos to be explored.17 Indeed, David Matless’s revision of the cultural interpretation of landscape in this period suggests that ‘two modes of conservative modernity clashed over the suburb’: the ‘exploratory, wide-ranging, expert, topographic’ and the ‘suburban, domestic’.18 This mixture of modes allowed for neo-romantic conceptions of landscape to be explored alongside more practical, modernist concerns

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with cleanliness, light and air in the home, which were stressed with the magazine’s emphasis on expansive windows and functional living spaces. As argued by Tim Benton, ‘for many modernists, the quintessential domestic pleasure was that of contemplating a fine view in pleasant surroundings’.19 Alongside an emphasis on neo-romantic attachments to the rural, the constructed views in these images of country homes and pastoral landscapes – reinforced by the motif of large, open windows, which often appeared as well in advertisements throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s – constructed the rural landscape as part of a visual experience of modernity, and even as a tempered, ‘mild’ form of modernism.20 Drawing on and exploring these connections between domestic modernity, modernism and pastoral imagery, the following section of this chapter focuses on two films released in the mid-1940s: This Happy Breed (d. David Lean, 1944) and The Captive Heart (d. Basil Dearden, 1946). Although the term ‘landscape’ literally denotes a space outside, a natural environment or a countryside view (Edward Casey suggests that ‘beyond the house and the neighbourhood lies the landscape’), scholarship in this field21 suggests that landscape need not only refer to a specific environ, but also to a particular treatment of a space.22 With this in mind, I explore how the aesthetic treatment of domestic scenes in both films – using colour and framing – allows them to be resituated as ‘landscapes from within’, spaces simultaneously characterised by domesticity and infused with rural iconography. By examining the pastoral images of home represented in wider culture, notably in aspirational magazines for lower-middle- and middle-class readers, I argue that those onscreen embodied a middlebrow set of values balancing preservation and progress, tradition and modernity, and domesticity and community. This Happy Breed

Adapted from a 1939 play by Noël Coward, This Happy Breed looks back to the interwar years by charting ordinary events in the lives of the lower-middle-class Gibbons family in their Clapham house against a background of national events. At the time of its release, C. A. Lejeune stated triumphantly: This film about the suburbs has gone out into the suburbs, and the suburbs have taken it into their hearts […] The idea that motivates all Coward’s work is the belief that civilisation, in its most British and parochial sense, is still a

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romantic adventure. A spring of suburban laurel is to him what a lei is to a South sea islander. [This Happy Breed is] a film that finds in a house in a row the symbol of a nation.23

Lejeune’s glowing review encapsulates the film’s associations between the homes of suburban Clapham and a sense of national identity.24 This Happy Breed’s opening sequence establishes these themes using pastoral imagery to frame not only the landscape outside, but also the spaces within, the Gibbons’ home. The scene begins with a panoramic, aerial shot which pans across the London landscape unblemished by bomb damage. Accompanied by a voice-over explanation – ‘hundreds and hundreds of houses which are becoming homes once more’ – this dissolves to a further panning shot of rows of roofs of terraced houses and their back gardens. From this overview and the construction of the landscape as a shared setting for nation-wide home-coming, another series of dissolves leads to a tracking shot through the Gibbons’ home, the centre of the film’s family-centred narrative, which follows them for the two decades between the wars. The fluid movement of camera into the house through an open window, across the empty landing and down the stairs is constructed as a continuation of the landscape outside. Accompanied by the dramatic strains of an orchestra, the sweeping movement of the camera through the interior evokes a panoramic gaze. It picks up on details of the fading décor: blue squares in a glass windowpane, grubby doorframes and muted squares of wallpaper where pictures have formerly hung. Finally, the camera comes to a halt behind the front door and the Gibbons family enter their empty home to the cheery introduction of Frank (Robert Newton) to the house: ‘Welcome to Number 17, Mrs Gibbons! And may all your days here be happy ones!’ Through framing, the national landscape outside appears to extend inside; the interiors of the Gibbons’ family home are constructed as a landscape of their own. On one hand, the constant movement of the camera suggests a topographical approach to landscape, in keeping with Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner’s re-evaluation of the cinematic landscape in which ‘the frame allows for, or even encourages, the audience to move over, or scan, the image; and the overall effect of a film is to place the audience in a dynamic and extensive experience’.25 On the other hand, the framing of the sequence suggests the pictorial value of the house within, as described in Martin Lefebvre’s definition of landscape as ‘a space of aesthetic contemplation and spectacle’.26 The panoramic view of the external landscape and the

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smooth movement of the camera through the open window of the Gibbons’ terraced house establish both the setting of interwar London and the home as ‘spaces of aesthetic contemplation’. The way in which the camera dwells on the details of the empty interior suggests a will to preserve a vision of the domestic landscape and the national past. This conjunction of topographical and pictorial modes lends a mobile, ‘exploratory’ perspective to the scene, while also conveying a conservative preservation of the ‘suburban, domestic’ spectacle of both exterior and interior landscapes.27 This sequence’s pictorial style – visually linking pastoral landscape with domestic interior – is reinforced by the use of muted colours evocative of natural or rural scenery. In the opening sequence, the interior of the house shares the natural colouring that characterises the garden fences, brick walls and grey roofs of the street outside. With the film’s cinematographer, Ronald Neame, director David Lean was experimenting with these natural colours in order to create a modern look for the Gibbons’ home and national events onscreen.28 With this in mind, Sarah Street suggests that This Happy Breed ‘demonstrate[s] colour being used as an active system, rather than as an unobtrusive aesthetic style’.29 Lean said: ‘everybody thought it was disgraceful. I had all the highbrows at Denham saying. “Why on earth are you doing it in colour?” I said, “It’s new and it excites me”.’30 Street’s examination of colour explores its negotiation of tradition and innovation in British cinema. She suggests that, although focused on the novelty that colour could provide in the first half of the twentieth century, ‘film-makers and technicians were also influenced by taste cultures that derived from older aesthetic traditions including British romantic and landscape painting or pictorial approaches in early colour photography’.31 For example, William Friese-Greene’s development of a ‘modern’ approach to colour in the 1910s was very much influenced by pastoral imagery, and he described this influence in a letter to his son, as follows: Remember, in colour, although so simple, all the great discoveries of the new world will be found. I don’t mean only the bright colours, but the dusky ones as well; and as we can photograph the passing of the fleeting colours now, nothing will be lost, for we have a chance of a permanent record […] which all comes down to a truthful record of Nature.32

Indeed, Claude Friese-Greene’s development of the Friese-Greene Natural Colour process was used to celebrate the landscape in travelogues including The Open Road (1925), a series of short films which showcased pastoral

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scenes via a motor trip through the country. As Street emphasises, ‘the rhetoric deployed to advertise the films was steeped with patriotic fervour’, thus emphasising modern developments in colour filmmaking alongside an evocation of national identity.33 Similarly, the Dufaycolor process was identified strongly with natural colours and a British ‘“look” suitable for subjects such as scenery and pageantry’.34 The pictorial construction of the Gibbons’ home as a landscape – using framing and muted Technicolor – arguably indicates a visual nod to a conservative modernity established by British filmmaking of the earlier decades of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, many film historians have cast the backwards-looking stance of This Happy Breed in a negative light. Robert Murphy suggests that it was the ‘most successful British film of 1944 despite its nostalgic view of the thirties’; and as Coward ‘heartily endorses the complacent selfsatisfaction of English suburbia’, he suggests that ‘one can feel the bonds holding together its conservative consensus creaking loudly’.35 Similarly, Higson characterises This Happy Breed as ‘adopting a self-consciously populist mode of address and […] working within the traditions of a conservative and nostalgic urban pastoral to construct an image of an organic national community’.36 Elsewhere, however, John Orr’s suggestion that David Lean ‘was always old-fashioned yet very often before his time, a conservative revolutionary in British cinema’, presents a new way of understanding the construction of domestic landscapes in This Happy Breed.37 My analysis of the film furthers these readings with the suggestion that This Happy Breed re-imagines connections between domestic life and pastoral landscape which were negotiated in a ‘conservative revolutionary’ cultural network in the 1930s. I explore how print culture in this period – including magazines, catalogues focusing on the home and popular colour books – constructed landscape views not simply with an uncomplicated look at the national past but also with a modern sensibility. I suggest that although these domestic scenes do indeed construct a vision of ‘a conservative and nostalgic urban pastoral’ from the interwar years, they were also influenced by ‘a self-consciously populist mode of address’ concerned with modernity, landscape and Englishness.38 Therefore, the film’s domestic landscapes – as constructions of pastoral imagery, Englishness and domesticity – convey a visual interpretation of conservative modernity: one which looks back to interwar modes, but simultaneously forward to the postwar home.

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Back to the tea table

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This Happy Breed’s most tragic sequence is set in the mid-1930s. Vi (Eileen Erskine) – the eldest daughter of main characters Mr and Mrs Gibbons (Celia Johnson) – runs into the dining room of their home to impart the news that her brother, Reg (John Blythe), and his wife have been involved in a car accident. Having hurriedly informed her Aunt Sylvia (Alison Leggatt) and Grandmother, Mrs Flint (Amy Veness), they leave the room and Vi runs into the garden to find her parents. Left with a view of the empty room, the camera tracks right, taking in details of the articles used to furnish the interior: heavy wooden furniture, a table laid for tea, and a worn cushion on an armchair (Figure 16). With the garden just visible in the background also appearing empty, this panoramic view evokes the introduction of the Gibbons’ home in the film’s opening sequence.39 In a stark counterpoint to the action, these images are accompanied by cheery dance music coming from the wireless and the sounds of children playing outside. The ‘landscape gaze’ of the mobile camera captures the material culture of the family’s domestic life rather than following the action which is taking place in the garden.40

This Happy Breed

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In earlier views of the room – when Aunt Sylvia, Mrs Flint and Mrs Gibbons are seen in conversation – the dining room is simply a setting for the everyday lives of the characters. However, the empty room suggests a changed construction. The shot’s survey of the details of the home offers spectatorial ‘contemplation’, allowing ‘the audience to move over, or scan, the image’, as they might scan a landscape.41 The framing of the empty room simultaneously emphasises topography and movement with the tracking movement of the camera, and also a pictorial or static capturing of the scene as if the room is frozen in time. In narrative terms, this dwelling on the interior serves to disguise the parents’ emotional response to the news outside, a trope in keeping with a theatrical tradition in which tragic events take place offstage, and here also keyed into a popular trait in British cinema at this time of maintaining emotional reserve. As Roger Manvell notes in his retrospective examination of British film, ‘the understatement of emotion – resolved by eloquent silences or by giving a certain pathos to the clichés of accepted behaviour, or by side tracking emotion to use laughter in its place – is as indigenous as our green, sweet and rain-swept landscapes’.42 The domestic landscape of the dining room acts as both symbol for and displacement of the emotion outside as well as being demonstrative of wider ideas about the ‘indigenous’ setting, nationally ‘accepted behaviour’ and Englishness. The theme of national identity and the setting of the living room as standing for the ‘indigenous’ English landscape is reinforced by the use of a palette of natural colours. Muted, pastel tones link the natural scene outside the house – albeit with the more vibrant pinks and greens of the May tree and the lawn – with the inside. The palette of the everyday material culture of the living room seems to belong to the same peaceful sphere as the suburban garden outside. A multitude of browns, dusky pinks, creams and greens are used for the furnishings and the table laid for tea, and dusky-pink-brown curtains hang at the window. In its setting up of this relationship between domesticity, colour and landscape, This Happy Breed follows in the footsteps of middlebrow literature from the late 1930s. For instance, Mrs Miniver, a 1937 novel by Jan Struther, was first published as a regular column in The Times and later made into a popular Hollywood feature film (d. William Wyler, 1942). The series’ episodic narrative follows the minutiae of everyday life for an upper-middle-class housewife, set in both her town and her country homes. In one of these columns, Mrs Miniver embarks on a period of quiet reflection following a hectic

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Christmas day as she looks out onto the countryside: ‘Mrs Miniver looked towards the window. The dark sky had already paled a little in its frame of cherry-pink chintz. Eternity framed in domesticity. Never mind. One had to frame it in something, to see it at all.’43 In Alison Light’s reassessment of middlebrow literature, she notes the prevalence of ‘an Englishness at once less imperial and more inward-looking, more domestic and more private’ and ‘more feminine’ in texts including Mrs Miniver.44 Light notes the engagement of these texts with the entry of women ‘into modernity, a modernity which was felt and lived in the most interior and private of places’.45 As such, Mrs Miniver constructs a form of conservative modernity in the late 1930s. Natural imagery appears to permeate her home with the colour and texture of her curtains and their ‘frame of cherry-pink chintz’. Through the use of the ‘cherry-pink’ colour, the domestic interior is irrevocably linked to the countryside landscape used to evoke ‘eternity’ and ‘Englishness’ outside. The ‘cherry-pink chintz’ in Mrs Miniver and the palette of browns, dusky pinks and greens in the tea-table scene in This Happy Breed evoke popular images emblematic of conservative modernity, in which consumer domesticity was constructed with an emphasis on pastoral traditions and landscapes. Furnishing and interior design catalogues published in the late 1920s and the 1930s frequently contained watercolour paintings of new decorative schemes in colour. In 1928, for example, a pamphlet titled The Joy of Design presented a series of relief decorations for the home inspired by natural imagery.46 These ideas for relief decorations present flowers as if hanging from curtain rails or sprays in the corners of the room. One design is described as ‘charming in its first glimpse of loveliness, this decoration enables you to bring indoors the fragrant beauty of an old-world garden’. Emphasising a relationship between these interior designs and national identity, the pamphlet begins with a quote from Shakespeare. Paintings of empty interior landscapes – often with views out onto a garden or countryside beyond – encapsulated this sense of pastoral Englishness while also promoting an aspirational, modern consumer culture. In the later 1930s, advertisements continued using watercolour schemes. For example, while a 1938 advertisement for Bast fireplaces published in Ideal Home magazine trumpets ‘a new rhythm in the home’, the watercolour painting of a serene living room – with its pastel creams, beiges and blues – suggests a continued relationship between the natural landscapes and the consumer home.47

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At this time, photogravure colour plates were a selling point of a new, modern style of woman’s magazine. Howard Cox and Simon Mowatt note that ‘by the 1930s the leading examples of [… monthly] periodicals were being produced using the high-speed photogravure process, providing a product that was clearly distinct from its conventional, staid letterpress rivals’ and thus connecting them with a new, bright vision of modernity.48 While a number of advertisements in the mid-1930s hailed the introduction of photogravure colour printing as ‘modern’, ‘dazzling’ and evocative of the ‘very latest fashions!’, ‘quality’ monthly magazines such as My Home, Ideal Home and Homes and Gardens still used muted, natural palettes in an effort to imbue modern domesticity with a sense of historical tradition and Englishness.49 My Home magazine offered design advice for the future home using watercolour illustrations and often an emphasis on pastel colours. In an answer to a reader’s problem with ‘modernising an  oldfashioned room’ featured in the January 1937 edition of My Home, an expert in interior decorating recommends that ‘instead of pink, have the decorations in pinky beige. This is not nearly as strong as pink, and is more in tune with the modern feeling.’50 The colourful centre pages of My Home adhered to this link of natural colours with modernity, with watercolour paintings of the resulting rooms. For example, in March 1937 a blue-green three-piece suite, beige walls and brown carpet accompanied by a view of a beach composed of similar colours outside, is described as ‘a room that is frankly modern’.51 These watercolour tableaus offered a topographical landscape mode as well as a pictorial one, featuring empty hallways, tables laid for tea and living rooms waiting to be occupied. Similarly, Ideal Home covers often used watercolour scenes featuring domestic interiors empty of occupants, capturing a neo-romantic ideal of the domestic landscape. For instance, the July 1937 cover featured a view through a set of French windows out into a bright summer garden: the interior is characterised by similar hues, including brown floral curtains, red roses arranged in a bowl in the foreground and a glimpse of pastel crockery arranged on a dresser (Figure 17). Set alongside these middlebrow images of the domestic landscape, the natural shades in This Happy Breed in the tea-table scene indicate a sense of national tradition, with a nod towards interwar consumer culture and its modern vision of the home.

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The Ideal Home (July 1937)

‘Magnificent yet mellow’ In the opening sequence of This Happy Breed, as the family move their things in, the structure of the house is surveyed in detail. The rooms, including the kitchen, hallway and parlour, are shown in dull, brown tones: the

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worn textures of the hallway stairs, the faded frame of the kitchen door and the ochre frames of the French windows in the dining room are emphasised in observational shots that linger in rooms after characters have left them. A number of objects are shown in slightly more vibrant hues: the slab of butter used by Aunt Sylvia to butter the cat’s paws, a lettuce brought into the kitchen in a basket and Ethel’s light blue shirt. As Frank hangs rich brown curtains at the French windows, the view beyond is also brightly lit, drawing attention to the vivid tones of the bushes and the pink cherry blossom tree in the background. Frank gestures towards Percy, the cat, in the garden and the film cuts briefly to an exterior view of the cat on the wall, revealing the muted, cream and grey colours of the brick garden wall and the other houses in the street and a bright blue sky in the distance. The mixture of bright and dull tones in the Gibbons’ new family home is thus echoed in views of the natural landscape of the garden outside. At the same time, these colour schemes establish the Gibbons’ family home as a setting symbolic of national identity. Throughout the film, the colour palette in depictions of public events points towards a national culture – the soldiers’ homecoming parade in 1919, the Empire Exhibition in 1924 and the death of King George V in 1936 – and its repetition in interior scenes establishes the home as a bastion of nationhood. For example, when the family visit the Empire Exhibition, bright reds, yellows, greens and blues – the vibrant colours of fairground rides, flags and posters – indicate the celebratory, pageant-like spectacle of the exhibition. This exterior sequence fades to a close-up of a Christmas card and a similarly colourful array of festive decorations hung across the family’s mantelpiece. This in turn fades to a scene of the family sitting in their parlour at Christmas. Some of the colours of the national events outside have seemingly infiltrated the Gibbons’ home: the reds, blues and yellows of the Christmas decorations, including paper chains and Christmas cards on top of the piano and the mantelpiece, evoke the bright colours used for the flags and bunting in the exhibition scene immediately before. Through the use of these bright colours, the visual spectacle of national events is carried into the family home.52 These visual congruences between the exhibition and the parlour scene also convey a key tenet of interwar suburban modernity: its entangled relationship with ‘the glories of the Empire’.53 The bright colours of the flags and bunting carried over into the Christmas parlour scene evoke the vivid reds, blues, yellows and greens used to decorate the booklets and maps for the Empire Exhibition in 1924, conveying its semi-mythical

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celebration of pageantry and national history, as well as the exhibition’s emphasis on familial, domestic values with its promotion as a ‘Family Party of the British Empire’.54 The combination of bright and natural colours in this scene reconstructs a structure of feeling associating pastoral landscapes, national heritage, imperial identity and modernity. In 1937, the British Colour Council – ‘responsible for the standardization, naming and coding of colour in the British Empire’ – published British Traditional Colours, a souvenir guide to the coronation ceremony of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.55 In the guide, royal robes are described as ‘coloured with dyestuffs extracted from the vegetation of the country’, linking symbols of the sovereign with the natural colours of the indigenous landscape.56 While the souvenir guide clearly evokes a conservative sense of tradition, an iconography of modern, national colours also had a part to play in the growing consumer culture surrounding domesticity. At this time, Modern Home magazine outlined some ideas for interior schemes to suit national colours, encouraging readers to ‘Decorate for the Coronation’.57 Bright colour illustrations in the magazine’s centre pages focused on ‘Coronation Colour Schemes’ to ‘make the house gay within and without’, with an emphasis on both modern schemes and natural imagery.58 This included living room walls in ‘Coronation “Gold” broken down with white to the tint of Spring sunshine’ and a modern jacquard bedcover in a ‘Bedroom in Coronation Blue’, with ‘deep and light blue on natural colour’.59 Meanwhile, a 1937 booklet from the paint firm Thomas Parsons and Sons detailed the eight colours sponsored by the British Colour Council to mark the coronation, encouraging potential customers to use the pastel, pastoral tones in the decoration of their homes.60 The relationship between the national and yet modern colours in This Happy Breed’s Christmas scene is redolent also of the treatment of landscape in colour books in the 1930s and throughout the 1940s. In what Matless describes as a ‘distinct mode of country reproduction’, Batsford Press’ 1937 England in Colour: A Short Survey of the English Landscape and its Antiquities emphasises innovations in colour photography while drawing attention to the natural colours of rural scenery.61 England in Colour used Dufaycolor photography – a style which ‘became identified with a limited, restrained colour palette that many deemed to be appropriate for an “English” colour aesthetic’ – and photogravure reproduction, a technique which, as already noted, was used by monthly magazines in their

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negotiation of conservative modernity.62 The photographs included in the collection embrace a watercolour aesthetic in the style of the ordered and idyllic pastel landscape featured on the book’s front cover. Ford suggests that The days may soon be here when the majority of such books as this will be illustrated with colour photography, but for the moment this collection is presented with the hope that it does convey some of the magnificent yet mellow colours of the countryside and buildings which form the landscape of England.63

The mixture of ‘magnificent yet mellow colours of the countryside’ articulates a negotiation between tradition and modernity that characterises the books as a whole. On one hand, the author admits that colour photography was not ‘new’, and his accompanying text advocates a more traditional pictorial mode of capturing the English seasons from a static position in one field or village.64 He also advises amateur photographers that ‘it is not necessary, when using Dufaycolor material, to seek for brightly coloured objects’. Instead, it ‘should be employed […] to photograph the ordinary colours met with in Nature’.65 The way that landscapes – and the ‘magnificent yet mellow colours of the countryside’ – are captured represents the book’s negotiation of both traditional, pictorial modes and modern technology. Other popular colour books displayed a modern capturing of the countryside, using reproductions of paintings. In Collins’ Peacock colour books and ‘Britain in Pictures’ series, for example, reproductions of paintings also adhered to this ‘magnificent yet mellow’ colour scheme. Published in the 1930s and 1940s, these books promoted innovations in colour printing while keeping an eye firmly on the past, featuring colour reproductions of a variety of works from fifteenth-century oil paintings to contemporary watercolours. In the ‘Britain in Pictures’ series, Edmund Blunden’s English Villages (1941), for example, includes a number of paintings characterised by the natural tones associated with watercolour.66 These watercolour palettes emphasised a traditional Englishness – described by Adrian Bury, an artist and writer specialising in watercolours in the 1930s and 1940s, as ‘as national as the language itself, as much part of England as her contours and climate’ – at the heart of the modern colour books.67 Like the combination of bright colours and more muted tones in This Happy Breed, paintings in English Villages also

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feature glimpses of vibrant colour: flashes of red uniforms in an otherwise brown and blue scene in Windsor in a watercolour painting from 1760; blue coats and a purple bonnet against the green foliage and rust-coloured bricks in Tottenham village in 1822; and rich oranges, yellows and greens in a contemporary oil painting of a village flower and vegetable show. Combining pageantry with the pastoral, these publications simultaneously promote the new capabilities of colour printing while reinforcing the idea of a national landscape to be preserved. Recording Britain

As part of the neo-romantic movement, watercolour was a medium that conveyed notions of the modern with national tradition. Neo-romantic landscapes were published in affordable 1930s Penguin paperbacks and in the wartime Penguin Modern Painters series; they later became more closely linked with themes of preservation as part of the Recording Britain movement.68 Set up in 1939 and officially titled the ‘Scheme for Recording the Changing Face of Britain’, this government scheme sought to capture the national landscape in the face of possible destruction by war and by modernisation. Painters – including neo-romantics and more traditional watercolourists – contributed watercolours of landscapes, towns and villages under threat, parish churches and country houses to the scheme. These were exhibited widely during the war and later published in a series of four volumes from 1946 to 1949, which one critic summarised as presenting a ‘certain demure brown sameness’ in their colour palettes.69 The artists working for Recording Britain used watercolour – described by art historian and curator by Chris Stephens as ‘the quintessential medium for English topography’ – to depict these landscapes as a reminder of a shared, past nationhood, but also as engaging with modern concerns for preservation.70 As a wartime example of rural imagery and colour negotiating conservative modernity, the natural, brown tones characteristic of the movement, as described by Alexandra Harris, ‘presented an umbery-ochre nation that might not for very much longer be painted in this mellow palette’: a palette and an emphasis on preservation that later characterised a number of domestic landscapes in This Happy Breed.71 In the second part of the 1925 Christmas sequence in This Happy Breed, Frank and Ethel’s young daughter, Queenie (Kay Walsh), explains her reasons for wanting to escape her life of suburban routine, and thus her

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rejection of an offer of marriage from the Gibbons’ next-door neighbour Billy (John Mills). Following this, she runs from the dining room, into the hallway and up the hall stairs. In a trope repeated throughout the film, the camera lingers on the staircase once she has run up it. The camera appears to capture the landscape of the hallway scene, in a pictorial style evocative of Dufaycolor photography and reproductions of watercolour paintings. Its static position at the bottom of the stairs takes in the worn banisters, the patterned mustard-yellow wallpaper and the wooden doorframes. A landscape painting hangs on the wall in between the doors to the parlour and the dining room, reinforcing the visual connection between the domestic interior and pastoral imagery. When it is later discovered that Queenie has left home in order to pursue her affair with a married man, the depiction of the dining room in the Gibbons’ home similarly conveys a filmic engagement with pastoral landscapes. As the camera pans to follow Ethel leaving the room, a large, blue-beige landscape painting again figures in a prominent position in the background. In a style evocative of the distanced, observational view of the tea table and the Christmas sequence, a long shot shows an almost-fulllength view of Frank as he puts Queenie’s letter in his pocket. This shot establishes a domestic landscape characterised by the natural colours of the beige wallpaper, the wooden furnishings and the rich green upholstered seat of a dining room chair. The camera follows Frank as he moves across the room and as he sits down in despair at the dining table. From here, the camera tracks backwards, as if through a pane in the French windows, until the square frames of the window come into view. The frame within a frame draws further attention to the pictorial style of the scene. Moments like these reinforce Higson’s notion that ‘the film is invested with a powerful sense of loss’, achieved particularly by the ‘preference for the distance of the medium shot and the group shot’ and by the movement of the camera away at the end of a sequence as if ‘the image, and the time that it documents, were fading from memory’.72 Through its evocation of watercolour topographies in the style of Recording Britain, the palette of natural, muted tones also conveys this theme, reinforcing connections between the Gibbons’ domestic life and national identity. Ronald Neame describes in his autobiography how he focused on dulling down colours: ‘with shades of gray and brown to “dirty down” the sets and costumes, I was able to light the picture so that everything looked drabber than normal’.73 In keeping with the aims and

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aesthetics of the Recording Britain scheme, the ‘umbery-ochre’ tones in the film define a conservative need for preservation as well as more modern ideas about the natural, British landscape, albeit in the interior spaces of the Gibbons’ home. For instance, the visual connection between nostalgic conservatism and the natural, brown tones of Recording Britain is epitomised by a scene set at the Gibbons’ home, in which Frank and Ethel escape for a quiet moment in the kitchen after their Christmas dinner. As the couple sit and look into the fire, the colours of the interior and the lighting of their faces are uniformly brownish-ochre in tone. The couple discuss their concerns about Reg’s interest in politics and Frank takes on the voice of domestic Britain, drawing comparisons between gardening, nationhood and politics: ‘it’s like gardening. Somebody once said we were a nation of  gardeners, we like planting things and watching them grow, looking out for changes in the weather.’ In this speech, Frank’s imagined view of the nation as a garden is visually underscored in the natural shades used to colour the wooden cabinets, the washing hanging in the cosy kitchen and the glow of the fire. Later in the film, muted colour schemes – characterised by browns, creams and beiges – gradually replace the earlier warm greens and pageant tones of the Gibbons’ home, as the family persevere through public and private problems.74 In a scene set in 1936, the family is shown sitting in the dining room, listening to the wireless. As a newsreader announces the death of King George V, Ethel continues ironing on the dining room table as Frank mends an alarm clock in the foreground and Aunt Sylvia reads in the background. The dining room has become noticeably more pallid in tone, and this is also emphasised in the grey and beige tones of the characters’ cardigans and the paper-strewn table. Described by Melanie Williams as ‘a domestic still life’, a medium shot establishes a pictorialstyle portrait of the family sitting closely together around the table (Figure 18).75 Like the earlier fireside scene, the muted colours in the scene chart the changed, domestic landscape in relation to the development of national events, with the sound of the wireless. As well as conveying connections between home and national identity, the colouring of later sequences in this style emphasises the film’s preservation of prewar sights – as a ‘pictorial Domesday of pre-war Britain’ – with the backwards-looking modernity that characterised the watercolour palettes of Recording Britain.76 In the years just before This Happy Breed’s release, magazine and consumer culture relentlessly continued to propagate these ideas. While there

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This Happy Breed

were fewer pages in home magazines, they continued to be published as a mode of engaging women in the war effort. Drawing on tropes established in the interwar years, images in the magazines combined topographical and pictorial modes, and thus continued to construct domestic landscapes. For example, the cover of the January 1943 issue of Ideal Home featured an open door from a hallway into a green kitchen. In the foreground, the soft palette of colours creates a sense of homely nostalgia. A deep brown chest stands in the background, with yellowy beige walls; there is a brown, patterned rug and a rust-coloured table against the wall on the right; vases of yellow and red foliage stand on the table, and landscape paintings on the walls are in contrasting pastel colours. Likewise, the colour sections in My Home continued to promote natural tones, often describing the colour designs for domestic layouts as ‘quiet’, ‘harmonious’ and ‘peaceful’, establishing the prospect of a peaceful home to which readers could return after the war. Significantly, the section is titled ‘The Home You Hope to Have Sometime’. In a feature focusing on the ‘Utility-Scheme – A LivingDining Room’, an illustration of the proposed room includes a central window with a clear framing of the landscape outside as well as landscape paintings decorating the walls inside.77 Here the peace and quiet of the

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imagined postwar home of the future is reinforced through its suggestion of a relation to the landscape outside, and firmly established by its natural colour scheme. These domestic landscapes also featured pastel colours (in the peachy walls); brighter reds and greens (in the sample pattern); and muted, natural browns (in the hallway scene on the cover of Ideal Home): such domestic landscapes and colours would shortly be revisited in This Happy Breed. In the film’s final scenes – set in 1939 – the Gibbons family prepare to move house. With his old drinking companion from next door, Frank reminisces about old times. Drawing attention to the ever-present surroundings of the Clapham home throughout the film, Frank asks: ‘I wonder what happens to rooms when you give them up?’ About its next occupants, he asks: ‘I wonder if they’ll feel any bits of us about the place?’ Frank’s questions emphasise the nostalgic view of family life and nationhood in the interwar years articulated throughout the film, and are followed by a reversal of the film’s opening moments as the camera moves from inside the empty home to a panoramic view of the London landscape. While expressing nostalgia for the past, through the iconography of landscape this sequence acknowledges a sense of the present, and even the future: a dual negotiation which is expressed by pastoral images of home. There is, I contend, something more complex than ‘a conservative and nostalgic urban pastoral’ at stake in This Happy Breed. Through pictorial framing and a watercolour palette, the depiction of the Gibbons’ house as a series of pastoral images presents an engagement with modern technologies and cultural constructions of modernity in the 1930s. Furthermore, the film’s engagement with a pastoral image of domestic life often figures Frank Gibbons – the father, ‘paterfamilias’ and ‘suburban sage’ – as its spokesman: in the fireside scene and his description of ‘a nation of gardeners’ particularly, he articulates the film’s visual negotiation of domesticity, nature and nationhood.78 While ostensibly a spokesperson for the film’s conservative values, Frank embodies an image of domestic masculinity, which can also be considered a part of This Happy Breed’s negotiation of modernity. His construction as a domestic ‘little man’ conveys connections between suburbia, pastoralism and Englishness that were returned to onscreen a couple of years later – in the unlikely setting of a prisoner-of-war camp.

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The Captive Heart Dedicated to prisoners of war still in the process of being repatriated, The Captive Heart centres on a group of soldiers imprisoned in a German camp, and their dreams of home.79 Sequences in the camp are punctuated by scenes focusing on the central characters’ wives and love interests back home in Britain.80 The film’s romantic narrative focuses on the developing relationship between Captain Karel Hasek (Michael Redgrave) – a Czech whose escape from the Nazis requires him to impersonate a dead British soldier named Geoffrey Mitchell – and Celia (Rachel Kempson), Mitchell’s wife. Hasek’s initial silence on the subject of home arouses the suspicion of his fellow captives, one of whom remarks: ‘we’re always talking about home, he never does’. Forced to write to Celia to keep up appearances, Hasek falls in love with her. The film intimates that it is the images of home that Celia constructs in her letters with which he has fallen in love: ‘a dream, a home in a strange land’. Once Hasek’s real identity is revealed, it is his appreciation of the pictures of home constructed by Celia’s letters which reinforces his position as part of the community of prisoners: he reads her correspondences to his fellow inmates and also describes their own increasingly domestic practices in the camp in his letters back to her. The film’s narrative construction of home, as irrevocably interwoven with notions of community, is also negotiated by its aesthetic depiction of domestic life as a series of pastoral images. In an early sequence, the representation of Celia’s home – depicted as an idyllic ‘little England’ – is introduced with a series of images, almost picture postcards, of her local, countryside village.81 First, a shot of the village green shows three young children playing with a water pump in front of a leafy churchyard as her car drives past in the background; this dissolves to the first view of Celia’s grand, brick country house framed in long shot by the trunk and branches of an old tree and the long grass of the green in the foreground. Later in the sequence, the film cuts to the house’s interior: from one corner of a large, high-ceilinged sitting room furnished in a country house style – complete with chintz-covered armchairs, packed bookcases and rows of china plates – the camera pans to follow a conversation between Celia and her father from a distance. As Celia moves further into the room, the camera maintains its static position, framing her among the traditional furnishings, with her father in the foreground. Framed in this pictorial style, the ordered, comfortable environment of the domestic interior is also established as a picture-postcard view, which is in

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keeping with Lefebvre’s definition of a film landscape as a ‘space of aesthetic contemplation and spectacle’ and continues in the same visual mode of address as the village scenes preceding it.82 The framing of Celia’s home as an extension of the surrounding iconography of village life articulates a vision of interwar England which was closely associated with static, suburban images of pastoral landscapes and domestic life. As evidenced in magazines and advertising in the interwar years, the suburban home stood as a distinctive re-imagining of the country cottage, evoking the rural communities of a mythical national past. As such, suburban iconography represented a reinvigoration of the ‘beau ideal’ – an image connecting domesticity, the pastoral landscape and an archaic idea of a village community indicative of a ‘blurring of the aesthetic, […] the physical environment, and the social’ – for the twentieth century.83 In this vision of the beau ideal, the private spaces of the home were constructed as part of a clearly defined ‘social’ environment, with connections to values of Englishness. The aesthetic construction of Celia’s home – and the visual congruence between the house and the rural surroundings – introduces the relationship between domestic life, landscape and community as a beau ideal, before Celia’s letters and the scenes in the camp later articulate the same theme, though under wartime circumstances. At first, however, the construction of the beau ideal in Celia’s home is presented as a contrast with scenes set in the prisoner-of-war camp. For instance, a further view of her living room – complete with silver tea service, comfortable armchairs positioned around the fireside and Celia’s demonstrative effort at maintaining domestic peace (despite marital difficulties) with the suggestion ‘if we [she and Geoffrey] should happen to meet when the war’s over, it won’t be as enemies’ – is shortly followed by a panoramic shot of the desolate landscape of the camp. Accompanied by a downcast musical score of violins, the camera establishes a view not only of guards ominously silhouetted against the light, dusty yard but also, somewhat unexpectedly, rows of trees and rose bushes around its edges. As the camera pans slowly across the landscape, the appearance of flowerbeds and rows of trees is highlighted in a stark, chiaroscuro style and, in the foreground, the dark shape of a watchtower light fills the frame, followed closely by the appearance of a Nazi soldier with a machine gun on lookout. In contrast to the spectacle of Celia’s comfortable home as part of a rural idyll, the portentous appearance of the landscape of the camp – with its hints of pastoralism, and thus continuing visual reminders of village

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England – is introduced as a spectacle characterised by enemy control and the disconcerting threat of surveillance. With a dissolve to a crowded scene in the camp’s wash hut, a shot from one corner of the room establishes an observational-style view of a number of the men in dirty bandages. As the men attempt to clean themselves or struggle to find space at a line of wash basins, the film highlights the discomforts and difficulties of the living conditions associated with the claustrophobic, forced community of the camp. In later scenes, conditions in the camp visibly change and the captive prisoners begin to cultivate homes for themselves within the patrolled boundaries of the prison. Their domestic, private hobbies – described in one of Hasek’s letters as ‘turning inwards from the wire’ – are shown to alleviate the pressures of community in the camp and to be central to an authentic depiction of a ‘convalescent phase’ in captivity.84 The convalescent phase was described both in the shooting script and the pressbook for the film as follows: the captive soldier ‘begins to rebuild his world in miniature inside it. He decorates, organizes, preoccupies himself with detail. His morale recovers and soars.’85 Accompanied by Hasek’s voiceover description of the captives ‘creating in miniature a world of their own’ as he writes a letter to Celia, one sequence begins with a number of the company tending their garden plots, mending clothes or just sitting in the sun outside the camp huts (Figure 19). The camera tracks through the scene, moving along the edges of ‘trim little gardens on the turfed-in space between the huts’.86 This movement through the gardens – capturing the men at work from Hasek’s narrated point of view – emphasises his newfound acceptance into the prison-camp community. Here, the cultivated domesticity of the camp is constructed as a landscape, which stresses mobility and an ‘exploratory’, modernist mode of address.87 Ideas of citizenship and ‘modern Englishness’ in the 1930s – as demonstrated in David Matless’s analysis of the visual politics of pastoral images as presenting modern ‘ways of seeing and being in the landscape’ in interwar culture – are recreated by this wartime scene.88 On one hand, the emphasis on movement in the ‘gardens’ sequence is therefore in keeping with a renewed, optimistic community and, also, Matless’s association of this topographical landscape with masculinity.89 On the other hand, a draft of the shooting script draws attention to this view of the new, cultivated and homely landscape of the camp as characterised by private, domestic values. The script explains: ‘men are cheerfully working on the gardens. Each garden is individual and distinct. There

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The Captive Heart

are crazy-pavings, flower beds, low wallflower hedges, etc. The sound of the piano continues over this.’90 The mise-en-scène and the observational distance of the camera establish the individual gardens belonging to each of the men – surrounded by rows of white pebbles or picket fences – in a mode capturing the domestic landscape as a static ‘space of aesthetic contemplation and spectacle’. Seemingly in opposition to values of masculinity and citizenship, this pictorial mode indicates a ‘suburban, domestic, little, humdrum’ landscape – deemed by Matless as ‘feminine and feminizing’.91 Indeed, as with the images of the village surrounding Celia’s home, a series of pictorial-style shots in the sequence following the gardening scene establish both domestic and communal scenes in the camp. Dai Evans (Mervyn Johns) is shown piecing together a doll in a workshop and another captive decorates a hut with a portrait of the king, while the men are also shown in a library and listening to an anatomy lesson, watching a boxing match, playing basketball, placing bets and singing in a choir. One of the last shots in the ‘gardens’ sequence reinforces the place of domestic life at the centre of this community, thus suggesting that the camp represents a renewed beau ideal – in the style of the film’s depiction of Celia’s home in England – for the prisoners. Cutting from the choir to

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The Captive Heart

an interior of one of the huts, the camera tracks back from a close-up of a record player, slowly revealing more of the scene of men sitting in the brightly lit room. In a distanced, medium shot, two captives sit in makeshift armchairs, one smoking a pipe; in the centre of the hut, a number sit sewing, smoking or simply lost in thought, while others get on with mending jobs or lie in their bunks around the edges of the room (Figure 20). The provisional domestic space is furnished with packing crates used for armchairs, and cluttered with washed shirts hanging from the ends of bunks and pictures on the wooden hut walls. In a sequence which celebrates both the private and the communal, the distanced framing of the room draws attention both to the newly domesticated room – complete with stove, armchairs, washing and vases of flowers – and also to the community of men crowded into bunks, armchairs and around the central table. The two modes of addressing the domestic landscape of the prisoner-ofwar camp evidenced in these sequences bear comparison with that of the Gibbons’ home in This Happy Breed. As in the opening camera movement indoors in This Happy Breed, the tracking shot through the gardens visually constructs a relationship between community and the private homes in the camp. Also, as in the pictorial style of depicting the Gibbons family at home in This Happy Breed, the view of the men in the cosy room in the

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hut is characterised by a ‘preference for the distance of the medium shot and the group shot’.92 Just as the domestic landscapes in This Happy Breed evidence an engagement with conservative modernity, The Captive Heart is characterised by a clash between the topographical mode of landscape in the gardens sequence and the static, pictorial visions of domesticity used to depict the men’s hobbies and the domestic interiors of the huts. This mixture of modes of address demonstrates a modern reconciliation of community and domesticity, and also masculinity and femininity, as part of a re-imagining of the interwar beau ideal, renewed and reinvigorated by the wartime domestic community depicted in the camp.93 The Captive Heart’s distinctive engagement with the beau ideal is founded in its construction of masculinity in that it resituates men at the heart of this cultural image of domesticity, landscape and community. Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumim’s reading of the film suggests that the construction of a ‘little England’ (in the mould of rural images of suburbia from the 1930s) creates a world onscreen ‘in which both masculine and feminine principles are in harmony’.94 My own reading of the film’s aesthetic style supports this with the idea that the beau ideal represents a shared community, from Celia’s home to the men in their hut. Although the pastoral image of domestic community first established with Celia’s home is initially contrasted with the harsh conditions of the prisoner-ofwar camp, the aesthetic construction of these spaces showcases the development of a sense of equilibrium between home and prison camp, altered by wartime circumstances. Noting the relationship between home and prison-camp scenes in the film, Kirkham and Thumim argue that the ‘harmony’ between men in the camp and women at home is established on the basis that masculine principles defer to feminine ones: the captive prisoners ‘must listen to the voices of women if they are to survive in a world where old masculinities are outmoded’.95 This suggests that the male characters rely on the advice of their wives and partners in order to survive everyday life in the camp: a reading that relies on an assumption that masculinity is limited to the public sphere of wartime, soldierly endeavours, and femininity to the private sphere of the home. Indeed, they argue that the ‘men could safely display a degree of domesticity in this situation […] because of the extreme and unusual circumstances (the experiences of war)’ and that ‘their masculinity and heterosexuality are never in any doubt’ due to their roles as soldiers.96 The following analysis extends Kirkham and Thumim’s reading of The Captive

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Heart by suggesting that a popular vision of masculinity constructed as part of suburban modernity in the 1930s had already overthrown ‘old masculinities’ associated with the military and a public idea of national identity. Drawing on research by cultural historians Judy Giles and Sonya Rose, I consider how conceptions of masculinity, and by extension national community, were promoted through the lens of a suburban beau ideal and taken up as emblematic of endurance in wartime.97 With this in mind, I suggest that the film can be resituated in relation to a postwar culture in which these themes were influential in promoting a shift ‘from rivets – to privets’: from war work back to the home and garden.98 Masculinity, domesticity and community With the interwar expansion of suburbia, a new cultural image of masculinity suggested a turn inward, towards the home. In the 1930s, Daily Express publication ‘The Home of Today’ announced: ‘Men and women are equally enthusiastic – a new consciousness of home-making has been born!’99 At this time, it was the cultural figure of the middle-class pater familias – pottering in the garden and watering his dahlias – that best symbolised a negotiation between ‘ideas of privacy and a decent bit of garden all to yourself’ and a shared national identity.100 Alison Light observes that: The 1920s and ’30s saw a move away from formerly heroic and officially masculine public rhetorics of national destiny and from a dynamic and missionary view of the Victorian and Edwardian middle classes in ‘Great Britain’ to an Englishness at once less imperial and more inward-looking, more domestic and more private – and in terms of pre [First World] war standards more ‘feminine’.101

This relationship between masculinity, domesticity and Englishness was reinforced by the popular identification of suburbia with images of the pastoral landscape. This cultural formulation conjured up an image of the golden ages of the English past – ‘nostalgia for a resurrected past, a rediscovery of yeoman roots’ – as part of a re-envisioning of comfortable, domestic life in the interwar present.102 For Light, it is Stanley Baldwin – Prime Minister three times between the wars – who epitomised this relationship between domestic ‘Englishness’ and landscape.103 In an oft-quoted 1924 speech, Baldwin attached his popular image to the private spaces of the English home, in which his descriptions of ‘the wild anemones in the woods in April’ and ‘the last load at night of hay being

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drawn down a lane as the twilight comes on’ are mapped out alongside the nation’s romanticised ‘power of making homes, almost peculiar to our people’.104 With influence on, and also influenced by, trends in suburbia, Baldwin’s idea was that, rather than being confined to the private sphere, domestic masculinity encapsulated a modern image of nationhood, albeit through recourse to images of a fabled, pastoral past. With reference to Baldwin’s influence and focusing on this issue of masculine identity, revisionist histories have understood the cultural imaginary of the home and landscape – the suburban beau ideal – to embody modern ideas relating specifically to citizenship. These accounts are a useful place from which to reconsider the relationship between domestic masculinity, landscape and community in The Captive Heart. With a focus on the years immediately after the First World War, Judy Giles suggests that the ‘figure of the “good tenant”, incorporating as it did concepts of home ownership and the returning serviceman as hero [with the provision of housing as part of the government’s “Homes Fit For Heroes” scheme], was important to this discourse of citizenship’.105 Drawing on the work of John Burnett, Giles credits rising house ownership with providing the possibility of men becoming ‘“fully participant member[s] of society”’.106 In this account, the image of the stereotypical suburban pater familias pottering around his private garden, seemingly ‘without communal function’ is recast.107 Giles suggests that ‘as women made “good” housewives insofar as they served the “national interest”, husbands were encouraged in good tenantry and by extension good citizenship via the provision of gardens’.108 Gardening as a domestic pastime played a communal function through residents’ gardening associations, flower shows, municipal garden competitions and horticultural classes. Again, it is pastoral images associating domesticity with a national landscape that reinforce these connections for Giles, who concludes that ‘discourses of pastoralism […] offered to the “new citizens” of a reconstructed postwar England a role in the creation a “decent, civilised life” as “good tenants”’.109 Sonya Rose furthers this reading with the suggestion that Light’s conception of ‘the home-loving, quiet reticence of interwar British national identity […] could be rearticulated’ during the Second World War with a ‘tempered masculinity’.110 Rose’s account once more draws on the discourses of a quiet, domestic masculinity. She quotes, for example, a BBC radio discussion of ‘What is a Good Man?’ (answering with ‘stayat-home, good, ideal husbands, good neighbours’) and notes pastoral

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images conveying ‘yeomen of England’ in a 1940 advertisement for beer to suggest that in wartime ‘the virility of the nation was tempered’.111 Accordingly, Rose demonstrates that ‘the “little men” as representatives of British identity […] became the “ordinary people” of the home front’, with the suggestion that ‘“good citizenship” and masculinity were virtually the mirror images of one another’ in wartime Britain.112 She explains that ‘what was new in the 1940s was the particular multidimensional and loose configuration of attributes associated with manliness that coalesced relatively early in the war – with Dunkirk and the Blitz – informing what Angus Calder has suggested was a mythical national sensibility’.113 While in the interwar years preservationists had criticised this sensibility as complacent pastoralism and Baldwin fell out of favour, the relationship between masculinity, nationhood and domesticity gained a newfound significance in popular wartime culture.114 With the ‘Garden Front’ and the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign, the garden was now much more explicitly national territory. According to Mike Brown and Carol Harris, The wartime garden wasn’t all ‘Dig for Victory’ vegetables and fruit. Flowers were still important and the Government encouraged gardeners to keep some. This was firstly to ensure that seed stocks would be available after the war and secondly, because the ‘morale value’ of flowers – their scent and colour – was needed in a world that was becoming even more utilitarian and drab.115

Flower growing had also found a number of prominent male advocates. Along with his column and a Daily Express cartoon strip featuring ‘Adam the Gardener’, on Sunday afternoons Mr Middleton’s BBC radio programme ‘In Your Garden’ adopted a personable tone which drew the national audience into the imaginary space of the garden. According to Daniel Smith, Middleton did not ‘attempt to hide his fundamental preference for flowers over vegetables […] a colleague at the Daily Express wrote of him, “it was not that he hated vegetables but rather that he found them dull. He could not love an onion where a dahlia might grow”.’116 Likewise, Stephen Cheveley’s 1940 book A Garden Goes to War presents a loving account of the flowerbed: It is a pleasing sight at the moment, with yellow and pink hollyhocks which we grew from seed, a good show of the special chrysanthemums, and masses of Michaelmas daisies. This seems the obvious place for an immediate sacrifice, so we must harden our hearts and lift the plants, even though the flowering season has still a few weeks to run.117

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In this vein, often depicted with a penchant for growing flowers, stoic ‘suburban paterfamilias’ characters repeatedly appeared in British films released throughout this period as an endorsement of the wartime consensus.118 ‘Father’ takes a tea break among the sweet peas in Ruby Grierson’s Ministry of Information documentary They Also Serve (1940); before leaving for his naval duties, Chief Petty Officer Hardy (Bernard Miles) reminds his wife ‘you won’t forget to out those bulbs in when the right time comes, will you?’ in In Which We Serve (1942); and Ethel remarks that once Frank ‘starts watering, he’d go on all night if we let him’ in This Happy Breed. These domestic pastimes suggest that the ‘old masculinities’ described by Kirkham and Thumim were already becoming outmoded much earlier in twentieth-century Britain, with masculinity becoming recast in the 1930s in relation to domesticity, pastoralism and citizenship, a dynamic which was re-established as a potentially useful symbol for consensus in wartime. The Captive Heart negotiates such constructions of masculinity using images of domestic life in the camp. These scenes are characterised by the realist evocation of detail, in a number of settings including the washroom, the yard and the medical hut. In the first sequence set in the camp, a highangle shot from the corner of one of the huts shows two men in their bunks in the foreground as one complains about the Red Cross. In the background, out of focus, the other men get on with daily tasks: one dries his hair sitting on one of the bunks while Evans and Corporal Horsfall (Jack Warner) sit at a table in the centre of the room, discussing the expected arrival of the Red Cross parcels. The film cuts to a medium close-up of the pair, privileging a closer view of everyday objects on the table, including mugs, Dai’s letter and Horsfall’s miniature toy boat. In the next shot, the camera pans across the room, following young Private Mathews (Jimmy Hanley) across from the window to his bunk. The way that a number of the men in the room obscure the camera’s view draws attention to the crowded conditions in the hut. As Mathews sits down with his head in his hands, a pair of boots in the foreground reinforces this observational mode of address and thus the film’s realist attention to the living conditions in the camp. The production and promotion of The Captive Heart indicates that this early interior scene can be read, first, as negotiating images of masculinity and the suburban beau ideal, and, second, as participating in a more specific engagement with domestic masculinity and wartime endurance. In terms of the first of these points, besides drawing attention to the

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observational mode of address in the aforementioned crowded interior, the room is also framed in a pictorial style, as a spectacle and thus as a sight to be preserved in the same distanced mode as in This Happy Breed. A static medium shot of the cramped room with the men around the central table is used repeatedly throughout the film to depict domestic life  and the sense of community in the camp. Michael Relph’s designs for the interior shots adhered closely to John Worsley’s illustrations for the book on which the film is based, Only Ghosts Can Live – Guy Morgan’s account of his experiences as a prisoner of war.119 The pictorial style of some of the interior shots in The Captive Heart closely resembles the domestic scenes portrayed in Worsley’s accompanying illustrations, which include rooms crowded with the men’s bunks, washing and the clutter of their everyday lives (Figure 21), glimpses of the men’s socked feet around the stove and an officer in uniform checking on the growth of his sunflower. Despite their focus on showcasing Morgan’s memories of his experience as a prisoner of war, Worsley’s illustrations reinforce a suburban construction of masculinity and the beau ideal which also influences some of his descriptions of camp life. In the chapter titled ‘Chintz and Tommy-Guns’, Morgan recalls the interior design of his pre-capture Italian summer residence with an eye to depicting a glamorous, aspirational culture: By no flight of the imagination could I have conjured up the vision of concealed neon lighting reflected by polished parquet flooring, of cocktail cabinets and built-in radio, Condé Nast décor, hot baths and soft pile towels, yes, even the inevitable bowl of huge white chrysanthemums straight out of Vogue and Good Housekeeping, copies of which lay on a glass-topped occasional table in a window alcove.120

This passage picks up on the ‘cocktail cabinets’ and the ‘built-in radio’, and the Moderne design of the interior comparable with glamorous worlds of Vogue and Good Housekeeping: part of a life before captivity but also a middle-class, suburban kind of domestic aspiration in line with ‘vernacular modernism’.121 Later passages focus on the domestic surroundings of the prison camp: in a number of Morgan’s descriptions, the central hut is labelled ominously as ‘the Room’ and is dealt with as a threatening, alien environment with an ‘utter lack of personality’.122 However, at other points, ‘the Room’ becomes imbued with a sense of familiarity, and even communal identity. One description notes the unique identity of the hut, with the suggestion that men from other rooms and huts

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The Room by John Worsley, Only Ghosts Can Live (1945)

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were ‘foreigners from another village’: ‘people who lived in other rooms in the main building were strangers, as though from other houses in a street, who knocked, stated their business, and entered with constraint unless invited’.123 For Morgan, the feeling of familiarity attached to ‘the Room’ is simultaneously noted as part of the shared identity of the camp, but also as indicative of an individual, private domesticity.124 Bearing these points in mind, a consideration of the film’s depiction of domestic life in the camp as an adaptation of the themes in the text and accompanying illustrations of Only Ghosts Can Live illuminates themes of aspiration, privacy and community central to the suburban beau ideal. Indeed, the pressbook for The Captive Heart repeated Morgan’s introduction to the script and reproduced some of Worsley’s illustrations to draw attention to the film’s visual style. The introduction described the Room as ‘our home, club, snug, refuge and retreat, the hub around which our lives revolved  […] as particular and distinct as Ivanhoe, San Remo and the Acacias in any street at home’, invoking an image of interwar, suburban modernity.125 On the other hand, the depiction of the men’s increasing domestication of the camp also engages with wartime experience.126 A number of passages in the shooting script detail the men’s struggle with the conditions in the camp. A direction for a sequence in which the men are confined to the huts by bad weather notes: ‘Hasek sits writing, and, as before, we hear his voice while CAMERA PROBES THE SCENE, emphasizing boredom and aimlessness’.127 Featuring scenes filmed on location at Marlag O, a prisonerof-war camp in Germany, the film’s authentic vision of the prisoner-of-war experience was noted in popular and critical responses to the film. Roger Manvell’s review suggests, for example, that it was ‘among the significant British films of recent years which have successfully interpreted the effect of the war on men’s lives and characters’, and Michael Balcon received a number of letters from former prisoners praising the film’s authenticity.128 The original synopsis for the film was submitted by Patrick Kirwan, who is described in a memorandum by Dearden as ‘full of the most amazing stories, having interviewed a great many of the repatriated prisoners’.129 A collaborative effort by Angus MacPhail and Guy Morgan influenced by these stories in addition to Morgan’s experiences, the shooting script detailed a process of ‘four psychological stages’ – disillusion, convalescence, boredom and, finally, homecoming – experienced by the prisoners while held captive.130 The attention to detail in the table scene described earlier conveys the feeling of disillusion prevalent in the camp before the arrival of

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Red Cross parcels, after which the men enter a convalescence period and are able to create a more homely environment. In the convalescence phase, one description of a recreation-hut scene set during Christmas 1940, immediately following the arrival of aid parcels, notes the increasingly domestic surroundings in terms of the men’s psychological wellbeing, as follows: Improvements in comfort are already noticeable in the room. The arrangements of chairs (home-made of Red Cross crates) round the stove, attempt the impression of a sitting-room. It is fairly crowded. At the far end Evans is conducting a small choir of men who are singing the Christmas hymn. Harley is playing at an old battered upright piano. The other men in the hut are all working away at various jobs which have been made possible by the arrival of Red Cross supplies. There are more evidences of personal comfort in the room and most of the men are making some little thing either for personal use or sentimental association.131

With these stages also detailed in the film’s pressbook, the everyday surroundings of ‘the Room’ were positioned as key to the film’s representation of the captives’ psychological process of adjustment to imprisonment. In keeping with Morgan’s memoir and in relation to the convalescent phase, the pressbook notes: ‘in this phase the things that weighed heaviest were the little things, the petty tyrannies of washing and mending clothes, bed-making, preparing meals, the hard-sitting, the continual scrape of hob-nailed boots on bare boards …’.132 Cinema managers were therefore advised to encourage audiences to understand its interior settings as central to the narrative: ‘I would like you to notice the Room scenes in this film. They were made in actual rooms in a camp in Germany and our lost years were lived in them.’133 These ‘actual rooms’ were thus positioned as indicative of the film’s realist exploration of the psychological adjustments of the prisoners of war, but also as emblematic of a communal, wartime experience and ‘our lost years’. Postwar domestic landscapes In negotiating interwar and wartime cultural imaginaries surrounding domestic masculinity, The Captive Heart’s strategy for showing the domestication of the prisoners also engaged with contemporary debates surrounding the return home in the immediate postwar period, when the film was released. This has been noted by a number of film historians:

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Raymond Durgnat, for example, proposes that The Captive Heart appears to ‘exemplify a transition stage […] P.O.W.s face the problems of readapting to civilian life’.134 John Orr’s analysis of a transition to peace as a ‘wider collective desire for post-war unity and for the healing of wounds’ suggests a more nuanced idea of transition in which past and future had to be reconciled.135 At this time, the images of home, garden and pastoral landscapes proliferated in magazines and advertisements, promoting a return to the peaceful conditions of the prewar home while also embodying ideals for the citizenship of the future, postwar world.136 In an advertisement for Berkeley’s easy chairs and settees, an illustration showing a relaxed wife sitting indoors as her husband waves from the garden and mows the lawn re-imagines the interwar past and reinforces the tagline: ‘Looking into a Bright Future’ (Figure 22).137 As such, domestic masculinity – whereby the ‘little man’ could once more be found in the

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Berkeley Easy Chairs and Settees advertisement, Picture Post (14 October 1944)

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garden – continued to feature prominently in the popular postwar reformulation of suburban modernity. Aside from idealised representations in advertisements, pastoral iconography provided an acceptable way of presenting domesticity and masculinity at a time when the return to the private home was also intensely problematic. The domestic sphere could potentially be a space closed off from the rest of society and characterised by self-interest. In an imagined letter to returning servicemen, popular spokesman for the middlebrow, J. B. Priestley, emphasised the place of the ‘citizen-soldier’ as a ‘modern’, ‘communal and co-operating man’,138 and he warned of the perils of returning to the prewar home, as follows: Don’t, I implore you, sink too deep, too far, into that famous English privacy. You feel at the moment that you can save your soul by bolting your door and then pottering or brooding in the most delicious seclusion [… spending …] the time carelessly, like Shakespeare’s folk in Arden, with your flower beds and bookshelves, your slippers and your armchair, your comfortable jokes and tunes on the wireless […] Beware again the charmed cosy circle. Don’t stay too long in the armchair – and be suspicious of all those publicity experts who tell you you need never move out of it – but get out and about, compel yourself to come to terms with strangers.139

Nevertheless, pastoral images in postwar culture continued to suggest the beau ideal connections between domesticity and shared community which were established in the interwar years, and reinforced in wartime. In The Captive Heart, the aesthetic appearance of scenes set in the prisoners’ camp and a number of the homes inhabited by their spouses and families back in Britain – depicted either in flashback or as part of the romantic narratives developed using letter-writing sequences – also construct images of a shared landscape. Drawing on visual tropes depicting domesticity in relation to rural landscapes in contemporary postwar culture, and following in the footsteps of Light, Giles and Rose, I suggest that scenes in the camp and on the ‘home front’ both engage with pastoral imagery in a way that reimagines interwar and wartime constructions of masculinity, community and home for postwar audiences. In the opening sequence of The Captive Heart, shots of the men’s long walk across an expansive and pastoral (often war-torn) landscape on their way to the camp are interwoven with documentary footage and with flashbacks to the homes of key characters in the troop. In the title sequence, a static shot shows the prisoners as they walk from the distance towards the

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camera, across a desolate landscape. Accompanied by a voiceover explaining their status as forgotten men, their ‘unbroken spirit’ and their journey across a ‘blazing, dusty dune’, this shot is marked by the expressionist style characteristic of other films made by director Basil Dearden, art director Michael Relph and cinematographer Douglas Slocombe (as also demonstrated in the previous chapter, in It Always Rains on Sunday). The contrast between the black silhouettes of their marching figures and the surrounding, lighter landscape constructs a pictorial image of the marching men. In a number of similar shots, the band of men is shown to be at the mercy of the landscape: the looming trees, expanse of grey clouds in the sky and the arid, dusty fields with which they are surrounded visually dwarf them in this series of shots. Stella Hockenhull identifies a similar chiaroscuro style in wartime information films, and suggests that this style indicates an engagement with ‘Romanticism’, invoking ideas of sublime landscapes in order to construct a sense of shared, national identity.140 In keeping with this interpretation, The Captive Heart’s pictorial landscapes convey the communal identity of the men as they struggle through their threatening, desolate environment. The men are then seen at close quarters as they struggle in the heat: one soldier (Dai Evans) collapses and is helped by two fellow captives. In a later shot, the same three are pictured: the characters of Horsfall, described in the shooting script as ‘the eternal, unconquerable, grumbling British soldier’ and Dai, his trusted friend, business partner and next-door neighbour, are introduced in a flashback to Horsfall’s prewar home.141 As Horsfall tosses an empty water bottle to one side in this exterior marching scene, the camera tracks in rapidly to a close-up of his grimy face and staring eyes, then dissolves to a flashback scene set in his home. A partial dissolve to the comfortable, prewar setting presents a close-up of the bottom of a pint glass as Horsfall tips it to drink. In contrast with the visually dramatic landscapes and the rows of marching men, this is an image of Horsfall’s private experience of home. The bottom of the glass fills the frame: the dark edges of the bottom of the glass contrast with Horsfall’s pale face in the background of the shot. In the narrative, Horsfall’s home is constructed as a comforting escape from the conditions of the march as it is then reinforced in a close-up of him licking his lips – at the thought of a beer in his home – in the film’s present. However, with the high-contrast lighting used here, the chiaroscuro aesthetic of the exterior marching scenes is also evoked with the image of the beer glass and domestic life: these interior scenes share

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some visual congruence with the images of wartime community presented by the march. Cutting back from the march to Horsfall’s home, the camera tracks back out from a medium close-up of him to a medium shot of his position in his cosy kitchen-living room as he, Dai and Dai’s wife, Dilys (Rachel Thomas), sit at the table and cheerily discuss the last war. The attention to detail in the traditional working-class décor of the Horsfalls’ kitchen-living room – including a tasselled cover for the mantel, a series of ornaments on the mantelpiece, a Welsh dresser neatly arranged with china plates and saucers and a tea table – reinforces Horsfall’s image of his home life as a privately treasured and comfortably ordered one (Figure 23). Again, in terms of the narrative, the bright lighting of the central table, the characters around it and the well-lit Welsh dresser and hearth in its immediate surroundings clearly contrast with the struggles of the men in the marching scene. Elements of the mise-en-scène, including the Union Jack flags tucked in behind the clock on the mantelpiece in the background and the framed paintings of rural scenery, convey connections between this comfortable home and the national landscape. Also, the pictorial framing of the scene and a looming, contrasting silhouette of a chair in the foreground against

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the bright background of the table can again be seen as sharing the aesthetic look of the landscape outside in the marching scenes. Rather than presented as a departure from the film’s depiction of a male community of prisoners, and thus as a stronghold of individual comforts and belonging to the film’s female characters, the prewar home is constructed as a bastion of privacy, but also serves as a visual reminder of the exterior landscape and related values of community emphasised in the wartime sequences. Chiaroscuro-style landscapes are similarly featured in the early interior scenes set in the camp. The increasingly domestic surroundings of the captives therefore are constructed in relation to their communal captivity and struggle against external conditions. For example, sequences signifying the narrative return to the camp repeatedly draw attention to the harsh conditions outside in the yard, with striking shots from behind looming silhouettes of searchlights and barbed wire, and landscapes of figures against the light background of the central yard. A later establishing shot of snow on the ground, tall barbed-wire fences, a threatening sign (‘Danger! There will be shooting without warning!’) and a guard walking past the huts utilises an expanse of grey sky and a length of wire fencing along the camp’s perimeter to create a striking chiaroscuro composition. In a scene set inside the huts, before the arrival of Red Cross parcels (in the period of ‘disillusion’ noted in the script), a medium shot of the room captures the men huddled around the stove in blankets, warming their hands.142 With the repeated announcement ‘Red Cross parcels are here!’, a number of shots of different rooms in the camp show the men excitedly running out of the huts to fetch the parcels, with the camera often dwelling inside these now empty rooms. In one shot, as the men cheer and run towards the door, the film cuts to a view of the empty table. While the shots of the men running out into the snow are characterised by a documentary aesthetic, the dwelling on the huts’ interiors emphasises a pictorial style, which simultaneously represents an extension of Horsfall’s prewar home and an engagement with the theme of wartime community. While these scenes address the development of domestic life in the camp in conjunction with the interwar home, the pictorial mode also engages with constructions of the beau ideal evident in postwar culture. For example, a year before the release of The Captive Heart, an article by Priestley in Picture Post titled ‘A Tribute to Britain’ was accompanied by expressionist-style photographs of natural, British landscapes, reinforcing the link Priestley draws between wartime community and the stable home

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life to which postwar readers could look forward. Photographs of Berkshire fields, wooded hills in Cornwall and the mountains of Snowdonia reinforce Priestley’s praise for the community forged under wartime circumstances in the ‘national epic of heroic effort, endurance and sacrifice’, presenting the idea that these are landscapes that could have been lost in the war, had it not been for this communal effort.143 In tandem with this rhetoric, Priestley suggests that ‘after victory we still want – and it is what we have always wanted – a steady and firmly rooted life, with plenty of fun and cosiness and a kind of domestic poetry inside it’.144 One photograph of a row of cottages captioned ‘an old grey Cotswold village which remains unchanged by time’, another of countryside with ‘the little homes and little fields of Devon’, indicate the preservation of a private community in the pastoral landscape.145 Expressionist landscapes in The Captive Heart similarly convey a nuanced postwar engagement with pastoral visions of community and domesticity. Indeed, as the camp becomes increasingly domesticated in the film, these pastoral images engage with domesticity in a way which chimes with the exploration of village life in magazine culture at the same time. In a style redolent of photo-essays in Picture Post, the late 1940s saw a number of photographic explorations of village life featuring in monthly magazines such as Ideal Home and Homes and Gardens. Evoking the beau ideal relationship between home and landscape, these included: ‘A Haunt of Ancient Loveliness’ in January 1945, ‘An English Village preserved’ in June 1945 and ‘In the Byways of England’ in August 1946.146 A number of these articles captured the unique, peculiar and varied everyday aspects of village life. In October 1946, ‘At the Sign of the Creaking Board’ describes the ‘varied and interesting … sometimes grimly so! […]origins of the quaint names and symbols that hang outside inns throughout the country’.147 Despite this conservative approach, these quaint aspects of the village are also emphasised as part of a modern conception of healthy living, which was in keeping with the influence of village communities and greens on postwar planning. In the same issue, an article announcing ‘THE REVIVAL OF VILLAGE LIFE’ ‘reports sound development, both planned and actual, along the lines of housing, craft, culture and a generally improved standard of living’.148 As aforementioned, in The Captive Heart, the relationship between life in the camp and rural visions of domesticity is constructed by shots of Celia’s home and her letters to Hasek. In one scene, Celia is shown writing

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in her drawing room, the camera tracking in to the desk, establishing a view of wild flowers in a vase, floral curtains on her left and out-of-focus furniture in the background, all part of a private world of home comforts. Following a pan across to the window and a dissolve, Celia introduces a number of shots depicting her home life. First her children and their grandfather pot up plants in the greenhouse, before a view of the village church and the children crossing the road is accompanied by her statement that ‘the village is the liveliest it’s ever been’; finally, a shot of the station master watering his plants at the local station is accompanied by the description: ‘everything’s changed and yet nothing’s changed’. Celia reiterates the traditional routines of the village – the 4.30 train is half an hour late ‘as usual’ and Mrs Trusket ‘still sells her toffee’ – with emphasis on the continuation of the past into the wartime present. This sequence captures images of England as demonstrative of a vision of home life, which was in keeping with the conservative modern style used in pictorial explorations of village life in Homes and Gardens. Following Celia’s descriptions of her rural community, the image of a village cricket match dissolves to a panning shot across the looming wire fence of the camp. A fielder skids into view to retrieve the ball and the camera pans to follow him back to the centre of the match being held in the dusty prison yard. The film cuts to Hasek’s gaze out of the window and, following a close-up of the photographs Celia has sent him, a point-of-view shot pans across the walls of the hut (with the other men’s photographs of loved ones pinned up) to the empty space above his own bunk. Following a close-up of Hasek pinning up the photographs, the other men enter the room after their cricket match. In contrast to the earlier chiaroscuro shot of the same hut, an establishing shot of the doorway shows them entering in their cricket gear. The prisoners’ cultivation of the camp and its increasingly homely aspects are made visually evident: the vase of flowers surrounded by books standing in the middle of the table is particularly emblematic of the increasing homeliness. As Hasek begins to read Celia’s letter aloud in this scene, the men appear united by their rapt attention to the pastoral images of England conjured by her descriptions: The apple trees are in full blossom already, making the orchard look like a sheet of fleecy snow, and Ten Acre Meadow is all white too because, this year, that’s where the ewes are pastured with their lambs. Soon the garden will be filled with the scent and colour of the May. Beyond the river, you can see the first vivid green of the larches in the bluebell wood.

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Evocative of Baldwin’s pastoral England, with this description the camera pans across the men’s faces in the room, taking in their cricket wear, sheets hanging up to dry in the background and the vase of flowers in the foreground.149 Like the scenes of Celia’s village life, the camera appears to dwell on the image of the men’s newly constructed domesticity and Hasek describes camp life so that she may ‘picture it’. The pictorial style of establishing shots of the interiors – and even a shot of Hasek composing a letter back to Celia, framed by a vase of flowers and pictures in the background in a reflection of Celia’s own position at a desk in front of an open window in her country home – visually links the male community’s cultivation of domesticity with the snapshots of village England. Adding nuance to Kirkham and Thumim’s account of masculinity in The Captive Heart, these static images and their emphasis on a pastoral stability create a sense of equilibrium which suggests that the film constructs a beau ideal characterised by the captives’ ‘temperate’ masculinity. A companionate ending

One unrealised ending of the film, as detailed in the shooting script, further establishes the relationship between Celia’s home and the men’s imagined home, and, purportedly, in the same pictorial style. The script describes: ‘in a series of shots, we see HASEK passing through the different parts of the village CELIA described in her letters. Mrs Truscott’s sweetshop, the village street. We see from the expression on his face that HASEK recognises everything he sees.’150 The script details a further sentimental scene in which Hasek accidentally meets one of Celia’s children, Janet, in her nursery and he tells her a story centred on his picture of home: And it was a magic house and a magic garden – come to life inside the snapshot … and then, suddenly, before the stranger’s eyes, it grew and grew until it was life-size. Celia outside bedroom door – the stranger felt himself closer, until at last he found himself there, inside the house, inside the magic snapshot …151

In the final sequence of the released film, Celia realises that Hasek has impersonated her husband. However, Hasek’s dream-images of home appear to act as a redemptive force in re-establishing the relationship that they had built through their letter writing. Hasek’s explanation that ‘I could see you at home with my own eyes, your home, the children,

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yourself’ chimes with the pictorial connections between community and home established throughout the film. Key to the establishment of their relationship as a ‘companionate’ one – an increasingly popular postwar concept of ‘marriage as “teamwork”’ and a partnership of equals which had roots in the interwar years – Celia’s trust in Hasek is revived by an elegiac image of the domestic community Hasek had constructed for her in his letter explaining the men’s ‘turninwards’.152 In the film’s final sequence, a montage of shots shows the captive men taking part in national victory parades accompanied by the ringing of the bells of St Paul’s. Following these scenes emphasising communal celebrations, a shot of Celia shows her re-reading the letters in order to re-imagine the beau ideal created by the men in the camp. The camera tracks in to a close-up of Celia’s face, which dissolves to a striking image of the now-broken gates of the prison camp silhouetted against the white sky, in a dramatic chiaroscuro style which, as I have noted in relation to a number of the film’s earlier scenes, emblematises the men’s wartime community. A series of dissolves to the empty tables of the camp cafeteria, the corridor and finally a panning shot of the bunks with the graffiti ‘Gone away – Address Blighty’, capture the camp as a series of pictorial images once more.153 In this scene, the remembered images of the now-abandoned spaces of the domestic and communal landscape inhabited by the men lead to Celia’s eventual decision to reconcile her romance with Hasek, and to rebuild a new, postwar home life with him. The way in which Celia uses the letters to remember, and thus shares in, the vision of the men’s lost domestic world suggests a final affirmative compromise between, on the one hand, private domestic life and, on the other, community as a re-imagining of the 1930s beau ideal developed throughout the war. As this chapter shows, the historical revision of ‘a slippage between the work of men “in the garden” and the work of women “making homes”’ throws light on this final re-formulation of the beau ideal in the postwar years.154 It supports and extends Kirkham and Thumim’s contention that ‘almost the entire cast of The Captive Heart collaborates to construct a “little England” in their German prisoner-of-war camp, a “little England” in which both masculine and feminine principles are in harmony’.155 In both prison camp and scenes back at home, pastoral images re-negotiate interwar visions of home, engage with wartime experience and reflect on the shift ‘from rivets – to privets’ and the postwar return to the home. In this way, contemporary problems surrounding the return of men

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to the home – as articulated in Priestley’s admonition to ‘beware again the cosy charmed circle’ – are addressed in the film’s construction of domesticity as a re-imagining of the relationship between domestic masculinity, pastoral landscapes and community from the interwar and war years.156 The pictorial mode of address used in the film’s evocation of both camp and home scenes as pastoral images therefore visually convey its ‘temperate’ compromise between the wartime worlds of men and women. Offscreen, such images also played an important role in the promotion of The Captive Heart’s stars. The film’s ‘companionate’ ending was complemented by the contemporary promotion of lead actors Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, whose ‘careers and private lives have been closely linked for ten years’.157 The onscreen image that reconciled Hasek and Celia was reinforced by promotional material emphasising Redgrave and Kempson’s companionate marriage, their home and pastoral images of their lifestyle in the mould of the beau ideal constructed throughout the film. Indeed, the pressbook for The Captive Heart stressed that Kempson was simply adding a film career to her roles on stage and as wife and mother, and an interview with Redgrave published in Picturegoer just before the release of the film ended with a note of longing for the privacy of the couple’s lives together with ‘three exuberantly healthy children’ and in ‘their lovely home’.158 In Ideal Home magazine in July 1946, Kempson and Redgrave’s companionate stardom was mapped even more explicitly as part of a pastoral version of modernity. A painting of their home, Bedford House in Chiswick Mall, appeared on the magazine’s cover, in an image reminiscent of the countryside, the pastoral watercolour and in the same style as Guy Lipscombe’s paintings: the bright colour cover imbues the Redgrave home with a sense of heritage as characteristic of a shared Englishness. Albeit in London, the large, red brick house with a Queen Anne terrace can be compared to the manor houses admired in Homes and Gardens with its nostalgic regard for quiet village life. In an accompanying article, Chiswick Mall evokes an image of the village landscape described by Celia in The Captive Heart: ‘for those of us who feel that the charm of London lies in its corners – those corners one turns to find some building of character hidden round the other side – Chiswick is probably a well-known haunt’.159 Besides its evocation of the beau ideal, the article also emphasises the immaculate and expansive Georgian interior design of Bedford House, which constructs an aspirational landscape in a traditional, English and highly luxurious style (Figure 24). The vision of Redgrave and Kempson’s

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Homes on Chiswick Mall, Ideal Home (July 1946)

stardom – in a pastoral idyll of home – held promise in stitching together the ideas of masculinity, domesticity and pastoralism for the postwar future. At the same time, this image indicates that the domestic Englishness that was central to The Captive Heart was also characteristic of the relationship between the British film industry and consumer culture in the 1940s.

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Notes 1 D. Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion, 1998), pp. 35–6; S. Hockenhull, Neo-Romantic Landscapes: An Aesthetic Approach to the Films of Powell and Pressburger (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), p. 3; B. Jones and R. Searle, ‘Humphrey Jennings, the Left and the Experience of Modernity’, History Workshop Journal 75 (2013), 191–212. 2 The shared pictorial aesthetic of these films was due to art designers Paul Sheriff and Carmen Dillon, as well as the matte paintings of W. Percy Day. Sarah Street and Sue Harper both highlight a close proximity between these ‘quality’ films and painting traditions: Harper specifically draws attention to the appearance of landscapes in Henry V as ‘there in order to look like paintings, to bear the signs of culture and to confer status on their consumers’, associating the film’s ‘consumers’ with a middlebrow sense of suburban aspiration. S. Harper, ‘The Ownership of Woods and Water: Landscapes in British Cinema 1930–1960’, in G. Harper and J. Rayner (eds) Cinema and Landscape: Film, Nation and Cultural Geography (Bristol: Intellect, 2010), pp. 147–60, at p. 154. 3 J. M. Richards, The Castles on the Ground: The Anatomy of Suburbia (London: John Murray, 1973, first pub. 1946), p. 22. 4 Ibid. 5 A. M. Edwards, The Design of Suburbia: A Critical Study in Environmental History (London: Pembridge, 1981), p. 129. 6 M. Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns: Social Change and Urban Dispersal in Post-War England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 35. 7 J. Lowerson, ‘Battles for the Countryside’, in F. Gloversmith (ed.) Class, Culture and Social Change: A New View of the 1930s (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980), pp. 258–80, at p. 260. 8 D. Sugg Ryan, Ideal Homes, 1918–1939: Domestic Design and Suburban Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), pp. 138–9. 9 H. Barrett and J. Phillips, Suburban Style: The British Home, 1840–1960 (London: Macdonald and Company, 1987), p. 15. 10 P. Oliver, I. Davis and I. Bentley, Dunroamin: The Suburban Semi and Its Enemies (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1981), pp. 77, 155. 11 Metro-Land booklet, Metropolitan Railway (1921), London Transport Museum, Ephemera Collection, 2004/2504. 12 Rural Cottages advertisement, Ideal Home (August 1937), p. xix. 13 Edwards, The Design of Suburbia, p. 130. 14 Ibid. 15 Georgina Downey suggests that ‘for the Romantic painters and poets, open windows were powerful symbols for the process of longing and yearning, and of the tension between freedom and societal constraints’. G. Downey, ‘Introduction’, in Domestic Interiors: Representing Homes from the Victorians to the Moderns (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 1–11, at p. 4.

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16 Hockenhull, Neo-Romantic Landscapes, pp. 2–3; D. Mellor, ‘The Body and the Land: Neo-Romantic Art and Culture’, in D. Mellor (ed.) A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain 1935–55 (London: Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd. in association with the Barbican Art Gallery, 1987), pp. 15–86, at p. 16. 17 ‘Frenchstreet End, Westerham, Kent’, Ideal Home (December 1937), pp. 458–9. 18 Matless, Landscape and Englishness, pp. 35–6. 19 T. Benton, The Modernist Home (London: V&A Publications, 2006), p. 30. 20 B. Highmore, The Great Indoors: At Home in the Modern House (London: Profile Books, 2014), pp. 46–7. 21 G. Harper and J. Rayner (eds) Cinema and Landscape: Film, Nation and Cultural Geography (Bristol: Intellect, 2010), pp. 13–28, at p. 18; M. Lefebvre, Landscape and Film (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. xi–xviii, at p. xviii. 22 E. S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), p. 24. 23 C. A. Lejeune, Chestnuts in Her Lap, 1936–1947 (London: Phoenix House, 1948, first pub. 1947), pp. 116–18. 24 The identification of the private sphere of home with a conception of nationhood in This Happy Breed has already been extensively mapped by A. Higson, ‘Re-constructing the Nation: This Happy Breed’, in W. W. Dixon (ed.) Re-Viewing British Cinema, 1900–1992: Essays and Interviews (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 67–81, at p. 68; A. Higson, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), pp. 247–9. 25 Harper and Rayner, Cinema and Landscape, p. 18. 26 Lefebvre, Landscape and Film, p. xviii. 27 Matless, Landscape and Englishness, pp. 35–6. 28 R. Neame, Straight from the Horse’s Mouth: Ronald Neame, an Autobiography (with Barbara Cooper) (Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2003), p. 77. 29 S. Street, Colour Films in Britain: The Negotiation of Innovation 1900–55 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, on behalf of the BFI, 2012), p. 92. 30 K. Brownlow, David Lean: A Biography (London: Richard Cohen, 1996), p. 172. 31 Street, Colour Films in Britain, p. 8. 32 Ibid., p. 32. William Friese-Greene to Claude, 5 May 1918 – Claude-Friese Greene papers, National Media Museum, Bradford quoted. 33 Ibid., p. 36. 34 Ibid., p. 40. For information on the technologies behind these processes, see S. Brown, ‘Technical Appendix’, in S. Street, Colour Films in Britain, pp. 269–72. 35 R. Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939–1949 (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 68, 70. 36 A. Higson, ‘Re-Constructing the Nation’, p. 67.

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37 J. Orr, Romantics and Modernists in British Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 65. 38 A. Higson, ‘Re-Constructing the Nation’, p. 67. 39 This comparison is noted by G. D. Phillips, Beyond the Epic: The Life and Films of David Lean (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), p. 70. 40 M. Lefebvre, ‘Between Setting and Landscape in Cinema’, in M. Lefebvre (ed.) Landscape and Film (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 19–60, at p. 48. 41 Lefebvre, Landscape and Film, p. xviii; ‘Between Setting and Landscape in Cinema’, p. 29. Harper and Rayner, Cinema and Landscape, p. 18. 42 R. Manvell, ‘Britain’s Self-Portraiture in Feature Films’, Geographical Magazine (August 1953), pp. 222–34, at p. 222. 43 J. Struther, Mrs. Miniver (London: Chatto & Windus, 1942, first pub. 1937), p. 20. 44 A. Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 8. 45 Ibid., p. 10. 46 The Joy of Design: Alluring Wallpaper Decorations of Refinement and Good Taste catalogue (1928), The Museum of the Home, Furniture catalogues collection, Box 17 43/1995–3. 47 Bast fireplaces advertisement, Ideal Home (March 1938), inside back cover. 48 H. Cox and S. Mowatt, Revolutions from Grub Street: A History of Magazine Publishing in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 55. 49 Woman magazine advertisement, Ideal Home (August 1937), inside back cover; C. L. White, Women’s Magazines 1693–1968 (London: Michael Joseph, 1970), p. 126. 50 ‘Could You Improve Your Home?’, My Home (January 1937), p. 41. 51 ‘A Room That Is Frankly Modern’, My Home (March 1937), p. 54. 52 Street, Colour Films in Britain, p. 93. 53 Sugg Ryan, Ideal Homes, p. 141. 54 M. C. Grant and F. Fox (collab.), The British Empire Exhibition Catalogue (London, 1924). D. Sugg Ryan, ‘The Empire at Home: The Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition and the Imperial Suburb’, in Imperial Cities Project, Working Paper No. 6 (Royal Holloway, University of London, 1997), p. 4. See Sugg Ryan’s most recent book, Ideal Homes, 1918–39: Domestic Design and Suburban Modernism, for an in-depth discussion of suburbia and empire. 55 L. Nead, The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-War Britain (London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2017), p. 147; Sarah Street states that the impact of the formation of the British Colour Council in 1930 on the British film industry ‘was more indirect than direct’. S. Street, ‘Cinema, Colour and the Festival of Britain, 1951’, Visual Culture in Britain 13:1 (2012), 83–99, at p. 85. 56 British Traditional Colours, souvenir in connection with the coronation of His Majesty King George VI and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth (London: British Colour Council, 1937).

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‘Decorate for the Coronation …’, Modern Home (May 1937), p. 37. ‘Coronation Colour Schemes’, Modern Home (May 1937), pp. 45–8. Ibid., pp. 45, 48. Coronation Colours, with a Few Colour Schemes for Interior Decoration, booklet sponsored by the British Colour Council Thomas Parsons & Sons (London: 1937), p. 1, The Museum of the Home, Furniture catalogues collection, Box 17 33/1989–2. Matless, Landscape and Englishness, p. 64. Matless also notes Odhams Press in this distinctive mode, who were behind the publication of Ideal Home magazine. Street, Colour Films in Britain, p. 5. C. B. Ford, England in Colour: A Short Survey of the English Landscape and Its Antiquities (London: B. T. Batsford, 1939, first pub. 1937), p. 114. Ibid. Ibid. pp. 113–14. E. Blunden, English Villages (London: William Collins, 1941). Gill Saunders, Recording Britain (London: V&A, 2011), p. 28. Adrian Bury, ‘Watercolour: The English Medium’, Apollo 19 (1934) quoted. For more detail on the Penguin Modern Painters series, see Hockenhull, NeoRomantic Landscapes, pp. 55–62, and C. Stephens, ‘Patron and Collector’, in C. Stephens and J-P. Stonard (eds) Kenneth Clark: Looking for Civilisation (London: Tate Publishing, 2014), pp. 79–100, at p. 99. S. Bone, ‘Visions of England’, New Statesman (24 September 1949) quoted in G. Saunders, Recording Britain (London: V&A, 2011), p. 8; Recording Britain Volumes I–IV, text by Arnold Palmer (London: Oxford University Press, in association with The Pilgrim Trust, 1946–49). Stephens, ‘Patron and Collector’, p. 97. Despite its title, ‘Recording Britain’ largely focused on England. Gill Saunders’ account of the scheme notes that Northern Ireland was not included, there were only seventy-six paintings of Wales (‘fewer than London’) and Scottish counties figured as part of a separate movement in ‘Recording Scotland’. Saunders suggests that ‘it might […] be seen as the visual equivalent of […] “condition of England” writing’. Saunders, Recording Britain, p. 9. A. Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010), p. 207. Higson, ‘Re-constructing the Nation’, p. 73. Neame, Straight from the Horse’s Mouth, p. 77. Street notes that ‘As World War II approaches and Queenie has left and been rejected by her mother, the colours of the film become more muted’. Street, Colour Films in Britain, p. 94. M. Williams, David Lean (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), p. 29. Saunders, Recording Britain, p. 9. ‘The Home You Hope to Have Sometime’, My Home (March 1943), p. 28.

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78 A. Spicer, Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), pp. 17–18. 79 A letter from the War Office to Michael Balcon in April 1945 suggests that The Captive Heart was released with the aim of coinciding with repatriation. R. W. Williams writes: ‘we are just as helpless as you in guessing when the war in Europe is going to be declared over officially, and all prisoners of war returned’. BFI Special Collections, Michael Balcon collection, Item G/73. 80 ‘Britain’ has been used specifically in this case as a Scotsman, Lieutenant David Lennox (Gordon Jackson), in the group of captives shows some attempt to represent regions beyond England. 81 P. Kirkham and J. Thumim, ‘Men at Work: Dearden and Gender’, in A.  Burton, T. O’Sullivan, and P. Wells (eds) Liberal Directions: Basil Dearden and Postwar British Film Culture (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1997), pp. 89–107, at p. 91. 82 Lefebvre, Landscape and Film, p. xviii. 83 L. Davidoff, J. L’esperance and H. Newby, ‘Landscape with Figures: Home and Community in English Society’, in J. Mitchell and A. Oakley (eds) The Rights and Wrongs of Women (Middlesex: Penguin, 1977), pp. 139–75, at pp. 145, 160. 84 The Captive Heart – small pressbook, BFI Reuben Library. Angus McPhail and Guy Morgan, The Captive Heart/Lovers’ Meeting – Third draft shooting script, p. 1, BFI Special Collections, Unpublished Scripts, S33. 85 Ibid. 86 Third draft shooting script, p. 76. 87 Matless, Landscape and Englishness, pp. 35–6. 88 Ibid., p. 67. 89 Ibid., pp. 35–6. 90 Third draft shooting script, p. 76. 91 Matless, Landscape and Englishness, pp. 35–6. 92 Higson, ‘Re-constructing the Nation’, p. 73. 93 Matless distinguishes between the ‘assertive’ modernist explorations of landscape endorsed by the preservationist movement in the 1920s and 1930s, and the ‘bucolic dreamings’ of ‘Conservative Englishness’ associated with suburban England, but this distinction appears slightly more blurred in The Captive Heart. Matless, Landscapes and Englishness, p. 36. 94 Kirkham and Thumim, ‘Men at Work’, p. 91. 95 Ibid., pp. 91, 106. 96 Ibid., p. 91. 97 Masculinity has been re-evaluated in relation to the middlebrow in K.  Macdonald, The Masculine Middlebrow, 1880–1950: What Mr Miniver Read (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 98 Lybro overalls advertisement, Picture Post (28 April 1945), p. 3. 99 Daily Express ‘The Home of Today’, quoted in G. Stevenson, The 1930s Home (Princes Risborough: Shire, 2000), p. 6.

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100 R. Cutforth, Later Than We Thought: A Portrait of the Thirties (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1976), p. 56. 101 Light, Forever England, p. 8. 102 Lowerson, ‘Battles for the Countryside’, p. 260. 103 Light, Forever England, p. 8. 104 S. Baldwin, On England: And Other Addresses (London: Philip Allan and Company, 1946, first pub. 1926), p. 7. 105 J. Giles, Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain, 1900–50 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p. 74. 106 Ibid., J. Burnett A Social History of Housing 1815–1985 (London: Methuen, 1986) quoted, pp. 73–4. 107 Matless, Landscape and Englishness, p. 36. 108 Giles, Women, Identity and Private Life, p. 75. 109 Ibid., p. 77. 110 S. O. Rose, ‘Temperate Heroes: Masculinity in Second World War Britain’, in S. Dudink, K. Haggeman, and J. Tosh (eds) Masculinity in Politics and War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 177–95, at pp. 181, 178. 111 Ibid., pp. 181, 179, 178. 112 Ibid., pp. 181, 177. See also: S. O. Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 151–96. 113 Rose, Which People’s War?, p. 152, A. Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991) referenced. 114 Matless, Landscape and Englishness, p. 30. 115 M. Brown and C. Harris, The Wartime House: Home Life in Wartime Britain, 1939–1945 (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2001), p. 34. 116 D. Smith, The Spade as Mighty as the Sword: The Story of the Second World War ‘Dig for Victory’ Campaign (London: Aurum, 2011), p. 142. 117 S. Cheveley, A Garden Goes to War (London: John Miles, 1940), p. 17. 118 Spicer, Typical Men, p. 17. 119 A. Burton and T. O’Sullivan, The Cinema of Basil Dearden and Michael Relph (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 38; G. Morgan, Only Ghosts Can Live (London: Crosby Lockwood & Son, 1945), p. 10. Worsley had been a prisoner at Marlag O with Guy Morgan, and was employed in an advisory capacity on The Captive Heart. J. Worsley and K. Giggal, John Worsley’s War (Shrewsbury: Airlife Publishing, 1993), p. 114. 120 Morgan, Only Ghosts Can Live, p. 26. 121 A. Kuhn, ‘Film Stars in 1930s Britain: A Case Study in Modernity and Femininity’, in T. Soila (ed.) Stellar Encounters: Stardom in Popular European Cinema (New Barnet: John Libbey Publishing, 2009), pp. 180–94, at p. 191. Miriam Hansen, ‘The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism’, Modernism/Modernity 6:2 (1999), pp. 59–77, at p. 60. Deborah Sugg Ryan explains that ‘Moderne’ was a contemporary term

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‘for what now falls under the umbrella term of Art Deco’. D. Sugg Ryan, Ideal Homes, 1918–1939: Domestic Design and Suburban Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), p. 68. Morgan, Only Ghosts Can Live, p. 65. Ibid., pp. 67, 65–7. Ibid., p. 67. The Captive Heart – small pressbook, Guy Morgan quoted. A number of film historians have specifically noted The Captive Heart’s place as ‘a “wartime” film’, including notably Spicer, Typical Men, p. 83. Third draft shooting script, p. 84. R. Manvell, ‘Recent Films’, Britain To-day (June 1946), p. 21, BFI Reuben Library, press cuttings file. Letters from a former prisoner of war and The Returned Prisoners of War Association in Special Collections at the BFI, Michael Balcon collection, Item G/73. ‘Notes on the beginnings of The Captive Heart’, Memorandum from Stella Jonchkere and George Canham (30 January 1948), BFI Special Collections, Michael Balcon Collection, Item G/27. Rodney Ackland, James Hanley, George Foa and Ted Willis were also recorded as contributing writers in Memorandum from Stella Jonchkere and George Canham (30 January 1948), BFI Special Collections, Michael Balcon Collection, Item G/27. Third draft shooting script. The Captive Heart – small pressbook. Ibid. Although the hut interiors were promoted as ‘real rooms’ in Germany, Alan Burton and Tim O’Sullivan indicate that they were constructed sets in a studio and only exteriors were shot on location. Burton and O’Sullivan, The Cinema of Basil Dearden and Michael Relph, p. 38. R. Durgnat, A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence (London: Palgrave Macmillan on behalf of the BFI, 2011, first pub. 1970), p. 244. Orr, Romantics and Modernists, p. 31. Horlicks advertisement, Picture Post (14 September 1946), p. 3. Berkeley easy chairs and settees advertisement, Picture Post (14 October 1944), p. 26. J. B. Priestley, Letter to a Returning Serviceman (London: Home & Van Thal Ltd, 1945), pp. 3, 25. Ibid., p. 30. S. Hockenhull, ‘Peas, Parsnips and Patriotism: Romantic Images of the Landscape in the Dig For Victory Campaign’ (Conference Paper delivered at Screen Studies Conference, Glasgow, 2014), n.p. Third draft shooting script, p. 2. Ibid., p. 1. J. B. Priestley, ‘A Tribute to Britain’, Picture Post (28 April 1945), p. 15. Ibid., p. 16.

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145 Ibid., p. 15. 146 B. Edwards, ‘A Haunt of Ancient Loveliness’, Homes and Gardens (January 1945), p. 25; R. R. Philips, ‘An English Village Preserved’, Homes and Gardens (June 1945), pp. 20–1; ‘In the Byways of England’, Homes and Gardens (August 1946), pp. 29–31. 147 M. Lovett Turner, ‘At the Sign of the Creaking Board’, Homes and Gardens (October 1946), p. 40. 148 W. M. Commer, ‘The Revival of Village Life’, Homes and Gardens (October 1946), p. 33. 149 Indeed, Baldwin’s 1924 speech was re-published in 1946 as part of a trend for interwar memorabilia. 150 Third draft shooting script, p. 124. 151 Ibid. 152 J. Finch and P. Summerfield, ‘Social Reconstruction and the Emergence of the Companionate Marriage, 1945–59’, in D. Clark (ed.) Marriage, Domestic Life and Social Change (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 6–28, at p. 7. 153 This was a style of eulogising the spaces of wartime community also evidenced in The Way to the Stars (d. Anthony Asquith, 1945), in which an opening tracking shot captures the empty spaces of an RAF hut and the individual markers of each of the characters’ lives within it. 154 Giles, Women, Identity and Private Life, p. 78, S. Baldwin, On England (London: Phillip Allan (1926) quoted. 155 Kirkham and Thumim, ‘Men at Work’, p. 91. 156 Priestley, Letter to a Returning Serviceman, p. 30. 157 J. K. Newnham, ‘They Knew What They Wanted’, Picturegoer (16 March 1946), p. 6. 158 The Captive Heart – small pressbook; J. K. Newnham, ‘They Knew What They Wanted’, Picturegoer (16 March 1946), p. 7. 159 J. Heal, ‘Homes on Chiswick Mall’, Ideal Home (July 1946), p. 28.

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Dream palaces: transforming the domestic interior

I

n the face of continuing postwar austerity measures, glamorous homes in British films offered cinema audiences an escape from everyday life. In A Man About the House (d. Leslie Arliss, 1947) two sisters in charge of a failing school in North Bromwich are forced to sell furniture to make ends meet, but inherit a villa in Naples and experience a wholly exotic life therein. Period drama The Courtneys of Curzon Street (d. Herbert Wilcox, 1947) features grand marble hallways and echoing ballrooms, through which Irish maid Kate O’Halloran (Anna Neagle) sweeps with elegant ease in a story centring on inter-class marriage and upwards mobility. In The Passionate Friends (d. David Lean, 1949), while protagonist Mary Justin (Ann Todd) faces a seeming lack of affection in her marriage, her upperclass lifestyle is defined by material comforts – an aeroplane journey, a society ball and the luxurious interiors of her married home. In contrast with the realist style of ‘quality’ films preferred by critics, and often associated with the themes of romantic desire and feminine subjectivity in ‘women’s films’, these films endowed domestic life with transformative possibilities and opportunities for ‘escape, escape, escape’.1 Visually conveying such offers of domestic transformation, expansive Georgian marble-lined hallways, elaborate cornicing and elegant antique furnishings feature in many postwar films. ‘Mythical Georgian’ period interiors offered aspirational landscapes – befitting ‘modern standards of taste and leisure’ and rivalling Hollywood interiors, while also projecting ideas of nationhood, heritage and decorum – indeed ‘prized precisely for […] aloofness from modern life’ and instead for ‘elegance, civility and grandeur’.2 As this chapter explores, the nascent consumer culture surrounding domestic, suburban modernity in the 1930s demonstrated a comparable tension – caught between promoting the home as an escapist spectacle and celebrating

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conservative ideals of historical tradition, stability and Englishness. By attending to the growing consumerism surrounding domestic life in this earlier period, I resituate postwar aspirational interiors  – ‘dream palaces’ onscreen – as engaging with interwar structures of feeling that negotiated the possibilities of escapism with middle-class restraint. Escapism and restraint As evidenced by magazine articles and advertisements focused on interior decoration and home improvements discussed in other chapters in this book, consumer culture played a central role in constructing suburbia as  modern. Helena Barrett and John Phillips describe how ‘by the early years of the twentieth century, manufacturers and retailers were taking an active role in the creation of a fashionable suburban home. Glossy catalogues illustrating their wares were produced, and department and furniture stores displayed their products in room settings to inspire their customers.’3 Hollywood Moderne-style furnishings – inspired by the interior designs of Frank Lloyd Wright and others – influenced these displays, catalogues and the homes themselves. J. B. Priestley’s English Journey describes the suburbs as a landscape of ‘giant cinemas and dance-halls and cafés, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars’.4 Drawing on English Journey, Annette Kuhn describes how The nexus suburbanisation/vernacular modernism condenses a new petitbourgeois leisure ethic, a ‘middlebrow’ set of tastes and a proto-consumerism, and allies these with material objects and associated lifestyles (the chrome and the Bakelite and the cocktail cabinets of Priestley’s and Light’s accounts). These objects are in turn associated with a particular design aesthetic: the appropriation and democratisation of modernism in the style known as Art Deco ‘moderne’.5

Moderne fittings and furnishings all served to reconstruct popular Hollywood visions of modernity in lower-middle-class homes. However, suburban tastes were not limited to this shiny brand of Hollywoodinfluenced modernity, its sleek, streamlined Moderne styles epitomised by chromium bars, cocktail cabinets and deco statuettes. Suburban culture in Britain did not wholeheartedly indulge in this valorisation of Hollywood glamour and escape: it was widely seen as vulgar, un-English and associated with open consumption. Instead, the consumerist transformation of domestic life was part of a ‘specifically British or English version […] of

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commerce and culture’, tempered by an emphasis on historical tradition and Englishness.6 Mary and Neville Ward note that a ‘fusion of modern living with Tudor symbols’ was a key aspect of the suburban home’s typical interior, suggesting that while some families struggled to maintain a consistency of style (at least within each room if not throughout the building), others enjoyed a touch of modernity in the wireless on the Jacobean style sideboard, or the softening influence of simulated candles, parchment shaded, at either side of the latest ‘modernist’ bed […] Never mind. Ancient or modern, plain or fancy, luxurious or austere; home is an affair of the heart.7

Further illuminating the contradictory nature of suburban design, Deborah Sugg Ryan suggests that ‘suburbanites tended to look backwards to a romanticised hybrid Old English or Jacobethan tradition in the dining room, the sitting room, or the parlour, and also forwards to Hollywood Moderne glamour, most often in the bedroom’.8 Images of domestic life – and with them the dreams of consumer possibility – were presented with an eye to these combinations and as part of a peculiar suburban modernity. For example, catering ‘mainly for the emerging lower-middle-class’, the highly popular Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition promoted new technologies and furnishings in the home.9 The exhibition constructed images of an idealised, aspirational domestic life and the offer of transformation, which were in keeping with the escapist experience of the Grand Hall at Kensington’s Olympia. However, the displays on offer at Olympia were also characterised by an emphasis on traditional, historical aspects of domesticity and national identity. An advertisement for the exhibition in a 1938 issue of Ideal Home reinforced its reputation for escapism with exclamations over ‘London’s most lustrous Spectacle! Sparkling with new ideas! Thrilling in its radiant loveliness! – More Brilliant than ever before!’ The text goes on to describe the thrilling, immersive experience that visitors could expect: ‘London calls you to Olympia. Calls you to the most enchanting, most talked-of spectacle in Town … to the vast fairy City of Glass radiantly lovely in colour and light …’10 This was accompanied by an artist’s illustration of the glass house, surrounded by onlookers, at the entrance of Olympia from Addison Road. The line drawing emphasises the gleaming spectacle of light falling on the surfaces of the house: a review in the same issue uses the same illustration alongside floor maps of the rooms in the house and a detailed

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description of all the sights and the materials used in its construction. In doing so, the review provides a glimpse of the immersive experience of ‘The Glass Age’ offered by this particular exhibit.11 Meanwhile, displays such as ‘The Story of the English Room’ in 1936 and ‘Period and Modern Furniture’ in 1939 celebrated the historical traditions of the English home and lent a sense of national restraint to the images of magical consumer possibility promoted and presented elsewhere at the exhibition itself. Film culture also played an important role in this restrained, English form of consumerism. Hollywood stars continued to be promoted in relation to Moderne interiors, including white dressing tables and modern telephones, but also featured alongside the quasi-historical, romanticised designs of country mansions. For instance, a 1937 Smarts Brothers furniture catalogue presented Carole Lombard alongside a Tudor-style living room, complete with wooden beams, candles in wall brackets on the walls, leaded windows, Aubusson-style rugs and antique furnishings.12 Likewise, furniture advertisements shown at the cinema reinforced a relationship between the aspirational spaces onscreen and the restrained, traditional possibilities offered by consumer escapism. In 1939, slides for Moore and Sons decorators to be shown at the cinema encouraged audiences to ‘Be up-to-date, Re-decorate’.13 These were accompanied by photographs of Moderne furnishings, which had come to embody the ‘vernacular modernism’ of the suburban home. However, the slides also emphasised a more conservative, historical style, using a medieval-style letterplate. While the consumer images of domestic life surrounding middle-class suburbia were clearly influenced by the Hollywood iconography described in Priestley’s account, they additionally suggest a more nuanced engagement with Englishness and a conservative sense of the past. Peter Mandler suggests that ‘a repudiation of spectacle and display was […] central to dominant conceptions of Britishness in the 1940s’, but by the restoration of consumer society in the 1950s, ‘modernity was now defined not in terms of rationality and restraint, but in terms of immediacy, impact and sensation’.14 Following the wartime success of  realist cinema, a number of popular British films in the immediate postwar years were marked by a transition to a style emphasising the comforts of consumerism and the offer of transformation which had made Hollywood films so successful and also so culturally invasive. In the following sections, I explore how two such films – Spring in Park Lane (d. Herbert Wilcox, 1948) and The Glass Mountain (d. Henry Cass, 1949) – offered visions of domestic transformation by constructing a particular spatial experience

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and by conveying aspirational images of British stars. By focusing on these constructions of domestic life as in keeping with a particular, tamed form of escapism suited to middle-class audiences, these two films are analysed as re-imagining a suburban vision of modernity for the postwar period. Spring in Park Lane

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Herbert Wilcox’s cycle of 1940s films known as his ‘London Series’ charts the spaces of domestic life as part of an upper-class landscape based predominantly in London’s West End. Spring in Park Lane is a comedy about an aristocrat, Richard (Michael Wilding), posing as a footman and his romance with Judy (Anna Neagle), the secretary and niece of a diamond merchant. The film’s domestic scenes mark a departure from those in the films considered so far; its upper-class setting – conveyed by the luxurious mise-en-scène of the Georgian-style townhouse belonging to Judy’s uncle, complete with ‘palatial’ hallway, dining rooms, a ballroom and terrace – offered onscreen spaces for escape and entertainment.15 This was extremely popular with audiences and Spring in Park Lane was the most successful film at the British box office in 1948, with an estimated audience of 20.5 million in one week.16 In the film’s opening sequence, following a series of shots of slowmoving traffic, wandering pedestrians, parks, fountains and statues in Wilcox’s clean, bright London, Richard and Judy are introduced in the grand central setting for the film, Uncle Joshua’s mansion. Unaware that a new footman has been hired and expecting to find Perkins the butler (G. H. Mulcaster) at the door, Judy is surprised by Richard’s answer to the doorbell. The camera tracks forward slightly and pans to follow her into the hallway. It comes to a halt as they make light-hearted conversation in the centre of a large, elegant room in the style of a public atrium or hotel lobby. A medium shot frames them against the extravagant though refined design of the interior, which includes a blossom-covered pillar and the white balustrade of the stairs curling round a corner and upwards into the house beyond (Figure 25). A later shot which tracks the pair as they cross the hallway suggests an exploration of space and mobility in the home. The focus on movement continues the spirit of the film’s preliminary views of London with the opening credits, in which a panning shot captures the traffic and people strolling along pavements evoke the mobility permissible on the streets and in the city outside, in a mode associated with modernity.

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Spring in Park Lane

The topographical exploration of the interior evokes the smooth, dwelling camera movement and capturing of domestic space also constructed by the opening sequence of This Happy Breed, and even through the gardens in The Captive Heart. However, rather than suggesting an observational view evocative of community as in these films, the ‘intimate relation with space’, as noted by Mary Ann Doane in her account of Hollywood film and consumption in the 1940s, is suggestive of a ‘consumer glance’.17 Here the movement of the camera into and through the domestic space – which is framed as an elegant topos distant from everyday life in the home, and closely connected with the movement of the film’s characters – conveys a treatment of space in tune with consumer aspirations. Indeed, Ross McKibbin classifies the London Series as ‘like the Hollywood glamour films, “women’s films”; but of women as consumers and home-builders, proponents of the long-delayed good life’.18 The movement of Richard and Judy through the space of the hallway draws the viewer into a space for the dreams and possibilities of consumer transformation. Further to this sense of mobility, in the opening scenes of traffic, the static position of the camera as it pans across the scene, and the dreamy sounds of a harp and strings, creating a light-hearted, romantic tone,

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also conveys a more restrained sense of spectacle. The initial pan into the hallway and the static framing of Richard and Judy emphasises the motionless spectacle of the immaculate interior behind them. On one hand, the visible series of staircases in the background is a reminder of, as architect and designer Edwin Heathcote puts it, ‘an ascent into a higher realm’ and, as described by Ben Highmore, ‘the expectation that going upstairs should take us to a private realm of dreams and desire’.19 Indeed, the grand, sweeping staircase in the background of this interior set presents a visual reminder of the promise of escape, mobility and imaginary transformations engendered in various accounts of traversing the staircase at the cinema. On the other hand, this still image of the domestic interior, with the dramatic architecture of the staircases as the dominant focus, conveys a more pictorial mode evocative of a sense of restraint and the rigidly accepted English social mores like the butler’s hat (‘Perkins, while that hat is where it is, England is England still’), divisions between upstairs and downstairs, honey at tea time and growing lettuces on country estates which otherwise characterise Spring in Park Lane. The framing of the spaces and the setting of the hallway in the opening sequence therefore evokes two modes of address – topography and spectacle, movement and stasis – which suggests the escapist possibilities constructed by film and conspicuous consumption, though with a sense of restraint indicative of the maintenance of the status quo. The way in which domestic life is framed to convey both an escapist, entertaining experience of space and a restrained spectacle was characteristic of Spring in Park Lane’s middlebrow status. An adaptation of a 1919 novel, Come Out of the Kitchen! by Alice Duer Miller and a remake of the earlier film version, Come Out of the Pantry (d. Jack Raymond, 1935), the film follows in the footsteps of light-hearted entertainments beginning just after the First World War and encouraged by Wilcox in roles as both producer and director. In 1949, Picture Post would note these origins, stating: ‘Anna has replaced the sixpenny novelette on the bookstall, and, to do her justice, made it a thousand times better.’20 A number of reviews were similarly equivocal: often accepting the frothy London Series as ‘pure box-office’ but not as demonstrating ‘any pretension to film craft’ or a contribution to the art of filmmaking.21 According to a Sunday Pictorial review, ‘this is a honey of a light, polished, froth-and-bubble comedy […] and exactly what thousands of fans have asked for’.22 In the Daily Express, Leonard Mosley wrote:

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They make films that are a million miles out of touch with reality. Their plots are daft. You know before the first credit titles fade that everything is going to come out nice and pink and happy in the end. Bless them for it. They are the soft lights and sweet music in a dark and jangling world.23

This assessment of Wilcox’s films as crowd-pleasers boasting high production values and star performances but low cultural value presents a compromise for the ‘serious-minded’ critical press.24 As part of the resuscitation of this popular series within the canon of British film studies, these films have been similarly cast in a ‘middle’ position. For example, Sue Harper argues that Wilcox’s postwar films suggested that ‘middle-class insecurity could be assuaged by making a minor settlement with the new ways’.25 Responses like these have drawn attention to the works’ middlebrow appeal, situating the London Series between a propensity for escapism and modernity, an imagined past and a reinforcement of a strictly class-structured status quo ‘of residual class and gender values’.26 In the same vein, Josephine Dolan resituates the London Series alongside new forms of ‘conspicuous consumption’ as acceptable, English and functioning within a model of conservative modernity retained from the interwar years.27 Dolan notes the spatial organisation of Wilcox’s later Maytime in Mayfair (1949) as illustrative of this interwar engagement with consumer culture, though also as indicative of an experience of utopian escape offered by contemporary exhibitions in the postwar years, including the 1946 Britain Can Make It exhibition and the Festival of Britain. Dolan describes how the ‘environmental organisation’ of such exhibitions ‘positioned the visitor to both inhabit and observe spatial relations’, suggesting that ‘the film set, and audience encounter with the screen, echoes the exhibition space (and vice versa)’.28 Expanding on this line of research, I contend that Spring in Park Lane’s treatment of domestic life – as both a topography of spaces and a spectacle – engages with the representation of an acceptable, conservative consumer culture surrounding the home that was showcased by the Ideal Home Exhibition from the late 1930s and into the postwar years. Displays at the exhibition held annually at London’s Olympia presented a range of mod-cons and other domestic technological developments, while also reinforcing a conservative sense of tradition, national identity and stability emblematised by the exhibition’s motto from King George V: ‘the foundations of the National Glory are set in the Homes of the People’.29 From the mid-1930s, the exhibition included displays dedicated to British

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film. The ‘magic’ spaces of British films – a term used at the 1948 exhibition to construct a relationship between the material world of home and the immaterial escape offered by the worlds on the cinema screen – were directly involved in the exhibition’s negotiation of escapism and restraint.30 This consideration of the Ideal Home Exhibition contextualises Dolan’s reading of space, modernity and consumer culture in the London Series specifically in relation to key developments in consumer culture and the representation of domestic life and escapism in the 1930s and also adds the offscreen relationship between ‘magic’ spaces of film and the home to current readings of Spring in Park Lane. By attending to the topographies of wider culture in the exhibition’s promotion of the home, the film can be productively re-interpreted in relation to two cultural aspects: the developing relationship between consumerism and film in the years before the Second World War, and the recurring trope of the ‘magic’ space both onscreen and off. The Ideal Home Exhibition

Inaugurated in 1908, the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition showcased domestic furnishings and interior decorations, and provided opportunities to buy them. In the 1930s, the show included scale reproductions of houses as part of a ‘Village of Ideal Homes’ which allowed visitors, who were largely from an aspirational lower-middle-class background, to experience utopian versions of their own homes.31 In 1939, for instance, the exhibition boasted twelve acres of pavilions, offering ‘all that you might need to fill and embellish the home of your desire’.32 Visitors were urged to ‘note the details of a subtly charming colour-scheme, or discover a new form in furniture’.33 The exhibition was reinstated in 1947 to great popular acclaim, with an attendance of over seventy-six thousand people on a single Saturday.34 Although the first postwar exhibition was limited by austerity conditions and displayed a relatively modest ‘Village of Beginning Again’ made up of pre-fabricated homes, by 1948 it once more allowed visitors to move through a landscape of model homes with mod-cons, technological innovations and manicured gardens. As well as providing aspirational visions of the modern home, in keeping with ideas of middle-class taste and a nationally embedded tradition of home-making, the Ideal Home Exhibition was constructed as an experience which was distinct from the domestic: as a utopia, it was presented as

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distanced from the quotidian and the everyday. The topography of spaces at the exhibition accordingly constructed a ‘heterotopia’, ‘capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’.35 This ‘aspirational world’ was ‘far enough removed to be spectacular, yet close enough to be attainable’.36 Its negotiation of ‘other’ spaces that resembled those of the everyday home constructed an experience of a tempered, suburban modernity. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the exhibition offered both a backwards-looking celebration of tradition, Englishness and restraint and also a more progressive emphasis on the future home, innovations in light and glass, and modernist designs, constructing an experience of tempered ‘conservative modernity’ suitable for an audience of suburban homeowners and potential homeowners.37 The transformative possibilities of consumer culture thus retained a conservative and particularly English character. From 1930, the experience of the exhibition as a series of topographical spaces was underscored by the catalogue given to visitors, which included a fold-out map of the halls they could explore. The organisation of the exhibits in the hall, dramatic lighting schemes, decorations and archways made clear that this was a space into which visitors were fully involved and engrossed in their exploration of this ‘other’ topos, at least in its idealistic representations. With an emphasis on spectacle, a number of exhibits promised an experience of ‘other’ space, which nonetheless linked closely with innovations in the modern home. For example, in 1932 the ‘City of Light’ demonstrated innovations in electricity and the ‘Rainbow City’ was a space for instruction on ‘Ideal Dinner Parties’. After the mid-1930s, this construction of space began to be influenced by a shift in popular perceptions of cinemagoing. Sugg Ryan argues that the exhibitions built on ‘established forms of entertainment’ and cites cinema as a key influence in the earlier years of the twentieth century.38 Previously considered as the sphere of young, ‘silly’ working-class girls, during the 1930s cinema was fast becoming embedded in acceptable notions of middle-class identity and incorporated into the ‘suburban modernity’ promoted in magazine culture and at the exhibition.39 The new supercinemas of the late 1930s were ‘luxurious, spacious, modern picture palaces […] associated with treats and special occasions and remembered as in every way a far cry from home’.40 Kuhn’s ethnographic study of cinemagoing in the 1930s notes that ‘cinemas, as physical spaces – as places – embody all these qualities of liminality and heterogeneity: they are very much part of a built environment, and yet

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they conjoin the mundanity and materiality of bricks and mortar with the worlds of fantasy and imagination’.41 This proposition draws attention to the heterotopic collision between the domestic and the magic spaces of the cinema building itself and the cinema screen. In a movement that mirrored the heterotopic experience of cinemagoing, the 1936 Ideal Home Exhibition was planned more than ever to be an ‘other’ space into which visitors could escape from the mundanities of the domestic everyday: The Tatler described it as ‘A New Wonderland for Home-Lovers’.42 In the catalogue, the main hall of Olympia was referred to as the ‘Grand Hall’ and its usual ‘Furnishing Section’ was renamed ‘The City of Beautiful Night’.43 A map was provided to help visitors to navigate this ‘city’ and was depicted in magazine reviews as a spectacular, futuristic metropolis of towers and walkways evoking the modernist cityscapes in the contemporary British film Things to Come (d. William Cameron Menzies, 1936).44 While showcasing connections with this architecture on the screen, the immersive spectacle offered by the ‘city’ also closely resembles the topographical experience of visiting a ‘supercinema’, as described by an informant in Kuhn’s study: To go to the Astoria was like going to a wonderland. One passed from the ticket office into the foyer which had a marble type floor and in the centre was a fountain and I think there may also have been fish […] The décor was Moorish. Overhead one could see what appeared to be a night sky with stars twinkling.45

Offering a similar experience, the 1936 exhibition catalogue’s foreword suggests to visitors that they Consider the City of Beautiful Night with its star-spangled velvety evening sky, its graceful buildings, its almost ethereal atmosphere – a scenic triumph created, only after months of thought and experiment, from a vast empty hall in a fortnight!46

These hyperbolic descriptions draw attention to the exhibition’s transformation of the hall. On one hand, the installation of luxurious materials used to create a night-time effect on the ceiling – including 24,000 yards of Lancashire velveteen – was described in order to highlight the process of the exhibition’s construction, thus drawing comparisons with the building of visitors’ ideal homes. On the other hand, the dramatic effect of the night sky described reinforces magical, ‘other’ qualities as a departure from material concerns. Further to this, the catalogue suggests to visitors that – in

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pavilions situated within this ‘other’ City of Beautiful Night – ‘you will see and buy the lovely goods of the actual world of to-day and to-morrow’.47 The ephemerality offered by the dream spaces of the exhibition hall was presented as both in keeping with the ‘lovely goods’ promoted as part of an attainable vision of the home and constructed as an ‘other’ space into which visitors could escape. Its conjunction of magic, escapist experience with the domestic was embodied in an artist’s impression of the expansive ‘City of Beautiful Night’ surrounded by photographs of the domestic delights on offer: gas stoves, paved garden walkways, brick fireplaces and living-room furniture.48 The 1936 exhibition catalogue describes the ‘remarkable effects’ provided by the Grand Hall, directing visitors as follows: Wander back into the floor of the Hall, noting the surprising visits, the sudden beauties. You will glimpse and hurry to admire the large clock made of Spring flowers on the floor in the Court of Furniture; see the Marionette theatre which closes the main avenue at the end of the Colonnade of Light. You will hear music relayed from a dozen loud speakers, none of which you will be able to see.49

While it is evident that the relationship between domestic and dream space was part of a mobile experience for the visitors, the spectacle presented by these different hallway designs also presented an opportunity for them to stand and stare at magical other worlds. With the aid of innovative lighting schemes, a sense of immersive stasis was constructed in the midst of the busy exhibition hall. This intention was emphasised by a number of artists’ impressions of the exhibition, but also in advertisements. In one advertisement for E.S.S. Signs a central illustration – which shows an idealised view of the hall with no bustling crowds – features a number of faceless figures as they wander towards the archway in awe. In 1936, along with the transformation of the Grand Hall into the ‘City of Beautiful Night’, the Ideal Home Exhibition began to feature displays supported by, and about, the British film industry. Referencing the homes featured elsewhere in the exhibition, reconstructions of set designs from new and forthcoming films and stars’ homes reflected the experience of topography, immersion and spectacle of the wider space of the Grand Hall by similarly presenting the spaces of British film as ‘other’. For example, in 1936, alongside a ‘Homes of the Film Stars’ display, an exhibit titled ‘The Shape of Things to Come: A Panorama of Furniture’ displayed

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furniture of the past, the present and future across three centuries. Ten modern furnishing schemes were inspired by futuristic designs featured in Things to Come.50 Adapted in the displays, these predictions included air-conditioned homes without artificial light or heating, rational furniture arranged for utility and newly invented materials, and buttons enabling the delivery of meals and activating radio and television communications.51 Like the ‘Village of the Ideal Homes’ and the ‘lovely goods’ offered in the pavilions, the ‘Shape of Things to Come’ display was anchored in a recreation of the consumer home.52 It was advertised as having been furnished by Gooch’s of Knightsbridge (as were the interiors of its stars in the ‘Homes of the Film Stars’ display), and included a free catalogue featuring the furnishings on show and directions to the Gooch’s stand where visitors could buy them. Visitors could obtain futuristic furniture as well as more traditional designs for their homes from Gooch’s, thus satisfying the combination of modernist designs with traditional ones in suburban homes. Seemingly paradoxical, this simultaneously fulfilled a desire of cinema audiences to inhabit the outlandish worlds of fiction film as an escape from the mundanities of everyday domesticity and satisfied concerns with furnishing the home. With similar aims, this display was supplanted two years later by a full-scale replica of the House of the Seven Dwarfs from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (supervising director David Hand, 1937), which has been described by Kuhn as ‘add[ing] up to more than merely a hint of the centrality of “home” in the imaginations of cinemagoers’.53 Onscreen, the dwarves’ home in Disney’s film conveyed ‘family stability and social cohesion’ in a magical setting; at the exhibition, the furnishings of the house – which were ‘faithfully reproduced’ from sketches by ‘one of England’s leading furniture manufacturers’ and described as representative of ‘all that is novel and new in building and housing’ – suggested that this fantastical reckoning of domestic harmony was also possible offscreen.54 By 1939, the film-related escapist side of the exhibition – now held at Earl’s Court – was fully exploited by its promotional material. The catalogue front cover and exhibition posters featured an illustration of a giant cherub opening up the roof of the building as light flows outwards to the night sky, reinforcing the sense that the exhibition is as much a space of heavenly dreams as of consumer realities. The catalogue describes the exhibition as an ‘all-embracing panorama of home’, and emphasises the ‘vast concourse of guests at Earl’s Court’ accompanied by music emanating from a hidden source, reinforcing this sense of immersive escape into an

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‘other’ space beyond the home.55 The introduction of the Kaleidakon – ‘a masterly combination of electronic organ and a newly perfected console for the meticulous control of colour-light’ – was central to this experience. To enhance your enjoyment upon such a pilgrimage in the acquirement of enlightenment and inspiration, melody is to accompany you, flowing enchantingly and somewhat mysteriously from a tall and graceful tower upon the sides of which a luminous colour accompaniment is to shine in an ever-changing mist of rich, opalescent quality. In this tower, which stands in a pool whose waters ripple – synchronised to the tempo of the melody and the movement of the hues – you see the Kaleidakon.56

The light and the organ music of the Kaleidakon presented a reminder of a similarly immersive experience of entertainment in the picture palaces, which also included musical accompaniments and light shows. British broadcaster and writer René Cutforth pays homage to this experience with his description of cinemagoing: ‘there was a rich syrup of music supplied by the organ – the “Mighty Wurlitzer” – which from time to time rose from the depths like a submarine and filled you right up to the top with Ketelby’s “In a Monastery Garden” or some similar fantasy of blessing and stability’.57 The experience of the exhibition as an ‘other’ space featured prominently in the wartime and postwar promotions of anticipated future exhibitions. The Daily Mail Book of Post-War Homes (1944), which explores women’s hopes and plans for homes of the future, featured a photograph of crowds thronging through the Grand Hall during a prewar exhibition, alongside the question ‘What will they see next time?’ It confidently answers that the first postwar exhibition would be a ‘wonderland of thrilling progress in all things for house and home’.58 In 1947, an advertisement announced the ‘Happy Return!’ of the exhibition, accompanied by an illustration of a house in a white central circle, surrounded by shaded edges, suggesting the transformative, ‘portal-like’ spatial experience offered to potential visitors.59 In 1948, despite continuing austerity conditions, the Grand Hall was re-forged as the principal attraction of the exhibition: it was dominated by a large tree decorated with twinkling fairy lights ‘as a symbol of many things – of the spring of our second era, opening the way towards a full jubilee, of renewed hope and tonic after our Nation’s hard years’.60 Artists’ impressions once more featured figures wandering around the hall in awe at the spectacular exhibits characterised by fountains of light inside the Pavilion of Beautiful Things and the Village of Ideal Homes, emphasising the spectacle with

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Artist’s impression of the Grand Hall at the Ideal Home Exhibition (1949)

which visitors were greeted, and the sense of escape granted by the fantastical spaces of the Grand Hall (Figure 26).61 Film exhibits also continued to embody the heterotopic meeting of escapism and domesticity in the postwar years. Describing the 1947 Gallery of British Films, the catalogue illuminates the craftsmanship and work that goes into contemporary film creations, conveying the spaces of British films onscreen as an ‘other’, ‘magic’ space into which visitors could also travel.62 The catalogue opined: Because you never go behind the screen, never look into the workaday world of the stars, where the cameras whirr in limelight and craftsmen work magic with canvas and paint […] come into the world behind the silver screen.63

The gallery promised to reveal the workings of the film industry using miniature reconstructions of film sets based on contemporary films. This included an artist’s studio in a derelict Georgian house from Odd Man Out (d. Carol Reed, 1947), a nineteenth-century cottage in County Mayo from Captain Boycott (d. Frank Launder, 1947), a palace in the Himalayas from Black Narcissus (d. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1947) and the 1820 bedroom in a rural mansion from Jassy (d. Bernard Knowles, 1947). Displaying a variety of dark, dilapidated homes, exotic locales and

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townhouse interiors – ranging across time periods, countries and levels of comfort – the gallery encouraged the same kind of escapist spectatorship as the earlier film displays, once again juxtaposing the material realms of the home with the escapist experience offered by recently released or forthcoming films. As in prewar exhibitions, the 1947 catalogue connects the intangible experience of cinema with the attainable realities of home-making, explaining that ‘the rainbow vision of Oberon’s palace, or the cloud castle in Spain, the misty croft or the dark, dank, dungeon had first to be built and perfected as tangibly as your home is’.64 Through this display and another in 1948, the ephemeral, imagined spaces of British film were seemingly made real – reconstructed as material sets – as part of the negotiation of an acceptably tempered, middle-class consumer culture of the home. Descriptions of the film sets in the 1947 catalogue praised film’s capacity to construct an escapist ‘other’ world for audiences, while also understanding home-building, comfort and taste. For example, The Courtneys of Curzon Street – an earlier film in Wilcox’s London Series – was previewed in the 1947 exhibition as a ‘fine example of home-building by studio Craftsmen’ and was accompanied by an advertisement for the film in the catalogue.65 W. C. Andrews’ interior design for the late-Georgian sitting room in Wilcox’s costume romance was praised as ‘tastefully decorated’ and ‘typical of the high standards maintained in the best British films of today’.66 A year later, Spring in Park Lane was released in this climate of increasingly acceptable consumerism and with the same devoted following of ‘suburban, Daily Mail-reading women’ as the exhibition.67 With this audience in mind, advertisements for Wilcox’s films appeared repeatedly in the Ideal Home Exhibition catalogues, encouraging visitors who were imagining their own ideal homes to do the same at the cinema with the London Series. Domestic transformations In the opening sequence of Spring in Park Lane, Judy trips lightly along a London street. Brightly lit, she is also framed with cherry blossom and accompanied by a light-hearted, upbeat rearrangement of the folksong ‘Early One Morning’ and the repeated motif of a harp glissando. The camera’s fluid shift from a crane shot of a tree in blossom to a smooth tracking shot along the pavement, reinforced by the score, complements her easy movement. As she pauses at the top of a set of steps outside a relatively

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nondescript front door – described in the ‘book of the film’ as ‘giving little indication of the magnificence within’, the film cuts to the marble hallway inside the house.68 Reviews focused on the transformative quality of this interior: Richard Winnington remarked that ‘the palatial interiors of the houses by some structural magic are about five times the width of the frontages’.69 Judy’s movement through the spaces of the street outside is matched by that of Richard inside: introduced by a faster strain of light-hearted music, Richard bounds across the huge hall to answer the front doorbell. The sense of mobility through both exterior and interior scenes is reinforced by gliding pans and smooth tracking shots through the spaces of the house and a continued use of high-key lighting. The mobile framing of Judy’s stroll along the street, her entry into the gleaming, upper-class setting of the house and Richard’s bound across the hall – from the plain front door to the grand interior – offers a transformative topography. Perhaps alluding to scenes framed in this style, Charlotte Brunsdon suggests that Spring in Park Lane ‘dips its toe into a world in which class configurations are changing, and to some extent the Judy and Richard couple are marked by modernity through their mobility in relation to the film’s topographies’.70 In Brunsdon’s reading, Richard’s movement across the hall visually reinforces the class mobility that his character – an aristocrat disguised as a footman – plays out in the narrative. This also goes for Judy, who, in another sequence, plays a piano duet with Richard in the ballroom of the house, thus coming down to the level of the servants, before moving across the room: the scene is framed in a long shot, which clearly shows her movement across the space. A dissolve suggests her ease of movement from space to space and, in the following scene, set in her glamorous open-plan flat, Judy’s continuous movement from bedroom to sitting room and her changed appearance in stylish evening wear suggest a transformative shift back to her aspirational, upper-class lifestyle. On the other hand, while the film conveys the capacity for transformative movement in the home, the appearance of these spaces as a pictorialstyle ‘display’ of ‘wealth and space’ also arrests this possibility for mobility, reinforcing a sense of status quo and stability in keeping with the social mores and class hierarchies demonstrated throughout the film.71 Like the appearance of the London traffic in its opening moments, the film presents a vision of dreamlike, easy mobility, with an eye on capturing this transformative movement in domestic space as part of a more conservative

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vision of consumerism, with a sense of decorum. When Richard runs across the hallway, the panning movement of the camera – which follows him as he darts up from below the stairs, across the room first in one direction and then in another, towards the front door – captures this movement from a distance, drawing attention not only to his movement but also to the space across which he travels. While laying out the topography of the space, these shots also construct a sense of spectacle in their surveying of the aspirational surroundings of the home. In the later scene, in which Judy appears to move with ease from ballroom to flat, a long shot of the ballroom first frames her in the luxuriously furnished room, in a static pictorial style. Then, in her flat, the camera tracks back to follow her movement through the space, eventually pausing on a static shot which, maintaining its distance from the characters in the room, again frames Judy’s movement in relation to a décor – an oversized lamp, a silk-upholstered chaise longue and curtains framing the bedroom in the background, which lend the look of a proscenium arch to the room as domestic spectacle.72 With the vast majority of sequences set in the grand rooms of the mansion, many of the key scenes in Spring in Park Lane – particularly in the development of Richard and Judy’s romance – take place in the elegant hallway. A transitory interior space between the central living rooms of the house, the hallway is suggestive of a simultaneous understanding of movement through this central space but also stasis. This framing of the hallway engages the very dynamic marking the Grand Hall at the Ideal Home Exhibition as a transformative space both to be moved through and explored and viewed as a spectacle. The dramatic white staircase, cornicing and furnishings, the shining black-and-white-tiled floor, the nude statue surrounded by flower arrangements and the pot of cherry blossom by the front door present an escapist mise-en-scène – informed by art director W. C. Andrews’ experience of interior decoration and knowledge of period furnishings. This décor marks Wilcox’s emphasis on making films which would compete with the visual appeal and opportunities for escapism offered by Hollywood features.73 The design of the furnishings in many of the scenes emphasises both stylish, modern appeal – with the sleek, silkupholstered furniture in Judy’s flat – and also a sense of a traditional past, particularly in the large, formal rooms of the mansion. Negotiating the same tension, the mansion’s series of rooms – including a ballroom, picture gallery and dining room – present a geography characterised by escapist recreational activities, but also one that is strictly arranged according to

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the rituals of upper-class life. The film’s design thereby reinforces Wilcox’s desire to create a Hollywood-style, escapist appeal, though one tempered by restraint and decorum. Spring in Park Lane frequently comments self-reflexively on this negotiation of space and spectacle as part of its cinematically specific heterotopic experience.74 In another hallway scene, one of Judy’s suitors, a film star called Basil Maitland (Peter Graves), suggests on first meeting Richard in the entrance hall that ‘you’re not unlike Michael Wilding’, to which Richard replies ‘I try, sir’. Maitland’s invitation to see the picture gallery belonging to Judy’s uncle conveys a self-conscious deconstruction of the space and spectacle offered by the interior spaces, and connects them with an understanding of the possibilities for escapism specifically enabled by the film. As Basil compliments his host, ‘you’re looking lovely, Judy, and beautifully lit’, his apparent incapability of telling the difference between film and reality throws the hallway around them into a new light in relation to both topography and spectacle. First, in terms of the topography of the space, the camera tracks the couple as they walk through the hallway and, towards the fourth wall and seemingly without boundary, into the gallery adjacent to it. Judy’s introduction – ‘we call this the picture gallery’  – appears to be addressed to the audience, thus breaking the boundary between the onscreen space and the cinema audience. Second, once inside the gallery, the audience is not offered a view of the pictures on display but instead only a view of Maitland and Judy as they look on at them. So, when Maitland remarks ‘I say, what a lovely set!’, it is somewhat unclear whether he is referring to the pictures or, due to his career and his earlier confusion of Richard and Wilding, to the film set itself and the spectacle of the gallery or entrance hall interior. Indeed, in a later sequence, as the house staff prepare for a dinner at which Judy must choose between possible suitors, another comment on the dining table laid with flowers and candles as ‘a gorgeous sight – a real work of art’ continues the association between the interior set design, the picture gallery and the ‘picture’ or film itself emphasised by Maitland. His character is key to Spring in Park Lane’s construction of domestic life as a heterotopia as his comments highlight the negotiation of space and spectacle offered by the interior and self-consciously connect this with the possibilities of escapism specifically constructed by film. The framing of domestic interiors – and particularly the hallway – provides another channel through which Wilcox’s film draws attention

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to its own topographies. On Judy’s arrival in the brightly lit hallway, wearing a glamorous white fur stole and evening gown, it is specifically through space and spectacle that the film draws attention to this selfconsciousness. Judy’s entrance is introduced with a swift pan across the expansive hallway – from the position of Perkins the butler in the centre of the room to Judy in the doorway. This is accompanied by the sound of the door opening, but also by a recurrence of the music that had earlier underscored the slowly moving spectacle of dream-like traffic in the London streets outside. Following a long shot across the hallway as Judy stops to greet Perkins (dumbstruck by her appearance), a dolly shot tracks her movement up the stairs; its sweeping movement is momentarily obscured by an arrangement of foliage surrounding a statue in the centre of the room. The distinctive and abrupt movement of the camera, the burst of music on Judy’s entrance, the obscured view of her movement up the stairs in her finery and her final pause on the steps all draw attention away from the film’s narrative and towards its construction of a magical and immersive topography. Later in the same sequence, a meeting between Richard and Judy, which takes place in the hallway once more, emphasises this self-conscious mode of address by way of a visually dramatic shot of the hall below from the top of the stairs (Figure 27). This is the only shot from this direction in the film and its dramatic impact is conceivably attributable to this change of direction: the spaces of the hallway below and the picture gallery beyond are visible in a way that has previously been restricted (as in the opening scene with Judy and Richard). This high-angle view is perhaps symbolic of the romance between Richard and Judy in the narrative and the class mobility it entails. In keeping with Brunsdon’s readings of space, class mobility and modernity, Judy’s developing feelings towards the footman are evoked through the downwards slope of the stairs and his position at the foot of them. At the same time, the appearance of the expansive marble floor spreading into the distance, the prominent white balustrade in the foreground and the elegant furnishings and light fittings all serve to reinforce the collaboration of mobility and spectacle in a way which calls attention to itself. Although the plush interiors of the hallway, the ballroom and the picture gallery seemingly articulate a utopian landscape for escape, the way in which these scenes are framed indicates a more complex heterotopia – one in which the spaces of home, consumer culture and film are navigated and negotiated.

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Spring in Park Lane

‘Magic’ spaces of home and British film

Spring in Park Lane’s self-conscious attention to the capabilities of the filmic medium for creating spatial topographies and spectacle is later amplified in a dream dance sequence. A dissolve from Richard’s daydreaming face as he cleans cutlery introduces a vision of Judy out on the terrace, accompanied by the sound of a choir and a xylophone, reinforcing the shift from real to dream vision and drawing attention to film’s capacity to create a dream-world through slow motion. The magical reveal of Judy is emphasised with a slow-motion view of her revolving on the spot on the terrace, gradually illuminated by high-key lighting against the night sky, until she runs forward with her arms outstretched through the shadows dotted across the space. As Judy runs across the moon-dappled floor of the terrace in a single smooth movement, the camera’s panning movement draws to a halt with a static, long shot of Richard as he picks her up (in one of a number of lifts). This framing of space – highlighting the couple’s topographical exploration of the spaces of the dance floor and also their position as a spectacle – is self-consciously illuminated by filmic techniques including slow motion. The magical modernity conveyed by the filmic medium negotiates both space and spectacle once more. These elements

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of Spring in Park Lane and of Wilcox’s later offering, Maytime in Mayfair, were recalled in critical reviews, and the image of Neagle lifted through the air by Wilding was often used in the promotion of the London Series.75 In the scene itself, the slow motion movement of Judy through the air, accompanied by a scale on the xylophone at various points, emphasises the light, bright and luxurious sequinned fabric of her dress and her movement as part of an immersive spectacle, in which the filmic medium itself plays a self-conscious part in conveying the fantasy. In an earlier scene set during the ball, the terrace setting for their later dream – with its trellised pillars, climbing roses and night-time back-drop – appears simply as an extension of the glamorous escapism characteristic of the rest of the house. In terms of the narrative, Richard’s daydream presents a break from the characters’ everyday lives and a fantasy space in which to embark on their romance. On the other hand, the treatment of the dream dance sequence also amplifies those modes used to express topography, spectacle and film in the earlier terrace scene and otherwise explored in the luxurious spaces of the home: the terrace is presented as an ‘other’ dream space, specifically as an extension on the utopian landscape of escape offered by the house. Indeed, the set design for the dance on the terrace featured as one of the set reconstructions at the Ideal Home Exhibition’s ‘British Picture Parade’ of 1948 and thus constructed one of the ‘magic’ spaces on offer there. As such, the exhibition catalogue’s description suggests that the terrace set simply extends the heterotopic spaces constructed by the more domestic, everyday scenes. The terrace is positioned in relation not only to the exhibition’s concerns with escape but also to the practicalities and ‘tangibility’ of the everyday home: ‘here is a drawing-room with a terrace overlooking Hyde Park in spring time – a fit scene for romantic episodes and a “dream dance” sequence’.76 The exhibition catalogue notes that ‘the terrace, with its trellised decoration and mural painting, was designed by W. C. Andrews to express the mood of the romantic scenes and provide a setting for the “dream dance”’.77 The dream dance sequence – with its emphasis on the romantic desires of the couple – provides the kind of ‘utopian sensibility’ characteristic of Hollywood musicals.78 However, further to this, it also suggests a heterotopic experience comparable to way in which the Ideal Home Exhibition’s film display negotiated the tangible, restrained and domestic alongside romantic, dream spaces and the fantastical worlds of film. Spring in Park Lane’s escapist treatment of domestic life can therefore be seen as engaging with the topography, spectacle and connections with

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film conveyed by Ideal Home Exhibitions in the late 1930s and continuing into the 1940s. This consideration expands on Dolan’s evaluation of the London Series in relation to conservative modernity and consumer culture, and as constructions of utopian spaces, by contending that Spring in Park Lane demonstrates an engagement with a heterotopic relationship between the ‘magic’ spaces of home and film at the Ideal Home Exhibition. Indeed, in a postwar climate encouraging escape and consumerism, the heterotopic experience offered by the Ideal Home Exhibition continued into the 1950s: the 1950 catalogue described ‘the silverweb citadel of the Grand Hall’, noting that ‘by whichever portal you enter – you will hardly fail to discover this spectacle’.79 It was again the more fantastical, escapist spaces of the exhibition that were emphasised by advertising campaigns: one poster for the 1951 exhibition featured a three-dimensional tree with animals nestling inside and fields in the distance.80 This postwar culture surrounding the home illuminates a relationship between domestic life and escapism that looked forward to a more prosperous age, and also back to the topography and spectacle constructed by exhibitions of the 1930s. The influence of the exhibition’s interwar navigation of ‘magic’ spaces in the postwar years thus supports Sarah Street’s suggestion that the London Series provided escape but also ‘reflected fear of change and anxiety about the post-war world during the awkward transition period when the optimism of the 1940s evaporated into a cautious conservatism in the 1950s’.81 The framing of domestic life in Spring in Park Lane also functioned as part of a conservative engagement between British stardom and postwar consumer desires. The ‘restrained, conservative persona’ of Anna Neagle – detailed by Andy Medhurst, Dolan and Street – was an instrumental part of the construction of domestic life discussed in this chapter.82 Reviewer C. A. Lejeune describes ‘the Wilcox girl’ as ‘not only what every young woman in the audience dreams she might be, but what every young woman in the audience feels she could be’.83 While Basil Maitland’s outcry against the construction of the fictional film within Spring in Park Lane as ‘long shot after long shot, when it’s perfectly obvious that the whole thing should be in close-up’ acknowledges the vanity of his film star character in the narrative, the chosen framing of Judy (Neagle) reinforced both the individual aspirations of transformation offered by the topography of the interior and a more communal, distanced sense of its spectacle. In several scenes, Judy seems to orchestrate the movement of the camera and the movement of the other characters: when Richard comes to rescue her at the front door

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before her date with Maitland, the camera pans to follow her crossing the expansive hallway, followed obediently by Richard. On the other hand, Judy’s appearance often provides a spectacle to be enjoyed by audiences, from her appearance at the front door to the layers of her delicate dress floating through the air in the dream dance sequence. The self-reflexive comments on the film also fall on Judy/Neagle when she is seen as the ‘beautifully lit’ character. A year later, the construction of Neagle’s star image in relation to space and spectacle was reinforced as part of the promotion of Maytime in Mayfair. Just before its release, Picture Post magazine detailed Neagle’s choices of material for new gowns and her opinions on fashion and dancing: she is seen to embody the conspicuous consumption with which she was associated. The article describes her offscreen life as indistinguishable from the escapist milieus through which she moves onscreen, reinforcing their engagement with the individual, transformative possibilities of consumer culture: ‘her Cinderellas move about in limousines, and the people she meets have impeccable manners, plenty of servants and no Left-wing nonsense about them. The object of life is the pursuit of happiness.’84 In accompanying photographs, Neagle is shown dancing through a series of stage sets used for a dream sequence in Maytime in Mayfair: the mobile experience of her glamorous existence is constructed as a spectacle of light, fabric and dance – just as in the style of immersion constructed by Spring in Park Lane and the Ideal Home Exhibition. Spring in Park Lane also hints at a domestic side to British stardom – and pokes fun at the suburban, homely nature of the British film industry – with another comment from Maitland. In contrast to the glamorous surroundings of the dining table, Maitland attempts to ensnare Judy with the offer of a holiday in ‘Hollywood, Capri, Denham, anywhere …’. The mention of Denham, one of the British film industry’s cluster of studios in a South Buckinghamshire village, with connotations of leafy lanes and quaint cottages, casts British film as small, ordinary and domestic in contrast to the more glamorous venues of Hollywood and Capri. The grounding of the British film star in relation to the homely also applies to Neagle, who throughout the 1930s and 1940s appeared in popular women’s magazines focusing on domestic advice and the realities of home-making.85 Janet Thumim notes that, in 1950, ‘a Picture show reporter found her “busy in a gingham apron”’, reporting that ‘“Anna loves her home life just as much as she loves making films”’.86 Once more, the escapist spaces of film

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were presented through a lens focusing on the ordinary sphere of home and offering a cultural construction of British stardom characterised by quiet domesticity which was similarly – and particularly – exemplified by popular star couple Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray. The Glass Mountain

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In the 1949 box office hit The Glass Mountain, Richard (Michael Denison) is a composer torn between his former, ordinary life with his wife, Ann (Dulcie Gray), and an Italian lover (Valentina Cortese) whom he meets when his plane is shot down during wartime service.87 In the opening moments of the film an operatic piece of music, ‘The Legend of the Glass Mountain’ – which later in the narrative is composed by Richard (actually a contemporary hit by Nino Rota) – accompanies several shots of natural scenery in the Italian mountains. This opening anticipates some of the film’s later scenes, when Richard is in Venice to conduct an opera based on the legend of the Glass Mountain. Dramatic images of the mountains, air travel and the opera stage are set against scenes focused on the comparatively tame domestic life led by Richard and Ann: for example, the opening view of the mountains dissolves to a long shot of the couple rowing on the Thames in leafy Richmond. With a church in the background and surrounded by a placid, tree-lined riverside landscape, the  music changes to more sober woodwind tones. Following a closer view of the pair relaxing in the boat, Richard looks up and cries: ‘Darling, look!’ The film cuts to his point of view: a brick mansion house covered in foliage and an overgrown garden. Ann exclaims: ‘Oh Ricky! It’s the kind of house I’d always dreamed of.’ The pictorial image of an idyllic home – framed as a vision of the couple’s aspirations for a comfortable lifestyle in a traditional English setting – marks a clear departure from the exotic images of Italy presented alongside it. This vision of quiet domesticity was reinforced by the contemporary star image of husband-and-wife acting duo Denison and Gray, who had already achieved popular acclaim individually, Gray in They Were Sisters (d.  Arthur Crabtree, 1945) and Denison in My Brother Jonathan (d. Harold French, 1948). Following the success of My Brother Jonathan (in which Gray also appeared), the couple’s star status was soon cemented by screen roles together in The Franchise Affair (d. Lawrence Huntington, 1951), Angels One Five (d. George More O’Ferrall, 1952) and There Was a Young Lady (d. Lawrence Huntington, 1953). As a result of these roles in

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popular films, and media images of the couple, a picture of cosy, domestic consensus became firmly associated with Denison and Gray’s stardom, much to Denison’s later chagrin.88 The ‘homeliness’ of British stars has perhaps counted against them in academic study to date: while Hollywood star images were often constructed in relation to a narrative of transformation and ‘rapid social mobility’, British stars were associated with staid, upper-class formalities and mores.89 Rachael Low’s History of the British Film led the way with the suggestion that British actors and actresses have not been deemed worthy of the glamorous connotations of star status because they are ‘somewhat homely’ in comparison with legendary international figures.90 Throughout the 1940s, the Denisons’ star image was characterised by the ‘homely’: by a vision of their domestic life together as at once aspirational, ordinary and undeniably English. However, I contend that their star image can be reconceived as an engagement with a suburban, domestic vision of modernity surrounding British stardom in the interwar years and which was later developed in wartime. I first look at the development in 1930s culture of the relationship between stardom and domestic modernity, as a prelude to a new analysis of Denison and Gray’s star images, and then turn to an evaluation of The Glass Mountain’s depiction of domestic life as a visual negotiation of escapism and restraint. ‘Homes of the Film Stars’ In the late 1930s, the presentation and promotion of their homes imbued British film stars with an image of modernity that they had previously lacked by comparison with their more glamorous Hollywood counterparts. Musicals starring Jessie Matthews, one of Britain’s most popular film stars, played a significant role in forming the new relationship between home and modernity onscreen.91 Sarah Street’s study of interior designs in 1930s musicals starring Matthews suggests that ‘while the interiors in Jessie Matthews’s films were opulent and in many ways the epitome of luxurious art deco design, the availability of mass-produced furniture and fittings meant that people could adapt what they could afford in their own homes in an art deco style’.92 Annette Kuhn’s analysis further defines the aspirational values surrounding Matthews’ star persona in relation to the ‘suburbanisation/vernacular modernism’ characterised by a ‘middle-brow set of tastes and proto-consumerism’ detailed earlier.93

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However, as noted earlier, middlebrow tastes extended beyond the sleek Moderne styles epitomised by Hollywood-influenced chromium bars and deco statuettes. Magazines and exhibitions promoted the modern home alongside an image of the indigenous British star which noted more down-to-earth qualities. In a 1937 edition of My Home magazine, a regular column entitled ‘News and Views for the Hostess’ comments with some disdain on the impracticalities of Hollywood’s domestic interiors and the stars’ craze for white fur carpets: ‘In Hollywood they are fur mad. They not only have their clothes fur-trimmed this year, but their houses are full of fur. Which seems odd when one reflects that theirs is a summer climate. I suppose it is the passion for make-believe which is so strong in all stage people.’94 The column continues by contrasting this impracticality with the  more down-to-earth British star at Elstree studios, exclaiming: ‘Just imagine if the Elstree stars […] had started such a fashion in London! It would mean a fortune for the cleaners.’ While the homes belonging to Hollywood stars continued to be a source of fascination for the cinemagoing public, Settle notes that in Britain the gleaming surfaces, white dressing tables and modern fabrics that furnished the glamorous lives of the stars were dismissed as impractical and mostly as ‘fads’: in other words, as a world away from British realities. The same My Home article links Elstree, one of the studios ‘located just beyond London’s outer suburbs, in the leafy Home Counties’, to a more traditional, practical vision of British stardom in keeping with a conservative, suburban vision of modernity.95 Offering home advice to ‘middle-class women who had little outside help’, My Home enjoyed a high circulation throughout the country, and particularly in the South East, where new suburban ideas of modern living were most prevalent.96 The image of the British film star at home offered an aspirational escapism constrained by values of ordinariness and Englishness. As this section explores, the modes of address used to present British film stars and home in this period can be defined in three strands: in relation to consumer culture; with an emphasis on ‘ordinariness’ – a term famously used by Richard Dyer to characterise the cultural phenomenon of stardom; and in relation to an idea of ‘Englishness’ defined by Alison Light as characterised by the centrality of domesticity.97 In 1936, ‘Homes of the Film Stars’, a display occupying one floor of the Empire Hall at the Ideal Home Exhibition, provided an idea of the conservative nature of consumerism constructed in relation to film stardom. The

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exhibit included reconstructions of homes belonging to Hollywood stars including Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Norma Shearer and Mae West, alongside those of British stars. Among the interiors featured were: Clive Brook’s ‘Tudor Lounge’ featuring a cocktail bar and bathroom complete with masculine ‘gadgets’ such as book racks and ash trays; Leslie Howard’s ‘green room’ and Easiwork cream and blue kitchen; Merle Oberon’s beach house bedroom – with apple-green walls, lavender satin bedcovers, chaise longue and gold lampshades; and the bedroom and dining room belonging to Jessie Matthews and her husband, fellow film star Sonnie Hale.98 In keeping with the consumerist ethos of the exhibition, the accompanying catalogue listed the furnishing and interior decoration companies responsible for reproducing the stars’ rooms and advertised where these companies could be found at the exhibition. In the reconstructed bedroom of Jessie Matthews, a carved canopy ‘draped in blue’ and peach-coloured bedclothes, ‘spacious and unconventional’ built-in wardrobe and ‘huge bowls of flowers’ convey the Moderne interiors in her films, thus reinforcing the analyses of both Kuhn and Street.99 By contrast though, in the reconstruction of Matthews’ dining room a ‘handsome old oak buffet’, ‘walnut chairs covered in rich Red Gold Brocatelle’ and a ‘model of the Golden Hind’ are concessions to a more traditional version of the modern home.100 This blending of old and new is particularly evidenced by the room’s combination of electric heating and lighting with wrought iron light fittings and an electric fire camouflaged by a stone-hooded fireplace.101 A number of the rooms belonging to British stars are described in the exhibition catalogue as retaining an English ‘character’ and ‘charm’.102 While promoting an attainable modernism, the rooms simultaneously reinforced a sense of tradition, conservatism and national identity, in keeping with the dual tone of the rest of the exhibition. In this setting, images of British stars were part of a cultural construction of suburban modernity, offering the opportunities of consumer culture, but also traditional English character. In 1938, a Picture Post article, ‘A Day with Gracie’, emphasised a similarly aspirational view of the British star at home. The photo-essay explores music hall and film star Gracie Fields’ large North London home and its glamorous interiors as she has her hair brushed in front of an oversized dressing room table, answers both telephones next to her bed (at the same time) and tidies up her grand dining room after a party. These luxurious, Moderne interiors are juxtaposed with views of her home’s traditional brick façade, in the style of a Tudor country house, and a photograph in which

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she shows her young nephew her coat of arms. Another photograph shows Fields assembling a Moderne-style bar, complete with a sleek sign ‘Gracie’s Bar’. Although this associates the British star with lustrous, modern interiors, the accompanying caption reinforces a view of Fields’ more down-toearth daily life. It reads: ‘“I like messing the place about”, says Gracie, “My biggest treat is to have a new job of building started. They say I must have been born with a brick in my hand.”’103 The photographs in ‘A Day with Gracie’ indicate the same aspirational domestic world as that inhabited by Matthews. However, the candid style of the photographs, showing Fields at home and partaking in seemingly everyday activities, along with captions which embody her down-to-earth, working-class star persona, add a vital level of ‘ordinariness’ to the image. In 1937, an article in the fan magazine Picturegoer on Flora Robson, a British actress known for roles in heritage dramas, emphasised the same aspects of tradition and ordinariness in parallel with domesticity. The article’s author explains how he ‘sought her out in her little house in Hampstead […] a house you may have passed hundreds of times and not guessed that it contained one of Britain’s greatest actresses’.104 He situates the glamour of British stardom in an indigenous setting: Robson’s home is ‘intimate’, ‘known and close at hand’, and the article suggests that her home could be passed on the street on an everyday basis.105 It emphasises the privacy of Robson’s home life by drawing attention to privacy as a national characteristic: ‘You’ve probably seen her on the stage and screen; but her private life – is that a sealed book to you? Yes, and it is to most people; all except for a few of her intimates […] she considers herself to be a public servant while she is working, and a private individual in her hours of leisure.’106 These assertions relate her private life to the rising importance of domestic culture in the 1930s and also to a changing idea of citizenship, from defensive to progressive.107 Light’s conception of ‘an Englishness at once less imperial and more inward-looking, more domestic and more private’ in middlebrow literature – and the idea of national community embedded in ideas of domestic modernity – was also an influential part of Robson’s star image in the 1930s.108 In the 1940s, this quiet, unassuming domestic side of British stardom was constructed in relation to national identity and became paramount in the promotion of popular British stars in wartime. By 1947, a film club publication on British Film Stars at Home described the private hobbies of Flora Robson once more, suggesting that ‘she has always loved

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gardening’.109 On this occasion, the language of the war effort is drawn on to promote home life as running parallel to community. In keeping with the Dig for Victory campaign taken up during the war years, Robson is described as ‘a keen “allotmenter”’. The scratches on her hands and wrists are described as the ‘honourable scars’ of the gardener. By the end of the Second World War, the vision of a modern, domestic England established in the 1930s had gained enhanced relevance in the promotion of British stardom. In 1947, Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC) planned to re-launch their studios at Elstree with emerging star Michael Denison as a new beacon of postwar optimism. However, the ensuing promotion of Denison’s stardom in the immediate postwar years, alongside that of his wife, Dulcie Gray, looked backwards to modes of address – consumerism, ordinariness and Englishness – that had been used to depict British stars and their homes in the 1930s.110 ‘Two Stars are Airborne’ Perhaps because of their adherence to careers in the theatre or simply due to a disregard of their later roles in small-budget, less prestigious but popular films, the scholarly attention to Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray has been limited.111 Despite widespread, nostalgic remembrance of the Denisons following their deaths in the 1990s – Denison’s obituary in the Guardian in 1998 suggested that, following careers in Glasgow repertory, the couple ‘kept their romantic afterglow as film matinee idols of the late 1940s and early 1950s’ – the pair are still mentioned only in passing in academic accounts of the period’s films and stars.112 However, an ‘afterglow’ surrounding the Denisons, and particularly The Glass Mountain, continues to this day, largely thanks to its Renown DVD release and regular screenings on Talking Pictures TV, which are met with admiration and nostalgia for the couple and the film.113 Denison and Gray initially forged their careers separately, and by the late 1940s Gray had already enjoyed a moderately successful film career. In her early days at Gainsborough Studios she was promoted as a ‘Rising Dramatic Actress’, though never in the same league as the studio’s major stars, Phyllis Calvert and Margaret Lockwood.114 Contemporary reception of her performances suggests that she was seen as ‘one of those knowing mice to whom chaps (in fiction, anyway), always return in the end’.115 This mousey persona, characterised by domestic dutifulness, was apparent in

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her early role in Gainsborough’s Madonna of the Seven Moons (d. Arthur Crabtree, 1944). In the narrative, Maddalena (Phyllis Calvert) has two personalities: as Maddalena, she is a sweet, obedient wife, but she also suffers from bouts of amnesia whereby she becomes Rosanna, a rebellious, glamorous gypsy woman. Dulcie’s character, Nesta, an acquaintance of Maddalena’s family, exemplifies the first of these types. Dulcie’s performance as Nesta in one of the film’s party scenes constructs her as a polite, stuttering bystander. The other, more adventurous characters frequently return to her as she waits for her husband and cheerfully repeats: ‘he’s sure to turn up, he always does’. Whereas Maddalena and her daughter, Angela (Patricia Roc), wear glamorous gowns befitting Hollywood starlets, Nesta’s gown is all dainty ruffles and bows. She admits that ‘it was a pair of curtains yesterday’, emphasising a relationship between her character and quiet, domestic tasks, in line with the make-do-andmend culture of the period. In later scenes, while Maddalena’s alter ego conducts an exciting affair in Venice, Dulcie as Nesta in a pinafore fusses over troubles with her stove and exchanges quips with her ‘clever brute’ of a husband. Reviews of Dulcie’s early performances suggest that she was liked by critics, but her appearance in Madonna of the Seven Moons, and later as the psychologically bullied wife to a more threatening ‘brute’ of a husband (James Mason) in They Were Sisters, led to her identification as the docile home-maker to whom wayward husbands would always return. She  so embodied a quiet, domestic life that Paul Dehn at the Daily Chronicle threatened to nickname her ‘Gracie Dull’.116 Dulcie herself later remarked in interview: ‘I played an awful lot of put-upon wives in those days!’117 She later appeared as a timid younger sister, Ellen, in A Man About the House and as the young wife of a psychiatrist – subjected to her husband’s (Kieron Moore) calm diagnosis of her ‘hysterical outbursts’ – in Mine Own Executioner (d. Anthony Kimmins, 1947). It seems her early roles as dutiful, timid young wives in Madonna of the Seven Moons and They Were Sisters thus continued to shape her film career. In 1947, ABPC took a chance on Michael Denison, a relative newcomer to the screen. In need of a box office success to re-launch the studios, ABPC warily took on Denison for the leading role in an adaptation of Francis Brett Young’s extremely popular novel, My Brother Jonathan (signing him up for a seven-year contract in the process). Gray appeared in the same production as his love interest, Rachel. In some respects, the promotional campaign surrounding Denison’s stardom was initially far removed from Gray’s mousey,

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domestic image. The pressbook for his first leading role announces: ‘Meet My Brother Jonathan – he’s box office!’ On the front cover, an illustration of a picture frame containing a photograph of Denison encourages cinema managers to emphasise his good looks, youthful masculinity and glamour.118 Denison’s autobiography details how ‘there had been various manoeuvres designed to groom me for stardom’ in the build-up to My Brother Jonathan.119 Orchestrated by ABPC’s publicity department, these included a ‘body-building suit’, which, in order to disguise his long neck and drooping shoulders, had ‘shoulders so wide and so soft that I had to go sideways through all double doors’.120 The parading of Denison through cinemas in his big-shouldered suit gave the impression of a glamorous film star persona; it gave the ‘visible’ distinction of stardom in competition with Hollywood’s leading men.121 Denison’s public appearances chimed with the idea of Elstree Studios as ‘Britain’s Hollywood’, and a number of reviews of My Brother Jonathan made transatlantic comparisons.122 Denison’s first major role both crystallised and lent nuance to this leading-man image. My Brother Jonathan opens with Jonathan beginning to relate to his son the story of his past as a doctor in the Midlands during the nineteenth century. The film’s narrative then takes the form of his flashback as Jonathan trains to be a doctor. A number of personal and professional setbacks befall the young Jonathan and construct him as a sympathetic character with noble intentions. In difficult circumstances, the film’s eponymous character crusades against hospital practices of overcharging patients (the film’s release fell shortly after the National Health Service Act passed in 1946) and foregoes his own happiness in order to make sure his family are content. However, Jonathan’s radical idealist hopes in the poverty-stricken conditions of a Black Country town – ‘with their unmistakeable echoes of Beveridge’, as Andrew Spicer notes – are tempered by signs of his ‘middle-class reliability’, such as his pipe.123 Denison’s performance of Jonathan is also endearing and reinforces this acceptably middle-class vision of modernity. For instance, at a high society ball in the film, as Jonathan dances with the love of his life – Edie Martyn (Beatrice Campbell) – he trips and bumbles along embarrassedly: this highlights his role as the underdog in comparison to a brother whom his mother praises and clearly loves more. Despite Denison’s ‘debonair’ good looks, ‘softspoken, restrained and chivalrous’ manners and Oxford education, the ordinary frustration and endearingly human portrayal of a character create sympathy for his performance.124

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Airborne sectional upholstery advertisement, Daily Mail Film Award Annual (1948)

A number of consumer tie-ins for My Brother Jonathan – including tailored suits, cosmetics and knitting patterns – similarly presented a negotiation of both glamour and domestic ordinariness of the film’s stars. Set in Jonathan’s cottage, the opening scene of the film reveals Denison as Jonathan sitting in a cosy country-cottage living room in an oversized streamlined Moderne armchair. A tie-in advertising campaign for armchairs compared the decision to cast him, an unknown star, with the decision to purchase an Airborne armchair (Figure 28). According to the text in the advertisement, The selection of an actor – or an armchair – depends upon personality, performance, finish, in the sphere of upholstery. ‘Airborne’ is a natural for stardom. Versatile and adaptable. Its sectional construction enables it to fulfil any role: from fireside chair to five-seater settee. ‘Airborne’ plays the part in perfect character. Here you see Michael Dennison [sic], who co-stars with his wife Dulcie Grey [sic], in the ABC film ‘My Brother Jonathon’ [sic] – and of course, the chairs are ‘Airborne’.125

Potential audiences for My Brother Jonathan were therefore instructed to direct their attention towards furnishings, both as an element in the construction of the film itself and as the prospective acquisition of an attractive film star lifestyle, with the glamorous evening wear of Denison

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and Gray and the Regency-style cornicing in the background reinforcing this aspirational image. The film’s pressbook proposes a special display for the ‘Airborne’ tie-up planned for shop windows, accompanied by the slogan ‘Two Stars are Airborne’ and featuring cardboard cut-outs of the pair perched on an armchair together.126 Published in the 1948 Daily Mail Film Award Annual, the Airborne advertisement played a role in a popular culture surrounding the optimistic return to modern homes, evidenced by housing exhibitions, documentaries, advertisements and catalogues. This return was particularly promoted by the Daily Mail, with the publication of the Daily Mail Book of Post-War Homes in 1944 and the resumption of the Ideal Home Exhibition in 1947. At the first of these postwar exhibitions, a display based on My Brother Jonathan featured in the Gallery of British Films in two sections. On one side of a partition visitors could see a late-Victorian/early-Edwardian interior, with the idea that they would show ‘the fussiness and over-elaboration of the early-Edwardian period, dark and oppressive wallpaper, unnecessary ornaments’.127 This was then contrasted with a second set, in which ‘the simplicity of today is emphasised – the electric fire, light furnishings and sun-lit windows’.128 In both the Airborne advertisement and the Ideal Home display, the promotion of My Brother Jonathan reinforced a postwar acceptance of a growing consumer culture and a sense of a developing domestic modernity. Indeed, elsewhere in the industry, Ted Black’s roster of female stars at Gainsborough and stars signed to Rank were also associated with the consumer culture focusing on domestic improvement. For example, Phyllis Calvert appeared in advertisements for Power Master refrigerators, and other actresses, including Patricia Roc, Sheila Sim and Margaret Lockwood, made appearances at the Ideal Home Exhibition, providing demonstrations of new household technologies or simply posing for photos next to furniture displays.129 These images of stars in relation to the home constructed a conservative acceptance of domesticity and consumption, while maintaining an escapist, aspirational model of British film stardom. While Denison’s individual star image was stressed in the early months of My Brother Jonathan’s release, Denison and Gray were also promoted as a husband-and-wife team. Denison’s role as Jonathan was publicised as his first starring role following his return from army duties – the emphasis on his performing alongside his wife chimed with contemporary concerns regarding the return to the home and marriage. Matthew Sweet’s account of Shepperton studios describes how the couple ‘spent two chilly

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winter days being driven around London in an open-top carriage, waving awkwardly at passers-by’, endorsing their link to a national past and the historical settings of their films, as well as reinforcing their image as a star couple.130 A 1947 film club publication by Robert Stannage, in which he describes his first impressions of British film studios and encounters a series of stars, also emphasised Denison and Gray’s companionate image, expressing delight in the fact that they share the same hobbies and interests in the home: ‘Michael and Dulcie live in a comfortable West End flat, full of old china (which they both collect!).’131 Reinforcing the companionate offscreen image, and balancing the glamorous home in Airborne’s advertisements with greater attention to the everyday, realist photographs of the ‘stars at home’ were also released to coincide with My Brother Jonathan. One of these featured the couple polishing a dining room table: Denison appears with his sleeves rolled up and Gray has a pinafore tied round her waist. This capturing of a seemingly candid view of the pair carrying out an ordinary household task anchors their contented relationship and their shared domestic labour, as well as offering an image of everyday reality for British audiences still facing setting up and maintaining homes in austerity conditions. The Denisons’ star image, insofar as it embodied both escapism and consumerist domesticity, was tempered – or made acceptable for middleclass audiences – by their association with the increasingly popular idea of  companionate marriage. According to Arthur Marwick’s study of postwar British society, ‘there could be absolutely no doubt as to the continued popularity of marriage as a social institution’.132 A prevalent idea in British society since the 1930s, companionate marriage was defined by ‘companionship between partners whose roles were different’ and ‘the idea of marriage as “teamwork”’.133 In the fictional narrative of My Brother Jonathan, Denison as Jonathan longs for his first love, Edie – as a beautiful step away from his ordinary life – but eventually finds that real happiness is to be found with the daughter of his medical partner, the more homely and practical Rachel/Gray, with whom he shares a warm, friendly working relationship. By the end of the war, companionate marriage, in which husband and wife shared emotional equality, was publicised as the ideal way to reestablish relationships in peacetime. It reinforced the idea of consensus and disguised any underlying tensions related to the return home. This was a trend very much in evidence in postwar film culture, as star couples including Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, Vivien Leigh and Laurence

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Olivier, and Jimmy Hanley and Dinah Sheridan were profiled jointly in film magazine articles and promotional materials.134 The focus on the Denisons’ ordinary home life was part of a contemporary trend in popular magazines such as Picture Post, and in film club publications such as Stephanie Lee’s 1947 British Film Stars at Home. While these publications often highlighted the stars’ aspirational lifestyles, they also emphasised their ordinariness. Quiet hobbies – watercolour painting, cooking, gardening and looking after cats – are described in intimate detail. Family life and everyday rituals are also highlighted, such as Jean Simmons’s routine of shouting ‘Mummy, I’m home!’ on her return from the studios.135 The realities of war are not excluded, as the edition details how David Farrar’s home was restored following bomb damage. The photographs included emphasise this sense of the ordinary, with photographs of Jean Simmons tasting soup, Eric Portman lounging in an armchair next to the hearth in his Cornwall cottage and Anne Crawford with her hair wrapped up and wearing overalls for some interior decoration. While some British stars – including notably Phyllis Calvert, Deborah Kerr and Laurence Olivier – continued to be depicted in their grand country houses, the cottage was more often the signifier of a more down-to-earth stardom and an idealised image of ‘lived in’ English homes.136 In the Denisons’ case, their ‘happy couple’ image was used to illustrate articles and letters about domestic contentment in Woman’s Own magazine, as well as in further advertising campaigns for carpet sweepers (‘Lifelong happiness ahead with a Ewbank sweeper’) – combining the companionate marriage ideal with domestic labour-saving and wardrobes (perhaps an odd choice of tie-up for The Franchise Affair, a thriller centring on a girl kidnapped and taken hostage in a country house).137 Against a background of domestic stardom in British postwar culture, the couple returned from filming The Glass Mountain in Venice to a tumult of publicity surrounding My Brother Jonathan. Denison described: It was extraordinary to return to London and find oneself the object of general ballyhoo […] There were interviews for the radio and the Press; photographic sessions at the cottage and in London, and gradually there was built up in the public mind the picture of coy domestic bliss which from the first we discouraged in every way short of separation.138

In 1949, Picturegoer continued to emphasise this vision of ‘domestic bliss’ with an article by Mavis Dearing entitled ‘Design for Living’, which

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romanticises the Denisons’ friendly relationship and their country cottage as follows: The cottage […] is thatched and has modern plumbing and a bathroom added. When the latter addition was made it was accommodated under a thatched roof to match the original. Thus, with its quaint, latticed windows and lovely setting, the cottage looks really ‘olde worlde’, and it certainly does spell peace […] In the ground that goes with it are many fruit trees and a lovely garden … Michael and Dulcie, who is persuasive with seedlings, worked wholeheartedly upon it at weekends, tidying it up, planting, planning and pruning.139

The article juxtaposes photographs of the couple performing domestic tasks, such as chopping firewood or making tea, with more conventional images of stardom (Figure 29). These included Gray, in an evening gown, in the arms of a tuxedoed Michael, with the caption: ‘the gardeners can do glamorous when the screen demands it’. Dearing emphasises the ‘inwardlooking’ nature of the Denisons’ home life, which was in keeping with the interwar vision of domestic Englishness.140 She states that their cottage is not ‘a show place’ for entertaining guests and holding wild parties; instead, ‘it is lived in by people who know how to make a home’.141 She then adds details on the Denisons’ evenings in together – ‘reading up on the

Design for Living, Picturegoer (29 January 1949)

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behaviour and care of favourite flowers’ – in a way that engages the pastoral imagining of modernity and associations with nationhood explored in the previous chapter. The opening pictorial image of the country home in The Glass Mountain, the Denisons’ next film together, can therefore be revisited as a re-imagining of domestic life and modernity. This sequence visually constructs the couple’s consumer aspirations in the home. On finding Ann’s dream house empty, the couple break in at the back door: as they are left standing at the door, the camera pauses to establish a view of the empty hallway before tracking forwards into the house. With no characters in the frame, the movement of the camera into the hallway and up the stairwell suggests the transformative potential of the interior. The framing of the domestic space bears comparison with the opening crane shot and tracking movement through into the Gibbons’ home in the opening sequence of This Happy Breed. Here, however, the movement of the camera, though moving alone through the space away from the characters, is motivated by the point of view and the desires of the couple, engaging with the consumer possibilities and topographies of the home promoted in this period. Indeed, as Richard’s disembodied voice states ‘we’ll need an awful lot of furniture’, the pair imagine the decorations of their home aloud, and portraits of imagined ancestors appear along a wall leading up the stairs, corresponding to their suggestions. Later in the sequence, as the couple discuss their furniture choices, their future music room fills with imagined furnishings. A grand piano, an old settee, a winged armchair by the fire and a Chippendale mirror flicker into view in the formerly empty room, with even a toy train moving through the room. As if by magic, their ideal home appears before them. With the movement of the camera in the hallway and the glowing flicker into existence of furniture in the music room, the house becomes a haven for the materialisation of consumer dreams. Following the transformation of the music room, there is a shot of the couple dressed in elegant evening wear as they drift into the room with the onset of music (Figure 30). This vision represents a transformed version of their everyday lives in parallel with the glamorous appearance of Denison and Gray on their Airborne armchairs. The image of consumer aspiration on display is characterised by movement and spectacle as the dream pair dance towards the camera and the scene dissolves back to a view of the empty room. The real couple appear in the middle of the room, looking on as the dancers disappear (Figure 31).

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The shot is framed to construct Denison and Gray as part of the static domestic spectacle itself, thus confirming the spectacular value of their film star image, the more glamorous connotations of their media representations and their ties to a culture of consumer aspiration offscreen. With a focus on the sites of fantasy in film as a response to modernity – albeit in the context of American film in the 1910s – Kristian Moen notes a relationship between the transformative appearance of domesticity, consumer culture and stardom. He suggests that ‘through the intersection of stardom and enchantment, cinema developed a culturally resonant form through which to display a modern world of mutable identities and transformative play’.142 In this scene, the transformation of the room and the spectacle of both the dancing stars and their reappearance in the room suggests a comparable construction of ‘mutable identities and transformative play’. Richard and Ann are positioned as spectators of the domestic imaginary: the transformation of the room is motivated by their desires, in keeping with a consumer gaze stressing the aspirational, transformative possibilities of both domestic life and the visible construction of stardom. However, the extra-cinematic promotion of the Denisons in relation to a tempered version of consumer culture, the companionate nature of their home life and their domestic Englishness suggests a different formulation of the transformative possibilities of the domesticity and a more down-to-earth ‘homely’ stability. The reappearance of Denison and Gray in the scene conveys a conservative imagining of Moen’s conception of transformative domesticity and stardom, stressing a sense of continuity. Indeed, the rooms being furnished are not those of a Moderne palace but those of an English country house: the portraits that appear along the stairwell are strongly indicative of an ancestral past in the home. Notwithstanding the magical transformation, the framing of the appearance of the furnishings in the music room in a static, medium shot, as in Spring in Park Lane, suggests notions of stability and the status quo embodied by the Denisons’ star image. In a following scene, the static framing of domesticity conveys the couple’s narrative shift from a cramped garret to a more luxurious lifestyle, while also offering a self-conscious reminder of the couple’s domestic stardom. Functioning as a visual explanation of the narrative development of Richard’s success as a composer, a close-up of the country house that was magically refurnished in the opening scene appears pictured in a newspaper. The camera tracks out to show photographs of Richard and Ann below the house and the headline ‘Garret composer writes song hit and buys

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dream house’. The image of the quaint country house provokes a reminder of Richard’s first view of it and of Ann’s accompanying description – ‘it’s the house I’ve always dreamed of’ – while the portraits of Richard and Ann below the image of the country home imitate the promotional strategies surrounding Denison and Gray in 1949. As the narrative develops, it becomes apparent that the couple have been able to recreate the country house in the style of the dream vision they had originally planned. The images of home which magically appear for the couple – including the arrangement of the music room – have been reconstructed in these scenes as a sign of their fulfilled aspirations. This is reinforced by the stylish luxury of their newfound comfortable domesticity. In one scene, Richard surprises Ann with breakfast in bed and she wakes up in an implausibly glamorous style for first thing in the morning, with immaculate curled hair and white fur cape. The way the scene is framed – with a medium close-up of her elegant appearance in bed followed by Denison perched at the end of the bed – once more draws attention to the glamour, and yet the companionate ordinariness, of the pair’s star image (Figure 32). The appearance of the Denisons’ dog Bonnie (who retains the same name and who appeared with them in the Airborne advertisement as well as in a number of their later

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films) and the couple’s intimate, light-hearted conversations with their pet in this scene reinforce the offscreen connections between the couple’s glamorous appearance and a stress on ordinariness and domesticity.143 The narrative of the fictional couple’s home life complicates this image: the recurrence of the idyllic image of the country house later marks Richard’s feelings of dread associated with returning to domestic routine as he comes back from war and becomes disillusioned with the earlier dreams of home he shared with his wife. After his plane crash, in anticipation of his return home, Richard writes to Ann that ‘everything will be as it was before I went away […] everything will be as it was’, but his attitude is clearly despondent. On his return home, Richard is frustrated by his inability to compose and by domestic interruptions such as the ringing telephone, his wife and meals. While Richard and Ann’s house is conveyed as a middlebrow paradise – of consumer aspirations, ordinariness, Englishness, which are reinforced by the Denisons’ domestic star image offscreen – Richard is obsessed by the high romance of the myth of the Glass Mountain (a love story told to him in Italy by Alida) and his relationship with Alida. He eventually leaves Ann and returns to Italy to be with Alida and complete his opera far from the routines of domesticity and his early dreams of the ideal home. Contemporary reviews found this change of character for Denison and the subject of troubles at home unlikely, given the promotion of his glamorous, though profoundly domestic, life with Dulcie. In the Daily Mail, Fred Majdalany wrote: ‘It is not altogether easy to connect Miss Gray and Mr Denison with these proceedings. They suggest so completely the kind of couple whose greatest marriage problem is likely to be how many sandwiches to cut when they give a party.’144 However, rather than breaking with the Denisons’ image of domestic stardom, the final scenes of the film seek to reconcile its ‘middle-class properties’ – embodied in Richard’s domestic life with Ann and their dream images of the ideal home – with the high romance embodied in the images of mountains at the beginning of the film and the opera staged as part of its climax.145 In conversation with Alida in the Venice opera house, a poet-friend of Richard and Ann (Sebastian Shaw) warns her against the surly composer: ‘Richard’s got a home […] his past is Ann and I think his past is inseparable from his future’, suggesting that Ann will be the woman to whom Richard will always return. Richard’s opera, the myth of the Glass Mountain and its romance thus become wrapped up in the ordinary, homely companionship between husband and wife – in line with the Denison and Gray’s star image.

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Both Spring in Park Lane and The Glass Mountain re-imagine modernity and domestic life through the lens of an acceptable, English escapism tempered by restraint. The transformative homes in both films offered a conservative vision of domestic life indebted to interwar suburban modernity for audiences seeking escape from the drab conditions of austerity Britain. However, as Street suggests, this will to imagine escape in the London Series also ‘reflected fear of change and anxiety about the postwar world’.146 Likewise, in its presentation of the ideal working partnership and the comfortable interiors of their domestic life, the star image of Denison and Gray pasted over anxieties – and the difficulties of postwar marital relations. The idealist spectacle of domesticity – which engaged the magical possibilities of consumer culture in the Ideal Home Exhibition and constructions of British film stardom – presented a contrast to more nightmarish homes featured in other films released in the same period, and a sense of psychological anxiety bubbling under the surface of British cinema’s engagement with ideas of domestic modernity. In the final chapter, I turn to consider how pictorial representations of domestic life – connected with themes of reform, community and consumer aspiration – discussed in the first three chapters were deconstructed, and yet simultaneously reinforced, by images of home shaped by subjectivity, instability and the uncanny.

Notes 1 J. Ellis, ‘The Quality Film Adventure: British Critics and the Cinema, 1942–8’, in A. Higson (ed.) Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema (London: Cassell, 1996), pp. 66–93, at p. 67; P. Phillips, ‘The New Look’, in M. Sissons and P. French (eds) Age of Austerity, 1945–1951 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1963), pp. 127–48, at p. 139. 2 Alison Light discusses the influence of a ‘mythical Georgian period’ and a ‘penchant for the Georgian’ as ‘a new modern fashion’ in the interwar period. A.  Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 35. P. Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 265. 3 H. Barrett and J. Phillips, Suburban Style: The British Home, 1840–1960 (London: Macdonald and Company, 1987), p. 35. 4 J. B. Priestley, English Journey (London: William Heinemann, in association with Victor Gollancz, 1934), p. 401. 5 A. Kuhn, ‘Film Stars in 1930s Britain: A Case Study in Modernity and Femininity’, in T. Soila (ed.) Stellar Encounters: Stardom in Popular European Cinema (New Barnet: John Libbey Publishing, 2009), pp. 180–94, at p. 191.

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6 B. Conekin, F. Mort, and C. Waters (eds) Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945–1964 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1999), p. 19. 7 M. Ward and N. Ward, Home in the Twenties and Thirties (London: Ian Allan, 1978), pp. 90, 7. 8 Sugg Ryan, Ideal Homes, p. 168. 9 J. Giles The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2004), p. 109. 10 ‘London’s Most Lustrous Spectacle!’, Ideal Home (April 1938), p. iv. 11 ‘The Glass Age: A Predominating Feature at Olympia’, Ideal Home (April 1938), p. 305. 12 Smarts brothers furniture catalogue (1937), Geffrye Museum, Furniture catalogues collection, Box 14. 13 Crown Wallpaper Magazine (1939 (Jan, Feb, Mar)), p. 23, Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture archive, Middlesex University. 14 P. Mandler, ‘New Towns for Old: The Fate of the Town Centre’, in B. Conekin, F. Mort and C. Waters (eds) Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain 1945–1964 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1999), pp. 208–27, at pp. 160, 168. 15 R. Winnington, ‘“Coo,” said the duchess’, News Chronicle (27 March 1948), p. 9, BFI Reuben Library, press cuttings file. 16 J. Dolan, ‘Post-War Englishness, Maytime in Mayfair, Utopian Visions and Consumer Culture’, in C. Hart (ed.) Englishness, Diversity, Differences and Identity: A Collection of Original Papers Exploring Notions of Englishness (Kingswinford: Midrash Publications, 2007), pp. 45–53, at p. 47. 17 M. A. Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 30–1. 18 R. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 450. 19 E. Heathcote, The Meaning of Home (London: Frances Lincoln, 2012), p. 62; B. Highmore, The Great Indoors: At Home in the Modern House (London: Profile Books, 2014), p. 137. 20 ‘Anna Does Another Neagle’, Picture Post (23 April 1949), p. 33. 21 ‘Spring in Park Lane’, Manchester Guardian (27 March 1948), p. 7, BFI Reuben Library, press cuttings file. 22 Sunday Pictorial quoted in Spring in Park Lane – pressbook, p. 5, BFI Reuben Library, press cuttings file. 23 L. Mosley, ‘Soft Lights in a Harsh World …’, Daily Express (28 March 1948), p. 9, BFI Reuben Library, press cuttings file. 24 ‘Spring in Park Lane’, Manchester Guardian, p. 7, BFI Reuben Library, press cuttings file. 25 S. Harper, Women in British Cinema: Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know (London: Continuum, 2000), p. 56. 26 Ibid., p. 56. Melanie Williams and Melanie Bell suggest that they ‘belong in the category of the “middlebrow”, offering neither the proletarian vigour of the lowbrow nor the intellectual acerbity of the highbrow’. M. Bell and

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M. Williams, ‘“The Hour of the Cuckoo”: Reclaiming the British Woman’s Film’, in M. Bell and M. Williams (eds) British Women’s Cinema (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 1–18, at p. 10. Dolan, ‘Post-war Englishness’, p. 45. Ibid., p. 49. Ideal Home Exhibition Catalogue (1930), p. 15, V&A Archive of Art and Design, Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition: Records, AAD/1990/9/11. ‘British Film Section’, Ideal Home Exhibition Catalogue (1947), p. 133, V&A AAD/1990/9/18. Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb, p. 109. F. R., ‘Foreword’, in Ideal Home Exhibition Catalogue (1939), p. 9. V&A AAD/1990/9/17. Ibid. G. R. Warren, ‘The Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition 1944–1962: Representations of the ‘Ideal Home’ and Domestic Consumption’, unpublished PhD thesis. Middlesex University, 2001, p. 4. M. Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics 16:1 (1986), 22–7, at p. 25. D. S. Ryan, The Ideal Home through the 20th Century (London: Hazar, 1997), n.p. Sugg Ryan, Ideal Homes, p. 19. D. Sugg Ryan, ‘Spectacle, the Public and the Crowd: Pageants and Exhibitions in 1908’, in M. Hatt and M. O’Neill (eds) The Edwardian Sense: Art, Design and Spectacle in Britain, 1901–1910 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 43–72, at p. 46; Focusing on a specific display at the exhibition in 1934, Sugg Ryan describes: ‘visitors […] who gathered round Heath Robinson’s participated in a collective, knowing and joyful experience of consumer culture and modernity similar to that found in the cinema’. Ideal Homes, p. 133. A. Kuhn, ‘Cinema culture and femininity in the 1930s’, in C. Gledhill and G. Swanson (eds) Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and Cinema in World War Two Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 177–92, at p. 184. A. Kuhn, An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002), p. 141. Ibid. ‘A New Wonderland for Home-Lovers!’, Ideal Home Exhibition advert in The Tatler (April 1 1936), p. xi, British Newspaper archive. ‘The City of Beautiful Night’, Ideal Home Exhibition Catalogue (1936), pp. 20–1, V&A AAD/1990/9/14. ‘The Ideal Home Exhibition’, Homes and Gardens (April 1936), p. 439; ‘Exhibition Review’, Ideal Home (April 1936), p. 325. Kuhn, An Everyday Magic, p. 141. ‘Foreword’, Ideal Home Exhibition Catalogue (London: Daily Mail, 1936), p. 14, V&A AAD/1990/9/14.

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47 ‘The City of Beautiful Night’, Ideal Home Exhibition Catalogue (1936), p. 21. 48 ‘Exhibition Review’, Ideal Home (April 1936), p. 325, V&A AAD/1990/9/14. 49 ‘The City of Beautiful Night’, Ideal Home Exhibition Catalogue (1936), p. 22. 50 Reproductions of homes belonging to the film’s stars, Margaretta Scott and Raymond Massey, also featured in the nearby ‘Homes of the Film Stars’ display. 51 ‘“The Shape of Things to Come”: A Panorama of Furnishing by Gooch’s of Knightsbridge’, Ideal Home Exhibition Catalogue (1936), pp. 268–9, V&A AAD/1990/9/14. 52 Ibid., pp. 267–9. 53 A. Kuhn, ‘Snow White in 1930s Britain’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 7:2 (2010), pp. 183–99, at p. 196. 54 Ibid., p. 196. ‘The House of the Seven Dwarves’, Ideal Home Exhibition Catalogue (London: Daily Mail, 1938), pp. 233–4, V&A AAD/1990/9/16. 55 F.R., ‘Foreword’, Ideal Home Exhibition Catalogue (London: Daily Mail, 1939), p. 10, V&A AAD/1990/9/17. 56 Ibid., p. 9. 57 R. Cutforth, Later Than We Thought: A Portrait of the Thirties (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1976), p. 82. 58 M. Pleydell-Bouverie, Daily Mail Book of Post War Homes: Based on the Ideas and Opinions of the Women of Britain (London: Daily Mail, Ideal Home Exhibition Dept of Associated Newspapers Ltd., 1944), p. 159. 59 ‘Happy Return! Ideal Home Exhibition’, Modern Woman (March 1947), p. 115. 60 ‘Foreword’, Ideal Home Exhibition Catalogue (1948), p. 5; Pages from Ideal Home Exhibition photograph album (1948), V&A AAD/1990/9/19 and AAD/1990/9/58. 61 Ideal Home Exhibition photograph album 1949–50, V&A AAD/1990/9/59. 62 ‘British Film Section’, Ideal Home Exhibition Catalogue (1947), p. 133, V&A AAD/1990/9/18. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., p. 138. 66 Ibid. 67 A. Medhurst, ‘Myths of Consensus and Fables of Escape: British Cinema 1945–51’, in J. Fyrth (ed.) Labour’s Promised Land? Culture and Society in Labour Britain 1945–51 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1995), pp. 289–301, at p. 299. 68 W. Mannon, A. D. Miller and N. Phipps, Spring in Park Lane … Adapted from the Screenplay by Nicholas Phipps. Based on a Novel ‘Come out of the Pantry’ by Alice Duer Miller (London: World Film Publications, 1948), p. 5. 69 R. Winnington, News Chronicle (27 March 1948), p. 9, BFI Reuben Library, press cuttings file.

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70 C. Brunsdon, London in Cinema: The Cinematic City since 1945 (London: BFI, 2007), p. 99. 71 Ibid., p. 98. 72 This static framing of the domestic interiors, and particularly this reference to theatrical staging, chimes with Christine Gledhill’s analysis of the development of the pictorial style and emphasis on middle-class decorum in the theatre and in British cinema in the 1920s and 1930s. C. Gledhill, Reframing British Cinema, 1918–1928: Between Restraint and Passion (London: BFI, 2003), pp. 20, 19, 51. 73 Wilcox’s postwar films showed the influence of the themes and motifs from his work in 1930s Hollywood. Critical reviews often noted these pretensions to Hollywood style. For instance, W. A. Darlington took issue with ‘the unreal England of Hollywood legend’ in I Live in Grosvenor Square (1945) in his Daily Telegraph review (24 July 1945), p. 15, BFI Reuben Library, press cuttings file. Wilcox’s will to create a British Hollywood was also evidenced in his promotion of Anna Neagle and his promotion of the idea that ‘We can develop Stars in Britain’, in Picturegoer (26 January 1935), p. 20. 74 A number of film historians have commented on this self-reflexivity, including S. Street, British National Cinema (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 130; Dolan, ‘Post-war Englishness’, p. 48. 75 Spring in Park Lane – medium pressbook, BFI Reuben Library. 76 ‘British Picture Parade’, Ideal Home Exhibition Catalogue (1948), p. 213, V&A AAD/1990/9/19./9/19. 77 Ibid. 78 R. Dyer, ‘Entertainment and Utopia’, in S. Cohan (ed.) Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 19–30, at p. 22. 79 ‘The Daily Mail Welcomes You’, Ideal Home Exhibition Catalogue (1950), p. 7, V&A AAD/1990/9/21. 80 Ideal Home Exhibition Photograph Album (1951), V&A AAD/1990/9/60. 81 Street, British National Cinema, p. 133. 82 Medhurst, ‘Myths of Consensus and Fables of Escape’, p. 299; Dolan, ‘Postwar Englishness’, p. 48; Street suggests that Anna Neagle ‘represented middleclass values which required her to be hardworking, humble and modest’. Street, British National Cinema, p. 145. 83 A. Lejeune, The C. A. Lejeune Film Reader (Manchester: Carcanet, 1991), p. 227. 84 ‘Anna Does Another Neagle’, Picture Post (23 April 1949), p. 33. 85 In Picture Post in 1938, an advertisement for Modern Woman promoted ‘TeaTime Talk with Anna Neagle’ (24 December 1938), p. 5. Later, in a 1949 interview with Woman’s Own, Anna remarked: ‘I think women are wonderful … they plan their lives in pattern of peace, yet when an emergency tumbles their familiar world about their ears, they rise to prodigious tasks outside their homes, and somehow manage to run their homes as a kind of sideline!’ ‘Anna Talks about the Girl He Left Behind’, Woman’s Own (14 January 1949), p. 20.

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86 J. Thumim, ‘The Female Audience: Mobile Women and Married Ladies’, in C. Gledhill and G. Swanson (eds) Nationalising Femininity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 238–56, at p. 254. 87 The Glass Mountain was so popular that it was re-released in 1950 and 1953. 88 In interview with Brian McFarlane, Denison explained that ‘they cashed in on the team idea with The Glass Mountain and then, for various reasons, it didn’t last […] I think the studios looked for opportunities to co-star us, and publicity sold us as the cosiest couple unhung, all that his-and-hers stuff with the thatched cottage in Essex’. B. McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema: As Told by the Filmmakers and Actors Who Made It (London: Methuen, 1997), p. 172. 89 R. Dyer, Stars (London: BFI, 1998, first pub. 1979), Barry King ‘Articulating Stardom’ (1985) quoted, p. 42. 90 R. Low, The History of the British Film 1918–1929, Vol. IV (London: Allen & Unwin, 1971), p. 263. 91 Ibid., p. 261. 92 S. Street, ‘“Got to Dance My Way to Heaven”: Jessie Matthews, Art Deco and the British Musical of the 1930s’, Studies in European Cinema 2:1 (2005), 19–30, at p. 21. 93 Kuhn, ‘Film Stars in 1930s Britain’, p. 191. 94 A. Settle, ‘News and Views for the Hostess’, My Home (March 1937), p. 24. 95 Kuhn, ‘Film Stars in 1930s Britain’, p. 191. 96 C. L. White, Women’s Magazines 1693–1968 (London: Michael Joseph, 1970), p. 96; W. N. Coglan, The Readership of Newspapers and Periodicals in Great Britain, 1936. A Report on Circulation Directed by W. N. Coglan. (London: Incorporated Society of British Advertisers, 1937). 97 Dyer, Stars, p. 42; Light, Forever England, p. 8. 98 S. Margrave, ‘Homes of the Film Stars’, Ideal Home Exhibition Catalogue (1936), pp. 252–64, V&A AAD/1990/9/14. 99 This interior also evokes the luxurious Moderne style inspired by cinemagoing that Deborah Sugg Ryan argues was manifested specifically in the interior designs of suburban bedrooms – a sense of glamour conveyed by the somewhat more ostentatious reproduction of Mae West’s French-style bedroom at the exhibition. S. Margrave, ‘Homes of the Film Stars’, Ideal Home Exhibition Catalogue, p. 261. 100 Ibid., p. 259. 101 Ibid.; ‘Exhibition Review’, Ideal Home (April 1936), p. 336. 102 S. Margrave, ‘Homes of the Film Stars’, Ideal Home Exhibition Catalogue, p. 259. 103 ‘A Day with Gracie’, Picture Post (29 October 1938), p. 13. 104 M. Breen, ‘The Star Nobody Knows’, Picturegoer (16 January 1937), p. 10. 105 B. Babington, British Stars and Stardom: From Alma Taylor to Sean Connery (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 10. 106 Breen, ‘The Star Nobody Knows’, Picturegoer (16 January 1937), p. 10.

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107 See N. Hubble, ‘Imagism, Realism, Surrealism: Middlebrow Transformations in the Mass-Observation Project’, in E. Brown and M. Grover (eds) Middlebrow Literary Cultures: The Battle of the Brows, 1920–1960 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 202–17, at p. 285. 108 Light, Forever England, p. 8. 109 S. Lee, British Film Stars at Home (London: Findon Publications, 1947), n.p. 110 These are ideas that also shaped the presentation of Vivien Leigh’s homes in magazines between the 1930s and 1950s, as I have explored in ‘“A Living Set”: At Home with Vivien Leigh’, in K. Dorney and M. B. Gale (eds) Vivien Leigh: Actress and Icon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), pp. 215–37. 111 Denison describes the couple’s ‘fluctuating struggle to live down our film-star images and to be accepted in the theatre’. M. Denison, Double Act (London: Michael Joseph, 1985), p. 4. See also H. Price, ‘“A Somewhat Homely” Stardom: Michael Denison, Dulcie Gray and Refurnishing Domestic Modernity in the Postwar Years’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 12:1 (2015), 25–44. 112 D. Barker, ‘Perfect Antidote to Kitchen Sink Drama’, Guardian (23 July 1998), V&A Theatre and Performance Archives, Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray, THM Biog file. 113 E-mail correspondence with Sarah Cronin-Stanley – Managing Director of Talking Pictures TV, November 2018. 114 M. Denison, Overture and Beginners (London: Gollancz, 1973), p. 195. 115 ‘Fred Majdalany at the Cinema’, Daily Mail (4 February 1949), p. 14, BFI Reuben Library, press cuttings file. 116 P. Dehn, ‘Angels One Five’, Sunday Chronicle (23 March 1952), p. 9, BFI Reuben Library, press cuttings file. 117 Dulcie Gray quoted in McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema, p. 174. 118 My Brother Jonathan – medium pressbook, BFI Reuben Library. 119 Denison, Overture and Beginners, p. 215. 120 The broad shoulders of this suit are the significant characteristic of a caricature of Denison which appeared in the Turf Cigarettes series to coincide with the release of My Brother Jonathan. 121 Street, British National Cinema, p. 134. 122 P. Warren, Elstree: The British Hollywood (London: Elm Tree, 1983), p. 90. This transatlantic label was reinforced with Warner Bros’ postwar investment in ABPC shares. For example, the Evening News describes Denison as: ‘a splendid newcomer to stardom’ with ‘the soft eyes of another James Stewart’. ‘My Brother Jonathan’, Evening News (19 February 1948), p. 3, BFI Reuben Library, press cuttings file. 123 A. Spicer, Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), p. 48. 124 Ibid., pp. 48–9. 125 Daily Mail Film Award Annual, British Films of 1947 (London: Winchester Publications, 1948), n.p.

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126 My Brother Jonathan – medium pressbook. 127 ‘British Film Section’, Ideal Home Exhibition Catalogue (1947), pp. 136–7, V&A AAD/1990/9/18. 128 Ibid. 129 ‘“The new Power Master no.10 is my choice” says Phyllis Calvert’, Picture Post (30 October 1948). Evidence of star visits found in Ideal Home Exhibition photograph albums, 1947–50. 130 M. Sweet, Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema (London: Faber & Faber, 2005), p. 207. 131 R. Stannage, Stars by Day: A Tour in Words and Pictures of the British Film Studios (London: The Film Book Club, 1947), p. 97. 132 A. Marwick, British Society since 1945 (London: Penguin, 2003, first pub. 1982), p. 40. 133 J. Finch and P. Summerfield, ‘Social Reconstruction and the Emergence of the Companionate Marriage, 1945–59’, in D. Clark (ed.) Marriage, Domestic Life and Social Change (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 6–28, at p. 7. 134 J. Heal, ‘Homes on Chiswick Mall’, Ideal Home, p. 28; Lee, British Film Stars at Home, n.p.; A. Hastings, ‘The Film Star Pair Who Could Win the Dunmow Flitch!’, Picturegoer (18 December 1948), pp. 12–13; ‘The Laurence Oliviers’ Home’, Woman’s Own (25 March 1949), p. 9. 135 Lee, British Film Stars at Home, n.p. 136 M. Dearing, ‘Design for Living: In an Essex Village’, Picturegoer (12 February 1949), p. 10. 137 B. Nichols, ‘My World … by Beverley Nichols’, Woman’s Own (5 May 1949), p. 11; ‘You Write This … We Pay!’ letters column, Woman’s Own (23 June 1949), p. 21; Ewbank sweeper advertisement, Woman’s Own (20 July 1950), p. 37; ‘Fitrobe’ advertisement, Woman’s Own (2 November 1950), p. 40. 138 Denison, Overture and Beginners, p. 223. 139 Dearing, ‘Design for Living’, p. 10. 140 Light, Forever England, p. 8. 141 Dearing, ‘Design for Living’, p. 11. 142 K. Moen, Film and Fairy Tales: The Birth of Modern Fantasy (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), p. 115. 143 Bonnie later featured in the home of lawyer Robert Blair/Denison in The Franchise Affair and in the bungalow of Dulcie’s airfield resident in Angels One Five. 144 ‘Fred Majdalany at the Cinema’, Daily Mail (4 February 1949), p. 14. 145 B. McFarlane, ‘Losing the Peace: Some British Films of Post-War Adjustment’, in T. Barta (ed.) Screening the Past: Film and the Representation of History (New York: Praeger, 1998), pp. 93–108, 99. 146 Street, British National Cinema, p. 133.

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Interior lives: imagining private visions of home

I

n a number of British films in the 1940s, domestic life manifested private anxieties, psychological troubles and emotional readjustments to the home. In postwar films noirs such as The October Man (d. Roy Ward Baker, 1947) and They Made Me a Fugitive (d. Alberto Cavalcanti, 1947), a stable home life is a long-distant memory for Jim Ackland (John Mills), who lives in a shared boarding house, and for runaway Clem (Trevor Howard). ‘Adjusting-to-the-peace’ films such as The Years Between (d. Compton Bennett, 1946) and Frieda (d. Basil Dearden, 1947) centre on the troubles of return for servicemen, but also feature expressionist-style explorations of the threatening spaces of home for their bereaved, isolated and alienated wives.1 In The Fallen Idol (d. Carol Reed, 1948), The Rocking Horse Winner (d. Anthony Pelissier, 1949) and The Magnet (d. Charles Frend, 1950), the home is presented as part of a disconcerting world of the unknown from the viewpoints of children. Postwar films often featured homes as uncanny milieus, influenced by gothic iconography and presented as extensions of a troubled unconscious. Expressive interior settings onscreen embodied the interior lives of screen protagonists, while also being suggestive of British cinema’s engagement with a contemporary climate in which the home was heralded as a site of social renewal and national invigoration but was also investigated with a sense of urgency and anxiety. Charles Barr identifies ‘a spectacular shift which occurs in mid-1940s British films from the public sphere to the private, with a stress on vision and fantasy’.2 This chapter focuses on private visions of the home onscreen in this period, exploring the expression of subjectivity – the dreams and nightmares of central characters – conveyed through a depiction of domestic life, and specifically through a combination of realist and melodramatic modes of address. Melodramatic excess and its corresponding dramatic

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visual style was often discussed as ‘novelettish’ or worthy of women’s magazines by contemporary critics more inclined towards praising British cinema’s realist qualities.3 However, I explore how melodramatic modes of address, with their emphasis on an ‘individual, personal and affective’ experience, were a popular means of expressing domestic modernity, and indeed modernism, in the interwar years.4 With this in mind, I contextualise the private visions of domestic life in two 1940s films in terms of their engagement with an interwar mode of address that constructed the modern home with an emphasis on psychological wellbeing. Melodrama and modernism In previous chapters, I have noted an emphasis on health and wellbeing as part of the construction of interwar suburban modernity. Bright, open suburban homes – in close proximity to leafy lanes and open fields – offered escape from urban dirt and squalor, providing living environments which correlated with increasing interest in health and psychological wellbeing. Psychoanalysis was an increasingly popular topic in these years, with magazines, journals, popular books and newspaper columns devoted to understanding the issues surrounding psychological health, ‘new ways of imagining human nature, pathological anxiety’ and ‘the “irrational” aspects of the human psyche’.5 Peter Mandler suggests that the ‘new emphasis on interiority and introspection […] was reinforced by the growth of “Little England” sentiment in interwar writing about the “national character”, evincing a desire to put behind one the globe-trotting days of the Victorian meridian and to cultivate instead one’s own garden (literally as well as figuratively)’.6 Specifically part of this ‘Little England’ mentality, the development of suburbia saw an increased interest in studies of the psyche as a ‘modern enterprise’, and perhaps the most visible case of these developments was the diagnosis of ‘suburban neurosis’ as a condition suffered by women isolated in their suburban homes.7 The prominent role of the domestic environment in conceptions of psychological wellbeing is evidenced in feminine middlebrow novels released around this time. Informed by contemporary interests in psychoanalysis, such novels were often preoccupied with imagining the home, foregrounding the subjective experiences of their female protagonists in doing so (as in Mrs Miniver in Chapter 2).8 Rosamond Lehmann’s novels are particularly acclaimed for privileging feminine, domestic subjectivities and The Weather

Interior lives

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in the Streets (1936) opens with the confused observations of its protagonist Olivia Spencer, as follows: Etty’s crammed doll’s house sitting-room, unfamiliar in this twilight, dense with the fog’s penetration, with yesterday’s cigarettes; strangled with cherrycoloured curtains, with parrot-green and silver cushions, with Etty’s little chairs, tables, stools, glass and shagreen and cloisonné boxes, bowls, ornaments, shrilled with a peevish reproach over and over again from the darkest corner: withdrew into a sinister listening and waiting as she slumped down at the miniature writing table, lifted the receiver and croaked ‘Yes?’9

As Olivia wakes to the sound of a ringing telephone in the townhouse belonging to her cousin, her half-awake state affects the description of the ‘unfamiliar’ room around her. Her inner thoughts become confused with the furnishings of the sitting room and even with the ‘fog’s penetration’ from the street outside. The ringing of the telephone is a personified, animated part of the room. In the final sentence, as the telephone ‘withdrew into a sinister listening and waiting’, the material presence of the receiver and Olivia’s croak of ‘Yes?’ suddenly crystallises the boundaries between the furnishings of the domestic interior and the inner life of the protagonist. The confusing experience of the room and the explicit exploration of the psyche in relation to the domestic environment create a feeling of the uncanny: a sense of ‘disorientation, where the world in which we live suddenly seems strange, alienating, [and] threatening’.10 In the same period, stories accompanied by dramatic illustrations of domestic life were a popular way of addressing the psychological life of the home in magazines aimed at lower-middle- and middle-class readers.11 Cynthia L. White describes these new publications as offering an ‘“intimate personal service”’ for mothers and housewives seeking to solve their everyday problems, ‘with a secondary emphasis on entertainment’.12 For example, Modern Woman – a monthly magazine introduced in 1925 (George Newnes Ltd) and aimed at an audience of ‘single professional women, housewives, homeowners and the families of the rapidly expanding middle classes’ – included domestic advice as well as escapist stories.13 Nicola Humble argues that the construction of domestic life in these magazines was ‘in a relation to the outside world that is simultaneously anxious and exhibitionist’.14 Stories in Modern Woman voice these anxieties, with their focus on the inner, emotional life of the home, destabilising the concept of domesticity as comfortable and constant and instead presenting it as a site for possible insecurity and instability.15

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These melodramatic, middlebrow formats were engaging with domestic life with an emphasis on the unconscious, an idea more common in artistic modernism at the time. With Kristin Bluemel’s definition of intermodernism as a ‘cultural and critical bridge or borderland’ situated between middlebrow culture and modernism, revisionist work under the aegis of ‘intermodernism’ explores this engagement.16 As part of this school of thought, Nick Hubble’s research on Mass-Observation suggests that one of its techniques was a form of ‘modernist imagism’, in which observers were to ‘liberate their perceptions from externally imposed associations’, with an emphasis on exploring the collective unconscious.17 Seemingly in contrast to the idea of a shared unconscious, images of home in melodramatic stories aimed at a female readership focused on the subjective experience of private, domestic life. This depiction of home engaged with the ‘modern enterprise’ of increased interest in psychological health, which Martin Daunton and Bernhard Rieger have suggested also ‘marked shifts in contemporary ideas about the individual and society’.18 These stories articulated a modern relationship between the inner and the outer worlds of domestic life by presenting a psychological experience of home to an imagined community of readers with wider concerns about the establishment of a domestic citizenship. It is the use of melodramatic traits in magazine stories – focusing on the visual and imagined drama of relationships in the home and its uncanny appearance – which tempers this modernist attention to the subjective experience of domestic life, allowing for a conservative engagement with modernity. The following sections consider the depiction of domestic life with a close eye on the interior life of a suburban housewife and mother, Laura Jesson, in canonical British film Brief Encounter (d. David Lean, 1945) and that of a maladjusted war veteran in postwar film noir The Small Back Room (d. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1949). I first explore Brief Encounter’s treatment of Laura’s interior life in terms of the 1930s promotion of the feminine, interior consciousness as an integral part of new configurations of domestic modernity.19 I then turn to explore how Powell and Pressburger’s depiction of the destabilised interior life of backroomscientist Sammy Rice negotiates interwar images of ‘uncanny modernity’ through reference to gothic iconography.20 While both films evidence the kind of ‘quality’ realism that contemporary critics praised, Robert Murphy indicates: ‘with their threatening shadows and angst-ridden protagonists, [both] belong more properly to a rich tradition of melodrama’.21 Through

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an examination of women’s magazine culture in the interwar years, I examine how – expressed through a combination of realist and melodramatic visual modes – they each construct connections between subjectivity and the home, and thus engage with the relationship between melodrama and modernism forged in the 1930s. Brief Encounter

Made in the last months of the war and released in December 1945, Brief Encounter centres on middle-class housewife and mother Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) as she dwells on a short-lived love affair with a handsome doctor (Trevor Howard) she meets at a local train station. Still Life (1935), the Noël Coward play on which Brief Encounter is based, simply shows the couple’s affair developing in a series of scenes set in the refreshment room of Milford Junction station. The closest the play comes to Laura’s domestic life is in a proclamation she makes that the affair ‘makes me a stranger in my own house’.22 She details how ‘familiar things, ordinary things that I’ve known for years, like the dining-room curtains, and the wooden tub with a silver top that holds biscuits, and a water-colour of San Remo that my mother painted, look odd to me’ – structuring her sense of disorientation around the defamiliarisation of the domestic.23 In David Lean, Anthony Havelock-Allan and Ronald Neame’s adapted screenplay, Laura confesses her love affair to her reliable husband Fred (Cyril Raymond) in the form of an interior monologue and with the ‘affair’ shown in imagined flashbacks – thus foregrounding her personal experience through an emphasis on her viewpoint and the domestic surroundings of her comfortable, semi-rural home.24 In the film’s final scenes, noticing her distraught expression, Fred embraces her and, with the line ‘Thank you for coming back to me’, acknowledges Laura’s departure from the everyday (and him) into her own thoughts. Brief Encounter’s exploration of feminine subjectivity and centring on a woman’s dilemma has been much debated. For instance, Marcia Landy’s feminist interpretation emphasises that the film’s central idea is ‘that women cherish a private fantasy life, that their lives are split between the romantic and the banal’: she emphasises that the spectator’s access to Laura’s thoughts is abruptly cut off with ‘Thank you for coming back to me’ and her return to Fred, home and family is accompanied by a sudden silencing of her interior monologue.25 Likewise, Antonia Lant argues that ‘Brief Encounter appeared to deal sincerely with a woman’s dilemma, but

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the codes of realism worked to make that which was actually controlling a woman’s choice invisible’.26 However, Richard Dyer’s study of Brief Encounter offers a different way of re-evaluating the film’s treatment of Laura’s subjectivity, as he highlights how Laura’s borrowing of books from Boots on her trips to Milford suggests ‘a penchant for a particular kind of middlebrow fiction aimed at middle-class women’ and emphasises that the film can be read using this framework of texts encouraging feminine subjectivities.27 Drawing on Nicola Beauman’s research on women’s novels, Dyer persuasively argues that ‘Laura’s reading places her within a circuit of readers and writers who, as […] Beauman puts it, “were linked by their mutual ‘pre-assumptions’”; they spoke the same language, were interested in the same kind of things, led the same kind of lives’.28 Not only does Laura’s borrowing of the latest book by Kate O’Brien convey her place as a ‘middlebrow reader’ and as part of a middlebrow network of similar, middleclass women, but her narrative imitates the ‘conflict between romance and everyday life’ and ‘the irreconcilability of marriage and passion’ characteristic of these novels.29 Brief Encounter’s centring of Laura’s thoughts – her dreams of romance versus her day-to-day existence – corresponds to the focus on the subjective experiences of home for female protagonists in interwar middlebrow fiction and the exploration of a feminine, domestic modernity in the work of writers such as Rosamond Lehmann, Lettice Cooper and E. M. Delafield.30 The ‘feminine angle’ in Brief Encounter can be explored by expanding the middlebrow network of women’s novels identified by Dyer to include the women’s magazines that – as Fiona Hackney’s research argues – were offering a new avenue for exploring modern, feminine subjectivities in the interwar years.31 The love story and central focus on Laura’s romantic desires in Brief Encounter have frequently been associated with ‘woman’s magazine stuff’.32 While it was praised by many for its realist style, some contemporary newspaper critics criticised it for being ‘keyed to daydreaming […] and women’s glossy magazines’.33 In the US, James Agee wrote that ‘the same story, with fancy variations, is told once or twice in every issue of every magazine for housewives’.34 Gene Phillips’ study of David Lean’s career repeats this sentiment by describing Brief Encounter’s plot as ‘reminiscent of the kind of romantic tale that fills the pages of the “true confessions” type of magazine’, emphasising that Lean’s tasteful treatment of this material is what differentiates it from these kinds of ‘romantic tale’.35 By contrast, in the

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field of feminist re-evaluations of British film and culture, Janice Winship contextualises Brief Encounter as part of a middlebrow network, highlighting its congruences with the emotional restraint of Woman’s Own fiction.36 More recently, as part of her re-evaluation of ‘the feminine angle of much of Lean’s work’, Melanie Williams comments that Brief Encounter ‘had to be rescued from damning associations with women’s mass culture in order to be reified’.37 Williams draws attention to a BBC television broadcast of the film in the 1960s which defended the film as follows: ‘Although the situation – an unsatisfactory love affair between two married people – is the basis of most women’s magazine stories, Brief Encounter has an emotional maturity virtually unknown in British films.’38 Far from rescuing the film from association with women’s magazines, I instead deliberately return to them in order to analyse its treatment of Laura’s interior life – drawing on Hackney’s reassessment of women’s magazines, and through a close exploration of stories published in Modern Woman. In so doing, I explore how the film’s depiction of domestic life alongside romantic daydreams reuses modes of address – combining realism with melodrama – established in magazines in the 1930s and thereby re-imagines the new feminine subjectivities central to the interwar promotion of domestic modernity. Realism, melodrama and ‘pictorial quaintness’

With her Rachmaninoff record playing, Fred absorbed in the crossword, and seated in a floral-upholstered armchair, Laura begins to describe her first meeting with Alec Harvey in the form of an interior monologue. Her meetings with Alec over a series of her Thursday shopping trips to Milford then structure the narrative, interspersed with returns to the film’s present and the narrator back at home in the library. In the opening library scene, a shot from over the corner of Laura’s armchair shows Fred carrying on with his crossword without noticing Laura’s despondent, fragile state. Accompanied by the Rachmaninoff and Laura’s whispered voiceover that ‘we’re a happily married couple and must never forget that – this is my home, you’re my husband and our children are upstairs in bed’, the view of the library presents an emotional and a material landscape that is at stake for her as she details the affair. As Laura’s thoughts drift from her home and family to her first meeting with Alec a few weeks earlier, the camera is positioned behind her in the armchair so that the chair itself and her head (out of focus and in the shadows) obscure the room and frame Fred and the

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library furnishings beyond (Figure 33). Repeated a number of times in the film, the framing and mise-en-scène in this scene contribute to its realist, observational mode of address, emphasising the close relationship between Laura’s interior life and her material, domestic surroundings that was much praised in reviews. For instance, in his appraisal of the film’s realist style, Roger Manvell describes Lean’s ‘sympathetic eye’ for presenting Laura’s character and story through close attention ‘to the environment of home, street, and station, which are so much part of her life’.39 Designed by art director L. P. Williams, Laura’s home stresses her middle-class respectability. Its design conveys the everyday, material world of suburbia – in close proximity to the ticket stubs, bath buns and sugar in the spoon at the train station. The published screenplay describes it as being ‘a solid, comfortable-looking house’.40 Although Laurie Ede raises the point that this did not give Williams much to go on as an art designer, this sense of the physical materiality of Laura’s home is firmly established in the film’s first domestic scenes, featuring the hallway, children’s room, dining room and library. ‘Solid, comfortable-looking’, the hallway is dressed to stress its ordinariness: wooden-framed paintings, a miniature Grandfather clock, painted bannisters and a Nouveau-esque chandelier. Fred’s hat, a collection of walking sticks and his coat hanging in the foreground, by

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partially obscuring the view of Laura as she tiredly climbs the stairs, draw attention to the very solidity and materiality of this domestic topos. The mise-en-scène is characterised by stability and stillness, suggesting the very opposite to Fred’s claim that ‘the place has been in an uproar’. The dining room is similarly described in the screenplay as ‘furnished and comfortable without being in any way spectacular’.41 And in this room, the same sense of reliability and middle-class respectability is conveyed through markers of suburban, conservative modernity, including a wooden sideboard with a trophy displayed on top, historical portraits and a landscape painting, a brick fireplace surrounded with contemporary tiles and a mantelpiece decorated with Tudor-style metal plates and tankard, together with Laura’s modern domestic appliance, a Cona coffee maker. While ostensibly a realist ‘study of the commonplace’, highlighting the materiality of Laura’s domestic life, this dramatic visual treatment of her home – emphasising its close connection with her interior life – recurs throughout the film, evidencing its equally melodramatic mode of address.42 For instance, the establishing ‘armchair-observer’ shot of the library cuts to one tightly framing Laura in the armchair – she appears to be encased by the chair, her lower half and the ends of the chair’s arms just out of shot. As Laura becomes increasingly distressed and uncomfortable in the conversation with Fred, this claustrophobic framing and stark lighting conveys the close relationship between her domestic, material environment and her inner, emotional life (Figure 34). Christine Geraghty notes the combination of realist and melodramatic modes of address in postwar Ealing films, arguing that they work in a similar way to give access to their female protagonists’ points of view. Indeed, Geraghty suggests that ‘the way in which melodramatic and realist modes come together to represent the women’s position can be found in the mise-en-scène, which, at key points, transforms the home from a mundane and ordinary space into a trap or prison’.43 Comparably, in Brief Encounter, ‘a melodramatic reordering of the domestic space to express the heroine’s feeling of entrapment’ is established visually – through the use of expressive lighting, the claustrophobic framing of the armchair and Celia Johnson’s (increasingly distressed) performance.44 The way in which Laura is framed in the space conveys the structuring of her daily life by domestic frameworks, reinforced by the somewhat uncanny size and shape of the furnishings, which appear to fill the room and enshroud her within her home (and marriage). Similarly, in a later scene –  following her discovery of her son Bobby’s

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accident – she becomes increasingly emotional: the view of her position in front of the fire is framed by the floral upholstery of Fred’s armchair and his crossword, both presenting a material realism but also conveying her state of mind using a melodramatic mode of address. As Laura begins to describe her love affair – ‘it all started on an ordinary day in the most ordinary place in the world’ – the view of Fred doing the crossword across from her fades. With Laura still visibly seated in the armchair in one corner of the frame, the scene in front of her changes to a view of the refreshment room in which she first meets Alec. Richard Winnington’s review praised the film’s depiction of their love affair, explaining that ‘Love in the suburbs is an endlessly and treacherously attractive theme to novelists, playwrights, and film makers; they have attacked it whimsically, patronisingly, grimly, comically, but seldom with the sincerity of Brief Encounter.’45 Other contemporary reviews attributed this ‘sincerity’ and the film’s poeticism to its realist aesthetic and its treatment of the everyday topos of the station’s refreshment room and Laura’s other weekly haunts. For instance, Patrick Kirwan describes ‘the dreariness of suburban platforms, the macabre atmosphere of the refreshment room, the bleak passageways and rain-swept streets capture a strange beauty under David Lean’s direction’.46

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By contrast, the film’s pictorial look has also been subject to critique for its associations with women’s magazine fiction and ‘emotionalism’.47 According to Silver and Ursini, Lean’s films were the ‘target of critical disfavor’ in the 1970s, assessed as ‘slick appeals to emotionalism harboured in pictorial quaintness’.48 More recent accounts have reassessed Brief Encounter as a quasi-melodrama or a woman’s film, attesting to the mixture of realist and melodramatic modes at work in the film’s construction of ‘love in the suburbs’. For instance, Dyer’s discussion of the role of middlebrow women’s novels as a key cultural framework through which to read the film highlights its negotiation of the ‘conflict between romance and everyday life’.49 Expanding on Dyer’s reading, I suggest that the depiction of Laura’s domestic life – from the library scenes to her dreams of life outside the home with Alec, which particularly stresses her visual imagination – is key to Brief Encounter’s use of a recognisable set of modes of address for communicating her conflict. By considering the role of its pictorial style in negotiating her subjectivity, I explore how the film presents a visual ‘environment’ exploring themes of domesticity, escapism and romance – situating this as demonstrating an engagement with a middlebrow network of communications articulating and supporting women’s experiences.50 Women’s magazines and domestic modernity

Encouraging and constructing ‘home-centred feminine subjectivities’ in the interwar years, Modern Woman magazine offered its middle-class readership advice on their homes and family lives, providing both explorations of and escape from everyday chores and domestic domains.51 According to historian Andrew Bingham, ‘several articles insisted upon the importance of married women maintaining a rich and cultured “inner life” – something that was an important part of contemporary notions of femininity […] and ensuring that they were not “drowned in domesticity”’.52 Indeed, Hackney argues that women’s magazines in the 1920s and 1930s offered a ‘heightened sensory realm of visual communitication [sic]’, an environment which enabled readers to actively explore ideas about domesticity and modern femininity.53 Hackney resituates magazines like Modern Woman beyond their advancement of familial and domestic norms, and the expectations of the housewives and mothers, and suggests that magazines offered ‘fluid, imaginary spaces in which women could question, negotiate and inhabit

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different identities, exploring what being both modern and a woman might mean’.54 Fictional stories were a regular feature of these magazines, and were often published in several instalments. Accompanied by dramatic illustrations, they played a key role in this visual environment and offered an experience of domestic modernity constructed for and by readers, exploring ‘feminine subjectivities’ through the combination of ‘an often melodramatic tone’ with ‘a new social and psychological realism’.55 For instance, a 1936 story called ‘For Poorer, for Richer’ centres on a young, newly-wed couple – Emma and Patrick – and their efforts to settle in to a cramped flat in West Kensington. The first half of the story introduces their romance but also dwells on Emma’s domestic work, particularly detailing her efforts to cook on a budget. Foregrounding her point of view, one passage describes: She decided to shop for Patrick’s dinner on her way home. To-night she was going to cook for him. Better start on steak. She would be more ambitious when she was used to that tiny, spluttering oven. There was a row of shops a few streets away from the flat. Emma reviewed them with frank distaste. She was quite sure that sort of butcher could not be relied upon to serve one with succulent English meat […] She cheered up considerably when she remembered that a department store, a favourite of hers, was only a penny bus ride away.56

Although many of the stories focus on romance in their explorations of marital harmony, the material realities of domestic life – such as the steak and ‘tiny, spluttering oven’ often feature, taking on an unhomely, even oppressive role. For instance, in another story featured in Woman and Home which focuses on two sisters – Gina and Arden – as they fight over a lover, domestic rounds are never far away. Arden ponders whether ‘she liked this monotonous round of domestic chores’, detailing the minutiae of her daily household work: ‘Washing-up, everything back in its place, beds to be made, duster and sweeper over the rooms – and the May sunshine blazing through the windows.’57 Domestic details and worries to which the readers relate were woven through dramatic stories, reinforced by ‘compelling visuals […] designed to enhance a sense of realism’ and connections to articles and advertisements offering domestic advice throughout the magazines.58 Short articles on childcare, interior design and domestic tips often appeared within the stories themselves. As such, these narratives not only privileged the subjective experience of female protagonists: Hackney suggests that they served as ‘a space for readers to question and reflect on

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the structures, expectations and assumptions that underpinned domestic life’, including chores, husbands and children.59 On the other hand, torrid romances, thrillers and crime stories were a way of escaping the everyday. Many of the dramatic illustrations accompanying these stories featured glamorous couples wrapped in romantic embraces – as in the illustration accompanying ‘Doc’, a ‘romantic story that proves that doctors, like other men, are not immune from the heart troubles that happen at sea’ (Figure 35).60 Their primary purpose was to provide an escapist outlet for readers at home – allowing them to imagine more exotic climes, more glamorous clothes and jewellery, and even romantic affairs and entanglements away from their husbands: a site for the readers to experience a sense of freedom and imagination. Hackney draws a comparison between cinemagoing and the ‘“montage-style” organizational structure’ of women’s magazines, which offered new opportunities for feminine spectatorship.61 Indeed, the illustrations accompanying stories nodded to these acts of spectatorship through their own portraits of female spectators. For instance, an illustration accompanying ‘For Poorer, for Richer’ features Emma looking on at her husband Patrick as he lights the cigarette of her glamorous rival Dolores. The caption reinforces this emphasis on her point of view: ‘it was rather pathetic Emma thought the way Dolores looked at Patrick’.62 Although featuring a more glamorous setting and costumes, the positioning of Emma in her armchair framed in the corner of the room in this illustration – a visual trope that appeared in other magazine illustrations – is a precursor to Brief Encounter’s armchair-spectatorship. Not only were these stories foregrounding the thoughts of central characters for the purposes of reader identification, they were reinforcing this through a stress on visual spectatorship both for the fictional characters and the magazine’s readers. For Hackney, ‘magazine reading increasingly meant “looking”’ in the 1920s and 1930s, and ‘a form of looking that was closely aligned with viewing film’, emphasising that ‘audiences, trained by weekly trips to the movies were well versed in the nuances of visual communication’.63 While this visual environment encouraged a questioning of and escape from the home, an explicit stress on the importance of spectatorship for housewives and mothers recurred in the magazine’s promotion of traditional domestic values – particularly in interior design articles on how to make homes more visually appealing. Advertisements also made use of the kinds of illustration seen alongside magazine stories to stress the connections between feminine spectatorship, home and romance,

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35 ‘Doc’, Modern Woman (February 1936)

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as a means of promoting domestic appliances. For instance, an advertisement for Cozy Stoves in 1938 features a drawing of a woman looking up from her reading at her husband across the room, using this image of their companionate marriage (but which also suggests her questioning gaze) in order to promote ‘A “Cozy” evening by the fireside’ (Figure 36). While an

Cozy Stoves advertisement, Modern Woman (January 1938)

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emphasis on active spectatorship in Modern Woman may have allowed for explorations of ‘what it meant to be both modern and a woman’, values of home, family and feminine domestic labour were nevertheless upheld.64 Blurring the boundaries between romance, escapism, visual pleasure and the everyday, home and duty was a distinctive characteristic of the promotion of domestic modernity in the 1930s, demonstrating a middlebrow balance between realism and melodrama that endures in Brief Encounter’s negotiation of Laura’s domestic realities and dreams of romance. ‘Love in the suburbs’ Brief Encounter opens with the couple’s tragic final meeting in the refreshment room – a tracking shot across the interior first lingers on station staff Myrtle Bagot (Joyce Carey) and Albert Godby (Stanley Holloway) at the bar, the sound of their conversation and the murmured sounds of customers and cutlery continue, but the camera smoothly tracks further, panning across the corner of the bar to introduce Alec and Laura seated together at a table in the corner of the room (Figure 37). For C. A. Lejeune, the scene captures an everyday landscape and the emotional pull of the couple’s romance:

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Two people, a man and a woman, are sitting at a table with cold cups of tea and a plate of bath buns in front of them. There’s a lot of chatter going on at the bar, but they’re not paying any attention. They’re sitting quite silent, and you can tell from their faces, from the way they’re fiddling with their tea, that they’re going through an emotional crisis.65

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The mise-en-scène establishes the everyday, realist qualities of the setting – including the cash register, a cake stand and collection of empty teacups ready to be collected on the bar in the foreground, the refreshment room signs, fading wallpaper and Victorian-style light fittings surrounding them. And yet, the framing of the couple – at a distance from behind the bar, with stark, white lighting falling on their faces and costumes – and the way the sounds of the room around them and Myrtle and Albert’s conversation render their intimate conversation inaudible, presents a melodramatic emphasis on torment. As they lean forwards over their (last) cup of tea together, the scene is created almost as a still tableau. Although this opening scene is not presented explicitly as Laura’s memory, its combination of realism and melodramatic ‘emotional crisis’ evokes the dramatic illustrations accompanying women’s magazine stories during the interwar years. In later sequences, a number of similarly pictorial moments feature as visual reinforcements of Alec and Laura’s developing romance. This includes a ‘pictorial long shot’ that tracks them walking along together at the lake side, static shots framing them together during Alec’s declaration of love in a boathouse scene.66 Framed in the same way is their desperately dramatic clinch in the underpass beneath the station, in the latter part of which Laura’s position as armchair-spectator is revealed in the right-hand corner of the frame. As Laura imagines her life together with Alec on her train on the way home, she looks happily out through the window onto the passing landscape and explains in voiceover: ‘I imagined him holding me in his arms, I imagined being with him in all kinds of glamorous circumstances.’ Her reflection in the train window fades to a series of images corresponding to her daydreams: dancing with Alec in evening wear under oversized chandeliers, together in a box at the opera in Paris, kissing in a gondola in Venice, driving together in an open-top car and leaning together on the rail of a ship, and standing on a tropical beach. Closely evoking the kind of imagery found in the dramatic, escapist illustrations accompanying magazine stories, the images appear in a ‘montage-style’ in the place of her reflection in the window.67 In British cinema, this ‘montage-style’ was used to convey feminine subjectivities in

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a few films engaging with the theme of marital readjustment in the same period: for instance, in a young wife’s memories of a romance – featuring a series of embraces in I’ll Turn to You (d. Geoffrey Faithfull, 1946) – and in central character Diana Wentworth’s memories of her wedding and marriage in The Years Between.68 Laura’s dreams of life with Alec, and palm trees on a tropical beach in the moonlight, fade to the ‘pollarded willows at the canal just before the level crossing’ and she nears home. As she leaves the station at Ketchworth and hands over her ticket, Laura returns to the material realities of her domestic life and distances herself from her ‘silly’ dreams. Likewise, magazine stories’ offer of escape and their accompanying visually dramatic illustrations were also tempered by a sense of ironic distance and self-awareness. For instance, in the second part of the magazine story ‘For Richer, for Poorer’, Emma returns to the flat to discover Patrick and Dolores in a romantic embrace. Her response is described as follows: Twice Emma moved her lips as though about to speak. There must be something one ought to say; something which would bring Patrick and herself back from those dizzy heights of cinema melodrama to everyday reality.

Following her confrontation of Patrick, Emma’s thoughts again emphasise this comparison between the romantic drama and melodramatic scenes at the cinema: ‘“This,” she thought, “is the kind of domestic scene one is always reading about”. She had seen it dozens of times on the pictures. And now it was happening to her and Patrick.’69 Dyer positions the montage sequence as belonging to the film’s presentation of mass culture – including cinema – that Laura and Alec mock together, and thus situates this cinemainfluenced montage as belonging to a lower rung in a hierarchy of cultural texts used to mediate and present Laura’s point of view.70 However, Laura’s critical distance from the offer of escape was also a component in the visual environment of women’s magazines. Albeit influenced by film spectatorship, such escapist, romantic interrogations of home paradoxically presented themselves as characterised by restraint – and the same kind of distance from outright escape as Laura’s ‘schoolgirlish fantasies’. The ‘imbrication of fantasy and realist elements’ in the presentation of Laura’s escapist reverie can therefore be seen as part of a broader, middlebrow network of images, including those in the cinema and particularly in interwar magazines – blurring the boundaries between escapism, middle-class decorum and domestic life.71

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In Brief Encounter’s final scenes, interwar ideals of companionate marriage and home win out against passion. Antonia Lant emphasises that ‘Laura’s narration ends, smothered in the convolvuli of floral upholstery’ and her romantic dreams are quashed by her duties to home and family.72 For Lant, Laura’s voiceover and the presentation of a female point of view create a sense of ‘fantasy escape’, but it is ‘of a temporary, truncated character, as is Laura’s inner fantasy in the train’.73 Indeed, throughout the film’s exploration of Laura’s private fantasies away from the home, her domestic duties and the restraints of her everyday life in suburbia are never far away. The sound of the Rachmaninoff concerto and Fred’s call to her across the library in Laura’s present punctures into the image of her walk arm-in-arm with Alec in the underpass sequence, and into her spectatorial reverie. The boundaries between Laura’s romantic fantasies and home life are highly permeable and, while Lant sees Laura’s romantic dreams as abruptly cut off, I suggest that their interwoven presentation throughout the film re-imagines the ‘conflict between romance and everyday life’ evident throughout the middlebrow novels that Laura reads herself, as well as the same conflict encapsulated by the visual environments and feminine subjectivities constructed in women’s magazines.74 Shaped by a combination of realist and melodramatic modes of address, and importantly by Laura’s spectatorship, the film articulates the kind of interior life – negotiating romances, daydreams and ideals, alongside and in order to interrogate domestic realities – that was encouraged and offered by magazines in the interwar years as a means for women readers to engage with, and imagine, modernity. ‘“Brief Encounter” and real life’

Through its presentation of an explicitly interwar landscape and a displacement of the war and present-day realities in 1945, Lant describes the erosion of the film’s ‘realist status’ and ‘insulation’ of the presentation of women’s problems with ‘temporal blankets’ and the ‘timelessness of the fantastic’.75 However, I suggest that it is this very recourse to interwar modes of address that allows for the presentation of Laura’s interior, ‘fantastic’ visions of home and the imagined possibilities beyond. Indeed, Marcia Landy argues that ‘Brief Encounter is symptomatic of how wartime cinema did not create new concepts of femininity, it enabled old ones to circulate […] melodrama is the medium through which these concepts travel, fused with and

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animating discourses of familialism, community and nation’.76 Through its depiction of Laura’s domestic life, the film looks back to an interwar construction of modernity characterised by feminine subjectivities and imagination that presented a means by which to question and interrogate domestic structures, although which simultaneously reinforced them. While critical reviews ‘consistently downplayed the importance of the film’s “feminine angle”’ and were ‘unable to acknowledge […] its many other qualities that reeked of melodrama’, Lejeune’s reviews came closest to acknowledging its appeal in the very terms that Dyer suggests.77 One of her reviews of the film suggested that it would offer the same kind of solace as a treasured novel: ‘for a very few people it will remain what might be called a bedside film, to be taken out and relished to one’s heart’s content, to be familiarised and loved; to be seen and savoured, in quietness, over and over again’.78 Lejeune further describes Brief Encounter as having a ‘peculiar sort of intimate appeal to the spectator, whispering directly and persuasively to the individual rather than speaking to an audience as a crowd’.79 On its release, this level of identification is clear from responses to the film published in women’s magazines, suggesting a symbiotic relationship between the film and women’s magazine culture from the 1930s to the immediate postwar years. For instance, in Woman magazine, Freda Bruce Lockhart praised Brief Encounter as ‘a real life romance as many will recognize it’ and ‘painfully true to life’.80 In 1946, Woman’s Own published a letter under the title ‘“Brief Encounter” and Real Life’, which vehemently stresses that Laura was well within her rights to consider an affair with Alec.81 While ‘a man has so much more variety, his work, his club, his home’, the writer argues that ‘a woman with young children is, of necessity, tied to her home and her thoughts’: ‘How she longs, sometimes, for a little flutter, to get away for a while from the trivial round. And who can blame her?’ Through her response to Brief Encounter, the viewer in question ‘reflects on the structures, expectations and assumptions that underpinned domestic life’ for both herself and her contemporaries. This was followed by a host of letters published in the following week’s issue, from which it’s clear that Brief Encounter not only inspired the kind of exploration of feminine subjectivity and identification encouraged by women’s magazines, but itself became a subject of discussion for the communities that continued to be hosted by them. In the immediate postwar years, the dynamic relationship between the interior, psychological life of the home and community conveyed in

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the pages of Woman’s Own was becoming more broadly pervasive as both official and popular discourses promoted the home as a key site of postwar reconstruction and national rejuvenation. However, as noted in Chapter 2, J. B. Priestley warned veterans against returning to their private homes, with his admonition: ‘we hurry home too quickly  […] beware again the charmed cosy circle’.82 Likewise, a 1946 manual aimed at explaining the difficulties of readjustment to the home, titled Living Together Again, explained that, due to ‘deeper and older troubles […] stirred up in him […] he is apt to come home with being outcast and unwanted. He is a stranger in his own house.’83 In this cultural climate of psychological readjustment, the home onscreen was imbued with a sense of the uncanny. The Small Back Room

In The Small Back Room, flawed protagonist Sammy Rice (David Farrar) works in a government team dismantling booby-trapped devices dropped by the Nazis. Sammy frequents a local pub and club to escape his predilection, when at home, for using whisky as an analgesic for the pain of a wartime leg injury. The film’s treatment of his domestic life is defined by Sammy’s psychological instability and a tumultuous relationship with his girlfriend Susan, who lives in the flat next door.84 The framing of Sammy’s workplace in the opening sequence conveys themes of instability and alienation which later come to characterise the film’s representation of domestic life. In the first moments, a colleague in a bomb disposal unit – Captain Stuart (Michael Gough) – is introduced through a series of closeups of his worried face and observational realist shots of the dark, noir-style streets as his car swerves to and fro as he drives across London to seek out Sammy. On his arrival, a cut from a brightly lit corridor in the central, noisy entrance of a government building to a gloomy exterior shot marks the introduction of the eponymous back room. A low-angle shot shows a dark, brick mansion – the ominous locale for Professor Mair’s research section – flanked by two more modern office blocks. This shot momentarily arrests Captain Stuart’s unsettled journey across London. The eerie house ahead of him – with his silhouetted figure in shot  – is framed in a distanced and static, pictorial style. This framing constructs a melodramatic mode of address, one organised around ‘miseen-scène, spectacle and obligatory “sensation scenes”’, with roots in the

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‘pictorial sensationalism’ of the nineteenth-century stage and gothic melodrama.85 The bright, vacant windows of the building in the dark surroundings of the wartime blackout suggest ‘an anxious encounter with otherness’ characteristic of gothic iconography.86 Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) is often cited as the quintessential example of the trope of the haunted house in gothic literature. For Poe, according to Edwin Heathcote, ‘the “house” is both the family and the physical dwelling. With windows like eyes and a huge, dark fissure opening up its front wall, the gothic house represents the disturbed mental state of the narrator’s old friend Roderick Usher.’87 In a comparable construction of the gothic uncanny in The Small Back Room, there is confusion between the psychological and the physical, the animate and the inanimate, the everyday domestic and a troubled state of mind. Through a mix of expressionist shots of the London streets and this more pictorial, melodramatic mode of address focusing on the gothic iconography of the haunted house, this sequence sets up a topography of the uncanny and, as such, constructs a backwards-looking engagement with modernity: it does so by negotiating gothic melodrama and modernism, and through a focus on domestic life. In terms of the former, a number of recent studies have explored how the nineteenth-century gothic uncanny was re-invoked by, and entangled with, the objectives and themes of artistic modernism. Jo Collins and John Jervis refer to ‘a reflexive “defamiliarisation”’ in modernism’s ‘programmes for artistic reinvention and renewal: “making the world strange” prepares the way for its inevitable return in disturbing, unrecognised form, in turn a central theme in surrealism, along with its fascination with dream, poised uncertainly between sleeping and waking’.88 Studies of film noir similarly suggest that a slippage between film noir and gothic influences, including Victorian melodramas of the 1930s, illustrates the hybrid nature of British film noir’s engagement with modernism.89 Andrew Spicer notes that film noir is indebted to ‘an older, more conservative tradition of “blood melodrama”, stories of violence and erotic love that included crime films but also Gothic romance’, which he suggests was ‘modulated through the nineteenth century “sensation novel” to become one of the staples of popular fiction targeted at a female audience’.90 Emphasising these influences, Spicer suggests that British film noir was ‘part of the same broad cultural interaction that gave rise to its American counterpart, the meeting of blood melodrama with European modernism’.91 The different modes of

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address in the opening sequence of The Small Back Room suggest that the film can be situated within this ‘broad cultural interaction’ between gothic melodrama and modernism. With regard to the focus on domestic life, a sense of dislocation from the home lies at the heart of postwar films noirs both in Hollywood and in Britain, and the depiction of Sammy’s home in The Small Back Room is key to its negotiation of the gothic uncanny and modernism.92 In gothic iconography, as already noted, the animated qualities of house and home present milieus seemingly ‘alive with menace’ and suggest undercurrents of unstable psychological states.93 From the turn of the twentieth century, modernist movements in art and literature enjoyed a similarly ambivalent and yet rooted relationship with the home: Christopher Reed suggests that ‘the domestic, perpetually invoked […] remains throughout the course of modernism, a crucial site of anxiety and subversion’ and, likewise, Catherine Spooner and Ruth McEvoy note a ‘modernist understanding of gothic as interior drama rather than dramatic spectacle’.94 The uncanny – as ‘a widely used figure for the simultaneous homelessness of the present, and haunting by the past’ – evokes the spaces of domesticity in this very vein, and in doing so presents a look to the past as a means of examining the present, or indeed future, psychological conditions of the home.95 Despite these currents of the uncanny in The Small Back Room, its aesthetic for the most part remains restrained. This was perhaps due to Pressburger’s distance from the project: according to Kevin Macdonald’s biography he ‘found it a brittle, cold story’.96 Powell and Pressburger were known for a rich, anti-realist visual style most famously evident in the fantastical worlds of A Matter of Life and Death (1946) or The Red Shoes (1947) and the dreary wartime settings of The Small Back Room were hailed as their ‘return to realism’.97 According to Macdonald, the film ‘fared dismally at the box office [because] nobody wanted to be reminded of the dark days of the war, particularly in such a harrowing, unromantic manner’.98 Describing The Small Back Room as ‘an intimate, black and white, and broadly realistic “kammerspiel” [which] penetrates claustrophobic and unglamorous work and domestic spaces’, Andrew Moor suggests that its melodramatic elements are tied to a realist depiction of a dark, wartime Britain.99 Suggesting a similar compromise between realism and melodrama, Alan Lovell describes the ‘creative interaction between excess and restraint’ as key to analysing the film’s aesthetic.100

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My own reading expands on these interpretations with the suggestion that the visual modes of address framing Sammy’s domestic life – a restrained vision of the uncanny – as belonging to a compromise between melodrama and modernism developed in earlier culture in the 1930s. Images of domestic life in Modern Woman magazine and a number of other publications in the 1930s conveyed a version of the gothic uncanny that was in keeping with increasingly popular ideas surrounding the psychological implications of the home. With this in mind, I explore how such eerie depictions of home offered a middlebrow version of ‘uncanny modernity’ using a combination of realist and melodramatic modes.101 These popular images allow the treatment of domestic life in Powell and Pressburger’s film to be re-contextualised as evidencing a conservative engagement with domestic modernity in the immediate postwar years.102 This compromise resonated with a continuing negotiation of the uncanny home as part of a middlebrow surrealism and, as I suggest, can be understood in relation to the issue of return at the time of The Small Back Room’s release. Uncanny landscapes During the scene in which Sammy’s flat is first introduced, the film cuts from Captain Stuart and Susan trying to reach him by telephone in one of the research section’s offices to the empty space of Sammy’s living room. With the protagonist notably absent, the camera moves across the room from a medium shot of the central hearth, tracking from the ringing telephone on a table in the foreground with an empty armchair visible in the background, over a whisky bottle and papers (Figure 38), past a portrait of Susan which is obscured by shadow, and finally comes to rest at her cat, Snowball, lit brightly (seemingly by a patch of moonlight in the wartime blackout conditions) in another armchair on the far side of the hearth. As the phone rings throughout the scene, this shot evokes Susan’s search for Sammy. However, the movement of the camera, tilting up and down, and also panning, as if surveying the everyday, domestic sights of the living room, also emphasises a gaze at the interior that is not necessarily restricted to Susan’s point of view, or to the film’s narrative. As in the empty Gibbons home in the opening scene of This Happy Breed, the domestic interior is framed as a landscape, using low-key expressionist lighting, which emphasises it as ‘a space of aesthetic contemplation and spectacle’ and

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Interior lives

The Small Back Room

the movement of the camera, which constructs the space of the room as a ‘dynamic and extensive experience’.103 This construction of domestic life as a landscape is therefore depicted in a way comparable to the engagements with conservative modernity and modernism in a number of the other films discussed in this study. In Love on the Dole, the Hardcastles’ home is introduced as a poetic realist spectacle which conveys a middlebrow, romanticised idea of domesticity and community; in This Happy Breed, the ‘landscape gaze’ appears to extend the national, pastoral landscape from outside to the domestic interior; in Spring in Park Lane, topography and spectacle in the central mansion evoke a restrained consumer gaze, tradition and Englishness.104 Each of these constructions emphasises the image of domestic life as a spectacle in order to evoke a shared identity in terms of reform, national identity and consumerism. However, the construction of this domestic landscape in The Small Back Room evokes the empty room as an uncanny, ‘other’ scene in the gothic tradition.105 Peter Hutchings suggests that the ‘uncanny landscape’, a space ‘suffused with a sense of profound and sometimes apocalyptic anxiety’, defined by ‘comprehensive dispossession and vacancy […] and an emphasis on the “alterity” of the landscape itself

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effectively displaces individual and social agency’.106 In the aesthetic and narrative style of film noir, the expressionist lighting and the movement of the camera in this scene reinforce a ‘relentless and fateful’ quality to Sammy’s absence, and with it a sense of ‘dispossession and vacancy’ in the room.107 The simultaneous tracking and panning movement of the camera through the interior – complemented by the eerie appearance of the shadowy interior and the unearthly sound of the ringing telephone – create a sense of movement which is out of control, erratic and powered by something out of sight, thus effectively displacing ‘individual and social agency’ and constructing the living room as an ‘other’, uncanny landscape. Through this construction of Sammy’s domestic life, the film here offers a visual rendering of inner instability. On one hand, this instability is constructed in relation to the film’s wartime setting – through a focus on Sammy’s war injury, but also in the uncanny framing of public spaces shaped by wartime transformation. For example, when Susan tries the telephone number of Sammy’s local pub, the repeated sound of the telephone ringing and a cut to the pub interior are accompanied by the same kind of camera movement: the camera tracks across portraits of important wartime figures including Winston Churchill, flags behind the bar and then across the crowds of people on its other side. These interior and exterior scenes therefore both establish the same forbidding sense of dislocation and instability and, emphasised by the portraits behind the bar, this sense is linked to the wartime setting. On the other hand, the construction of the interior landscape also evidences an earlier, interwar trope of middlebrow culture linked more specifically with the home. In monthly magazines such as Ideal Home and Homes and Gardens throughout the interwar period, the image of a room lying in wait conveyed stability, a romantic sense of the prospect of return and conservative modernity – and, indeed, this image was an enduring part of the postwar culture surrounding The Small Back Room. The ‘uncanny landscape’ in Sammy’s flat may appear at first sight to be a deliberate distortion of these consumer-driven images; however, this construction of an ‘uncanny’, ‘other’ world reuses visual tropes which were used to promote the comforts of home in terms of psychological wellbeing in magazine culture. In 1938, for example, Picture Post featured an advertisement for Jelks furnishings, which pictured a room waiting to be occupied (Figure 39). Conveying a sense of ‘dispossession and vacancy’, the rays from a standard lamp shine on a waiting chair, table and dresser in another empty room,

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Interior lives

Jelks Furnishings advertisement, Picture Post (29 October 1938)

though this time composed for the magazine reader’s examination of the furnishings on sale. Likewise, a series of advertisements for Min Cream featured black-and-white line drawings of empty kitchens, bathrooms and hallways. In a nursery scene, the bars of a chair feature prominently in the foreground: the lighting via the bright window in the background and the canted angle from which they are captured mean that the chair legs cast shadows across the floor.108 The noirish style of the drawings in these advertisements and the uncanny sense of ‘vacancy’ and loss of ‘agency’ comparable to the scene of the empty room in The Small Back Room are part of a consumerist construction of the private, emotional attachments of the home. Indeed, these illustrations of the home are comparable to the aspirational images of empty interiors which were used to convey the psychological benefits of the home in magazine articles and advertisements such as Picture Post, Ideal Home and Homes and Gardens in the interwar years. These waiting rooms, with their hints at an uncanny side to domesticity in this consumer sphere, belong to a cultural milieu in which psychological

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health and the modern home were central. As Richard Overy shows, this was part of a wider, and increasingly popular, 1930s interest in psychoanalysis.109 Michal Shapira suggests that, at this time, ‘journalists in the national press started using psychoanalytic vocabulary about inner life, regression and emotional conflicts’.110 Numerous advertisements for tonics, tablets and books on psychology offered help in combating feelings of depression connected to the home: the advertisement for Min Cream, featuring the noirish, empty chair, appeared in Modern Woman magazine alongside one advertising tablets promising ‘those depressing pains banished in five minutes’.111 In My Home magazine, another advertisement encouraged readers to write to the British Institute of Practical Psychology for a free book on eradicating the inferiority complex: ‘You cannot control these impulses – but you can, through Auto-psychology, remove them altogether by eradicating from your Subconscious Mind the trouble from which they sprang.’112 As part of this cultural construction of the modern home, psychological health was positioned not only in relation to the private sphere but also as important in home life and good citizenship.113 Hackney’s study of interwar ‘service magazines’ suggests that they were ‘simultaneously concerned with women’s lives in the domestic world and as citizens, with the constitution of “self” and “other” within the realms of the public and the private’.114 In this way, ‘uncanny landscapes’ in interwar advertising may have ‘displace[d] individual and social agency’ but, in doing so, also suggested a more communal sense of home.115 Whereas Hutchings’ study suggests that the uncanny landscape ‘resists some of the attractions of the picturesque but […] at the same time has no obvious social-realist ambitions’, the ‘uncanny landscape’ in Sammy’s living room in The Small Back Room engages a structure of feeling developed in the interwar years in which ‘picturesque’ elements of uncanny, interior settings became entangled with ‘social-realist’ possibilities of depression, stress and ideas of modern domesticity and community.116 With foundations in the 1930s, according to Shapira, ‘psychoanalysis helped make the modern democratic self in Britain’.117 With private, psychological health and domesticity positioned at the heart of interwar ideas concerning democratic citizenship, the uncanny depiction of Sammy’s home – with a focus on inner instabilities – also speaks to a conception of shared, communal identity focusing on the home, as in other films examined so far.118

Interior lives

‘Well, put me in the picture’

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In The Small Back Room, the objects in the mise-en-scène of the flat are central to the framing of Sammy’s domestic life as an ‘uncanny landscape’.119 Throughout the film, the objects on Sammy’s table are endowed with a range of meanings and functions: the ringing telephone has an obviously narrative function; the appearance and reappearance of the framed photograph is a ‘telltale sign’ of the status of Sammy and Susan’s relationship; and the looming whisky bottle points to Sammy’s psychological state.120 In this early sequence, the construction of alterity is reinforced by the shrill, repetitive sound of the ringing telephone and the unevenly lit objects, including Snowball the cat on an armchair. Reinforcing the uncanny appearance of the mise-en-scène, the ringing of the inanimate telephone suggests an animated quality to the rest of the room. This is further emphasised in a later scene when Sally suggests that the persistent ringing of the telephone as ‘like a nasty vicious little man’, and in a further scene in which – left alone with the portentous bottle of whisky – Sammy loses control and rings the ‘Talking Clock’. In this living room scene – known as the film’s ‘delirium’ sequence – the echoing voice from the telephone brings an eerie presence to the room. Likewise, the gothic motif of the gazing portrait – with Susan’s photograph and a series of cameo-style portraits decorating the walls of the flat – also reinforces this emphasis on ‘otherness’ in domestic scenes. The framing of Sammy’s flat in a pictorial style mirrors the uncanny appearance of these framed portraits. Following the opening hunt for him and his rescue from the pub, Sammy returns to the flat with Captain Stuart and Susan and requests information from Stuart: ‘well, put me in the picture’. In an observational style, the scene is introduced with a tracking shot following Susan as she enters the room from the kitchen. In a shift away from the ‘dynamic’, mobile exploration of the landscape of the living room in the waiting room sequence, however, the framing of the room takes on a ‘theatrically pictorial vocabulary’ (Figure 40).121 As Susan stops and pours coffee at the table, her portrait, a vase of flowers and Susan herself in the foreground frame the two men in the scene and imply her point of view as she listens. With a similar effect, later in the sequence, a cut to a long shot of the room from behind the table in front of the hearth establishes Sammy’s movement into a closer position to the camera: Susan, Stuart and the interior in the background are once more framed in a pictorial style, emphasised by the bright light from a couple of lamps in the room.

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The Small Back Room

The pictorial style of framing the room evokes a visual mode characteristic of the highly stylised drawings that accompanied stories in women’s magazines of the 1930s. As I’ve suggested already, these illustrations often had a starkly expressionist aesthetic and focused on evoking the emotional states of characters, frequently through compositions in which they appear framed tightly in relation to one another and to visually dramatic settings. For instance, in a 1938 issue of Modern Woman, ‘Warning to Wives’ by Margaret Stevenson – a story focusing on adultery – featured an illustration of the arrival of the ‘other woman’, Althea, at a dinner party in the home of a husband and wife.122 One of many similar illustrations, this drawing is characterised by a high-angle view framing the wife as she looks on at the pair, evoking the ‘excessive style’ and emphasis on emotion characteristic of melodrama.123 In an illustration accompanying another adultery story, ‘Trick in Hearts’, a couple are closely framed in the shadows of their living room, a lamp and table in the foreground. In both illustrations, as in The Small Back Room, domestic objects – a table in the centre of the room in ‘Warning to Wives’ and a lamp in ‘Trick in Hearts’ – loom large in these suggestions of a disturbed inner landscape (Figure 41).124 While such illustrations and uncanny images of home offered a gothic, pictorial style of melodrama, they were also part of fictional constructions

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‘Trick in Hearts’, Modern Woman (February 1938)

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engaging with a new structure of feeling concerned with realism and psychological wellbeing. The stories and illustrations were frequently used to articulate the real issues and anxieties of the female readership, often relating specifically to home life and even with small articles on domestic advice peppered throughout the texts of the stories. Hackney notes the  ‘connections and slippage’ between themes covered in the stories and in the factual articles and problem pages of these magazines.125 As such, the same dramatic visual style used for these fictional constructions often featured in drawings and photographs illustrating factual articles. For example, in Modern Woman in November 1938, an article titled ‘You’re in Love, But is He?’ is accompanied by a photograph of a couple clinging together in the light of a fire in a highly stylised, expressionist composition of the living room characterised by pools of light and the pale faces of the pair framed in one corner of the room (Figure 42).126 Yale locks, white cats and thresholds Throughout The Small Back Room, domestic scenes are repeatedly introduced by extreme close-ups of objects. In the scene of the couple’s initial return home from the bar with Captain Stuart, Susan’s suggestion ‘I’ll make you some coffee’ cuts to a high-angle, extreme close-up of coffee swirling in a coffee maker, accompanied by the sound of its bubbling. In other sequences, the couple’s return home is marked by a recurrent extreme close-up of a key turning in the flat’s Yale lock. In a later scene, the pain in Sammy’s leg worsens and he struggles to mask his physical and emotional discomfort on an Underground train journey home with Susan. A long shot of Sammy’s angst-ridden face as he holds tightly to Susan dissolves to a close-up of the Yale lock as the key is turned in the front door. With a cut to the flat’s interior, Snowball the cat rearranges himself on the armchair. A further cut shows the front door opening, reflected also in a mirror in the background. The couple slowly enter the dark flat, lit from the light in the hallway; and a further cut introduces an intimate close-up of their ensuing passionate kiss, in a small patch of bright light in the corner of the shadowy room. The kiss sequence constructs the threshold to the flat as a liminal space, and is demonstrative of the film’s negotiation between melodrama and modernism. The threshold functions as a gothic ‘marginal’ space, a representation of ‘otherness […] the dark and mysterious unknown’.127

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‘You’re in love, but is he?’, Modern Woman (November 1938)

The framing of the sequence is once more indebted to the pictorial iconography of ‘otherness’ constructed in gothic melodrama. The extreme close-up of the Yale lock illustrates the film’s attention to ‘complexities over doors, locks, cabinets, secret rooms or compartments’: a symbolic gothic geography of intimate domestic sights labelled by Shani D’Cruze in

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relation to ‘insecurities’.128 The cut to the interior of the room before the couple have entered, and Snowball’s movement away from the armchair, is also suggestive of an ‘other’ life – and an uncanny presence – within the flat when the  couple are not there: a briefly visible mirror in the corner of the room signals the uncanny trope of ‘doubling’.129 In terms of modernist influences – referencing the surrealist movement – Andrew Webber describes the threshold as ‘a special place’ explored as ‘what [Sigmund] Freud calls the “other scene” of the unconscious and [André] Breton the “unusual place” of the dream and the “hidden places” of the zone within’.130 This reverence for the uncanny and animate properties of the threshold, as evoked by the series of objects shown in this sequence, therefore shows the influence of Hein Heckroth, the film’s art director, who strongly identified with surrealism despite the fact that such influences were ‘emphatically denied’ by Powell and Pressburger.131 The style of rapid montage – with the Yale lock, the white cat and the threshold shown in extreme close-up – constructs Sammy and Susan’s return to the flat with close attention to the minutiae of intimate rituals such as the turning of the key in the lock: these momentary images emphasise a concern with the unconscious, usually unnoticed, automatic and ritual experience of domestic life. At the end of the sequence, the framing of Susan and Sammy’s passionate embrace – with the majority of the frame in shadow, though with their faces partially illuminated – further illustrates the clash between both melodrama and modernist modes. As the pair kiss they are shown in extreme close-up, and the lighting of their pale faces starkly contrasts with the dark shadows of the room. On one hand, the tight framing and eerie lighting of their faces constructs them as part of the series of inanimate, uncanny objects pictured as momentary images which convey the unconscious rituals of their return to the home. On the other hand, this shot also evokes the visual style of the melodramatic illustrations used in interwar magazine stories and advertisements. Illustrations of couples embracing were among the most popular illustrations in women’s magazines throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s. Indeed, the first part of this sequence evidences a more restrained, pictorial style of examining the interior as the couple are first shown from a distance, in a medium shot framing them in the shadows of the room (Figure 43). In the living room sequence which follows, the couple cross the threshold into the home and the distanced mode of framing them together in the centre of the room similarly re-establishes a more

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Interior lives

The Small Back Room

restrained pictorial emphasis on the uncanny landscape of the home. An iconography of melodrama and the gothic uncanny – deploying modes of exploring psychological realism and domestic life from earlier magazine culture – is once more evident in the dimly lit living room. Re-imagining return

In the film’s later delirium sequence, when Susan fails to meet Sammy after work and he is left to his own devices in the flat, he is overcome by his increasing need for whisky and driven to a frenzy. As a visual evocation of his descent into an unstable mental state, the living room décor is transformed as part of his nightmarish hallucinations and a number of shots depart completely from the realist set of the flat, with a gargantuan papiermâché version of the ever-present whisky bottle looming over Sammy as he cowers, perspiring and shaking, against the now monstrous wallpaper. This scene affords a clear departure from any restrained examination of domestic life and the uncanny, and contemporary critics denigrated it as exhibiting a ‘vulgar sense of spectacle’, labelling it as a ‘big lapse into Archery’ in the News Chronicle.132 Stella Hockenhull suggests that this sequence is the only one that demonstrates Heckroth’s surrealist agenda.133 However, I argue

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that a surrealist fixation is also apparent throughout the other domestic scenes, albeit established using a pictorial mode of address. The intertwining of melodrama and modernism of the Yale lock sequence suggests that a version of middlebrow surrealism – as a more subtle negotiation of the gothic uncanny – is perhaps closer to the mark. The pictorial modes of framing domestic life in The Small Back Room can be resituated as an engagement with a structure of feeling related to the psychological experience of domestic life that had already been explored in women’s magazines of the interwar years. By suggesting that the film’s uncanny depiction of domestic life is indebted to constructions of the private life of the home in magazine culture, this chapter contextualises the treatment of Sammy’s unstable home, with its central focus on Susan’s perspective too, as a postwar re-imagining of uncanny, domestic modernity. At the time of The Small Back Room’s release in 1948, however, home, hearth and modern citizenship were taking on new meaning and increasingly promoted as part of a national programme of domestic rehabilitation: Shapira notes that ‘the end of the war and the postwar period […] saw a new focus on “domestic citizenship”’.134 With reference to reconstruction schemes and architectural modernism, Richard Hornsey suggests that ‘like the war-damaged districts of London’s Victorian slums, the interior space of the pathological psyche was […] laid open, to be charted redesigned as part of that same class-bound drive toward a lasting social cohesiveness’.135 The psychological importance of the home took on a new, more public importance in a national period of reconstruction, readjustment to the home and a rethinking about social democracy with the beginnings of the welfare state. Nonetheless, interwar modes of address, including the domestic landscapes of advertisements and the expressive illustrations and psychological realism of melodramatic stories, continued to be used in exploring the possibilities of the future home: as part of a new middlebrow negotiation between private psychological health and public community, and between modernism and melodrama, for the postwar years. Pictorial modes – the melodramatic framings and empty domestic landscapes explored in this chapter – were an enduring part of postwar culture and represented a cultural reconstitution of the interwar relationship between melodrama and modernism suited to the changing place of the private home in society. In weekly magazines, a sense of the home as unfamiliar, ‘other’ and uncanny was apparent in advertisements for domestic products and in stories about returning veterans. The eerily

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animate qualities of inanimate objects even continued to feature as part of this ‘otherness’ attached to the domestic space: for example, a 1946 advertisement for Sposs furniture dressing featured an illustration of an armchair with a face and arms, with the slogan: ‘Welcome Back with Open Arms’ (Figure 44).136 Wider magazine culture often also evidenced

Sposs furniture dressing advertisement, Woman and Home (May 1946)

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a middlebrow understanding of surrealist images and practices: this was particularly notable in an article on the ‘surrealist boom’ published in Picture Post in October 1949; and a number of issues of Lilliput magazine  – a companion to Picture Post – featured a series of close-up photographs juxtaposing different sights, including mops, dancers, jellyfish and even a threshold.137 Influenced by the middlebrow, ‘modernist imagism’ of Mass-Observation and the surrealist style of photographs included in Picture Post, these photographs evoked the everyday as other, suffused with the unconscious.138 A couple of years later, in a highly popular exhibition called ‘Black Eyes and Lemonade’ held at the Whitechapel Gallery, Barbara Jones’s display of ‘unsophisticated Victoriana’ was heavily influenced by the Victorian gothic tradition and the uncanny.139 This included ‘a talking lemon [from an Idris Lemonade advertisement], fifty times as large as life, rattling its teeth and rolling its eyes, and saying in seductive tones to all and sundry that lemonade is good for man, woman and child’ alongside everyday household ornaments including a patchwork tea cosy, a cage of stuffed birds and a tiled fireplace in the shape of a terrier.140 As a Festival of Britain exhibition, this evocation of gothic iconography, surrealism and the national past was positioned as part of the festival’s popular postwar construction of the modern home and modern Britain in 1951. With this in mind, although Powell and Pressburger’s delirium sequence – with its giant papier-mâché whisky bottle and nightmarish living room landscape – may not have been to critics’ tastes, when considered alongside these other cultural constructions of domestic life it can be figured as part of a cultural re-imagining of modernism and the gothic uncanny in the immediate postwar years. Notes 1 B. McFarlane, ‘Losing the Peace: Some British Films of Post-War Adjustment’, in T. Barta (ed.) Screening the Past: Film and the Representation of History (New York: Praeger, 1998), pp. 93–108, at pp. 98, 104. 2 C. Barr, All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (London: BFI, 1986), p. 16. 3 R. Winnington, ‘The Years Between’, News Chronicle (25 May 1946), p. 12; ‘The Years Between’, Daily Mail (27 May 1946), p. 15, BFI Reuben Library, press cuttings file. 4 M. Landy, British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930–1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 189–90.

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Interior lives

5 M. J. Daunton and B. Rieger (eds) Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late Victorian Era to World War II (Oxford: Berg, 2001), p. 6. 6 P. Mandler, ‘The Consciousness of Modernity? Liberalism and the English National Character, 1870–1940’, in M. J. Daunton and B. Rieger (eds) Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late Victorian Era to World War II (Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp. 119–44, at p. 134. 7 Daunton and Rieger, Meanings of Modernity, p. 6; R. Hayward, ‘Desperate Housewives and Model Amoebae: The Invention of Suburban Neuroses in Inter-War Britain’, in M. Jackson (ed.) Health and the Modern Home (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 42–62, at p. 45. 8 N. Beauman, A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel 1914–39 (London: Persephone Books, 2008, first pub. 1983), pp. 134–71; N. Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 108–48; C.  Briganti and K.  Mezei, ‘House Haunting: The Domestic Novel of the Inter-War Years’, Home Cultures 1:2 (2004), 147–68; H. Hinds, ‘Domestic Disappointments: Feminine Middlebrow Fiction of the Interwar Years’, Home Cultures 6:2 (2009), 199–211, at pp. 202–3. 9 R. Lehmann, The Weather in the Streets (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972, first pub. 1936), p. 5. 10 J. Collins and J. Jervis (eds) Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 1. 11 F. Hackney, ‘“Women Are News”: British Women’s Magazines 1919–1939’, in A. Ardis and P. Collier (eds) Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 114–33, at p. 116. 12 C. L. White, Women’s Magazines 1693–1968 (London: Michael Joseph, 1970), p. 96. 13 F. Hackney, ‘“They Opened Up a Whole New World”: Feminine Modernity and the Feminine Imagination in Women’s Magazines, 1919–1939’, unpublished PhD thesis. Goldsmiths, University of London, December 2010, p. 24. 14 Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, p. 109. 15 Hackney, ‘“They Opened Up a Whole New World”’, p. 168. 16 K. Bluemel (ed.) Intermodernism: Literary Culure in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 2. 17 N. Hubble, ‘Imagism, Realism, Surrealism: Middlebrow Transformations in the Mass-Observation Project’, in E. Brown and M. Grover (eds) Middlebrow Literary Cultures: The Battle of the Brows, 1920–1960 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 202–17, at p. 208. 18 Daunton and Rieger, Meanings of Modernity, p. 6. 19 J. Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2004), p. 12. 20 Collins and Jervis, Uncanny Modernity, p. 2.

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21 R. Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939–1949 (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 2. 22 N. Coward, Still Life. A Play, Etc. (London: Samuel French, 1938), p. 25. 23 Ibid. 24 G. D. Phillips, Beyond the Epic: The Life and Films of David Lean (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), p. 87. 25 Landy, British Genres, p. 227. 26 A. Lant, Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 167. 27 R. Dyer, Brief Encounter (London: Palgrave Macmillan on behalf ofthe BFI, 2015, first pub. 1993), p. 43. 28 Dyer, Brief Encounter, Nicola Beauman, A Very Great Profession quoted, pp. 43–4. 29 Ibid., pp. 44–5. 30 E. Arnot Robertson – a middlebrow novelist in the 1930s and film reviewer for Good Housekeeping and the Daily Mail in the 1940s and 1950s – showcased this common language and network of communication in her review of Brief Encounter in 1945. In her recognition of its characters and landscapes, she describes how ‘the thought that flashed across my mind when I heard the doctor in the film mention that he is going to work in Johannesburg – “I wonder if he’ll meet Paul?” Paul is an actual medical friend of mine in practice there, and I had to remind myself that this film was not real life.’ E. Arnot Robertson, ‘A Critic Has a Good Cry’, Daily Mail (23 November 1945), p. 2, BFI Reuben Library, press cuttings file. 31 Hackney, ‘“Women Are News”’, p. 116. 32 R. Durgnat, A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence (London: Palgrave Macmillan on behalf of the BFI, 2011, first pub. 1970), p. 215. 33 J. M. Brown, Saturday Review of Literature (12 October 1946) quoted in Lant, Blackout, p. 184. 34 J. Agee, The Nation (31 October 1946) quoted in Lant, Blackout, p. 184. 35 Phillips, Beyond the Epic, p. 94. 36 J. Winship, ‘Women’s Magazines: Times of War and Management of Self in Woman’s Own’, in C. Gledhill and G. Swanson (eds) Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and British Cinema in the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 127–39, at p. 132. 37 M. Williams, David Lean (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), pp. 9, 86. 38 Ibid., quoting promotional material for the BBC transmission of the film on 9 October 1956. 39 R. Manvell, ‘Recent Films’, Britain Today (February 1946), pp. 17–18, BFI Reuben Library, press cuttings file. 40 L. N. Ede, British Film Design: A History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), p. 59; R. Manvell, Three British Screen Plays (London: Methuen & Co, 1950), p. 16.

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Interior lives

41 Manvell, Three British Screenplays, p. 18. 42 C. de la Roche, ‘Film News from London’ – dispatch sent to USSR, p. 27, BFI Reuben Library, press cuttings file. 43 C. Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’ (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 90. 44 Ibid. 45 R. Winnington, ‘Brief Encounter’, News Chronicle (24 November 1945), p. 19, BFI Reuben Library, press cuttings file. 46 ‘Films reviewed by Patrick Kirwan’, The Standard (23 November 1945), p. 6, BFI Reuben Library, press cuttings file. 47 A. Silver and J. Ursini, David Lean and His Films (London: Leslie Frewin Publishers, 1974), p. 12. 48 Ibid. 49 Dyer, Brief Encounter, p. 44. 50 Hackney discusses women’s magazines as ‘environments’: ‘a material and imagined space […] that was intended to connect and communicate with women as directly as possible, representing their interests, attitudes, emotions and needs’. Hackney, ‘“They Opened Up a Whole New World”’, p. 30. 51 Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb, p. 12. 52 A. Bingham, Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 106. 53 Hackney, ‘“They Opened Up a Whole New World”’, p. 12. 54 Hackney, ‘“Women Are News”’, p. 120. 55 Hackney, ‘“They Opened Up a Whole New World”’, pp. 12, 168–9. 56 B. Hedworth, ‘For Poorer, for Richer’, Modern Woman (January 1936), p. 10. 57 G. S. Donisthorpe, ‘Blind Journey’, Woman and Home (February 1936), p. 19. 58 Hackney, ‘“They Opened Up a Whole New World”’, p. 158. 59 Ibid., p. 176. 60 D. Black, ‘Doc’, Modern Woman (February 1936). p. 15. 61 Hackney, ‘“Women Are News”’, p. 121. 62 Hedworth, ‘For Poorer, for Richer’, Modern Woman (January 1936), p. 11. 63 Hackney, ‘“Women Are News”’, p. 119. 64 Ibid., p. 120. 65 C. A. Lejeune, ‘Film Guide’, The Listener (29 November 1945), p. 8, BFI Reuben Library, press cuttings file. 66 Manvell, Three Screenplays, p. 47. 67 Hackney, ‘“Women Are News”’, p. 121. 68 Ibid., pp. 121, 116. 69 Hedworth, ‘For Poorer, for Richer’, Modern Woman (February 1936), p. 19. 70 Dyer, Brief Encounter, pp. 58–9. 71 Lant, Blackout, p. 157. 72 Ibid., p. 183. 73 Ibid., p. 181. 74 Dyer, Brief Encounter, pp. 44–5.

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81 82 83 84

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Lant, Blackout, p. 160. Landy, British Genres, p. 232. Lant, Blackout, p. 164. C. A. Lejeune, ‘The Films’, Observer (25 November 1945), p. 19, BFI Reuben Library, press cuttings file. A. Lejeune (ed.) The C. A. Lejeune Film Reader (Manchester: Carcanet, 1991), p. 233. F. B. Lockhart, Woman (9 February 1946), quoted in M. Bell, Femininity in the Frame: Women and 1950s British Popular Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), p. 154. ‘Brief Encounter and Real Life’, Woman’s Own (12 April 1946), p. 6. J. B. Priestley, Letter to a Returning Serviceman (London: Home & Van Thal Ltd., 1945), p. 30. P. Bendit and L. J. Bendit, Living Together Again (London: Gramol Publications, 1946), p. 20. The BBFC took issue with the couple living together in the same flat. Sue Harper suggests that Pressburger conceded passively to the BBFC’s demand that the couple not live together ‘in sin’. Kevin Macdonald explains how Kathleen Byron’s protest to Pressburger influenced a new arrangement which saw them living in neighbouring flats. S. Harper, Women in British Cinema: Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know (London: Continuum, 2000), p. 61; K. Macdonald, Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter (London: Faber & Faber, 1994), p. 300. C. Gledhill, ‘The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation’, in C. Gledhill (ed.) Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987), pp. 5–42, 23, 27. Frank Rahill, The World of Melodrama (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1967) quoted. R. B. Anolik, ‘Introduction: The Dark Unknown’, in R. B. Anolik and D.  L.  Howard (eds) The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2004), pp. 1–16, at p. 1. E. Heathcote, The Meaning of Home (London: Frances Lincoln, 2012), p. 17. Collins and Jervis, Uncanny Modernity, p. 4. For example, R. Murphy, ‘British Film Noir’, in A. Spicer (ed.) European Film Noir (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 84–111, at p. 85; H. Hanson, Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), pp. 5–8. A. Spicer, Film Noir (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2002), James Naremore (1998) and Thomas Schatz (1997) referenced, pp. 5, 10–11. Ibid., p. 175. Powell and Pressburger’s relationship with place – and more specifically their engagement with themes of ‘home’ – has been discussed as a form of this nuanced relationship with modernism. J. Orr, Romantics and Modernists

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in British Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p.  90; A.  Moor, Powell and Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), pp. 12–15. Helen Hanson uses the phrase ‘alive with menace’ to describe the gothic iconography of the uncanny home in Hanson, Hollywood Heroines, p. 48. C. Reed (ed.) Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996), pp. 7–17, at p. 16; C.  Spooner, ‘Gothic in the Twentieth Century’, in Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (eds) The Routledge Companion to Gothic (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 39. Collins and Jervis, Uncanny Modernity, p. 2. Macdonald, Emeric Pressburger, p. 300. Ibid., p. 301. Ibid. Moor, Powell and Pressburger, p. 137. A. Lovell, ‘The British Cinema: The Known Cinema?’, in R. Murphy (ed.) The British Cinema Book (London: Palgrave Macmillan on behalf of the BFI, 2009), pp. 5–13, at p. 9. Collins and Jervis, Uncanny Modernity, pp. 1–2. Moor, Powell and Pressburger, p. 138. M. Lefebvre (ed.) Landscape and Film (London: Routledge, 2006), p. xviii; G.  Harper and J. Rayner (eds) Cinema and Landscape: Film, Nation and Cultural Geography (Bristol: Intellect, 2010), p. 18. M. Lefebvre, ‘Between Setting and Landscape in Cinema’, in M. Lefebvre (ed.) Landscape and Film (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 19–60, at p. 48. Anolik, ‘Introduction: The Dark Unknown’, p. 1. P. Hutchings, ‘Uncanny Landscapes in British Film and Television’, Visual Culture in Britain 5:2 (2004), 27–40, at p. 29. A. Silver and J. Ursini, Film Noir, ed. P. Duncan (London: Taschen, 2004), p. 19. Min Cream advertisement, Modern Woman (February 1937), p. 93. R. Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilization, 1919–1939 (London: Penguin Books, 2010), p. 144. M. Shapira, The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War, and the Making of the Democratic Self in Postwar Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 10. Anti-Kamnia Tablets advertisement, Modern Woman (February 1937), p. 92. British Institute of Practical Psychology advertisement, My Home (February 1937), p. 81. Shapira, The War Inside, pp. 5, 18. Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, p. 109; Hackney, ‘“They Opened Up a Whole New World”’, p. 12. Hutchings, ‘Uncanny Landscapes in British Film and Television’, p. 29.

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116 Ibid. 117 Shapira, The War Inside, p. 6. 118 The centrality of home to new ideas in psychoanalysis is particularly emphasised in J. Stewart, ‘“I Thought You Would Want to Come and See His Home”: Child Guidance and Pscyhiatric Social Work in Inter-War Britain’, in M. Jackson (ed.) Health and the Modern Home (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 111–27, at pp. 122–3. 119 Thomas Elsaesser’s definition of melodrama emphasises the importance of mise-en-scène, with particular attention to objects in the middle-class home in Hollywood family melodramas. T. Elsaesser, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama’, in C. Gledhill (ed.) Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987, first pub. in Monogram, 4 1972), pp. 43–69, at pp. 55, 61. 120 Harper, Women in British Cinema, p. 61. 121 Harper and Rayner, ‘Cinema and Landscape’, p. 18; Gledhill, ‘The Melodramatic Field’, p. 32. Gledhill describes Victorian gothic melodrama as using ‘theatrically pictorial vocabulary’. 122 M. Stevenson, ‘Warning to Wives’, Modern Woman (January 1938), p. 28–9. 123 J. Mercer and M. Shingler, Melodrama: Genre, Style and Sensibility (London: Wallflower, 2004), p. 2. 124 U. Bloom, ‘Trick in Hearts’, Modern Woman (February 1938), pp. 10–11. 125 Hackney, ‘“They Opened Up a Whole New World”’, p. 179. 126 H. Henry, ‘You’re in Love, But Is He?’, Modern Woman (November 1938), p. 21. 127 I. M. Bussing, ‘Haunted House in Mid-to-Late Victorian Gothic Fiction’, unpublished PhD thesis. University of Edinburgh, 2010; Anolik, ‘Introduction: The Dark Unknown’, p. 1. 128 S. D’Cruze, ‘“The Damned Place Was Haunted”: The Gothic, Middlebrow Culture and Inter-War “Notable Trials”’, Literature and History 15:1 (2006), 37–58, at p. 41. 129 S. Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in Vincent B. Leitch (ed.) The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1919), pp. 929–52, at p. 940. 130 A. Webber, The European Avant-Garde 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) referenced, p. 39. 131 S. Hockenhull, Neo-Romantic Landscapes: An Aesthetic Approach to the Films of Powell and Pressburger (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), p. 52n. 132 Moor, Powell and Pressburger, p. 138; News Chronicle (1949) quoted in Macdonald, Emeric Pressburger, p. 301. 133 Hockenhull, Neo-Romantic Landscapes, p. 52n. 134 Shapira, The War Inside, pp. 112–13. 135 R. Hornsey, The Spiv and the Architect: Unruly Life in Postwar London (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p. 26. 136 Sposs furniture dressing advertisement, Woman and Home (May 1946), p. 21.

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137 ‘Fancy Meeting You!’, Picture Post (1 October 1949), p. 35; ‘Juxtaposition’, Lilliput (May 1949), pp. 23–30, 67–74. 138 Hubble, ‘Imagism, Realism, Surrealism’, p. 208. 139 R. Artmonsky, A Snapper Up of Unconsidered Trifles: A Tribute to Barbara Jones (London: Artmonsky Arts, 2008), p. 48. 140 Ibid., p. 66.

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Conclusion: ‘The best of both worlds’

The mood of the suburbs seems in retrospect tranquil. Many an occupier felt he shared in the pleasures of both town and country. The best of both worlds. The best of all worlds. Really the summers were extraordinarily long. Sitting in a deck chair in the garden one could just catch the smell of the pinks in the border. Traffic noises were limited to the neighbours’ lawn mower or the bakers [sic] delivery van. The house was fresh and polished, the clink of tea cups, the slumbering dog lifting one eye and twitching an ear at the prospect of a biscuit when the family gathered round the afternoon tray. And even when the summer merged into winter, it was cosy.1

M

ary and Neville Ward’s description of the ‘mood of the suburbs’ captures the tranquil atmosphere of a summer’s afternoon, embodying the sense of nostalgia and domestic peace with which suburban life was promoted, and for which it has also been chastised. They present an image of leisurely, suburban domestic life characterised by stasis and the ‘in-between’, as ‘the best of both worlds’.2 In the following decade, British films picturing home captured the ideas of stillness that had been so closely associated with suburban domesticity. In the style of suburbia’s still ‘fresh and polished’ house, with its ‘clink of tea cups’ and ‘the slumbering dog’, pictorial images of domestic life recurred throughout feature films made and released in the 1940s.3 Home onscreen encompassed a variety of different settings and ideals, whether in working-class kitchen-living rooms, a terraced house in Clapham, a riverside mansion in Richmond or a comfortable library in semi-rural (and fictional) Ketchworth. Images capturing domestic life included the reflection of Rose Sandigate in her bedroom mirror in It Always Rains on Sunday; the lingering shots of the empty table laid for tea in This Happy Breed; the peculiarly spectacular view of the

Conclusion

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hallway from the top of the marble staircase in Spring in Park Lane; and the shadows of the empty living room in The Small Back Room. In terms of décor, these domestic settings were often far from the furnishing styles, decorations and dimensions of the typical suburban interior. However, their pictorial treatment nevertheless suggests an engagement with images of home that proliferated in magazines, advertisements, colour books, furniture catalogues and exhibitions as part of interwar, suburban culture. In looking back to interwar modes of address, these films also re-imagined cultural constructions of modernity. Tea table politics, pastoral images, dream palaces and private visions of home onscreen embodied a debt to an interwar culture in which picturing home was a means of conveying modern ideals of social reform, national identity, comfort and citizenship. Such prewar forms of suburban, domestic modernity continued to play a key role in popular culture during the Second World War and immediately afterwards, when the idea of returning home was an extraordinarily potent one. Demonstrating this, a series of magazine advertisements for Brasso and Reckitt’s featured atmospheric illustrations of tranquil, prewar homes waiting to be occupied after the war (Figure 45). Mentioning the series, cultural historian Janice Winship suggests that ‘this remembrance of things past is also a means of imagining life after the war […] memories, and the sketching of a future, focus on the domestic – a room, possibly a cottage room’.4 Likewise, for Judy Giles, the advertisement’s offer of an empty, peaceful domestic interior, and promotion of household cleaners that will accomplish this, conveyed the promise of modernity for both middle-class and working-class women, working together ‘a cluster of meanings linked to historically specific ideas of the housewife, home, peace, and the emergence of a new and better world’.5 Just as illustrations and photographs of empty prewar rooms in wartime popular culture presented memories of the domestic past as a means to imagine the postwar future, images of home onscreen also negotiated past, present and future – a muddling of time which Lawrence Napper has defined as a specifically middlebrow trait as well as one that is distinctive to British cinema in the 1940s.6 While the balance between past and future articulated by domestic life onscreen evidences the idea that suburban modernity could represent ‘the best of both worlds’, it is also suggestive of Virginia Woolf’s denigration of the middlebrow as ‘neither one thing nor the other’.7 Indeed, a number of studies of British cinema have already alluded to the ‘middle-position’ of British cinema: ‘between restraint and passion’, between ‘Realism and

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45

Brasso and Reckitt’s advertisement, My Home (May 1945)

Tinsel’, or – with a focus on the immediate postwar years – simply as a cinema ‘between’.8 This sense of in-between-ness was evidenced at the level of film aesthetics: the visual modes of address in each of the films in this book are characterised by realism and romanticism, pastoralism and preservation, escapism and restraint, and melodrama and modernism. By

Conclusion

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discussing British cinema in the context of a suburban landscape of ‘little Englanders, nostalgia bores, Bakelite-sniffers’, I have suggested that these modes of address can be re-contextualised and redefined as part of a more dynamic negotiation of competing ideas and ideals: of privacy and community, past and future, consumerism and Englishness, and inner and outer wellbeing.9 Situated within an interdisciplinary field of research focusing on interwar culture – encompassing studies of middlebrow literature, women’s magazines and the Ideal Home Exhibition – that has already overturned derisory labels of domesticity, conservatism and femininity and highlighted their different forms of modernity, this book has stressed cinema’s contributions to mid-century constructions of domestic life and modernity.10 Landmark studies of British film in the 1950s have emphasised that the film industry’s output in the following decade continued to be shaped by a struggle between tradition and modernity, which I suggest had roots in interwar forms and expressions of modernity. The tensions implicit in suburban culture of the 1930s would seem to have had a long reach in a postwar British cinema that remained couched in negotiating ‘old and new ways of presenting the world and pleasing audiences’.11 Through attention to the filmic properties of the home onscreen – from the shots of the tea table in Love on the Dole to the track across the living room in The Small Back Room – these visual constructions of domestic life engendered a negotiation of modernity that was specific to the cinema. Nonetheless, their constructions of home presented a meshwork of both filmic and extra-cinematic visual styles and influences, and a combination of movement and stillness, that was central to this middlebrow vision of modernity. The images of domestic life onscreen were not only shaped by specifically filmic devices of framing and camera movement; they shared visual congruences with art forms including photography, painting and illustration, and looked back to interwar developments in magazine layouts, printing techniques and exhibition design. Their portraits of home feature expressive visual tropes that were also evidenced across a variety of non-cinematic media, and which included tea table scenes in workingclass homes, ‘landscapes from within’ imbuing domesticity with pastoral iconography, and armchair spectators and waiting rooms conveying the interior lives and psychological significance of home. At the level of film production, the modes of address in question rely on the visual effect of production design, based on illustrations and drawings, including, for instance, Michael Relph’s designs for The Captive Heart based on John

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Worsley’s illustrations of prison camp interiors and W. C. Andrews’ tasteful terrace from Spring in Park Lane displayed and championed at the Ideal Home Exhibition. This study has drawn attention to several visual components of this re-imagined modernity that merit further analysis. For instance, in a number of the films analysed, domestic settings articulate contemporary ideas about the modern home – including the use of Georgian interiors prevalent in postwar films to evoke an acceptably conservative glamour, and the recurring trope of hallways and stairwells to convey a climate of instability and transition back to the home; in other words, through interior design. Furthermore, as Giles indicates, domestic labour was a key way of imagining modernity for women in the interwar years, and, indeed, women’s domestic work features at the heart of a number of the films I have analysed. For example, Mrs Hardcastle building a fire in the hearth and surveying her dilapidated home in Love on the Dole stands for a past domestic labour from which the ‘New Jerusalem’ presented at the end of the film would offer escape. Laura in Brief Encounter and Susan in The Small Back Room are models of middle-class women aided by modern coffee-making devices evocative of labour-saving ideals. However, this does not necessarily lead to contentment and comfort, and instead forms part of domestic environments imbued with subjectivities, instability and an eerie sense of the uncanny. Perhaps the most significant recurring visual trope in the films included in this book though, and one on which it is pertinent end, is a crossing from outside to inside – evocative of returning home. This can be seen, for instance, in the opening transitions from townscape to backyard to Mrs Hardcastle in her kitchen-living room in Love on the Dole; in the fluid crane shot of rows of homes and gardens and through the open window in This Happy Breed; in the track forwards into the dream home of Ann and Richard in The Glass Mountain; and in Laura’s downcast return to the hallway – and the everyday, material world of her domestic life – in Brief Encounter. Each of these sequences, and others detailed across the book, demonstrate a picturing of home that I suggest is at the heart of their engagement with suburban, domestic modernity. The crossings from exterior to domestic interior in each embody a balancing act between public and private – situating the homes in question in industrial workingclass townscapes, national landscapes, consumer daydreams and feminine subjectivities, and constructing domesticity through processes of mapping,

Conclusion

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capturing, transforming and imagining. As such, they construct pictorial images visually characterised by a middlebrow balance of ‘betwixt and between’, but also dynamic, modern portraits of home and society.12 Echoing the sentiments of my grandfather’s quoting of ‘’Mid Pleasures and Palaces tho’ we may roam …’ – and his dream of postwar return – these filmic crossings into the home in 1940s films simultaneously promised a return to the past and dreams of the future. Notes

1 M. Ward and N. Ward, Home in the Twenties and Thirties (London: Ian Allan, 1978), p. 6. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 J. Winship, ‘Women’s Magazines: Times of War and Management of Self in Woman’s Own’, in C. Gledhill and G. Swanson (eds) Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and British Cinema in the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 127–39, at p. 133. 5 J. Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2004), p. 137. 6 L. Napper, ‘Time and the Middlebrow in 1940s British Cinema’, in S. Faulkner (ed.) Middlebrow Cinema (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 71–87, at p. 75. 7 V. Woolf, The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1942), pp. 179–80; Ward and Ward, Home, p. 6. 8 C. Gledhill, Reframing British Cinema, 1918–1928: Between Restraint and Passion (London: BFI, 2003), p. 62; R. Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939–1949 (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 34; A. Davies, ‘A Cinema in Between: Postwar British Cinema’, in A. Davies and A. Sinfield (eds) British Culture of the Postwar: An Introduction to Literature and Society 1945–1999 (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 110–124, at p. 111. 9 M. Sweet, Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema (London: Faber & Faber, 2005), p. 5. 10 Deborah Sugg Ryan’s analysis of ‘suburban modernism’ and Judy Giles’ exploration of domestic modernity and the suburbs discuss the use of ‘suburban’ as a derogatory term. D. Sugg Ryan, Ideal Homes, 1918–1939: Domestic Design and Suburban Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), p. 52; J. Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb, p. 30. 11 S. Harper and V. Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 1; C. Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’ (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 35–7. 12 Woolf, The Death of the Moth, pp. 179–80.

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Bibliography

Archives and collections British Film Institute National Film Archive, BFI Reuben Library, London Press cuttings files Pressbooks British Film Institute National Film Archive, Special Collections, London British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) collection Michael Balcon collection Unpublished scripts The Museum of the Home (formerly the Geffrye Museum of the Home), London Furniture catalogues collection London Transport Museum, London Ephemera collection, Metro-Land booklet, Metropolitan Railway (1921) Mass-Observation Archive, University of Sussex Mass-Observation directives, Report on Mantelpieces (1937) Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture Archive, Middlesex University, London Crown Wallpaper Magazine (1939)

Bibliography Victoria and Albert Museum, Archive of Art and Design, London Ideal Home Exhibition catalogues and photograph albums, AAD/1990/9 Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition: Records Victoria and Albert Museum,Theatre and Performance Archives, London

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Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray, THM Biographical file

Periodicals

Geographical Magazine Homes and Gardens Ideal Home Kinematograph Weekly Modern Home Modern Woman My Home Picturegoer Picture Post The Tatler Woman and Home Woman’s Own

Contemporary publications

Baldwin, S. On England: And Other Addresses. London: Philip Allan and Company, 1946 (first pub. 1926). Bendit, P. and L. J. Bendit. Living Together Again. London: Gramol Publications, 1946. Bertram, A. Design in Everyday Things. London: British Broadcasting, Corporation, 1937. Betjeman, J. Continual Dew: A Little Book of Bourgeois Verse. London: John Murray, 1937. Blunden, E. English Villages. London: William Collins, 1941. British Traditional Colours. Souvenir in Connection with the Coronation of His Majesty King George VI and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. London: British Colour Council, 1937. Carrick, E. Art and Design in the British Film: A Pictorial Directory of British Art Directors and Their Work. London: Dennis Dobson, 1948. Cheveley, S. A Garden Goes to War. London: John Miles, 1940. Coglan, W. N. The Readership of Newspapers and Periodicals in Great Britain, 1936. A Report on Circulation Directed by W. N. Coglan. London: Incorporated Society of British Advertisers, 1937.

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Bibliography Sweet, M. Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema. London: Faber & Faber, 2005. Thompson, L. ‘1938’, in T. Hopkinson (ed.) Picture Post 1938–1950. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970. Thumim, J. ‘The Female Audience: Mobile Women and Married Ladies’, in C. Gledhill and G. Swanson (eds) Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and British Cinema in the Second World War, pp. 238–56. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Ward, M. and N. Ward. Home in the Twenties and Thirties. London: Ian Allan, 1978. Warren, P. Elstree: The British Hollywood. London: Elm Tree, 1983. Webber, A. The European Avant-Garde 1900–1940. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004. Weightman, G. ‘Picture Post’ Britain. London: Collins & Brown, 1991. White, C. L. Women’s Magazines 1693–1968. London: Michael Joseph, 1970. Williams, M. David Lean. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014. Williams, R. The Long Revolution. London: Penguin Books, 1965 (first pub. 1961). Winship, J. ‘Women’s Magazines: Times of War and Management of Self in Woman’s Own’, in C. Gledhill and G. Swanson (eds) Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and British Cinema in the Second World War, pp. 127–39. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Worsley, J. and K. Giggal. John Worsley’s War. Shrewsbury: Airlife Publishing, 1993.

Unpublished material Bussing, I. M. ‘Haunted House in Mid-to-Late Victorian Gothic Fiction’. PhD thesis. University of Edinburgh, 2010. Hackney, F. ‘“They Opened up a Whole New World”: Feminine Modernity and the Feminine Imagination in Women’s Magazines, 1919–1939’. PhD thesis. Goldsmiths, University of London, 2010. Hockenhull, S. ‘Peas, Parsnips and Patriotism: Romantic Images of the Landscape in the Dig For Victory Campaign’. Conference Paper delivered at Screen Studies Conference, Glasgow, 2014. Mansell, J. ‘Sound, Light and the Modern British Home, 1920–1955’. Keynote paper delivered at Domestic Imaginaries: Homes in Film, Literature and Popular Culture Symposium. University of Nottingham, 2014. Sugg Ryan, D. ‘The Empire at Home: The Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition and the Imperial Suburb’, in Imperial Cities Project, Working Paper No. 6, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, 1997. Warren, G. R. ‘The Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition 1944–1962: Representations of the “Ideal Home” and Domestic Consumption’. PhD thesis. Middlesex University, 2001.

Bibliography

Films

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A Man About the House (d. Leslie Arliss, 1947: British Lion Film Corporation) A Matter of Life and Death (d. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946: Eagle-Lion Distributors Ltd) Angels One Five (d. George More O’Ferrall, 1952: Associated British-Pathé) Black Narcissus (d. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1947: General Film Distributors) Blithe Spirit (d. David Lean, 1945: General Film Distributors) Blue Scar (d. Jill Craigie, 1949: British Lion Film Corporation) Brief Encounter (d. David Lean, 1945: Eagle-Lion Distributors) Cage of Gold (d. Basil Dearden, 1950: General Film Distributors) Captain Boycott (d. Frank Launder, 1947: General Film Distributors) The Captive Heart (d. Basil Dearden, 1946: General Film Distributors) Come Out of the Pantry (d. Jack Raymond, 1935: United Artists) The Courtneys of Curzon Street (d. Herbert Wilcox, 1947: British Lion Film Corporation) The Demi-Paradise (d. Anthony Asquith, 1943: General Film Distributors) Doss House (d. John Baxter, 1933: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) The Fallen Idol (d. Carol Reed, 1948: British Lion Film Corporation) The First of the Few (d. Leslie Howard, 1942: General Film Distributors) The Franchise Affair (d. Lawrence Huntington, 1951: Associated British-Pathé) Frieda (d. Basil Dearden, 1947: General Film Distributors) The Glass Mountain (d. Henry Cass, 1949: Renown Pictures Corporation) Henry V (d. Laurence Olivier, 1944: Eagle-Lion Distributors) Hue and Cry (d. Charles Crichton, 1947: General Film Distributors) Ideal Home Exhibition (1947: British Pathé, Unissued/unused material) I Live in Grosvenor Square (d. Herbert Wilcox, 1945: Pathé Pictures International) I’ll Turn to You (d. Geoffrey Faithfull, 1946: Butcher’s Film Service) In Which We Serve (d. David Lean and Noël Coward, 1942: British Lion Film Corporation) It Always Rains on Sunday (d. Robert Hamer, 1947: General Film Distributors) Jassy (d. Bernard Knowles, 1947: General Film Distributors) Love on the Dole (d. John Baxter, 1941: Anglo-American Film Corporation) Madonna of the Seven Moons (d. Arthur Crabtree, 1944: Eagle-Lion Distributors) The Magnet (d. Charles Frend, 1950: General Film Distributors) Maytime in Mayfair (d. Herbert Wilcox, 1949: British Lion Film Corporation) Mine Own Executioner (d. Anthony Kimmins, 1947: British Lion Film Corporation) Mrs Miniver (d. William Wyler, 1942: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) My Brother Jonathan (d. Harold French, 1948: Pathé Pictures Ltd) The October Man (d. Roy Ward Baker, 1947: General Film Distributors) Odd Man Out (d. Carol Reed, 1947: General Film Distributors) The Open Road (d. Claude Friese-Greene, 1925: British Film Institute 2006) The Passionate Friends (d. David Lean, 1949: General Film Distributors) Pool of London (d. Basil Dearden, 1951: General Film Distributors)

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Bibliography The Proud Valley (d. Pen Tennyson, 1940: Associated British Film Distributors) Quiet Wedding (d. Anthony Asquith, 1941: Paramount British Pictures) The Red Shoes (d. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948: General Film Distributors) The Rocking Horse Winner (d. Anthony Pelissier, 1949: General Film Distributors) Say It With Flowers (d. John Baxter, 1934: Radio Pictures) The Small Back Room (d. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1949: British Lion Film Corporation) Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (d. David Hand [supervising director], 1937: RKO Radio Pictures) Spring in Park Lane (d. Herbert Wilcox, 1948: British Lion Film Corporation) The Stars Look Down (d. Carol Reed, 1940: Grand National Pictures) There Was a Young Lady (d. Lawrence Huntington, 1953: Butcher’s Film Service) They Also Serve (d. Ruby Grierson, 1940: Ministry of Information) They Made Me a Fugitive (d. Alberto Calvacanti, 1947: Warner Bros) They Were Sisters (d. Arthur Crabtree, 1945: General Film Distributors) Things to Come (d. William Cameron Menzies, 1936: United Artists Corporation) This Happy Breed (d. David Lean, 1944: Eagle-Lion Distributors) The Way to the Stars (d. Anthony Asquith, 1945: United Artists Corporation) The Years Between (d. Compton Bennet, 1946: General Film Distributors)

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Index

advertisements/advertising 4, 12, 13, 14, 38–40, 71–2, 73, 79, 80, 91, 98, 104–5, 124, 126, 184, 185, 187, 198–200, 206, 208–9, 210, 219–20

Cass, Henry 3, 15, 126 catalogues (furniture, interior design) 4, 14, 76, 79, 124, 126, 135, 156, 219 Cineguild 3 colour books 14, 76, 83–5, 219 colour filmmaking 75–6

Agee, James 178 A Man About the House (1947) 123, 153, 237 A Matter of Life and Death (1946) 195, 237 Andrews, W. C. 138, 140, 144, 222 Angels One Five (1952) 147, 172n, 237 Anthony, Asquith 69, 122n art direction 6, 50, 106, 140, 180, 206

colour photography 75–6, 83–4 colour printing 80, 84–5 Come Out of the Pantry (1935) 129, 237 companionate marriage see ‘marriage’ consumer culture/consumerism 1, 4, 10, 14–15, 16, 79, 80, 83, 87, 114, 123–6, 128–31, 132, 135, 138, 139–40, 142, 145–6, 148–50, 152, 155–6, 157, 160–2, 164, 165, 167n, 197–9, 221, 222 Cooper, Lettice 178 The Courtneys of Curzon Street (1947) 123, 138, 237 Coward, Noël 6, 69, 73, 76, 177

and the Ideal Home Exhibition 125, 134, 136, 145 film tie-ups/film star endorsements 126, 135, 138, 149–50, 155–7, 158, 163

see also ‘set design’

Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC) 152, 153, 154, 171n Balcon, Michael 49, 102, 119n Baldwin, Stanley 96–8, 111, 122n Baxter, John 14, 25, 28, 29–30, 33, 64n Benjamin, Walter 9–10, 16–17, 19n Betjeman, John 2 Black Eyes and Lemonade exhibition 210 Black Narcissus (1947) 137 Blithe Spirit (1945) 69, 237 Blitz 48, 58–9, 62, 67n, 98 Blue Scar (1949) 21, 237 Brandt, Bill viii, 59, 65n Brief Encounter (1945) 3, 15, 176–83, 185, 188–92, 212n, 222, 237 Britain Can Make It exhibition 12, 130 British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) 28, 214n British Colour Council 83, 117n Captain Boycott (1947) 137, 237 The Captive Heart (1946) 3, 14, 73, 90–6, 97, 99–114, 119n, 120n, 121n, 128, 221, 237

see also ‘This Happy Breed’

Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition 4, 12, 13, 125–6, 130–8, 140, 144–5, 146, 149–50, 156, 165, 221, 222

film displays/exhibits 134–5, 136–8, 144, 156, 170n

Dearden, Basil 3, 49, 73, 102, 106, 173 Dehn, Paul 51, 153 Delafield, E. M. 178 The Demi-Paradise (1943) 69, 237 Denham Studios/Denham Village 7, 18n, 75, 146 Denison, Michael 147–8, 152–65, 170n, 171n documentary movement 6, 21, 29, 33, 63n domestic labour 157, 188, 222

see also ‘labour-saving devices/domestic appliances’

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Index Doss House (1933) 29, 237 Dufaycolor 76, 83–4, 86

Howard, Leslie 4, 69, 150 Hue and Cry (1947) 49, 237

Ealing Studios 3, 49, 57, 61 E. Arnot Robertson 212n East London/the East End 25, 45, 47–62, 68n Edwardian 96, 156 electricity 22, 132

Ideal Home 4, 14, 72, 79, 80–1, 88–9, 109, 113–14, 118n, 125–6, 198, 199 Ideal Home Exhibition see ‘Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition’ I Live in Grosvenor Square (1945) 169n, 237 I’ll Turn to You (1946) 190, 237 imperial/imperialism see ‘empire’ In Which We Serve (1942) 6–7, 69, 99, 237 It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) 3, 14, 25, 45–52, 55–62, 66n, 106, 218, 237

British Electrical Development Association 38–40

Elstree Studios 149, 152, 154 empire 11, 70, 79, 82–3, 96, 117n, 151 Englishness see ‘national identity’ Evening Standard 33 The Fallen Idol (1948) 173, 237 Festival of Britain 12, 130, 210 Fields, Gracie 150–1 film noir 176, 194, 198 The First of the Few (1942) 4–8, 69, 237 Foucault, Michel 9, 55 The Franchise Affair (1951) 147, 158, 172n, 237 Frieda (1947) 173, 237 Friese-Green, William & Claude 75 Gainsborough Studios 152, 156 gas 3, 22, 38–9, 134

British Commercial Gas company 39

Georgian design/past 113, 123, 127, 137, 138, 165n, 222 Giles, Judy 10, 20n, 96, 97, 105, 219, 222, 223n The Glass Mountain (1949) 3, 15, 126, 147–8, 152, 158, 160–5, 170n, 222, 237 gothic iconography/melodrama 173, 176, 194–6, 197, 201, 202, 204, 205–6, 207, 208, 210, 215n, 216n Gray, Dulcie 147–8, 152–65, 171n, 172n Greenwood, Walter 28, 30, 40 Hamer, Robert 3, 25, 51, 57 Hardy, Bert 58 health 39, 40, 109, 174

see also ‘psychological health/wellbeing’

Heckroth, Hein 206, 207 Henry V (1944) 6, 115n, 237 Hewitt, Charles viii, 59 Higson, Andrew 5, 8, 22, 29–33, 44, 47, 63n, 76, 86, 116n Hoggart, Richard 21, 61 Hollywood 15, 78, 123–8, 140–1, 144, 146, 148–50, 153, 154, 169n, 171n, 195, 216n Holmes Paul, R. 30 Homes and Gardens 14, 72, 80, 109, 110, 113, 198, 199

Jassy (1947) 137, 237 Jennings, Humphrey 22, 69 Kempson, Rachel 90, 113–14, 157 Kinematograph Weekly 30 Kirwan, Patrick 102, 182 kitchen-living rooms 21, 23, 26–7, 29, 32–3, 39–41, 43, 55–8, 59, 107, 218, 222 Kuhn, Annette 16, 124, 132–3, 135, 148, 150 labour-saving devices/domestic appliances 10, 158, 181, 187, 204, 222 Lean, David 3, 6, 8, 18n, 69, 73, 75, 76, 123, 176, 177, 178–9, 180, 182–3 Lehmann, Rosamond 174–5, 178 Lejeune, C. A. 73–4, 145, 188–9, 192 Light, Alison 10–11, 79, 96, 97, 105, 124, 149, 151, 165n Lipscombe, Guy viii, 113 Lockhart, Freda Bruce 192 London County Council (LCC) 59 Love on the Dole (1941) 14, 25, 26–34, 35, 36, 39–45, 64n, 66n, 197, 221, 222, 237

and censorship 28, 41, 44

Macphail, Angus 102 Madonna of the Seven Moons (1944) 153, 237 The Magnet (1950) 173, 237 Majdalany, Fred 164 Manvell, Roger 78, 102, 180 marriage 123, 147, 156–60, 164, 165, 170n, 178, 179, 181, 183–4, 190

companionate marriage 112, 113, 157–8, 162, 163, 187, 191

masculinity 89, 92–3, 95–100, 103–5, 111, 112–13, 114, 119n, 150, 154 Mass-Observation 7, 14, 22–3, 33–4, 176, 210 matte painting/matte backgrounds 6, 115n Matthews, Jessie 148, 150–1 Maytime in Mayfair (1949) 130, 144, 146, 237

Index

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melodrama 4, 6, 15, 173–4, 176–7, 179, 181–2, 183, 184, 188, 189, 190, 191–2, 193–6, 202–4, 205, 206–7, 208, 216n, 220 middlebrow culture 3, 9–11, 24–5, 52, 53, 105, 124, 149, 176, 208, 210

and British cinema 3–4, 6, 9, 14, 17, 22, 26, 34, 40, 43, 44, 48, 51, 56, 61, 73, 78, 80, 115n, 129–30, 164, 166n, 178–9, 183, 188, 190, 191 196, 197, 198, 208, 219–20, 221, 223 middlebrow/feminine middlebrow literature 3, 10–11, 78–9, 151, 174–5, 178, 183, 191, 212n, 221

Mills, John 7, 18n, 86, 173 Mine Own Executioner (1947) 153, 237 Ministry of Information 6, 99 Moderne/Art Deco Moderne design 100, 120–1n, 124–6, 148–51, 155, 162, 170n Modern Home 83 modernism 2, 8, 34, 37, 38, 73, 92, 119n, 197, 208, 210, 214n

and melodrama 4, 15, 174–7, 194–6, 204, 206–10, 220 suburban/‘vernacular modernism’ 3, 10–11, 70, 73, 100, 124–6, 132, 133, 135, 148, 150, 223n see also ‘Moderne/Art Deco Modern design’

Modern Woman 4, 15, 169n, 175–6, 179, 183–8, 196, 200, 202–5 Morgan, Guy 100, 102, 103, 120n, 121n Mosley, Leonard 129–30 Mrs Miniver 78–9, 174, 237 My Brother Jonathan (1948) 147, 153–8, 171n, 237 My Home 14, 72, 80, 88, 149, 200, 220

Napper, Lawrence 3, 4, 219 National Health Service 154 national identity, and British cinema 3, 6, 29, 61, 69–70, 91, 106, 107, 116n, 123, 157, 192, 197, 219

Englishness 4, 15, 61, 76, 78–80, 83–5, 89, 91, 92, 96–7, 113–14, 119n, 124–5, 129, 130, 132, 147–52, 159–60, 162, 164, 165, 197, 221 and home 11–12, 96–9, 151, 173, 174, 193, 208, 210 citizenship 12, 38–40, 41, 92–3, 97–9, 104, 105, 151, 176, 200, 208, 219 consumer culture 15, 123–7, 130–1, 132, 149–50

see also ‘This Happy Breed’

Neagle, Anna 123, 127, 144, 145–6, 169n Neame, Ronald 75, 86, 177

neo-romantic/neo-romanticism 8, 69, 72–3, 80, 85 nostalgia 3, 7, 54, 70, 76, 87, 88–9, 96, 113, 152, 218, 221 The October Man (1947) 173, 237 Odd Man Out (1947) 137, 237 Only Ghosts Can Live 100–2 The Open Road (1925) 75, 237 Orwell, George 14, 23–5, 61 pageantry 69, 70, 76, 82–3, 85, 87 paintings 6, 63n, 72, 75, 79, 80, 84–7, 88, 107, 113, 118n, 144, 180, 181, 221

see also ‘matte backgrounds/paintings’

The Passionate Friends (1949) 123, 237 pastoral/pastoralism see ‘rural imagery’ photo-journalism/photo-essays see ‘Picture Post’ ‘pictorialist tradition’ 8 Picturegoer 113, 151, 158–60, 169n Picture Post 4, 8, 13, 14, 25, 33–41, 42, 44–5, 48, 52–5, 57, 58–61, 62, 68n, 104, 108–9, 129, 146, 150, 158, 169n, 198–9, 210 Poe, Edgar Allan 194 Pool of London (1951) 49, 237 postwar reconstruction 11, 12, 15, 48, 58–9, 62, 63n, 193, 208 postwar social transition/readjustment 11, 104, 145, 173, 190, 193, 208, 222 Powell, Dilys 51 Powell, Michael and Pressburger, Emeric 15, 69, 137, 176, 195–6, 206, 210, 214n Priestley, J. B. 9, 23, 105, 108–9, 113, 124, 126, 193 prisoners of war/prisoner-of-war camps see ‘The Captive Heart’ The Proud Valley (1940) 21, 238 psychological health/wellbeing 15, 102, 103, 153, 165, 173, 174–6, 192–6, 198, 199–200, 204, 208, 221 ‘Quality films’ 3, 115n, 123 Quiet Wedding (1941) 69, 238 realism 4, 5–7, 13–14, 21–2, 24–5, 99, 103, 123, 126, 157, 173–4, 184, 208, 219, 220

and melodrama, in Brief Encounter 176–7, 178–83, 188, 189, 190, 191

in The Small Back Room 193, 195, 196, 200, 204, 207

see also ‘It Always Rains on Sunday’, ‘Love on the Dole’

Recording Britain 85–7, 118n Redgrave, Michael 21, 90, 113–14, 157

241

242

Index The Red Shoes (1948) 195, 238 rehousing 12, 27, 37, 48, 59, 61

see also ‘postwar reconstruction’

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Relph, Michael 100, 106, 221 Richards, J. M. 69 Robson, Flora 151–2 The Rocking Horse Winner (1949) 173, 238 rural imagery, and suburban modernity 1, 3, 11, 62, 69–73

and British cinema 13, 14, 16, 29, 69, 218–19

landscapes and cinema 6, 8, 29, 73, 74

see also ‘The Captive Heart’, ‘The First of the Few’, ‘This Happy Breed’ Say It With Flowers (1934) 29, 238 set design 13, 30, 51, 134, 141, 144, 221

see also ‘art direction’

Shepperton studios 156 Sheriff, Paul 6, 115n Slocombe, Douglas 47, 49, 106 The Small Back Room (1949) 15, 176, 193–208, 219, 221, 222, 238 and censorship 214n Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) 135, 238 social investigation 13–14, 22–5, 27, 29, 33, 44, 48 social realism see ‘realism’ Spender, Humphrey viii, 35, 52 Spring in Park Lane (1948) 3, 15, 126–31, 138–46, 162, 165, 197, 219, 222, 238 stars/stardom 13, 15, 113–14, 126–7, 130, 134–5, 137, 145–65 The Stars Look Down (1940) 21, 238 Street, Sarah 28, 41, 75–6, 115n, 117n, 118n, 145, 148, 150, 165, 169n Struther, Jan 78 suburbia/suburban culture 1–2, 22, 23, 24, 34, 69, 70–3, 91, 96–8, 99, 119n, 138, 218–19

and British cinema/the British film industry 7–9, 14–15, 16, 18n, 146, 148–50, 220–1 and class 2, 10, 16, 22, 34, 70, 72, 96, 100, 124–5, 126, 131, 132, 138, 149, 175, 178, 180–1, 183 interior design/architecture 3, 11, 14, 22, 70–2, 135, 170n see also ‘modernism, suburban/vernacular modernism’

and modernity 3, 9–13, 34, 69–70, 82–3, 96, 102, 124–5, 127, 132, 148–50, 165, 174, 181, 219–22 ‘suburban neurosis’ 15, 174

Sugg Ryan, Deborah 3, 11, 70, 117n, 120–1n, 125, 132, 167n, 170n, 223n Sunday Pictorial 44, 129 Sunday Times 51 surrealism 194, 196, 206, 207–8, 210 Sutherland, Duncan 50 There Was a Young Lady (1953) 147, 238 They Also Serve (1940) 99, 238 They Made Me a Fugitive (1947) 173, 238 They Were Sisters (1945) 69, 147, 153, 238 Things to Come (1936) 133, 134–5, 238 This Happy Breed (1944) 3, 14, 73–89, 94–5, 99, 100, 116, 128, 160, 196, 197, 218, 222, 238 Tomlin, Harold viii, 24 Tudor/Tudorbethan style 1, 11, 70, 71, 125, 126, 150, 181 uncanny 15, 165, 173, 175, 176, 181, 193, 194–6, 197–204, 206–10, 222 Victorian design/past 24, 38, 42–3, 54, 60, 96, 156, 174, 189, 194, 208, 210, 216n watercolour painting see ‘paintings’ The Way to the Stars (1945) 122n, 238 Wilcox, Herbert 3, 123, 126, 127, 129–30, 138, 140–1, 144, 145, 169n

‘London Series’ 127–31, 138, 144, 145, 165

Williams, L. P. 180 Winnington, Richard 139, 182 Woman 192 Woman’s Own 158, 169n, 179, 192–3 women’s films 123, 128 women’s magazines 10, 15, 146, 174, 175–6, 177, 178–9, 183–8, 189, 190, 191, 192–3, 202–4, 206, 208, 213n, 221 women’s novels see ‘middlebrow/feminine middlebrow literature’ Woolf, Virginia 3, 9, 219 Worsley, John 100–1, 102, 120n, 222 The Years Between (1946) 173, 190, 238