Ripping England!: Postwar British Satire from Ealing to the Goons 1438467354, 9781438467351

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Ripping England!

Also in the series William Rothman, editor, Cavell on Film J. David Slocum, editor, Rebel Without a Cause Joe McElhaney, The Death of Classical Cinema Kirsten Moana Thompson, Apocalyptic Dread Frances Gateward, editor, Seoul Searching Michael Atkinson, editor, Exile Cinema Paul S. Moore, Now Playing Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann, Ecology and Popular Film William Rothman, editor, Three Documentary Filmmakers Sean Griffin, editor, Hetero Jean-Michel Frodon, editor, Cinema and the Shoah Carolyn Jess-Cooke and Constantine Verevis, editors, Second Takes Matthew Solomon, editor, Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination R. Barton Palmer and David Boyd, editors, Hitchcock at the Source William Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, Second Edition Joanna Hearne, Native Recognition Marc Raymond, Hollywood’s New Yorker Steven Rybin and Will Scheibel, editors, Lonely Places, Dangerous Ground Claire Perkins and Constantine Verevis, editors, B Is for Bad Cinema Dominic Lennard, Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors Rosie Thomas, Bombay before Bollywood Scott M. MacDonald, Binghamton Babylon Sudhir Mahadevan, A Very Old Machine David Greven, Ghost Faces James S. Williams, Encounters with Godard William H. Epstein and R. Barton Palmer, editors, Invented Lives, Imagined Communities Lee Carruthers, Doing Time Rebecca Meyers, William Rothman, and Charles Warren, editors, Looking with Robert Gardner Belinda Smaill, Regarding Life Douglas McFarland and Wesley King, editors, John Huston as Adaptor R. Barton Palmer, Homer B. Pettey, and Steven M. Sanders, editors, Hitchcock’s Moral Gaze Nenad Jovanovic, Brechtian Cinemas Will Scheibel, American Stranger Amy Rust, Passionate Detachments Steven Rybin, Gestures of Love Seth Friedman, Are You Watching Closely?

Ripping England! Postwar British Satire from Ealing to the Goons • Roger Rawlings

Cover image credit: The Goon Show on the BBC (1951–60). Image courtesy of Photofest. Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2017 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production, Eileen Nizer Marketing, Anne M. Valentine Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rawlings, Roger, author. Title: Ripping England! : postwar British satire from Ealing to the Goons / Roger Rawlings. Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2017. | Series: SUNY series, horizons of cinema | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016056704 (print) | LCCN 2017018251 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438467351 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438467337 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Comedy films—Great Britain—History—20th century. | Ealing Studios—History—20th century. | Comedy films—United States—History— 20th century. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.C55 (ebook) | LCC PN1995.9.C55 R39 2017 (print) | DDC 791.43/617—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016056704 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

List of Images

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1

A Nation Turns Inward: The Setting of Economic and Artistic Postwar Britain

11

“Fog in Channel, Continent Cut Off”: Postwar British Filmmakers Look Inward

35

The Great Bloodless Revolution: Postwar British Film and the Ealing Satires (to 1949)

51

4

The Ealing Satires’ Annus Mirabilus (1949)

61

5

Ealing at a Turning Point (1949 and After)

87

6

The Special Relationship: American Satires of the 1940s

115

7

Postwar Britain Faces Its Subconscious: Spike Milligan and the Goons’ Postmodern Schizophrenia

145

The Post-1950s Satire Boom: Satire Explodes into Late Twentieth-Century British and American Popular Culture

177

2

3

8

vi

Contents

Epilogue

203

Notes

213

Works Cited

251

Index

259

List of Images

Figure 1.1

Princess Elizabeth, 1949.

10

Figure 1.2

Clement Attlee, 1950.

16

Figure 1.3

William Beveridge, c. 1950s.

19

Figure 1.4

Kingsley Amis, c. 1950s.

25

Figure 2.1

Michael Balcon, c. 1938.

38

Figure 2.2

Gracie Fields, 1943.

44

Figure 3.1

Hue and Cry (Charles Crichton, 1947).

59

Figure 4.1

Winter, 1947.

65

Figure 4.2

Passport to Pimlico (Henry Cornelius, 1947).

70

Figure 4.3

Whisky Galore! (Alexander Mackendrick, 1949).

73

Figure 4.4

Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949).

81

Figure 4.5

Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949).

83

Figure 5.1

The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951).

95

Figure 5.2

The Man in the White Suit (Alexander Mackendrick, 1951).

99

Figure 5.3

The Titfield Thunderbolt (Charles Crichton, 1953).

104

Figure 5.4

The Ladykillers (Alexander Mackendrick, 1955).

111

Figure 6.1

To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942).

120

Figure 6.2

The Paleface (Norman Z. McLeod, 1948).

140

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Illustrations

Figure 7.1

The Original Goons with Michael Bentine, c. 1951. 151

Figure 7.2

The Goon Show on the BBC (1951–60).

163

Figure 7.3

Later Milligan, with Peter Sellers in The Great McGonagall (Joseph McGrath, 1975).

175

Figure 8.1

Withnail and I (Bruce Robinson, 1987).

189

Figure 8.2

Mark E. Smith and The Fall, 1980s.

194

Acknowledgments

When I first started thinking about postwar British satire about ten years ago, there wasn’t even an entry in Wikipedia for Ealing studios, let alone the Goons. The idea for this work began during my PhD studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, still—after so many political attempts to strip it of its mission or forcing it to operate on a perennial shoestring—one of the great public institutions in the nation. I especially am indebted to my directors of that time, Luke Menand, Morris Dickstein, Norman Kelvin, and most of all, the incomparable and hilariously brilliant Peter Hitchcock. Also deserving thanks is Professor Robert Pattison, who made pragmatic and stylistic suggestions. Thanks to Dr. Robert Eisinger for his continual encouragement, and to the many graduate and undergraduate students who endured my prattling on about the genius satirists working in Britain after World War II. I am grateful to various libraries, institutes, and their diligent worker-bees: the BBC and the BFI in London; the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center; the Bobst Library at NYU; the library at the CUNY Grad Center in New York; and the librarians at Florida Atlantic University, all of whom were most valuable in tracking down books and obscure material that helped shape the ideas found here. Also, many thanks to my inspirational colleagues at PBSC and YipTV.com. Kudos must also be extended to the head editor at SUNY Press, James Peltz, for his constant encouragement, and James’s assistant Rafael Chaiken, and Senior Production Editor Eileen Nizer, who answered many questions patiently and precisely along the way. Most of all, a shout out unquestionably to the head editor of the Horizons of Cinema series, the ingenious Murray Pomerance, whose work I have admired from afar for many years, and who saw the value in the thesis from the beginning. Murray pushed and pushed until the chapters pleased what the Peer Reviewers might flag as lacking, what the marketplace needed,

ix

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Acknowledgments

and what would make this an original piece of work. His own irreverent and feisty punk rock attitude was a welcome shot of adrenaline again and again the whole way through. And finally, to my supportive family, and above all my dad, Walter Edward Rawlings (1930–2014), who turned me on to so many of these works, and made sure that the postwar British satirists, and their incessant questioning of often undeserved British purloined privilege and their finger-on-the-pulse reflections of changing national mores, were a major part of my upbringing. This book is dedicated to him.

Introduction What we in hindsight call change is usually the unexpected swelling of a minor current as it imperceptibly becomes a major one and alters the prevailing mood. —Morris Dickstein

•

HIS IS A STUDY OF POSTWAR BRITISH film satire. It is purposefully a comparison study. It asks the long overdue question, “Compared to the major postwar filmmaking cinemas, Italian, French, Scandinavian, and, yes, American, why hasn’t British film of the same period been equally considered as a major contributor?” Ripping England! briefly considers those other various European outputs and holds them against the British satires. It then compares them further to the American ones being made simultaneously. The postwar British satires hold up more than well against the work of their other Western counterparts. Everyone knows of Europe’s postwar cinematic miracles. They have been written about extensively. Italian filmmakers sought to document the war’s devastation through a new genre of neorealism using stock footage, off-the-cuff on-location shooting, and whatever raw film stock they could get their hands on. They gave us such classics as Roberto Rossellini’s Open City (1945) and Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves (1948). In 1945 France celebrated liberation with the release of Marcel Carné’s The Children of Paradise and Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast. Ingmar Bergman’s debut as a film director came in 1946 with Crisis. After the destruction of World War II, Italy, France, and northern Europe built on their existing cultures of cinema

T

1

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Ripping England!

to produce innovative films that reflected their societies’ reconstruction and renovation. The filmmakers contributed to what would be recognized as a new wave in cinema, and ultimately, a new Europe in a modern world. The same process occurred in Britain, but the British cinematic miracle is little discussed and often unacknowledged. Reduced to making “support the war-effort” propaganda and documentaries during the war, British filmmakers also started afresh after 1945, first by going back to their literary classics, from Shakespeare to Dickens, but then, more importantly, as they got further away from the traumas of war, to their national tradition of satire. Though respected by Hollywood, critics, and the public for the intensity and zaniness of their characters and narratives, the postwar British comedies weren’t mere “comedies” but great achievements of high satire—key cultural documents in understanding a new England facing a new world. Ripping England! will investigate the work of certain writers, filmmakers, and performers working in postwar England, and identifies the period between 1947 and 1953 as a particularly fertile moment for British satire—a time when British cultural identity was redefining itself amid a socioeconomic landscape of loss of empire, crippling rationing, and Labour’s newly implemented welfare state. This book will look at the too often neglected miracle of postwar British cinema and popular culture.

America’s Role After World War II, all Europeans and European filmmakers were dependent on America in some way, either financially or aesthetically. Italian and French directors still looked to emulate the style and structure of American films. Neorealism wanted to be a new genre, but its ashcan grittiness had already been popularized by the American social realist (I’m a Fugitive from a Chain Gang) and films noir (The Maltese Falcon) movements in the years leading up to U.S. entry into the war in 1941. The Children of Paradise aspired to be a French Gone with the Wind, and later the French New Wave auteurs revered the Hollywood cartel. For the British and their popular culture, there was a special relationship with America. In the political and economic aspects of this consociation, the British were subservient, like the other Western European societies wrecked by the war, but in their cinema and popular culture, they did like the French and Italians and cultivated their own cultural sensibilities on the root stock of American money and production. Especially in film, they more than held their own, as a comparison of British and American satires will show.

Introduction

3

Did postwar America actually understand these satirical works that French critics (who most certainly did not understand them) labeled, in a Franco-centric anti-Anglo-Saxonism, “small” films? Not really. During the 1930s and through the war years, there essentially were only four types of “England” known to Americans, all of them somewhat mythological: • Ye Merry Olde England of Friar Tuck and Robin Hood. • The England of Shakespeare, Dickens, Sherlock Holmes, and the Bröntes. • The English historical dramas (Henry VIII; Mary, Queen of Scots), and the family sagas (How Green was My Valley; Wuthering Heights) often created by classical American Hollywood directors like John Ford and William Wyler. • And finally, the England that gallantly pulled through the war (Foreign Correspondent; Mrs. Miniver). It was a very narrow and myopic comprehension. There were British directors (Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Lloyd, Edmund Goulding, and Robert Siodmak–technically German, he had learned the craft with Hitchcock at Ufa, but like Hitch he worked in England before fleeing to the states) and actors (Ronald Coleman, C. Aubrey Smith, Laurence Olivier, Robert Donat, Cary Grant, Madeleine Carol, Charles Laughton, Vivian Leigh, and Joan Fontaine; Errol Flynn was Australian) already working in Hollywood–some had gotten their start in silents, but most were there mainly because Hollywood turned to more posh, clearly-enunciating English voices as sound entered the picture in the late 1920s. Before the war, MGM was the most Anglophelic studio making a calculated stab at “costumes and classics/castles and castes” Brit-centric fare as it depended on English-speaking foreign box office to round out their revenue. This was seen in such films as Mutiny on the Bounty (1933), Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry the Eighth (1933), the Euro flair of their “tiffany” stars like Greta Garbo, and of course, the melodramas produced by Sidney Franklin, including Goodbye Mr. Chips (1939); the other successful film before the war was Noel Coward’s Cavalcade (Frank Lloyd, from Fox, 1932). These films illustrated the difference between “British” film and British film—idealized Hollywood representations that sought to fulfill audience expectations about England vs. the more prosaic truth—exactly what Ealing and the Goons would change after the war.1 Until then, Americans still thought of England in stereotypes.

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Ripping England!

By the time America joined the war at the end of 1941, two long years of constant combat had exhausted the British people fighting off invasion. Soon more than two million Americans were stationed in England alone, albeit on bases that were made to feel homelike—American outposts with baseball diamonds and canteens serving American food and products—islands within an island. Though mixing with average Britons, these Americans were sheltered, too. America and Britain tried to understand each other better. Edward R. Murrow reported on British life as the war geared up, and Alistair Cooke was sent to tour rural America and send his reports back to explain that strange land to the former mother country.2 The two English speaking countries were foreign to one another and would only really get to know each other in the aftermath of war through their popular cultures, especially their satiric films. By the 1960s, both countries’ satiric offerings would create one of the great transatlantic cultural exchanges of the twentieth century, without each really acknowledging it as being so. That would come later, with Beyond the Fringe, the satires the Bronxborn Kubrick made in England (Lolita and Dr. Strangelove), the American director Richard Lester’s Beatles’ films, and eventually Monty Python and its American conjunction Saturday Night Live (created by a Britishinspired Canadian, Lorne Michaels) in the States. A few points are clear: • At the time, America certainly recognized oddball characters from her own tradition of regionalist humor (Mark Twain/Damon Runyon), so they would’ve mostly “got” the capricious denizens in Lavender Hill Mob and Ladykillers, though the Scots in Whiskey Galore! may have been much more of a challenge, as they still are today (Trainspotting; Death at a Funeral; My Name is Joe). • More sophisticated eccentrics such as Dennis Price in Kind Hearts and Coronets or Alec Guinness in Our Man in Havana probably only appealed to upscale, cosmopolitan sensibilities in large cities like New York and Chicago who sought out such quixotic fare. • The Goons, however, would not have been understood by Americans in the 1950s at all; instead they were laying the groundwork for Beyond the Fringe and the Pythons that came in with the anything-goes 1960s (The Goons’ foremost talent, Peter Sellers, would be the secret-weapon star

Introduction

5

of both of Kubrick’s early 1960s English-American satires). But Americans would have been used to comedians who had honed much of their craft in England and Europe, such as Charlie Chaplin, Cary Grant, Jack Benny (he was stationed overseas during World War I), and Bob Hope (Hope was born in Eltham, London, in 1903; many of his early World War II USO appearances brought him back to England in the 1940s). • The more esoteric or high-brow satire (the kind later institutionalized in publications such as Private Eye) really was an English thing—an English scheme. Even today, after all the transatlantic exchanges of English Premier League (EPL) soccer matches, Downton Abbey, Masterpiece Theatre, and BBCAmerica, smaller English/Scottish films still have had a hard time reaching anything more than a cult audience—think Steve Coogan/Rob Brydon in the Trip films, cross-dressing comedians like Eddie Izzard, or artistic geniuses like Mark E. Smith of The Fall. Most British actors and artists today, if they are recognized at all, are known usually because they are cast in major roles in big-budget superhero films (Christian Bale/Tom Hardy, etc.) or in Game of Thrones, or by audiences now used to their seasonal doses of Helen Mirren, Dame Judy Dench, Maggie Smith, the Redgraves, Colin Firth, Hugh Grant, and Emma Thompson, especially when they play English royalty, which is catnip to American audiences’ fetish for crowned heads come Oscar time. In sum, it is true that most Americans were still not really familiar with English quirks and idiosyncrasies in the late 1940s (though some of the troops would become accustomed to them). The British films of this era were, to outsiders, exotic and peculiar, one reason they were called “little.” And they were new stories often about working- and middleclass lives struggling to survive in the new Age of Austerity—people who today are the Brexiters, who regularly read The Daily Mail, who those in the press label “little Englanders.” At the same time, the American satires of the period (of W.C. Fields, Jack Benny, Preston Sturges, and Bob Hope) were just as strange, and just as culturally significant, to British audiences. British and American comedies and satires explained each nation to the other in a detailed (not to mention brilliantly hilarious) way. Taken together,

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Ripping England!

these British and American satires would help forge a shared Englishspeaking postwar mentality that buttressed the special relationship. To understand this relationship better, included here is a chapter on what America was doing in a similar vein at the same time as the British satires.

The British Postwar Cultural Milieu Much has been written about the Angry Young Men (John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe) and the Movement writers (Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis) of the mid-1950s; but the satiric artists and filmmakers discussed here were making their commentaries earlier, in the immediate aftermath of the war’s end. Possibly one of the reasons the postwar satires have been overlooked is what Ben Shephard describes as the “goodie-goodie” problem of history: It raises what the writer Gitta Sereny has called the “goodiegoodie” problem. How, in our modern culture—where evil is sexy, goodness is dull, and organized goodness is dullest of all—can we find a way to make organized altruism interesting? The selling of Hitler was in the hands of Joseph Goebbels, Albert Speer, and Leni Reifenstahl, who created an iconography which still pervades popular mass culture today [see The Daily Mail and Fox News]; whereas the selling of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (and the humanitarian ideal it stood for) was entrusted to the National Film Board of Canada, whose feeble efforts to create an imagery of international brotherhood and cooperation are long forgotten.3 This historical problem is the same problem the British comedies have had in gaining respect. They seem on the surface frivolous, but really are the veridical representations of the British people and their humorist ethos imbedded in their popular culture of the late 1940s and early 1950s. But if the task is daunting, it is also necessary if history is to consist of more than “the mass killers of our time—crazed despots, the perverted henchmen, their army chiefs” and do justice to their opposites, “the healers who spent themselves in trying to prevent or redress the deliberate inhumanity of those with the power to hurt.”4

Introduction

7

Even today, the History (sometimes referred to as the “Hitler”) Channel and its cognates show rerun after rerun of the evil deeds of the mid-twentieth century, while the great humanitarian efforts go far less heralded.5 Writing about Eric Auerbach’s affinity for reality-based fiction (Mimesis, 1953), Arthur Krystal notes that “Auerbach tended to undervalue the comic and, consequently, gave short shrift to both Dickens and Thackeray.”6 The Ealing/Goons satires have suffered a similar fate; they have not been taken seriously by historians or analysts of the period who have been too intimidated by the giants of French, Italian, and Scandinavian postwar cinema to admit so. They should be. Earlier British upheavals had produced consonant eruptions of British satire. After the revolutions of the seventeenth century, Butler, Dryden, Swift, and Pope used satire to address the social trauma and define a new age. Revolutions in America, France, and industrial society were followed by the satires of Austen and Byron. After World War II and the end of empire, with a furiously changing national mood and economic situation, the Brits again turned to satire to understand where they were and what they might become. The first chapter of this book provides the historical background against which British satire flourished in the wake of war—the international and domestic crises the Attlee/ Labour administration consistently faced, and the plans the government was making to make sure safety nets were put in place for all her subjects, from full employment to health care for all. Some would be successful, some not so much. Chapter 2 explores how the new, younger artisans working at Ealing turned inward, not concerned with what their counterparts on the continent—the Italian neorealists, the French tradition of Qualitiers, the Scandinavian existentialists—were proposing about the medium. Instead, they sought to bring British topical stories to the quickly shrinking-fromthe-Empire island nation, and did so through a dogged work ethic, which placed less emphasis on proposing new theories about the cinematic medium than reflecting the postwar austerity-laden atmosphere. For this reason, as well as not being as melancholically inclined, the British satires have been ignored by critics and academics who pined for the European movements that shaped their formative years. Britain was more idiosyncratic and self-reliant. Its own tradition of music hall and satire provided their artistic model for soul searching. The remaining chapters seek to show how the British satires of the late 1940s and early 1950s were a highly original, authentic, indigenous response to a nation’s critical identity crisis. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 concentrate on the Ealing satires, especially the great year 1949, when Ealing truly hit its stride with three masterpieces: Passport to Pimlico, Kind

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Hearts & Coronets, and Whisky Galore! Then later, early 1950s film texts considered here include The Man in the White Suit (1951), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953), and The Ladykillers (1955), among others. To put the British experience in perspective, Chapter 6 looks at American satires doing similar work for American culture and society at the time, from the sophistication of Ernst Lubitsch/Jack Benny, Eddie Cline/W.C. Fields, Preston Sturges, and to the European exiles such as Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, and Douglas Sirk, who fled European destruction to live and work in Hollywood, whilst still producing serious critiques of postwar American life. The British satirists concentrated on their own uptight little island, but would’ve been somewhat aware of these dark and funny American films because of the unique nature of film distribution, the shared language, and the “special relationship” Churchill described in his “Iron Curtain” speech of 1946.7 Chapter 7 unpacks the amazing work of the militant satirist Spike Milligan, along with the versatile performers Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe and their BBC radio program, The Goon Show, which was also at its most prolific during this period. The final chapter discusses later English satires inspired by these postwar artists, including works from Beyond the Fringe, the Beatles’ mid1960s films (A Hard Day’s Night and Help!) and the Kubrick-in-England Anglo-American satires, to later satires on TV (Monty Python), in print (Private Eye, founded in 1961), on film (Withnail and I), in music (The Fall), and on stage (Bill Hicks). Satire became the dominant genre in both Britain and the United States in the entertainment industries after the great upheaval. These ingenious satirists questioned the moral certainties and absolutes of those (often insular) groups that held sway and power for so long in both countries, from the religious and political to the hidebound “preservationist” societies. The British satires of the late ’40s and early ’50s held up a mirror to an England rife with change, helping to codify who they were and where they were headed as a newly inward-turning island culture. As Morris Dickstein explains in the quote that starts this section, these shifts often occur imperceptibly, and Britain’s artists and filmmakers didn’t realize it at the time, but they were changing and affecting their culture and society irreversibly through their uniquely indigenous and subsequent pasquinades. Our hope is that readers will come away with a new appreciation of how the postwar British satirists and artists negotiated the cataclysm of the late 1940s and early 1950s through humor and militant irony. As a final note, “Ripping England! ” has multiple meanings. The title denotes the fact that there arose in the aftermath of the war a new

Introduction

9

satiric movement that tore old England a new one. It is also meant as a signpost—that this study will document the sheering away of the old world from the new. And, most importantly, the title signifies the divide between those who pined for tradition and those who wanted to move on and gain a new place in a culture that had for so long closed them out. “Ripping England” is meant as a not-so-gentle jesting of the moorings that were coming loose from their bearings in a midcentury England forever changing, for better or for ill.

Figure 1.1. Princess Elizabeth, 1949, two years before her ascension. Photofest.

1 A Nation Turns Inward The Setting of Economic and Artistic Postwar Britain

But while they speed the pace of legislation With sleepless ardour and unmatched devotion, The lower strata of the population Appear to have imbibed a soothing potion; Faced with the mighty tasks of restoration The teeming millions seem devoid of motion, Indifferent to the bracing opportunity Of selfless service to the whole community. It is as if the Government were making Their maiden journey in the train of State, The streamlined engine built for record-breaking, Steaming regardless at a breakneck rate, Supposing all the while that they were taking Full complement of passengers and freight, But puffing on in solitary splendor, Uncoupled from the carriages and tender. —from “Let the Cowards Flinch,” published in The New Statesman by Sagittarius (pseudonym for Olga Katzin), October 1947

•

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Ripping England! HE WAR’S END BROUGHT JUBILATION

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and relief. But it also brought new cultural and economic monsters for Britain: postmodernism and the end of empire. The elements of prewar modernism—Freud, Darwin, relativity, fragmented sense of self, an obsession with the capacities of language, and the introduction into the marketplace of new technologies such as airplanes and radios—had transformed Western and world culture. The new postwar period was shaped by its own preoccupations and technologies, which included everything from the atomic bomb and antibiotics to computers and the search for a solution to the mystery of heredity in the structure of DNA. This time the fate of the planet was at stake, not just vagaries of economic or psychological structures. This was a new age and a new world where cause-and-effect were practically simultaneous. For the theorist/geographer David Harvey, the struggle between utopian visions and dystopian realities of the mid–twentieth century was due to what he calls the “Space-Time Compression,” brought on, invariably, by capitalism and its push for faster modes of production and transportation: I use the word “Compression” because a strong case can be made that the history of capitalism has been characterized by a sped-up pace of life, while also overcoming the spacial barriers so that the world seems to collapse inward on us. As space appears to shrink to a “global village” of telecommunications and “spaceship earth” of economic ecological interdependencies, and as time-horizons shorten to the point where “the present” is all there is (the world of the schizophrenic), so we have to learn how to cope with an overwhelming sense of compression of our spacial and temporal worlds.1 Under the influence of what is now labeled High Modernism or Postmodernism, this newly sped-up world collapsed the imperial boundaries Britain had long sustained into a messy global conflation. Or as Jameson put it, Taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called postmodernism. The case for its existence depends on the hypothesis of some radical break or coupure, generally traced back to the end of the 1950s or the early 1960s. As the word itself suggests, this break is most often related to notions of the waning or extinction of the hundred-year-old modern movement (or to its ideological or aesthetic repudiation). Thus, abstract expressionism in painting, existentialism in philosophy, the final forms of representation in the novel, the

A Nation Turns Inward

13

films of the great auteurs, or the modernist school of poetry (as institutionalized and canonized in the works of Wallace Stevens): all these are now seen as the final, extraordinary flowering of a high modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted with them.2 So, the arts, too, began to shift to capture this unwieldly new historical and cultural paradigm, and within them would be seen new aesthetic preferences: for more outrageous and farcical structures, for fragments over wholes (including the idea of the joke without a punchline), for an incessant reliance on irony and pastiche, and for a distrust of catharsis, closure, and even critical analysis of its own relentless force. What it is called matters less than its 24/7 psychotic pop-culture dominance. Today it is simply known as hegemony, but before 1939, England had a long history of cultural imperialism.3 To take but one example, the forcing of the English language onto cultures that came under the spreading empire as the English establishment attempted to eliminate all non-English languages within the “British Isles” cohort (Welsh, Irish, and Scottish Gaelic) by outlawing them or otherwise marginalizing their practitioners.4 By the nineteenth century, the British imperial system extended around the globe. It was a legacy that vexed postwar Britain. Besides a tattered empire, postwar Britain also faced a financial catastrophe that was its most immediate reality. In 1945, after six years of war, to those in tune to economics or politics, British hegemony was mortally impaired, even if their cultural dominance appeared, especially to the British themselves, to continue unabated. “England as a great power is done for,” sighed Evelyn Waugh into his diary in 1946. “The loss of possessions, the claim of the English proletariat to be a privileged race, sloth and envy, must produce increasing poverty . . . until only a proletariat and bureaucracy survive.”5 Paul Addison adds that, When the Marxist left and radical Right emerged in the 1970s there was one point on which they were agreed: that many seeds of decline were planted in the immediate postwar years. According to the Marxist left, this was because socialism and the class struggle were betrayed. According to the radical Right, it was because free market forces had been stultified by the Welfare State and the managed economy.6 Whichever view is correct, and it is probably some combination of the two, the new Attlee government, and politicians in general, wanted to maintain the image of Rule Britannia, even as the nation felt its decline more and more each day.

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Led by the United States, the victorious Allies formed the United Nations in 1945, and the 1947 American Marshall Plan (or the European Recovery Plan, as it was known overseas) was another calculated strategy to sustain America’s newly gained upper hand at Britain’s expense.7 The plan offered billions in aid to countries that maintained (mostly) democratic governments and (mostly) political allegiance to the United States to prevent them from drifting into the communist orbit. Many nations insisted on reinforcing or reviving their distinct cultural identities, complaining that in fashion, advertising, and mass media, among other areas, Europe was becoming a colony of the States. The domination of American film offers a good example of how the United States prevailed culturally and financially in these years. The lending of Marshall Plan funds was carefully tied to acceptance of the Motion Picture Export Association of America’s (known as the Blum-Byrnes agreement) terms of American film as the best form of propagandic defense against communist and fascist tendencies. Also, the major European filmmaking countries began to reestablish their industries, using American film and culture as influence for their styles. Godard would categorize the postwar climate as “Coca Cola and Marx.” He wasn’t far off: the two products that were nonnegotiably attached to the Blum-Byrnes/Marshall Plan funds were Coca Cola and American movies; no two products would be more effective in spreading American-style democracy, the thinking went.8 And this demand was also made on America’s closest ally, Britain. But after victory, Britain and her people were too caught up in the triumph and the utopian ideals of the coming New Jerusalem to notice such incursions. In Britain, it would be the postwar satirists who would have to point out the truth to them, laughingly.

The Paradox of the New Jerusalem Even though he hoped to continue a Coalition government, at least until the war in the East was over, Churchill called a national election for July 5, 1945; the results were not released until July 26, 1945, and Clement Attlee won in a Labour romp.9 It was the first general election in over ten years and the first noncoalition government in over five. A number of shifts factored in to the move toward Labour. Martin Pugh writes, Between the outbreak of war in September 1939 and the general election of July 1945 political fortunes in Britain changed drastically in favour of the Labour Party . . . The result was essentially a defeat for the Conservative Party rather than Churchill; for the Conservatives were labeled the “Guilty Men”

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whose pursuit of appeasement had left the country unprepared for war . . . Moreover, the Labour Party could no longer be written off as dangerous or unfit to govern as in the 1930s. Its (Labour’s) leading figures, particularly Attlee, Morrison and Bevin, had served with distinction in the wartime coalition since 1940 . . . in short the mood of 1945 was very close to what one historian has called “Mr. Attlee’s Consensus.”10 Not only was there a rejection of the Conservative stance that many felt led to war in the first place, but there was also a new generation who had been born after World War I and came of voting age during the Depression. In other words, an entirely new electorate: In addition the electorate had changed considerably since the last election in 1935. As many as one in five electors were voting for the first time, and of these 61 per cent are estimated to have supported the Labour Party—a reflection, no doubt, of their education during the depression and the rule of National Governments.11 And Ross McKibbin notes: The second, in many ways the most attractive explanation, simply does away with the problem of “conversion” (did people change their political allegiances during the war?) by arguing that Labour’s victory was the delayed effect of generational and demographic change. It suggests that those who voted Conservative in 1935 mostly continued to do so, [but] by 1945 Labour was supported by a new cohort of voters who were politically socialized by the interwar years . . . In other words, a high proportion of those voting in 1945 reached political maturity after the Labour Party had become the second party of state.12 Further, it might have been the newly implemented mandatory educations in the armed forces that turned the younger cohort toward Labour: A once popular version of the “wartime-change” explanation of the Labour victory was the radicalization of the armed forces; an assumption that there was something about military experience which radicalized men and women in ways life did not do for those still on the civvy street.13

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For all its ills, war throws disparate groups together. And disparate groups learn about the world much faster and to accept human differences much better, which is hardly “radicalization.” However, what was more surprising was that Labour had even moved past the Liberal Party in stature and influence for the first time in its history. By the Second World War Labour had emerged as the standard-bearer of the key elements in radical Victorian politics: it incorporated Gladstonian tradition in foreign affairs; it was a party of causes; it maintained libertarian principles; and it propagated improvement through social reform.14 By the end of the 1930s, Labour had secured much more support from the middle classes, especially in regions such as the Midlands, Yorkshire, Manchester and Liverpool, East Anglia, Scotland, and, not least of all, the many soldiers from all over Britain who were now stationed or chose to permanently live in London. Churchill lost not because Britain wasn’t thankful; he lost because of these undeniable mitigating factors.

Figure 1.2. Clement Attlee, 1950. Architect of postwar England’s New Jerusalem. Photofest.

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Additionally, and probably most importantly, he lost because of what Labour had been promising since even before the war, in which the working masses were pledged a newly prosperous and “accountableto-all” Britain. This would be England’s New Jerusalem.15 Whereas 1940–45 in France demonstrated the bankruptcy of France’s institutional culture and intensity of her internal divisions, in Britain it signaled the vindication, almost the apotheosis, of the institutional and national consensus that the victory of the Labour Party in the general election of 1945 seemed to many foreign observers an almost revolutionary event. In reality it marked the strength of the institutional consensus in Britain at the same time as it created a new set of policy priorities that would become the guiding maps of the postwar order. . . .”16 Britain faced a paradox: the people wanted to “get back to normalcy” as the war wound down, but also to “Never Again!” (Attlee’s renowned platform in 1945) return to how things were before the war in the era of the Great Depression and almost zero social services for the masses who had helped keep Britain intact. Attlee’s high-wire act had to span this double-bind throughout his years in office, from 1945 to 1951.17 The “New Jerusalem” Welfare State was the result of William Beveridge’s white paper issued in the winter of 1942–43, which identified five “Giant Evils” in society: SQUALOR, IGNORANCE, WANT, IDLENESS, and DISEASE (they always appeared in CAPS), and a series of changes were put in place to deal with them.18 “The Beveridge Report” sold more than 100,000 copies in its first month alone, astonishing numbers for a very poor population of only forty-six million in 1943–44; but people wanted to know what their future might look like in a new Britain that would finally take care of all her own, no longer just the privileged few. The eventual magisterial account [by Ministry of Health head Richard Titmuss], Problems of Social Policy (1950), would make canonical the interpretation that there had indeed been a seachange in the British outlook—first as the mass evacuation of women and children from the main cities brought the social classes into a far closer understanding than there had ever been before, then as the months of stark and dangerous isolation after Dunkirk created an impatient, almost aggressive mood decrying privilege and demanding “fair shares” for all. Between them [Titmuss’s assessment, who

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Ripping England! began it in 1942, and Beverage’s report], according to the Titmuss version, these two circumstances led to a widespread desire for major social and other reforms of a universalist, egalitarian nature.19

The report revealed that the government had at last recognized the responsibility to care for its people “from the cradle to the grave” (or, as some preferred, “from the womb to the tomb”). The proposed changes promised a government commitment to health (DISEASE)—in 1948 the National Health Service was created; education (IGNORANCE)—from 1944 the Butler Act raised the school-leaving age to fifteen and guaranteed education for all; employment (IDLENESS)—guaranteed “full” work; housing (SQUALOR)—Labour passed the Town and Country Planning Act in 1947; and social security (WANT) for the elderly and infirm—the National Insurance Act of 1911 was greatly expanded in 1946 (The National Health Service Act).20 These may have seemed like new ideas to voters in 1945, but Pugh also suggests that thoughts about managing the economy in good times and bad had begun in fact after World War I. In the immediate aftermath of 1918 even socialists often regarded wartime controls as a unique experiment rather than as a pointer to future strategy. . . . However, by 1923, in the face of mounting unemployment, the ILP was in retreat from guild socialism, and began to concentrate upon the techniques for managing the economy. The ILP’s [Independent Labour Party] Socialist programme of 1923 displayed an underconsumtionist approach in the emphasis it laid upon raising and stabilizing the demand for products of industry by a more equal distribution of incomes. Indeed the ILP had already begun to study Keynesian ideas to some effect: it identified a scientific credit policy as the means of moderating the fluctuations in the economy; and unemployment was ascribed basically to inadequate purchasing power which was itself a consequence of insufficiency of bank loans. Thus, state management of banks and credit seemed to the ILP crucial for economic planning; and the extension of control over other industries was similarly seen in the light of what each would contribute to costs, prices, production levels and so forth.21 Managed economies were clearly now possible after the visibly successful fiscal stewardship by America and Britain during the war.

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Figure 1.3. William Beveridge, c. 1950s. Eradicator of England’s five “Giant Evils.”

In any case, the New Jerusalem was an ambitious plan and a noble gift to the heroic nation, but, there was one problem: the continuing belief that Britain could still afford to maintain a worldwide empire. After the high cost of the fight with the Axes, including the huge debt in loans owed to the United States, and the impossibly exorbitant cost of sustaining overseas territories that no longer brought wealth back to the island nation, there were less than zero resources left to pay for the New Jerusalem. Even before 1945, the British Empire had begun its transformation into a Commonwealth. The (white) colonies of Canada (1867), Australia (1901), New Zealand (1907), and the newly created Union of South Africa (1910) became federated self-governing Dominions.22 After the war, Britain’s heavy war debts created a climate within both the public and policy elites that was increasingly doubtful of the continued benefits of the remaining imperial possessions.23 The Indian Independence Act of 1947 was the biggest pillar to fall, as it partitioned the colony into two newly free nations, India and Pakistan, creating its own set of political quandaries and challenges, but it wasn’t the only one. The skeptical British historian Correlli Barnett has explained away this decline as the British simply ignoring what it took to maintain dominance in world industry:

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Ripping England! Britain has been a nation blinded by pride (of being a world power) to the signs of decay at the technological roots of its strength . . . a (clear demonstration of how) a nation will cling to the political and economic faiths of the past.24

Britain may have been blinded by past glories, but despite the march toward state-sponsored support for all its citizens, and even with the new Labour change of government, the British people and its political classes were still very cautious about implementing the new schemes immediately, and it took every bit of the six years Labour was in power to fully do so. To argue that taking a Scandinavian course, and settling for a prosperous, inward-looking northern existence, was a runner in 1945–51 is to succumb to another set of delusions. The whole weight of British history and recent experience was against that—not to mention urgent necessities and inescapable responsibilities with which the Attlee Government was confronted.25 These would include sticky situations in the Middle East (most notably what to do about Palestine and the possible creation of the Israeli state), the currency dilemma, and, by 1950, Korea. The British still thought that they were entitled to some postwar spoils, but they weren’t. However misguided it may appear now, they thought they had won. Unlike General de Gaulle, Attlee and Bevin found vacant seats waiting for them at Potsdam. Britain was one of the victor states occupying the territory of her former enemies; a Permanent Member of the Security Council with the power of veto; still head of a large empire with widespread possessions; well ahead of any other state except the two superpowers in military, industrial and technological resources. Her interests and responsibilities were worldwide, at least as wide as those of either Russia or America. For her to abandon these, or even seriously reduce them, at short notice was out of the question. Apart from its effect abroad, it would have been a blow to national morale that no newly elected government could be expected to strike after a war from which Britain [after all] had emerged victorious.26

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This was the basic paradox facing postwar Britain: it wanted to be a twentieth-century northern European welfare state and at the same time a nineteenth-century global power. (Pugh even suggests that the real visionary of England’s decline had been Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin (Earl of Bewdley), who was thinking such thoughts even before he became Prime Minister in the mid-1930s.)27 The end of empire resulted in postwar Britain living through an anxious and uncertain time where fundamental economic difficulties and social dissatisfactions overtook so much of the early postwar hope, whose own “new” order would become persistent and unrelenting austerity.

Austerity Britain Britain’s biggest problem was its currency and trade imbalance, an economic cataclysm not waiting to happen, but happening now; it was the most sobering meaning of the term “aftermath.”28 From 1947 to 1949, the United Kingdom had an international trade deficit of almost £300 million. This doesn’t sound like very much to us today, but for the late ’40s, and for an empire that was used to being a worldwide creditor, it was seemingly intractable.29 Two-thirds of Britain’s prewar international trading partners were in rubble or had turned to the United States, many of its patents had been sold off to pay for the war, and its military, especially its mighty navy, was decimated. But the biggest shock to their system was the instant canceling of Lend-Lease (the program put into place in early 1941 by FDR that had allowed him to “rent” materiel goods to Britain without violating the Congressional ban on sending aid to either side of any international conflict) by Roosevelt’s successor Harry Truman on August 25, 1945.30 We were, in short, morally magnificent but economically bankrupt, as became brutally apparent eight days after the cease-fire in the Far East when President Truman severed the economic lifeline of Lend-Lease without warning. Lend-Lease, “the most unsordid act in the history of any nation” as Churchill called it, was negotiated in the early months of 1941, well before the United States had entered the war. “Unsordid,” the beginning may have been, but the end of Lend-Lease was undeniably brutal. . . . Material already in transit would have to be paid for straight-away and an audit would have to be drawn up of all unconsumed Lend-Lease items in Britain. “Thus,” as Sir Alec Cairncross starkly recalled, “what had provided the

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Ripping England! United Kingdom with roughly two-thirds of the funds needed to finance a total external deficit of £10,000 million over six years was withdrawn unilaterally without prior negotiation.”31

It was an instantaneous blow that would resonate for an entire decade, if not more—at the very least, until Attlee and his ministers agreed on devaluing sterling in 1949.32 The contrast of the GDP before and after the war paints the “hard numbers” picture: if it had been growing by 4.64 percent in 1939 (and that was still in The Great Depression), by 1949 it was only .102 percent, and still just 1.6 percent in 1955.33 Literally all resources were expended on paying down the foreign debt, and keeping the pound down to sell goods for export. And to make matters worse, the United States then insisted that sterling (a major worldwide currency before the war) be fully convertible to dollars by 1947. So, Britain embarked upon a postwar export drive, which was only possible at a price of a fairly hard life for most people. One sign of the times was the frequent use of billboard hoardings encouraging the British worker to ‘work or want,’ a message which the average British worker was only too aware of, and yet did not want to hear, after so many years of hardship and deprivation. The stringencies of postwar food rationing were all too obvious at the time, as was the acute shortage of housing, clothing, furniture, and in fact, consumer items of any type.34 Consumer items? Even if your average Briton could afford a new gadget or “consumer item,” Britain could only look, not have. For example, in 1946, people who were eager to see new designs and the new use of materials developed during the war applied to less belligerent ends queued for hours to get into the “Britain Can Make It” exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It was a sign of the times that most of the consumer items on display at the V & A were stamped “EXPORT ONLY,” so that the popular press quickly renamed the show “Britain Can’t Have It.” There were many stories in the press at the time about the day-to-day grind of having to face shortages of all kinds. The Christmases of 1945 and 1946, for example, were marred by the absences of anything very much to serve as presents.35

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Bare cupboards and empty stockings were to be Britain’s spoils of war; on top of that, 1946 and 1947 would be two of the coldest winters in British history.36 The renowned Annals historian Fernand Braudel has observed, “Towns are like electric transformers. They increase tension, accelerate the rhythm of exchange and constantly recharge human life.”37 If this is true, then life in London during and at the end of the war was intensified tenfold; and by the end of the decade, though the government was in better shape financially, average people in the street still did not feel it themselves. “What do you consider to be the main inconveniences of present day living conditions?” Mass-Observation asked its regular, largely middle-class panel in autumn 1948. The male replies tended toward terseness—Lack of Homes, Food Rationing, High Cost of Living, Insufficiency of Commodities causing Queueing, Crowded Travelling conditions, Expenses of Family Holidays’ was an engineer’s top six—but the female responses were more expansive. “1. High cost of living,” declared a housewife. “This means a constant struggle to keep the household going and there is very little left over for the ‘extras’ that make life.” 2. Cutting-off electric power in the morning (usually just before 8 o’clock). 3. Shortage of some foods, particularly butter, meat and sugar . . . [M-O next asked, “Had attitudes changed toward clothing, etc.?”] “Yes,” replied one jaundiced housewife. “I used to look upon ‘making do’ and renovating as a national duty and make a game of it. Now it is just a tiresome necessity.”38 The pictures of “miserable Britain” were implanted in minds around the world by these stark observations found in newspapers and magazines in the postwar years. But even more vividly, the postwar satirists also helped shape and cement those images with their barbed and sapient portraits.

The Art Scene The received wisdom of the late 1940s was that, after the “People’s War,” the landslide victory of the Labour Party in the General Election of 1945, and the establishment of a welfare state, a newly democratized British society was set to rid itself of inequalities and class divisions for good. But instead, without the common cause of winning the war, Britain

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reverted to the peacetime Darwinian class-based conflagrations, and in the arts, too, the growing other classes now demanded their fair share. Indeed the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts was created (albeit, voluntarily) in 1940 (which would become the permanent Arts Council by 1943, whose first chairman was John Maynard Keynes), and it brought various performers and musicians to factory towns during the war years to supply culture around the country. It was a big hit, and its budget grew every year, especially after its most successful sponsoring of Spanish paintings in the freezing, heat-starved winter of 1946–47 when thousands lined up to view the exhibition. And so, As Paul Addison wrote, “the temporary wartime bridge between the arts and the masses was in fact crumbling.” [It would no longer be temporary; art-going would become a permanent norm after the war]. Inevitably the arts based themselves after 1945 on a regular constituency of enthusiasts.39 Many budding Brits who grew up in the postwar period and benefitted from the 1944 Education Act felt that the old prewar upper classes still maintained their privileged position as they commanded the social and cultural high ground; these newly educated young strivers were determined to challenge that. The Arts Council helped level the field, but this is also where and why the postwar satirists would announce their own presence on the scene independently as they thrived on this contrast between the glittering pretense of mass culture and the shabby reality of a class-bound educational system. In the literary world, for example, Kingsley Amis, who did National Service in the peacetime army, gave his Lucky Jim protagonist Jim Dixon a university post at a time when provincial colleges were mostly third-rate Oxbridge wannabes. As David Lodge describes: In 1954 it was acclaimed as marking the arrival of a new literary generation, the writers of the 1950s, sometimes referred to as the “Movement” or “The Angry Young Men.” These were two distinct but overlapping categories. The Movement was a school of poetry, of which Philip Larkin was the acknowledged leader, and to which Amis himself belonged, along with other academics like John Wain, Donald Davie and D.J. Enright . . . They consciously set themselves to displace the declamatory, surrealistic, densely metaphorical poetry of Dylan Thomas and his associates with verse that was well-informed, comprehensible, dry, witty, colloquial and down-to-earth.40

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The Angry Young Men, a journalistic term originally coined in an article in The Spectator, grouped together a number of authors and/or their fictional heroes of the 1950s who were vigorously pissed off with life in contemporary Britain. They would include John Osborne/Jimmy Porter (Look Back in Anger, 1956; The Entertainer, 1957), Alan Sillitoe/ Arthur Seaton (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1959; The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, 1959), John Braine/Joe Lampton (Room at the Top, 1957) and Kingsley Amis’s Jim Dixon.41 At the same time, as Lodge explains above, The Movement was less a school of poetry than a motley group of language-soaked exceptionally literate outsiders with like-minded sensibilities rebelling against posh posturings and “high language,” who sought to use street idioms and slang to replace the turgid old boys’ stodgy verbiage.42 For them (or in reality), it was an updating of Wordsworth’s romantic manifesto celebrating the more authentic language of the common man; but for postwar Britain, it was a highly charged conceit.

Figure 1.4. Kingsley Amis, c. 1950s. Anti-Establishment street-speaking snark. Photofest.

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Although these writers “arrived” in the mid- to late 1950s (Lucky Jim was published in 1954), their education and careers had begun in the late ’30s, but then had been inevitably interrupted or in some cases delayed by the war, making their formative years really the later ’40s. In Jim, though no dates are specifically mentioned in the text, Amis’s satire is clearly a novel about the late ’40s and the shadows of the war, and certainly cannot be set later than 1951 since a Labour government is still in power.43 The grounding of the novel itself, too, is clearly that of socialist, “austerity” Britain, “when a young university lecturer might plausibly possess only three pairs of trousers, live in a lodging house, surrendering his ration book to his landlady, not even dream of owning a car, and keep anxious count of his cigarette consumption, not on health grounds, but on financial ones.”44 John Osborne (1929–1994), Alan Sillitoe (1928–2010), and John Braine (1922–1986) had similar mid1950s publications with similar late-1940s contexts. This was Britain’s new Silent Generation artistic contribution.

The Silent Generation If good news was almost ubiquitous from the advancements of the Allied militaries from late 1942, right up until the end of the war (barring the blip of the Battle of the Bulge), after the initial high of the win, a psychological depression took over both Britain’s (even as the economic one continued) and America’s subcultures (where the economic one had ended): Churchill hollered about impermeable iron curtains; ominous atom bombs were detonated on remote atolls and Russian wastelands; and American (and British) commie hunters made daily headlines shouting their (often unfounded or unproven) accusations. The 1950s are thought of as such a wonderful prosperous time in both the United States and the United Kingdom (certainly Reagan and Thatcher would paint them that way), while the noirish late ’40s, filled with such hard times and incessant anxiety, so often get overlooked.45 This is unfortunate, for the arts were going through a great Renaissance in both republics. In the United States, even an artist such as Jackson Pollock was already doing his splatterings while the war was still being fought (he created Mural for Peggy Guggenheim in 1943, long before his move with Lee Kraisner to the Long Island Springs locale—a village adjacent to East Hampton—in November of 1945), with its mythical “epiphanic moments” about the magic wand of “the drip,” and was almost completely finished with his Zen-impulsed mizzles by 1951 (the same year the Ealing satires would be winding down, and the Goons

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just gearing up). The critic Manny Farber was already on to the jittery affect of Pollock’s painting, writing in The New Republic in 1945, “the paint is jabbed on, splattered, painted in lava-like thicknesses and textures, scrabbled, made to look like smoke, bleeding, fire, and painted in great sweeping continuous lines.”46 Action was the new generation’s word of the day—Action Painting, Action Writing, action, action, action at all costs, including for the government to take action and individuals to take action in their own lives. Just as the line and the brushstroke begged to be free, so too did the English language, and the new (Silent Generation) artists would attempt this for them. And in England the new satirists rose to the task, siring their greatest and most important work at the latter end of the shadowy 1940s. In the United Kingdom and the United States, the late 1940s are the great years for these satirical masterworks, not the 1950s Restoration of Churchill’s glorious return or the beaming war-hero Eisenhower’s vistas of 1950s television, Technicolor, Elvis, and Playboy magazine. The mid- to late 1940s was the more precise period that influenced and formed such amazing personalities who came of age at that moment, members of the cohort known as the Silent Generation (born somewhere between 1924 and 1943, give or take a year or two): in music with John Lennon (1940)/Paul McCartney (1942), Mick Jagger/Keith Richards (both 1943), Ray Davies (1944), and Jimmy Page (1944); letters with John Osborne (1929), Alan Sillitoe (1928), Philip Larkin (1922), Kingsley Amis (1922), and John Braine (1922); and the groundbreaking drollery of Spike Milligan (an honorary Silent, 1918), Peter Sellers (1925), and Tony Richardson (1928) in the UK. Meanwhile, a similar phenomenon was brewing in the States with the Silents of Miles Davis (1926), John Coltrane (1926), Elvis Presley (1934), the Everly Brothers (1937, ’39), and Bob Dylan (1941) in its popular music, and Lenny Bruce (1925), Mel Brooks (1926), Mort Sahl (1927), Mike Nichols (1931) and Elaine May (1932), Woody Allen (1935), George Carlin (1937), and Richard Pryor (1940) in the new radical comedy in the United States; along with the new generation of “angry” young English actors such as Albert Finney (1936), Vanessa (1937) and Lynn (1943) Redgrave, Malcolm McDowell (1943), and Alan Bates (1944), and the new American “Method” actors Montgomery Clift (1920), Marlon Brando (1924), Paul Newman (1925), Marilyn Monroe (1926), James Dean (1931), and Jack Nicholson (1937). In other words, those artists who gave the Silent Generation its not-sosilent voice. Generations are writ with “real-world-events,” narratives creating tropes and characteristics that lend themselves to studies in mass

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psychology and behavior. These Silents grew up being first conscious of the Great Depression, then the long traumatic years of World War II, the 1950s “culture of conformity,” the 1960s revolutionary tumult, and the 1970s malaise. In both America and Europe, many of their fathers fought in the war and, if they survived, often wanted to restart their lives anew—new education/new job (the GI Bill/the new European policy and promise of “full employment”), new wife/new house in the suburbs (1946 still holds the record for most divorces in American history/a rebuilt subsidized Western European welfare state)—almost to the point of ignoring those children born in the late 1920s to early 1940s, during the horrible years. In fact, many worked to forget them, as they wanted to forget the Depression, leaving heavy psychic scars. The arts, and especially the cinema, both mirrored the Silents’ lonely situation and provided a means of addressing it. Because of the postwar 1940s and ’50s Red Scare, the Silents in both the United Kingdom and the United States had to be secretively inventive in their protests, disguising their anger by speaking in code: painting abandoned representation for abstract expression; in acting they used their “Anger” and “Method,” turning inward to articulate these cultural frustrations; in theater, allegories were the strategy of choice (The Browning Version (1948); Separate Tables (1955); The Love of Four Colonels (1951); Crucible (1953); Streetcar (1947); Waterfront (1954—based on the “Crimes on the Waterfront” investigative journalist series from 1947 by Malcolm Johnson); music literally became silent (John Cage’s 4’33”) or wildly unwieldy—bebop, jazz solos, rock and roll scat (“Bebop a lulu”/“Womp-bomp-a-loom-op-a-womp-bam-boom!”) and British Skiffle; poetry and the novel spoke in tongues or hyperbolic run-on asymmetrical non-iambic verse; and criticism shifted inward, too, with the “close reading” and anti-contextual turn (from I.A. Richards and Charles Kay Ogden to F.R. Leavis and Cleanth Brooks). Much of this would have been absorbed by the other Silents who had also lived through these hardscrabble, harrowing experiences (most of the Ealing artists were too young to have fought in the war, and Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, and Michael Bentine in the Goons were only slightly older than Sellers). The British (and American) Silents were definitely not so guarded, or so silent.47 Obviously, a key trait all these Silent artists have in common is a stubborn and fierce independence, but also a reaction to their late 1940s circumstances. Code, but also satire, became their wall of psychic defense. And so, for Amis, the original inspiration for his antipathy was a glimpse of what was then University College, Leicester, in 1948, when he was visiting Philip Larkin who was a librarian there:

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Jim is ill-at-ease and out of place in the university because he does not at heart subscribe to its social and cultural values, preferring pop music to Mozart, pubs to drawing rooms, non-academic company to academic. . . . When he loses his university job, however, Jim resignedly prepares to take up school teaching (at his own school), as if there were no alternative. A huge portion of the first generation humanities graduates in the 1940s and 50s went into educational careers not because they had a vocational call; but because entry to the other liberal professions—administrative civil service, the foreign service, law, publishing, etc.—was still controlled by the public-school-Oxbridge-old-boy network. They were the ideal readers of Lucky Jim.48 Much has been made of how these Angry Young Men and Movement poets critiqued and deconstructed British life under the new postwar realities of the Welfare State. But they were of the 1950s and it was years before, in the late ’40s, that the artists explored here, the satirists of Ealing and the Goons, had long been making their commentaries on new Britain, using the more immediately accessible, “hot” popular culture mediums of film, radio, and print.49 It may have been a bleak and terrible time, but the arts became a new addiction to this new generation, and in a population of just forty-six million, more than thirty million continually went to the pictures each week, newspaper competition and circulation increased threefold, and radios were always on in English homes.50 It was a thriving time for old media, and the satirists would conquer all three. Even in the fashion-world changes were happening head-spinningly fast. Indeed, it was the arrival in February of 1947 of Parisian swirling skirts with their “Renoirish curves and flounces . . . below waist and bustle which brought the phrases ‘Tizer’ and the ‘New Look’ into common usage in Britain,” as Harry Hopkins put it, even borrowing that title for his evocation of early postwar British life. At what was basically merely a return to traditional feminine lines was indeed a remarkable tribute to the grip which the puritan discipline of Austerity and Fair Shares had gained in our island life. The chorus of disapproval grew as it became known that the new fashion required thirty or forty metres of material, not to mention new corsets, still firmly classified by the Board of Trade as “luxury garments.” . . . The Government was rumoured to be considering legislating against the new skirt length.51

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But, some bureaucrats supported the New Look shift in attitude. In the meantime Sir Stafford Cripps, made an appeal for moderation, receiving emphatic support from Miss Mabel Ridealgh, MP for North Ilfords. “The New Look,” declared Miss Ridealgh, “was too reminiscent of the caged-bird attitude. I hope fashion dictators will realize the new outlook of women and give the death blow to any attempt at curtailing women’s freedom.”52 Needless to say, the shock of 1947 became the fashion of 1948, even if it had a suspiciously French tilt. This was just the moment the English satires were being forged, a genre requiring some clarification.

Satire and the New Film Setting In the arts, “genre” traditionally divides into various kinds or “types” (e.g., literature, film, music, painting, sculpture, performance, etc.) according to criteria particular to that form. Literary variations split between poetry and prose; poetry might thus branch off into epic, lyric, and dramatic, while prose might be cleaved into fiction and nonfiction. Obviously, these can be further partitioned ad libitum.53 Satire, then, is both a literary and/or artistic technique that attempts to ridicule its subject as a means of provoking change or preventing it. In either case, its ultimate goal is the same as rhetoric itself, to “persuade” its audience to a certain point of view by exposing the object of attention it is attacking as weak and irrational, or maybe even dangerously damaging to the health of the community at large. James Sutherland explains: What distinguishes the satirist from most other creative artists is the extent to which he is dependent on the agreement or approval of his readers. If he is to achieve this catharsis for himself, he must compel his readers to agree with him; he must “persuade” them to accept his judgment of good and bad, right and wrong; he must somehow inoculate them with his own virus. In actual practice, a minority of his readers probably already agree with him; the great majority are either quite indifferent and must be aroused, or they are actively hostile and must be converted.54 Satire is the most effective form of persuasion (no wonder the great British nineteenth-century satirist Jane Austen named her narrative study

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as such); it is the ultimate form of rhetoric. In Gilbert Highet’s comprehensive study of satire, The Anatomy of Satire, still the standard work, he describes the rhetorical devices that are used in this superior act of persuasion. Any author who often and powerfully uses any number of the typical weapons of satire—irony, paradox, antithesis, parody, colloquialism, anticlimax, topicality, obscenity, violence, vividness, exaggeration—is likely to be writing satire.55 Furthermore, Highet defines satire as “a playful distortion of the ‘familiar.’ ” Dr. Johnson, in the Dictionary, called it, “a poem in which wickedness or folly is censured.”56 In The Battle of the Books, Dryden followed Horace when he wrote, “Satire is to tell the truth, laughing,” while Pope in The Dunciad said it is to “Damn, with faint praise.” Bakhtin noted in The Dialogic Imagination that satire is the most democratic form of art/ literature because it is multivoiced, where everybody has agency.57 For Northrop Frye, satire differentiates itself from comedy by being a mythos of winter—as opposed to summer’s sweeter jesting (which is comedy’s seasonal mythos)—for its militant irony: “its moral norms are relatively clear, and it assumes standards against which the grotesque and absurd are measured. It is the mythical pattern of experience because it attempts to give form to the shifting ambiguities and complexities of unidealized existence.”58 What they’re all trying to lovingly, but maybe a bit overpedantically say is: rhetoricians love to study satire because it is the most powerful, and so, persuasive force of all literary genres. Satire differentiates itself from comedy in other ways, too. Though both expose and ridicule human folly, and both use similar rhetorical devices, the basic difference between comedy and satire is the difference between the optimist and the crank: comedy is social, it is uniting, and it usually ends in a wedding. But satire is lethal, it seeks to destroy, to burn away the rot of what it sees as the virus decaying society; thus, this often ends in the blowing up of the world so a newer, purer one may be born.59 Satire is disuniting and antisocial, and though a bit of an exaggeration, it is also often delivered by a lone screaming prophet-madman out to change the world and its ills. Satire came in a great variety of modes in the long eighteenth century. If Horace, Persius, and Juvenal were classical models, Rabelais and Cervantes were Renaissance models of burlesque in fiction, and Bacon and Hobbes Enlightenment models for a general satire of human knowledge. Later, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British satire included the highbrow yet provincial novels of Austen, the

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socio-philosophical discourse of Hume, and the mock-histories of Gibbon. And, if you didn’t get the historical idea by now, as stated in the intro, English satire always seemed to appear after major political and social ferments, as a safety wall of defense or well-needed sense of release. The same happened yet again after World War II, as the Ealing artists (and the Goons) trafficked in this genre with vehemence, commenting on and reflecting the new postmodern, postwar, post-empire Britain. In the introduction to George Perry’s terrific study on British cinema, The Great British Picture Show, he asks, yet again, the ubiquitous question posed about British cinema since anyone can remember: Speak of the French cinema and immediately there springs to mind a quality as hard to define as it is to imitate. Even if the film-makers are poles apart in intention and approach, as disparate in time and style as say Feuillade and Godard, somehow we can sense the essential “Frenchness” of their work. That same robust uniqueness also characterizes the Italian and Swedish cinema. Is the British cinema in comparable achievement, or must it be dismissed as merely the product of a Hollywood satellite? In other words, is the British cinema worth regarding seriously, and if it is, are there recognizable threads of style relating the earliest pioneering of films today?60 It is more than worth considering. In fact, it is worth stating emphatically that in the immediate postwar years, British cinematic satire was one of the key artistic European phenomena that re-examined a culture and character in an enormously changed world, making it one of the pivotal postwar cinemas of the western hemisphere. And yes, right up there with the Italian, French, and Scandinavian achievements. Perry feels it couldn’t be, though, because of its perennial financial straits. Throughout its whole seventy-five years or so it [the British industry] has stumbled from crisis to crisis, prey to political folly on the one hand and semi-fraudulent wheeler-dealer on the other. The British cinema’s diffidence, its punch-pulling, its polite avoidance of controversy have something in common with the national character.61 Maybe the industry did face financial crises again and again, but of the films that did get made, “punch-pulling” is exactly what it did not do in the late 1940s and early 1950s, as not just British cinema, but also British journalism, theater, and radio turned inward, re-awakening and

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re-employing the great historic national genre of satire to reinvent the national character once again.62 And they should be placed on par with the other postwar European miracles for it. After the World War II, the debate about the economic and social impact of the American feature film in Britain was highlighted by the fact that many Britons and Americans had come into contact with each other en masse. During the war, sites such as the huge American supply and maintenance base at Burtonwood in Lancashire (in the extremely rural high northern English country hills just below the Scottish border) literally became American cities inside Britain, complete with baseball diamonds, snack bars, beauty shops, and “washeterias.” It was one of the many ways in which newly outward-looking America shaped the isles and the continent in very profound ways during, but even after, the war: The American presence in Europe was sustained after 1945 by the large standing armies left there and also in the growing hordes of American tourists who visited each year. Harry Hopkins, following Defoe, Orwell and Priestly, wrote a travel diary for a journey through Britain in the early 1950s. Regularly he encountered “Americanus Turisticus,” in pearly-grey hat, hung about with “Leica’s and light meters,” and “G.I. Joe, fresh-faced and crew-cut, rimless and earnest, bursting, as usual, in sheer rude health, out of those sleek blue Air Force uniforms.” The number of American tourists visiting Europe soon came to equal the total number of European migrants to North America.63 Never before had there been such a potential for cross-cultural contact between the peoples of different continents.64 In this environment, Ealing, the other English film studios, and the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) took the opportunity as cultural arbiters and purveyors to counter the American influence and to re-imagine the British identity. It wasn’t just the incoming Queen who would work to rebuild England in a new, modern way. After the horrors of war, the bomb, and the Holocaust, there was plenty to satirize: the new welfare state and its grand ambitions; the loss of empire in the shadow of America, not to mention the newest big power of Europe—the USSR; the push and pull between capitalism and socialism on the continent and in England; the always present class-issues in English life, from the fragile ambitions of the petit-bourgeoisie to the perceived lack of ambition of both the proletariat and the aristocracy, which now faced a new urgency; the basic absurdity of the Cold War (and

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England’s attempt to join it), and the burden of being the first generation to face the possibility of complete annihilation; the constant xenophobic struggle between conservatism and liberalism in English political life, which seemed to paralyze any forward momentum at all; the outrageously pretentious refinement of the upper class against the fight to conserve basic (yet often antiquated) middle- and working-class British cultural traditions; and, if nothing else, the great tradition of regaling the abundance of regional English traits and foibles, renewing themselves after six long war years, from the Home Counties to the Highlands. As an island nation, Britain turned to its long native tradition of satire for a re-examination of who they were and where they were headed now that they were no longer a world power. The satirists in this postwar world discredited the beliefs and assumptions of the preceding era, especially the nostalgia for Edwardian moral certitude. They confronted the new postmodern forces of the bomb, DNA, computers, and globalization, and they challenged the unrealistic, utopian atmosphere in which the welfare state was born. A new intellectual skepticism emerged in this postmodern Britain, where new conditions required new forms of thought and new critiques that tended toward absurdism and pure satire. It would be their own miraculous postwar contribution to the global cross-pollinating cultural scene—a contribution much more significant than they are given credit for.

2 “Fog in Channel, Continent Cut Off” Postwar British Filmmakers Look Inward

“Look at these eyes. I’m dead behind these eyes. I’m dead just like the whole, dumb shoddy lot out there. It doesn’t matter because I don’t feel a thing and neither do they. We’re just as dead as each other.” —Olivier speech on the death of music-hall from The Entertainer (Tony Richardson, 1960).

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these pages demands a certain abandonment, a particular avoidance. We must not think that the world of the British satirists began in an obsession with American or European cinema of the time, or particular adulation of “great figures” such as Orson Welles, John Ford, Jean-Luc Godard, Vittorio De Sica, or Ingmar Bergman, because it didn’t. That British satire has been so overlooked by film historians generally owes in some ways to the distancing implicit in this nonaffiliation. Yet postwar British filmmakers don’t deserve to be ignored. This chapter documents how, as denizens of an island nation, they turned inward to rediscover their own cultural heritage rather than looking outward for sources, first, by mining HE ENTERPRISE TAKEN UP IN

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their recently diminished indigenous music hall tradition for inspirations of “Britishness,” and then by re-establishing Britain’s long and vibrant application of satire as their bloodless weapon of choice to make very bloody comments on their rapidly changing nation. The British filmmakers achieved this not by sitting around theorizing about Masters of the Universe auteurs, proposing neorealist Marxist manifestoes about the plight of the exploited masses, or by being infatuated with postwar existential melancholic ennui. Instead, they were craft persons who took a particularly British “get stuck in and get on with it” attitude toward the stories and films they made, an attitude spearheaded by Michael Balcon at Ealing and his desire, like the music hall veterans he would employ to carry out his vision, to make British film more “British.”

Ealing Ealing studios, still a working studio today, has operated almost from the very moment film arrived in Britain in the mid-1890s. Since the end of the nineteenth century, film in England had been a cottage industry, even during its brief golden period in the early 1900s, with wonderful filmmakers like Cecil Hepworth (who founded the Hepworth Manufacturing Co., c. 1900) and Lewin Fitzhamon (who directed for him one of the earliest parallel action films, Rescued by Rover, 1905). These filmmakers, known collectively today as the Brighton School, are considered pioneers of the shift from a cinema of attractions that lasted from 1894 to 1902 to a cinema of narrative integration from 1903 on. They edited scenes together and helped create the system of continuity editing and match-on-action techniques used around the world today. Those films that have survived from dogged restoration and preservation are very inventive in their double exposure and editing craftsmanship (Grandma’s Reading Glasses, George Albert Smith, 1900—thought to have the first close-up; Explosion of a Motor Car, 1900, and How It Feels to be Run Over, 1900—with the first intertitles; That Fatal Sneeze, 1907, and the very first version of Alice in Wonderland, 1903, with their inventively moveable sets—all directed by Hepworth).1 Ealing began even earlier than Hepworth, and was more centrally situated for London nickelodeons. Starting in 1896 as a small film production company located in West London and originally named Will Barker Studios, Ealing—as it eventually came to be called after the green (park) opposite which it still sits—at first provided short silent films for local independent auditoriums.2 In 1929 it was taken over by (theater) producer Basil Dean’s recently formed Associated Talking Pictures (ATP) to cash in on the new talkie fad.3 As many as sixty films were made at ATP in the 1930s, but

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with the Depression taking a heavy toll on all industries, Dean left the struggling studio, and the board of directors turned to Michael Balcon, who was then running British MGM, to improve ATP/Ealing’s fortunes and restructure its production line in the wake of expansionist Hollywood threats—Hollywood had aggressively pushed into newer territories during and after World War I, capitalizing on the major world power’s suicidal preoccupations with destroying one another, from London and Berlin to Istanbul and Tokyo—snatching young talents like Ernst Lubitsch or King Vidor away from their own country’s fading industries along the way.4 Balcon took the job because he was tired of Louis B. Mayer’s overbearing involvement in every aspect of every film (even in England). After the war it was very cheap to shoot in England (the war had made the dollar the strongest currency in the world), and that, along with a common language and a well-educated collection of professional unionized technicians, was always an attraction for American studios. But again, right up to the beginning of World War II, American audiences saw only the stereotypical Britain previously discussed (Ye Merry Olde England, Shakespeare and Dickens, the historical dramas and family sagas, or films about the glories of the British Empire, etc.).5 Balcon actively set out to challenge those clichés with a dose of satire and realism, which would radically oppose what British film had been, and the British idea of themselves obsessed with worldwide spreading of their cultural hegemony, decorum, and values. But, more important to our story, Balcon wanted to make British films with more modern British subject matter than the ones Hollywood was churning out, and he deliberately chose a new generation of talented performers and budding entertainment industry professionals who specialized in skit-based burlesque and topical commentary.

Michael Balcon—A Circle Needs a Center Balcon was born in Birmingham in 1896, the youngest son of Jewish immigrants. In 1920 he partnered with a mate, Victor Saville (whom he had befriended during their time together in World War I) to create Victory Motion Pictures, first to make commercials, and then, by 1922, feature films, eventually renaming themselves Gainsborough Pictures. (They took over a studio originally built by Famous Players-Lansky in a converted power station in Islington, where one of Balcon’s earliest mentees was a young Alfred Hitchcock, who was screenwriter, art director and assistant director on Balcon’s first produced feature, Woman to Woman [d., Graham Cutts].) Seeking financing from Gaumont-British, they gave up control of Gainsborough so Balcon could became head of Gaumont’s

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British division, which he ran until 1937, when he became Executive Producer at MGM-British. It was during these years that Balcon honed his communal approach, allowing directors to stretch their creative legs.6 Balcon’s character and beliefs were shaped by that conflict, but also by the hardships faced by the British between the wars. “A strong reaction to his experiences of the 1930s determined the kind of producer Balcon became at Ealing. Instead of trying to make films that appealed to the American market, he became an outspoken campaigner for films that reflected British values, and could recoup their costs.”7

Figure 2.1. Michael Balcon: English movie mogul. Pre-Ealing, with Rouben Mamoulian and Miriam Hopkins, 1938. RKO Radio Pictures/Photofest.

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Balcon was socially radicalized by the war, the 1920s general strike, and the Great Depression, but he was also a walking contradiction. He was a conservative progressive. He wanted to push the envelope, without ruffling feathers or tearing apart British institutions. He believed in civil rights, women’s rights, and the artist’s vision, yet never really hired persons of color, refused to allow even women who were successful directors in advertising to direct films, and in his communal think-tank sessions with his writers, directors and other creators, he always had the last word. To Balcon, the realities of postwar Britain were essentially invisible so far as Hollywood was concerned. As Kracauer put it: “Hollywood producers currently neglect, without perhaps consciously intending so, the living English in favor of the [their] less problematic ancestors.”8 Hollywood producers were very reluctant to give any serious attention to the changes taking place in late-1940s Britain, but most off-putting for the American studios, apart from successive trade disputes with the British government, was the pessimism and gloom that they felt shrouded the British people. But Balcon wanted to capture that truth about life in Britain before, during, and after the war, and he saw his appointment at Ealing as the perfect position to respond to such neglectful conditions. He felt telling the truth of the British people and their customs, values, and practices was a civic duty, even if the studio had to start slowly (in fact, at one point during the war, production came to a complete halt).9 As soon as the postwar euphoria ended, Ealing found its niche: documenting the new “fed-up” mood of postwar Britain with specifically British satires reflecting the new inward-turning, “island nation” mentality. As he drifted apart from Saville, Balcon’s closest collaborator became Penrose Tennyson, the grandson of the Poet Laureate, who became his protégé at Gaumont-British (Balcon was enchanted by the pedigree). Penrose believed in the drama of the human face, in the realism that was so pervasive in the arts in the early twentieth century, and in the collaborative nature of a film project (for him it was about community, a value Balcon would particularly adapt). Penrose’s early death had a crushing and lasting effect on Balcon, who always made sure Tennyson’s spirit lingered over Ealing, with Balcon himself writing, “At the risk of sounding pretentious, I affirm that there is another side to it which (for want of a better word) I shall call it a spiritual side. Filmmaking is not a cold-blooded process of manufacture; you cannot make films as you make sausages . . . a group of creative people is involved in each film.”10 This was why he placed epigrams around the studio, the most famous of which announced, “EALING: THE STUDIO WITH THE TEAM SPIRIT.” And so Balcon sought out compatible suitors who could work together in a collegial atmosphere with a collective ethos that valued hybridized

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consensus over individualized visionary will-to-power (Welles, Godard, or Truffaut would have hated it). In America this would become known as the Genius of the System; for Balcon and his Ealing compatriots, it was simply the British way.11 As a result, Balcon gave opportunities to new writers such as Tibby Clarke, Henry Cornelius, and John Dighton; new directors such as Charles Crichton, Robert Hamer, Alexander Mackendrick, and Henry Cornelius; the new producers Sidney Cole, Michael Truman, and Seth Holt, who would work right alongside with him; and finally, some new star players to film such as Stanley Holloway, Margaret Rutherford, Alec Guinness, Dennis Price, Peter Sellers, Joan Greenwood, Basil Radford, Miriam Hopkins, and Valerie Hobson, most of whom had been honing their crafts in the music halls, auditoriums, and even pubs up and down the not so green or pleasant postwar British land.

Postwar English Satire Comes to West London In reaction to the harsh economic times postwar (and to the continued American presence in their lives—many British women would marry Americans and move to the States), the artisans at Ealing went a very different way than the neorealists, American-inspired French new wavers, or moody melodramatic existentialists plying their new wares in mainland European cities also recovering from the war; the postwar British filmmakers chose their great customary practice of satire to make their reflective public statements. Ealing Film Studios cast itself as the voice of this disappointment and discontent, and its new fireplug toilers set out to create stories aimed specifically at the domestic British market. Young, talented artists, often first supported by Arts Council grants, turned their sights on critiquing the postwar disappointments through slight but nonetheless snide parodies of British norms, submitting irreverent scripts and ideas to newly opened ad agencies and the slowly recovering studios.12 Balcon, with his insistence on locally grown British stories, ran the studio most attractive to these young Turks, who looked to Ealing first and foremost for their futures. (We will look closely at the personalities driving each of those young bucks as we consider their contributions in the following pages.) And Ealing was able to lure them with its ability to reach mass audiences through its widespread and professional film distribution deals. With his dogged work ethic, as if he had wasted so much time fighting with Louis B. Mayer, Balcon hired those talented young performers who didn’t over-intellectualize every frame, or the effect and meaning it

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might have on the exploited masses. He wanted diligent work-horses, not ponderous over-thinkers. Neither the young firebrands nor Balcon could have cared less about what Hollywood was trying to market to the world (except for some clever new American satires), or about being taken seriously as intelligentsia theorizing about “auteurs” and “aesthetics” or some “new realism.” It’s not that they were consciously anti-intellectual, per se, but they did have an inbred British working class Midlands-Scots-Irish healthy skepticism and mistrust of the social elites who had run things for so long and now wanted, like the politicians fighting for the new social programs that gave common people a leg up after so much sacrifice, to make new British films for a new Britain that wasn’t materializing the way it was supposed to. And in this spirit, they worked together to make the studio a kind of Hamish artists’ collective.13 Charles Barr explains: Insiders and outsiders alike commented upon Ealing’s “family” atmosphere. On the walls was the slogan, “The studio with the Team Spirit.” For the filmmakers whom Balcon employed, job satisfaction and security commonly made up for the modesty of the pay; the symbol of the Ealing system became the Round Table at which, every week, producers, writers, and directors consulted freely together. The values acknowledged were those of quality and craftsmanship.14 A decade before the kitchen sink social dramas of the late 1950s, Ealing’s collaborative artists turned out films that captured the changes Britain had experienced and was facing in the postwar era—all done with a satirical social realist’s concern for injustice. The new satirists also wanted to separate themselves from any Hollywood influence who were pushing their films on the British public and monopolizing what little studio space there was, and to maintain a distance from the types of films being made at British Lion (Alexander Korda’s mostly adventure pictures), Hammer (the famed British horror masters), or Gainsborough, which actually was the true studio that specialized in the “little comedies” that the Ealing films get lumped in with.15 Robert Murphy’s 1989 study of the studio, Realism and Tinsel, does a distinguished job of analyzing the comedies produced by the Gainsborough Studios, which include such domestic sitcom-like films as Holiday Camp (Ken Annakin, 1950), and most importantly, The Huggetts Series (1948–49), in which a working-class couple (Jack Warner and Kathleen Harrison) struggle through postwar rural Britain, a world that feels frozen in time. The Huggetts are more in the “comedy re-enforces

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communal values” mode rather than the “satires challenge community values” one that were produced by Ealing.16 Balcon and his acolytes had a more ambitious agenda—one borrowed more from their indigenous tradition of satire, but also from their great heritage of music hall.17 The postwar English satires belong to a film culture that was decidedly not interested in copying Italian, French, or Scandinavian style; it was more involved, if anything, in their indigenous English Music Hall tradition.

The English Music Hall Tradition In the mid-1800s, with the sprawl of railways in Britain, the theatrical successes of London were able to travel faster to the provincial towns. What also traveled faster was the influence of the different regions of the British countryside on each other. By the 1850s, the music hall had established itself in industrial Britain as an escape from the dark satanic soot-spewing mills, and its new stars began to exhibit and parody regional and provincial dialects and characteristics. Soon, every town had its own music hall creating regionally local stars, many of whom went to London and returned on-tour as nationally-known entertainers. The music halls of London set the pattern for those in the provinces, which were regularly visited by the “star” who considered Birmingham, Manchester, and other cities as important as London, and developed specific materials for them all. This grew out of earlier pub life where special annexes to public houses were staples, and by the late-19th century large and sumptuously decorated theatres were built to accommodate this form of entertainment.18 Large taprooms were built into these new theaters to hold on to the ale-thirsty working-class denizens and to remind audiences of the growth of the music hall out of the public house. The mainstay of music hall entertainment was the comic, sentimental, or character song, performed by highly popular entertainers, usually with rowdy participation by the working-class audiences, who stamped their feet, clapped their hands, shouted at the performers, and sang along at their regionally prideinducing hymns and anthems.19 Music hall’s decline began during World War I when fewer productions could be staged because scrap metal and other material had to

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be rationed.20 Music hall bills were costly because they included “a wide diversity of acts (singers, dancers, jugglers and comics), and producers turned to providing lighter entertainment, or plays that needed fewer actors or set changes, and musical comedy, melodrama and farce became the staples of a new minimalism which reflected the starkness of the war.”21 The generational conflict between the nineteen-teens, World War I survivors, and the Bright Young Things who came of age in the 1920s was the theme of the times, especially in the works of Noel Coward and Frederick Lonsdale, both of whom turned to contemporary comedies of manners (Lonsdale’s On Approval [1927]; Coward’s Private Lives [1930]).22 But most importantly, by the late 1920s synchronized sound had introduced new possibilities for characterization as it put faces to the regional accents audiences heard on the “wireless” and drew the conventions of the music hall into the cinema, stealing patrons away from the live theatre.23 In the States, the vaudeville tradition can be seen in the great run of 1930s musicals, from the Busby Berkeley dance sequences in films such as Golddiggers of 1933 (Mervin LeRoy, 1933) to 42nd St. (Lloyd Bacon, 1933). In England, music hall also migrated into such films as Harmony Heaven (Thomas Bentley, 1930), The Song You Gave Me (Paul L. Stein, 1933), Music Hath Charms (Thomas Bentley, 1935) and Over She Goes (Graham Cutts, 1937). The most successful films of this genre were those starring the music hall comedienne Gracie Fields (1898–1979), who sang of “The Biggest Aspidistra in the World,” then at the height of her popularity.24 She is a special case because, whereas the wild American deco flapper trendies stressed devil-may-care attitudes toward money and everyday worries, Fields emphasized her traditionalism, her locality, and her deep roots in the harsh environs of Lancashire/ Yorkshire northern English working-class life.25 She was Britain’s answer to France’s torch song chanteuse Edith Piaf, salt of the earth and keeping it real but without the maudlin self-pity and tragically doomed romances. But when the war hit in 1939, the music hall tradition fell away from British film as the British studios and the BFI turned to making dramas to support the war effort. Still, after the upheaval of World War II, which closed many theaters in London and the larger provincial cities that were being heavily bombed, an important revival of live hall-based entertainment occurred as the state began to subsidize it through the newly created Council for the Encouragement of Music and Arts (CEMA; created in 1940 to promote British culture in the face of threatening Germany), later simply known as the Arts Council.26 One result was the preservation of

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Figure 2.2. Gracie Fields, 1943. England’s Edith Piaf. ABC Radio/Photofest.

the Bristol Old Vic, along with the formation of several first-rate touring companies, which also became an outlet for squeezed music hall troupes.27 The council helped foster and finance younger playwrights of the postwar period as interest shifted from the modern verse plays of Fry and Eliot to plays of protest and satire. Eventually, these younger satiric playwrights turned to the film studios and began to write for them.

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In its heyday, music hall presented the type of entertainment most loved by the general population and would have a great influence on later young artists who grew up listening to and steeped in the tradition that made them feel so English, from the rock groups the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, Queen, and the Who, to composers such as Andrew Lloyd Webber and John Barry. These younger tunesmiths were irreverent, ironic, and snarky, but they held a particular soft spot for their Englishness that can be heard in so many of their music hall–inspired melodies, even as they spoofed its myopic and often provincial traits and mores. Though eventually television would later appropriate its practices in its numerous variety hours and programs, in the first decade after World War II, England was too debt-ridden to produce television programs just yet, or for the general population to even afford household TVs. But music hall’s cheap postwar revival was the perfect vehicle for British film and radio. So, in postwar Britain, the English music hall rituals found their way back into film and radio by the indigenous artists who had gotten their start on the traveling circuits, and who had learned that parody and the mocking of public figures and outdated customs got the biggest laughs. New actors, directors, and writers—Alec Guinness, Stanley Holloway, and Peter Sellers; Robert Hamer and Alexander Mackendrick; and Peter Ustinov and Spike Milligan—would make the transition from the halls to film and radio, bringing their satiric chops to an ever-widening and receptive postwar British audience. After the hard years of postwar rationing, austerity, and self-sacrifice, the best way for these restless Brits to make their complaints would be to protest bloodlessly—through their great indigenous tradition of satire. They welcomed the opportunity to be cultural arbiters reshaping and reimagining the British national identity through the strongest means of protest at their disposal—filmic satire. And it is this seriousness of concern with topicality (which has a short lifespan) and lack of existential self-involvement that has allowed them to be overlooked for so long, especially by the Baby Boomer generation that grew up with the 1950s postwar European Continental miracles. The British satires (1947–1953) arrived a little too early to be appreciated and experienced by Boomers.

Boomer Nostalgia With the war done, European nations had to choose their way forward. But with which precepts or ideals? Socialists and Communists believed that the fair-play social revolution could start from scratch in this “year zero.” And in some countries left-wing parties did indeed win substantial support. Elsewhere, more conservative values took hold, returning

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to faiths that nations lived before the catastrophe overtook all else. But everywhere in Western Europe the United States was a major influence, militarily, financially, and, eventually, culturally. The lending of Marshall Plan funds became a main part of European postwar life, especially as the program demanded American films be shown in the recipient countries, having a major effect on their indigenous film culture. It was within this atmosphere that the major European countries tried to re-establish their film industries. The Italians, led by Roberto Rossellini, Cesare Zavattini, and Vittorio De Sica sought a new realism to face down the trauma of what had happened to their people and their nation. The French began a new variation of their intermittent love affair with American film and culture, first at the Cinemateque Francaise under the tutelage of Henri Langlois, and then later through the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave), led by the precocious trio of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Claude Chabrol, along with Alain Resnais. And in Scandinavia, Bergman would give the world the intense existential think pieces the world has come to consider midcentury moody modernism. The generation born during and after the war, approximately 1942 to 1960—depending on whether you are an historian or a marketer—went crazy for these new European gems. Pauline Kael was right—she pejoratively labeled the Boomer Generation’s love for the new European cinema as “come dressed as the sick soul of Europe films.” These new films became their Young Wertherian crush on mirthless sorrows for themselves, the most addictive of all degenerative moods. Oscar Wilde said, “The world is sad because a puppet was once melancholy.” Impressionable Boomer art geeks, beginning to discover art house foreign films in the mid-1950s and early ’60s, became junkies for this feeling and stayed hooked on it their entire careers. This observation is confirmed in nostalgic recreations of the period, including Bernardo Bertolucci’s revisit to his youthful rebellion in his freewheeling Jules and Jim (Truffaut, 1962) remake The Dreamers (2004) set during the May ’68 riots in Paris, and documentaries on that moment such as Jacques Richard’s 2005 Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinemateque, where part of the riots themselves that fervent month were film-related when Henri Langlois was removed from the head of the Cinemateque Française, as well as films about the films of the New Hollywood inspired by the European new wave, from Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (Kenneth Bowser, 2003) based on Peter Biskind’s wonderful book, to A Decade Under the Influence (Ted Demme, Richard LaGravenese, 2003).28 The romance those academics and critics (not to mention filmmakers)— from Andrew Sarris and Penelope Gilliatt to David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, from Roger Ebert, Annette Michelson, and Robert Sklar to Janet Staiger, Susan Haywood, and Marcia Landy, to name but a few—

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had with the new travel-lusty and picturesque European films acted like a dopamine-inducing opiate on Boomers’ budding bodies and minds. This highly affluent and educated postwar generation who first came into contact with those continental miracles and who wanted to have deeper European existential experiences than they felt homegrown American films were capable of feeding them, have been projecting on to them their own melancholia since they took hold of the critical establishment in the late 1960s. And they have never let go: those Continental ’50s and ’60s film movements have been the staples making up the postwar canon in cinema studies classes ever since Boomers appropriated English departments in the 1970s and ’80s and mind-melded them into cultural studies curricula for majors of all sorts. Think of those born between the years 1945 and 1952, say; they would have been too young for Ealing (not to mention the Goons) and their great run in the late ’40s and early ’50s. Instead, someone in this cohort wouldn’t be ready for European sophistication until their late teens or early twenties (if ever), until the late ’50s and early ’60s. And this is exactly what happened. The Ealing films passed this generation by as they were still wallowing in their prelapsarian bliss with their Davey Crockett caps, Barbie dolls, and hula hoops. This isn’t a slam—merely an observation. Nor was this learned preference for youthful impressions new to their generation: Kael’s own beloved period was that of the 1930s American screwball comedies; she was born in 1919, making her past her own impressive coming-of-age when the new wave appeared. (My own beloved period was discovering the Jarmuschs and Lynchs in the mid- to late 1980s). But this Boomer nostalgia has had an enumerating resonance for the academic canon over the last half-century. In New York City, the revival house The Film Forum now programs a month of tributes to the double bill age, recreating the clashing together of different types of films in an ode to the old days. The bills sell out to Boomer audiences every year. Writing in The New York Times, long-time Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman revealingly offered this benediction: One of the formative movie experiences of my adolescence was seeing Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player on a weekday afternoon at the old Bleecker Street Cinema. The double bill was an immersion in the black-and-white, Gauloise-enriched universe of nouvelle vague Paris, and exiting the theatre onto Bleecker Street became a disorienting extension of the movies, a demonstration of the medium’s power.

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Yes, a demonstration of the power of film, but more so a demonstration of one’s fondness for indelible memories of one’s younger self. He continues, It has been said that every film critic is a closet programmer. So is anyone who teaches cinema studies. As an instructor, I invariably structure courses around double bills . . . and to assign André Bazin’s “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema” as reading, (is) to demonstrate the potential of sound film.29 This is classic Boomer sentimentality—Hoberman’s own “Dejection: An Ode.” And film studies has suffered from this “We must have them read Catcher in the Rye!”–like assigning of a previous generation’s most impressionable consecrations ever since, just so they can relive their moment of awakening over and over through their classes and students, as if to say, “That was me!” Why not, instead, assign the films and the essay as a snapshot of its time and place, rather than lamentations of one’s own lost youth; better to contextualize a movement’s import to give students and readers a lesson in history and culture. This is why re-exhuming the forgotten Ealing satires is as an historically worthy undertaking as the other postwar movements have been. The mind/body sensation of lachrymose longing has been a constant theme in the arts and letters for millennia, as Wilde’s statement above attests. But the true masterwork examination of its addictive qualities was first published in the same century as Shakespeare’s death (1616), in 1691: Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Here Burton exhaustively documented the phenomenon of wistful dejection, especially in the young, and why it is always such a furtively lifelong lasting pang. “I write of melancholy by being busy to avoid melancholy,” he declares ironically in the introduction—ironically because he loves melancholia, floating away on its warm jets of ecstasy, even while he is explaining how each subsequent generation finds its own moment to freeze in time, usually, not coincidentally, right about the time of one’s own sexual and sensual discovery and awakening. It is what the Boomer film lovers have done with film history. They fell in love with their first falling in love. And it helps explain why the British satires have been overlooked and ignored for so long—they didn’t provide the “sick soul of Europe” enduring romanticism the Italian, French, and Scandinavian films did. For almost two subsequent generations, Boomer memories have overwhelmed reality. The crucial story, then, was the transatlantic exchange of European and American ideas flashing across cinematic screens after 1945. This

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exchange was theorized and closely analyzed by intellectuals of Italy, France, and northern Europe at the time, but because the English took a very different approach during their own period of reconstruction, they have been long neglected. More importantly, the British satires were not necessarily created and led by an elite intelligentsia, which is why their films have been labeled pejoratively as “little comedies.” American academics and critics have been afraid to give the British their due for fear that the European intellectuals (mostly French—Truffaut and Godard were especially brutish) they so revered would mock them. As a result, these impressionable young Turks felt that the British films weren’t as important as their continental counterparts. But they were. And the Ealing satires were the most culturally significant of them all because they came long before the late-’50s Free Cinema, Angries, and Social Realists (which Boomers would discover for a brief moment when they arrived). The Ealing satires are key postwar British artistic statements; they are the true reflections of the British mood of the immediate postwar period of austerity, and why an examination of what the British did is in such needed redress.

3 The Great Bloodless Revolution Postwar British Film and the Ealing Satires (to 1949)

When disaster comes, the English instinct is to do what can be done first, and to postpone the feeling as long as possible. Hence they are splendid at emergencies. No doubt they are brave—but bravery is partly an affair of the nerves, and the English nervous system is well equipped for meeting a physical emergency. It acts promptly and feels slowly.1 —E.M. Forster on the English character, 1920

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HE BRITISH MAY HAVE ACTED splendidly during the emergency of the war, but then they had to wait and wait for some economic respite when things would be better, when the country would experience in the postwar age the material comfort that they had long anticipated in the prewar and war years.2 When feelings did emerge, they were usually feelings of disappointment and discontent. To assuage these feelings and begin to dig themselves out of the physical and psychological trauma and rubble of the war years, British fillmakers turned first to their literary classics for identity comfort-food, and then eventually to their historical methodologies of music hall and satire to comment on

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their postwar pinched austerity conditions. Even as the industry itself was facing serious financial challenges.

British Film Industry at the End of the War The perennial debate about the economic and social impact of the American feature film in Britain continued after the war. In 1952, the Political and Economic Planning Commission published the first full study of the postwar film industry with its harsh introduction: The crisis in British filmmaking—where lies the main problem of industry—started long ago, and only at rare intervals during the past forty years have there been short periods of prosperity to lighten an otherwise depressing canvas. Of a stable production industry there has been no sign.3 (Political and Economic Planning, White Paper, 1952: 11) Once again, the biggest blow was Truman’s Lend-Lease cancellation, which crippled the British studios’ ability to raise cash for productions. (Keynes, who had been made a Lord by then, exclaimed in his white paper on the consequences of the American decision: “Without help, and a lot of it, we have not a hope of escape what might be considered, without exaggeration, a financial Dunkirk.” Meanwhile, the future Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who was a member of Attlee’s cabinet, snarked, “There’s nothing so irrelevant as a poor relative,” a play on Charles Lamb.)4 Through 1947 and 1948, the United Kingdom participated in international trade at a deficit of $280,000,000 (1948 dollars).5 Similarly, the harsh terms of the Anglo-American loan that finally was negotiated by the summer of 1946 made the loan more a straight-jacket than a lifeline because the United States insisted on the return to full sterlingto-dollar convertibility.6 The British film industry retaliated with a high import tax on American films. Sarah Street explains: A major one was the shortage of dollars which handicapped the British economy. Film imports were expensive and concern was expressed about high sums remitted to the US which exacerbated Britain’s acute balance of payments problem: in 1947 American film earnings were calculated at $70million (PEP, 1952: 98). The debate centred on the dilemma of “bacon or Bogart?” Despite the popularity of Bogart, bacon won out and in August 1947 a 75 per cent ad valorem duty, the Dalton duty, was imposed on American films, a move of unprecedented severity against Hollywood . . . American producers vocifer-

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ously opposed the duty, but the public debate’s polarization between “food or flicks” demanded a tough approach during the severe winter of 1946–7, and the 75 per cent duty won out as the best way to reduce the cost of film entertainment.7 The Board of Trade miscalculated, not realizing that Hollywood would retaliate by pulling their films from Britain completely, leaving distributors without content, and the public at large without their Bogart. Postwar Brits were still addicted to movies as their source of entertainment and news; they wanted both their bacon and their Bogart. So, the duty was removed in 1948 when a deal was made for American studios to not take out more than $17 million from the British economy, plus a sum equal to British film earnings in the states. After the Anglo-American Film Agreement in 1948 the emphasis of government policy shifted from dollar-saving back to protection for the film industry. As soon as American films re-entered the market, British producers were faced with severe competition, and American companies, including Warner, MGM and Twentieth-Century Fox, started to initiate projects in Britain, although fears that they would invade British studios proved unfounded. . . . Nevertheless, between 1948 and 1950 the Hollywood majors spent nearly £6 million of frozen sterling on production activities. (PEP, 1952: 160)8 Just as the French feared American cultural imperialism, the British feared their industries would be overtaken by American companies, and film was no different. So, a quota was put in place on American product, and a small tax was attached to every sold ticket to help out the British studios. The renters’ quota had been abolished in 1947 as a result of the pressure during the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) negotiations. . . . Two important new schemes were adopted by the Labour Government to assist producers: The National Film Finance Corporation (1949) and the Eady Levy (1950).9 These were the financial realities facing the British studios. Ealing would decide to use this to its advantage by making specifically British films aimed at the home audience; but first, the industry would give the people the comfort food of British historical classics, a balm they needed before charting new waters.

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First, the Old Standards Literary adaptations by the English studios during the war were almost nonexistent; emphasis was placed on documenting the threat to the English way of life and promoting national solidarity through war-effort propaganda, fiction and nonfiction. At war’s end it was another story, and British studios—Rank, Ealing, Associated British Picture Corporation, British Lion, and Hammer Films—turned to safe productions of old standards. The postwar literary cinema boom really got under way with David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946). In the four years between 1947 and 1950, 115 of the 314 feature films released derived from novels; that is over a third. When 56 adaptations from plays are added, well over one-half of the total output derives from (more or less) literary sources. In fact, there is in each year of this period scarcely a handful of either critically or commercially significant films based on original screenplays, the most notable being the T.E.B. Clarke-scripted Ealing films Hue and Cry (1946) and Passport to Pimlico (1949). Even the Powell-Pressburger team, perhaps most cinematically venturesome in the British cinema, based four of its five films of this period on novels, and the fifth (The Red Shoes) is indebted to Hans Anderson.10 The British of the immediate postwar era turned to their classic literary and dramatic works to remind themselves who they were in this very changed atmosphere. Olivier made his directing career by producing, quite successfully, two Shakespeare classics, Henry V (1944), done to rally the country patriotically as the war wound down, and his highly introspective Freudian-laced Hamlet (1947), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture and, for Olivier, Best Actor. After directing the action sequences in the wartime film In Which We Serve (1942), David Lean did a trilogy of Noel Coward scripts—This Happy Breed (1944), Blithe Spirit (1945), and Brief Encounter (1945); he then turned to Dickens with Great Expectations (1947) and Oliver Twist (1948). And Carol Reed stuck with the popular novelist Grahame Greene in his movies Odd Man Out (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948, based on Greene’s story “The Basement Room”), and of course The Third Man (1949). The industry was playing it safe, feeling its way forward and trying to bring the British character back to its old self.

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These classics served a purpose: they reminded the British of their cultural heritage after so much physical and emotional rupture. This was the shot in the arm needed for their collective identity; and once they were again secured in their Britishness, they could turn to satire to protest the country’s later postwar stagnation. Once the industry began to regain its footing and people were getting on with their lives, it was Michael Balcon at Ealing who decided to truly begin to reflect and reshape postwar British identity by making specifically topical and satiric British films aimed at the home audience.

Ealing Arrives: Ealing’s 1945–55 Drama versus Comedy/Satire Output Production of postwar Ealing pictures was divided between small dramas and the satires. Following is a complete list of the titles of the films produced at Ealing, in the order in which they were made. Dramas March 1947—Nicholas Nickelby June 1947—The Loves of Joanna Gooden July 1947—Frieda November 1947—It Always Rains on Sunday February 1948—Against the Wind November 1948—Another Shore November 1949—A Run for your Money June 1950—Dance Hall October 1950—The Magnet February 1951—Pool of London December 1951—Where no Vultures Fly January 1952—His Excellency February 1952—Secret People March 1952—I Believe in You July 1952—Mandy March 1953—The Cruel Sea November 1953—Meet Mr. Lucifer January 1954—The Love Lottery October 1954—Lease of Life March 1955—The Night My Number Came Up September 1955—Touch and Go

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Comedies/Satires February 1947—Hue and Cry April 1949—Passport to Pimlico June 1949—Whisky Galore! June 1949—Kind Hearts and Coronets August 1951—The Man in the White Suit March 1953—The Titfield Thunderbolt February 1954—High and Dry December 1955—The Ladykillers October 1957—All at Sea One can discern from these titles, as Balcon sought to project, Ealing went directly for the topical in both genres, dealing exclusively with immediate and indigenous postwar British issues, what in the United States would be labeled “Ripped from the Headlines” stories, which Warner Bros. had specialized in in the 1930s (Balcon might rather have worked there instead of MGM). Though most were dramas, it was the satires that came to define Ealing’s reputation and, more importantly, the new postwar British national identity.

The Ealing Satires They began in early 1947, not even a year and a half after the war’s end (about 14 months) and the Labour win (July 5–26, 1945). The head writer at Ealing for the satires was Cambridge-educated journalist Thomas Ernest Bennett (“Tibby”) Clarke (1907–1989), the true forgotten hero of the postwar artists who was responsible for much of the Ealing satiric material during this period. Clarke was a member of the World War II generation (b. 1904–1923), was thrown out of Cambridge after only a year for missing too many classes and, after the war, started his career at Ealing in the advertising and marketing departments, as many other writers would later do. Before Ealing, he worked as a doorto-door salesman and briefly as a policeman, giving him material for all his scripts (Lavender Hill Mob; Passport to Pimlico). The first film of one of his scripts, Hue and Cry, appeared at the beginning of 1947, directed by Charles Crichton and produced by Balcon. It would set the model of what would become the Ealing satirical style with its topical subject matter (national crime/the black market), loopy narrative strategy (fantasy mixed with realism), and regional characterizations.

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Hue and Cry Directed by Charles Crichton Written by Tibby Clarke Produced by Michael Balcon Associate Producer Henry Cornelius Released February 1947 Released in the UK on February 25, 1947, Clarke’s debut was a minor hit in England, made so by the young Silents (turning into teenagers by the mid-1940s) who were hungry for films depicting young folks their own age who had lived through the damaging war years.11 That the film was released so early in 1947 suggests that the filming was done in the late summer and fall of 1946, making it a pretty quick start for Balcon’s new approach, and heralding Ealing’s new age. A group of late teens closely scrutinize a weekly serialized comic, The Trump, reading it for clues to happenings in their daily lives, and they begin to suspect that the comic is being used by a band of crooks for coded communication on a series of heists that have been occurring in the neighborhood.12 After being brushed aside by the authorities as “fantasizing” kids, the group decides to track down the villains themselves. The film is a shabby little imp, roughly shot and edited, and sometimes feels stuck in the prewar 1930s, a sort of Bowery Boys/Dead End Kids knockoff moved to London, and is a prime example of the demand for “order at all costs” by the British public, even if it means taking the law into their own hands, which the kids do here (a “hue and cry” is screaming public demand for authorial action on some civic issue or infraction). But the film has a newly charged energy and spark not yet seen in English films from other studios, and certainly not in the staid war pictures that came out in the previous few years. It separated Ealing productions from all the others. Borrowing from the Italian trend, Hue and Cry forsook filming in the studio (agreed upon by Balcon, Clarke, and Crichton together) for the bombed-out ruins of London to give the film a jolt of reality that acts as a grounding effort to counter the wildly improbable story. As an announcement of Ealing’s new direction the film concentrates on localized British peculiarities and verities, the exact opposite of what a Hollywood production would demand: it does away with schmaltzy sentimentality and races through its breezy eighty minutes with some wonderful performances by the young guns who are thrilled to be allowed to be themselves, and who are unfazed by the grimness of their war-ravaged surroundings, while their thick cockney accents lend them a “seen it all”

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attitude. To young adults coming-of-age and learning all they could about the world, ravaged cityscapes are moonlike playgrounds, not sad reminders of England’s struggles during the war or her new inchoate dominion. As they play amongst the debris, a particularly long and loud sequence is of the kids recreating the Battle of Britain as the soundtrack crashes and whistles, illustrating how the picture one garners from a given period really depends on your age. There are stock images for every period. For postwar Britain they are black and white images of hardship and high endeavor. They conjure up a land in which it was usually winter and the people were digging themselves out of snowdrifts. The middle classes . . . driven on by the exhortations of the government, were all digging coal or building ships. The women, meanwhile, were queuing up for offal at the butcher’s . . . Only one item is missing from the received impression: the fact that there was plenty of fun to be had in the Attlee years. It was often summer and the summers were long and hot. And whatever the season peace brought with it a sustained outbreak of pleasure.13 Children who lived through the war and after probably remember it as a terribly exciting time to be alive, if not exactly Wordsworthian “bliss,” while their elders couldn’t wait for a return to some sort of British normalcy, whatever that meant. Narratively Hue and Cry is also the beginning of the codification of the Ealing satiric film style, using the fantastic plot device (a serial comic book set against the brutal realism) to drive the story forward into social commentary of a more metaphoric sort: how Britain was to build herself out of the rubble and chaos. For Balcon, the realism was crucial, though Sue Harper and Vincent Porter suggest that this turn to realism was “problematic” for Ealing and British cinema itself: Ealing provides the most important evidence of the extent to which realism had become the dominant discourse in 1950s art direction and production design . . . accordingly, Balcon . . . imposed his wishes with undue rigor on his underlings, and intervened on issues such as acting styles, narrative structure, and visual style. In the 1940s he had developed a coherent theory about film, famously asserting that there were two cinemas, one of responsible realism and

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Figure 3.1. Hue and Cry (Charles Crichton, 1947). Tibby Clarke begins his reign. General Film Distributors(GFD)/Photofest.

one of meretricious tinsel, and he saw no reason to change his mind now. Balcon’s preoccupation had always been with content over form, and remained so.14 Harper and Porter mean this as a critique, but it should really be seen as a compliment. Content is more important than form, and that was exactly what Balcon was trying to achieve: to show the ugly truth as well as the humor of it. Balcon understood he needed it to be entertainingly light, but also used satiric flights of fancy grounded in a realism that would lend it the cachet and legitimacy to be taken seriously as a picture of, and comment on, late ’40s Britain. This is especially on view during the memorable climax in which practically every child (protagonist as group) in London is seen running through the rubble in a carnival-like atmosphere to catch the crooks, a community coming together to maintain and protect British stability in the face of postwar domestic challenges

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(such as postwar crime and ration cheating). The end sequence even references the Odessa Steps from Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1926) as the kids all rush down the famed escalier of the Grand Central Walk near the Crystal Palace in southeast London (Penge) in pursuit of the thieves.15 It’s an exhilarating testament to Ealing’s exhilarating postwar start. Hue and Cry’s satiric humor comes most of all from the so obviously forced acting of the adults in such a kids’ story and the corny music whenever we see the villains. Such overtly melodramatic stylistics played on the English obsession with their “stiff upper lip” or “laughing in desperation” traits (often attributed to WWII Brits, and to Cockney irreverence about the upper classes, whom Cockneys labeled the “tartan and tweed brigade”). Here Ealing was clearly capitalizing on that irreverence, assuming postwar audiences had that jaded sense, too, and now broadcasting it as a national typification by way of these new satiric films. Hence, Hue and Cry is a classic mock-heroic, and it acted as a testing of the waters for Balcon, Clarke, and Crichton, as well as Ealing itself, as the film announced that the studio was now turning toward exclusively British tropes, characteristics, and subject matter told through uniquely British tongue-in-cheek cinematic stylings: the Rank Logo, the graffiti credits on half-destroyed London walls, the regional backdrops and post-Dickensian characters, and an emphasis on teamwork and ensemble togetherness rather than a dominant singular hero or star, as in the Olivier/Reed/Lean films (though Alastair Sim tries to steal the show by hamming up his character of the cowardly hack writing the comic serial, an odd eccentric in the true British style of wacky provincial characters). The as-a-group approach mirrored the new Ealing and the new England attempting to continue and maintain the communal spirit that held together during the war. Ealing was on its way to becoming the most important studio exemplifying the English desire to forge a new postwar British identity as it headed into its most prolific year, 1949. The Great English Late Twentieth-century Bloodless Revolution had begun.

4 The Ealing Satires’ Annus Mirabilus (1949) “Kind hearts are more than coronets/And simple faith than Norman blood.” —Tennyson, from “Lady Clara Vere de Vere,” in Poems, 1842

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INETEEN FORTY-NINE WAS the great year for Ealing satire, wherein three of the most important film satires were produced: Passport to Pimlico, Whisky Galore!, and Kind Hearts and Coronets. These films, coming at the peak of the British export and material goods crises and the height of the postwar British identity crisis, reflected the desires of the British people looking for a much better postwar life. They would satirize the social and political forces that blocked the emergence of a new British identity.

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Passport to Pimlico Directed by Henry Cornelius Written by Tibby Clarke and Henry Cornelius Produced by Michael Balcon Filmed summer 1948; UK release April, 1949 Ealing’s first satire of 1949, in production during the summer of 1948 and released in April of 1949 by General Film Distributors, was the 61

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deservedly famous Passport to Pimlico, directed by Henry Cornelius (written by Cornelius and Tibby Clarke). Stanley Holloway is the nominal star of the movie, but the shared belief in a democratic approach to the production and message continues, as the true main character is the group of actors featuring other famous faces of the 1940s, such as Margaret Rutherford, Hermione Baddeley, Naunton Wayne, and Basil Radford. The film asks through them, “Which way is Britain going to go?” and “What are we as Britons going to achieve collectively?” It shows them as average Britons, much more than mere spectators of a newly social democracy grasping for agency against the economic and social forces acting against them. The film has much more in common with the collective ethos of some earlier American films—Sullivan’s Travels (Sturges, 1939) and The Grapes of Wrath (Ford, 1939), say—that dealt directly with the Depression and its impact on groups of individuals thrown together in poverty and their dependence on each other in their struggle to survive. The difference here is the exuberance of the satire in attacking the British social malaise. Sticking with Tibby Clarke’s favorite narrative device, the premise of Passport to Pimlico also reaches for the fantastic. Its plot uses the satirical contrivance of a world turned topsy-turvy: Londoners in Pimlico (located in central London, off the west bank of the River Thames) suffer through an unusually scorching heat wave, recalling not only the extremes of weather during the war but also the brutal winter of 1947, which the Attlee government had struggled ineffectively to manage. Extremes of climate made a deep and lasting impression on the postwar population of Britain. Peter Hennessey describes that horrible winter: When cold weather and the fuel crisis fused in a cruelly malign fashion towards the end of January, 1947, it produced a loss of faith in the government of competence and fair shares [Attlee’s campaign tag]. “Shiver with Shinwell and starve with Strachey” became the inevitable (and somewhat plausible) headline in the Conservative Press. For Dalton 1947 was Labour’s “annus horrendous” . . . The God of politics can be mercilessly cruel. That holy grail of the British Labour movement, nationalization of the mines, became a reality on 1 January 1947. Two months later power supplies across the country had almost broken down. Over 2,000,000 people were thrown out of work; people worked in offices by candlelight; fires and traffic lights went out; the national newspapers were cut to four pages. . . . no one was allowed to cook on an electric stove from 9a.m. to

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12p.m. and 2p.m. to 4p.m. The northeast wind blew for a month without stopping. The Kew Observatory recorded no sunshine at all from 2 to 22 February. The temperature didn’t rise above freezing between 11 and 23 February. The Thames froze. Coal boats, bound for London were icebound in northeast ports . . . Even Big Ben froze and couldn’t operate.1 The winter, the austerity, and life in postwar England in general was so harsh that even Noel Coward, who in 1947 was living more comfortably than most, recorded in his diary, “The place is unlivable. I hate cold. I wish I were back in Egypt. I wish I were anywhere but this goddamned country where there is nothing but queues and restrictions and forms and shortages and no food and cold. Flu and the fuel crisis is the last straw.”2 A population remembers such things, no matter how much the government proffers relief. Hennessy and Andrew Arends, in a 1983 survey of the flow of cabinet business in the first months of 1947, explain that the Attlee administration was so woefully unprepared for the severity of that winter because “of heavy duty preoccupations from India to the bomb, from the meat lorry drivers’ strike to the housing shortage.”3 But it was the flooding in the spring that really capped off the experience for Brits, who began to think it would never end. The spring floods of 1947, like the snow, were recordbreaking. In the second week of March the great thaw began . . . Between the eleventh and the twentieth, the flow of the Thames at Teddington Lock increased from 3600 million gallons a day to 13,500. . . . the banks of the Ouse and the Wissey crumbled in areas to the north and south of Ely as agricultural workers and servicemen fought and failed to stem the flow. An aerial photo taken from 16000 feet by an RAF plane on 25 March shows isolated farms in Hoddenham area sticking out of a vast sea, like Bangladeshi hamlets after a hurricane. . . . the River Lea to London’s northeast burst its banks, contaminating the huge reservoirs that flank. By one of those cruel ironies which accompany natural disasters, a million Londoners were without drinking water . . . the army fed 20000 people from emergency field kitchens set up in the middle of Yorkshire’s tiny, new island kingdom as Army “ducks,” built for chasing the Wehrmacht across European rivers, carried its citizens away from over 2000 flooded homes.4

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And this was after the famishing and (today thought as unnecessary) bread shortage of the year before. Writing her “Letter from London,” cabled to publications around the world on April 14, 1946, Mollie PanterDownes described the fears of a coming bread shortage due to having to provide rations to the British Zone in Central Germany: “Housewives have good reason to be worried. Bread is not only the staff but the stodge of life in British menus—the reliable filling for the empty chinks in the hungry child and the worker in the heavy industries—and the threat to the precious, darkish loaf was a depressing one. Should rationing prove necessary, it would be hard luck for Sir Ben Smith, who, the women feel, lacks Lord Woolton’s cozy bedside manner.”5 But bread rationing would come, and be quite dire within months of her fears. An especially sharp blow came in the summer 1946 when bread was rationed. It hadn’t happened during the war. It lasted two years and almost everybody, including the official historian of the Ministry of Food, now thinks it was unnecessary . . . a needless mistake from day one . . . it was introduced for altruistic reasons—to help alleviate famine in Asia and defeated Germany, the bulk of whose population was concentrated in the British Zone. Throughout 1946 the extraction rate of flour from the wheat increased until it reached 85%, darkening an already grey loaf. Bevin hated the so-called “British Loaf.” He said it made him belch.6 These are the circumstances that gave birth to the satires of the late 1940s. Audiences recognized immediately the cruel weather and extreme social policies that Passport to Pimlico depicted as facts of their lives. Pimlico, in all its Bakhtinian carnival splendor, was a sharply focused mirror. When an unexploded bomb goes off in an already rubbished Pimlico, the local city representative Pemberton (Holloway) climbs into the hole and finds a wealth of riches from a former time (subconsciously recalling for the audience ye Olde England, when knights and chivalry was the order of the day), including an ancient decree which proclaims that the Pimlico area of these central Londoners, who stand in for the British people themselves, is in fact part of Burgundy, France. Professor Hatton-Jones (Rutherford), a medieval history expert, authenticates the document, not only showing some use for such professions but also a respect for a professor’s input in helping to codify the law, attributes that would be derided nowadays. The denizens immediately act as if they are freed from British rule and constraints.7 Declaring that British law has no

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Figure 4.1. Winter, 1947. “The place is unlivable,” groaned Noel Coward.

jurisdiction over them, the new Burgundians release all pent-up desires by spending wildly on things they were denied under austerity, hoarding basic goods, and eating and drinking as if they hadn’t for years (because they hadn’t!). Their rallying cry becomes, “This is Burgundy!” For 1949, this was a thrilling wish-fulfillment for the still-rationing British public, a comic premise satirically executed. There’s a catch, however, since without restraint imposed by the British government, Pimlico is now open to all and any carpetbaggers and vendors who seek to sell and trade without barriers (it becomes a Burroughsian Interzone), again playing on English fears of loss of law and order. In response, Pemberton organizes some of the townspeople to form an interim government to establish a sense of order in the borough (the ultimate British virtue). Whitehall strikes back with the imposition of customs taxes and fees on anyone who seeks to leave Pimlico for London. In real British life, Attlee’s promises were welcomed by

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the electorate, and Attlee himself was well liked, but the government’s hopes for the people seemed a long way from fulfillment to the average Briton, and the pain from the war—loss of loved ones, self-sacrifice, the constant bombing raids—still throbbed. In Passport to Pimlico, Whitehall is assailed for its detachment, so extreme that in the movie the government close the frontier, meaning they cut off Pimlico for good from the rest of England in a boneheaded act of bad PR. The Burgundians fight back by evacuating children, stopping underground trains from entering their “territory,” and presenting themselves in the media as helpless and famished victims of an uncaring British bureaucracy that cuts off their supplies and electricity. These deprivations were everyday occurrences for Londoners in the late 1940s, and British viewers would have identified Pimlico’s hunger and want as their own postwar experience. One of the best writings about the rationing during (and after) the war comes from Susan Briggs: Rationing was thought of as a necessary restriction during the war, and people happily turned the queue into a national institution. Memories of wartime shortages during the First World War were associated with unfair distribution and with profiteering. The Second World War was not to be a war like that. There were black markets—and country folk in Cumberland could fare better than town-dwellers in the Midlands—but the Ministry of Food, as much as innovation and the Ministry of Information, was the biggest and fairest shop in the world.8 This time it was much more intense because unlike the First World War, which was fought “over there,” on the fields of France, this time the war came to them in raids and bombing campaigns on London and other major industrial English cities. Audiences experienced these firsthand, and now could relate directly to the film’s portrait of suffering denizens. There is a breaking point for anyone, Brits included; sacrifice can last only so long even amongst the most stoic of peoples. And so after the war, riots and other scuffles broke out over necessary everyday needs, especially in the poorer working-class neighborhoods.9 In Passport, Clarke and Cornelius evoke this sacrifice and breaking point by having sympathizers stand outside the gates and throw food into the closed-off area and even organize an airlift, Berlin style. The two sides finally reach a compromise: they will rejoin the commonwealth if they use their valuable treasure as a “loan” for the cash-strapped British government. The film ends with a classic party; the heat wave breaks,

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rain pours down on the relieved community, and the banquet is moved inside—in other words, this isn’t a happy Hollywood ending, as the real Britain, damp and raw (cold even), returns. One would be tempted to say that this is an allegory for postwar Britain, and it certainly is, but it is played with such realism that it is almost a photo-documentary, less an allegory than a literal portrayal of a community protesting the policy failures of its own government, and questioning the war’s purpose if life afterward was to be just more of the same, or worse. Rationing during wartime unites, but rationing during peacetime agitates and divides. Furthermore, Passport to Pimlico presented Britons with another real-life challenge when, immediately after Pimlico declares independence, into their domain comes the bane of the British economy both during and after the war, the spiv. As the ultimate scrounger opportunists, spivs were, for once, not breaking any laws by operating in Burgundy/ Pimlico because . . . well, there were as yet no laws to break. Journalist Michael Quinion has spent much of his career researching such arcane English words and outlaw professions: A “Spiv” was typically a flashily dressed man (velvet collars and lurid kipper ties) who made a living by various disreputable dealings, existing by his wits rather than holding down any job. (Another name was wide boy, with wide having the old slang sense of sharp-witted, or skilled in sharp practice.) He was a small-time crook, living on the fringes of real criminality. He is most strongly associated with the period during and immediately after the Second World War in Britain; he always seemed able to get those coveted luxury items that were unobtainable in that period of austerity except on the black market, such as nylons. Private Walker in the BBC television series Dad’s Army was a typical spiv; Arthur Daly, the second-hand car dealer in Minder, was a linear descendent of the breed.10 In a recent study of this new midcentury happy breed, An Underworld at War: Spivs, Deserters, Racketeers and Civilians in the Second World War, Donald Thomas explores the obscure British phenomenon of the spiv. Interestingly, the crackdown on such dangers was often as bad as the black market itself: When goods belonged to the state, no one was hurt by them going missing; when “fair shares” weren’t being given, they had

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Ripping England! to be grabbed; when nobs were stockpiling provisions, proles had every right to use the black market—so the justifications for dealing and stealing ran. But it wasn’t just the poor who ended up in court or prison. Among the celebrities who ran afoul of the law were Noel Coward, fined the equivalent of £64,000 for failing to declare investments, and Ivor Novello, sent to prison for four weeks for the private—and therefore prohibited—use of his Rolls-Royce. Burglary, offences against property, GBH [grievous bodily harm]: all increased during the war, with an especially sharp rise in crime as hostilities drew to a close. The average citizen was 85 per cent more likely to be a victim of violence in 1945 than in 1940. But the vast majority of transgressions were minor (counterfeit ration books, over-charging, goods falling off the back of a lorry), and many offences wouldn’t have been offences at any other time. The applauded peacetime profit-maker became the derided wartime profiteer. There was more law-breaking because there were more laws to break.11

Though the crackdown was often overly harsh, for the community in Passport, more important than remaining free from British authority is the need to protect themselves against the particularly British blight of the spiv.12 Crucial to the sense of malaise were the corrosive effects, in peacetime if not in war, of the overriding context of rationing, price controls and production controls. . . . Ina ZweinigerBargielowska, historian of austerity, makes it abundantly clear that the black market and all its devices—including off-ration and under-the-counter sales as well as tipping and favoritism— were at least as extensive after the war as during it . . . yet the fact was that a significant part—perhaps even the majority—of the respectable middle class, and indeed of the working class, simultaneously condemned and used the black market, without which they would have been hard pressed to maintain an even barely recognizable quality of life. Some even found themselves succumbing to the temptation of coupon fraud.13 The spiv, though loathsome to be around for too long, was an indispensable cog in the war– and postwar–time machine for persons of every class (and in the postwar Occupied Zones, the black market was even worse).14

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It was as big of an on-the-ground problem as the trade imbalance on the economies of scale for the British exchequers. So, even with its fantasy premise, the film is an accurate document of much of London in the late 1940s: the extreme weather that seemed to mirror the extraordinary conditions citizens found themselves still living under; the underground markets with their dangerous characters, and not just in the East End; continued rationing and expansion of state controls; an indifferent, sometimes hostile, or just overwhelmed state bureaucracy; and an accumulation of spivs, with their penchants for underworld violence. Added to that “the evacuations, shortages, airlifts [even pigs! Hence the phrase “pigs will fly”], not to mention the newsreels echoing wartime reportage,” as Marcia Landy describes.15 Pimlico takes a dig at the in-power Labour government that (the satire suggests) was incapable of maintaining the British perseverance exhibited during the war. And it exhibits the theme of how dangerous it can be for people to believe that politics and the politicians who claim simple solutions to complex problems can be solved with clever sound bites (today with 140-character sound bytes). But if the government wasn’t capable now, the Burgundians always were. The populist ideology of the war years is reenacted as the Burgundians seek to resist a foreign and dictatorial government. The heat wave is symbolic of the fever gripping the population, which is finally broken by the rainstorm, coinciding with the return to normalcy [meaning, more self-sacrifice]. The heat is the gauge of the intensity of this topsy-turvy world, which turns out to pose complications not only for the government but for the inhabitants of Pimlico.16 The heat here is a surrogate for the recent horrible winters Englanders had endured, during which the Attlee government couldn’t manage to help its citizens with elemental services like coal delivery and street clearing. Balcon, Clarke, and Cornelius were giving viewers a true-to-life reflection of their real-world experiences, with a humorous ventilator. In his study on the psychological implications of various forms of humor, Ian Green reflects, Comedy might be used as a framework or disguise that allows the overcoming of inhibitions, so that, within the context of comedy, the rupturing of the moral or political conventions of a society becomes possible. Others have argued that because

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Figure 4.2. Passport to Pimlico (Henry Cornelius, 1947). Stanley Holloway gets his temperature taken by Betty Warren and Barbara Murray. Eagle-Lion Films/ Photofest.

such a supposed rupturing can only be achieved within the context of comedy, the function of comedy is therefore to negate any possibility of significant realignment or effect on a society’s conventions and practices.17 The problem or inbuilt contradiction of the satiric framework, then, is that “it can be seen simultaneously (1) to overcome censorship, both in the straight social meaning of the term and in the Freudian sense of the censorship of conscious and pre-conscious processes, and thus can treat sensitive issues of varying natures; and (2), through its mechanism, to avoid, repress or displace the treatment of sensitive issues by, so to speak, drowning them in laughter or ridicule. The first process negotiates, and the second avoids, possible unpleasure through the satiric form.”18 This allows the viewing audience to experience and take part in the community protest in the film, while also being able to leave the theater in a less militant mood. It gave the 1949 audience an outlet for their frustrations

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and disappointments, living vicariously through the Pimlico state, while assuring the theater owners that they would not be rioting or ripping up their seats. (Which actually did become a major problem when the American rock and roll and juvenile delinquency films Blackboard Jungle, The Wild One, and Rock Around the Clock—with its inciting hit “Rip it Up,” which many audiences actually did to the seats in the theaters in which these films were shown—arrived in 1955–56.) All the jokes in Pimlico need to be understood in the context of postwar Britain to capture their effect on postwar British audiences. (Bosley Crowther, writing in the Times stated, “Viewed with a fair appreciation of the trials through which the British are now going, it is not hard to figure why its humors have been popular on its home ground.”)19 For example, Professor Hatton-Jones’s remark, “I am now able to change the course of history,” or PC Spiller exclaiming, “Blimey, I’m a foreigner,” or the ultimate stance, “It’s just because we are English that we are sticking up for our rights to be Burgundians!” all need to be contextualized within the moment of the late 1940s, the film’s fantastic premise, and satire’s central goal of persuasion. All the humor of these ironies and events depends on the framing of the story as a comic fantasy and on the logic that is permitted to develop within it. Finally, the framing is taken away by the negating of the context of the fantasy as the heat wave ends in rain and a cooling of the temperate atmosphere. The thunder negates the explosion; the bomb-site is transformed into a playground and a swimming pool; it is the great satiric device of ending with the wiping away of all that came before to start anew.20 And since Passport belongs to comedy’s militant wing, satire, its jokes don’t let the audience off the hook through psychological release valves. They have an edge that prompts the audience to leave the theater and do something tangible about the government’s incompetence. Gilbert Highet wrote, “These are then the closest kin of satire: on one side, invective and lampoon; on the other, comedy and farce. Invective and lampoon are full of hatred, and wish only to destroy. Comedy and farce are rich with liking, and want to preserve, to appreciate, to enjoy.”21 If the satirist wants to destroy the world so a new one can be born from its ashes, the comedian makes fun but ultimately lets the community off the hook, telling them, though they may have some quirks, they know they are good and righteous. One may argue that Pimlico, then, is merely a comedy (“a little English comedy”), as it ends with the banquet and

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the coming-together of the citizens, but its master message is clearly to the British government that postwar rationing and sacrificing have got to end; they want that new world borne out of the ashes to arrive now. As a satire, then, Pimlico is no little English comedy; it is much more militant, more sophisticated (as destructive), more focused, and more affective in its reflexivity than a standard comedy (as productive) could express. Socialist Britain’s banquet is rained out. The genius of Ealing in the Balcon era was to dictate that the problems it explored through satire should be the problems of living in the real postwar British world—the network of inhibitions and censorship that is necessary, or seems necessary, to set up and accept for people to live contentedly. As Mrs. Pemberton says at the end of the film, “You never know when you’re well off ’til you aren’t.” Context is all. Whisky Galore! Directed by Alexander Mackendrick Written by Compton Mackenzie (novel) and Angus MacPhail (script) Produced by Michael Balcon Filmed summer/fall, 1948; UK release June 16, 1949 Whisky Galore! employed many of the themes of Pimlico in no less a sociological manner to again capture the realism that satires need to make them work, and Galore! was shot in the Outer Hebrides on the island of Barra in an intense, though mostly lovely, June, one hundred miles from the nearest mainland. To add to the realism of the location and shooting style, Mackendrick and Balcon cast many indigenous islanders (with such remoteness, how could they not?), borrowing slightly from Italian neorealism’s approach. Galore! portrays an extreme Scottish community both sorely hit by the war’s effect on their economy, but little concerned about “Hitler’s bombs or the hordes of an invading army”; their isolation allowed the war to stay as far away as it was to America, the very next stop heading west. Based loosely on a true event during WWII off the isle of Eriskay, a ship containing crates of whiskey wrecks off their tight little island (nervous about using the devil’s brew in the face of American censors, Tight Little Island was the title used for the U.S. release), and the satiric convention is how supposedly humble semi-savages act just as greedy or uncivilized as those in the dog-eat-dog cities when given the opportunity. The main antagonist to the islanders is the scrupulous Captain Paul Waggett (Basil Radford), who is determined to deprive the men of the whiskey they have garnered. Waggett cannot

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understand the islanders, their customs, and their language. He measures their culture against his own English culture and finds theirs deficient. Even his own wife cannot understand his obsession with discipline, and she is permitted one of the final comments in the film as she laughs raucously at Waggett’s being exposed while sending back what he believes to be ammunition to the mainland that turns out to be whiskey subject to excise. His rigidity produces nothing but blunders. The only character with whom he shares an affinity is Mrs. Campbell, a rigid disciplinarian who rules her son with an iron hand until the whiskey liberates his tongue, enabling him to stand up to her.22 Hence, it is a classic fish-out-of-water story, or better yet, an Englishman thrust into an outer corner of the fading Empire, asking if maintained dominion over these strange breeds is worth the postwar costs. In this case, the protest (and the audience’s vicarious pleasure) comes

Figure 4.3. Whisky Galore! (Alexander Mackendrick, 1949). Ealing’s attack on Britain’s “Empire mentality.” Universal Pictures/Photofest.

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from this small Scottish community undermining Waggett’s overly rigid and repressive authority, another clear substitution for the continued austerity and autocratic rules imposed by the British government, even on such remote inhabitants, who may or may not (like Burgundians) consider themselves part of Great Britain at all (the two countries have been united since 1707). They are a proud nation with their own complicated relationship to the crown. Galore! is easily the most vehemently self-critical attack on the empire mentality of all the Ealing films. The fact that the islanders are so addicted to alcohol is a swipe by the filmmakers, as Hitchcock took similar swipes in The 39 Steps at Scottish culture and their pension for “the drink,” but in this case whiskey is an indigenous product the islanders are proud of, like fashion from Milan or cocoa from Peru, separating them from their southern masters (represented by the rigid Waggett) and thus the main thread that holds the polis together; it is a trope that trumps the enforced rule of law that just won’t work on such a different culture with their different values, customs, and practices. Indeed, the montage of the islanders’ inventive ways of hiding the whiskey show a cunning and a cleverness that defeats plodding English prejudice. For cultural differánce, this might as well be Forster’s India in the way Waggett’s English efficiency has little chance against Scottish mores. Staying with Balcon’s desire for social commentary in his Ealing films, Galore! also portrays a small populace closing ranks around their esoteric belief system that English law cannot completely contain, as in Pimlico’s zone. As in a John Ford film, the centerpiece is a party, or dance, that binds the folky folks together in shared values and musical harmony, and helps reassert the community’s identity in the face of foreign interference. The dance is the act of rebellion, as the flaunting of austerity was in Pimlico, while the English authorities attempt to impose an excise tax on the saved precious cargo, with the islanders quickly hiding and storing their mother lode in every possible container, including cash registers, baby carriages, pots, and spigots—a transgressive act they commit as protest to English rule. Though observed in the High Streets of the Home Counties, not all laws are obeyed in the North.23 The Ealing satires now were clearly showing the coming apart of the Empire, thread by thread, mirroring the worldwide trend toward independence, even in nations that could ill afford to separate themselves from their mother countries financially. Did these satires point a way forward for regions looking to break free, or did they exacerbate the problem? It wasn’t just the imperial drumbeat, the captivating threnody of great powerdom that explains the lack of critical self-awareness

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in mid-century Britain. It was part of the warp and woof of our institutional life whose essential soundness had been proven between 1939–45 when the spiritual and practical bankruptcy of those “modern” movements across the Channel had been exposed for the world to see.24 And if Balcon insisted on authenticity in the use of the actual villagers, emphasizing their colorful customs, was it to give them agency or was it merely to add an exoticism to the humor that would appeal to English filmgoers to the south, allowing those audiences to mock geographical idiosyncrasies? This is a technique that goes back hundreds of years, allowing audiences to feel superior to the quirky bumpkins; in nineteenth-century America, American journalists would travel to the farthest outer areas of the country to report for New England audiences on the strange eccentrics that populated the hinterlands. The most famous example was Mark Twain’s travelogues from Roughing It (1872) to Life on the Mississippi (1883). There is always a fine line when filmmakers intrude on isolated communities. At the beginnings of film itself, the Lumières traveled the world and filmed its extraordinary exoticisms to amuse the complaisant Eurocentrics in the mother nation. Certainly the images of the sea and the town give Galore! a sense of life on the outer islands off Scotland, and add a new portrait of the Scots apart from their usual quaintness as portrayed in British films up to that point.25 The opening sequence recalls Robert Flaherty’s often staged docudramas, especially Man of Aran (1934), with the voice-of-God narrator explaining the quixotic lifestyles of the northern isles natives with a sense of wonder, “These are happy peoples, with few and simple pleasures” (cut to women spinning wool and men catching lobster and fish, burning peat bog for fuel to heat their thatched huts). This opening approach, now often rejected as patronizing, insulting, or overly invasive (as in the “ethnographic studies” of indigenous Third World peoples by Jean Rouch), clearly illustrates that documentary’s revolutionary Free Cinema and Verité were still an entire decade away. But here, because it sets up the story and the islanders, using Flaherty’s expository style in the opening moments works to help create the stark contrast with southern Englanders. In Galore! the English are portrayed as repressive and blind to the indigenous traditions and customs of their (supposedly) fellow Britons (how much more must the English fail with their imperial subjects?): While Waggett seeks to remind the islanders of the war and their duty to England, his constant attention to duty is

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Ripping England! counterproductive. He is incapable of gaining the cooperation of the people, and literally becomes a laughingstock, both for the islanders and for the film audience. He is the typical spoilsport who, ironically, is responsible for bringing people together in opposition to what he represents. While the film is a celebration of community, its sense of community is not simplistic. It is based on the reality of privation and restriction, but also on the necessary struggle against institutional power. . . . The film explores the particularly timely issue of state power as it encroaches on private life, seeking to legislate pleasure—a familiar theme of the postwar period. However, the film’s vitality lies in its carnival atmosphere, its loosening of restraints.26

Landy here is being restrained about the film’s militancy. (In fact, this wasn’t the first British film about the northern lands’ disconnect with the south. Michael Powell’s 1939 gorgeous and underseen The Edge of the World expresses a similar sentiment about the Scots’ feelings of alienation from their British overlords.) It’s as postcolonial a statement as Edward Said’s critique of imperialism: The broad tendency was to expand and extend control farther, and not to spend much time reflecting on the integrity and independence of “others” . . . The imperial attitude is, I believe, beautifully captured in the complicated and rich narrative form of Conrad’s great novella Heart of Darkness . . . This narrative in turn is connected directly with the redemptive force, as well as the waste and horror, of Europe’s mission in the dark world. Conrad dates imperialism, shows its contingency, records its illusions and tremendous violence and waste . . . he permits his later readers to imagine something other than Africa carved up into dozens of European colonies, even if, for his own part, he had little notion of what that Africa might be.27 In Heart of Darkness, Conrad said, “They were conquerors, and for that you only want brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind.”28 With Galore! the English try to conquer by force but end up being thwarted by a thousand years of local beliefs and customs—espe-

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cially with their beloved elixir and main economic export, whiskey, like peyote to peoples of certain Native American tribes. As in Pimlico, the satire worked on the then-current audiences by encouraging them to imagine the new world as culture clash, and opening them up to other points of view besides cold-blooded expansionist English tendencies. In Galore! we not only get the vicarious thrill of Pimlico’s “What if?,” but also the documentary view of a very independent people affected by the taxing decrees mandated by the Home Counties. Which, one would hope, would prompt even the most patriotic of English audiences watching these exotic natives fight for their human rights to realize that certain policies and facts about postwar British life needed to be changed, and that they, the audience, were the only ones who could bring about this change for the far-too-long colonized indigenous population. If Whitehall continued to promise material happiness, but only delivered more restrictive policies on basic human necessities (like whiskey), then small bloodless rebellions were not uncalled for. Robert Eliot insists that the magical, ritualistic, and artistic power of satire to address outraged injustice with “satiric flourishes,” means that its “over-riding function is to develop with cold implacability the horror of English civilization.”29 Whisky Galore! illustrates this view of satire as agit-prop. Galore! was one of the first British films to force the nation to recognize that the world had changed, that Britain was at a crossroads, especially in facing the end of Empire, her harsh subjugation of foreign peoples, and the right of those peoples to govern their own affairs. When in 1949 Sir Henry Tizard, the Chief Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Defense, warned, in the deepest Whitehall privacy naturally, of the dangers of the great power illusions, his advice was met “with the kind of horror one would expect if one had made a disrespectful remark about the king.”30 Yet what Tizard said seems both wise and commonsensical to those familiar with what Churchill would have called “our island story” since the turn of the 1940s and ’50s. “We persist,” wrote Tizard, “in regarding ourselves as a Great Power, capable of everything and only temporarily handicapped by economic difficulties. We are NOT a great power and never will be again. We are a great nation, but if we continue to behave like a Great Power we shall soon cease to be a great nation. Let us take warning from the fate of the Great Powers of the past and not burst ourselves with pride (see Aesop’s fable of the frog).”31 It would have been truly amazing if Tizard’s view had been the early postwar orthodoxy, but his views were similar to those of the Ealing satirists (as

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a bit later, to the Goons) who were making Tizard’s main point through their creative entertainments, their hardcore, yet quite sensitive, satires. Peter Hennessy notes that A case could be easily made for mid-century Britain as the most settled, deferential, smug, un-dynamic society in the advanced world. The fundamentals of its constitution—Crown, Parliament and the Civil Service at the centre, strong municipal tradition at the periphery—were unquestioned apart from a tiny handful of Welsh or Scottish Nationalists.32 These satirists certainly weren’t Scottish Nationalists, but they were making Ed Said’s point forty years before Culture and Imperialism’s appearance. And those Welsh and Scottish Nationalists are no longer just “a tiny handful;” they are now the majority in both nations. Kind Hearts and Coronets Directed by Robert Hamer Screenplay by Robert Hamer and John Dighton Adapted from the 1907 novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal Mind by Roy Horniman Produced by Michael Balcon Filmed fall, 1948; UK release June 13, 1949 The last Ealing satire of 1949 was also released in June of that year. Kind Hearts and Coronets was literally the crown jewel of the period. It’s ironic that it should turn out to be Ealing’s highest satiric achievement as, when it was being filmed, Balcon was very afraid that audiences wouldn’t get it, that it was too black, that it was too high-brow, snobbish even, and he almost pulled the plug on it halfway through production. He later came to view it as his favorite of all the Ealing films, with good reason— it’s a masterpiece.33 This time, though, Tibby Clarke was not involved; Robert Hamer and John Dighton wrote the Hearts script from the Roy Horniman (1874–1930) novel. Directed by Hamer, Hearts offers a much more trenchant psychological and social examination of the effects of the British class system than any of the other Ealing films, probably because Balcon was correct—it is much more highbrow than anything Ealing had yet done and stands in comparison with the great films of any nation during this time. In British art, it stands with Dryden, Swift, and Pope in its satiric achievement—a Dunciad in celluloid. The secret weapon here was Robert Hamer. Hamer was the most precocious and adventurous of Ealing’s artists, and probably its most

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gifted.34 Hamer openly declared his interest in the seeder side of human nature: “I want to make films about people in dark rooms doing beastly things to each other,” he asserted, in an H.P. Lovecraft–like artistic reason d’etre. As the most urbane, witty, and sententious of intellectuals (in a gang that was bereft of them), he was also a renowned boozer, which must have rankled the proper Balcon. Balcon changed British cinema, but he didn’t want to completely subvert the dominant paradigm. He believed in the British tradition of decorum. It was not an attitude that the head of production at Ealing Studios Michael Balcon would have encouraged. He felt films should be improving. So although Hamer was lucky enough to make films as brilliant and uncompromising as It Always Rains on Sunday and Kind Hearts and Coronets, his time at Ealing was more notable for what he was not allowed to make . . . His story is a very British one of a filmmaker denied the opportunity to express himself freely.35 Nevertheless, at least the world has these two incredible works. Before moving to Ealing, Hamer also had the good fortune to work with Germany’s master producer Erich Pommer (as many German craftspersons were leaving to escape the hostile atmosphere in the 1930s), and soon Hamer was editing for Pommer (Vessel of Wrath, 1938) and Alfred Hitchcock (Jamaica Inn, 1939), and the Expressionist influence can be seen when he began to direct, first for the General Post Office service, working for Alberto Cavalcanti (the Italians were fleeing their version of fascism, too) on 1943’s fascinating Dead of Night (Hamer’s sequence was the brilliant haunted mirror section in that film), then finally for Balcon at Ealing (the most admired before Hearts is the heavily stylized, nonnaturalist melodrama It Always Rains on Sunday, 1947, which was Ealing’s biggest moneymaker that year). Hamer specialized in militantly ironic melodramas, around the same time Douglas Sirk was coming into his own in the genre in the States after also fleeing the frightening scene in central Europe. The genius of the system often produces great collaborations, but it can also stifle individual genius, and Hearts is Hamer’s most fully realized vision. As per satire’s requirements, Hearts is another outlandish plot based on “fantastic wish-fulfillment.” As Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) sits in prison, waiting to be executed for murder, he puts down his tale for posterity (the protagonist’s name was changed from Israel Rank to avoid charges of anti-Semitism). Told in flashback and voiceover, it’s a story of his mother (Audrey Fildes), who married beneath her class for the

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sake of love—what a silly, jejune, middle-class mistake!—and who hoped that one day her son would be accepted by her family, the D’Ascoynes, as the D’Ascoyne family (each member played by Alec Guinness) has a dukedom waiting for whomever may be next in line. After she dies, she is cruelly barred from the D’Ascoyne family mausoleum, and Mazzini, with dripping bitterness, tells us he was forced to bury her in “a hideous suburban grave.” Louis vows revenge and, despite the sheer number of family members standing between him and the title, he takes to killing them off one by one until he gets what he feels is rightfully his: that dukedom. This in itself is always a challenging narrative conceit—the countdown story—because one runs the risk of the audience counting to see “How many do we have left?” or “What number are we up to?” as the story unfolds, like a film told in real time where the hero has ninety minutes to clear their name or get hold of the antidote or save the world. But Hearts is so clever and cultivated, and so enjoyably suave is Dennis Price’s performance, one barely notices how many are left to knock off. Louis also has to deal with the insults of his love, Sibella (Joan Greenwood), who has little faith in his ability to reach his dukedom, a woman having few choices in Edwardian England but to attempt to marry well. She soon realizes he may get there yet as he marries Edith (Valerie Hobson). The marriages matter because to the Victorians and Edwardians bloodlines are lineage, and lineage is status, and status automatically confers character, quality of life, and how you are treated by the rest of society. It would have been the biggest fear of any midto-upper-class Briton to fall into a class lower than the one they were born in to. So, exacting her own revenge, Sibella turns Louis in to the authorities—but soon helps clear his name when she discovers Lionel actually committed suicide. And in the brilliant twist ending, which the Lavender Hill Mob would later borrow, Louis mistakenly leaves his memoirs in his cell on his release. (It is important to note that the UK version ends with Mazzini remembering that he left his memoirs behind, as the camera cuts to them sitting on his desk; the American version added an extra scene, with the memoirs being found by a guard and handed over to the head constable, as the 1930s/’40s Production Code could never abide any crime going unpunished.) The film is a period piece, taking place in the early 1900s in a post-Victorian Edwardian haze that sought to continue Victorian conservative policies and cultural sensibilities.36 However, like many science fiction stories set in the future, or westerns set in the 1800s, this film is really about the moment at which it appeared—England 1949—and its story is a comment on postwar English economic and social issues, especially the continuing class divide that was supposed to be addressed,

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Figure 4.4. Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949). Louis (Dennis Price) must endure even the insults of his love, Sibella (Joan Greenwood). Ealing Studios/ Photofest.

if not erased, by Labour’s 1945 landslide, along with the “five giant evils” cited in the Beveridge Report. Unlike other Ealing satires, Hearts is told using a restricted narrative in which we see only what our main character, Mazzini, sees. By using the restricted tactic, Hearts makes itself especially unique in that it forces the audience to live only through Louis, who daringly tells much of the story in heavy voiceover, as he writes and reads his memoirs aloud. Voiceover is risky in film even at the best of times because film is a visual medium—voiceover can often seem an act of desperation, as if the story being told isn’t conveying enough information or isn’t constructed well enough through the visuals for the audience to understand what is going on. But in this case, the voiceover is so calculated and poetic it adds another layer of depth as our antihero, highly educated and sophisticated, with his pitch-perfect King’s English, uses high language in all its Wildean glory, with its infinite jesting puns and layered savoir faire about the vulgarity of modern life and disrespect for the beauty of the English language

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(a notion Orwell was also lamenting around the same time in his famed “Politics and the English Language” [1946]). The emphasis and dependency on language was what Hamer was looking to explore—the beauty of the English language, its cadences and lyrical rhythms and sounds, how it can seduce just as powerfully as a rich visual image. In a twist for Balcon, instead of glorifying the working classes, Kind Hearts and Coronets lets the aristocracy destroy itself in perfectly modulated, snobbish prose. The voiceover also acts as a counterpoint to what appears onscreen, often adding ironic twists to the visual events.37 For example, when Mazzini kills his first D’Ascoyne (who is off on an illicit weekend with his mistress), the doomed couple sit snogging in a gondola as Mazzini unties their craft and sends both of them over a waterfall. Louis wryly observes in voiceover, “I was very sorry about the girl, but found some relief in the reflection that she had, presumably, during the weekend, already undergone a fate worse than death.” The learned and erudite prose seethes with transgressive delight, the omnipotent narration acting as a distancing device that gives us a sense of glee and allows us to suspend moral judgment about the series of murders Mazzini commits, especially since Mazzini’s tone of voice is so careful and unemotional, focused on explicit detail instead of affect. In perfect complement to this, Guinness plays the entire D’Ascoyne family as even colder and more out-of-touch, upper-class creeps, which must have pleased Balcon (with his egalitarian streak in his working methods), and more self-absorbed than Mazzini could ever be, making Mazzini sympathetic. But a purely restricted narrative with voiceover is also open to questions of bias, legitimacy, authenticity, and of course, reliability. Since all is told by Mazzini, can we believe all he tells? The fact that the narration is restrictive becomes a comment, by Hamer and Dighton, on the narrator himself, since all is seen through Mazzini’s eyes and from his perspective. For 1949, this expressly suggests the changing world, a newer, darker more existential postwar world, an introduction to late Modernity. Told this way, the text then can be seen as especially good at conveying—visually, verbally, and psychologically—the constantly shifting and changing nature of truth in a new world order (Kind Hearts and Coronets was made the same year as Rashomon, the ultimate modernist parable posing that every story is relative to the teller). Hearts’ critique of objective truth and the unreliable narrator of Modernism help audiences understand that their own relationship to the incessant visual stimuli that surround them—especially coming from the new British semi-Socialist state and its opposite, the old class system that was trying to hold on to its privileged world—is often problematic and, at the very least, extremely complicated, constantly suspect to self-conscious analysis.38

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Much has also been made of how Alec Guinness’s portrayal of all the D’Ascoynes is a virtuoso performance.39 It surely is, but only in relief to Louis’s harsh judgment of class strictures. More importantly, by keeping his D’Ascoynes so pompous and with a shameless sense of entitlement (even the nicest of them, such as the vicar), Guinness makes Louis’s confrontation with the D’Ascoynes an encounter with an institution (the Establishment) rather than with individuals, and subconsciously, knowing it is Guinness in each role enables the viewer to focus on the class system itself, while continuing the Ealing satiric narrative practice of using a group protagonist; this time it is Price against the entire upper class, a particularly favorite sport of the British, even today. (Jerry Lewis’s The Family Jewels [1965] could probably be seen as an homage of sorts.) The female characters are extremely important, too, another set of opposites in a film filled with them. Sibella is sexy and duplicitous, while Edith is the unimpeachable image of proper English correctness. But Louis’s attachment to his mother was determinative long before these two entered his life.

Figure 4.5. Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949). Alec Guinness’s tourde-force. Eagle-Lion Films/Photofest.

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Such psychological complexity in male–female relations was one Hitchcock would love. As for the gruesomeness of the murders themselves, Roger Ebert claims, The methods of Louis’ murders are in the spirit of George Orwell’s famous essay “Decline of the English Murder” (1946), in which he regretted the modern practice of simply shooting people and being done with it. Praising the ingenuity of an earlier generation of English murders, Orwell examines those crimes “which have given the greatest pleasure to the British public,” finding that poison is the preferable means, and that an ideal murderer is a member of the middle class who hopes to improve his social position or get hold of a legacy. Mazzini admirably meets these criteria. One D’Ascoyne is dispatched by poison, another is blown up at tea, and a third is swept over a waterfall after Louis unties his boat. My favorite murder involves a suffragette D’Ascoyne who is demonstrating in a hot air balloon when Louis shoots her down, observing “I shot an arrow into the air/She fell to earth in Berkeley Square.” Murder, Louis demonstrates, and Orwell would agree, can be most agreeably entertaining, so long as the story lingers on the eccentricities of the villain rather than on the unpleasant details of the crimes.41 And as long as, per Orwell, it is done in the name of attacking the class system. A sentiment, as in Passport and Whisky, postwar British audiences would have secretly taken vicarious delight in.

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Another technique that allows Hamer to get away with such sardonic humor is that most of the murders are shot in long and medium shots, generally avoiding close-ups that would personalize the Guinness characters, and so make us wince at the killings, and disproving the supposed “lack of technique” in the cinematography of British films of the period.42 However, the most entertaining of the incidents is that of the dignified poisoning of the sweet but clueless vicar, a subtle yet blistering critique of English stuffiness as one will ever see (but also clearly a postwar comment on the inutility of religion in war-ravaged and poverty-stricken England). His clueless platitudes on Chaucer and Canterbury pilgrimages is obviously completely impractical to the struggling persons who make up his flock. It is in this sardonic depiction that Price/Guinness and Hamer/ Dighton achieve the supremacy of their satire. It is the longest sequence in the film and the one in which we get to know, most intimately, a D’Ascoyne character. It also contains two of the great performances in British cinema, as Price, for this episode disguised as a touring bishop, and Guinness, as the vicar, seriously ham it up—two great actors playing it for all its humor, but also for all its moving pathos.43 Kind Hearts and Coronets is a perceptive satire on how the aristocracy had evolved and devolved in the first half of the twentieth century. David Cannadine’s The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy describes the sudden rise of the readership in the first quarter of the twentieth century of the old magazine Country Life, aimed directly at country squires who felt threatened by the coming of modernity, and who, though affected by the war and the new welfare policies, clung to and somehow seemed to maintain their upper-class status and living: The magazine Country Life was started in 1890 by romantic, country-loving businessmen. It was started because the country and all that it stood for was being threatened by industrialization and the growth of towns. It aimed to cover every aspect of country life. Behind it lay two assumptions: that life in the country was inherently better than life in the town, and that the life of an English country gentleman was the best life of all. Just as the complaining, censorious, reforming attitude of the early-Victorian middle classes had helped to make the upper classes more moral and more religious, the idealistic, romantic country-loving enthusiasm of a large section of the early-mid-twentieth-century middle classes helped to make them very much more conscious of what they possessed, and careful and conservative in the way they looked after it.44

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Kind Hearts takes place during the beginnings of Country Life magazine (at the turning of the Victorian century), but was made during the midtwentieth-century period when the magazine was becoming popular once again—postwar Britain looking back nostalgically on their former green and pleasant land, even as the class system that was forecast to be completely altered (maybe even eradicated) by the New Jerusalem continued almost as it always was. Ealing’s most brilliant satire, made by the most tragic of the Ealing aesthetes, reminded postwar Britons they had a long way to go. But it also is the aberration in the Ealing oeuvre for its uncommon sophistication, for though Balcon gave his employees a security to be creative without fear of reprisals, he himself was not a Richard Pryor– like radical. And believing so strongly in the English custom of restraint and respectability, he actually kept Hamer the most reined in of all his artists, and rarely approved his scripts.45 This made Robert Hamer the biggest casualty (he could have had a career as prolific as James Whale’s) of all the Ealing geniuses. David Thomson went so far as to aver that Hamer’s career “now looks like the most serious miscarriage of talent in the postwar British cinema.”46 But the fact that Hamer’s two gems exist at all is testament to Balcon’s enabling of the Ealing satiric ethos, tapping into the postwar existential absurdism that in many ways—one of them being humanistic—was the sanest of all responses to an inexorably changed European world. Ealing’s 1949 annus mirabilis was the proverbial Hunter Thompson–like moment when the wave crested, crashed, and rolled back—but it splashed all that came afterward with the satiric bug, changing the Western cultural landscape forever more.

5 Ealing at a Turning Point (1949 and After) “Experience—the wisdom that enables us to recognize in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.” —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

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I

T IS ODD THAT AFTER SUCH AN amazing year in 1949, Ealing produced no satires at all in 1950. Why? Is it possible that Balcon was so spooked by the brilliance of Kind Hearts that he turned against them? Were the country’s finances and well-being getting so much better that satire was no longer necessary? Or was it because the Goons, who were becoming well known even before their premiere on the BBC in spring of 1951, would begin to fill that vacuum? It’s hard to say. Maybe the satires had had too great of an effect and Balcon decided to pull back for a bit. In any case, while the government was finally handling the economic crisis, the country didn’t feel itself getting any better, so the Atlee administration tried to change that perception with a festival to lighten the mood. This would be somewhat effective, but the festival would also remind its attendees more of the promises made than the realities being lived.

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Spring, 1951—The Festival of Britain The Festival of Britain opened in the spring of 1951 in London at the same moment the Goons were hitting the BBC airwaves. Because of the five years spent repaying American loans, unloading Asian, African, and Middle Eastern states and municipalities to reduce the financial strain, implementing the “Never Again!” programs, and because most government money was still going toward maintaining their worldwide military, much of England continued to need rebuilding: Marshall Plan funds went right back toward paying down the debt, not to new housing or work schemes. It was classic vicious economic cycle— Germany struggled with this exact same predicament after World War I—and so Attlee’s Labour government conceived of the Festival in late 1949 as a last-gasp remedy to their quickly diminishing hopes of being re-elected in the forced elections of October 1951, which the Conservatives would indeed go on to win.1 The festival was an attempt to give Britons, after years of sacrifice, a feeling of recovery and progress. The scheme would work, psychologically, but it wouldn’t get Attlee re-elected. The idea was to take the still war-ravaged warehouse district on the Thames next to Waterloo station on the south bank and build a shining monument to the Socialist Britain of tomorrow. The only problem was the country was fed up with hearing about shining tomorrows; they wanted tomorrow now, and the Conservatives used this as a wedge to regain power. Churchill and the Conservative Party complained that the money (£8 million) would have been much better spent on housing, education, or the overworked medical budget—ironically, the very issues Labour had won on in 1945. Construction in the warehouse district included a riverside walkway, a dome (later the inspiration for the Millennium Dome, now the location of the O2 arena), the Skylon (an unusual cigar-shaped steel tower supported by cables), and the Guinness Festival Clock. Another purpose of the festival was to show off Britain’s economic and cultural recovery. Several double-decker buses toured Europe to publicize the event. And though the main exhibits were in London, others were held in almost every town up and down England, from Leeds to Canterbury. Churchill, however, hated the idea. He saw it as socialist propaganda, and after his re-election, in an egregious nose-thumbing to Labour’s vision for the nation, he had almost all of the Festival buildings eradicated, as if the festival had never taken place.2 Even with Churchill’s grand snub, the meaning and impact of the festival was captured by Michael Frayn’s classic editorial in The Guardian in 1963, “The Festival” (also published later in the Penguin book The Age of Austerity 1945–

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1951).3 In the editorial, Frayn proposed that though the Conservatives won the election that October, it was the Festival that started Britain off, psychologically and economically, on her 1950s boom to becoming a prosperous nation once again. It had worked, just not in time. Though it helped the Conservatives return to power after the failures of Labour’s efforts to pay down debt and over-reaching social schemes, the Festival marked the turning point for a Britain that was and would steadily recover in the 1950s because of Attlee’s policies. It was a cultural marker in another sense, too: it marked the coming of the new postmodern Space-Time compression late-twentieth century. Frayn famously distinguished between herbivore and carnivore elements in British society at its moment in 1951: “Festival Britain was the Britain of the radical middle classes—the do-gooders; the readers of the News Chronicle, The Guardian and The Observer, the signers of petitions; the backbone of the BBC. In short, the Herbivores, or gentle ruminants.”4 Because the postwar satires’ overall aim was to push the British into a more inclusive, less divisive society, and suggested that their imperialist program needed to come to an end, the Ealing satires belonged with the herbivores, even as they often ridiculed them. Satire, in general, belongs with the carnivores because it is often so ruthless in its attacks (for the community it is mostly destructive, whereas comedy is productive), but the true carnivores ravaging Britain were the targets of the Ealing satirists: the American capitalists and British bureaucrats (not to mention spivs) whom they saw as corrupting and over-running British culture and industry and leading the nation up the garden path toward a raped and exploited, foreign-dominated economy and culture.5 And most importantly, these satires differed themselves from the Italian, French, and Scandinavian cinemas by capturing and expressing the new British cultural identity in their plaintive English manner: They are, first of all, not lavish or spectacular in appearance. They were distinctively middle class in their outlook, and they probed tradition, loyalty, community, and social responsibility, expressing a distaste for overreaching and crass materialism. Rooted in a populist ethos, the films disdain rugged individualism, and are characterized by the struggle to overcome class and generational divisions. The negative figures in the films are bureaucrats, unyielding authoritarian figures who obstruct the sense of collectivity. At their worst, the Ealing films are weighed down by their populist ideology. At their best, they are mordant dramatizations of hierarchical society in which upward mobility can be achieved only through drastic means.6

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The “negative figures” were the carnivores sucking the life out of the English character and energy. And though Ealing refrained from producing any satires as the Attlee government built their festival, they returned just in time for its opening and the late 1951 political campaign, reminding audiences of the recovery period, but also of the drastic means exhausted Britons used to survive the war and after. The Lavender Hill Mob was the first of these later Ealing films. The Lavender Hill Mob Directed by Charles Crichton Written by Tibby Clarke Produced by Michael Balcon and Michael Truman (Associate Producer) UK release June 15, 1951 The Lavender Hill Mob went into production at Ealing in winter of 1951, and was released in June, just as the festival went into full swing. Clarke borrowed heavily from real life from his time working as a policeman for his plot, where a low-level bank guard conceives of robbing his employer of the gold ingots he is supposed to guard, recalling prewar Depressionera fantasies, with the gilt of gold an especially attractive object of desire (“Follow the yellow-brick road.”). Alec Guinness, by now leading man material, headed an ensemble that included not only Stanley Holloway, but also the well-recognized Sid James and Alfie Bass. In a first for Ealing, the film won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay and was nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Guinness). The English satires were now beginning to be exported and seen, gathering recognition outside of England, especially in America, where urban, educated audiences made them into minor hits, appreciating their high language and upscale urbanity, though these new urbanites were Silent generation imprimaturs. Culturalistas like Dwight MacDonald, readers of the New Yorker, and the new brilliant young writers working in television—Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, Woody Allen—took note. Sticking with their satiric device of the fantastic, this time it is the Freudian wish-fulfillment fancy of a small group of working-class stiffs looking, as always, to escape their social position through get-rich-quick schemes (a premise soon to be made famous on American television with Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Kramden in The Honeymooners, 1955–56). The bizarro-world account still has to be played as completely real, as in Pimlico and Coronets (or, in later British satires such as Dr. Strangelove, 1963), so the story is set in the then dangerous Lavender Hill vicinity of Battersea in South London (near the Clapham Junction rail stop). Some-

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what as in Coronets, Holland’s motivation as played by Guinness comes from a rich day-dreamy life (what else could low-wage workers do with their time?) in which he imagines a better world, not for Britain, but for himself, a fanciful notion that he feels will free him from the restraints of staid English working-class routines (especially as bank guard). His dream was, essentially, the desire of the entire English postwar generation. For the makeup of the rest of the “mob,” Holloway plays Pendlebury, who makes tourist knickknacks (the English certainly had noticed by 1951 the ability of both Americans and continental Europeans to afford to travel through England on the cheap at the time, while the Brits could barely afford to eat meat; Pendlebury poetically—maybe poetry was all they had to cling to—laments his British tourist-serving moneystrapped fate: “I cultivate British depravity! Anne Hathaway’s cottage to keep string in. Wouldn’t you prefer the comfort of an old biscuit tin?”), while Alfie Bass and Sidney James play Short and Lackery, respectively— two petty thieves. The grift is to melt down the gold loot into tiny Eiffel Towers that can be easily moved (a clever little dig at continental frivolity) with each man handling his part of the job, thus, reaffirming their collective English working-class skills as very important to England’s economic life, even if used for crime.7 Though the heist doesn’t quite go as planned (Pendlebury is briefly taken in during the robbery), they get away with the bullion, and Pendlebury and the others melt and recast the gold as the tacky Parisian towers and ship them to France as worthless tchotchkes. Inevitably, these gold monuments get mixed up with regular ones, and finding the real ones becomes like looking for a needle in a haystack full of needles. In a bit of unrestricted narrative (in contrast to Kind Heart’s restricted narrative technique, in this film viewers are shown something that the main characters cannot see), the audience is privy to the real gold being brought back to England by some schoolgirls, and, once back, through a series of wild episodes, the group tracks down all the pieces but one, which ends up at a police exhibition. In the obligatory final chase, Pendlebury is caught while Holland escapes to Rio de Janeiro (where a blinkand-you’ll-miss-her Audrey Hepburn as Chiquita makes an appearance). Similar to Coronets, he is telling his story from behind the wall of the law, caught, though clinging to the fantasy of getting away with it; but the Production Code–like demand that while crime may be explored, justice must prevail before the audience is allowed out of the theater still stood in 1951. With much less emphasis, Mob, like Coronets, utilizes the main character’s first-person voiceover narration, and we get inside the head of Holland. In the live action in the film, Holland cleverly goes out

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of his way to be perceived as the quintessential postwar 1950s English “loyal” employee whose only wish in life is to preserve the status quo and serve queen and country by serving his own office as best he can (“I was aware they ridiculed me for fussing. But that was exactly what I had wished to achieve.”). But we know his secret longing to break from the madding crowd when he monologues over shots of packed London streets, For 20 years I’ve dreamed of this. But fate had denied me the success of all my plans. Still I never quite lost sight of the goal, inaccessible as it often seemed to me, when I was merely a non-entity, among all those thousands who flock every morning into the city. Most men know they will never be rich and never have the chance to achieve their ambitions, but I was in a unique position of having a fortune literally within my grasp. For it was my job to supervise the delivery of bullion from the gold refinery to the bank. Authority may prevail in the end, a conventional device to keep the censors satiated, but the late Attlee-governed audience would have delighted in the gold-within-reach subversive contrivance and experienced the film as not so much a morality tale as another dig at the pinched struggle of their own drab postwar lives (Pendlebury again, citing John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Maud Muller” [1856] sighs, “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest of these ‘It might have been.’ ”). All of the gang really have the same goals as the English audience—to escape to a better rank, better condition, better life—aspirations with which the audience couldn’t help but empathize. Obviously, as protagonist, Holland’s goals are the most pronounced—a change-at-all costs from the bureaucratic straight-jacketed banality of life in austerity Britain, even as many of the New Jerusalem policies had already begun to help so many people who before the war lived shorter and grimmer lives. And the other men’s goals are even more prosaic: simple ease from postwar struggle, especially the feeling that the moneyed interests (the government, banks, industrialists, etc.) controlled every aspect of middle- and working-class lives (Holland tells us he earned, “8 pounds 15 shillings a week, less deductions,” another sign to the audiences that Clarke and the filmmakers understood how dreadfully stagnant wages were and how they were cut in to by the new socialist policies). The caricature is also another strike against the new American capitalists and British bureaucratic carnivores raping England’s old values while never delivering the goods on the newly promised ones, most definitely a mes-

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sage the postwar British audience wanted to hear—it’s what put them in the cinema seats and made the satires hits. But even with the shared sacrifice and pulling together, crime was still a major problem throughout the 1940s, and Mob was one of the first British films to acknowledge its wartime and post-wartime extent. Despite the celluloid myth of Casablanca, a gangster who rallied to his country’s cause, exercising (his) anti-social talents on the enemy was a rarity. The first instinct of the criminal world was to escape military service at all costs.8 As the Blitz raged above, Londoners’ underworld compatriots merely went about their business. Early in 1941, shelter gangs went to work, robbing those who had sought refuge for the night. In 1940 there had been individual cases of thieves stealing handbags of suitcases, a crime that had more significance as shelterers began to take their valuables with them . . . a woman in Tottenham who took her £3000 (£120,000 today) life savings to the shelter every night in an attaché case was robbed by a man whom she knew as a friend of her sons . . . by January 1941, however, organized gangs infested the crowded tube shelters. Their method was to target bags in which shelterers carried their valuables. When the chosen victims settled down to sleep, the thieves found a space nearby. They would edge the bags further away, little by little, while the owners and others around them slept, and then carry them off as if they were their own.9 To purse cutters and petty spivs, the screaming air-raid sirens was also a call to get to work looting people’s houses that were being bombed out; it was an even worse problem than the tube poachers who left families to return to their half-collapsed homes to find their personal belongings purloined. There were few more emotive subjects in the course of the war than looting. It seemed the most evil and mean-minded preying upon the poor and the unfortunate. Sometimes it showed the tragedy of a life ruined by a moment of greed, in which the greater victim might be the perpetrator. At its worst, it was well-organized by pre-war pickpockets, members of race gangs, and minor West End criminals.10

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Compared to these criminals, spivs were downright quaint. The idea of England as teacups, Mary Poppins, HP sauce, and Yorkshire pudding was a fabrication that the Ealing satirists sought to unmask. Though Guinness/Holland himself is not a Bow bell–hearing cockney, his mob members are, and The Lavender Hill Mob somewhat humanized these scroungers, as the later 1970s gangster films would also do, getting audiences to root for the gangsters as tragic heroes or poorly educated misfits. But the film also reminded audiences they were often vicious un-British louts. The noir forties was the atmosphere into which the satires stepped and mirrored brilliantly. Even so, in spite of its working-class decency and loyalty, The Lavender Hill Mob implies (as the 1960s satirists would, too) that the smugness of so-called English middle-class respectability was just as responsible for England’s stagnation as industrial and governmental ineptitude. The language employed in the film, particularly the use of double entendre, suggests that the world of the mob and that of the relevant social institutions are actually interconnected. It would appear in these telltale moments, which could be attributed to mere word play or conventional comic confusion, that a more serious issue is being explored: specifically, the notion that the bureaucratic social world is characterized not by ignorance but by a refusal to look and to listen. Though the film’s alliance of workers and the underworld against the forces of respectability is subversive, the narrative, utilizing the comic mode of the world turned upside down, turns out not to be a utopian solution but to a sober restoration of law and order.11 In other words, why, in life, especially as a collective polis, do we so often miss warning signs? Why do we refuse to “look and listen”? And, since we don’t, we need the sober restoration of law and order to be the final denouement in all these postwar British satires. It is true that wish-fulfillment and money-chasing schemes were Clarke’s favored narrative strategies, but these films also proved how big a role Balcon played in the creation of the framework and the style of the Ealing satires in his continued insistence on presenting the fanciful stories with utter realism. One way Crichton/Clarke achieves this is having Guinness add up exactly the price of gold (Guinness: “Gold at 240 shillings, its value at .025—a loss of approximately six shillings—a total of 495,987 pounds.” And to his conspirators he reveals, “Gold on the

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Figure 5.1. The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951). Holland (Guinness), the picture of English middle-class respectability to blink-and-you’ll-miss-her Chiquita (Audrey Hepburn). Universal Pictures/Photofest.

black market goes for 2 and a half times its standard price.” And that was for only 100 bars. Their heist would be for 212 bars!). The same level of detail goes into the planning of the theft, for it is meticulously described, structured, and executed by Crichton and his crew (very much like the continental film Rififi [1955], of which Mob is a precursor, as it is to the “perfectly planned heist films” that would trend in the later 1950s).12 The planning becomes a vicarious thrill after which the actual deed is almost too much of a chore for Holland to pull off. Yet, even with the realism, satire still relies on stereotypes: The depictions of types—the man of fashion, the rich mercantile vulgarian, the lawyer, and the priest—a means of selfdefinition, as well as being a complaint about the world and its ways . . . one of the central subjects of English satire from

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The Ealing satires mocked country and city alike, but especially celebrated those outsiders (the undesirables of Ambrose Bierce’s satiric quote) whom Philip Larkin and Amis were also beginning to champion right at that moment. In his poem “Reasons for Attendance,” Larkin writes: What calls me is that lifted, rough-toungued bell (Art, if you like) whose individual sound Insists I too am an individual. It speaks; I hear; others may hear as well, But not for me, nor I for them; and so With happiness.14 It doesn’t matter how a person speaks—in fact, a “rough-tongued bell” is exactly what makes one unique, it stamps identity—it is the person (possibly even artist) and her words as they are ordered that truly count. And Lavender Hill Mob gave audiences a rare firsthand look at such lowbrow, rough-tongued urban petty criminals by incorporating their hard-lived dialects and street smarts as essential to its realism. While it’s true that Larkin’s later published letters exposed a deeply crotchety and biased man, his poetry of the late 1940s and early ’50s celebrated the tough, unsparing outsider voice as the more authentic replacement for the self-satisfied, bourgeois fop. Larkin and his art challenged that security blanket of privilege, or more accurately, of those ideals of perfection in speech, looks, and actions as practiced by the British upper class. Larkin’s poem continues: Therefor I stay outside, Believing this, and they maul to and fro, Believing that; and both are satisfied, If no one has misjudged himself. Or lied. Larkin is much happier running with the hunted than the hounds, which is why he “stays outside,” even if he does acknowledge (though

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not respect) that those well-bred Oxbridges who may see through their entitlement-tinted lens (“they maul to and fro, Believing that”), those glasses still make them blind, believing in their own superiority. In other words, these same working-class, rough-hewed, and rough-lived characters Larkin turned to document were also appearing now in the later Ealing satires (and on radio through Milligan’s Goons), beautifully executed by Clarke, Crichton, and Balcon. American audiences especially were finally seeing a very different Britain than the classical Hollywoodproduced version. If the satirist turns to his craft to deal with the bustle of the cosmopolitan world, then Lavender Hill Mob is a window into postwar London’s frenetically swarming atmosphere: City life, innovatory, restless, “unnatural,” is something poetry finds it hard to come to grips with . . . the satirical form enables him to describe, and even to relish, while apparently rejecting . . . the images spring directly and freshly from the way of life which most concerns him. . . . What we see in satire is something very interesting, and, occasionally moving. The poet is at grips with the ordinary, rather than the exalted: with society, and the men in their everyday relationships to one another. These relationships may be far from ideal, but they go to make a kind of poetry which has its own, very genuine, fascinations.15 Lavender Hill Mob illustrated this point in its portrait of everyday people’s struggles in life in modern London. By now Guinness was Ealing’s most dependable star, even if the ensemble as protagonist was their most successful trope, and Ealing would continue to rely on him for international star power. The Man in the White Suit Directed by Alexander Mackendrick Written by Roger MacDougall, John Dighton, and Alexander Mackendrick Produced by Michael Balcon Associate Producer Sidney Cole UK release August 7, 1951 The next Ealing satire would be slightly different in character representation and narrative construction, but no less a reflection of the harsh constraints of austerity Britain. The Man in the White Suit was directed

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by Alexander Mackendrick, scripted by Mackendrick, John Dighton, and Roger MacDougall from MacDougall’s stage play, and released in August of 1951, at the height of the festival and the political race for office that Labour would lose, and its impact must have somewhat cancelled out the Festival’s successful message. It was the first time that Guinness would finally get to carry a picture (though an argument can be made that he carries Kind Hearts by playing those multiple roles). And it would be another militant spin on Ealing’s appraisal of corporate politics, including the corruption of the labor unions, socialist Britain’s most celebrated achievement against corporate exploitation (albeit the attack was not nearly as vicious as 1959’s I’m All Right, Jack, produced by John and Roy Boulting; see Chapter 8). When Sidney Stratton (Guinness) invents a miracle fabric that never stains or wears out, the powers-that-be naturally try to suppress it. After all, how would capitalism survive without planned obsolescence of products and people? Sidney Stratton is a social idealist, not unlike Clement Attlee himself. The writers, directors, and producers make him a Peer Gynt–like figure, naive about class hierarchies, how they got that way, and how corporate structure and strictures really work, examining the old adage, “A true measure of character is how one acts when given power,” and ironically, as a result, Stratton necessarily and inevitably intrudes on the postwar Fordist workplace, where everyone knows their place and is quite happy to keep it that way: those who try too hard are flies in the ointment of the free-flowing British factory system. One may dream of creating products that will make life easier and better for postwar Britain, but it is a fool’s errand and, in fact, even anti-worker: trying to make a fabric that won’t soil or wear out is much like GE creating a light bulb that won’t burn out; it can be done, but it would eventually limit the sales of light bulbs, and so “destroy thousands of jobs in the meantime.”16 Or so the argument goes. Sidney is another classic quixotic English character, and is the opposite of the industrialist Birnley (Cecil Parker) and his colleagues, as well as the representatives of labor, headed by Bertha (Vida Hope). “Capital and labor are hand and hand in this,” is the motto of the industrialists and fellow workers who see Stratton’s ambition as a threat. Sidney, ironically, then, brings these unusual adversaries, normally sworn enemies, together, however momentarily, exposing how their interests are far more similar than they portend in public. Fortunately, Sidney gains the ear of a very important and influential person, Birnley’s daughter Daphne (Joan Greenwood), who takes a liking to him because, as a woman, she has no say in company policy. What is more, she is able to provide him with the raw materials he needs to produce his shining amaranthine suit, a glittering piece of armor

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any woman seeking a knight would be attracted to. As a woman, she understands Sidney’s societal trappings first hand and welcomes the fact that he represents resistance to the massive forces of postwar industrial patriarchal containment. In fact, in the narrative, Sidney’s only allies are female (the other being the young girl who helps him to escape when, later in the film, he is on the run from the corporate overseers and the law who want to destroy his invention), outsiders from the maledominated corporate and social world (especially after women had gained some form of legitimate agency in industry during the war). Satirists often attack those who should know better, and the film is also equally critical of Sidney’s naiveté toward the realities of union interests and British industrial practices; by this point in his life he should know better. But this “intelligent innocent,” a classic type in the history of English satire, sheds light on the collaborative nature of doubledealing of postwar industry and those who maintain the dishonest game. However, it is only as a quirky individualist that he is able to subvert the dominant powers, fighting from the inside (an interesting twist on the Ealing collective ethos), but, like all insiders, dependent on the outsiders

Figure 5.2. The Man in the White Suit (Alexander Mackendrick, 1951). Guinness was now Ealing’s most reliable working-man paladin. Ealing Studios/J. Arthur Rank Org./Photofest.

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(the female characters) to achieve his success (and the Ealing ethos is sustained). It is a statement on the nature of capitalism itself that all who try to get ahead, even for the most altruistic of reasons, necessarily exploit and use the under-represented to prop themselves up.17 (The white suit is the main symbol of this material and class- and gender-based appropriation, especially when it disintegrates at the very end!). “A working class hero is something to be,” John Lennon would later lament. Sound, too, plays a role in signaling Stratton’s rebellion. The various explosions from his experiments have a rhythmic quality as layered into the soundtrack, and are directly connected to the disruptive elements unleashed by him, acting as yet another form of narration in contrast to the narrative voiceover (again, satirically and ironically juxtaposed with the images on screen), sending signals to the audience that he is the symbol (the suit) and the voice (the noises) of rebellion against the state and policies of postwar industrial Britain. For the Ealing satires, their chief rhetorical devices became regional dialects, the settings themselves, sound, and characterization. (For the Goons, who by now were on the radio, rhetorical devices were sound effects, genre parody, and characterization.) Satire seemed to be moving into its noisiest phase, probably an unconscious response to the new rival medium, television, or at the very least, the Goons, who were beginning to use every possible sound effect to its fullest use. Sidney’s attempt to rise in English society is all the more subversive and threatening to the corporate carnivorous establishment since, unlike Mazzini, we are not dependent on just his point of view in our decision to side with him or not. Like all great satire, the narrative offers no consolation but is unremitting in its portrayal of social disintegration. Furthermore, Landy and other critics have noted that the suit gives the film an almost hidden reflexivity about the state of Ealing itself by the mid-1950s: Sidney’s “invention” is, like British filmmaking in the postwar era, threatened by inertia, bureaucracy, and misapplied finances. The film is consonant with the ideology of many of the 1950s films which dramatize the conflict of the individual against organized society, and presents that society as massively corrupt with few redeeming qualities. . . . After The Man in the White Suit, Ealing comedies themselves begin to disintegrate.18 This last point is especially true, not because the quality of writing or directing went down after this satire, but because the cultural, and more importantly the economic, climate had begun to change, and, by

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1952–53, these films could ease up on the agit-prop and deliver lighter satire (even though the Goons would be even more ferocious now that they were on the BBC), as there was less need for the militant din, in film at least, that high satire is able to conjure up. That said, Man in the White Suit was Ealing’s biggest satiric hit so far, which perhaps played a part in Attlee’s fortunes that year even with the British economy now on the mend due to his policies. A more nostalgic, Tory-friendly take on industrial Britain was possible now that the Restoration had been secured. The Titfield Thunderbolt Directed by Charles Crichton Written by Tibby Clarke Produced by Michael Truman Executive Producer Michael Balcon UK released March 1953 After the success of The Man in the White Suit, Ealing waited a whole year before filming their next satire, The Titfield Thunderbolt. The slow but sure success of the Attlee policies, and the fluctuation in currency of the pound vis-a-vis the dollar gave Ealing mixed signals, even as the recent satires had all been hits, even abroad, putting British film on the international map. After rupturing cultural changes (in part because of the satires) and with the Conservatives back in power, the crushing debt burdens from the war were finally plateauing. Austerity shortages were beginning to ease day to day. The 1946 V & A exhibition’s, and subsequent 1951 festival’s moniker, “For Export Only” was becoming a thing of the past, and the new modern conveniences other countries had been enjoying were finally becoming available domestically. But Britain wasn’t completely out of the woods yet, and satire still had its place, if in a less vituperative manner. Ironically, because these late satires became less angry in tone, they are the ones responsible for marking all the Ealing films with the “quaint” label, as they were more languid and, in some ways, more pedestrian, even prosaic. Directed by Charles Crichton from another Tibby Clarke script, Thunderbolt went into production in late 1952 and was released in March of 1953. The film shares a kinship with the earlier ones insofar as it too directs its critique against the profit motive and bureaucracy of the carnivores. Titfield is a small green hamlet whose railway line has been losing money for years and the new Conservative government, now owning the railroads (rail nationalization happened in 1948), wants to shut it down to meet their cost-cutting promises made during the election campaign.19 However, since it is the oldest railway in the world, the townsfolk rally

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to save the rail line because it is a symbol of mythic old England, just as in Passport, and hence, linked inextricably to their British identity. It ends, also like Passport, with the community coming together and beating Whitehall. The dissident town rail line is saved and remains an umbilical to London and part of a larger, more expansively connected Britain, even as the empire continued to shrink. Yet, as Charles Barr observes, What a change is evident, four years after Passport. After its fashion, that film tested out ideas about society in a genuinely open and exploratory manner, discovering its answers in the course of the film, or at least putting the audience through a process of discovery. The Titfield Thunderbolt knows all of the answers before it starts—knows them, in effect, from Passport. Like The Man in the White Suit, it shows a society which has committed itself to the backward-looking, soft-option path which Passport settled for, and is thus a warning of some consequence. But it in every way lacks the critical perspective of MacKendrick’s film.20 By “lacked the critical perspective,” Barr means it wasn’t as cantankerous in its attack. This was because the times, and the administrations, had changed. The need for militant satire to ridicule failed postwar policies and poorly executed economic salves was fading, and if Ealing itself was coming apart in 1953, it was a byproduct of that decline, not the cause of it. Still, this time the satire is directed at the debt—and inflation— obsessives of the newly installed Churchill government. Paul Krugman explains what inflation-obsessives often overlook, One answer is that obsessives failed to distinguish between underlying inflation and short-term fluctuations in the headline number, which are mainly driven by volatile energy and food prices. Gasoline prices, in particular, strongly influence inflation in any given year, and dire warnings are heard whenever prices rise at the pump; yet such blips say nothing at all about future inflation. They also failed to understand that printing money in a depressed economy isn’t inflationary. . . . At a fundamental level, it’s political. This is fairly obvious if you look at who the inflation obsessives are. The overall picture is that most conservatives are inflation obsessives, and nearly all inflation obsessives are conservative. Why is this the case? In part it reflects the belief that the government should never seek to

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mitigate economic pain, because the private sector always knows best.21 It seems that tearing down the Festival of Britain was more than a metaphor. Churchill tried to erase almost all that was accomplished in the Attlee years. And now the Ealing collective had a new cause: the head choppers and hatchet men who wanted to cut absolutely everything. They were the new carnivores who in their zealousness with cutting every government expenditure were losing sight of the good that had been done by the Attlee policies; not only would they have a horrible effect on almost all of Britain, they would slow the recovery significantly. It’s a cycle Britain (and America) seems to be repeating yet again today. Krugman continues, When Andrew Mellon told Herbert Hoover to let the Depression run its course, so as to “purge the rottenness” from the system, he was offering advice that, however bad it was as economics, resonated psychologically with many people (and still does). By contrast, Keynesian economics rests fundamentally on the proposition that macroeconomics isn’t a morality play—that depressions are essentially a technical malfunction. As the Great Depression deepened, Keynes famously declared that “we have magneto trouble”—i.e., the economy’s troubles were like those of a car with a small but critical problem in its electrical system, and the job of the economist is to figure out how to repair that technical problem. Keynes’s masterwork, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, is noteworthy—and revolutionary—for saying almost nothing about what happens in economic booms. I’d argue that Keynes was overwhelmingly right in his approach, but there’s no question that it’s an approach many people find deeply unsatisfying as an emotional matter. And so we shouldn’t find it surprising that many popular interpretations of our current troubles return, whether the authors know it or not, to the instinctive, pre-Keynesian style of dwelling on the excesses of the boom rather than on the failures of the slump.22 Now the satiric target had shifted, from the bum’s rush of Labour’s drab austerity to the even worse policies of Conservative’s slash-and-burn economics in the name of the free market. Suddenly Ealing was able to prove it was still relevant, if a little less vituperative. For in Titfield, the satire had shifted from documenting the suffering the New Jerusalem had caused

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(but was necessary to bring more equality and services to all of Britain), to the very death of the connection to England’s past industrial strengths and glories (by the free market carnivores of Churchill’s ’50s), represented by the train itself. Conservationists against the conservative budget meanies. The Thunderbolt is a relic of the Victorian age, of the older England that had obviously died, like the west in the American westerns. The rural British wanted to maintain and preserve that image of green England, but also its connection to the major trading hubs of the big cities. The Thunderbolt is the means of getting out of such small towns and seeing the world and not always throwing the baby out with the bathwater in the name of “new business.” The Kinks would later pay tribute to the village green, a bygone symbol of England’s lost past, and their many albums were conflicted about the passing of England; goodriddance to an antiquated and outdated social system, but if only to be replaced by skyscrapers and office blocks, what was the profit in that? The past may be obsolete, but is the “make it new!” fascination always so much better? Ray Davies added, “Like the last of the good ol’ puffer

Figure 5.3. The Titfield Thunderbolt (Charles Crichton, 1953). A relic of older, Victorian England. Universal Pictures/Photofest.

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trains/I’m the last of the blood and sweat brigade/I’m the last of the good old-fashioned steam-powered trains/But I live in a museum, so I’m okay.” (“The Last of the Steam Powered Trains,” 1968)23 The lyricist compares himself to the last of those commissioned trains—a relic, yes, but a tribute, too. And a museum is exactly where the Thunderbolt was when it was taken out to refight the village’s battle. The Titfield story itself is a mirror of 1953 England in that, in the narrative, the community is divided between those enthusiasts bent on maintaining the railway line and those determined to bring in the buses. Those who want to salvage the train are the most conservative members of society in real life, from the preacher (George Ralph) and the squire (Naunton Wayne) to the wealthy village eccentric (Stanley Holloway). They come together and push the community to save this symbol of Britain’s great and powerful past, arguing that to let it pass into oblivion is to lose identity as British citizens. As Holloway says, “We mustn’t let this, too, pass, like so much of our heritage nowadays,” reminding the 1950s audience how the tensions in the film are the same tensions in postwar Britain—a rumination of the push-pull nature of historical headway and the conflict between the forces of conservation versus British modernity (with all its postmodern messiness and all mod cons). And here, in a new twist for Ealing, in the odd effort at satirizing the dangers of the headlong leap into the new, Britain is portrayed as associated with Americanization, as visualized in the film by the pub’s television (the most ubiquitous of carnivores to filmmakers, too), which only plays American westerns. This is ironic because Titfield itself celebrates its own mythic past, its nearly lost innocence and romantic allure, an old-world mythology the conservative denizens fight vehemently for. Above all, the amalgamation of the squire, clergyman, and wealthy eccentric identify the film’s sense of community, which is conceived of along the lines of traditional English pastoral mythology. Their “resurrection” of the train is, like the film’s enterprise, a resurrection of a museum portrait of an earlier England. Instead of celebrating the utopias of community as it seeks to do at the end, the film reveals, in spite of itself, the efforts on the part of a few conservatives to salvage a way of life that is not merely passing but is actually gone.24 It was the first postwar Ealing film that evoked and pined for old Britain, exactly the type of film that Balcon, during the height of the satires (1947–1953), sought to avoid, hating the sentimentality of the still current crop of films about old Britain pumped-out by Hollywood.

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Why, though? Why this almost sentimental change? Because England was finally on her way back, facing a brighter, shinier future of better services and flasher appliances and homes, back on the road to domestic prosperity and world influence, so, they could go back to dreaming of Albion’s Old Jerusalem mythologies. And yet, Titfield Thunderbolt also often feels like a mock-pastoral in its fondness for those mod cons the citizens use to preserve the relics from a bygone age. Sue Harper and Vincent Porter complain that in this “color” Ealing film, cinematographer Douglas Slocombe was overwhelmed by the new Technicolor process (even though Technicolor had been in use in Britain since 1937): “his use of the medium on The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953) is uninventive; the high colour values are so uninflected that the little village and toy town train lack emotional substance.”25 But that is the point, as a mock-pastoral, the fakeness of “Ye Olde English” town and its “green and pleasant land” countryside is pure myth. Here, the satire suggests the Art of Artifice that would be perfected by Austrian émigré Douglas Sirk working in the States at the very same moment. The artificiality of the image in Titfield Thunderbolt exposes the artificial construct of musty concepts like Olde England; it mocks the British addiction to their own olden days fetishes, suggesting that Balcon was moving away from the harsh realist style of the late forties satires and into a more exaggeratedly oversaturated one. This new type of gently mocking tone would give way to the rougher language and subject matter of the last classic, The Ladykillers. The Ladykillers Directed by Alexander Mackendrick Written by William Rose (story) and Tibby Clarke (script) Produced by Michael Balcon Associate Producer Seth Holt UK release December 8, 1955 Reaching one more time for a story that modernized the nostalgia for passed times, in the spring of 1955 Ealing finished out their great satiric run with The Ladykillers,26 wherein a motley collection of thieves again plot a robbery (Clarke’s preferred narrative device), this time of an armoured car, and use the King’s Cross boarding house of an innocent old maid, Mrs. Wilberforce (Katie Johnson), who lives alone with her parrot, as their base of operations. The professor (Guinness) and his gang of kooky characters (from Cecil Parker as Major Courtney and Herbert Lom as Louis to Peter Sellers as Harry—by now famous on radio as the most talented Goon—and Danny Green as One-Round) convince her

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that they are a musical group using the room for rehearsals. Once she discovers their decidedly un-British scheme and before she can turn them in to the authorities who already think her a nutty old loon, they try to get rid of her, but end up knocking each other off instead in complex sequences of tricks and double-crosses. As the signifier of Old Britain, she of course survives unharmed. Most critical readings of this late Ealing satire view it, like Titfield, as an ode to Ye Olde England, to what has been lost but also to what deserves to be preserved, if not resurrected. A much more arresting reading as an Ealing satire is that it is more an exposé of how that postwar nostalgic obsession with old England continued to crush those at the bottom of the socioeconomic food chain, making the film a serious treatise about how Britain was continually being held back by its living-in-the-past mentality, and showing how those Brits were actually still living pinched lives even with their new sense of visibility and diversity in postwar England. Part of what makes one British in any time is the practice of effacing oneself for the good of the community and nation—a favorite target of the later satirists as a culture of conformity can also lead to a loss of individual identity. Ladykillers is a snapshot of classic British hyperhospitality, only here the not-really-so evil villains lose more than their ipseity in their criminal endeavors, they lose their lives in their desires to break free of postwar British pieties and constrictions. Mrs. Wilberforce’s house is the symbol of this entropic kingdom. And, like the house, which is the sole survivor of another time, hemmed-in by the images of modernity, she [Wilberforce] is a relic, a survivor from another world. Everything in her house is original and authentic, in contrast to the disguises and impersonations of her lodgers. She is the incarnation of a sense of history, duty, and gentility.27 While Mrs. Wilberforce is sturdy Old England, the gang is a microcosm of modern British society, many of whom migrated to London after the war seeking their fortunes in the now-booming England-on-the-mend. They view themselves as good Britons with good intentions (they’re good bad, not evil), but they are fallible, too, as the professor states with dripping rancor, “It was a good plan but for the human element.” In fact, in the most satiric moment in the film, they compare their theft (after Wilberforce finds out) to the government’s attempts at social welfare as they, too, are merely looking to spread the wealth of the country to the deserving working classes; they see themselves not unlike the modern postwar politicians, Robin Hoods for the New Jerusalem.

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There may not ever again be a community that came together for the war, but there is unity against postwar English austerity (the gang), and in this way the audience actually finds themselves rooting for the oddballs even more than old Wilberforce/England. Everything in the house may be “original and authentic,” and everything about the gang “false,” but in post-Empire Britain they are envoys for how diverse Britain was becoming. The house manifests itself as old England’s values and historical culture but also one that acts like a stifling prison for the newly emancipated working classes. Sitting at the cul-de-sac of a nearly deserted block, crucially poised on the dividing line between city and country, Mackendrick and Clarke use her “English Country House,” modest though it is (it is a suburban home, having not the grandeur of a Downton, but it also isn’t a postwar pre-fab concrete eyesore, either; it is still a concrete English trope often used as an extra, if not the main, character in English literature and film) to contrast how the world had changed by the mid-1950s, illustrating the problems associated with the glorifying of the English country house as a symbol of supposed civility and benign power.29 Virginia C. Kenny poses, The country-house ethos had the greater efficacy as a unifying metaphor because its setting—the country-house itself—was so palpably a functioning entity, bearing witness to the reality of the fusion of past, present and future social values in an ever-changing but seemingly unbreakable continuum.30 English country houses after 1945 were rare, symbols of the lost age. Few Britons could afford to buy them, and with the declining aristocracy, fewer still could afford their upkeep, mirroring the meltdown of the traditional class structures. Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) was an elegy for the departure of the country lifestyle as much as for an architecture that he lamented would die with the New Jerusalem shift to working- and middle-class concerns, especially in its attempts at wealth redistribution and building of nondescript pre-fab council estates. Along with the popularity of Brideshead, there was an active nostalgia with the rise of the Conservation Corps that conspired to save old country

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houses (along with the environment) because it symbolized saving old England herself.31 The English country house story has had a great revival with Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989), Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (2009), Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child (2011), and of course Julian Fellowes’s Downton Abbey (2010–2015). In an observant Guardian article, Blake Morrison explained the appeal: What attracts the non-U contemporary novelist to country houses is the space they afford for gathering a group of diverse characters—servants as well as masters—under one roof, so as to watch how tensions develop, love affairs begin and catastrophes unfold. In this, they’re also engaging with a tradition that runs from Pope, Fielding and Austen to Forster, Wodehouse and Waugh. That tradition is reflected in the number of classics with houses as their title—Howards End, Waverley, Wuthering Heights, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, The Spoils of Poynton—not to mention the fictional houses made so memorable that they rank with real ones—Pemberley (home to Mr Darcy), Manderley (home to Max de Winter), Thornfield (home to Mr Rochester), Baskerville Hall, and so on.32 The house has staying power because it represents stability, decorum, and everything premodern—in other words pre-Lapsarian—before it all was lost to the ill-bred socialists and the uncouth masses. Morrison continues, As Mark Girouard points out in his anthology A Country House Companion, there’s a mythology surrounding English country houses that extols them as “magical places” and their owners as wise custodians who tend the land, look after their tenants and servants, devote their lives to public service, fill their galleries with beautiful pictures and their libraries with rare books, and are unfailingly hospitable to friends and guests. Predictably, the most zealous purveyors of the myth have been aristocrats themselves, who depict their homes not as monuments to power and wealth but as embodiments of grace and gentility.33 Indeed, the houses were kept by their potentates as symbols of the philanthropic nature of their generosity toward Britain’s poorer classes, never mind how confined and precarious the lives of so many of those in these

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classes were. For these captives, it was the original job-lock, and the estates themselves were monuments to now-outdated British class strictures, what Raymond Williams called “knowable communities,” because they were so familiar and self-contained and everyone knew their place within them.34 If the English country house novel can be broken down further into the regionalist variant (whose setting is constructed to emphasize its difference from any other region and whose world is for the most part stable) and the provincial one (whose setting is constructed in terms of its difference from the metropolis and which, as a result, is in dialectical interchange with the fast changing modern world), in both cases the emotions evoked are nostalgic for a lost age, an anxious fear and longing for something that can never be brought back. In gothic British stories, if the English country house stands for the past that never really goes away, it is the same here in Ladykillers. Wilberforce (from the old English meaning “wild boar”) and her house (the ultimate staple of old England) work to defeat this unseemly modern mob. But this was 1955, and Ladykillers sits squarely in that transition between the country house ideal of Waugh’s wistful imagination (though he himself later apologized for over-romancing it) and Ealing’s later postmodern attacks on British sentimental eidolons.35 As a postwar critique, Ladykillers’ nostalgia crushes the hopes and dreams of postwar Britain. The film is a paean to old age . . . Mrs. Wilberforce’s world is an apt metaphor for mid-1950s England, a cul-de-sac slumbering peacefully but shortly to be violently awakened.36 That sleepy old blind alley had already been more than awakened by the war! But in 1956 one final shock and challenge to Empire would appear, the Suez crisis, which many historians believe to be the true end of Empire.37 Ladykillers captures this apocalyptic fin-de-siècle mood of eclipse with its gothically dark color scheme and Halloween-like tones capturing the haunting mid-1950s anxieties over Empire’s decline and Britain’s Cold War international tensions and conflicts.38 Ironically, though a robbery and murder story, the film actually begins as a melodrama (which is why the lighting styles, muted colors, and camera angles are so mawkishly neo-noir) and slowly shifts to deep black comedy. This was another way British films differentiated themselves from Hollywood fare that bathed themselves in perfectly placed, beautifully carved actors in evenly distributed light. Here Mackendrick darkens the frame by shooting a full F-stop up and organizing Kafkaesque compositions that are morbidly bent. This became Mackendrick’s signa-

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Figure 5.4. The Ladykillers (Alexander Mackendrick, 1955). Professor Marcus (Guinness) and his gang (Herbert Lom, Danny Green, Cecil Parker, and Peter Sellers) are no match for Mrs. Wilberforce’s (Katie Johnson) English country house. Continental Distributing/Photofest.

ture trick, to start his stories in heavy drama (the introductory shots of Guinness through the haze of the front door of the house is foreboding) and then slowly reveal that what the audience is actually watching is a comedy (err . . . satire), albeit a very grim one.39 Suddenly a film that was creeping along as an ominous thriller becomes a character study of British eccentricities way out of their element. Sinister forces within the old Victorian house suddenly go askew, one by one. At one point, for example, in a farcical chase sequence, the eccentrics are forced on to the rooftop to save Wilberforce’s prized parrot (an anthropomorphized personification of the antithetically Lucretian belief that free will is an illusion, or at the least, that one has no chance against nature’s inscrutability).40 Though Old England wins in the end, Mrs. Wilberforce is not the one who aids in the gang’s dissolution:

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Ripping England! . . . she is ineffectual. She does not bring the men to justice, hard as she tries. She cannot convince the police that a robbery has taken place. In short, it is almost as if she were invisible to everyone except the audience. The men do themselves in no thanks to her. The film begins as a parody of a horror film, and her house appears the perfect setting for a crime as it personifies age and decay.41

The eccentrics, as moderns, do themselves in, the poor sods. In the face of Mrs. Wilberforce’s Victorian manners, none of the modernized gang have the Victorian/colonial plunder-the-world bloodlust and killer sensibilities to actually knock her off (even if the audience sometimes roots for it); they’d be killing old England itself if they did, and this no true Briton could endure. So, logically and ironically, their downfall is a simile for England’s inability to ever become fully modern—crushed by its citizens’ incurable longing for the glory that was the past. This is an updated twist on the earlier Ealing satires that cried again and again for Britain to modernize her antiquated soul.42 Professor Marcus grumbles a final epitaph, “No really good plan could ever include a Mrs. Wilberforce!” Definitely not if she is old England, and certainly not if the British wanted to attain full modernization yet keep their British identity, a paradox as confusing as the New Jerusalem itself. As Faulkner exalted about the pull of history on us all, “The past is never dead; it’s not even past.”43 Or, in other words, the inhuman element.

The End of Ealing Ailing and hemorrhaging money, Ealing was sold to the BBC in late 1955.44 In 1956, Balcon was asked by the BBC to do what he did best—to make another comedy. But what the new regime didn’t understand was that the moment for great satires had passed, because the postwar malaise had passed. In any case, doing his job, Balcon gave it one more shot. It was called Who Done It? (Basil Dearden), and its most notable feature (since it is not a great film and is indicative of the decline of the Ealing production values, too) was a new young comedian on the music-hall scene, Benny Hill.45 The topical subject matter had obvious parallels to the unmasking of the spies Klaus Fuchs and Allan Nunn May in 1950 (the British equivalent of the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss) who had penetrated the British intelligence system. The film is further evidence that by 1956 the Cold War was in full force, replacing the end of Empire as the Brits most pressing concern. It became a new hot topic for British

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filmmakers, from the James Bond franchise to Hitchcock’s Technicolor international intrigues. In any case, Who Done It? was a failure at the box office, and Ealing’s day was done. There were exactly ninety-six films made under Balcon, the smaller ones almost always making back their production costs because the average Ealing film was a collective endeavor that used a formula as we’ve explored, which allowed all the artisans to share in the creation of the product. Film historians often mention Ealing only in passing, and condescend to its supposed paternalism. Charles Barr defends against this criticism, but still doesn’t go far enough in saying why: “Ealing’s values were decent, virtuous and simplistic, and finite of ambition,” he argues.46 This is a fine summation of Balcon’s and Ealing’s achievement, but it is also a romanticized view of Ealing as stereotypically British with its decency and decorum and stiff-upper-lip character. This view turns Ealing into something it wasn’t. The satires were editorials that took this sentimental British caricature to task, not ones that re-enforced the nostalgia. That was what made them significant postwar works of art (and separated them from the other British studios), reflecting and promoting a new Britain. Ealing understood the true history of Britain in the late 1940s, and of British cinema, no matter what the French or Italians said about them. In fact, many of the Ealing team were anti-Establishment, and labeling them (simply because they were British) as “decent, virtuous and simplistic” was exactly the kind of myopia they were lampooning. Ealing’s satire would be echoed in the next/1960s decade from the Beatles and the Kinks to Beyond the Fringe and the Pythons. Balcon and Ealing actually represented that high-end attack of the herbivores against the carnivores, those “readers of the Daily Express; the Evelyn Waughs; the cast of the Directory of Directories; the members of the upper- and middle-classes who believed that if God had not wished them to prey on all smaller and weaker creatures without scruple he would not have made them as they are.”47 In a tribunal ode to their own staying power, unlike many other old British film studios that are now furniture warehouses, factories, housing estates, and shopping centers, the Ealing buildings/studios on the compact site between Walpole Park and Ealing Green still stand, and still house a working electronic conduit of popular culture voicing the fears, hopes, and desires of the British people. So now, for transatlantic contrast, a look at how the American satires of this same period—late 1940s to early 1950s—were becoming more sophisticated and more appreciative of what the British satiric artists were doing, and so, helping these two nations explain themselves to each other in a deeper way.

6 The Special Relationship American Satires of the 1940s

I will merely mention a few other aspects of [postwar] Anglomania as seen in pop music: Elton John, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and other pop artists in America, a black “Downtown” Julie Brown on MTV, and perhaps even the constantly stressed Britishness of Bob Hope. —from O.R. Dathorne’s In Europe’s Image: The Need for American Multiculturalism1

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S A STUDY OF POSTWAR BRITISH SATIRE, examining what American films were doing at the same time in this most esoteric of genres helps enlighten how these cultures affected one another very differently from their continental counterparts. Most saliently,

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• they shared a common language; • the twain were conjoined by what Churchill in 1946 famously tagged the “special relationship” (or as he pronounced it in his “Iron Curtain” speech, somewhat suspiciously today it must be noted, “the fraternal association between Englishspeaking peoples”);2

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Ripping England! • there was the clear influence of so many Yanks who descended on England by the millions during the war; • Hollywood, too, had moved into England (and has never really left) during and after the war;3 • even before the Blitz and the Battle of Britain, many American and British newspapers and periodicals carried “Letter from London,” and/or “Letter from the States” sections and reports for their readers, reflecting an unspoken yet clear support for each other’s thoughts on the catastrophic events unfolding in Europe; • as compatriots who had come through the war together, art and popular culture became the way the nations explained themselves to each other, and by 1945, film had become the most influential of all the arts; and • Americans would become British film’s main export audience after the war, enabling the Brits to continue their worldwide influence, if not colonially, then culturally by returning desperately needed finances back to the isles, and by America adapting so many British stories, shows, styles, and even attitudes, especially satiric ones, which continues to this day.

The American satires would have a different tinge. Whereas the States would immediately have one of the longest economic booms in its history, Britain would face one of the longest downturns in theirs. From these different financial circumstances, the caustic posture of the American send-ups versus the British versions were pronounced—they were not as socially militant as the British ones. Still, the acid-tongued artists working in their respective “special-relationship” countries would come to have mutual admiration for how far each pushed the boundaries of Western Anglo tastes.

Postwar Atmosphere and American Satires of the 1940s The American film industry boomed during and immediately after World War II, with more than ninety million people going to the movies each week, sometimes even twice a week or more. The years 1943 to 1959 have been called the “Best Years” by historians, journalists, and academics because of the plentiful gifts the U.S. government showered on GIs and

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various industries that helped win the war (military/defense, transportation/auto, agriculture/provisions, banking/credit, etc.), rippling out to all levels of society and facilitating even the lowliest of classes in attaining higher standards of living than they had ever known before.4 But these same years have also been called the Age of Anxiety, the Age of Doubt, the Postwar Blues, and a Period of Triumphalist Despair.5 There was no getting around the war’s psychological shocks that echoed long after the last shot was fired. In magazines, comics, and movies there was a new emphasis on death, violence, and cynicism, along with a renewed sense of anxiety caused by the return to an aggressively capitalist system after years of government stimulus since at least 1933. Many feared that the financial gains won during the war would now come to an end. So, a belief took hold that getting-and-spending would be the best way to stave off a return to Great Depression levels of want. Violent strikes and labor/ management tensions over frozen wage hikes and benefits, especially at auto plants and Hollywood studios, erupted after the mostly peaceful wartime cooperation. Rising tensions with the Soviet Union and the now chronic dread of the atomic bomb added to the readily revealed horrors of genocide, fascism, and holocaust. And, there was a new fascination with abnormal psychology, especially the neuroses and unpredictability of returned vets. To underscore the sense of existential dread, both Sartre and then Camus visited the States in early 1946, aware of an audience eager for their alternatively astute views on the darker turn the first half of the twentieth century had brought to human nature.6 The mostly B-film noirs were the truest reflections of these postwar worries, but satire played an important role, too.7 American film produced its own comedic commentaries on the menacingly churning culture of the time, and were just as important to the subculture of cinematic aficionados in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other urban centers who sought out such recondite fare wider domestic audiences were not yet ready for. The postwar American satires also illuminate the enormous effect the English detractors would have on the most cosmopolitan and astute new writers, directors, performers, and comedians coming of age in the 1940s and ’50s. Even if most Americans weren’t yet in tune with the coming satire wave, many Americans were becoming worldlier. Returning soldiers brought back with them an appreciation for foreign practices, values, and ideas, and film began to be taken more seriously after the more cultivated releases of Citizen Kane (1941) and Casablanca (1942). At the same time, periodicals such as Partisan Review, The New Yorker, The Nation, and Commentary began to review popular cultural artifacts with high-brow analysis. In the 1940s there were some crucial American films that made

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serious statements through multileveled truculent irony, putting on view the period’s anxious and tenebrous uncertainties for those whose antennae were open to such examinations, and the U.S. satires were often just as sneakily clever in their pricking of American mores as their British counterparts. Though a half-dozen other films could probably be cited as notable postwar American satires, here are a few that stand out as some of the strongest and most lastingly influential of that time without which, maybe, the British satires wouldn’t have been as presciently acerbic either.

Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942) During the 1930s, as Germany amped up its war machine and xenophobic rhetoric, no studio would go near making films that commented on the situation, either for fear of reprisals or of standing out—the studios did not want to remind Americans that they were run by Jewish moguls, and that they were some of the highest paid CEOs in the country (in fact, Louis B. Mayer was at one point the highest paid person in America). The only studio that dared—after Chaplin and United Artists made The Great Dictator (1941; though Chaplin financed that burlesque himself)— would be Warner Brothers, and they did so only after their German representative was murdered by the SS.8 The German-born and -trained Ernst Lubitsch, working with Hungarian émigré (via England) Alexander Korda, set his film To Be or Not To Be (1942) among a Warsaw theater troupe, whose own subversive play is banned as the Nazis invade (the ultimate humorless xenophobes, freedom of thought and speech frightens them). The troupe is forced to put on only Shakespeare plays (somehow deemed safe, even though the Germans were already bombing England by 1940). They stage Hamlet. Lubitsch had already brought a European sophistication to Hollywood in the 1930s after he was tempted over from Ufa by United Artists’ co-founder Mary Pickford. He had Garbo laugh in Ninotchka (1939) and James Stewart compose a love letter in The Shop around the Corner (1940). Lubitsch parodies not only Hitler and his fascist ideology, but ham acting, too, embodied by Josef Tura (a pitch-perfect Jack Benny). Benny plays the cuckold to his beautiful wife Maria Tura (the brilliant Carol Lombard), who cheats on him with a young officer, Lt. Stanislav Sobinski (the handsome Robert Stack), who always leaves the theater to visit Maria backstage just as Benny goes into the Dane’s famous soliloquy (it’s a shame we don’t get more of it than just the first two or three lines, as Benny’s delivery is marvelously dry). Benny notices and gets increas-

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ingly angry, thinking his performance is boring audiences. Instead, it is his wife who is bored and turns to infidelity to liven up her marriage; it is the acceptable thing to do in European educated circles, something God-fearing Americans could absorb only through humor. STANISLAV: What are we gonna do with your husband? MARIA: What? STANISLAV: We must tell him, of course. MARIA: Tell him what? STANISLAV: That we love each other. That we’re mad about each other. He has no right to stand in our way! MARIA: Stanislav, you’re really a darling, but you don’t seem to realize that I’m a married woman. STANISLAV: That’s why I want to talk to your husband. MARIA: But I love my husband! STANISLAV: No, you don’t. You’re just decent—you’re kind and you feel sorry for him. MARIA: You have to understand . . . As a good-looking but naïve soldier, Stanislav couldn’t comprehend such continental savoir vivre. Neither could most Americans. Lombard is light as air and gorgeously erudite (even watching today one empathizes with how crushed Clark Gable must have been at her premature end). Here Lubitsch exposes the childish prudery of blue noses and finger-wagging moralists who make life miserable with their benighted outrage. Lubitsch would much rather spend time with urbane characters who often exhibit double standards than with those who stifle noumenon love and exuberant life with soul-crushing moralizing. His continentals have weaknesses and odd foibles, but they are always human (“they have their reasons,” in Renoir’s renowned incantation), stylish and suave, and much more multidimensional than average American Hollywood hayseeds like Gary Cooper or Will Rogers. This was the ultimate Lubitsch touch.

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Figure 6.1. To Be or Not to Be. Tura (Jack Benny) is interrupted by Sobinski (Robert Stack) and the Lubitsch touch. United Artists/Photofest.

Through mockery of Aryan cruelty (Lubitsch wastes no time in suggesting that Lombard/Maria’s glamorous dress wouldn’t fit in in the barbaric Nazi-run camps), To Be or Not to Be allowed Lubitsch to tap into the new interest in fighting Nazis with America’s just-in-time entry

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into the war. Satiric, yes, but with delicate poignancy, as the marching Nazi boots are more than serious. Lubitsch always mixed his droll observations with pangs. The film was released on March 6, 1942. Even though shot and edited very quickly (the script had to have been written or worked out in the fall of 1941, when American sentiment still wanted nothing to do with “that European war”), this brilliant romp amazes with its foresight and daringness to push isolation-prone Americans to think about what is happening in Europe. America did not enter the war until Dec. 8, 1941 (and the date on the calendar of the movie’s clueless villain Colonel Ehrhardt says Tuesday, December 16, 1941—just over a week after Pearl Harbor). The movie asserts that many already knew about the concentration camps and Gestapo atrocities. Lubitsch, who adapted the script with Edwin Justus Mayer from the story by Melchior Lengyel, was obviously informed of these horrible doings, too, and here he brings them to the American audience. Not only do we get Benny’s own mocking of his overblown ego, but also a lampoon of how seriously actors take themselves, even while true horrors play out in reality (such as the eradication of an entire race within a supposedly civilized country, Lubitsch’s own native land). As the movie’s characters act out a plot to divert the saboteur Siletsky to Gestapo headquarters, in their own theater disguised with the set from their banned play about the Nazis, other actors instruct Josef to not overact. “We’d hate to leave our country in the fate of a ham!” Ping! Benny reacts prissily like some reality TV rageholic. Classic Lubitsch and Benny. When Siletsky realizes Benny is not Col. Ehrhardt, Siletsky escapes and races through the theater and in a terrific setup he is shot on stage by Stanislav. The curtain goes up for all the company to see, in a life imitating the theater imitating life infinite-regression moment. Eventually Benny/Tura has to impersonate Siletsky to Col. Ehrhardt, and Ehrhardt is even more of a buffoon than when Benny overplayed him. “So they call me Concentration Camp Ehrhardt, eh?” and they both laugh. With the joke, Tura: “Of course, you’ve heard of that great actor Josef Tura.” Ehrhardt: “Yes I saw him perform once before the war. What he did to Shakespeare we are now doing to Poland.”9 Some critics were offended by this line, demonstrating all too well exactly Lubitsch’s point about American squeamishness with serious satire. Lubitsch’s brilliant aesthetic allows the camera to act as a fly on the wall as we are aware of the double meanings in every joke. He even doubles the doubling as actors impersonate actors impersonating Nazis and use the theater as a way to expose the inhumane creed of Hitler. Lubitsch said to one critic who questioned To Be or Not to Be’s daring:

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Ripping England! What I have satirized in this picture are the Nazis and their ridiculous ideology. I have also satirized the attitude of actors who always remain actors regardless of how dangerous the situation might be, which I believe is a true observation. It can be argued if the tragedy of Poland realistically portrayed in To Be or Not to Be can be merged with satire. I believe it can be and so do the audience which I observed during a screening of To Be or Not to Be; but this is a matter of debate and everyone is entitled to his point of view.10

Lubitsch was a true satirist who realized that behind the humor is tragedy and a hope for change. And David Edelstein, writing about the controversy-causing James Franco/Seth Rogan comedy The Interview (2014) in New York Magazine, adds, “There’s a great American tradition of tasteless, righteous, violent satire against political leaders, and, to repeat the point, when they’re totalitarian dictators of repressive states whose people don’t dare satirize them, it’s all the more righteous.”11 Lubitsch’s work fitted in well with this American satiric tradition. Lubitsch also pays tribute to British resolve and notes in the film that England had become a base of Polish resistance. Korda was probably very pleased when the film’s narrator states, “But the real resistance was found somewhere in England. The Polish squadron of the RAF!” in which Stack/Stanislav serves. And Lubitsch’s satire especially would have hit home with British audiences forced to rations when (the real) Col. Ehrhardt wonders aloud, “What kind of a man doesn’t drink, smoke or eat meat!?” Joseph Tura replies, “Oh, you mean Hitler?” In a panic Ehrhardt instructs, “Forget I said that.” And in the final act, the Nazis take over the theater to stage yet another pageant for Hitler (a nod to Riefenstahl’s grandiosely pompous films). As Hitler himself arrives in a procession of German limos and enters the theater to the singing of the National Anthem, the actors sneak in dressed as Nazis and pretend to grab the Polish Jew Greenburg, who (Felix Bressart, a Lubitsch staple) gets to speak the Shylock soliloquy (something he’d always wanted to do), just as Bronski gets to play Hitler (something he said he’d always wanted to do), fooling the Nazis outside the theater. Tura orders all the Nazis (the actors) to leave Poland immediately, and they do in Hitler’s cars, headed for the planes that will take them to London. They have saved the Polish underground and shown that actors are useful and that the arts can be a matter of life and death. As Bronski goes in to get Maria, he fools Ehrhardt again, and Maria runs out after him screaming, “Mein Fuherer!” and they escape.12 Finally on the plane, Lubitsch gives us one last the-Germans-as-lemmings joke

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when Bronski (as Hitler) makes the German pilots jump out of the plane on command. Bronski himself parachutes on to a field in Scotland, as a Scottish farmer remarks, “First it was Hess, now him!” and the actors are welcomed as heroes. When Tura is asked what he would like to do for the war effort, Maria announces, “He wants to play Hamlet,” and we see him in a packed house, and again as he starts his monologue, this time a different young suitor leaves his seat. The Lubitsch touch was the power of suggestion, an elbow-in-theribs to upscale audiences, a technique that is always much more powerful than actually showing, a touch that Spike Milligan would adapt for his radio verbal/visual suggestiveness. At Lubitsch’s funeral, Billy Wilder is said to have pined, “No more Lubitsch,” to which William Wyler responded, “Worse than that—no more Lubitsch films.” Both had spent some of the war years soaking up British gallows humor.

W.C. Fields’s Revolt from the Village If the seeds of the coming postwar satire boom can be found in Lubitsch, the most venomous critic of the American mid-cult lifestyle would be W.C. Fields. Fields’s specialty was laying bare how some middle brows are always straining to “put it across” but they don’t really have, as Dwight Macdonald put it, “the cultural means” to do so. Fields was Macdonald in disguise with his contempt for the average American’s appetite for low-brow kitsch. In the 1930s and early 1940s, everyone from Diego Rivera to John Steinbeck rushed to celebrate the common man as the new model of mankind, after denigrating the rubes in the countryside in the sophisticated 1920s. One holdout, though, who continued to mock the average American was W.C. Fields. But Fields didn’t just mock the “boobousie,” so much as critique the entire American experiment. In Fields’s work, democracy had been high-jacked and sold, and he rendered it as a colossal fraud on the middle and working classes. By the 1930s, the celebration of the common man was the order of the day, from Hollywood movies (Meet John Doe, Frank Capra, 1941), to popular music (Woody Guthrie), to literature (Steinbeck), and even to dance (Aaron Copeland and Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo, 1942). But Fields wasn’t buying it and would continue to lampoon the small-town, nineteenth-century beliefs that sustained their puritanical superiority over modern America into the 1930s and ’40s. Fields made his career as a juggler touring the world on the vaudeville circuit, including long stints in Britain with the same revue playing cities from London to Manchester, Edinburgh to Newcastle.13 As he perfected his act, he slowly recognized that his wry persona as a put-upon

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crank worked even better than his athletic talents. This resource was very fortunate, as his body had aged quickly from heavy drinking. As sound came to the movies, Fields came into his own, but he found he could only really work with the one director whom he felt understood what he was doing, Eddie Cline. Cline photographed Fields’s great visual pantomime, but helped him pivot over to creatively playful language with close-ups and asides meant for sharp urbane in-the-know audiences. Like Mencken and Lewis on the page before him, language gave Fields the means for deriding the mythological nineteenth-century American utopia of apple pie and democracy. Fields often worked with the prim yet erudite Franklin Pangborn, particularly so he could juxtapose different oddball speaking methods. Pangborn played the gay, officious parody of conservative respectability, decency, and decorum. In The Bank Dick (1940), Pangborn is the bank manager, the figure of authority Fields must divert from exposing his son-in-law-to-be’s “borrowing” of bank funds, the little guy caught in the middle who gets shafted as the big bankers run semi-legalized rackets. Fields, who wrote the script under the nom-de-plume Mahatma Kane Jeeves (my hat, my cane, Jeeves), seems to have a great respect for Pangborn’s character, too, and yet he has to save his own skin by getting Pangborn looped, thus taking him out of commission.14 Fields also employed Edward Brophy, a character actor who often played the bumbling regulator watching out for workplace irregularities, but who is completely ill-suited for the job with his malapropisms and incompetent handling of every situation. In You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man (1939) he plays the local union representative asking Fields’s charlatan carnival showrunner chancer, “You don’t want no trouble with the unions, do ya?” Whipsnade: “Oh, I get it. I pay union wages.” Brophy: “Yeah, but which kind, the maxium or the minium?” In a classic comedic standard, Fields repeats his malapropism with venom, “the maxium or the minium, eh?” “Yes, the minium or the maxium?” These mistakes allow audiences, even those who are union supporters, to laugh at the uneducated rube, though Depression-era viewers probably gave him points for trying. Fields’s technique of parading oddball characters to amuse audiences was nothing new in the American humor tradition, derived in many ways from Mark Twain’s nineteenth-century regionalist travelogues, usually written for New England upper-middle-class readers who wanted to be told about the rest of America in all its strangeness, an America to which only the blue-blood WASP Northeasterner truly belonged.15 Now Fields’s upgraded twist on such outsider characters and their aural and visual quirks was the perfect tonic for his audience, the long-suffering victims of those hardest of hard times.

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“You can’t cheat an honest man, never give a sucker an even break or smarten-up a chump,” he informs anyone who will listen (they never do), summing up his entire comic philosophy in a single memorable line (borrowed from Calvin Coolidge’s famed 1920s proto-Babbitt promoney-chasing dictum, now applied by Fields with post-1920s and postmodern irony). You cannot cheat an honest man, because an honest man won’t ever get “suckered” into “holding your cash for you” in the baitand-switch short con; he’s kind of dumb, because he is so honest, but it is much easier to con someone who is dishonest to begin with.16 Here Fields’ is more interested in the long con of American banking, an occurrence as real today as it was when Fields was writing and performing. Jonathan Tasini’s research has shown, As the numbers reveal, we have basically lived through two distinct economic periods in this country since World War II. First, from right after the war until the mid-1970s, when productivity and wages basically tracked one another. That is, people worked hard and were productive—and that hard work was rewarded in ever increasing paychecks. Starting in the mid-1970s, however, while people kept working hard and productivity continued to soar, wage growth ceased.17 To Tasini, banksters have once again run rampant over the middle classes. Many economist are solidly in agreement on this fact. Every day the business section of The New York Times has another exposé on another bank or hedge fund that has been fined for illegal practices (bankers now just see the fines as the cost of doing business). The never-ending trend continues because they know they will never really pay a price, or that the government will always be there to bail them out when they fail. If any system has been rigged over the last thirty years, it has been banking. Business writer and venture capitalist Bruce Cannon Gibney sees the financial scandals of the last thirty years as directly connected to Baby Boomers’ protecting themselves through their political power: Any one bailout, tax cut, or similar would have been fine; indeed, orthodox. But it was not “just one”; the crisis was not so much acute as it is on-going, beginning with the S&L disaster of the mid-1980s and continuing with the LTCM emergency of 1998, the dot-com crash of 2000, and the housing and financial panics of 2008. And yet, over the years of Boomer control the response has always been the same: more deregulation, more spending, lower taxes, and no

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Whether it was just the Boomers or some combination of generations, either way, bankers have been emboldened to skirt, flaunt, and outright ignore the laws and rules that govern their sector. Bankers in Fields’s day were tame by comparison; his head would explode if he had to deal with their corrupt and deceitful shenanigans today. In the early 1940s, Fields continually satirized the contradictory traits of the American national character: Puritanism and rich self-indulgence, which should be two completely incongruous impulses and pursuits, but in America, are completely at home with one another. Fields, like Tasini, sees banking as just another American hustle, making money out of nothing whilst producing nothing of value, which is why he never trusted them.19 In the 1920s, businessmen, bankers especially, were the exemplars of American success; by the 1930s, they were American swine. Fields’s “Banker Song” from You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man (1939, while the country was still in the throes of the Depression) is a masterstroke of satiric mistrust of anyone with the ambitions of becoming a banker; that is, someone who makes money off of other people’s hard labor without contributing anything positive to society themselves. As the incompetent ringmaster of a fourth-rate circus, aptly named Larson E. Whipsnade, Fields horribly underpays his staff and performers (if he pays them anything at all), races the law from state border to state border, and sometimes has to perform himself when his stars go on strike. In the film’s most memorable sequence, he moonlights as a ventriloquist, a snide jab at his co-stars Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy, who the studio (Universal) kept forcing on Fields because their films (and radio programs) together were very popular, but which Fields felt degraded his work. When Whipsnade’s most popular act in this two-bit circus strike in protest, Whipsnade has to fill in, and he becomes the world’s worst ventriloquist. He laughs much too hard at the dummy’s lame joke about a cat’s tail being like a journey because it’s “long to the end.”20 The bad bushy moustache attempting to hide his obviously moving lips is hilarious, but it is a distraction to the real message, which is found in the lyrics of the song. His heart was set on becoming a banker and wearing a high silk hat And he treated rich and poor alike; it wasn’t long before he accumulated nearly

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$1000 in his own right (go away boy, you draw flies) And he charged them $500 and told them that was practically nothing He returned to the village to see his old sweetheart She looked oily (?!) through the imitation lace curtains She gained (mumble) pounds in the 10 years he’d been away A calico dress . . .21 It’s a story not unsimilar to Booth Tarkington’s Pulitzer-winner The Magnificent Ambersons (adapted by Orson Welles in 1942) about a “great” Midwestern family (1924/1943) whose young prodigal son goes off to seek his fortunes and returns to claim his sweetheart. In Fields’s telling, she is plumper and “oily,” not quite the princess he remembered her being, while he has transformed into the perfect Babbitt, a bankster charlatan who overcharges because that’s the American way. Babbitt was a God-fearing Rotarian Protestant who believed fervently in American capitalism and the magic of the free market, a system that will (God-has-willed-it) reward the Babbitts for all their hard work and delayed gratification. “Thems the Shylocks who got the mortgage on this house,” Fields’ hen-pecking wife pronounces at the beginning of The Bank Dick (1940) about Jewish Babbitt wanna-bes, exposing her racism and Babbittic ideological fetishism at the same time. Never mind that she’s being horribly politically incorrect, the family buys into the money-chasing Babbitt catechism just as much as any other group in America, which is exposed at every turn in this late Fields’ classic (its best scene contains another vultures’ rap from a slimy con man selling sham shares in the utterly fictitious “Beefsteak Mines”; Fields’ bank dick buys into the grifter’s scheme, but his naivety thwarts the charlatan in the end—hence, “you can’t cheat an honest man”). It’s all a con to Fields: the damning Puritanical tradition; middle-class respectability; Old WASP money vs. New Gatsby/Jazz Age obsessed materialism. Fields was born in the late nineteenth century (1880), and so he understood the supposed Genteel Tradition, a tradition he always saw as mythological at best and completely bogus at worst. Fields mocks the Babbitts who want to live a nineteenth-century lifestyle in a fancy twentieth-century suit and ostentatious automobile, in other words, the provincialism of small-town America and the vapidity of American popular culture, even as the business community embraced the Babbitt stereotype with civic pride. Fields thought it was all a lie, and he wasn’t buying it.22 Or, to play on Orwell: Americans are not so interested in ideas as to be tolerant of them.

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Fields’s last full-length, top-billed film was Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941), written by John T. Neville and Prescott Chaplin with the story by Otis Criblecoblis (Fields). (After Never . . . , Fields would be too ill to continue doing entire features). This is one of his funniest, as Philip Hamburger commented in The New Yorker: “It consists of scenes of this imaginary film, perhaps the sharpest parody of Hollywood ever made. We see Fields high in the sky in a fabulous airliner with his beautiful niece, a child singer of the species Durbina durbina [mocking the popularity of Deanna Durbin].”23 A completely meta-story (Fields plays himself, as does Pangborn), but this time Pangborn is the head of the studio listening to Fields pitch his own scripts, which he of course never could understand—a dig at the executives at Universal and the best document we have of Fields’s life working within the classical studio system (or the Industrial Mode of Production, as academics call it). Pangborn is under attack as he enters the studio floor from swinging lights and Nazis who slam into him while a wind machine blows him this way and that the whole time.24 We even get Margaret Dumont (from the Marx Brothers films) in her familiar role as the matronly sufferer of fools (i.e., the straight “man” to the Brothers’ insults and high jinx). Fields gifted his fans a postmodern cap to his consistently ahead-of-his-own-time brilliant career. The film is a pasquinade on Hollywood before Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1949), Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon (1941), or Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run (1941). Sucker includes the hysterical diner sketch with a large waitress who makes his life a constant burden, even in just trying to order a meal: FIELDS: I’d like a bowl— WAITRESS: cup. FIELDS: —cup of the stew. (She crosses almost everything he orders off the menu.) FIELDS (under his breath): I don’t know why I come in here. WAITRESS: You’re always squawking about something or other—if it isn’t the steak it’s something else. FIELDS: I didn’t squawk about the steak, dear. I merely said I didn’t see that old horse that used to be tethered outside here.

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Life for Fields is an endless run-in with half-wits and lazy pettifoggers. As he exclaims a little later against another injunction, “Suffering sciatica!” On the plane we also get another take on his standard shaving scene, with so little room to share with someone always in his way, much imitated by later comedians. And as he drops his liquor over the side, he naturally jumps out after it, and lands on a mountain top with a lovely maiden (Ouilotta, who has never seen another human, and he sees his opportunity to play “Squid Jam,” i.e., a game of Post Office). As Margaret Dumont (Mrs. Hemoglobin) seeks to join in the fun, the film returns to Pangborn and the studio, and we switch back and forth in this fashion. Next, Fields is in a Russian village teaching the proletariat about nature’s virtues. The Deanna Durbin–like songstress (Gloria Jean) sings again. As Hamburger wrote, Before The Great Man is through, he has encountered a huge gorilla, blown the foam off an ice-cream soda, and wildly driven an elderly lady to a maternity hospital, under the mistaken impression that she is to have a baby. Believe me, there has never been anything like that automobile ride anywhere, not even in The Bank Dick. There’s small point pursuing the logical line of this drama.25 It really is quite bizarre, but is just a pretext for Fields’s antics and his final exposé of American madness as the war began. Right in the middle of a scene, Fields even breaks the fourth wall as he steps into a soda shop and turns to the camera, “This thing was supposed to be a saloon, but the censor cut it out.” Hamburger actually began his review of Sucker thus, These are the dog days in the emotion-picture exhibiting field, all right. When I say “dog,” I am not referring to small dogs—Pekes and Poms—but to great big snarly, ill-tempered beasts. Up and down Broadway, the mastiffs are now on display, and the only conceivable reason people pay their money to attend is that they have an uncontrollable urge to climb into an ice box for a couple of hours. In contrast to what is laughingly called the “current cinema”—so hot, so dry, so cruel on the mind—I should like to recommend an eight-year old creation of W.C. Fields’, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, mercifully resurrected at the Avenue Playhouse. I seriously doubt if you will find

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Hamburger was on to the slow-burn rise of satire in the postwar years, when the seriousness of the returning shell-shocked troops, the new fight with the Soviet Union, and the House Un-American Activities Red scare made for a miserable summer of 1949. (The Russians had exploded their first atomic device only three weeks earlier on August 1, 1949, prior to Hamburger’s review, marking the true beginning of the Cold War twostate nuclear standoff.) Sucker was bizarre in a way that would prefigure the absurdist madcap surrealism of Spike Milligan and the Goons of the late ’40s and early ’50s, proving that small pockets of satire had finally made their way overseas and would inform the Brits about American humor and culture. Fields died on Christmas day, 1946, so he saw the end of the war, but did not live to see the ripple effect his brand of cynical, cantankerous satire would have on both American and British artists to come.

The 1940s Satires of Preston Sturges Sturges’s-directed satires are well-known, but less well known is one of the scripts he wrote for Paramount (the most European-influenced studio under Adolph Zukor and then Barney Balaban), called Remember the Night (1942); Sturges’s script was made during the war, which explains its darker tone. Remember the Night is the antithesis of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), even if it was made half a decade before that now-classic holiday staple.27 Capra’s American touch was passé by 1946, and the failure of It’s a Wonderful Life as an independent production began his decline. He made only a few films after the war. He should have turned to Sturges as his model. Directed by Mitchell Leisen but written by Sturges, Remember has the same wholesome down-home Americana atmosphere as Capra’s holiday staple (it even has some of the same cast, among them Beula Bondi as the mother), but this time Barbara Stanwyck is Lee Leander, a petty jewel thief who is nabbed snatching a bracelet from a high-end shop, a good girl gone bad from a rough upbringing in Indiana by a hateful mother and absent father. She needs to visit her Midwest home to get her priorities straight again, just as Fred MacMurray’s District Attorney, John Sargent, needs to learn that sometimes good people are caught in economic and moral traps.28 It’s a brilliant premise: since it’s almost impossible to convince a jury to convict Stanwyck at Christmas time, MacMurray’s DA gets a continuance until after the holidays. When her lawyer suggests she was

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temporarily “hypnotized” by the jewels, Sargent sees this as his chance to ask for an expert on brain-blindness, who (he knows) is away for the Christmas break. The judge and jury buy his lawyer’s dodge, while her comical council decidedly does not (the wonderfully hammy character actor Willard Robertson);29 Stanwyck barks at him, “Hypnotism?? That gag’s so old it’s got whiskers!” Feeling bad for her, MacMurray bails her out of jail, and with nowhere else to go he brings her back to his Indiana home (they bond over both being originally from the Hoosier state). Sturges gets to show the mythos of the goodness of down-home Midwestern American values, but also their prosaic nature, simultaneously (we even get a yodeling song from Sterling Holloway). Remember the Night would presage the postwar noir movement in its pitch-black darkness and absurdist moral lessons masked by holiday forgiveness. Along the way Sturges also sorts out urban versus rural justice, as MacMurray and Stanwyck are accused of breaking a fence, messing with private property, and caught trespassing by a gun-toting yokel who drags them in to the local magistrate. LEANDER tells him, “Don’t give your right name.” SARGENT: “Don’t give yours, either.” This advice coming from a supposedly honest Indiana lawyer? LEE: “I never do.” Both are learning the gray areas of law vs. disorder: she the warmth and value of down-home familial love and he the difficulty of growing up in a broken Depression-era family. For Sturges, life is suffering, and prosecutorial discretion should always err on the side of compassion and empathy. It’s revealed by the judge that this was a classic trap by a sleazy hayseed who created a detour so they’d unavoidably end up on his property, thus having to pay a fine, thus bringing in revenue for the town from unsuspecting out-of-towners going home for the holidays. A classic American scam, even from supposed God-fearing Midwesterners.30 Lubitsch, Fields, and Sturges’s point was that Americans were afraid of mental freedom—people actually thinking for themselves. Incuriosity and fear of anything new, foreign or intellectual, is as American as Wall Street corporate welfare or blaming the poor for their own plight. The true key to these satirists’ mordant observations was their belief that American democracy produces complacent and even dangerously

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narrow-minded conformists who purposely strive for the mediocrity of the middle-brow—half-educated masses who crush original minds for daring to think differently. These 1940s American satirists were attacking the “herd” mentality and encouraging Americans, as Edmund Wilson did before them, to discover the buried life, trying to awaken an emotionally repressed country they saw as sterile. Fields and Sturges (and Mencken) were actually anti-democratic in the sense that they believed democracy creates an atmosphere of tolerance for every form of idiocy, encourages it in fact, lending hucksters and carnival barkers a platform to scam, extoll hatred as a virtue, and often get rich while doing so. American outsider groups meet in their attacks on Wall Street crooks, platitudinous politicians in the pockets of lobbyists, corporate monopolists, and banksters alike. Donald Friede labeled such American Babbitts “Mechanical Angels” in 1948.31 In the 1940s, Lubitsch, Fields, and Sturges continued the work of earlier satirists Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, and Nathanael West. But as Lubitsch was from Mitteleuropa, Fields toured for months on end performing in shows throughout Britain, and Sturges was a cosmopolitan traveler from a wealthy family who spent many summers living in Paris, soaking up its intellectual old-world sophistication. They knew the British/European humorist tradition quite well, and they brought it back to the States with them, introducing such satiric fare (gradually and carefully) to American film and culture. If the postwar British artists had any outside influences it would have been these upscale erstwhile American satirists; if there was an Anglo-American transatlantic cultural exchange after the war, it can be found in this subtly shared satiric tradition. By the postwar years, a new crop of critics of the status quo would fill the void left by Lubitsch, Fields, and Sturges. These filmmakers, like their counterparts in the art world and academia, were mostly refugees who had fled the European catastrophe. They would contribute greatly to postwar American life and culture, while influencing the most intelligent of the British satirists, from Ealing to Milligan.

The European Émigrés and Late 1940s Satire in the United States The arts in America really took off in the late 1940s. The vibrancy of the period can be seen in the artists working at the time, and those who spoke of it. By the end of the decade, one that many were quite happy to see drift into the past, new jazz forms were thriving in clubs like the Spotlight, the Three Deuces, Jimmy Ryan’s, the Onyx, Tondelayo’s, and

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the Hickory House, mostly on 52nd Street, up in Harlem at the Savoy Ballroom and the Baby Grand, and in the village at the Village Vanguard and the Five Spot; even Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, and Charlie Mingus were already playing their new bebop, mostly in the East Village. In fact, by war’s end, in popular culture, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were already part of public consciousness on a large scale (Gillespie’s excitingly hopped bebop/swing hybrid “Salt Peanuts” had already stormed the charts in 1942–43.32 Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers especially went crazy for American bebop jazz that was coming out of the States).33 And in theater, by the fall of 1945 Rouben Mamoulian would have two Rodgers & Hammerstein scored hits, Carousel and Oklahoma, playing not just in New York but already touring the country (with dance sequences choreographed by the great Agnes de Mille). And of course the Beats, too, were travel-lusting the countryside, soaking up inspiration for their forthcoming cultural contributions to the late 1940s mighty ferment. Gore Vidal thought it bliss itself to be alive at that moment: Between the end of the Second World War in 1945 and the beginning of the Korean War in 1950, there was a burst of creative activity throughout the American Empire as well as in our client states of Western Europe. From Auden’s Age of Anxiety to Carson McCullers’s Reflections in a Golden Eye to Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky to Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire to Anthony Tudor’s ballets . . . it was an exciting time. All the arts in America exploded. Unlikely arts like ballet. . . . Suddenly in music there’s Lenny Bernstein . . . we were producing many first-rate poets, starting with Robert Lowell . . . and Tennessee Williams in the theater. I mean it was a burst. In five years this happened. Everybody came along at the same time. Why? Because we’d lived through depression. We’d lived through World War II. Most of us had not been too frightened to get in to the war, and so we went and got frightened once we were actually there, naturally, but we felt that was what you had to do. So our reward was a golden age of five years in all the arts. And those of us who were in the arts, I mean it was a magical time. Then what happened? Korea.34 A new breed of American satires also belongs to this period. Some of the postwar satirists were émigrés who fled Hitler’s madness. They arrived before the war, and their careers flourished afterward; they cherished

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America and her freedoms (it had harbored them, after all), but they couldn’t help pointing out her inherent contradictions.35 Douglas Sirk and Billy Wilder were among them, and they brought a new maturity to American films.

Billy Wilder, Sunset Boulevard (1949), and Ace in the Hole (1950) Wilder, an émigré from central Europe who also escaped Nazi thuggery, concentrated two of his most intense and complex films on how the powerful media, newspapers and the movies, often distort truths, mislead the public, and abuse their power. In their own way these films were as damning as Kane, but while Kane was a tragedy, Wilder trafficked in satire, until the satire morphed into straight-out comedy in his later 1950s Monroe vehicles, The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959).36 David Thomson calls Sunset Boulevard “one of Hollywood’s most confused pieces of self-adulation.”37 Story-wise, this is true, as it begins as a typical noir detective yarn with the block-lettered titles, the hardscrabble voiceover of the protagonist, and the journalistic attempt at an investigation; but it quirkily morphs into a pitch-black satire of old versus new Hollywood. The film was much too eccentric for even the French auteur critics to handle (they effectively ignored it). They preferred their noir straight. But today the film is regarded as a great exposé of La La Land’s sleazy mores and culture. Without it there would be no The Entertainer (Tony Richardson, 1960) or even The Player (Altman, 1992). Morris Dickstein writes, Gloria Swanson’s strident, mannered, operatic performance, which starts as high camp with the obsequies for a pet monkey and culminates with a Grand Guignol mad scene worthy of Callas or Sutherland. . . . [Swanson] tells William Holden that “we didn’t need dialogue—we had faces,” her own face is too often a garish mask of self-absorbed posturing and melodrama: precisely what the 1940s saw when it glanced back at the silent-film era.38 Like today’s zombies, Desmond is a caricatured reminder of the embalmed past, and those times have left her by the wayside. This is exactly what Hollywood hated about the film; they just wanted it to go away because it exposed the misdeeds of Hollywood’s consistently nostalgic presentation of itself as a mythical place that lures the young into dreams of stardom and riches, talent not necessary. Its string-pullers feed on the

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blood of the young to keep its own decaying bodies and bank accounts replenished and refreshed. Desmond’s mansion, like the English country house of the 18th and 19th century Gothic stories (discussed in chapter five), is the second most important character in the yarn, the expressionist manifestation of Norma Desmond’s distorted mind. It holds unsavory secrets beneath the covered-over furniture and in its hidden hallways and rooms. In old Gothic tales these crimes were usually opaque but in this case the secrets are transparently of Old and New Hollywood. Hollywood not only destroys that which made it such a rich company town (its stars), but having the attention span of a fruit fly, it always moves on to the next big thing as quickly as possible, feeding on new blood and leaving a trail of tears and spent bodies by the side of the road. As an Eastern European, Wilder knew well the folk lore and the Gothic legends of the superstitious country peasantry. The Gothic mythologizes as it fascinates, and to Wilder this was exactly Hollywood’s stock-in-trade, especially the New Hollywood of the postwar period facing so many challenges. And no vision of Hollywood is more potent than Hollywood’s OWN vision of itself, a self-portrait in a convex mirror, as John Ashbury put it in 1971; for Wilder, it was a funhouse mirror, that beloved industry town which today still pumps out self-reflexive narcissistic movies and shows about shows and movies, whether it is A Star is Born (1933/1953) or The Comeback (2014). It is not so much a place, as a state of mind; a twisted utopia. And Norma Desmond is more than a Femme Fatale of the late 1940s movies whose sexual allure is bound up with her treachery and entrapment— who, seen from the outside, is a reflection of postwar male anxiety—a deep fear of the newly emancipated women and her sexual needs. . . . Its Gothic tropes: the dead monkey; the rats running around the empty pool; the vaguely haunted house that entombs all who enter; Stroheim’s white gloved enabler of her fantasies of herself; the wheezing organ.39 Wilder, who learned his craft in prewar (or inter-war) Germany just couldn’t resist the Gothic allure that he had seen firsthand. Many of the returning vets that we observed in Chapter 2 were unable to handle the New Woman, who grabbed at the independence that war gave them. Those returning vets were confused as to how the culture had moved on without them. In the film this confusion is seen in the older woman pursuing a younger man and the images of the gothic woman as a victim of a patriarchal male society. Strong women, from

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Cleopatra to La Belle Dame sans Merci, destroy the sensitive, romantic young male. Norma is both vampire and doppelganger, sucking the life out of Joe, but also reflecting his deeper, darker impulses, like those of the returning vets who would not reassimilate into a very different postwar American life that was happy to leave many of them behind for good, as in Paul Thomas Anderson’s take on lost souls drifting along vulnerable to postwar psychobabble in The Master (2013). This kind of filmmaking was militant, fascinating, and difficult to watch, high satire at its most biting, with little humor to be mined except from Norma’s deluded walking dead persona. But truthful all the same. Ace in the Hole (1950) is an attack on the desperate way media (newspapers, radio) will do anything for a story. As the cynical journalist (Kirk Douglas) pronounces, “Bad news sells best because good news is no news.” (The goodie-goodie problem of history resurfaces yet again). Like the British satires, Ace in the Hole was criminally overlooked: they were funny, but essentially serious in nature. Ace appeared almost fifteen years before the movement now known as the New Journalism of the 1960s, where the journalist becomes part of the story, even to the point of shaping its outcome. In Cold Blood (1965) is usually considered the first example of the New Journalism and was followed by the reporting of Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion. But Ace already has Kirk Douglas controlling the circus surrounding a working-class man who becomes trapped in a cave that implodes behind him. Ace suggests we need media that reports serious news objectively, not manufactured pieces of infotainment. The film ends tragically (as satire often does), and the circus moves on to another town, another story, and another manufactured event; in the summer of 2014, CNN’s coverage of the downed Malaysia Airlines flight 17 came often with rampant speculation and even preposterous pronouncements (it flew into a black hole!), and every day felt very much like Ace’s sensational fabrications—an ominous foreshadowing of the daily sensations of the Trump presidency. In film, the journalist who controls the narrative has become the most used methodology in documentary since the appearance of Michael Moore’s Roger and Me (1989), in which Moore was in almost every shot as narrator and performer.40 Others using the same approach today include Morgan Spurlock (Supersize Me, 2004), and even the filmmakers (Laura Poitrus/Glenn Greenwald) of the Oscar-winning Edward Snowden documentary (Citizen Four, 2014), which has the filmmaker/journalist as a big part of the story. But Wilder would learn the hard way (both Sunset Boulevard and Ace in the Hole were released to critical brickbats) always to make his

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satire humorous and not just viscerally (and viciously) attack-filled. No matter how enlightening they were, these two satires were just too dark for postwar America seeking happier and lighter fare. After the attacks on these two satires, Wilder came to believe that if you are going to tell people the truth, you’d better make it funny. He wouldn’t make a satire without humor again, and neither would the British artists of Ealing and the Goons.

Bob Hope, The Paleface (1949) In a recent Bob Hope biography, Hope: Entertainer of the Century (Simon & Schuster, 2014), Richard Zoglin argues that Hope was the definitive comic of the twentieth century because he achieved his fame in the dominant formats of his time (radio, movies, TV), until the 1960s and the Boomers made his brand of sexism embarrassingly outdated, after peaking with the Rat Pack fad in the early ’60s. His attacks on hippies and the anti-war protesters relegated him to the past. But in his postwar satires, especially parodies such as The Paleface (Norman Z. McLeod, 1948), a clinical mocking of the earnestness of John Ford’s trademark genre the western, Hope did seem for that fleeting moment ahead of the curve. Starring with Jane Russell, whose twin peaks provoke Hope into endless innuendoes that would appall the PC police today, Hope in The Paleface has an air of cool credibility. The title itself points to Hope’s Midwestern, unhip whiteness, the way today’s rappers and young comedians make fun of pale-faced, pampered suburban teens on whose expendable dollars they depend for their bling. In 1949 that unhipness was the very fulcrum of The Paleface’s satire. The Paleface has a screenplay by Edmund Hartmann and Frank Tashlin from a story by Jack Rose and Melville Shavelson. It was directed with some farcical dexterity by the studio craftsman Norman Z. McLeod, who had learned his trade directing the early Marx Brothers features Horse Feathers (1931) and Monkey Business (1932), as well as W.C. Fields’s gem It’s a Gift (1937). The Paleface has some superior long silent passages that allow Hope, like Fields before him, more than a few slapstick gags. By 1948, the western was solidly embedded in American culture after more than fifty years of frontier stories—from the visual iconography of Frederic Remington, the literary successes of James Fenimore Cooper and German stories of Karl May (1842–1912), whose Winnetou novels from the 1890s inspired many an immigrant to exile, to the primitive works of early film beginning with The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter, 1903) and of course the John Ford classics (from Stagecoach,

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1939, and My Darling Clementine, 1946, to his cavalry trilogy of the later 1940s).41 These familiarities allowed The Paleface to roast all the tropes of the western genre, from scary thoughts about the primitive nature of prairie dentistry (Hope’s trade here; he’s ironically named Painless Potter) to the tough cowboy outlaw stereotype, embodied more by tough-as-nails Russell than by the eastern neurotic Hope (whose style Woody Allen has long-since admitted to nicking for his own character), and famously copied by Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles (1974).42 In an interview for Bottom Line magazine, Leonard Maltin cites Blazing Saddles as the model for western parodies that would follow: This Mel Brooks film helped set the stage for the modern jokea-minute anything-for-a-laugh parody. It became a benchmark against which many later comedic filmmakers would measure their work, from Airplane! (David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrams, 1980) to The Naked Gun (David Zucker, 1988) to the Austin Powers films.43 Saddles was a big hit for Brooks, making it a model for many similar types of parodies (not just westerns) that followed its formula, but without The Paleface, there’d be no Saddles; it is the true benchmark. A genre has peaked when it can be parodied so completely as in The Paleface. Classic western ideas sent up include western monikers, such as Hope’s “Painless” Peter Potter, Russell’s “Calamity” Jane, and the Dirty Shame saloon; the out-of-place easterner as cowboy, whom audiences would’ve recognized as instantly funny (and since Hope was actually British, having been born in London in 1903, American audiences would have recognized him as even more of a square); the dumber-than-a-bag-ofhammers townsfolk; and American visions of the idealized free west with its openness and rugged individualism, a clear anachronism in the postwar noir atmosphere, though the 1950s nostalgia for the nineteenth-century west would be seen in ranch houses, cars named for horses, and Formica bars. Especially funny is the shootout, when Hope and his nemesis farcically keep missing one another during their uncivil confrontation in the middle of the town’s main street because they are hidden by passing wagons and other western icons, as the undertaker happily waits for one of these barbarians to get shot (he will make a buck either way). Russell again secretly steps in and in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance–like fashion shoots the villain herself from a nearby window, making Hope seem once again to be the hero, even if the audience knows otherwise. Hope’s classic ultimatum to a local rough rider, by 1948 already trite, “I’m giving you ’til sundown to get outta town” is so cheesy it

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evokes laughter of the disbelief kind. This only two years after the classic existential brilliance of John Ford’s Clementine, with its sad conquest of the American West for eastern settlers. The nosy townsfolk give Painless overly complicated and useless advice before his duel: “he draws from left, so lean to the right; there’s a wind from the west, so aim toward the east.”44 Hope continually taps into his coward persona and allows for the classic asides that were turned into an art form with the perfection of cinematic sound in the 1930s (as exemplified by Groucho’s dependence on audiences’ expectation of Shakespearean quips to which only they are privy—as if Margaret Dumont never heard Groucho’s sexist insults). Hope also borrows from Groucho by nonchalantly rendering what would become his biggest hit song, the now American standard “Buttons and Bows,” written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans. In the plot, the governor’s lackeys break Calamity Russell out of a small-time jail, promising her immunity if she’ll help capture some gunrunners who have been selling their wares to the local native savages. Though a tough outlaw, she has to pose as a respectable Clementine (giving the wardrobe department ample opportunity to emphasize Russell’s assets) and infiltrate the town’s good folk (in other words, the white European settlers). Throughout, Russell is in control (Hope even has to explain to the good folks that “he’s the Mr.” in their union). The whole way through, she steals the show and is the silent hero of the tale, embodying the postwar independent ethos for women in the workplace and in the home. This film was a satire designed for a changed postwar America.45 The Paleface is pretty silly, even by today’s low-brow Rogan and Franco stoner comedy standards, but Russell’s brilliant straight woman illustrates that the actors are well aware of the insipid premise, giving the parody some bite. One running gag is Russell continually knocking Painless out with a blackjack or a gun handle; another has Russell exiting and entering rooms through their windows, proving further what a wildcat she is. The final reel puts Jane back in her cowgirl get-up (complete with leopard print suede) and gives the Christmas 1948 audience what they paid for—her close-ups have more gauze over the lens than Marilyn’s would. The Indians are even more overly stereotyped, adding to the farce (Yellow Feather: “How.” Hope: “Not so good. I’ll let you know.”), while the great Iris Adrian plays the Marlene Dietrich saloon singer to the hilt, as a bold Technicolor redhead. John McCarten wrote in The New Yorker at the time, “Bob Hope comedies have left me limp but this time he’s gotten hold of something droll. . . . The film has a good time spoofing all the usual ingredients of cow-country drama, from the gun duel along the deserted streets to the flight from Indians in a careening wagon. I’m sure the producers didn’t guess how enormously

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Figure 6.2. The Paleface (Norman Z. McLeod, 1948). “Painless” Potter (Bob Hope), “Calamity” Jane (Jane Russell), and the dummer-than-a-bag-of-hammers townsfolk benchmark the satirizing of the western genre. Paramount Pictures/ Photofest.

popular “Buttons and Bows” was going to be, for if they had, I’m sure they’d have never let him toss it off as casually, briefly, and satisfactorily as he does.”46 McCarten himself probably didn’t appreciate how genreshifting and influential this satire would become. During The Paleface one great line spoken by Russell in her nearbaritone stands out, and might even be used as an explanation for the role satire (and art, in general) plays as the reflection of postwar American and British life: “There’s an old saying,” she quips. “When you’re hunting a mountain lion, stake out a goat. The lion gets the goat and we get the mountain lion.” Stake out a satire (or the best of any art form) and you will get the clearest understanding of a culture at a particular time and place. Hope satirized and inverted the strong, silent hero embodied by John Wayne and Henry Fonda in the late American 1940s, an image that had lasted since the beginnings of narrative film itself at the dawn of the century. Now that the century was middle-aged, satire made way for a more sophisticated standard, and Britain’s Bob Hope contributed to

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nudging American audiences to accept the British affectation of pausing, making a Shakespearean snarky aside, and then moving on.

The Melodramatic Satires of Douglas Sirk My God, the suburbs! They encircled the city’s boundaries like enemy territory, and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place-name appeared in the New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun. —John Cheever, Esquire, July 1960.

Another refugee from the central European diaspora (who also passed through Britain on his way to California), Douglas Sirk embraced the tawdry middle-brow schmaltziness of melodrama and used it as a satirical bludgeon against the postwar cultural consensus. Most of the directors working in postwar melodrama wanted to explore the dark undercurrents in American culture. Creating a subgenre of these “problem films” were the melodramas of the Eastern European Sirk, narratives that, ironically, American audiences loved, especially the female audiences at whom they were aimed. Today, Sirk’s four masterpieces Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1956), Written on the Wind (1957), and Imitation of Life (1959) are all closely examined for Sirkian irony and the hidden critiques of the banality of American culture of the 1950s. In fact, his brand has become such a staple in college film studies classes that all of his Criterion Collection super-releases come with feminist-infused critical academic essays touting his importance to the pre-1960s women’s movement. His embrace of women’s pictures allowed him to become the purveyor of subversive messages to a confused and conforming 1950s subculture of both domesticated and suffocating housewives and similarsituation gay communities who responded to his filmic essays with their wallets. Sirk’s films were all big hits in the supposedly stolid ’50s, proving someone was responding to their appraisals of the dangers of conformity and mainstream ideals, as Sirk dissected postwar American society in widescreen Technicolor. His films were critically panned at the time, superficially labeled “women’s weepies”; today they are recognized as high art because they employ a style since identified as “the art of artifice,” using hyperrealistic oversaturation of color and design to enlarge the satiric attack on domestic bliss and 1950s conformity. In All That Heaven Allows Rock Hudson plays a nature-loving cowboy figure who pines for the utopian freedoms of the natural world, opposed to Jane Wyman’s country club aesthetic. William Carlos Williams wrote about the earthy early settlers and their most hearty swain,

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Hudson embodies this great American traditional manly-man, but Sirk’s irony is that this perennial ideal is out of sync with 1950s America’s bourgeois subtopia, where consensus and conformity are the reigning social standards—even as western motifs from ranch houses to Daniel Boone television shows were sold as authentic America.48 Still, Hudson and Wyman are a good couple because both yearn to break from that world. It wasn’t just the Silent artists and the Beats who pined for escape, to head out to the territories like Huck, but the ladieswho-lunched on their Thursday night outings to the movies intuitively recognized their own trapped selves (as did gay groups, who would have known about Hudson’s hidden sexuality) in the subtext of Sirk’s acerbic melodramas; this is serious camp as high satire. But Hudson’s nonconformist individualism is mocked by the community. “So there’s Sarah’s nature boy,” one snarky country club knowit-all jeers about their forbidden love (he’s her gardener; she’s a much older woman, in a world where older men with younger women are the norm). Their authentic love for one another is crushed by the stifling mores of the unforgiving town (in other words, Heaven itself), while the satire hides in the melodrama. Sirk’s satires attack the consensus culture and the men who run society; they are usually set in the soul-crushing suburbs and use obvious metaphors to address taboo subjects and controversial social issues such as female isolation.49 In Heaven, Wyman’s lime tree bower isn’t her natural prison but her social construct, embodied by her suburban house as suburban jungle. Sirk’s imagery ensures that elements of the home environment dominate every scene, signaling that the objects or means of domestic bliss are the very things that limit opportunity and ultimately take over the characters’ lives. (In one iconically brilliant passage, Wyman

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peers out through her prison-home window at caroling children sleigh riding in perfect Connecticut snow.) Melodramas in this vein present the female heroine as victim, trapped by patriarchy and impossibly narrow societal expectations. The woman must give up individuality in order to integrate into the suburban community; Sirk’s satire doesn’t preach to his audience, but rather allows them to make the connections on their own, “If an audience doesn’t have imagination, then they should stay out of the cinema,” he notoriously exalted.50 In one of the great images of the 1950s, Jane Wyman is given a television by her clueless kids to help assuage her loneliness, and as the camera pans from her pinched visage and then zooms into her reflection in the television set we instantly understand, as viewers of the 1950s would have, her entrapment and death of her own identity (not to mention it being a nice jab at films’ now rival medium). Sirk was one of filmmaking’s greatest ironists, and he established a gulf between how characters perceive themselves and how we, the audience, view them. As Sirk told an interviewer in 1973, “These happy endings all express the weak and sly promise that the world is not rotten and out of joint but meaningful and ultimately in excellent condition. One could follow these thoughts endlessly through Dante, Moliere, and Calderon and even in the grandiose, celestial, operettalike ending of the second part of Faust . ” 51 When Grace Metalious’s potboiler Peyton Place became a runaway bestseller in 1956, it shocked a complacent 1950s American public getting used to the idea of the United States of tail-finned cars, Old Glory, and suburban bliss. Peyton Place unearthed the hidden side of small-town America, the incest, drunkenness, abortion, and adultery, subject matter that had been the staples of Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson twenty years before in their great 1920s novels, along with the later novels of Richard Yates and the short stories of John Cheever, the patron saints of Eastern Seaboard pathos and fallen paradises who are considered the great documenters of American postwar faux happiness. But Sirk showed the broken façade of this American suburban Arcadia ten years before these cracked mirrors appeared (and also ten years before Warhol’s artificed silkscreens). Such later American achievements as The Maysles Brothers’ Salesman (1969) and Grey Gardens (1975) and the films of David Lynch (Blue Velvet, 1986) and Todd Haynes (Far from Heaven, 2002; Mildred Pierce, 2011) simply would not exist without Sirk’s grand satires. But neither would the British Powell and Pressburger’s dark-hued intrigues, and the later tongue-in-cheek mannerisms of Robert Hamer’s ingeniously constructed cosmopolitan punch-ups. The postwar era of the 1940s and early 1950s was deeply conservative, but its social fabric was changing as inexorably as its values, and the postwar satires on both

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sides of the Atlantic paved way for the satiric shift that would come to the fore in the 1960s. So, the British did borrow from American film like their Continental brethren (and the more urbane of the Americans from their British counterparts), but they relied even more than the Yanks on their own indigenous tradition of satire, using it to send transatlantic signals about how the British were redefining themselves and commenting on their changing cultural moment and identity. Their mutual admirations would be based less on politics than on compatibility of temperament. In fact, the best way to think about the American-Anglo special satiric relationship is what would similarly happen twenty years (a generation) later, when more streetwise and down-to-earth variations of rock— punk rock—would spring up in both countries, almost simultaneously. Though the movement would begin in the states with the Velvets, the Stooges, the Dolls, and the Ramones, it would quickly get picked up in Britain with the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Jam, and the Damned. But while the American version was much more artistically based and aesthetically driven, the British variant would be much more political and sociological. It was the difference between their economic circumstances: postwar prosperity versus stagnation; middle-class affluence versus working-class austerity; individualized confidence and identity versus collective desperation and dissimilarity. That western pop and punk music would take over the world by the 1980s should further come as no surprise. Ideologues be damned, it would be the true thing that would tear down the (Berlin) Wall and fracture the Soviet (dis)Union: the denizens of the Eastern bloc wanted more Beatles and Levis, not more bombs and Lenin. In other words, the satiric subcultural swelling would slowly become a major one as the British satires accumulated by the early 1960s, as will be discussed in Chapter 8. Luckily, back in England by late 1940s, there would be another group of satiric herbivores, the Goons, just starting to join the fight.

7 Postwar Britain Faces Its Subconscious Spike Milligan and the Goons’ Postmodern Schizophrenia

“To go completely against the tide in a violent reaction against the impoverishment and sterility of thought processes that resulted from centuries of rationalism, we turned toward the marvelous and advocated it unconditionally. We wanted to tap into the superior reality of the subconscious mind.” —Andre Breton, when interviewed about The Surrealist Manifesto, 1924.1

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MILLIGAN (1918–2002) CREATED The Goon Show as a comedy sketch in late 1946. It eventually hit the airwaves on the BBC in the spring of 1951, and along with the Ealing satires, was at its most prolific during the postwar 1946–56 decade (Milligan had made his solo debut on radio in 1949). The Goon Show was a collaborative production (Sellers, Secombe, Benetine), but the focus here is on Milligan because, well, he wrote almost all the shows.2 PIKE

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Milligan was one of the most original and influential British comic writers of the latter half of the twentieth century. Dubbed by Eddie Izzard “the godfather of alternative comedy,” Milligan took the prewar continental movements of Dada and Surrealism and interwove them with the British satire and music-hall traditions.3 His fascination with language and the absurd qualities of everyday life influenced English culture in the early postwar years, most especially through his militantly pacifist and anti-nuclear stances, which would have an enormous effect on changing British attitudes. Like the Ealing films, the Goons helped crystallize postwar British satire into a culture-defining phenomenon—an inward-turning reaction after years of colonialism and imperialism—paving the way for Beyond the Fringe (1960–66), Monty Python, and all the other waves of anarchic, anti-format humor that followed in the ’60s and ’70s, right through to today. Because of Milligan and the Ealing artists, humanist satire is now the dominant style of social and political protest in most Western cultures. It was an orderly chaotic attack on all things traditionally British in an age of desperate transition.

The Goon Show’s Weekly Topicality The Goon Show’s main line of attack was whatever was happening in the news. But right from the start Milligan began with attacks on the skewed English class system. Milligan felt that authority should come with courtesy, but only to an extent, for he learned from his upbringing and his war experiences that life isn’t always neat: when authority becomes overly repressive, the results are usually worse than allowing for some dissent. A socially relevant example is found in the episode “The Phantom Head Shaver (of Brighton)” from October, 1954: Setting: Brighton, 1898, the local Courtroom. FX: Bells ringing, woman screams, chickens squawk, a huge splash, and an explosion. BAILIFF (spoken in a deep black man’s voice, like Louis Armstrong, played by the wonderful Ray Ellington):4 Silence in the Court! Silence! The court will now stand for Judge Snarl. (Aside) And if you’ll stand for him, you’ll stand for anything. JUDGE SNARL (in thick Cockney accent, with serious lisp): Awright, Awright, now-a, get seated and let the malarkey start.

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BAILIFF: M’Lord, the first case: “The Case of Prunella and Nugent Dirt: Mrs. Dirt vs. Mr. Dirt.” (Shouting) Mrs. Prunella Dirt!? MRS. DIRT: Yes, mate? BAILIFF: Raise your right hand, and your left leg. Now, do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? MRS. DIRT: I do. BAILIFF: Well, you ain’t gonna get far! (Laughs) My Lord, the witness for the “persecution” is ready. JUDGE SNARL: Awright. Let the-a persecuting council start off his spiel. (More laughs.) BAILIFF: Silence in court! Everybody screams, “Silence in court!” And the sound F/X descend into a dinned trample and, of course, a cacophony of explosions.5 The black bailiff makes the asides (Milligan adored Louis Armstrong), lampooning the British system of justice, at a moment when India had been just given its independence, the Suez was in crisis and about to be lost forever, and the Empire was clinging to its various African holdings. The Goons were helping England to enter her new post-class system, postcolonial phase. And it was eaten up by popular British audiences, no matter how much the BBC feared its irreverence. In an age of rationing and welfare bureaucracy, The Goon Show became the chief (and most popular) ventilator for a British public that needed, agreed with, and admired the Goons’ new cutting-edge, postmodern, near-schizophrenic invective and perspective. It was anarchic performance art, which should have been just a chaotic mess, but somehow it worked, by hanging its craziness on its serious satirical foundations. Like Socratic dialogue, their discussions and performances were meant to persuade, exposing the British to their own cultural idiosyncrasies and inadequacies; this was militantly satiric cultural critique. To convince the audience of the point of the sketch,

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satirists must carefully ply their trade with special devices. For the Ealing satires, their chief devices became the settings themselves (English country houses, old trains, village greens, Scottish highlands), and giving visual ticks to characters’ class and regional customs and practices. For the Goons, in this new radio-based satire, the devices were by default sound effects, but they took it further than anyone had ever done before. In fact, the crazier the better; they used narrative genre-parody and vocal pyrotechnics to illustrate their own takes on British Isles urban and folksy affectations. With the Goons, postwar Britain was finally facing its subconscious head on.

Getting to the Goons: Milligan, Secombe, Sellers, Bentine Born on April 18, 1918, in Ahmednagar, India (he died on Wednesday, February 27, 2002, in England), and educated at various Roman Catholic schools in India, Burma, and England, Milligan was the son of an Irishborn regimental sergeant-major in the British Army. His mother, Florence Winifred Kettlebrand was English; both parents were minor entertainers and encouraged their son’s growth in music and acting. Milligan’s family moved to England in the 1920s but also moved from military pay to dole poverty. After high school, he went to Goldsmith’s College (today the University of London), studied music, and joined the Harlem Club band, a jazz group in which he sang and played drums and bass (a great prep for so many musical parodies he’d insert into his scripts). He was drafted into to the army at the beginning of the World War II, and his company, D Battery of the 56th Heavy Regiment Royal Artillery, in which he was both a gunner and a trumpeter, gave him a forum for his outgoing personality. He played trumpet in the Battery Band, and along with being a perennial jokester, the war instilled in him the intertwined sense of the tragic and comic in humanity. In many ways, he was a British Robin Williams. His company was sent to North Africa early in 1941, and served in the first wave of combat, giving him PTSD tremors that stayed with him for life, but it was also there that he met his lifelong partner in craziness, future Goon Harry Secombe.6 Three years and many traumas later, in January 1944, during the attempted advance on Mont Cassino in Italy, Milligan was wounded while trying to establish an observation outpost.7 He was hospitalized for shell shock and reclassified as “unfit for battle,” infusing him with the guilt that would haunt him for the rest of his life (in blackouts, manic mood swings, and despair). As the war ended, and his service moved him through London, he kept busy by

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playing in the Bill Hall trio while moving with Secombe into a London apartment. Secombe was by then honing a postwar career in radio and stand-up comedy. Milligan said of the Welsh-born Secombe (September 8, 1921–April 11, 2001): “In the early days I was writing scripts for Derek Roy, and being left out were all these jokes that were piling up. It was at this time I met a man in Italy [viz: it was Africa] in the soldier’s concert party; I thought he was a Polish comic. I discovered he was a Welsh comic called Harry Secombe but I went on thinking of him as Polish because I couldn’t understand a bloody word he said.”8 And Secombe on Milligan: I got on like a house on fire with Spike because we shared the same kind of humor. We’d both been through the mill as soldiers and a bond forms between you under those sorts of conditions which you can’t really explain to other people. It’s beyond the scope of normal experience. You know, I still go to all the regimental reunions, and I think Spike tries to as well, because you forge those bonds with those fellows that never break. It’s very difficult to explain to people, even to my own kids, what war is really like—what it’s like to be shot at. It’s all the noise and the smell and the rest of it, which is probably why the Goons were so noisy.9 Secombe later went to work for Pat Dixon, a producer of programs that were licensed to the BBC Home Service, and Secombe introduced Dixon to Milligan just as they started doing skits at Grafton’s Pub. In late 1946, bar owner Jimmy Grafton, who was trying to become a producer and writer, brought Milligan and Secombe together with Peter Sellers and Michael Bentine. Grafton’s Pub would be the Hamburg where Spike and company would hone their satiric craft, performing days and weeks on end—their own “10,000 hour-rule” birthing ground.10 Sellers was from Southsea in Hampshire (b. Richard Henry Sellers; September 8, 1925–July 24, 1980), born into a family of Jewish (on his mother’s side) entertainers. He learned mimicry (his greatest talent) and how to play various instruments (ukulele, banjo, and viola) from his father, his parents were well-traveled, giving Sellers a deep impression of regional English character voices and affectations.11 Younger than the others, he didn’t have the social camaraderie Milligan and Secombe (and even Bentine, in a different way) had experienced in the army, so he was thrilled when he was introduced to them by Grafton. Milligan explained meeting Sellers after the war:

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Ripping England! Peter wanted to look like a male model—posh suit, posh collar and tie, Macintosh, gloves he carried in his left hand . . . oh, and a trilby hat. I met him at the Hackney Empire. He was waiting for somebody who appeared to be a Polish comic (Secombe). Peter was so soft-spoken—I thought I was going deaf! He was quite dignified, only he didn’t buy anybody a bloody drink all night. Dignified, but skint. Then the Polish comic met him and me.12

Sellers felt Spike made him the comedian he became. “I was just a vase of flowers, and Milligan arranged me.” Milligan’s response was, “Good god, that’s a very poetic way of putting it; wonderful symbolism, yes, or a complete bloody lie! The interesting point was there was a central spark—a sheer delight in abstract comedy.”13 Sellers fit the Goons perfectly, and though Milligan wrote everything, Sellers’s acting ability later made him the biggest international star the Goons would produce. The brief fourth member, Michael Bentine, who had also been in the war, had the opposite upbringing from Milligan: he was born into a very wealthy British family, had gone to Eton, and was an officer in the war who saw zero combat; he was everything Milligan despised about British tradition and decorum. Though Milligan admired Bentine’s highly educated mind, Milligan slowly forced Bentine out, feeling too threatened. Milligan reasoned, “He used to talk about drom feasts and pranks. As far as I was concerned prank was Chinese for a piece of wood!” Bentine lasted through the first year on the BBC show, but unfortunately for history none of the shows in which he participated in the first series exist on tape anymore, and his real influence is lost forever.14 They worked on their act at each other’s apartments and at Grafton’s for more than two years, and then made it an official weekly show at Grafton’s in 1949, putting on full variety shows in a real pub, just like the original music halls. The scene was a version of what was occurring in the States at the same time, a new Bohemian happening that began to take root in collective rebellion against the quickly fading conservative consensus. Peter Stead observed: The Bohemians thought that they were glimpsing “humanity at large,” the “throng,” but more recently historians have questioned whether that was the case. The theoretical debate has tended to follow Raymond Williams’s suggestion that although the urban working-class found in music-hall per-

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formers “their most authentic voice,” the halls were not full manifestations of working-class culture but were rather “a very mixed institution.” They were mixed because although all the vitality, the songs, the humor, and much of the idiom came from what E.P. Thompson has described as the traditionally “rowdy” element in working-class culture, these things had now ceased to be spontaneous and informal and had passed into other hands.15 By going back to the pubs to put on their shows, and making them spontaneous again, the Goons were reacting against the then-current music-hall decline, and so were in some way reinventing the tradition essentially in order to preserve it. It worked, because their satiric variation of music hall variety still exists today on television shows from Britain/America’s Got Talent to Saturday Night Live and Later . . . with Jools Holland, not to mention the myriad late-night talk shows, from Steven Colbert to James Cordon.

Figure 7.1. The Goons (Harry Secombe, Michael Bentine, Peter Sellers, and Spike Milligan) in a rare shot with Bentine, 1951. They began as the Goons at Grafton’s Pub in 1946. Photofest.

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As they were shaping their collaboration, Secombe individually got an audition in 1949 on the brand-new BBC Light Programme talent show, Opportunity Knocks (it began in February 1949 and eventually migrated to television), and then got Milligan a tryout.16 Both impressed the judges, especially when they worked together, and they were brought back a number of times. Not to be outdone, Sellers phoned up another BBC producer pretending to be Kenneth Horne, then the star of the radio show Much Binding in the Marsh, which ran on Radio Luxembourg for overseas British troops, in order to get the producers on the phone. He told them about this brilliant bloke Peter Sellers who was a “talented up-and-coming performer.” He was so convincing he was given a supporting role on the show. Now the BBC brass knew who they each were, and eventually they were seen together at Grafton’s, where they recorded a show as an audition tape, which led to them being hired to do a half-hour weekly program for an expanding postwar BBC.

The Goon Show and Fighting Auntie’s Staid Dominance The first Goon Show was recorded on April 12, and fully broadcast on May 28, 1951. The Goons wanted to call it “The Goon Show,” but the BBC named it “Crazy People.” At first it was still just a collection of clever ideas and half-baked skits, until the third series, when new producer Eric Sykes was assigned to force them into a more story-based format, which gave sorely needed discipline to Milligan’s wildly inchoate writing and Seller’s and Secombe’s improv (he also added announcer Wallace Greenslade for the same reason).17 Milligan is said to have picked the word “goon” out of a Popeye comic, using it as a derogatory term for people he saw as idiots.18 So began his influence on the British language. Their brand of anarchy was very new on the British airwaves. Though they began in the spring of 1951, the late 1952 episodes are the earliest available on tape or cd.19 Like the Ealing comedies, this radical change in comedy started almost immediately after the war ended, beginning in the pubs and moving outward on to radio and the big screen, as its influence and popularity spread. With its appearance in prime time on Sunday nights, The Goon Show was in the most influential position possible, and it very quickly became the most popular show on the BBC Home Service, revolutionizing humor in British popular culture forever. The Goons blended ludicrous plots with topical stories, outrageous puns, newly invented catchphrases, and way over-the-top sound F/X.20 But most subversive of all was the show’s satire, challenging British opinion

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of the day, and how the island nation would and should see itself. Its instant popularity proved the culture was ripe for an absurdist intervention and a re-examining of who the British were. Milligan played many of the parts on the show, ranging from Minnie Bannister to Moriarty and, most memorable, Eccles. But more importantly, he was responsible for writing almost all the shows.21 Secombe’s best-known Goon role was as Neddie Seagoon (an obvious combination of “Se”combe and “goon”), the protagonist of the show’s ridiculous plots. Though just as nutty, Secombe, in fact, as a good family man (and later a very plump and religious one), was the central stabilizer, the straight man as the perfect contrast to Spike the surreal nut and Sellers the suave playboy genius.22 Worried about their role as arbiters of British taste, and about such heavy satire of British culture, the BBC resisted many of The Goon Show ideas practically every week, creating a running feud with Milligan throughout their nine-year run; no wonder he burned out again and again.23 “Programmes must all be kept free of crudities, coarseness and innuendo,” insisted the BBC Variety Programmes Policy Guide for Writers and Producers (generally known as “The Green Book”), a document that had existed since the 1920s but was updated for the war period and then again at the end of 1948. “Humour must be clean and untainted directly or by association with vulgarity and suggestiveness. Music hall, stage, and to a lesser degree, screen stands, are not suitable to broadcasting . . . there can be no compromise with doubtful material. It must be cut.” There was “an absolute ban” on the following: Jokes about lavatories, Effeminacy in men, Immorality of any kind. Suggestive references to Honeymoon couples, Chambermaids, Fig leaves, Prostitution, Ladies underwear (e.g., winter draws on), Animal habits (e.g., rabbits), Lodgers, Commercial travelers; Extreme care should be taken in dealing with references or jokes about Pre-natal influences (e.g., ‘His mother was frightened by a donkey’), Marital infidelity; Good taste and decency are the obvious governing considerations. The vulgar use of such words as “basket” must also be avoided.24 This pretty much ruled out everything the Goons stood for and produced (how does one avoid innuendo in any form with the English language as suggestive as it so often is?). Probably the nearest equivalence in the States to the fight over content at the BBC would have been the 1920s and early 1930s Production Code struggles between Hollywood censors

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and creative writers under contract to the studios. Then again, during the late ’40s Red Scare, new talents on film, radio (and later in Britain, TV) wanted to push the boundaries and truly reflect the culture they saw changing around them. Kynaston says of the BBC rules: Religion, politics and physical deformities were all heavily restricted areas, though “references to and jokes about drink are allowed in strict moderation so long as they can really be justified on entertainment grounds.” As for expletives “they have no place at all in light entertainment and all such words as God, Good God, My God, Blast, Hell, Damn, Bloody, Gorblimey, Ruddy, etc., etc. should be deleted from scripts and innocuous expressions substituted.” Any jokes that might be taken to encourage strikes or industrial disputes were to be avoided, while ‘the Corporation’s policy is against broadcasting impersonations of elder statesmen, e.g., Winston Churchill.’ Altogether, it was Auntie at her most auntie-like.25 People think of the late 1950s/early 1960s “sick comics,” and the films Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) and The Graduate (1967) as the Production Code and censorship breakers in the United States (the rating system would be implemented in 1968), and in the UK of the Beatles and the Stones challenging the Establishment with their lyrics and public actions. But all of the broadcasting taboos were smashed earlier by Milligan and the Goons in the early 1950s.26 And the postwar British public was ready for them. They voted with their ears when they made the Goons the most successful show on the BBC for more than six years running. This gave the Goons unprecedented freedom for their half-hour of mayhem (invective satire is difficult to sustain any longer than that when presented on a weekly basis),27 allowing them to alter prevailing British cultural customs and mores almost overnight. Their popularity at home also brought them a cult following with the BBC listeners all over the world—in some ways, ironically, preserving small traces of the British Empire (and its satiric tradition) overseas, even as it was systematically coming undone. Secombe insisted, A lot of young comics now say, “Oh, I just go on stage and improvise.” That’s impossible. You can’t have a theatre full of people who have paid good money to see somebody who hopes to improvise . . . When you improv there is no guarantee of success. It must be perfectly planned. When Spike finished his

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script it was all there, every word, especially with a 30-minute program it has be perfect and disciplined.”28 The most poignant satire is very serious business, so every word and sound was intentional. And Milligan was the ringmaster. Milligan’s militant humor came from his own encounters with the outdated English mores and class structure, and he took on the army, the church, and the BBC itself, his resentments coalescing into the creation of unforgettable idiot bigwig characters. To accomplish this, like Billy Wilder, he had to tell the truth but make it funny, and the Goons created a whole spectrum of voices (Sellers especially could do anything), even as the BBC fought them from doing voices of sacrosanct figures such as Field Marshal Montgomery, Churchill, or the Queen (the BBC usually only approved staid vaudeville jokes like, “I used to play the Palladium.” “Yes, I know. I’ve never heard it played better.”). The Goons constantly defied Auntie’s scowls, knowing that the time was ripe for such attacks, and so they pushed the envelope. Secombe said, The Goons were a reaction against the pomposity we all shared during the war. When you see old-time wartime films on TV you realize how incredibly artificial and pompous we (the British) were. People like Spike and Peter and Larry tried to cut through this . . . we used to do outrageous things and there were lots of BBC Execs (retired generals, all sorts) who said, “bad taste,” especially about anything against the forces. I was nearly sacked because of a joke about OBEs. Peter said, “Have an OBE” or something. For that I was hauled up before a board with these old boys sitting around a table saying, “we mustn’t say that . . .” it happened altogether about eighteen times and once it was an official reprimand which got entered into my BBC records.29 It went down on all their permanent records, especially Milligan’s, but he had targets to take down, and he went for them with dynamic audacity.

A Militant Satirist’s Personal Psychology and Anti-Authoritarianism So, where did Milligan garner his sense of absurd satire? Certainly, one place was where any comic gets it from: the need for attention—to make up for some lack—but it also comes from an innate sense of the injustice in the world and a hunger to expose it; the satirist uses his

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attacks as a defense mechanism against the incessant negative forces of the world. In his 1963 study of the satirist’s personality and psychological makeup, Leonard Feinberg viewed the motivation as compensation for some social or personal deficiency and/or a strong need to “adjust” to his or her society:30 Many psychiatrists believe that the humorist is a person suffering from a neurotic maladjustment to society, a man who uses humor as his defense against, or aggression towards, a menacing world. Dr. Jacob Levine, for instance, says, “It is no accident that comedians are often basically sad, depressed persons. For them humor serves as a defense against anxieties arising from their relations with people and their society.”31 Milligan would be the first to admit this. An Indian-born, poor IrishEnglishman to whom the English refused citizenship, he was lost in traditional Britain. Milligan grasped for a solid identity by fighting back.32 The scriptwriting process completely drained Milligan. Turning out a show a week on his own caused him to have a series of nervous breakdowns.33 In the 1950s, while in his mid-thirties, his existence was as crazy as the later Saturday Night Live performers (of which The Goon Show was clearly the original model). It all came from my fragmented fertile mind. My umbilical with life had been cut and I was floating in a womb of my own, revolving around and around with ideas spilling out of my head faster than I could catch them, grabbing at them. I didn’t know that the first show would be the first of two hundred. I didn’t know there was that much in me. I had to write one every week—it was willing me on to death. . . . Keeping up the constant stream of ideas and scripts which were required for the show took a heavy toll on me. I suddenly had a breakdown. The AA [Army Ambulatory service during and after the war] towed me away to the psychiatric hospital. This all really went back to the war when I was blown up. If I’d known what was good for me, I’d have never have come down. Writing the show broke up my first marriage. I’ve just become normal again in the past four or five years [he said this in the mid-1980s].34 Sometimes he simply said, “I’m Irish. We think sideways.” In any case, Milligan’s absurdist outlook was also a combined result of the crazy pres-

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sures of relentless creative production, and his war-related post-traumatic stress disorder. It is also interesting to note that the radical British theorists of psychoanalysis, R.D. Laing (he was Scottish) and Melanie Klein, flourished in the early ’60s, a full decade after Milligan’s Goon shows essentially proposed that the mad are the true sane ones. Laing spent twenty years of his career working with schizophrenics, evolving his theory of madness. He found that, in many ways, schizophrenics were rational personalities living in hostile, usually familial, environments where their only escape from their situation was to become either catatonic or violent. These people were not mad, Laing believed, but merely adapting the best they could to survive. In short, to “go mad” was the only rational response. Laing asked the simple but essential postwar, postHolocaust cold war question, “Who, after all, could be called mad and who, sane?” It was the normal, repressed people who had become really unhinged.35 Rational society is really mad society, and the more extreme the form of that which we call madness, the more one approaches genuine sanity.36 Milligan’s 1950s madness certainly manifested itself this way, in a surreal satire of postwar Britain. He stated: Essentially, it is “critical” comedy. It is against bureaucracy, and on the side of human beings. Its starting point is one man shouting gibberish in the face of authority, and proving, by fabricated insanity, that nothing could be as absurd as what passes for ordinary living.37 Milligan was anticipating Laing’s position. If looked at through the eyes of Foucault, where the “invention” of mental illness by the nineteenthcentury reformers was a means of power grab by excluding the “certified insane” from modern civilization, absurd madness, satiric or otherwise, exposes how authority actually fears the truth-telling nature of such sensitive souls as threatening the rigid social constructions created and held by the power elite.38 In Milligan’s case, after the Army and the ruling classes, it became the postwar pressures concerning domestic “normalcy,” those in the ’50s conservative Restoration government, and then the staid BBC that drove Milligan to practice his absurdist, surreal satire. And their constant hounding often drove him to his own postmodern schizophrenia. After experiencing the trenches, Milligan would have none of the peacetime self-importance that the upper classes and authority figures preserved for themselves (and why he was so tough on the upper-crust

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Bentine).39 On air, he would ceaselessly deride the swollen-headed British aristocracy and upper classes (the sorts who went from Eton to Oxford and joined the Bullingdon Society). This drove the BBC brass nuts, as they depended on the privileged political class for their continued existence. But it unleashed a pent-up need in the public and was the beginning of the dismantling of authority that would follow in the next decade. Milligan recalled, The Goons gave me a chance to knock people who my father, and I as a boy, had to call “Sir.” Colonels, chaps like Grytpype-Thynne with educated voices who were really bloody scoundrels. They’d con and marry rich old ladies; in reality, they were bloody cowards charging around with guns.40 Yet, even with his spleen, in the end, he always came down on the humanistic side against the dehumanizing aspects of the postwar world.

Milligan Challenges a Changing Culture with a Surreal, Absurd Satire When Beckett’s Godot appeared in January, 1954 in Paris (London, 1955), the work of another Irishman interested in documenting modern man’s madness, the Goons’ own Theater of the Absurd had already been on the air for nearly three full years. And if the Goons were out for blood—and they were—a quick look at a short list of some of the wonderful titles of the shows illustrates exactly the kind of postmodern surrealist/absurdist approach they took toward topical 1940s and ’50s (mostly British) issues: “Fred of the Islands”; “The Army, Navy, and Forced Air”; “The Building of Britain’s First Atomic Cannon”; “The Missing Bureaucrat”; “The Kippered Herring Gang”; “The Case of the Missing Prime Minister”; “The Collapse of the British Railway Sandwich System”; “The Fear of Wages”; “Insurance, the White Man’s Burden”; “The Building of the Suez Canal”; “The British Way”; “The Case of the Missing Heir”; “Six Charlies in Search of an Author”; “Manhattan: The Lost Colony”; “Drums Along the Mersey”; “The Nasty Affair at the Buramai Oasis”; “The £1,000,000 Penny”; “Ill Met by Goonlight”; “Queen Anne’s Rain”; “Ned’s Atomic Dustbin”; “The Conquest of Space”; etc.41 Milligan was conquesting the space between the British public’s ears. Clearly, Milligan and the Goons stand in the great tradition of anarchic, satirical humor that connects Ben Jonson and the Earl of Rochester with Jane Austin and Lord Byron, vaudeville and pantomime with the Ealing comedies. But their addition of extreme “absurdity for its own sake” also gave it a connection to continental art movements Mil-

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ligan came to draw on as he grew as an artist. That attitude was what he described as his “Theory of Irrelativity:” “How would you describe a Goon? Mankind is a “Goon”—anyone who can get a perfectly quiet planet into such a bloody state in 2000 years must indeed be a GOON. It seemed silly to go on being serious after five very serious war years. I suppose the idea was to get as far away as possible from what was normal. It was a reaction against the stringencies of the war and afterwar, years.”42 Personal experience aside, Milligan’s absurdist ideas gained greater dimension drawing on the Dadaists and surrealists who thrived, for similar reasons, in the major urban centers (from Paris to Zurich, Berlin to Rome) in the 1920s and ’30s. Dada, the post–World War I cultural movement, was not, according to its proponents, art—it was anti-art.43 Where rules governed art, Dada ignored them. If art was said to have an implicit or latent message, Dada strove to have no meaning (that was its meaning). The artists of Dada had become disillusioned by art, art history, and history itself because they were always controlled and shaped by the ruling war-mongering classes who sent the lower classes into battle to fight their petty wars. Many of them were veterans of World War I (or had seen many of their friends pointlessly slaughtered) and had grown cynical about humanity after seeing what men were capable of doing to each other on the battlefields of Europe.44 They thus became attracted to a nihilistic view of the world and created a new form of art in which chance and randomness formed the basis of living. There is not an attempt to find meaning in disorder, but rather an acceptance of disorder as the fundamental nature of the world, randomness being the one iron law of our universe, giving a kind of logic to dislogic, and using it as a means to express their distaste for the presumptively rigid aesthetics of the previous age (Victorian for the 1920s artists, and Edwardian for Milligan).45 Surrealism, too, was an aesthetic-political movement that emphasized the critical and imaginative powers of the unconscious,46 and although related to Dada, it allowed for a wider exploration of dreamlike free-flow consciousness.47 Thus one might say that surrealist strands may be found in movements such as Freudian psychology and even Free Jazz (Don Cherry, Sun Ra, etc.). In fact, Milligan was a great jazz lover and structured his scripts to play like Free Jazz pieces (another Silent Generation trend), seemingly random but actually very structured and carefully thought out. Secombe attests: Spike had a wonderful gift for surreal humor which I think we understood and joined in. It wouldn’t have been any good for us to have someone like Max Miller with us. He wouldn’t have understood what we were all about. We were different.

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Max Miller was a vaudeville comic who specialized in quick quips, oneliners, singing comedic songs between his gags; he was classically old school, as far from Dada and Surrealism as one could get, and exactly what the Goons were rebelling against. On one level, surrealism may be said to be the product of a specific culture, time, and place—that is, early twentieth-century Europe. However, thought of as the effort of humanity to liberate the imagination as an act of insurrection against society, Milligan’s brand of comedy was completely new and refreshing to a changing Britain in the early 1950s, making it all the more impressive that it found such a wide audience on the postwar British radio airwaves. While Dada is relatively nihilistic in nature, surrealism possesses a more positive perspective, and Milligan combined these two elements and added the pointed social criticism that satire specializes in. Milligan’s “sick-comic” mind could and would ricochet anywhere, yet was always held together by the acute satirical slings and arrows he let fly at British cultural mores.49 According to Peter Sellers, the essence of the process of Spike’s nonsensical logic and surreal “mind-pictures” was, “You take an idea and you just let your mind wander: it’s the runaway idea. The only way I can describe the form of humor that we enjoyed is to say that we took a given situation and carried it to its illogical conclusion.”50 In the beginning, this newly synthesized comic style was shocking to British audiences, and few got it at first when The Goon Show began on May 28, 1951, as “Crazy People.” In fact, when Milligan subjected his first script to the trauma of a live audience, he felt that it was the musicians who saved the day: “Peter and Harry had been in recording studios before, I was the only one outside the pale. I was worried if no one liked the script. In fact, the audience didn’t understand a word of it! God bless the band; they saved it. Having all worked the musichalls, they dug and got all the jokes. They were muzos [professional session musicians] and they dug the jokes.”51 And occasional co-writer Eric Sykes, who worked on some of the later scripts, also explained the newness of the style: I worked or wrote for many of the top performers during and just after the war—I was far more aware of the range of comedy acts which were around in the 50s, but there was no comparison to the Goons. Stage comedy came in the form of farces or vaudeville. It came from comics who had an act

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they honed over forty years. But radio brought comedy into people’s homes in a completely new way, and the Goons broke that wide open, from their use of sound to characterization. Between them, Spike and Peter Sellers created characters which represented every aspect of life in Britain as we knew it, from the idiot do-gooder (Eccles was honest but thick), to the incredibly aged like Minnie and Crun. And, unlike other shows, despite their familiar traits, these characters were from another world.52 That other world was the real Britain facing its postwar realities and true self.

Rhetorical Devices in Milligan’s Satire: Sound, Leacock, and Jazz The art of satire is partly rhetoric, and Gilbert Highet describes the devices that are used in satire’s act of persuasion that allows one to see when they are face to face with the genre: any author who often and powerfully uses a number of the typical weapons of satire—irony, paradox, antithesis, parody, colloquialism, anticlimax, topicality, obscenity, violence, vividness, exaggeration—is likely to be writing satire.53 In their use of language, these The Goon Show exhibited in spades. But because the medium was radio, Milligan had to use all kinds of sounds as his chief rhetorical device, not just words or Peter Sellers’s brilliantly varied dialects and impersonations. Milligan discovered that the best rhetorical device for his new surreal satire was a wide variety and diametric juxtaposition of aural vibrations. And he pushed the show’s producers and sound team as far as possible, demanding more and more unusual resonations to lampoon the artificiality of story structure, British social constructs, and even the noisiness of modern British life. Sound became the key trademark of the show. Milligan wasn’t only very exact about the dialogue, but also about the final soundscape of each script produced, writing detailed descriptions of the different dins and musical arrangements he wanted, especially as the audience expectations became higher as the series went on.54 Milligan acknowledged this was the secret ingredient to the satire of the show, saying, “We made it essential to radio, where the pictures are better because they happen on the other side of your eyes.”55 The Goons reveled in

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their power to create outlandish images in the listener’s mind. It is most poignant in that very often these sonic collages would carry themselves out to an extreme reductio ad absurdum—from charging rhinos to atomic explosions. The loudest possible racket imaginable, for Milligan’s absurd satiric point, was the ultimate mark, and bane, of modernism; in fact, later in life, he became an ardent campaigner against unnecessary noise pollution.56 So, in the special effects (F/X) section of any given script one might confront a Wurlitzer organ crossing the Sahara, changing key each time it changes gear as one does in “The Mighty Wurlitzer,”57 or blaring jet engines when a character is simply offered a cocktail: F/X: Make the effects of eight jet planes. A police siren, the victim of a maniacal strangler, the San Francisco earthquake, and the Hydrogen bomb. It dies away in a strangled sob and hiss. Moriarity takes a sip and the verdict on the cocktail follows—“Mmmmm. Quite nice, that.”58 And many of these crazy scenes often ended with the hydrogen bomb exploding. This makes sense as satire destroys all in its wake and seeks to wipe away the corrupt world that was there before so that a new purer one may be born. To Milligan, who was seriously anti-nuke, it was also the best way to directly confront the H-bomb horror. Sound-wise, Milligan’s biggest influence was Canadian novelist Stephen Leacock. “We weren’t like any other comedy act,” Secombe said, “not even the Marx Brothers or W.C. Fields or the Ritz brothers. We liked [Edward] Lear and Beachcomber. But mostly, at the time, we admired a Canadian humorist called Stephen Leacock—he was a very aural writer.”59 As a novelist, Leacock would seek to create mental pictures in the minds of his readers through elaborately descriptive sound effects.60 Milligan stole/borrowed/adapted Leacock’s special literary technique and ran with it in his scripts for the Goons, using, for example, the sound of a jet engine for someone simply going from one side of a small room to the other—a classic mock epic/mock heroic satiric device. That was very new to radio. These hubbubs also extended to the musical interludes played wonderfully by Max Geldray and Ray Ellington. They were used as transitions but rarely as mere time-fillers. They were carefully chosen for their comic emphasis depending on the subject matter, becoming contrapuntal punctuations to the satirical content of that week’s program. For example, in the episode titled “The Space Age” (1957) the band plays “A Russian Love Song” with lyrics about Sputnik:

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Gentleman! Look up in the skies—I can’t believe my eyes! It’s that dear old fashioned Russian satellite moon! What, what, where? Hand me my gun—we’re going to have some fun [bang!] Oh I missed that naughty Russian satellite moon Stand aside—my reply to that is this rocket driven hat England’s answer to that Russian satellite moon The President. Gentleman the President of the har-har-har of the har-har-har There is a Russian satellite moon of Arkansas, Mr. President Thank heaven it is not over America Don’t worry, we are prepared for this Mr. Presley: let ’em have it! Now listen here! I’ll make it clear just what we intend to do I’m gonna rock around that Russian satellite moon.61 The show would not have been the same without the house jazz experts (Max Geldray, Ray Ellington, and Wally Stott), for their music broadened,

Figure 7.2. The Goon Show on the BBC (1951–60). The true progenitors of the late twentieth-century satire boom. Photofest.

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complemented, and even helped create and re-enforce, crucial satirical set pieces, another classic Silent contribution to its postwar innovation.

Structure and Pace of The Goon Show Another technique was the parodying of other genres for the structure of the shows. Milligan used what is known as “inverted travelogues,” as Voltaire (Candide), Swift (Gulliver), or Byron (Don Juan) did. The Goons adapted this narrative typology (mostly the adventure story) each week, sending their inept heroes to far-off lands and times—ancient Egypt, Rome, 1920s Europe, the Far East, even early twentieth-century Manhattan. In such classic satires, the writer disguised himself as a visitor from a faraway land (Britain); but in reality he was observing and describing his own country (thus, the “inversion”), exposing its bizarre customs and beliefs, character flaws, faults, and often biased idiosyncrasies through gentle mocking, social satire, and even outright disgust. In these, the hero could be a passive observer or some sort of knight-errant, interrupting, and so helping, to resolve a current-day social or political predicament. For the Goons, this role was given to Neddie Seagoon (or it could just be Bob Hope as interloper). The Goon Show consistently followed this pattern, while adding some dastardly villain (e.g., the Phantom Head Shaver) who threatened truth, justice, and the British way of life.62 These satiric mock-heroic fantasies allowed Milligan to reflect and critique the new postwar British landscape week in and week out. Included in this stock-structure design was a specialized format used each week. Each show would open with Announcer Greenslade pronouncing in a very deep, earnest voice, “This is the BBC.” This would immediately be followed by a counterpoint F/X—for instance, a cash register ringing or a burp—underscoring their attitude toward the BBC’s pretentiousness. Next, Secombe would announce “The Highly Esteemed Goon Show!” followed by a quick musical intro, always different, always humorously absurd (like a short blast of “the 1812 Overture” for 20 seconds). Then, Greenslade and the Goons would explain, Brecht-like, the complete plot of that night’s show, always parodying a classic story (usually with a mystery to keep listeners waiting for the type of resolution that satire disavows), which would, by satiric definition, proceed to spin wildly out of control. This same structure every week gave the listeners the comfort of knowing where they were at any given moment during the show, and who was who and what was what, allowing all to be in on the joke.63 The Goons were proving that postwar British satire had reached its postmodern self-conscious stage.

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The story’s resultant collapse would next result in nonsense behavior and play-acting—like knocking people’s teeth out, surreptitiously shaving their heads, hitting them with batter puddings, or stealing massive Wurlitzer organs to set a new land speed record at Daytona Beach— allowing the audiences a return to their “anything goes” childhoods, when all was right with a world that seemed endlessly new, before having to face the hardships of postwar British adulthood. It was a needed release, like the Ealing wish-fulfillment fantasies. But to get in the satirical jibes, speed was crucial—to keep people laughing and giddily unaware of the satire’s brutality. In the most intense satire there is little room to move, and the satirist must work fast (like Swift’s Modest Proposal, say). This is the chief reason for the frantic madness. As a result, Milligan pioneered “the joke without a punchline,” giving him space to create a public satire of current events and politics of the early 1950s. Like getting injections from the dentist to numb the pain, after two or three injections, by working fast, the satirist can now start drilling as hard as he likes, for the satirist has to get us to accept the premise of normal British life as absurd. Along with the rapid pace, also essential was the turn toward the solidly recognizable three-part format, as producer Peter Eton, strongly supporting the Goons’ silliness and keen commentaries, knew that true high satire requires stern discipline (he had studied art and English literature at university).64 But this discipline was also learned from the work of Alexander Pope. Pope was especially adamant about the care and attention needed for high satire, which is why he set the standard of manipulation of the heroic couplet that later poets sought to emulate but could rarely match. Eton got the Goons to recognize that discipline in satire is essential because the genre is so fragile. If not “perfectly express’d,” as Dryden instructed, the satire can backfire on the satirist, making him the fool in the public’s eye. In this way, Eton introduced the class-wary Milligan to some worthy highbrow postulates. But the most recognizable rhetorical technique was making people completely familiar with the characters, just how and where they would appear each week in each story, and how they facilitated the satire (special fun for the audiences was always identifying who was playing who among the three voices of Sellers, Secombe, and Milligan). And so came a Dramatis Personae of Goons’ regulars: Eccles, the “original Goon” and kindly all-purpose idiot; Neddie Seagoon, “true blue British idiot and hero always”; Bluebottle, Seagoon’s cowardly sidekick; Miss Minnie Barrister (“Spinster of the Parish”) and her high-pitched mate, Mr. Crun; Mr. Grytpype-Thynne (the villain) and his sidekick, the Frenchman

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Moriarty; and Major Denis Bloodknok, “military idiot and coward.”65 These characters were parochial British staples, and Milligan and the Goons used them to forward their satire of postwar British cultural life.

The Goons’ Characters and Their Types Become Postwar Staples The very fey Bluebottle, played by Sellers, appeared in each episode mainly for one reason—to get the dreaded “deading,” a sort of spanking of the effeminate Englishman (with his barely closeted queenish quirks) so often found in the English literature of Waugh and Forster (or the machismo of the American Hemingways and Millers). Bluebottle was the one character so self-absorbed he always not only read his lines but absent-mindedly read aloud his stage directions, too.66 Stage Directions (read aloud by Bluebottle): Enter Bluebottle, pauses for audience applause, as usual, not as saucy. (Laughs) Strikes defiant Bus Driver outside garage pose, but trousers fall down and ruin effect. BLUEBOTTLE (pulls up trousers, tucks in shirt): “Uhh . . . my hands are cold.”67 And later, Seagoon enters quickly. BLUEBOTTLE: Ahh!! I’m unarmed, you wouldn’t hurt a nursing mother would you!? SEAGOON: Bluebottle! Go in and get him! BLUEBOTTLE: I don’t like this game, let’s play another game. Let’s play the husbands of Rita Hayworth. [A nod to the tough dudes she hitched herself to, from Orson Welles to singer Dick Haymes. The suggestion was a certain type of brute Bluebottle would swoon over]. SEAGOON: Bluebottle, don’t tell me you’re a coward?? BLUEBOTTLE: Okay, I won’t, but you’re bound to hear about it sometime!

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SEAGOON: Bluebottle! BLUEBOTTLE: Okay, I’ll go in . . . for Eng-gland! In and out the door he goes. F/X: Door slams! BLUEBOTTLE, after he gets shaved, screams: Oh, you rotten swine, I’ve been balded! There goes my Tony Curtis–type haircut!!68 Bluebottle was homophobically ridiculed as a clearly gay character, but in an odd way also gave voice to English effeminacy, making homosexuality more visibly open by its portrait on the show every week, thus suggesting, in the new England of the modern 1950s, that it should be less of a crime and simply one more variation on traditional English mannerisms.69 It was definitely offensive; but its blatancy broke down barriers, too. Henry Crun, voiced by Peter Sellers, was recognized by his perennial inarticulate expression of frustration, “Mnk-mnk-mnk!,” and usually was Seagoon’s uncle, employer, or shopkeeper. Often appearing with his obvious aged lover, the naughty auntie-figure Minnie Bannister (played by Milligan), he was always exposing their trysts (“You sinful woman, Min!”). They were the original old married English pensioners couple arguing with each other over absolutely nothing, but the suggestion of their highly sexual relationship, for two elders, allowed Milligan to puncture yet another British taboo.70 Grytpype-Thynne (also Sellers) was a shady character who always conned Seagoon with Iago-like machinations that inevitably dragged Neddie down the garden path, mostly by promising him get-rich-quick schemes (foreshadowing Ralph Kramden and The Honeymooners that would appear in the States almost five years later [1955–56]).71 As Milligan mentioned, G-T was a sleazy officer, usually working with the French Count Jim Moriarty (a play-off Sherlock Holmes’s notorious nemesis).72 Grytpype-Thynne is so sordid that he would leave Moriarity in the dust whenever he could, turning to the idiots Eccles and Bluebottle as scapegoats for his plans.73 In high satire, the most specific character the satirist uses is the “panurge.” Coming from Rabelais, he represents one of the essential elements in the genre personifying satirical scorn for the small-minded and the mean, the prejudiced and conventional. Highet explains: To mock and expose the gullibility of mankind is one of the chief functions of the panurge, the clever, unprincipled character who is the friend and associate of Prince Pantegruel. They make a strange couple, the good prince and the bad courtier:

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Ripping England! they do not closely correspond with the other master-servant pairs who are notable in satire: Dionysus and Xanthias, Don Quixote and Sancho, Don Juan and Leparello. . . . Pantagruel takes Panurge into his service, and spends much time talking with him. Panurge can in no sense be called an advisor or a minister of his Prince . . . and it is impossible to excise Panurge from Rabelais’ wonderful story. He is the crook who plays cruel jokes on pretty girls and well-dressed men, can outgesture a symbolist, out-jargon a psychologist, out-language a semanticist—he personifies the mischievous, destructive force of satire, evil in itself, and only potentially good when attached to a good prince or good principle.74

Grytpype-Thynne was Milligan’s Panurge. In Rabelais, the exploits of the Panurge are almost always shocking as his heroes are beaten, soused in filth, threatened with instant execution, while in equally outrageous ways, the satiric villain often abuses and humiliates the rest of mankind right back. Milligan’s villain goes even farther: he steals the bells of Notre Dame, urinates over the royal palace, and befools priests, nobles, and monarchs, enjoying the absurd sufferings of others. In the Goons, he also shaves heads, mummifies Egyptian pianos and uses them as weapons, mocks ex-Indian Army men as well as diplomats, and forces Welsh people to prove that they aren’t really from Peru. As example, Moriarty and G-T violently attack Seagoon: (Scenario and all stage directions are read out loud): Late one night in 1927, young archaeologist Neddie Seagoon is working in the Oriental Exhibits Room at the Victoria and Albert Museum trying to decipher a parcel of ancient Mongolian clay tablets. They hold the key to the location of the tomb of Tartar Emperor Genghis Khan with its untold treasures. Two unexpected visitors in the shape of Grytpype-Thynne and Moriarty arrive. Seagoon is struck on the head by a mummified Egyptian piano and the two villains vanish with an incredibly rare inscribed tablet. (Grytpype: “Dear listeners, the sound you hear is Neddie Seagoon hamming it for all he’s worth.” Seagoon: “I just like to give the Seagoon fans their money’s worth.”). Seagoon summons the police with the aid of Eccles and the trail leads to the Singapore/China frontier. As a safety precaution, Dr. Fred Fu-Manchu has tattooed the entire inscription from the missing clay tablet on the back of Grytpype-Thynne’s false teeth!75

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Milligan borrowed Rabelais’s concept of the Panurge for his villainous sardonic buddy-story characters. But he also borrowed from the clichés found in the British Isles stories of Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Fu Manchu tales of intrigue. Voiced by Harry Secombe, Neddie Seagoon was the most important Goons’ character, for though he was a dolt, he always solved, or better yet, stumblingly, defaultly solved the mystery (always playing a detective, a lawyer/solicitor, a policeman or an adventurer—in other words, any profession for which he was simply ill suited). Neddie was the original overconfident idiot that is such a staple in British and American satire of today (think Will Ferrell—Talladega/Anchorman/as George W.—or Steve Coogan as Alan Partridge). Milligan called such characters “charlies” (real-life ones, too), and he made them the centerpiece of the program. As the ultimate self-righteous hot-air balloon who was always (blindingly) loyal to Britain—a dumbass patriot, making him an even slyer metaphorical device through which Milligan critiqued such British character flaws. Seagoon’s main vice was always his pursuit of money at any cost; this was Milligan’s swipe at the postwar greedsters from spivs to banksters and professional plutocrats—the same crowd W.C. Fields hated. Just when he thought he had finally found his fortune, Seagoon would launch into “They’ll always be an England . . . !” always, of course, only to then find that it was all a pipe-dream. (For Seagoon, as a patriotic Brit, he’d claim he “cannot be bribed;” but, surprise surprise, he always takes the money anyway).76 In the end, though, outside the heroes and villains category, the most recognized and celebrated Goon of all was Milligan’s famed idiot nonsavant, Eccles (not a confident idiot, just . . . an idiot). Eccles was the original Goon, and the character most identified with Milligan himself.77 He was often heard (especially in the later episodes) in long, often completely pointless conversations with Bluebottle, which did little to push the plot forward, but commented acutely on postwar British life by ridiculing the lack of change made by Labour’s and/or Tory’s frustrated efforts. Eccles especially was the key character used by Milligan to knock the British army (he was often a soldier), exposing on a weekly basis England’s new post-empire ineffectual role on the world’s stage.78 A typical setup: (Stage Direction): Eccles is guarding an army station in the Midlands, when Neddie Seagoon, acting as a solicitor for the defense in the Head-Shaver case, comes up to him: ECCLES: Halt! Who goes there?!?

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Ripping England! SEAGOON: Have no fear, I’m Queen’s Council Neddie Seagoon, in the Dirt case. ECCLES: Oh. SEAGOON: Let me through! I have on me several documents of identification, including a letter of personal trust from the commander of the British Army; a memo of recommendation from Mr. Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary; a special pass signed by Mr. Clement Attlee, leader of the Opposition; and last, but not least, a permit to go where and when I please, signed by the Right Honorable Prime Minister himself, Sir Winston Spenser Churchill! ECCLES: Friend or foe?!79

Eccles and Seagoon were to the Goons’ satiric narrative what Shadwell was to Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe. It takes a moment to realize that what seems to be praise is actually denigration of the deadliest kind (“Damning with faint praise”): Shadwell alone my perfect image bares, Mature in dullness from his tender years; Shadwell alone of all my sons is he, Who stands confirm’d in full stupidity.80 As Milligan maintains the mock heroic of Seagoon and Eccles, he makes it difficult for us to see immediately just what is being implied, and yet, when we realize the irony, the effect is magnified. Their maturity, like Shadwell’s, is in dullness. Besides, his goodly Fabrick fills the eye And seems design’d for thoughtless majesty: Thoughtless as Monarch Oaks that shake the plain, And, spread in solemn state, supinely reign.81 So, borrowing from Dryden’s technique, Secombe’s Seagoon’s selfaggrandizing and notable girth (an especially sore/funny point in a supposedly “rationing” postwar Britain) were reliably mocked, like Shadwell’s “goodly fabrick” and Eccles “thoughtless majesty.” By utilizing and getting the audience to recognize the staple structure and staple characters each week, Milligan created a disguised format that got his satiric mutation across on a large-scale, national level.

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The Definition of Insanity: The Goon Show as Social/Cultural Criticism and the New Popular Culture Like the modern artistic movements that Milligan borrowed from and used for his new postmodern brand of British satire, The Goon Show furiously worked to keep pace with the world shrinkage David Harvey described in his Space-Time Compression, as a mirror image of what exactly was going on. Milligan’s anarchic brand of satire reflected this shrinking, spedup, and compressed new Cold War order. In fact, each script always had its own dig at Cold War fears and madness (including satirizing the absurd levels of secret police and espionage worries). Milligan was mocking both the seriousness of the new age, but also its absurd consequences.82 In an article called, “The Standup Comedian as Anthropologist: Intentional Culture Critic,” in the Journal of Popular Culture, Stephanie Koziski noted: The best comics are sensitive cultural critics. They pattern their comic material close to everyday reality, making obvious behavioral patterns, explicit and tacit operating knowledge, and other insights about society’s objects of conscious reflection. Contrasting a familiar society with an alien one, anthropologists’ observations may evoke in their (scholarly) audiences a new perception by incongruity, as something of the pan-humanity of man is glimpsed through their explanations of culture.83 Koziski believes the most important farceurs bring “a level of conscious awareness to audiences from hidden underpinnings of their culture, and this was exactly Milligan’s great genius and importance in redefining the postwar, early 1950s English national identity. National identity, however, is by no means a fixed phenomenon. It is constantly shifting, constantly in process of becoming. The shared, collective identity, which is implied, always masks a whole range of internal differences and potential and actual antagonisms, and as the late 1940s turned to the early 1950s, Britain, its mores, and self-concept were changing, and the Goons were there, responding as concretely as the Ealing satirists to the new society, helping to reinvent it by giving it a caustic hook to hang its new persona on. “We weren’t trying to undermine the BBC,” Peter Eton summed, “we were trying to undermine the old order in Britain.”84 Or, in script form, WOMAN: Blue Eyes of Grisham, I have a question.

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Ripping England! MILLIGAN: Darling! WOMAN: No, I have a serious question. MILLIGAN: Continue. WOMAN: I’m a middle-aged woman. MILLIGAN: Well, give it up—there’s no future in it!85

By critiquing the fearful climate of change in Britain, along with its desire to move on, to get where they were going as a new island-nation without empire, and be who they were to become, the Goons’ militant topical humor always came ’round to score trenchant points against the status quo and current British events. As Seacombe put it, “We would go to the cinemas and often see something completely mad. The news shows would run for about an hour, and there was always one we sat through many times. The shows included Movietone news items about life in dying parts of the British Empire.”86 So, consistently, the Goons would inject quick extant quips on the current state of British social and political life into each show: ANNOUNCER WALLACE GREENSLADE: The Head Shaver had frightened the public so badly, only two people came to Brighton that summer. UNKNOWN VOICE (spoken by Peter Sellers): C’mon Clem, What’ve we got to lose??87 Clem was of course Attlee, a character very much like the American Adlai Stevenson, who would be later be lampooned (as the feckless two-time near-president some thought of him as) in Strangelove, but Sellers was making the other “unknown” character sound like Churchill—hence two very bald men who had been running the country for the past fifteen years.88 A danger though, as always, was that nothing dates like topical humor. But the Goons overcame such dangers with their energy, speed, and disciplined anarchy—and most of all, by their breaking down of 1950s social taboos. At the same historical moment in biological sociology, The Kinsey Report appeared to explain the human animal’s sexual predilections to a puritanical America. Writing about The Kinsey Report’s (1948/1953) effect on American culture in the 1950s, Lionel Trilling commented,

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By virtue of its intrinsic nature and also because of its dramatic reception, “The Kinsey Report” is an event of great importance in our culture. It is an event which is significant in two separate ways, as symptom and as therapy. The therapy lies in the large permissive effect the Report is likely to have, the long way it goes toward establishing the community of sexuality. The symptomatic significance lies in the fact the report was felt to be needed at all, that the community of sexuality requires now to be established in explicit quantitative terms. Nothing shows more clearly the extent to which modern society had atomized itself than the isolation in sexual ignorance which exists in us.89 This is exactly what Milligan’s Goons, using less (though only slightly less) scientific means, were also accomplishing across the ocean. By the end of World War II, Waugh and Orwell were past their most important satires, and wrote little of significance after war’s end.90 Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim didn’t appear until late 1954, almost a full four years after the Goons hit the airwaves, and six years after the Ealing films appeared on the scene.91 In literary circles, it was an important moment for the working-class poetry of the Movement, and five years later, the realist dramas of the Angry Young Men. However, the late 1940s and early ’50s, in English popular culture, was a watershed moment for British satire, one that would not have existed without Ealing, and certainly not without Milligan and the Goons, no matter what Martin Amis might claim.92 The times had changed, and it is little wonder that an inventive knave was found to make his profit out of British public credulity, providing the means to help redefine who they were, and who they were going to be, in an Empire-less, welfare-state, revamped, inward- and yet future-looking Britain. Even though he was a gifted mimic and performer, after the Goons ended in 1960 (a choice more his than anybody’s), Milligan felt exhausted but lost, as, surprise, the BBC wanted little to do with him (even as a performer), thinking him too loose a canon for such a respectful institution.93 This is not to say he became irrelevant, or that he failed to produce. After the Goons’ final series, Milligan turned to writing plays (Oblomov, 1964; The Bed Sitting Room, 1962), children’s literature (The Bald Twit Lion, 1967), poetry and novels (Puckoon, 1963), motion picture scripts (The Postman’s Knock, 1962; The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins, 1971) and, of course as always, humor. He also went on to write and star in the TV sketch series Q (1969–72), and to publish loads of other written material, including his own twisted interpretation of Lady Chatterley’s

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Lover (1994), along with his famous best-selling war memoirs, which began in 1971 with Hitler, My Part in his Downfall. Several characters from The Goon Show also appeared in a film he made with Peter Sellers called The Muckinese Battlehorn (1956), and The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film (1960). Probably the strongest Goons-related film appeared in 1975, The Great McGonagall (Joseph McGrath, written by Milligan and McGrath), starring Sellers and Milligan where Milligan is the infamous Scottish (from Dundee) lyric poet and tragedian William Topaz McGonagall, who even today is generally considered the lousiest metrist that country ever produced.94 Reviewing the film in The New Yorker, Penelope Gilliatt (Kael’s colleague/rival at the ’zine) pronounced, The whole story is draped—figuratively speaking, and often actually—in a Union Jack, which the Goons were the first public figures to treat as a beloved extinct object: dead as a doornail, but something to be commemorated. Their feelings about patriotism are both real and surreal, both skeptical and doting. Their way of seeing the behavior of late empire builders as a mixture of sobriety, endurance, and bashful arrogance . . . their film is delicately absurd, and full of sublime falls from fantasy onto a trampoline of commonsense from which we bounce upward again revived, and unbruised except for laughing.95 It was another brilliant stroke from the uncompromising genius. But The Goon Show was the pinnacle of Milligan’s achievement and contribution to postwar British culture.96 He never reached such heights or level of influence again, but the fact that he did it all at Old Auntie (the BEEB) for all of Britain to tune in to each week was the most astounding achievement of all; it is what the British call “Fighting from the Inside.” He lived the life of the complete postmodern schizophrenic, sacrificing much of his own sanity for our benefit. And it would be enough to influence generations. The Goons were easily the biggest factor in adumbrating the coming of the popular culture satire boom of the 1960s and ’70s. John Cleese and the other Pythons grew up listening to them. In fact, there most definitely would not have been a Monty Python without the Goons. Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, and others of Beyond the Fringe paid homage. John Lennon’s wordplay was often called “Joycean,” when really it was “Milliganesque,” and Lennon himself pointed to the influence of Milligan’s “coup d’etat of the mind.”97 In Canada and America, the members of the Fireside Theatre, Second City TV, and other later comedy troupes such as the Not Ready for

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Figure 7.3. Later Milligan, with Peter Sellers as Queen Victoria, as Scotland’s lousiest metrist. The Great McGonagall (Joseph McGrath, 1975). Photofest.

Prime Time Players and later still the Upright Citizen’s Brigade all have at one time or another credited Milligan and the Goons. But it wasn’t just comedy, it was satire of the highest order, unique to a postwar Britain searching for cultural signifiers to help coalesce and redefine itself after a postwar identity crisis. The Goons were the court jesters of an entropic kingdom, and for postwar British audiences, a respite from late 1940s and early 1950s strife and austerity.98 Outrageous satire has become the norm of all up-and-coming comic performers and programs in the UK and the United States since the 1960s. It was the art form that best connected the two cultures, and has given America new vistas of the real Britain, and Britain new vistas of America, ever since. They have informed each other in this way and deserve a cursory look.

8 The Post-1950s Satire Boom Satire Explodes into Late Twentieth-Century British and American Popular Culture

“Without the Goons I probably wouldn’t have had the confidence to be silly.” —Michael Palin, interviewed about The Goons.1

•

A

S IF A STATEMENT OF PROTEST,

immediately after the war, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, England’s artists turned to satire to voice their dissent and dissatisfaction with the continued economic and social stagnation of their home country; after those early seeds were planted, satire went from strength to strength as England entered the 1960s. As it did so, it exploded into the popular culture in the work of the Boulting Brothers, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, the Beatles, the Kinks, and Monty Python; the films of expatriate Americans Stanley Kubrick (Lolita, Dr. Strangelove) and Richard Lester (A Hard Day’s Night, How I Won the War); and, later, publications such as Private Eye, the films of Bruce Robinson (Withnail and I, How to Get Ahead in Advertising), and the pop-oriented tunesmiths and wordsmiths John Lennon, Ray Davies, and Mark E. Smith, as well as new comic stylings of the unmatchable

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Bill Hicks. These artists all took their cue from the seeds of the highly original and revolutionary British satirists and satires of the late ’40s and early ’50s. One cannot document all the satiric comedy that has sprouted in England and the States since Ealing and the Goons led the way—it has easily become the dominant genre of the two English-speaking nations, almost a psychological crutch—so a quick glance at just a few of the most poignant satirists over the last fifty years will have to do.

Film: The Boulting Brothers and the End of the ’50s That the 1960s was a turbulent decade of change around the world is hardly news. And that the ’60s put the English back on the map as international trend-setters is just as well known. Many of the trends of the 1960s were triggered by demographic changes brought on by the Baby Boom generation coming of age and the dissolution of Britain’s colonial empire, but among their cultural products, after the golden period, were some amazing satires picking up where the 1950s wizards left off. In film, the 1960s really began in 1959 with a series of outstanding works signaling a new era, most notably the Boulting Brothers’ new satires. John and Roy Boulting (b. 1913) were twin brothers from Bray who worked as producer and director, respectively (and even when they weren’t working together their work was almost indistinguishable), and they made a mix of tight, economical dramas (Brighton Rock, 1947; Seven Days to Noon, 1950) and some clumsy comedies (Carlton-Browne of the F.O., 1959).2 But following Ealing’s model and looking to fill the gap left by Ealing’s decline in the late 1950s, the brothers turned from melodrama and espionage to satire, creating such films as Private’s Progress (1956; here, in Milligan’s footsteps, the satiric target being the army), Brothers in Law (1957; dissing barristers and solicitors), and Lucky Jim (1957; from Amis’s caustic attack on postwar English academia). But in 1959, they made their greatest satire when they took on capital and labour with I’m All Right, Jack, starring Peter Sellers.3 Sellers plays Kite (a clever name for one who flies too high), a power-mad factory union shop-steward who calls strikes at the very suggestion of any changes in contractual agreements between union and management. While he mouths democratic platitudes (unread copies of Marx sit on display in his office), he knows less what they mean and more what is best to keep himself in a position of power. One can be pro-union and still recognize the dangers of such zealotry. Historian Roy Strong lays-out the real-life dilemma at the time:

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The unions were of course deeply committed not only to full employment but also to nationalization. As the revival of Britain depended on its economy and therefore its workforce, the co-operation of the unions was regarded as crucial to any government. By the mid-1950s a new generation of trade union leaders had emerged. They took full employment for granted, and now saw their role as one of pressing for better conditions and higher wages, irrespective of the state of the economy. No government was prepared to outface them. When, in 1956, the Conservatives passed their Monopolies and Restrictive Practices Act, for example, the unions were excluded, meaning a golden opportunity was lost. If the Conservatives dared not cross the unions, Labour’s inability to do so was even more constricted for the party was actually enmeshed in a system which depended on the unions for its funds via political levy.4 This is exactly what I’m All Right, Jack foresaw and attacked. The irony is interesting since better wages and conditions actually improve economies, and England’s economy in 1959 was the lead-in to the wild 1960s. But here, Windrush (Ian Carmichael) is a worker who questions such tactics (it creates unproductivity and inflation), and Kite, even more so, conspires with management to get rid of such bad apples. Kite’s pretensions to social consciousness are undercut by his uncouth appearance and pontificating malapropisms. The film attacks labor (the herbivores) especially hard, but it simultaneously exposes the corruption of the postwar capitalists (the carnivores) and their shady manipulations of Third World markets. If Windrush is a union pariah, Kite is a knee-jerk Labour fake. As in The Man in the White Suit, it is the women who see the truth of the paternal industrial order, Lysistrata-like. Kite’s wife and daughter disobey him to the point of refusing to play their roles at home, leaving him to fend for himself, lying helplessly prostrate and harrumphing all the way. The satire is so blatantly against Kite that the only question one asks is why did Mrs. Kite marry him in the first place? Because he had a secure job? Or was it because she at first bought into traditional gender roles? Or perhaps was Kite a different person as a young man? In any case, little evidence suggests that he has changed by the end of the story from when we first meet him. The film doesn’t answer these questions, but it does show the women to be far more pragmatic and insightful about their position in British postwar industrial life than the men—a clear comment on how wartime necessities changed

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gender roles forever, no matter how much the English expected to return to a patriarch-dominant society. The women are grateful for “full” employment after so many years of hardship, but with it comes a host of new problems leading to a different kind of economic and social stagnation:5 With memories of the 1920s and ’30s still vivid in people’s minds, “full” employment remained at the top of any political agenda. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, unemployment never exceeded more than 3 percent of the workforce, allowing it to rise beyond what was considered dangerous to the country’s social stability. To achieve this figure meant ignoring overmanning, restrictive practices and resistance to change. Ironically, no objections were raised to the growth of automation, as jobs were so plentiful. Such a policy, however, bore within itself the roots of its own destruction. Full employment meant bidding for workers, so wages spiraled ever upward, in the end reaching unaffordable heights, fueling a deadly inflation and pricing British goods out of the world markets.6 By the 1970s, inflation would be Britain’s (and America’s) biggest economic problem.7 The Kites’ daughter, Cynthia (Liz Fraser), also questions Kite’s omniscient authority that he wields at the shop, and she uses her curvy looks in a constant search for pleasure, already a very different attitude from that of her parents’ generation. She has little time for her father’s bluff. Of all the women in I’m All Right, Jack, only the classic old maid aunt, Dolly (Margaret Rutherford), agrees with Stanley and his blowhard Marxism, thus actually conflating conservatism with communism. She wants him to be true to his class, and do whatever it takes to maintain the status quo in and out of the workplace, and she and Mrs. Kite butt heads on these issues. It is a sharp contrast to the work ethic the (supposedly lazy) men have at the factory, and what makes this Boultings’ revue so subversive and insightful. The tension comes to a crescendo during a television program hosted by Malcolm Muggeridge, a debate show whose subject becomes Stanley’s firing, leading to a Socratic dialogue on the state of the government’s over-involvement in people’s lives. In classic satiric form, Stanley creates an anarchic mob scene by crashing the show and throwing the blackmail money into the air, making the audience leap from their seats to try and grab some of it, a not-so-subtle symbol for late-’50s Britain’s growing materialism—quite a change from late ’40s rationing. Stanley is then declared mentally unstable by a court, and he ends up in a

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nudist colony with his own father. Caustically sending up all media, from newspapers and billboards to TV and even documentaries. The ending, with the pretentious Stanley running from a horde of nude women, evokes a Swiftian disgust for the body (or a Bakhtinian love of the body, depending on how you look at it). In any case, the Boultings had gotten it right, and I’m All Right, Jack (1959) would kick off the ’60s satire boom.

Carry On, John Profumo, and the Dawn of the ’60s Revolution During this period, other British studios also pumped out a series of farces that were not really satires but bawdy comedies that exhibited a shameless male chauvinism doing even more damage to late twentiethcentury male propriety than even Benny Hill would inflict (their bawdiness was a way to out-do television). Filmed at the old Ealing studios, they were known as the Carry On films, films that followed a strict formula beginning with Carry On, Sergeant in 1958. It was such a hit it created an entire industry of stupid, lowest-common-denominator comedies whose existence was sort of like I’m All Right, Jack’s premise: to keep a core of regular actors employed.8 It is not an accident that these films prospered in the mid-1960s just as the sexual revolution that was happening in the States migrated to swinging London, too, with the Beatles and the Stones forcing the Establishment to change with the times.9 Though the Carry On films are important to the period for pushing the envelope on vulgarity, it was the Boultings who were producing the most authentic satire in the late ’50s and early ’60s. So the ’60s really began in 1959, creating a true shift in British and American culture that would be underlined by the government scandal of John Profumo.10 Prime Minister Harold Macmillan (1957–63) was still basking in the glow of his 1959 election victory over Labour and the Liberals when the ’50s turned to the ’60s, but the blue smoke surrounding Conservative power was dissipating.11 It began at Orpington in Kent in March 1962, when a reliable Tory constituency turned out instead for Jeremy Lubbock, and the Liberals finally had a long-sought victory. Macmillan then went on a purge, replacing one-third of his cabinet (borrowing Depression-era Germany lingo, it was dubbed “night of the long knives”), and Supermac became Mac the Knife.12 Early ’60s Conservative disarray was compounded by Labour’s consolidation around Harold Wilson, who talked a more pragmatic game than past opposition leaders, and by 1961–62, the winds of change were shifting from the staid Conservative status quo as the Beatles practiced in Hamburg, Bob Dylan hitchhiked to New York, and JFK stared down Khrushchev’s Cuban missile deployment. But it

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would be the Profumo scandal that would bring Labour to power in October of 1964. Today, some still get bent out of shape by sexual scandal, when politicians and other public figures are caught in compromising positions, but in 1963 the very notion was deeply shocking in the pre-pill, pre-promiscuity age, when unmarried pregnancy was a matter of deep family shame and divorce was avoided at all costs (so unsavory was the shame factor that even the press turned a blind eye to politician’s private affairs).13 The British Secretary of War, John Dennis Profumo, a quintessential high Tory, Harrow- and Oxford-educated, bred for a career in politics, was revealed to have a mistress, Christine Keeler, who was also the mistress of the Russian naval attaché, Eugene Ivanov.14 Profumo and Keeler met at Lord Astor’s country mansion, Cliveden, giving a “peculiar peccadilloes of the aristocracy” air to the whole affair, but Profumo lied about his liaison to Parliament, and the matter spiraled out of control. PM MacMillan resigned, replaced by Sir Alec Douglas-Home in October of 1963, and, forced to call an election, the Tories lost their ten-year hold on the government and the cooler, more open-minded Wilson-led Labour helped usher in the swinging ’60s. But in a world of Cold War politics straight out of Dr. Strangelove, which ironically was then in production at Shepperton studios in London, it was the fearful anxiety of Soviet penetration in to the secrets of the West that spooked the British public. The media had a field day and English culture was changed forever, marking the true beginning of the swinging ’60s in Britain and the newer more sexually and artistically permissive atmosphere in the culture, in the streets, and in the arts; what had been brewing underground since the mid-’50s now stretched its tentacles into every British family’s home.15 The culture had long since lost its innocence; now it lost its inhibitions, too. And as the Baby Boom generation began to come of age, satire was picked up by new voices aimed at the Boomers’ financially secure precociousness. The next great satires in English popular culture would come from the most famous British export of the twentieth century, the Beatles. Though their early songs were straighter bubble-gum pop, their movies revealed their weaning on Ealing and the Goons in their self-deprecating joisting. Their first two films were wildly entertaining satires that mocked their own celebrity and British cultural pretensions (A Hard Day’s Night, 1964, and Help!, 1966). They also laid bare the transatlantic cross-pollination taking place, as both were directed by an American, Richard Lester. Lester, born in Philadelphia in 1932, studied English literature at the University of Pennsylvania, fell in love with the postwar Ealing films, and immigrated to London in the mid-1950s, where he worked in advertising directing TV commercials. He produced

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an independent variety show that was seen by Peter Sellers, who then hired Lester to help translate episodes of The Goon Show to television (named by Milligan A Show called Fred, May 1956). Milligan, Sellers, and Lester made a short 35mm film (The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film, 1962) that ran before some of the Boulting comedies, and it became John Lennon’s favorite film before the Beatles hit, so when the Beatles were asked to make a feature film in 1964, Lennon immediately requested Lester as director. A Hard Day’s Night (1964) was the result, showing both an exaggerated and simplified version of The Beatles’ private and performing lives.16 It perfectly addressed both their British and American fans, who were copping on to satire more and more in a reaction against the saccharine teeny-bopping-aimed media of the 1950s. Many of its stylistic innovations survive today in the conventions of pop promos, in particular the multi-angle filming of live performances and the surrealist jump-cuts (borrowed from Godard’s 1959 visual innovations in Breathless and, more importantly from the Goons) intercut with some completely nonrelated, often ridiculous, inserts. Lester went on to direct several quintessential “swinging” films, including the sex comedy The Knack (1965), the second Beatles film Help! (1965), and another more serious satire, also with Lennon, How I Won the War (1966).17 But his Beatles’ satires are especially important because of their direct association to popular culture through their enormous success, bringing the very provincial and esoteric English chaffing of public mores and figures of the postwar era to an international audience, helping to fuel a new form of British cultural imperialism fifteen years after the war had killed off their physical colonial dominance. And yet, without Ealing and the Goons, Lennon and the Beatles would have been less intelligent, irreverent, or, even popular. Another American expatriate who moved to Britain for artistic license and the same love of twisted absurdist humor as Lester was Stanley Kubrick, who employed Sellers (after hearing him with the Goons) for his two early 1960s satires, Lolita (1961), and the most affecting and powerful satire to come out of this period, Dr. Strangelove (1963). This was the country where both ex-pats would permanently settle because they could make these kinds of films without Hollywood interference, in the spirit of British impudence, and still have successful careers; they brought British satire to American audiences, and at the same time American craftsmanship to British films.

Later Satires of the 1970s and 1980s Satire continued to be a genre comics and other serious artists used to establish themselves. Notable British satires of the 1960s and ’70s were

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The Magic Christian (Joseph McGrath, 1969–70, with the screenplay credited to Terry Southern, Peter Sellers, John Cleese, and Graham Chapman), Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, 1974–75), Life of Brian (Terry Jones, 1979), and The Great Rock and Roll Swindle (Julian Temple, 1980). But the 1970s would be the decade of the American satirists, from Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Nichols and May, to Richard Pryor and George Carlin, whose Silent Generation sauciness was finally seeping in to American and European public consciousness. One of the most important set designers during the changes of the ’60s and ’70s in the theater and film industries was Assheton Gorton (1930–2014). Gorton worked on such trend-setting swinging London ’60s films as Richard Lester’s The Knack (1965), Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), Joe Massot’s Wonderwall (1968), and Joseph MacGrath’s The Magic Christian (1969). In the ’70s and ’80s, Gorton was chief designer for Mike Hodge’s Get Carter (1971), Karl Reisz’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), and Ridley Scott’s Legend (1985), before finishing out his career with Michael Caton-Jones’s Rob Roy (1995), E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of a Vampire (2000), and Disney’s 102 Dalmatians (2000). Gorton’s eclecticism and flexibility allowed him to change with the times and adapt to any genre’s needs. That these films of the satiric ’60s are so iconic is a result of his keen eye and talent. As we survey Gorton’s films, we see an astonishingly variant array of vistas, fantasy words, realistic environments, bizarre interiors, and enchanting and often other-worldly hideaways—the futuristic abysm of The Bed Sitting Room (1969), the cramped and unendingly inspired interior of The Knack (1965), the jazzy melee of the photographer’s lair in Blow-Up (1966), Mr. and Mrs. Blossom’s kinky home design, and the professor’s green “cave” in Wonderwall (1968).18 What was crucial abut Gorton’s career was his apprenticeship in the Television of the 1950s at ABC Weekend (Associated British Corporation, a drama company based in Manchester with offices off Oxford Street, London), which put him right smack center of the burgeoning arts scene of the satiric 1950s and ’60s in London. When asked if Lester knew about Jerry Lewis’s The Errand Boy (1961), Gorton responded, “Lester would have known about the Lewis films.” It would take the rise of independent production companies in the 1980s for the satire revival to really take hold again in England, especially through George Harrison’s Handmade Films (and the independent Channel Four), and today the biggest underground cult film from the period is easily Bruce Robinson’s George Harrison–produced Withnail and I (1987).19

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Robinson (b. 1946) trained as a classical Shakespearean actor at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama, where his ability and good looks landed him the part of Benvolio opposite John McEnerey’s Mercutio in Franco Zeffirelli’s much-praised Romeo and Juliet (1968). But despite this and other parts in films by Ken Russell (The Music Lovers, 1970) and François Truffaut (the male lead in L’Histoire d’Adele H, 1975), he hated the degrading cattle-call auditioning processes and turned to writing and directing. Successful British producer David Puttnam finally produced Robinson’s script about Cambodia, The Killing Fields, in 1984, for which he was nominated for an Oscar.20 But it was the subtly ingenious Withnail and I that brought a new generation to the later British satiric run—a film about two unemployed actors living in abject squalor in Camden Town in the late ’60s, which shot newcomer Richard E. Grant to stardom. Today Camden Town real estate is priced out of all modest reach, but in the late ’60s one could rent an entire house there for peanuts, and the two wannabe actors, as they wait for the phone to ring, test each other’s patience and the survival skills of their English middle-class upbringing when placed in rural ex-urban surroundings. Marwood, or “I,” the narrator of the film (played by Paul McGann) is the saner and better looking of the two, but Withnail is the acting genius; the story is based on Robinson’s true experiences. To relieve their lives from their mundane grind, and get away from freezing London and the interlopers who crash on their couch stoned out of their minds, the two sneak off to a country weekend cottage owned by Withnail’s flamingly gay uncle, Monty, played by the monumental Richard Griffiths (1947–2013). In the great satiric tradition, the holiday turns from a good idea to an awful debacle when they realize that their classical and overly romanticized English country house is a frozen-in-time decrepit farmer’s cottage devoid of any charm, even worse than their ruinous flat back in London. Being city-dwellers, they find themselves unable to find sustenance or even a way to keep warm: WITHNAIL: This place is uninhabitable! MARWOOD: Give it a chance. It’s got to warm up. WITHNAIL: Warm up? We may as well sit round this cigarette. This is ridiculous. We’ll be found dead in here next spring.

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The laughs come from the ideal of English Romanticism (Wordsworth’s love of the earth and the country; Blake’s “England’s green and pleasant land”), so beloved by Boomer flower children juxtaposed with the reality of the harsh English winters. And each subsequent attempt at civility becomes more and more barbarously untenable. Wordsworth’s country-love (or Jagger’s children of the moon communality) is lost on these out-of-their-element misfits. But satire is often a subtle business, and when Withnail and I was previewed to a small audience in London’s West End, things went as poorly as that country trip for the duo. Robinson said, “It was a morgue. It was like the fucking Producers.”21 But since Robinson was influenced by the transatlantic crossings of music and satire (Hendrix blasts from the soundtrack), now his model was not Bob Hope or even Billy Wilder vehicles, but instead Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), in its ode to the death of the 1960s (or at least the ideals of the ’60s) and how Boomers were supposed to change the world for the better in that violent decade, but instead “failed to ‘Paint It Black,’ ” as Danny the Druggie (Ralph Brown) shrewdly reflects. What makes the whole thing work is how, again and again, it debunks such rhapsodic notions of the age as a swinging time for all in London. It wasn’t. For many young folk, it was a terrible period, the days of the classic struggle by developing artists trying to make it doing what they wanted to be doing, wondering if they would be relegated to a lifetime on the dole, or, even worse, if they would have to join the back-breaking labor force to eke out some sort of depressing living for themselves and their families for the rest of their lives, like their fathers before them. For if there was one single thing Boomers feared more than anything, more even than the Vietcong or the atomic bomb, it was becoming their parents. And for these two sorry sods, their failures and dim futures are horrifyingly evident. As Robinson states, for the audience, It’s deadly serious. When we were tramping around in those fucking bags up some fell in Ullswater, there was nothing funny about it—it was fucking horrible. Awful. The comedy comes out of it post the event, taking an artistic view of it. For example, the drunken landlord in the pub in the Lake District was based on a publican from a dump called The Spreadeagle in Camden Town. He used to get completely wasted and very acerbic, and say, “Isn’t it time you two cunts left?” So I had him in my head, then I had us with these carrier bags on our feet, then I had the publican up the hill in Ullswater.22

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Since their plight, and Withnail’s theme, is the symbolic death of the ’60s in English popular culture, at the end of the film, Robinson gives his main protagonist a very short and sharp haircut, signaling the end of hippiedom, and so the dreams of his generation. With the haircut—“They’re selling hippie wigs in Woolworth’s man.” That’s exactly what happened—I got a job in a play called Journey’s End, the text that you see the character reading—in Theatre 69 in Manchester. I came back one day with that very haircut. I was moving on, I was moving out. I still have nightmares about having my hair cut, because in the late Sixties it was something that fucked with your head. Everything was about long hair—‘Granny Takes a Trip down the King’s Road’ and all of that. And when I came back and went for Sunday lunch with my friends in a restaurant I would be stared at like a Martian because I was the only guy with short hair. Because the rest of my clothes were like everyone else’s they’d all think I’d been in jail.23 And yet, his brand of rebellious satire was also a comment on the Thatcherite ’80s in which it appeared (1984): I’m still pretty much Left establishment but I’m very establishment now in the sense that I’m lucky to live in a nice house and I’ve got some money. But my passion is still very much towards the Left. I’m a classic champagne fucking socialist. But what’s wrong with that? Two of the words are very nice—champagne and socialism. I know what it’s like to have no money but I’ve only ever been broke—never poor. Because I’m educated, I could listen to Sibelius or read fucking Shakespeare even if I couldn’t eat. One of the worst indictments of the Conservatives is not educating people, not allowing them to be broke. The opposite of broke isn’t rich.24 Again borrowing from Hunter Thompson’s classic, Robinson gives the juiciest lines to the past-his-prime, overindulged, and overweight but sadly beautiful and passionate Uncle Monty, whose speech on the death of the age and the ideals of youth elevates the film: UNCLE MONTY: The old order changeth, yielding place to new, and God fulfills himself in many ways. And soon, I

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Monty represents the harsh distance between hope and reality that the boys are facing. This most heart-rending moment is Robinson’s ode to his own youth and England’s perceived glorious past. The august Monty shows that he is not crazy; as the aesthete dandied dinosaur he is, he is, in fact, the absolute pinnacle of learned sophistication and wistful humanism that Butler’s 1944 Education Act and Attlee’s and Wilson’s followthrough (including the 1967 Sexual Offenses Act) had made possible for all Britons: they may be poor (or gay) but at least they are well-educatedly aware of it. It is a solitary moment of realization in an energetic satire on the rites of passage before one turns thirty and toward a life of full adulthood and responsibility, one England was to face as the swinging scene it depicts was now fading into the thin air of the ’70s malaise, like the baseless fabric of Robinson’s flickering, lighted cinematic vision itself. After the poor showing of Withnail (it is now a cult hit), Robinson retired, like Pope, to a country estate to write similar private elegies and generally stay far removed from the city and vulgar mob. Robinson’s subsequent films would go on to mock the advertising world and explore

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Figure 8.1. Withnail and I (Bruce Robinson, 1987). Withnail (Richard E. Grant) and I (Paul McGann) with Uncle Monty (Richard Griffiths), the past-his-prime, overindulging, but sadly beautiful dandy. Handmade Films/Photofest.

criminal psychology, but he would never again achieve the same heights of satiric vision as he did in Withnail.

Theater and Television The influence of Brecht, whose plays were now beginning to be seen in translation on the English stage, showed itself in the episodic narrative methods of Robert Bolt in A Man for All Seasons (1960), while that of the Theatre of the Absurd, imported from France and Italy by Beckett and Ionesco, had already reached London with the former’s Waiting for Godot in 1955. These plays made clear the cosmic absurdity of Man, his imperfect powers of communication with his fellows, and his crushing fears of being alone and shamed by a cruel universe. In Britain, theater also turned to satire for some relief from the unabating Cold War pressure cooker.25 Satire’s ’60s stage revolution was further led by newcomers Peter Cook, Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller, David Frost, Eleanor Bron, and

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Dudley Moore; one of its most successful incarnations was a West End show that appeared in early 1960, Beyond the Fringe (1960–66), which cleverly mimicked (nicked, really) Milligan and the Goon’s anarchic style. Peter Edward Cook (November 17, 1937–January 9, 1995) was a British satirist of the highest order, specializing in anti-establishment rites that reflected the madness of life in Britain during the Cold War. Cook was himself Establishment educated at Radley and at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he first performed and wrote comedy sketches, eventually hooking up with Dudley Moore for their popular television show Not Only . . . But Also (1964–70) on the BBC. Like the Goons, they drove the BBC around the bend with their incessant mocking of British social conventions, English provincial life, and the New Jerusalem socialist experiments, because the British public’s taxes supported the BBC and the new safety nets.26 Fringe also made the atmosphere ripe for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, (1969–1974). The highly educated Pythons (they were all Oxbridge, half from Oxford, half Cambridge)—Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam (the only American, and not educated in England), Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin—performed their own written work. Like its precursors, Python was so clearly modeled after the Goons that even they admitted to near-plagiarism;27 one added element, since it was visual (TV), was Gilliam’s surrealist animations, which also borrowed from the bizarre absurdist drawing style of Milligan.28 The show was produced by the BBC, like the Goons and . . . But Also, and as usual the BBC often censored much of it.29 The Pythons were such an enormous worldwide success (the comedy equivalent of the Beatles), that they have been overcovered, overanalyzed, and overexposed. Unfortunately, this has overshadowed the Goons (and Ealing), without whom the Pythons would not have had their style, or even the confidence to go as far as they would in each surrealist skit. Still, they became important in their own right because of their talent, because the show has aged so well, and because it has become permanently integrated into British and American popular culture.

Print By the 1960s, Waugh and Amis were the old guard, mocked by the newer artists as being out of step with modern Britain. Soon newer literatures were being published, taking their aim at the old and new alike. Private Eye is a monthly British satirical magazine, founded in 1961 by Christopher Booker, Peter Cook, Richard Ingrams, and Willie Rushton right in the midst of the ’60s boom (it is still published).30 PE specializes

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in taking on the Establishment in such an esoteric manner that most of the jokes are accessible only to those in the know; for example, the phrase, “Ugandan relations” is a PE euphemism for extramarital sex; Queen Elizabeth II is always referred to as “Brenda,” and “tired and emotional” is a phrase used to describe a drunken stupor of any public figure caught out (first used on the 1960s Labour party Cabinet Minister George Brown, who was “discovered” one night). But PE is also respected for its serious investigative journalism (it helped expose, for example, the phone-hacking scandal of The Sun newspaper in the early 2000s), and it has been repeatedly sued for libel; it is only kept running by appealing to readers to help defray legal costs and damages awarded against them.31 Its equivalent in the United States today is The Onion, proving how satire keeps crossing the waters (sample Onion headline in 2000: “Newly Elected George Bush Declares: ‘Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Finally Over!’ ”).32 Satire on the printed page, and now online, keeps proving topical protest is stronger than ever.

Tunesmiths and Wordsmiths John Lennon, the singer-songwriter from the famous quartet, admired Milligan, especially for his wordplay.33 Lennon would say, “Take two disparate ideas or words, smash them together and see if they make any meaning,” and he was fond of ad-hominem puns in every line.34 And in a classic Bloomian Anxiety of Influence, like Gilliam, Lennon also “borrowed” Milligan’s drawing style (viewed side by side, the similarities are uncanny), and while Milligan’s are “nice,” Lennon’s go for hundreds of thousands at auction each year. Ray Davies’s (The Kinks) satire came from his hardscrabble tragic working-class upbringing (inspired by his older sister’s young death), while he also adored English Music Hall and their melodic tunes.35 But this was the ’60s, and it was uncool to fancy such old British relics, so Davies disguised that adoration by borrowing their tuneful descants and style, and added snide lyrics that both scorned and pined for old England. It was an ingenious juxtaposition. We are the Village Green Preservation Society. God save Donald Duck, vaudeville and variety. For snarky young boomer Brits, this was bold, verdant even, for 1960s hippisters. Were Kink’s fans supposed to fall over laughing in mocking youth style, or were they supposed to take these songs seriously, as a lament for a truly lost England? These verses are so chock full of love

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and satiric mocking they create at once a tearful nostalgia and a laugh, as the lines name-drop current and old British cultural staples. “We are the Desperate Dan Appreciation Society / God save strawberry jam and all the different varieties.” Desperate Dan was an English character slumming though the American Wild West frontier (by British cartoonist Dudley D. Watkins for The Dandy, and later for Beano), who made his first appearance in 1937. “Preserving the old ways from being abused / Protecting the new ways, for me and for you / What more can we do?” When you watch the Kinks perform this “little known album track,” especially in a 1972 BBC special presentation of the prodigious album, it is clear they are being quite sincere.36 “They go on: “We are the Draught Beer Preservation Society / God save Mrs. Mopps and good old Mother Riley / We are the Custard Pie Appreciation Consortium / God save the George Cross, and all those who were awarded them / We are the Sherlock Holmes English-speaking Vernacular / God save Fu Manchu, Moriarty and Dracula.” Even though Mrs. Mopps is an Indian-inspired English chutney (now produced in Carhampton, Somerset), Donald Duck an American character (created by the American Walt Disney, after he lost the copyright to Mickey), Sherlock Holmes and Moriarity the invention of a Scotsman (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), and Dracula that of an Irishman (Bram Stoker), all became engrained in British literature as Victorian and Modern British cultural icons (Disney had an Irish-English heritage via Canadian parents). In entertainment and literature, the Brits always claim the Scots-Irish-Welsh as their own—just ask Kenneth Branagh, Liam Neeson, Tom Jones, or any of the actors who embodied James Bond, none of whom were actually English besides Roger Moore. And Fu Manchu (in a late Edwardian racist manner) was created by the English author Sax Rohmer (aka Arthur Henry Ward), who was born in Birmingham but lived most of his adult life in New York City (1883–1959). Hence, the English colonization project continues in full representation in Davies’s imaginative ballad. And it ends in a fitting, almost Douglas Sirkian, poking yet affectionate manner: “God save little shops, china cups, and virginity / God save Tudor houses, antique tables, and billiards / Preserving the old ways from being abused / Protecting the new ways, for me and for you / What more can we do?”37 With its sincerely tongue-in-cheek lyrics and simultaneously sentimental and satirical delivery, it is art’s highest aesthetic order: blistering irony. Davies’ hymn is an English Warhol. So many of Davies’s titles in the music hall tradition were also snide sendoffs of creaky British formalities that swinging Britain laughed at, yet secretly also yearned for: “Animal Farm,” “Waterloo Sunset,” “Muswell Hillbillies” (Muswell Hill was the area of London where the

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Kinks grew up), “Lazing on a Sunny Afternoon,” “A Well-Respected Man,” “Dedicated Follower of Fashion,” “Sleepwalker,” “Where Have all the Good Times Gone?,” and finally, “Arthur (or The Decline and Fall of the British Empire).” They were bitterly nostalgic, proving even the most acerbic crosspatch has a sentimental soft spot for Britain’s past.38 Mark E. Smith is a poet, musician, and the acid-tongued leader of the English rock band The Fall. Melodic, cacophonic, and magnificent, The Fall easily remain the most enduring of the late-’70s punk and post-punk iconoclasts, and Smith is the key musical satirist of his generation because in his art the music is always secondary to his voice, lyrics, and message (though he’d never admit it). The Fall’s minimalist riffs are powerful and catchy, but they are no match for the vituperative lyrics sabotaging everything from Thatcher’s policies (“Hex Enduction Hour”) to neo-romantic pop (“Glam Racket”), from bureaucrats (“Town and Country Hobgoblins”) and socialist academics (“The Birmingham School of Business School”) to poncy faux celebrities (“Ersatz UK”) and gerontocracy (“The League of Bald-Headed Men”). Smith’s enormous output is staggering. Formed in Manchester in 1977, The Fall has attracted a cult following that clings to his every utterance, a particularly abstruse brand of satire that is as prolific and powerful as Swift, Pope, or the Earl of Rochester were in their own times. And, without the high-brow pretensions. Musically, the Fall’s minimalist aesthetic was inspired by American garage/swamp rock of the 1960s and 70s, most essentially Link Wray, Dick Dale, and the Ventures; the Lenny Kay culled album Nuggets: Original Artifact from the First Psychedelic Era: 1965–1968 (Rhinodisc, 2012); the Velvet Underground; Iggy and the Stooges; and the Ramones. In the first song of his career, Smith yawped, “We are the Fall! / Northern white crap that talks back / We are not black. Tall / No boxes for us. / Do not fuck with us. / We are frigid stars. / We are spitting, we are snapping, “Cop Out, Cop Out!” as if from Heaven!”39 “Northern” because he is a proud Madchesterian; “frigid” because he is the sensitive poet; “spitting . . . snapping from Heaven” because he is the classic satirist-prophet screaming in the wilderness for attention to point out society’s ills so as to save his beloved English (herbivores) culture from the poisoning infidels (carnivores). Take for example, “Kicker Conspiracy,” from 1983. When “Kicker Conspiracy” came out “no bugger wanted to know about soccer songs,” Smith later reflected.40 The game itself was in turmoil: it was embarrassed by rampant hooliganism, on the verge of being censored by the government, and headed for a similar fate that would befall boxing (relegated to pay-per-view only), even before the triple blows of Heysel,

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Figure 8.2. Mark E. Smith (far right) and The Fall, 1980s. He changed modern satire, and modern rock; no new band would ever admit to not recognizing his influence. Photofest.

Hillsborough, and Valley Parade served to change the game’s reputation beyond redemption. Smith sniped at the mug-headed hordes who swaggered around the stadium in matching shirts and who carried what, in hooligan culture, are called, “stadium” knives (shivs to be used in the brawl after the match; who won the match never really mattered to the thugs, who got off on A Clockwork Orange–like ultra-violence).41 As much a sequence of linked tirades (the satirist’s preferred narrative strategy), including a brilliant, and still pertinent, parody of television football reporting, “Kicker Conspiracy” addressed what, even today, seems the guiding principle of the game’s administrators—crushing individual ingenuity in favor of mindless formations. In the marble halls of the charm school / How flair is punished! / Under Marble Millichip, Kicker, Kicker Conspiracy / J. Hill’s satanic reign: Ass-lickers King O’Team.42 Borrowing from Blakean imagery, Smith attacked the blockhead mentality of team-conformity football, as well as Jimmy Hill, England’s leading

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TV football pundit at the time, and the FA’s then-chairman Sir Bert Millichip.43 This is pre–Premier League (when it was known as the First Division), before England began to accept foreign players (i.e., those with “flair,” a reference to great international players, especially of the Dutch World Cup teams of the 1970s whose idea and displays of Total Football entranced spectators during its brilliant run),44 before the First Division morphed into the world-class league on par with Germany’s, Italy’s, and Spain’s that it is today.45 Millichip famously went out of his way to keep the league English-only, seeing himself as a pillar of the Establishment, harking back to the days when Britannia ruled. In other words, to Smith, Millichip was a “dinosaur-like anachronism in the modern world.”46 “In the booze club, George Best does rule. / How flair is punished! / His downfall was a blonde girl / but that’s none of your business!” Best was a Northern Irish footballer who played for Manchester United and is seen by many as the greatest player of the modern age. He was the first “pop” footballer because of his long hair and partying ways on the London and Manchester club scene, and is regarded as integral to 1960s Britain as the Beatles. He constantly clashed with the authorities and was a burnt-out alcoholic by the time he was twenty-seven. Yet despite all of his problems, he is still widely admired, even by Smith, who here suggests that the F.A.’s crushing of individualism drove Best to drink. “Kicker Conspiracy” was uncool, uncouth, uneverything that a right-minded mid-’80s pop star should be thinking about, but Smith would never be your right-minded average pop star.47 Smith might also be heard mocking Britons’ lemmings-like habit of heading to Spain for their holidays, not to mention the puritanical postponement of personal satisfaction that comes with saving for such a holiday, “I’ve sold my car, thrown in my job / I’m 34 years old. I’m going to Spain / Cousin Norman had a real fine time last year / He said it doesn’t rain / hope I can quickly learn the language, yeah.”48 It is a biting indictment of small English dreams. Smith also punctuates yuppie self-aggrandizement and paranoia about their worth in his essay/ song “The Man Whose Head Expanded” (1983): The man whose head expanded was corrupted by Mr. Sociological memory. Was corrupted by Mr. Sociological Memory Man. Could not get a carrier bag for love nor money. . . . No little pub incident. A red-faced post-Jolly Grapes would steal

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Smith is parodying the socialist tendencies of constantly creating “fiveyear” plans that never go quite as they are supposed to (because times and economics change so much quicker than that), along with the British tendency to shift the blame to anyone but themselves: O’er grassy dale, and lowland scene / Come see, come hear the English “Scheme” / The lower-class, want brass, bad chests, scrounge fags. The clever ones tend to emigrate. For Smith, emigration isn’t an option (“don’t abandon the barracks,” he’d advise; he still lives near Salford, Manchester’s rougher side of town). Britons needed to face up to their own social maladies and solve them pragmatically. “Like your psychotic big brother who left home for jobs in Holland, Munich, and Rome. He’s thick, but he struck it rich, switch. . . . Peter Cook’s jokes, bad dope, check shirts, lousy groups— always pointing their fingers at America. Down pokey quaint streets in Cambridge. . . . If we was smart we’d emigrate.”50 And yet, English Schemes are often (to Smith, anyway) noble but lame attempts to constantly do what is best, what is right for the British who live day to day, often on the dole, on lower-class wages in crap housing waiting for their government to come through for them (how could they ever when they are bought and paid for by the carnivores?). At the same time, he understands that the government needs to do something, that the free-wheeling, so-called “free market” years of the late 1970s to today’s Tory/Brexit dominance has rendered Britain a capitalist wasteland, puncturing the soulless braggadocio of the politicians and the financierrapists. Smith’s words are not so much lyrics as editorial snapshots of Britain over the last thirty-five years. Often the cantankerous titles alone tell the story of Smith’s intense and unrelenting late twentieth-century British satire: “Solicitor in Studio,” “(I Just Want) Room to Live,” “Bend Sinister,” “The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall,” “Code: Selfish,” “The Infotainment Scan,” “This Nation’s Saving Grace,” “Spoilt Victorian Child,” “Lie Dream of the Casino Soul,” “Disney’s Dream Debased,” “Have You Seen the English Deer Park?,” “Second Dark Age,” “Eat Yerself Fitter!,” “Why Are People Grudgeful?,” “No Xmas for John Quays,” “Middle Class Revolt!,” “Behind the Counter,” “Oswald Defense Lawyer,” and “The North Will Rise Again” (read: Manchester, despite so many destructive governmental policies, will become a vibrant economic

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and artistic English center once again, as it did with the Madchester movement of the 1990s).51 Smith still rants on today. The band has gone through forty different members over the years—he is the sole survivor. There is no mistaking that it is Smith’s project. Whether you enjoy the sounds or not, The Fall has changed modern satire. No new comic or rock band would ever admit to not being influenced by Mark Smith, and modern British culture is richer for Smith’s running elucidations about their nation. The Fall stand, tall and unyielding.

And Finally, Stand Up! People The last satirist in this survey is an odd one, for he was an American who never became an ex-patriate and who never denounced his Americanness, but he did have to go to England to gain a following and a career. Bill Hicks was born on December 16, 1961, in Valdosta, Georgia, and his family moved around before settling in Houston when Bill was seven. They lived in the Memorial area to the west of the city, a place called, unironically, Nottingham Forest, a “strict Southern Baptist ozone,” as Hicks later called it. Hicks is important to late twentieth-century British and American satire because he truly was the ultimate bridge between the two cultures before his death at thirty-two, for while he had a cultfollowing in the States, it was Britain that first and truly embraced him and where he was most popular and well known while he was alive.52 Anglo-American satire has never been the same since. In 1978, Hicks began visiting the Comedy Workshop in downtown Houston while he was still in high school—even though he was only sixteen, he would sneak out of his house at night—and sometimes got to perform. It’s where he met anarchic comedian Sam Kinison, who became his mentor and helped shape his outrageous and outraging style. Hicks took Kinison’s anger (and some of his political ideology) and shaped it into something more metaphysical and speculative. As an onstage manic preacher-philosopher, Hicks thought on his feet, taking off on tangents with his riffs on taboo subjects, from anti-abortion groups to the Gulf War. In 1984, Hicks secured his first Letterman appearance; Hicks did a five-minute slot, then slumped down in the guest chair and lit a cigarette.53 His devil-may-care attitude won him admiration from Letterman himself, as Letterman later remarked: “What I liked about Bill was, here is a guy that nobody knew, myself included, and who had a swagger to his demeanor, both physical and emotional. And I just liked that. For no good reason, no justifiable reason, ‘I’m cocky. Nobody knows me. Too bad.’ You could almost see him turning his shoulder to the audience.”54

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For the next ten years Hicks did about three hundred gigs a year on small and large stages, as the ultimate confrontational satirist who, true to his beliefs, wasn’t interested in furthering his career by having his own talk show or sit-com (for him television was “Lucifer’s dream box”). As he told the Chicago Sun Times, “I get a kick out of being an outsider constantly. It allows me to be creative. I don’t like anything in the mainstream and they don’t like me.”55 So, he lived for the thrill of live performances and really saw himself as a satiric prophet/preacher. He said, “Listen, the next revolution is gonna be a revolution of ideas. A bloodless revolution. And if I can take part in it by transforming my own consciousness, then someone else’s, I’m happy to do it.”56 He was right. In the great tradition of the British postwar geniuses, he aided in that bloodless revolution of late twentieth-century British and American satire, and his power came from his emphasis on the right choice of words (like Francis Bacon’s “the proper words in their proper places”) with the right delivery and especially the right inflections to cut his subjects down to size. He was Mark Smith via Mark Twain. Hicks’s first introduction to Britain came in November 1990 when he was one of eighteen comedians in Stand Up America!, a six-week engagement in London’s West End. His Angry Young Man irony was immediately grasped by audiences in the UK (it would take the States a little longer), and in 1991 he won the Critics’ Award at the Edinburgh Festival (which began on August 24, 1947, at the very birth of this new Age of Satire).57 He toured Britain and Ireland to enthusiastic audiences and, explaining his success there, Hicks said, “People in the United Kingdom and outside the United States share my bemusement with the United States that America doesn’t share with itself. They also have a sense of irony, which America doesn’t have, seeing as its being run by fundamentalists who take things literally.”58 Hicks’s growing sophistication continued to receive praise from British critics, especially his material about the 1990–91 Gulf War where he was telling people things they really hadn’t been allowed to hear in the States because of the media’s near-blackout compliance. He saw the war and America’s tough-guy bravado as complete hypocrisy: I’m so sick of arming the world and then sending troops over to destroy the fucking arms [we gave them], you know what I mean? We keep arming these little countries, then we go and blow the shit out of ’em. We’re like the bullies of the world, you know. We’re like Jack Palance in the movie Shane . . . throwing the pistol at the sheep herder’s feet:

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“Pick it up.” “I don’t wanna pick it up, mister—you’ll shoot me.” “Pick up the gun.” “Mister, I don’t want no trouble, huh. I just came down town here to get some hard rock candy for my kids, some gingham for my wife. I don’t even know what gingham is, but she goes through about ten rolls a week of that stuff. I ain’t looking for no trouble, mister.” “Pick up the gun.” Sheep-herder reaches down. “Okay. If you say so.” BAM! BAM! BAM! (three gun shots) “You all saw him. He had a gun.”59 Altering people’s perception of events, Hicks made British and American listeners see things from angles the media ignored, and made a niche for himself in an England whose postwar satiric strain had long been codified. He had joined the English satirical ranks. In November 1992, he recorded the Revelations video for Channel 4 in England. Filmed at the 2,000-seat Dominion Theatre, Hicks punctured media hypocrisy with his sharp pock-marking humor about current events. He toured this set even back in the United States. The reviews for it were raves by educated critics starved for such intelligent insights. “Hicks may be the freshest—surely most daring—voice in standup in years. . . . Midway through his act, I realized just how banal and predictable comedy has grown,” wrote the San Francisco Chronicle at the time.60 In its performance, Hicks skewered the saccharine puritanism of 1990s America: I find it ironic that people who are most against sexual thoughts are generally these fundamentalist Christians who also believe you should “be fruitful and multiply.” It seems like they would support sexual thoughts, you know, perhaps even have a centerfold in the Bible. Miss Deuteronomy: “Turn offs: floods, locusts, smokers.” I actually did that joke in Alabama, right.

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Ripping England! These three rednecks met me after the show, man. “Hey, buddy! Come here. Hey, Mr. Comedian! Come here. Hey, buddy, we’re Christians, we don’t like what you said.” So, I said, “Then, forgive me.”61

Hicks saw his mission as slaying all the “fevered egos” polluting the planet. He called himself “Goat Boy” or “Shiva the Destroyer” (once again, the satirist seeks to eviscerate the world so a newer purer one may rise out of the ashes), using his invective as a mega-weapon to expose truths and expose government and societal hypocrisy. He tried to reach as many people as possible, to put them in touch with inner and outer space in a majestic flight of one-consciousness thinking. But Hicks’s life was cut short when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 1993. On October 1, 1993, Hicks made his twelfth and final appearance on Letterman, from which his routine was axed because it was felt the material would not go down well with the show’s sponsors (one of which turned out to be a pro-life lobbyist group). Knowing his time was fading, he went on the warpath: “If you’re so pro-life, do me a favor: don’t lock arms and block medical clinics. If you’re so pro-life, lock arms and block cemeteries.” It was the first comedy act ever to be censored at CBS’s Ed Sullivan Theater, to Letterman’s shame.62 Hicks was so incensed he wrote a thirty-nine-page letter to The New Yorker’s theater critic John Lahr, which inspired Lahr’s almost-as-long article. “As long as one person lives in darkness then it seems to me a responsibility to tell other people.”63 This encapsulated Hicks’s philosophy. It is the role of every individual to do something to enhance and advance the human condition on this earth, in this life. Unlike those we place our trust in—politicians and other so-called “professionals”—Bill wanted to have a lot of fun informing the world, so he turned to humor’s most persuasive genre and used it for his humanistic calling. On January 6th, 1994, his health clearly ailing, he played his final show in New York. It’s a strange world; I don’t know what we choose, WHY we choose the things we do as a collective. You ever wonder that? You know what I mean, the fact that we live in a world where John Lennon was murdered, yet Milli Vanilli walks the fucking planet. You know? Bad choice. Just from me to you, it wasn’t a good one. But isn’t that weird, we always kill the guys who try to help us. Isn’t that strange, that we let the little demons run amok, always? John Lennon: murdered. John Kennedy: murdered. Martin Luther King: murdered. Gandhi:

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murdered. Jesus: murdered. Reagan . . . wounded. You know. Bad fucking choice.64 The satire stayed vigorous right to the end. Hicks died a month later. If history is written by the victors, it is also then rewritten by each successive generation of artists and historians as they re-examine different minor currents that become major ones through the lens of their own time, distance serving to clarify and redress the iniquity all at once. The later satirists were paying homage to the original postwar satirists as they worked to find their own voices within the genre. In film, theater, television, print, and the popular mediums of pop and stand-up, satire has since reigned as the favored species through which subsequent generations voiced their concerns and disillusionments with their times in British and American culture. The British and American artists of the last fifty years didn’t so much as find their voice as borrow it from the postwar satirists of Ealing, the Goons, and those immigrant new American filmmakers of the late ’40s. They have made satire a means of protest and reflection to keep themselves, their leaders, and our communities in check, re-defining what their cultures could be, should be, and so now are.

Epilogue

Despite the humiliation of defeat in the war, the German Occupation, the trauma of score-settling immediately after liberation and the continuing political and economic crises since, Paris was beginning, slowly, to recover and was . . . still Paris. For a start, if you were well-off you could get decent food and wine. There were still nightclubs with music and dancing. The salons of glamorous, fashionable women were coming back. Ideas mattered and had consequences and people argued passionately about them—so different, as George Orwell observed, from life in austerity Britain, where nobody was arguing about ideas. He wrote soon after the war: “The English are not sufficiently interested in intellectual matters to be intolerant about them.” —From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, Victor Sebestyen1

History is lived forward and written backward, and it’s possible to see now that two artistic groups helped define the British identity after World War II. The satirists of the Ealing Film Studios and the BBC’s Spike Milligan and the Goons were among the cultural revolutionaries of their day, working in a genre that would come to define postwar British popular culture. They changed the culture dramatically, influencing all that came afterwards, by making the immediate postwar period fertile through a uniquely British use of satire. Writing in the late 1990s, Andrew Higson sought to make the case for a national cinema of Britain but felt frustrated that previous critics had pooh-poohed English film: In the late 1960s two prominent film critics complained that “British cinema was an ‘unknown cinema’ (Lowell, 1969), utterly amorphous, unclassified, unperceived” (Wollen, 1969). What Lowell and Wollen had in mind was not that there wasn’t a popular film culture, or that audiences didn’t watch 203

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Ripping England! British films or know how to make sense of them, but that British films had not been written about extensively by the new generation of critics, historians, and scholars.2

This “new generation” of critics he was talking about was comprised of younger intellectuals, writing in France for Cahiers in the 1950s, and in England, for publications like Screen, which became, typically, a 1960s Marxist and Structuralist screed. The French were obsessed with American films, not British ones (with both Godard and Truffaut snarkily calling the term “British Film” an oxymoron). And the critics of that time gave little credence to British cinema since the Grierson documentaries and the films of the Social Realist age. Even the British ones. Agreeing with these temperamental and dismissive critics, Higson himself goes on to talk only about the “collective nature” of British social realism, from the Grierson documentaries to the Mike Leigh and Ken Loach realist fictional films, and how the genre they created is Britain’s one “true” contribution to cinema of that era. It wasn’t. As witnessed by the 2014 quote that opens this epilogue, even today few critics feel that the period between 1946 and 1956 was important for English thought, ideas, and especially cinema other than for its “kitchen sink” realist dramas. It was. The British were doing something just as daring as the Italians, French, and Scandinavians. They were exploiting a native heritage of satire. And satire wasn’t only happening in British cinemas, it was also erupting in the other most popular cultural medium, radio, with Milligan and the Goons. Satire defined the early 1950s British experience and was key to the immediate postwar period, influencing their island brethren, politicians, and the culture at large in a fast-changing British landscape. The historian Harold William Chase says of postwar America, “Rarely has a society experienced such a rapid or dramatic change as what occurred in America after 1945.” He suggests, despite representations of stability and calm, that the 1950s were “more a time of transition than stolidity.” The period is characterized by shifts from production to consumption, from saving to spending, from city to suburb, from blue- to white-collar employment, and from an adult culture to a youth culture. Whether it is read as post-industrial, postcapitalist, or postmodern, postwar America is designated by those who study it as a time of significant change.3 In Britain, these industrial and material changes would have to wait a decade, but while they waited, the British satirists expressed the postwar hopes, dreams and frustrations of the island nation that sought, after

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empire, to establish a newly relevant culture. To do this, the satirists and their audience had to turn inward, not outward, reassessing who and what they were in a new world order. The satirists became pioneers in this reassessment of British culture and identity in the aftermath of war. It was a moment that lasted about nine to ten years, until the British were forced to realize once and for all that they were no longer a major force on the world stage. By 1956, the Suez crisis put an end to any lingering British illusions of global-power status. Suez was the true end of English international hegemony. The ghosts of Munich loomed heavily over Suez. . . . The symbolic importance of the crisis was that it marked a confrontation between the old ambitions of British imperialism and the new realities of post-imperial retrenchment.4 After winning World War I, Britain had planned another 100-year block of international dominance, in arms, colonial extension, and culture. But on that Saturday morning in 1956, all that had been laid out in The Great War was at an end. The feebleness of 1956 attested to the astonishing decline in Britain’s fortunes since 1918. And that was that. It wouldn’t be until the late 1950s or early 1960s that the elements of the society Britons inhabit today became evident. In the decade after the war, modern Britain was only an idea, while other societies, especially America, could point to new achievements. But the idea became the basis for what would follow in time, and for the British, satire became the medium by which the idea of a new society was shaped.

Is Satire Conservative? Satire often appears to be conservative. It appears fearful of change, wedded to tried and true ways that seem to have been abandoned without understanding the good those ways have done for a culture. And satire doesn’t seem to offer any positive solutions—it merely mocks. But like other genres, satire goes through cycles, and it can be used by liberal and conservatives alike to make their points. The satirists of the late 1940s and early 1950s attacked Attlee’s Labour government and its utopian policies, but they were for the most part, supportive, just as John Stewart and Stephen Colbert today ridicule Democrats while supporting them, too. Edward Lucie-Smith explains: People commonly say that satire is best written from a conservative point of view; that the satirist needs a firm ground to stand on. It is also said that there is now no place for

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Ripping England! satire in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries because education is no longer based on the classics, and that a good knowledge of them, on the part of the reader as well as the poet, is necessary to poetry of this kind.5

This view is the “the center cannot hold” type of conservative thinking on education, based on an outdated notion of what constitutes literacy. It gives them their grounds for complaints about how the modern world keeps eroding traditional values. The fact is, however, that most of the good satiric verse written during the twentieth century has been satire of the Left, and in this it resembles what was written during the Middle Ages. Satiric writing seems to be engaged in a return to the vernacular tradition. It takes pride not in sophistication, but in roughness. It is prepared—so it seems—to sacrifice literary quality for the sake of immediate effect. . . . But it is already evident that the twentieth-century satire which survives will owe this survival to the fact that it is well written and, furthermore (if this needs saying), that good writing actually increases the impact which the satirist has on his contemporaries.6 Ealing and the Goons were writing and exemplifying this kind of satire that was of both the lowest and the highest order, often simultaneously. The real conservative streak of British satire would emerge at the end of 1950s with films such as I’m All Right, Jack (John and Roy Boulting, 1959) and The Angry Silence (Guy Green, 1960) that tapped into middleclass resentment at the powerful labor unions. But British satire of the postwar period is really neither liberal nor conservative: What, then, are the typical subjects (not the objects) of social satire in English? For many people this is a foolish question. “Surely,” they would answer, “the subject is English society itself.” And, in a way, they are right. But if we examine a mass of examples we find that the definition can be narrowed. The satirist speaks about power, and men of power. And it is at this point that political satire crosses an invisible frontier, and becomes something else.7 And this was exactly what the postwar satirists were doing: examining what happens to people when they get power; how they act and what they do with it, left or right. They were questioning the motives of

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government and the politicians who claim to represent the people. It is not that they were anti-Attlee or anti-Churchill, it is that they were attempting to get their government to follow through on their promises and show the falsehood of the slogan that the people “Never had it so good.” The Boulting Brothers, Ealing, Peter Sellers, and Spike Milligan were hardly right-wing reactionaries.

Better Angels? In The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), Steven Pinker argues that, though it may not seem it from the 24-7 news cycle, we are now living in a world that has actually been getting more peaceful since World War II.8 The reason it doesn’t feel that way is because every single incident is blasted across all mass media as “BREAKING NEWS!!” and “A NEW 9/11!!,” from Facebook News (where most Millennials get their trough feed according to some “trending” algorithm) to the corporate sexopoly (Comcast-NBC, Viacom-CBS, Time-Warner-CNN, Fox, Disney-ABC, etc.). But worldwide conflations are actually less and less each decade (they are just more concentrated), and violent crime is at the lowest it has been in fifty years; though you’d never know it by turning on anything electric when getting up in the morning or home at night. Ex-senator Jim Webb (Virginia), the Vietnam War hero and former secretary of the Navy under Reagan, who made a name for himself as a vocal opponent of American interventionist-style foreign policy because of its deleterious effects in indigenous populations, argues that we must recognize, “The protective vacuum that surrounds our understanding when it comes to the viciousness that war brings to noncombatants in other lands,” and that Britain has refrained from world conflict because they saw firsthand what had happened to them in the 1940s. “Britain was bled out and spent out. They understood the great price of the recent wars in a much more sobering way that did most Americans.”9 Britain’s turn toward bloodless protest has helped make the world a less violent place (today Parliament debates on a daily basis whetheror not to aid the fighting in hotspots around the world, from Syria and the Levant, to Eastern Europe and the Ukraine). Of course, there are many in the world who are too serious and zealous to allow satire to stand, from attacks on cartoonists in The Netherlands to the Charlie Hebdo bombings in Paris in January of 2015. After the June, 2016 “Brexit” vote, Robert Kuttner observed But what about race? Didn’t race play a big role in this vote? It surely did—and let’s distinguish race from immigration. The British right-wing reaction was not just a backlash against

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Ripping England! the recent influx of refugees and economic migrants from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Since the 1950s, when Britain rebranded its empire as the Commonwealth, Britain has had a relatively liberal immigration policy for its former colonies—one part carrot to promote allegiance, one part guilty conscience. Even as early as the 1960s, Enoch Powell, a right-wing Tory, was already campaigning against immigrants, with slogans like “If you want a n***** for a neighbour, vote Labour.”10

The satirists have helped make the West a more tolerant place. But, there still simply are some in our often sad world incapable of irony— the angry Brexit voters who decided Britain should leave the European Union, which actually helps British middle classes stay competitive in the new globalized economies, is concrete proof.11 People think that the dumping ground for the Anglo white trash who were run out of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was just Australia. It wasn’t. It was also America, as witnessed by the xenophobia, the inbred provincialism, and the rampant peasant AngloIrish pathologies and paranoias that runs throughout the Appalachian Trail, from Maine to Texas, the Florida panhandle to Northern Michigan. In her intensive study on the history of Albion’s miscreant seed, White Trash, Nancy Isenberg explores how these English-Irish-Scots descendants have carried out their cultural fears, territorial protectiveness, and class-based grievances against “elites” and those perceived as “others” to tragic ends: by clinging to their religion, perceived white persecution, opioid addiction, and guns, guns, and more guns ad absurdum.12 Writing in Wired about the proliferation of mass shootings after 9/11 (especially during the Obama administration), and the incessant collective howling about what to do about them (stricter gun control laws or more open-carry rights?), Brian Rafferty nailed the importance of satire, and The Onion in particular, in dealing with such frustrating and unyielding madness: “ ‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” That’s from The Onion, of course—just one of the many sneakily corrosive, sadly spot-on pieces the satirical outlet has published in its twenty-year online history, which also includes the likes of “Nation Celebrates Full Week Without Deadly Mass Shooting” and “God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule.” When the world feels like a wet piñata full of shit and spite, it’s comforting to know that there are people who not

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only share your frustrations, but who can articulate them in a way you can’t. And often, the best vehicle for that rage is the kind of distilled, to-the-point satire that only The Onion can provide.13 Satire is often the only solace we have in the face of tragic events: to expose the inhumanity of other men through mocking and bringing down their inhumane actions. Rafferty concludes that satire is a monolith, one that’s not uncaring, exactly, but that’s certainly unsparing, delivering its bitter truths with zero hems nor haws. The Onion’s satire is so forthright and righteous, so unconcerned with whether or not it offends anybody—really, who would the offended even complain to?—that it carries a stamp of finalword authority. That may be why its best, bleakest stories pop back into our consciousness at times like these: As much as it pains us to admit it, they’re just as bluntly accurate now as they were on the day they originally ran. When you’re faced with that kind of horrific truth—when you realize that you’re not only living in the Nation Where this Regularly Happens, but also in the Nation Where It Will Happen Again—the only way you can deal with it is to laugh.14 That is the power of satire. Its best, bleakest stories are topical at the time, but they become bluntly prescient later on. It is the first stage of healing when the grief is overwhelming. And it has been the key element linking the special relationship between the British and Americans, and in the west overall, since 1945. Since World War II these two cultures explained themselves to each other through satire: what the issues were that concerned them the most, what they believed, and who they were as peoples and nations. Satire has been one of the most rewarding and edifying artistic interchange between British and American popular culture in film, print, radio, and television, almost above all other genres. From our observations then, a few new points are clear: • Satire has become a leading cultural response to grievances in the West. • Satire aims to rock the boat; it does so, sometimes crudely but benignly, promoting nonviolence while releasing pentup frustrations and giving public voice to those who feel left out.

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Ripping England! • England’s late 1940s and early 1950s satires paved the way for the generations that followed. The Silent generation exercised its satirical gifts long before the Angry Young Men and the Social realists of the late 1950s, the satire boom of the 1960s and 1970s from Beyond the Fringe and the Pythons, the Beatles and the Kinks, the Clash and the Fall, and the vituperative stand-up comics of the last 30 years. • The satirists kept Britain’s imperialist projects in check (in some ways an early example of today’s “shaming culture”).15 • Further, continued satire by Milligan, Private Eye, and other media outlets helped spur the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and pro-environmental movements of the 1960s and ’70s, along with later protests over such controversial decisions over the Falkland Islands and support for the National Health Service. • And, most of all, postwar satire has helped bridge the British–American cultural divide through each nation’s compatibility of temperament, a bridge that continues right through to this day.

They may have seemed small, but in hindsight these protests against Britain’s postwar false promises and expansionist histories were positive steps with long-lasting ripple effects.16 In short, Britain’s tradition of bloody colonialism has turned into a bloodless revolution (well, less bloody, anyway), as Pinker documented, and the postwar British satirists have had a huge influence on that fact. The world has become more peaceful—it is just hard to see that when bad news sells so much better than good news.17 Sometimes we get overwhelmed with how much comedy is out there, especially the satirists’ incessant battering-ram playfulness, but they are necessary to battle the incessant injustices of the thieves and the liars. Today, as Louis Menand put it at the end of his essay on the anxious influence The Cat in the Hat (1957) has had on subsequent rascals since the appearance of the good Dr. Geisel’s masterpiece, Cakes on rakes are everywhere. A million cats cavort frantically for our attention. Even the fish has been co-opted (though what choice did he have?). “Enjoy!” cries the fish. “Consume! Everything will be fine when your mother gets home.” But

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the fish is whistling into the wind. The mother has left, and she’s never coming back. It’s just us and that goddam cat.18 Satire is everywhere. Now it’s just us and those goddamned satirist felines. And thank God, too.

Ripping England When she was Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher attributed the social ills of the age (the 1970s and ’80s) to what she called “sixties culture” and said she wanted to “take England back to the 1950s,” which she presented as “an old-fashioned Britain, structured and courteous.”19 But 1950s Britain was in many ways an anxious, reactionary time when fundamental economic difficulties and social dissatisfactions arose after the early postwar hope that life was going to be better as a new British society moved toward fairness and equality. Societies need to produce materially to sustain themselves, but also culturally through their arts and media, to explain who they are, who others are, and how the world works. The British satires of the late 1940s and early 1950s held up a mirror to a Britain facing a critical identity crisis and gave her the strength and way forward, and along the way established satire as a forceful critical tool through which Western culture challenged and changed government, custom, and belief—no longer with bloodthirsty barbarism but instead with bloodless barbs.

Notes

Introduction 1. For the best overview of Hollywood’s depiction of England before the end of World War II see Mark Glancy, When Hollywood Loved Britain: The Hollywood “British” Film 1939–1945 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999); Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain, from 1920s to the Present (London: I.B. Taurus, 2013); and The 39 Steps (The British Film Guide) (London: I.B. Taurus & Co., 2003). 2. Alistair Cooke, Alistair Cooke’s American Journey: Life on the Home Front in the Second World War (New York: Grove Press reprint from original Penguin edition, 2007). Cooke made his first trip around America in 1933, at age twentyfour. He became an American convert in December of 1941 (right before Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into the war), and began writing his “Letter from America” column for the Guardian newspaper in 1945 (the first was on the formation of the United Nations). He was the physical manifestation of the transatlantic cultural representations of England and America to each other, an early embodiment of what the English satires would achieve. Hollywood made a few attempts at films that worked at that cultural interchange, but they were often clumsy: MGM’s A Yank at Oxford (Jack Conway, 1938), a film whose script process took more than three years to complete alone because the Yank was considered too brash and disrespected fair play, and the Brits were seen as too posh and snobbish and didn’t appreciate American rugged individualism; and a Mickey Rooney vehicle A Yank at Eton (Norman Taurog, 1942), which had as an insultingly false representation as he’d have with his “Japanese” character in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards, 1962). 3. Ben Shephard, The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War (New York: Borzoi/Knopf, 2010), 8, quoting Gitta Sereny, The German Trauma: Experiences and Reflections, 1938–2000, (Penguin UK: 1st edition, 2001). It has also been suggested that the emphasis later film historians placed on continental European films came out of a sense of guilt, because the real suffering had taken place there, and especially in those countries (Italy, France, and Scandinavia). Also see William Graebner, The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1991), chapter

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4, where Graebner describes the remiss as an attempt by historians and other intellectuals (especially American ones) to create, construct, or affirm the existence of a “culture of the whole,” one that encompassed and dealt with worldwide problems in aggregate, rather than micro-targeted regions; Wendell Willkie labelled this new approach One World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943) after the former presidential candidate’s forty-nine-day world tour in 1942 (his widely disseminated statement sold over three million copies in the U.S. alone, and was translated into sixteen languages); ironically, Willkie would become one of FDR’s closest compatriots and supporters after losing to him in a landslide in 1940 (449 electoral votes to 82; 62.5% of the vote). 4. Shephard, 8, quoting Jonathan Glover, A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2nd edition, 2012). 5. A good example of a great humanitarian effort would be the superlative documentary film The Rape of Europa (Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen, Nicole Newnham, 2007), about the returning of the many looted works of art during WWII by the U.S. Army to their rightful owners, if they were still alive. The program was enormously successful, and the film was well received. But it rarely gets shown, as the destructive despots take precedence on today’s cable channels—though George Clooney tried when he made a (generally disappointing) fictional film out of the study, The Monuments Men (2013). 6. Arthur Krystal, “The Book of Books,” on the making of “Mimesis,” The New Yorker, December 9, 2013, 88. 7. Churchill gave his “Iron Curtain” speech on March 5, 1946, at the small Westminster College in Harry Truman’s home state of Missouri, after being invited by Truman to talk about the postwar threat posed by the USSR. The actual title of the speech was “The Sinews of Peace,” but the Iron Curtain catchphrase became the one that stuck, as Churchill knew it would.

Chapter 1 1. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Blackwell Press, 1989), 240. 2. Fredric Jameson, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” The New Left Review, No. 146, July–August, 1984, 59. 3. The most go-to texts on European cultural imperialism over the last few decades have been Robert Stam and Ella Shohat’s Unthinking Eurocentrism (London: Routledge, 1994) and Edward Said’s Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979) and Cultural Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993). 4. Other languages had almost or totally been wiped out by this point, including Cornish and Manx. See the history of the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549 for an early revealing instance of English magistracy. 5. Quoted in Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel (London: Secker and Warburg, 1993), 276. 6. Paul Addison, Now the War is Over: A Social History of Britain 1945–51 (London: BBC Books and Cape, 1985), vi. 7. Next, the United States presided over the formation of NATO in 1949, bringing Western Europe even further into the American sphere of influence.

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8. For a first-rate survey of American cultural influence in Europe before and after the war see Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through 20th-Century Europe (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005). 9. Churchill didn’t only prefer a coalition government because it gave him less opposition or resistance to his polices and declarations, but he himself had switched parties at least twice in his career, making it hard to pin down his own political allegiance. Certainly, he was a classic blue-blood Oxford bred Conservative imperialist (the type still exists today in the likes of historians Niall Ferguson and Norman Stone), which is why he did every possible thing to contain the loss of empire during and after the war. But he also continued the policies of the new welfare state after he was reinstated in 1951. Labour won 393 seats to Conservative 197 (47.7% of the vote). Even today, the 1945 election is considered Labour’s true origin story. 10. Martin Pugh, The Making of Modern British Politics 1867–1939 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 294. Pugh is quoting from the famous antiConservative polemic from 1940, Guilty Men (London: Gollancz) written by Michael Foot, Frank Owen, and Peter Howard (all three members of the Liberal Party before the war); it was so popular it went into more than ten printings and had a wide influence on blaming Chamberlain and the Conservatives for the late 1930s appeasement deals. Ross McKibbin adds, “That onslaught on Chamberlainite Conservatism, Guilty Men, was published by Gollancz and immediately had an enormous success. . . . But (I would argue) the electoral truce [the wartime coalition government headed by Churchill] concealed the movement to Labour.” (Ross McKibbin, Parties and People England 1914–1951 (New York: Oxford UP, 2010), 119). For “Attlee’s Consensus,” Pugh is quoting Paul Addison, The Road to 1945 (1st edition, London: Jonathan Cape, 1975). Also see recent biography of Clement Attlee, John Bew, Citizen Clem: A Biography of Clement Attlee (New York: Oxford UP, 2017 [First published Great Britain by Quercus book as Clement Attlee: The Man Who Made Modern Britain, 2016]). 11. Martin Pugh, Ibid., 295. 12. Ross McKibbin, Ibid., 110. 13. Ross McKibbin, Ibid., 113. 14. Martin Pugh, Ibid., 297. 15. The name is borrowed from William Blake’s term for the coming changes that would be Britain’s paradisiac fate, from his poem (and national hymn) “Jerusalem;” “I will not cease from mental fight/Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand/Till we have built Jerusalem/In England’s green and pleasant land.” 16. Serge Bernstein and Peter Morris, Political Consensus in France and Britain, Studies in European Culture and Society, Paper 5, European Research Centre, Loughborough University of Technology, 1991, 19–20. 17. Later, from 1951 to 1964 a Conservative government would control Britain. The Prime Ministers of the postwar period have been: Winston Churchill—1940–45; 1951–55 (Conservative); Clement Attlee—1945–51 (Labour); Anthony Eden—1955–57 (Conservative); Harold Macmillan—1957–63 (Conservative); Alec Douglas-Home—1963–64 (Labour); Harold Wilson—1964–70, 1974–76 (Labour); Edward Heath—1970–74 (Labour); James Callaghan—1976–79 (Labour); Margaret Thatcher—1979–90 (Conservative); John Major—1990–96 (Conserva-

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tive); Tony Blair—1996–2007 (Labour); Gordon Brown 2007–10 (Labour); David Cameron 2010–16 (Conservative); Theresa May 2016–present (Conservative). 18. William Beveridge was director of the London School of Economics in the late 1930s, and before that had served as the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Food at the end of World War I. He consistently suggested a foodrationing system for emergencies and difficult financial times, especially issuing every Briton an identity card based on income. In fact, “Within four months of the war starting, the scheme was in operation. The ‘National Registration Identity Card’ and the ‘Ministry of Food Ration Card’ became two of the most familiar artifacts of the war and lasted deep into the peace—identity cards until 1952, ration books until 1954.” Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain 1945–1951 (London: Penguin, 2nd edition, 2006), 44. 19. David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945–51 (New York: Walker & Co., 2008), 40. Also see Selina Todd, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910–2010 (London: John Murray Publishing Ltd., 2015). 20. The classic welfare state period lasted from approximately 1945 to the late 1970s/early1980s, when the Thatcher government privatized many of the previously nationalized industries. Many of its features still remain, but are constantly contested; for example, eye exams are no longer free, and neither is higher education, to name but two; and the tax-payer funded BBC today is consistently accused of a liberal bias by the Cameron/Osbourne/May neoliberal free-market worshippers. 21. Martin Pugh, 265. Pugh is referencing A. Oldfield, “The Independent Labour Party and Planning 1920–26,” International Review of Social History, (1976), 21. 22. Within this context, the dominions were recognized as fully independent states under the British crown by the 1926 Balfour Declaration and the 1931 Statute of Westminster. See the Bibliography for some of the most useful texts on British postcolonial states. 23. Postwar decolonization happened rapidly, often too rapidly, as “Independence!” fever spread round the globe. Suez and the Falkland’s notwithstanding, Britain rarely fought to retain any territory. 24. Correlli Barnett, The Pride and Fall: The Dream of Britain as a Great Nation (New York: The Free Press/MacMillan, 1987), xi. 25. Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain 1945–1951, 432. 26. Alan Bullock, Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary, 1945–51 (London: Heinemann, 1983), 844. 27. Pugh continues, “Perhaps the chief architect of the mid-twentieth century Conservatism was Stanley Baldwin . . . it was during the 1920s that he prepared his party to surrender the Imperial cause which had been the pillar of late Victorian Conservatism, a process that culminated in the rapid dismantling of the Empire in the 1950s and 1960s and Britain’s application to join the European Union. After Baldwin, Conservatives invariably chose their leaders from their more liberal or innovating figures like Sir Anthony Eden, R.A. Butler and Harold Macmillan, or Edward Heath and Reginald Maudling.” 265.

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28. A term not lost on early 1960s London School of Economics student Mick Jagger, who would label the Stones’ sixth album exactly that, Aftermath (London Records, 1965). 29. Which is why many historians today argue that the real winners of WWII were the smaller, previously colonized countries, and not the West at all. 30. For a comprehensive overview of Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease program, see David M. Kennedy, The American People during World War Two (Freedom from Fear, Part II) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 43-ff. and James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York: Hardcourt, 1956/1984), 63. The idea came to Roosevelt late one night in his constant fight with Congress over helping Britain. He remembered the difficulty Woodrow Wilson had in aiding allies, but knew that while selling war-related goods was illegal, leasing them was not. He described it to the American public as lending a firehose to your neighbor while their house was on fire—one doesn’t stop to think about it first—you can ask for return compensation later. FDR had won them over. 31. Hennessy, Ibid., 94. 32. See Hennessy, on the panic it caused, 94–99. VE day was May 7, but this was only eight days after cease-fire in the Far East. 33. http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2009/nov/25/gdp-uk-1948growth-economy. 34. Paul Swann, The Hollywood Feature Film in Postwar Britain (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 9. 35. Swann, Ibid., 9. 36. See especially Alex J. Robertson, The Bleak Midwinter 1947 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1987). 37. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, Volume 1, The Structures of Everyday Life (New York: Fontana, 1988), 479. 38. Kynaston, Ibid., 296–97. 39. Hennessy, Ibid., 310. 40. David Lodge, “Introduction,” Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (New York: Penguin, 1992), viii–x. LJ was first published by Victor Gallancz, 1954. 41. All these works would be made into films by the late 1950s or early 1960s. 42. The Beats and Bukowski were doing the same in the States. 43. One character remarks about the inability to “pour water on troubled oil,” a reference to the Persian Oil Crisis of that year. The point is that, although it was published when the Tory government elected in 1951 had been operating for some time, the setting was the late 1940s; not unlike the American Beats’ earliest work, Howl (1956), On the Road (1957), Naked Lunch (1959), and Cain’s Book (1960), published in the mid- to late 1950s, but all really about their authors’ situations and experiences in the late 1940s period. 44. Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim, 28. 45. Both Thatcher and Reagan believed it to be the last great decade for their countries, a pre-lapsarian Eden before the Fall of the 1960s.

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46. Manny Farber, “Jackson Pollock,” New Republic, vol. 112, no. 26, June 25, 1945, 871. 47. As would be the same in Italy, France, and Sweden with their new covey of directors. 48. David Lodge, Lucky Jim, again from the “Introduction,” viii. 49. “Hot” medium, according to Marshall McLuhan. 50. The Audit Bureau of Circulation was created in 1931 by the ISBA (Society of British Advertisers) to properly verify actual numbers for these mediums; they can be found at its website: http://www.abc.org.uk/. 51. Harry Hopkins, The New Look, A Social History of the Forties and Fifties in Britain (London: Socker and Warburg, 1963), 95. 52. Hopkins, Ibid., 95. 53. Parody is a form of satire that imitates another work of art in order to ridicule it. The line between parody and satire is often blurred. Satires need not be humorous, indeed they are often tragic, while parodies are almost inevitably humorous. A good overview, but hardly an extensive one is at http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Satire. 54. James Sutherland, English Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1956), 5. 55. Gilbert Highet, The Anatomy of Satire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1962), 18. A common technique of satire is to take a real-life situation and exaggerate it so much that it becomes ridiculous (take any episode of SNL or South Park). But some works of satire are subtle enough in their exaggeration that they still seem believable to many people, the comedic intent often lost on them, and there have been instances where the author or producers of a satirical work have been harshly criticized as a result. “Stephen Colbert” (air quotes intended) has been a sublime example of someone who many still do not realize was an act, and his admirers now lament his decision to retire his blowhard character. 56. Highet, Ibid., 15–16. 57. In the Goons’ shows, this was true in the sense that most of them were ensemble pieces, even if Milligan wrote most of the shows, while in the Ealing satires Alec Guinness was often the central attraction of the films; he was the ensemble, often playing multiple roles in a single film. 58. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1957), 223. 59. See, for example, the ending of one of the great satires of the 1960s (made in Britain by the American Stanley Kubrick), Dr. Strangelove (1963). 60. George Perry, The Great British Picture Show (Toronto: Little, Brown, 1974/1985), 9. 61. Perry, Ibid., 11. 62. Spike Milligan’s Goon Show first aired on the radio in the early spring of 1951, though they were performing live as early as 1947. 63. Swann, Ibid., 46. 64. Swann, 123. It worked the other way around, too, as noted in the intro. Alistair Cooke wrote a travel diary on small-town America in the early 1940s, observing how they were just as stuck in the nineteenth century as many British

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towns still were; again, see Alastair Cooke, The American Home Front, 1941–1942 (New York: Grove Press, reprint, 2007).

Chapter 2 1. In 1979, the then-biggest restored collection of Brighton School films were shown at the Brighton-held Cinema Studies Conference (today the SCMS), and a first-rate collection of scholarship was produced from it edited by the incomparable early film expert Thomas Elsaesser: Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: BFI, first published in 1990, reprinted 2008). The conference program is available on-line: http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/film/FN0552. 2. There is a superb interactive visual history of Ealing at the BFI website, narrated by Jonathan Ross, here: http://www.btplc.com/bfi/bfi_jross_main.html. The BFI and screenonline.org do a good job explaining how these early Ealing films foreshadowed the more egalitarian atmosphere the postwar era would usher in and also how they reminded viewers that many toffee-nosed upper-class Brits had been almost blindly pro-Hitler before the war; see, especially, Went the Day Well? (Cavalcanti, 1942), and J.B. Priestley’s The Forman Went to France (Charles Frend, 1943). 3. The landmark still exists and is now used as a television studio by the BBC; for this reason, it claims to be the oldest working film studio in the world. It’s probably correct in that claim. 4. Charles Barr, Ealing Studios (Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1977; reprinted London: BFI, 1988), 4. 5. As just one example of how in the 1930s and 1940s Hollywood only made films about the English that portrayed the less complicated England of Victorian pomp and empire, see John Ford’s Wee Willie Winkie, 1937; others set in earlier times might include Lloyds of London (Henry King, 1936), and/or Mary of Scotland (Ford again, 1936). As a later example, see the Darrell Zanuck produced The Black Rose (1950), made in Britain with Tyrone Power and directed by the veteran Henry Hathaway. Balcon’s first act as director was reinstating the Ealing moniker to announce its intent to be unmistakably and contemporarily British. 6. Mark Glancy, The 39 Steps (The British Film Guide) (London: I.B. Taurus & Co., 2003), 20, 104–105. 7. Charles Drazin, The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s (London: I.B. Taurus), 102. As a realist, Balcon recognized that there were very few opportunities for British films to make money overseas, even in English-speaking America. Hitchcock’s classic The 39 Steps (1935) actually was one of the few films that was a hit in some major U.S. cities (notably New York and Minneapolis), but even that film cost Gaumont-British/Rank significant amounts in marketing costs. See Mark Glancy, The 39 Steps (The British Film Guide) (London: I.B. Taurus & Co., 2003), 87–89. 8. Swann, 34–35. Swann also notes that other factors, such as the opposition of the many prominent film producers to British policies in Palestine, were also significant in shaping American representations of postwar Britain in the late 1940s.

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9. In 1944 all of the American studios operating in England handed over their British Isles distribution to the Rank Organization. The management and decision making as to what kinds of stories would be produced at Ealing, however, stayed exclusively with Balcon. What was ironic about Rank in the postwar British cinema industry was, whereas in America the Supreme Court was breaking up the monopoly/oligopoly of the studio system, the British Institute of Film went out of their way to keep Rank intact, so as to protect against American infiltration, especially the buying-up of British studios and distributors. They made its nearmonopoly official policy. See also a delightful 2017, BBC/Channel 4 produced film, Their Finest, directed by Lone Scherfig, which is about the cultural and production shifts at Rank during the war. 10. Michael Balcon, Michael Balcon Presents: A Lifetime in Films (London: Hutchinson, 1969), 94. 11. See Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System (New York: Pantheon, 1988). The phrase may have existed before Schatz’s eponymous book, but it is now his to own. 12. Yes, many new ads began to exhibit a new snarky irony that reflected the postwar fed-up feelings. British-born David Ogilvy, who founded his agency Ogilvy & Mather with the backing of the British company Mather & Crowther in New York in 1948 (properly named Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson, & Mather), eventually merged with the British agency Benson and became one of the most prominent postwar ad firms in the world. They sought out such irreverent writers and designers to plug-in to the late-1940s irritable and irascible mood. 13. Screen on the famous Ealing Team Spirit: “They often had meetings in the pub, and Balcon encouraged a collective way forward. (Note: their one horror film was a film of five different gothic short stories titled Dead of Night (1945), with five different directors, including Robert Hamer and Cavalcanti, whose pieces are the strongest, even oddly noirish in their style and aesthetic; Angus McPhail and T.E. Clarke assisted in the writing).” 14. Barr, Ibid., 12. 15. Screen also notes that police-procedural films were also concurrent with the early satires. Ross states: “The Blue Lamp (Basil Dearden, with Michael Relph, 1950) introduced the detective P.C. George Dixon (Jack Warner) and planted the seeds of British television detective shows to come [most famously Warner himself as Dixon of Dock Green, a series that had an amazingly long run, from 1955 to 1976]. Dirk Bogart is a mean and cynical new type of character on screen (though not in the actual streets filled with spivs that Londoners knew so well) and would be seen in the late ’50s plays of rough trade and “loot” by the Angry Young Men; it also has an excellent debate on gun control that the United Sociopaths of America could learn a little from today. These films took on such taboo subjects as crime and delinquency, drugs, sex and the new rebellious music, rock and roll.” 16. Robert Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society, 1939–49 (London: Routledge, 1989), 214–18. The Huggets comedies were working-class based, in films such as Here Come the Huggetts (Ken Annakin, 1948), Vote for Huggett (Ken Annakin, 1948), and Huggetts Abroad (Ken Annakin, 1949). They always

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ended with the community values being prized above change or challenges to tradition. As Sarah Street notes, “Their plucky attempt[s] to seek a better life is thus thwarted and they return (to Britain), grateful for normality after their hairy experiences” (79). 17. It’s also important to site that Sue Harper and Vincent Porter’s very thoroughly researched study of the British studio system of the 1950s, British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference, conducts a chapter-by-chapter review of the fully operational studios after the war—Rank, Ealing, Associated British Picture Corporation, British Lion, Hammer Films—theirs is a nuts-and-bolts, by-the-numbers overview of the studios’ day-to-day operations and is highly useful for any historian of the postwar period. As one can note from the subtitle, the authors document the turn toward irreverence, especially by the end of the ’50s with the coming of the Angry Young Men films (Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, Karl Reisz, 1960; Room at the Top, Jack Clayton, 1959), but little time is spent on the importance of the late ’40s satires, not even as “quaint” little English comedies. For Ealing, Harper and Porter mostly concentrate on Balcon and his time at MGM. 18. Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson, British Music Hall (London: Gentry Books Revised Edition, 1974), 9–11. 19. One of the cleverest tributes to this tradition is found in the opening sequence of Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935). Richard Hannay, a visitor from Canada, takes in a music hall and is witness to the acute divisions between the upper classes (the boxes), the middle classes (in the stalls), and the working classes (sipping their draughts along the beer rail located off to the sides and rear of the hall). When these rowdy yobs shout at the stage, a respectable husband and wife team in the stalls worry they don’t want to be seen as “so common!” To Hitchcock, the music hall was the perfect locale to expose and exploit class divides and issues pertaining to each group, namely, identity. The MC in fact has to scold the restless mob to “Please behave! You’re not at home!” He is of course ignored as the riot spills out into the street. 20. After World War I it was also because of the rise of the cinema (itself a child of the music hall), and after World War II that of TV, which eroded the habit audience of the English music hall tradition. 21. Mander and Mitchenson, Ibid., 35–37. 22. There are a number of first-rate examinations of the young artists and scenesters of 1920s Britain, the best of which are D.J. Taylor, Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London’s Jazz Age (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010); and Allison Mahoney, Bright Young Things: A Modern Guide to the Roaring Twenties (Reprint edition, London: Potter Style, 2013). 23. One of the best portraits of the early twentieth-century music hall experience can be found in the biography of juggler/magician W.C. Fields by James Curtis, W.C. Fields: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 2003), who worked the British music hall circuit in the early 1900s. See also Chapter 6. 24. The music hall performers George Formby (1905–61), who strummed his ukulele, and the comic Sid Field (1904–50) were a few others who made the transition from stage to screen.

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25. The opening section of Sally in our Alley (Maurice Alvey, 1933) sets the brutal conditions: poverty, bleak housing, delinquency, child abuse, and absent fathers are the norm; while Sing as We Go (Basil Dean, 1934), Fields’s first film set in her native northern setting uses documentary imagery of a mill factory and of its Depression-causing closing, further sheds light on the working Brit’s scrappy hard-luck lives. Singing in her own rough tenor, Fields urges the workers to tough out the bad times, that their toughness is a British trait that will always yield survival, whilst the workers wave union jacks and sing along, presenting a more docile, harmonious, consensus view of English working-class life than seen in Depression-era Italy, France, or even booming, madness-growing Germany, even if they were clear indications, like the great Warner Brothers social realist films of the same pre-code early sound period, of the toll the Depression took on all Western countries, and the growing nationalism it inspired. 26. The Council’s first chairman John Maynard Keynes had a rough time with Britain’s overstretched finances. 27. Peter Ustinov and Terence Rattigan emerged as new scenarists of promise through these grants. Most of the actors of the 1930s who were still active somehow made the transition to the later more social realist atmosphere of the postwar theater and sometimes even to television. 28. See Eyes on the Prize (Henry Hampton, 1987–1990), the PBS sensation of Boomers’ civil rights participation that ran for three years. 29. James Lewis Hoberman, “Doubling the Movie Magic by Pairing Classic Features of the Past,” The New York Times, August 17, 2016, C1, 5.

Chapter 3 1. E.M. Forster, from “Notes on the English Character,” from Dennis Walder, ed., Literature in the Modern World (London: Oxford UP, 2004), 176. 2. The time of the Return of the Soldier (Rebecca West, 1924), general strikes and great Depressions, 1918–1947. In fact, July 5, 1948, is specifically considered the day of the new Britain, as it was the day the NHS went into full working mode, “a day that transformed like no other before or since the lives and life chances of the British people,” in the words of Peter Hennessy, Never Again, 143. 3. Political and Economic Planning, White Paper, 1952, 11. 4. Quoted in Victor Sebestyen, 1946 (New York: Macmillan, 2014), 72–74. The Charles Lamb quote is “A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature—the hail in harvest—the ounce of sour in a pound of sweet,” from one of The Last Essays of Elia, 1823. Wilson would become Prime Minister in 1964 after Profumo, overseeing Swinging Britain. He held that office again from 1974 to 1976. See a new collection of essays reassessing his tenure: Andrew Crines and Kevin Hickson, Harold Wilson: The Unprincipled Prime Minister? Reappraising Harold Wilson (London: Biteback, 2016). 5. Swann, Ibid., 125. Also on these numbers, see Hennessy, 98–100. One headline read, “Britain Hangs by a Lancashire’s Thread,” which became a famous postwar poster.

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6. The final loan was $3.7bl. plus $650m. in final settlement of LendLease obligations. The rate of interest was 2 percent. On Thursday, December 28, 2006, The New York Times announced, “Britain to Make Its Final Payment on WWII Loan.” A pretty good financial return on investment by the Truman administration. Also see Chapter 1. 7. Sarah Street, British National Cinema (London: Routledge, 2009, 2nd edition), 16–17. 8. Sarah Street, Ibid., 17–18. 9. Sarah Street, Ibid., 18. The Eady Levy was named for the Treasury official who was part of the scheme. Street continues: “Exhibitors agreed to participate in the scheme in exchange for a reduction in Entertainments Tax and an increase in seat prices. Like the NFFC, the scheme was introduced as a temporary measure, but it became statutory in 1957” (19). 10. Brian McFarlane, “A Literary Cinema? British Films and British Novels,” from All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, Charles Barr, ed. (London: BFI Books, 1986), 132. It is true about Powell and Pressburger also turning to established British literature, from The Red Shoes (1948) to Tales of Hoffman (1950), but during the war they made some fine original scripts, too, from A Canterbury Tale (1944, released in 1948) to Stairway to Heaven (A Matter of Life and Death in the U.S.) (1944). 11. Hollywood would discover in the young Silents audience that they finally had a demographic that did not want to stay home in front of the wireless, or later the boob tube, but instead would rather go out to the cinema with their mates and girlfriends. Hence, the new American “juvenile delinquency” films that would begin to appear (The Wild One [1953], Blackboard Jungle [1955], and Rebel without a Cause [1955]) were made specifically for this age group. Being early 1947, Hue and Cry was an early indication (even before the American youth films) of what was to come in England as well. 12. Scrutinize is the correct term here, as New Criticism’s journal Scrutiny (founded 1932 by F.R. Leavis and L.C. Knights) was contemporary with the film and becoming popular amongst the new generation of literary scholars on college campuses. 13. Paul Addison, Now the War is Over: A Social History of Britain 1945–51 (London: BBC Books and Cape, 1985), 52. For social life and English city kids during the Battle of Britain also see Joshua Levine, The Secret History of the Blitz (London: Simon and Schuster, 2015); Juliet Gardiner, Wartime Britain: 1939– 1945 (London: Headline Book Publishing, Ltd., 2005); and Jackie Hyams, Bomb Girls: Britain’s Secret Army: The Munitions Women of World War II (London: John Blake Ltd., 2014). 14. Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference (London: Oxford UP, 2003), 203. 15. The steps were designed by Sir Joseph Paxton, with Edward Milner as his Superintendent of Works and Landscape Gardener, in 1854. Surprisingly, the Italian Terraces in front of the Crystal Palace, which partly burned down in 1936, are still (somewhat) intact.

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Chapter 4 1. Peter Hennessy, Never Again, 277. Hennessey is quoting Hugh Thomas, John Strachey (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 238; and Hugh Dalton, High Tide and After, Memoirs 1945–60 (London: Frederick Muller Ltd., 1962), 187–92. 2. Graham Payn and Sheridan Morley (eds.), The Noel Coward Diaries (Boston: Da Capo Press, Revised Edition, 2000), 79, entry for January 29, 1947. Coward left a few weeks later on a Cunard bound for New York, which was also experiencing a bitter cold spell. 3. Hennessy, Ibid., 278. 4. Hennessy, Ibid., 278. Quoting Alex J. Robertson, The Bleak Midwinter, 1947 (Manchester, UK: Manchester UP, 1987). 5. Mollie Panter-Downes, “Letter from London,” The New Yorker, April 20, 1946, 48. 6. Hennessy, Ibid 276. 7. Apparently the film was inspired by a real-life event of the 1940s when the maternity ward of Ottawa Civic Hospital was temporarily declared Dutch territory by the Canadian government so that when Princess Margriet of the Netherlands was born there she would not lose her right to the throne. 8. Quoted in John Wheeler-Bennett, King George VI (London: MacMillan, 1958), 439–40. 9. Hennessy, 172–73: “The residents of the quiet home counties towns affected were less than ecstatic about the proposal of a predominantly workingclass cockney influx . . . Silkin [the new Minister of Town and Country Planning, who had even more sway over policy in that area than Attlee] was howled down at a public meeting in May of 1946 with howls of ‘Gestapo’ and ‘Dictator.’ Sand was put in the tank of his car and its tyres deflated. Later more imaginative protestors in the winter of 1946–7, after the new town corporation was set up, changed the signs on the railway station to ‘Silkingrad.’ ” “Bevan’s personal position looked very shaky in the summer of 1946 when the country was suddenly affected by a squatter movement which saw the peaceful occupation of empty property, led by the Communist Party in London. . . .” “In the end twenty-five new towns were built which now house some 2 million people. But, in the late 1940s, they did little to ease Bevan’s immediate headaches. When Labour lost office in 1951 most of the first batch were still building sites.” 10. World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion, 1996–2003. 11. Donald Thomas, An Underworld at War: Spivs, Deserters, Racketeers and Civilians in the Second World War (London: John Murray, 2003), 256–58. Thomas continues: “Spiv is a characteristically British English colloquial term whose meaning and cultural implications will be obscure to anyone outside the country. Having explained all that . . . nobody knows for certain where the word comes from. Its first known use in print was in 1934: ‘Spiv, petty crook who will turn his hand to anything so long as it does not involve honest work.’ It has indeed been said that it is VIPs backwards; also that it was a police acronym for Suspected Persons and Itinerant Vagrants. VIP does date from the same period,

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but it would be very surprising if it was the source. Apart from the sense being wrong, inverted acronyms based on word play were uncommon then. The police story is just a well-meaning attempt at making sense of the matter. The more usual explanation is that it comes from a dialect word spiving, meaning smart, or spiff, a well-dressed man. This developed into the adjective spiffy, smart or spruce, recorded from the 1850s, and into spiffed up, smartly dressed.” 12. The bureaucratic equivalent became known as a “snooker.” The other well-researched study of illegal trade during this period is Mark Roodhouse, Black Market Britain 1939–1955 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013), which argues that despite the huge market for goods that fell “off the back of a lorry” and evasions of strict regulations, the black market still did not undermine the austerity measures Britain faced. 13. Kynaston, Austerity Britain, 110–11. Quoting Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity, chap. 4 (including pp. 161, 172). 14. According to Victor Sebestyen’s data, “Allied soldiers, mainly Americans, could make vast sums on the black market in a giant scam that cheated Germans and Russians—and the American taxpayer at the same time. At the US Army Post Exchange stores, the PX, a GI could buy a carton of Lucky Strikes for a dollar. A Soviet soldier would pay $100 on the black market. A Mickey Mouse watch cost a GI $3.95. A Russian would pay $500, and perhaps as much as $1000 for a camera that cost an American soldier $14.95 . . . The amount of Russian-printed Occupation Marks sent back to the States ‘exceeded the amount of pay at a ratio of six or seven to one’ ” (57). No wonder returning troops and postwar Americans expected such a higher standard of living than everyone else. 15. Marcia Landy, British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930–1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991). 16. Landy, Ibid., 371. 17. Ian Green, “Ealing: In the Comedy Frame,” in British Cinema History, James Curran and Vincent Porter, eds., (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1983), 296. Also see Nigel Watson, “Carry On Ealing,” from online site Talking Pictures, http://www.talkingpix.co.uk/Article_Carry%20On%20Ealing. html. 18. Green, Ibid., 296. 19. Bosley Crowther, “Passport to Pimlico, British Offering, Is New Feature at Trans-Lux 60th St.” The New York Times, October 27, 1949. 20. Green, Ibid., 298. 21. Highet, Ibid., 155. 22. Landy, Ibid., 372. 23. With the Scottish Independence vote in the fall of 2014, these issues and their actions were once again front and center; that the Scots voted to stay within Great Britain doesn’t belie the fact that they actually won many concessions from London, and much more self-governing control of their own affairs and distribution of the crown’s financial support. And immediately after the Brexit vote, Scotland announced a new referendum, to stay in the EU. It has never ceased to be a messy, complicated, and antagonistic relationship. Or as

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the main group-member Renton yawps in Danny Boyle’s 1996 cracker-jack satire Trainspotting, where heroin was substituted for whiskey a half-century later: “It’s shite being Scottish! We’re the lowest of the low, the scum of the fucking earth! The most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash that was ever shat out of civilization! Some people hate the English. I don’t. They’re just wankers. We on the other hand are colonized by wankers. Can’t even find a decent culture to be colonized by. We’re ruled by effete assholes! It’s a shite state of affairs to be in, Tommy, and all the fresh air in the world won’t make any fucking difference!” By 2018 we shall see how that relationship (possibly finally) plays itself out. 24. Hennessy, Ibid., 433. 25. Powell and Pressburger’s gorgeous Scottish film I Know Where I’m Going, made only a few years earlier (1945), takes place in the same northern Hebrides big sky and crag desolation (Mull now instead of Barra). 26. Landy, Ibid., 51. 27. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 289. 28. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Dover, 1990), 50. 29. Elliot, Power of Satire, 209. 30. Margaret Gowing, Independence and Deterrence, Britain and Atomic Energy 1945–52, Vol. 1, (New York: MacMillan, 1974), 230. 31. Gowing, Ibid., 230. 32. Hennessy, 435. 33. It goes in and out of print through the Criterion Collection (remastered DVD, 2006). 34. Hamer (1911–1963) was born in Worcestershire near Wales. He went to the Rossall School in Lancashire (whose motto Mens agitat molem [Minds animate matter] was fitting for his promising career), through which he succeeded to Corpus Cristi College, Cambridge, though was expelled after a gay affair he had was exposed; it would hang over him and his work for the rest of his life. By 1934 he had become first a clapper-boy and then an editing assistant for Gaumont-British, where he was groomed by Balcon to eventually become screenwriter and then director by the late 1940s. See Drazin, Finest Years, and BFI’s screenonline.org Biography section. 35. Drazin, The Finest Years, 71. 36. Today’s example of Edwardian nostalgia might be Downton Abbey (2010–2015), or politicians who garishly (fetishly) decorate their offices after its set design. 37. A technique that would be adopted by Kubrick once his love affair with British culture began when he traveled to work there from 1962 on. 38. Yet, in the same year, it should be noted, in 1984, Orwell defended objective truth and attacked the Totalitarian effort to relativize and undermine it. This was the push and pull of the “What is Truth?” relativity phenomenon in the immediate postwar years. 39. It definitely had an influence on Peter Sellers’s confidence to do so many characters for the Goons and later in his movies. Both also probably influenced later American comics to do the same, from Jerry Lewis to Eddie Murphy.

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40. Barr, Ibid., 127. 41. Roger Ebert, DVD review, Chicago Sun Times, September 15, 2002. 42. Harper/Porter, Ibid., 206–211. 43. Note: The film’s title comes from Tennyson, whose advice Louis should have taken: “Kind hearts are more than coronets / And simple faith than Norman blood.” 44. Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1978), 303. 45. The most famous of which was a script Hamer consistently pushed for, Soho Melodrama. But it never got made. (It probably would have been as brilliant as Welles’s Ambersons. Oh, wait, they took that one away from that genius, too.) In any case, Hamer had to take on lesser projects, sometimes at other studios (he did The Spider and the Fly for MGM, 1950; and His Excellency, 1951, To Paris with Love, 1952, and Father Brown, 1954 for Ealing. His directed work School for Scoundrels (1960) starred Ian Carmichael, Terry-Thomas, Dennis Price, and Alistair Sim, with a partially uncredited screenplay by Peter Ustinov; but Hamer was so ravaged by alcohol by then the film had to be completed by Cyril Frankel. He was gone less than three years later, at fifty-two. (His last writing work was brushing up dialogue for Nicholas Ray’s Fifty-Five Days at Peking, filmed in Madrid in 1962. He and Ray both got loaded, and neither really finished their work on that picture, though Ray is still credited, and the film made back its widescreen Technicolor Charlton Heston-David Niven-Ava Gardner-sized budget.) It’s also worth seeking out his second wife’s memoir, Pamela Wilcox’s Between Hell and Charing Cross (London: Allen & Unwin, 1977). 46. David Thomson, New Biographical Dictionary of Cinema (London: Little, Brown, 2002), 367.

Chapter 5 1. Ironically, despite polling more votes than any party in all elections ever held (Labour 13,948,385; Conservative 12,659,712; they were further hurt by the third-party Liberal candidate Clement Davies, who pulled 730,546 votes, yet Labour still out-polled both of them), Labour lost their power in October of 1951 because of constituency boundaries (what in the States is known as gerrymandering; it is called “first past the post” in Britain), failing to win enough seats to form a majority (Conservative 320; Liberal 6; Labour 296). It would be the Fabian Society that would begin Labour’s new opposition after the lost election with their continued social explorations in the “Is This Socialism?” lectures around the country. 2. The Royal Festival Hall and a council estate in Poplar are the only remaining structures still standing as reminders of the festival today. 3. Misquoted so many times by many different commentators, its so-called herbivores and carnivores have become clichés. 4. Michael Frayn, from his essay “The Festival” in The Age of Austerity (London: Penguin, 1963), also republished in the Manchester Guardian, Thurs-

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day, May 3, 2001: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/may/03/britishidentity. features11. Frayn would later become a playwright himself, penning the hit farce Noises Off (1982), among others. 5. Many of the postwar satirists would have preferred a fully baked socialism, instead of the slow implementation designed by Attlee’s Labour ministers. 6. Marcia Landy, British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930–1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991), 370. 7. Pendlebury mistakenly on-purpose steals a painting from a street vendor, and he’s taken in. He gets both the police and the painter to believe the painting is actually worth something (a sly, pre-Warhol joke about the coming “art world as commodity”). It is a classical English “mistaken-identity” farce sequence with a message about hubris and art (the street painter’s) versus hubris and craftsmanship (Pendlebury’s). 8. Donald Thomas, An Underworld at War, 46. 9. Thomas, 74–75. 10. Thomas, 76. 11. Landy, Ibid., 56. 12. For another such meticulously planned and executed theft film of the period see also Kubrick’s The Killing (1957). 13. Edward Lucie-Smith, The Art of Caricature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981), 23. 14. Philip Larkin, “Reasons for Attendance,” written in 1953, from The Less Deceived (1st edition, Hull, UK: The Marvell Press, 1958). 15. Lucie-Smith, 24. 16. Today Google and Apple will try to crush any small start-up that infringes on their dominance. 17. Just as the advertising world always co-ops fringe communities, whether it is punk rock or gay subculture, turning them loose on the mainstream after a little watering down, so does capital appropriate rebellion, turning it into another way to make a buck. 18. Landy, Ibid., 59. 19. Hennessy, 116. After the formation of the London Passenger Transport Board in 1931. Hennessy continues: “Inland transport in 1945 was, in terms of the country’s long-term economic prospects, perhaps the most kaleidoscopic industry of all. . . . The planned shift from road to rail, and the use of rail as the wartime carrier, had been so successful that the railways had been overloaded . . . almost to the point of breakdown. In the years between the German invasion of Poland and the Japanese surrender, the amount of merchandise carried by rail increased by 77 percent. . . . Passenger traffic had almost doubled. This extra load had to be carried with less than a proportionate increase in the manpower and resources. By the end of 1942 locomotives were scarce. In 1944–5 the railway teetered on the verge of breakdown. If anything the picture worsened in 1946–7 as the dawn of public ownership approached on 1 January 1948.” Hennessy partially quotes from C.I. Savage, Inland Transport, HMSO, 1957, for his numbers and statistics.

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20. Barr, Ibid., 160–61. 21. Paul Krugman, “The Inflation Obsession,” The New York Times, March 2, 2014, A25. 22. Paul Krugman, “How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled,” New York Review of Books, June 16, 2013. 23. The Kinks, from We are the Village Green Preservation Society (words and music by Ray Davies), (UK: Pie Records, released November 22, 1968. Published by Noma Music, Inc./Hi-Count Music, Inc., BMI./ABKCO Music). 24. Landy, Ibid., 61. 25. Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s, 208. 26. Ladykillers was the only Technicolor widescreen production Balcon undertook since he hated big-budget risks; by 1955, however, Roadshow productions were becoming the norm, even for the British industry, in order to compete internationally. 27. Landy, Ibid., 61. 28. Landy, Ibid., 63. 29. Some conquered nations would probably take issue with the idea of the “benignness” of the British imperial project. 30. Virginia C. Kenny, The Country-House Ethos in English Literature 1688– 1750: Themes of Personal Retreat and National Expansion (Brighton: Harvester, 1984), 204. Country house poems became a popular genre in seventeenth-century England, where the poet honored the home and grounds of his benefactor. It was assumed that Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” (1616) was the first true country house poem, but today it is Aemilia Lanyer’s “The Description of Cooke-ham” (1611) that is now considered the earliest. 31. See the extensively researched new book by Adrian Tinniswood, The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House between the Wars (London: Cape, 2016) for its deep samplings of the changes in such a British cultural staple by Country Life magazine during the interwar years. 32. Blake Morrison, “The Country House and the English Novel,” The Guardian, June 10, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/11/ country-house-novels-blake-morrison. 33. Morrison, “The Country House and the English Novel,” The Guardian, June 10, 2011. 34. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), 163. 35. By 1959, in the preface to the revised edition, Waugh realized he had over-nostalgized Brideshead “with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language, which now with a full stomach I find distasteful.” He put it down to the craziness of the war, stating, “It was impossible to foresee, in the spring of 1944, the present cult of the English country house. It seemed then that the ancestral seats which were our chief national artistic achievement were doomed to decay and spoliation like the monasteries in the sixteenth century. So I piled it on rather, with passionate sincerity. . . . Year by year, generation after generation, they enriched

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and extended it; year by year the great harvest of timber in the park grew to ripeness.” Today, the nostalgia for that England is as overrun as the Yorkshire location at Downton. 36. Jeffery Richards and Anthony Aldgate, British Cinema and Society (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999), 111–12. 37. The Suez crisis was the appropriation of the Canal Zone by Egypt’s newly elected President Gamal Abdul Nasser, who came to power in July 1952 after the British attempts to quell an uprising resulted in fifty-two Egyptians being killed and the overthrow of King Farouk established a republic in a coup. In 1956, Nasser declared the zone part of Egypt. These events were also known as the Tripartite Aggression, after Israel invaded Egypt backed by Britain and France. Britain demanded an Egyptian retreat and looked to the United States for emotional and military support. Eisenhower refused (along with the USSR and the U.N.), and Britain lost the stand-off. It was the final blow. 38. Hennessy remarks, “Putting a date to the end of the British Empire is the ultimate ‘trivial pursuit’ of the historical profession.” For some, it’s the Boer War (Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, New York: Random House, 1987). For Corelli Barnett, it was an “irresistible economic decline.” Hennessey says, “For me the turning point is a richly ludicrous episode in the history of Empire which took place on the roof of the world (Tibet) three years after accommodation had been met in South Africa,” around 1905. Never Again, 217–19. 39. He couldn’t help but make his films this way; his most famous one was to come in 1957 with The Sweet Smell of Success in the States (Burt Lancaster greatly admired MacKendrick’s satires and personally chose him as director); Sweet Smell of Success was so dark it pretty much ended his directing career; today it is a classic. 40. The use of animals is another staple of the British satires (as in Orwell’s Animal Farm, 1945). But even in live action tales there’s always a parrot or a pig or a herring or a fox or a goat or a hedgehog or a hound or some other bizarre animal floating around as part of the subplot. For a good example of the use of animals in English film satire, see Cold Comfort Farm (John Schlesinger, 1995). Also listen to The Kinks, “Animal Farm,” from The Village Green Preservation Society. “I’ll take you where real animals are playing,” Ray Davies sings—in other words, to modern England itself. 41. Landy, Ibid., 379. 42. Hence, their incessant stories set in Middle Earth, from Lord of the Rings (Tolkien, 1937) to Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin, 1991). 43. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Random House, 1950). 44. In 1995 the studios themselves were purchased by the National Film & Television School (NFTS). 45. In some ways, it was also a precursor to Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959). Garry Marsh plays an inspector who always arrives at a crime scene too late to find the evidence (new Britain’s “lack” of old Britain’s/Victorian police

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work’s success and work ethic). Hill plays Hugo Dill, a schnook who as he dreams (again, the fantasy element) of becoming a detective follows Marsh around. But when he’s rejected, like the kids in Hue and Cry, he sets out to fight crime on his own and a very young Belinda Lee becomes his partner in crime fighting when she stumbles on a gang of Russian spies who are planning to eliminate British atomic scientists at a conference. By pretending to be one of the spies, Hill saves England from infiltration from within. 46. Barr, Ibid., 56. 47. Frayn, Ibid.

Chapter 6 1. O.R. Dathorne, In Europe’s Image: The Need for American Multiculturalism (Westport, Connecticut: Bergin & Garvey, 1994), 92. 2. See note 6 of the introduction. 3. All the major Hollywood players today still have studios in England. And America’s most successful filmmaker, Steven Spielberg, literally shoots (at least part of) every one of his films in England. That is some serious professional and cultural pull. 4. Today we face the opposite problem: only the corporate and wealthy classes receive such governmental largess perks; hence all boats have definitely not been rising. About the importance of maintaining mixed economies (the government-sponsored market side by side with the unfettered free and open market) see any serious economist from Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman to Thomas Piketty and Nicholas A. Bloom. 5. For “Best Years,” see Joseph C. Goulden, The Best Years (New York: Atheneum, 1976). 6. Camus’s only American excursion happened just at war’s end in March of 1946. He lectured in NYC (Columbia), Montreal (McGill), and Boston. Though he hated the term, he was riding the wave of Existentialism touched off by Hannah Arendt’s article, “What Is This Philosophy They Call Existentialism?” Camus was astonished by New York City’s abundant luxuries and cultural treasures, but also remarked about the Bowery, “Finally, reality!” See Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life translated by Benjamin Ivry (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 217–227; and http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/books/albert-camus-strangerin-a-strange-land-new-york.html. 7. One must laugh at life’s disquietude or else be constantly crying, and as damning as satire can be, as comedy praises, they can be very funny, too. This often makes for great art, as Welles remarked in The Third Man (1949) at the time. 8. See the excellent Turner Classic Movies original documentary The Tramp and the Dictator (2002), available on YouTube. 9. So many of these jokes would later be borrowed by Woody Allen in his films; viz: Annie Hall: “I was trying to do to her what Eisenhower’s been doing to the country.” 10. From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Be_or_Not_to_Be_ (1942_film); no source is given for this quote.

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11. David Edelstein, New York Magazine, December 27, 2014, http://www. vulture.com/2014/12/movie-review-the-interview.html. 12. Ehrhardt’s bumbling commandant seems to have been the model for Schultz in Hogan’s Heroes (1965–71). 13. James Curtis, W.C. Fields: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 2003) includes an extensive documenting of all of Fields’s overseas performances and travels. 14. Orson Welles claims Fields’ pseudonym (Mahatma Kane Jeeves) was also a nod to his own famous film. See Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 137. Apparently, they were great friends; Welles called him Uncle Claude, and he turned him on to P.J. Wodehouse, “because he was so funny. That kind of bothered Uncle Claude—that someone else was funny. Generosity was not his salient virtue.” 15. And maybe some Southern plantation owners, to allow them to feel superior, the way the biggest ratings for contest shows like American Idol are the first three weeks when audiences get to laugh at the delusions of the talentless. 16. See David Mamet’s famous exploration of American con artists in House of Games (1987), where a self-satisfied psychologist is sucked into a long con of high-stake swindlers; Mamet seems to be suggesting that psychiatry might be the biggest con of all. 17. Jonathan Tasini, The Audacity of Greed (Brooklyn, NY: Ig Publishing, 2009), 113. 18. Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America (New York; Hachette Book Group, Inc., 2017), 208. Gibney also takes the revolving-door boomer politicians to task for their continued pushing of false, long-discredited, and intellectually dishonest supply-side trickle-down voodoo economics. 19. The story of Fields placing his money in dozens of banks is actually a myth, probably brought on by how often banks were ridiculed in his scripts. Again, see Curtis’s unmatched Fields biography. 20. It was the only time Fields ever laughed on screen as a comedian, in a bad act—it was against his creed as a satirist to ever laugh—and he never broke character. 21. “Banker Song,” (Written by W.C. Fields) from You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man (1939). 22. He even mocked Will Rogers’s carefully crafted rube persona, though they were good friends in real life. In Fatal Glass of Beer (Clyde Bruckman, 1933), Fields had satirized the American obsession with world travelers in the 1920s and ’30s, which to him was mindless and silly. Freezing up in the tundra? No thanks. Might as well be Bear Grylls in the Arctic or Anthony Bourdain eating bugs in Nicaragua. It’s a sucker’s adventure. 23. Philip Hamburger, The New Yorker, August 20, 1949, 48–49. 24. Fields was under exclusive contract to Universal, which sometimes rejected scripts he’d hand in to them as being too risqué for the Production Code, too non–family friendly. So, here he adds a Deana Durbin stand-in in the child actress Gloria Jean to ease the gritty satire.

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25. Hamburger, Ibid. 26. Hamburger, Ibid. 27. Wonderful Life was actually Capra’s first major flop, as he had been so busy during the war creating propaganda to convince the troops and their mothers to fight the good fight in the Why We Fight series (1943–45). Also see the fantastic documentary Five Came Back (Netflix, 2016) by director Laurent Bouzereau, from the Mark Harris book of the same name (New York: Penguin, 2014). 28. The theatrical release was well received. The New York Times reviewer Frank S. Nugent wrote: “It is a memorable film, in title and in quality, blessed with an honest script, good direction and sound performances . . . a drama stated in the simplest human terms of comedy and sentiment, tenderness and generosity . . . warm, pleasant and unusually entertaining.” New York Times, January 18, 1940. 29. Robertson was actually in I’m a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Mervyn Le Roy, 1932). 30. These were terribly paved back roads, long before Eisenhower’s massive National Interstate and Highway Act of 1956. An America divided against itself as the war kicked in. 31. Donald Friende, The Mechanical Angel, His Adventures and Enterprises in the Glittering 1920s (New York: Knopf, 1948), 225. 32. “Salt Peanuts” has a murky origin story. It was thought to be partly composed by Gillespie with bebop drummer Kenny Clarke, but also included contributions from Parker. In any case, it beautifully captured the anxious moment and changed American music almost instantly. 33. Goulden, Ibid., 485. 34. Robert Sheer, “Gore Vidal: Living Through History,” Truth Dig, November 21, 2006. 35. In fact, one would have been hard-pressed to find any American film from this period in which some aspect—the music, set design, writing, cinematography, lighting, and so forth—was not handled by a European or, at least, a foreign craftsperson, who had probably trained in their home country but had fled during the terrible ’30s. 36. For Wilder’s (and his then writing partner Charles Brackett) inspiration (which also included input from Time-Life reporter D.M. Marshman), and a history of Sunset’s production, see Otto Friedrich, City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s (Berkeley, CA: UC Press, 1997; first printed by HarperCollins, 1986), 414–21. Wilder wanted to cast Mae West and Montgomery Clift in the principle roles; they balked, and he luckily wound up with Swanson and Holden by default. Even with the brilliant results, Louis B. Mayer, still (barely) head of MGM in 1950 shouted at Wilder, “You bastard! You have disgraced the industry that made and fed you!” Wilder didn’t disagree, but told him to go fuck himself anyway. 37. David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (6th edition; New York: Knopf, 2014), 1114. 38. Morris Dickstein, “Sunset Boulevard,” Grand Street, Vol. 7, No. 3, Spring 1986, 177.

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39. Dickstein, Ibid., 177–80. 40. See also Moore himself getting K-Mart to stop selling bullets after the company was shamed by the victims in Bowling for Columbine (2002). 41. One of the best pieces about Karl May can be found in Rivka Galchen’s essay “Wild West German,” The New Yorker, April 9, 2012, where she dissects why Germans still adore the writer Karl May, even to the point of building theme parks and staging an annual festival devoted to May’s life and work. Most amazing among the nuggets in the piece is that May himself never visited the American West. 42. Blazing Saddles was co-written by Richard Pryor, from whom it really got its radical teeth. 43. Leonard Maltin, “12 Movies That Changed the Way Movies are Made,” Bottom Line Magazine, Volume 36, No. 1, January, 2015, 14. 44. This bit became the inspiration for Danny Kaye’s later more poetically inspired, “The pellet with the poison is in the vessel with the pestle, the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true,” from 1956’s The Court Jester (Charles Vidor). 45. Russell in her autobiography said of her character, “My role was like a female Bob Waterfield—dry and flat . . . a stone face. Hope’s name for me was ‘Lumpy.’ I had to wear corsets and pantaloons. Ugh.” Still, Hope was Russell’s favorite co-star, and here rolls with the fun, and Hope, shockingly, though as hammy and spotlight hogging as ever, does allow Russell to shine, which accounts for Russell’s sincere appreciation of Hope’s generosity. My Autobiography (New York: Arrow Books, 1987). 46. John McCarten, The New Yorker, December 25, 1948, 37. 47. William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (New York: New Directions, 2nd edition, 1933; first published 1925), 63. 48. During the 1950s, the western had another of its periodic revivals in Daniel Boone, John Wayne, and Vista Vision big-sky tales that would return again later in the late ’60s and ’70s with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969), True Grit (Henry Hathaway, 1969), Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971), and Jeremiah Johnson (Sidney Pollack, 1972), until Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) financial debacle ended the trend for quite a while. 49. Their origins often lie in the Gothic stories of the nineteenth century, mostly written by women as cautionary tales aimed at younger females to introduce them to the limitations imposed by the prison of patriarchal dominance. For example, the novels of Anne Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolfo (1794) and The Italian (1797) with their scary Byronic brutes that terrorize the young heroine; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818); and even Austen’s satirical variant on the genre, Northanger Abbey (1818). 50. Video interview at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z02M_qbTbDA. 51. Wolfgang Limmer, Suddentsche Zeitung, November 17–18, 1973, translation from the original German by Virginia Soukup.

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Chapter 7 1. André Breton, as quoted in “Radio Interviews with André Parinaud (1913–1952)” in Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism (Paragon House English, 1993), 63. 2. While in the army as a gunner, Milligan met Harry Secombe, and after the war, the pair hooked up with Peter Sellers and Michael Bentine and worked together on the stage, and then at the BBC as the Goons from 1947–1960 (though Bentine only lasted one year on the radio show). After 1955, Eric Sykes and Larry Stephens sometimes joined in the ensemble. 3. Broadcaster Michael Parkinson said Milligan was “indisputably the most important British comedian over the last 50 years,” and Stephen Fry called him “immortal, always.” He received an honorary knighthood from Prince Charles (Milligan held an Irish passport) despite making fun of him during a live television show in 1994, calling him “a groveling little bastard.” 4. Ray Ellington (1916–1985) led the program’s quartet. From the Goons’ site (http://www.thegoonshow.net/cast/ray_ellington.asp): “Ray was born to a Russian Jewish mother and an African-American father in England. He formed the Ray Ellington Quartet in 1950. Ellington specialized in jazz but experimented with many other genres throughout the show’s history. Ellington’s band was one of the first in the UK to feature the stripped-back guitar / bass / drums / piano format that became the basis of rock’n’roll, as well as being one of the first groups in Britain to prominently feature the electric guitar. They were also reputedly the very first jazz band in the UK to use an amplified bass.” 5. BBC Radio Collection, The Goon Show, Volume 12, “The Phantom Head Shaver (of Brighton),” originally broadcast October 19, 1954, Producer: Peter Eton; Scriptwriter: Milligan. 6. The story of Secombe meeting Milligan is a famous one in Britain: Secombe was advancing on foot up a North African hill, Milligan came running past him, downhill, literally chasing a loose cannon, which proceeded to go flying off a cliff. 7. Again, see John Huston’s Let There Be Light (1946) for footage of the American advance through Italy. 8. Main sources: Norma Farnes, The Goons: The Story (London: Virgin, 1997), 72, 92. This is the best (though limited) source of information on the Goons—it is an oral history, a collection of first-hand interviews with Milligan, Secombe, Eric Sykes, and producer Peter Eton, collected by Milligan’s secretary, Norma Farnes. The Goon Show Companion by Roger Wilmut (London: Robeson’s Books, 1971) was very nicely updated in 1981 (also London: Robeson’s Books) by including the famed Grafton’s Pub owner Jimmy Grafton for more primary knowledge. There is surprisingly little else from the BBC other than their collection of Goons cds with some brief liner notes. And finally, of course, there are also a handful of Internet sites run by Goons’ freaks that offer even less information than the frustratingly lacking books. The fan site is http://www.

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thegoonshow.net/. An excellent brief video overview of the Goons is available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmuS3SGgRsw. And finally, The Goon Show Preservation Society, 27 Kew Drive, Davyhulme, Urmston, Manchester M31 2WW can be tapped for further fandom. 9. Farnes, 72, 92. 10. See Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers, “In Hamburg We had to Play for 8 Hours . . .” (New York: Back Bay Books, 2011), 35ff. 11. Mimicry of other actors and acting styles is a particular English acting strength, seen today in artists from Emma Thompson to Daniel Day Lewis. 12. Farnes, 48. 13. Farnes, 56. 14. It’s important to note the absence of any of the recordings of the first two series (though there are some silent images of Bentine performing on YouTube). This truly is a great loss. 15. Peter Stead, Film and the Working Class (London: Routledge, 1989), 4–5. 16. Opportunity Knocks (on radio it ran from February 1949 only to September of the same year, but was later revived and eventually became a hit TV program on ITV). In 1977, the Clash mocked its insipid conventionality in their satiric rocker “Career Opportunities.” While Milligan made Secombe’s career, Secombe gave Milligan his career. 17. Eric Sykes, and then Peter Eton, both deserve credit for giving the Goon the well-structured tightly packed story structure they used each week, and this was the best thing for Milligan, who now had a picture in his mind every week of what would happen, and where. 18. It was also used by the British army to describe the Germans in the POW camps. 19. From the Goons’ site: “Many of the earliest radio episodes no longer exist. No episodes from the first series survive. Only Episodes 1 and 3 from the second series (1951–52) survive. Only one full episode and one ten-minute extract from the third series survive.” A major reason for the loss of the recordings by the BBC in 1962 was to save space on shelves. This type of excuse drives preservationists up-the-wall today, as they search and research for old footage to recreate lost classics (an uncut version of Welles’s 1942 film The Magnificent Ambersons is still the most sought after artifact). But space was a problem in bombed-out London, and also in New York City and Hollywood, too. It would take Lew Wassermann’s genius to realize the economic importance of saving these great works; they aren’t just cultural history, they are future revenue streams. Only recently recognizing this, the BBC has ordered all online Goon shows removed from YouTube. The BBC chose to save only those Goon Show recordings that “represented the style and range of the show during its nine-year run,” but Auntie’s idea of representation and the Goons’ would have been worlds apart in aesthetic taste. Lesson: save everything and let the historians and academics sort out their import later. The BBC has put offers out to anyone who may have home-taped and preserved the shows aired during the 1951–52 period, but are

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still lacking in the rare material. There are a few clips in the Goon special listed above of Bentine performing with the others. 20. Bentine left in 1952, and Sellers, Secombe, and Milligan took the Goons to 1960. During the same period, Milligan wrote a television show called A Show Called Fred, winning the writer of the year award for 1956. Later, he starred in more than twenty-five films. 21. Almost all of the Goon scripts were written by Milligan (there were more than 120). The first three series are credited to Milligan, Larry Stephens, and Jimmy Grafton. In series three he suffered a breakdown and missed twelve episodes (they were written by Stephens and Grafton). In series four, episodes 1 through 20 were by Milligan and Stephens, then 21 through 30 by Milligan alone (Michael Bentine made a surprise appearance in episode 13). Eric Sykes then joined Milligan from series five on, and so it went with John Antrobus and Maurice Wiltshire helping out occasionally. In any case, Milligan was almost always the showrunner, all with the characters he had created. 22. Much of this information can be found in the BBC documentary on Spike’s life, Spike Milligan: Vivat Milligan!, BBC Radio Collection CD # ISBN 0-563-53073-1, 2003. From the BBC site: “To date, the BBC has released 30 CD sets of these re-mastered episodes (originally on audio cassette tapes), containing most of the shows, plus an additional CD set comprising The Last Goon Show of All and Goon Again.” Almost all Goon Shows are streaming at GoonShowRadio, http://goons.fabcat.org/. 23. It was around this time, and for these stodgy reasons, that the BBC became known as “Auntie.” 24. BBC Written Archives (London: Caversham, 1948), R34/259. 25. David Kynaston, Austerity Britain: 1945–51 (New York: Walker Publishing, 2008), 310. 26. The “sick-comics” were those stand-up satirists of the Silent generation—e.g., Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Brother Theodore, Nichols and May, etc. (“Sickniks,” as they were labeled)—who were taking similar approaches to comedy in the States. But, none were on radio or television on a weekly basis, as the Goons were; they mostly performed in clubs and cabarets. (Because the high-profile Boomers were coming of age in the 1960s, they were much more visible and vocal; but the ’60s were the aftermath floodgates, not the cuttingedge avant de siècle. The 1950s Silent artists were the ones who showed the way forward in that fervent postwar decade.) 27. Hence, The Daily Show and Colbert run 30 minutes; the 90-minute Saturday Night Live has its interludes and weekly musical guests to fill the rest of the space. Yet, Saturday Night Live’s season lasts only about 10 to 12 weeks; the Goons were on over forty weeks per year. 28. Farnes, 165. 29. The Goon Show BBC Documentary CD, section 2. 30. The “Adjustment Theory” is based on the assumption that the primary motivation of the civilized man is the achievement of a desirable status among his peers.

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31. Leonard Feinberg, The Satirist: His Temperament, Motivation, and Influence (Des Moines: Iowa State UP, 1963), 137. 32. Although he fought for the United Kingdom during the war and lived in England from 1933 until his death, in his later life he was constantly challenged when he appealed for full citizenship by each successive government; he was declared stateless in 1960, and finally got an Irish passport so he could travel. In this instance, it might be considered the “I ain’t got no home” theory of identity. 33. In the end, the strain proved too much, and he decided to end the series in 1959. However, a wave of protest from devoted fans convinced him to make one extra set of programs, which ended with The Last Smoking Seagoon on January 28, 1960. But even this was not to be quite the end, and The Very Last Goon Show of All was recorded on television before a Royal audience in 1972. Spike screamed the last line after the applause: “Right. That’s it. Now get out!” 34. Farnes, 54. 35. See R.D. Laing, Wisdom, Madness, and Folly: The Making of a Psychiatrist, 1927–1956 (New York: MacGraw Hill, 1961); Sanity, Madness, and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics (Baltimore: Pelican, 1964); The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (London: Havistock, 1960); and The Politics of Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1970). 36. This became a popular stance in the ’60s as a rationale for taking psychedelic drugs. In America these questions were asked by novels such as Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) and films such as Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies (1967). 37. Ibid., BBC Documentary CD, section 4. 38. See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, English translation by Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1964). 39. As Milligan aged, he felt Churchill was the last major politician with a sense of humor, “The ones we’ve got now are ridiculously pompous,” he would say of newer politicians. Though at what point does a young brilliant satirist become just a tired old grouser? 40. Farnes, 51. 41. Because the Goons were so reliant on sound F/X, the regional dialects of the performers, and the rapid-fire pace of the show, it is difficult to convey the humor on the page. Though there were over 120 episodes, those considered here are general representatives. 42. Farnes, 10 and 13. 43. It probably began in Zurich in 1915, but there were also active Dadaists in New York such as Marcel Duchamp and Beatrice Wood, both of whom had left France at the beginnings of World War I. The origins of the name are unclear. Some believe that it is a nonsensical word; others hold that a group of artists assembled in Zurich in 1916, wanting to form a movement, chose a name at random from a French-German dictionary. Dada in French is a child’s word for hobbyhorse. Either way, they were looking to connect adult man with clear arrested emotional and rational development. 44. Hemingway, too, along with other American expatriates who returned to Paris in the 1920s, felt the uselessness of living in the United States with

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a culture that had no true clue about the horrors of war, and even worse, no respect for artists and the life of the mind. His anti-hero, Nick Adams, observes the twentieth century’s melancholic addiction to alienation. 45. Early continental satirists like Voltaire and Rabelais had trafficked in this randomized structure or pattern-less pattern, and Milligan drew on their inspirations, too. See Rabelais’s pentalogy Gargantuan and Pantagruel (Books I and II, 1653, and Book III, 1693). 46. Surrealism completely altered post–World War I painting (Dali), writing (Apollinaire), poetry (Jacques Prévert), and film (see Bunuel/Dali’s Un Chien Andelou, 1926). André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto (the first of many; it often seemed as if there were more manifestos than art works) announced itself on the scene in 1924, where Breton defined surrealism as “pure psychic automatism,” “automatism” being spontaneous ideas put down on paper quickly without moral or aesthetic interference or self-consciousness; (“First thought, best thought,” the Beats would later say). As capitalism always does, after World War II surrealism was appropriated by the advertising world and moved into popular culture all over Europe (hence the Goons’ success), so that many ads displayed “juxtaposed realities,” just as Breton once demanded; today’s revolutionaries are tomorrow’s back-dated squares. “Ceci n’est pas un pipe.” It isn’t a pipe, it’s a drawing of a pipe. Whatever, dude. 47. If one looks back in American poetry, the work of the first American surrealist poet, Charles Henri Ford, stands out. He wrote his first surrealist poem in 1929, and welcomed Breton when he came to New York before World War II. 48. Farnes, 96–97. 49. Again, the Goons could be considered the British incarnation of the American sick comics. 50. Farnes, 4. 51. Ibid., BBC Documentary CD, section 4. Also, Farnes, 51. It is ironic that in the early 1950s hipster muzos got Milligan’s outrageous jive, as later Mark Smith would complain about how the square, narrow-minded, and undaring muzos he worked with could never get what he was trying to do. The cycles of culture continue to spin. 52. Farnes, 167–68. 53. Gilbert Highet, The Anatomy of Satire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1962), 18. 54. Milligan also ended the series partly because he had exhausted the BBC sound library; he had literally run out of audible possibilities. 55. This is not only a surrealist notion but a romantic one, where imagination is the highest of all human faculties, as what cannot be seen must be imagined. And, in fact, an attempt to convert the series’ scripts to television in the 1960s (as The Telegoons) didn’t really work out because it was too literal—what the audience doesn’t see is the true secret. 56. Interestingly, he was a strident campaigner on all environmentally related matters, worrying about the effects of modernism on the earth, from rampant hyper-capitalism to overpopulation, the destruction of the rain forests to the proliferation of nuclear arms.

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57. “The Mighty Wurlitzer,” Series No. 6, episode 16, originally aired January 3, 1956. Producer: Peter Eton; Scriptwriter: Milligan. 58. From “Ye Bandit of Sherwood Forest.” From Series No. 5, episode 14, originally broadcast December 28, 1954. Producer: Peter Eton; Scriptwriters: Milligan and Eric Sykes. 59. Farnes, 54. Beachcomber was a nom de plume of Wyndam Lewis and J.B. Morton in The Daily Express, a weekly humor column that ran from 1919 to 1975 under the heading “By The Way.” 60. In the end, it is this sympathy for man that made Leacock’s humor so appealing to Milligan. Though Milligan used the carnivore style of satire for his ridicule and cultural points, it was his empathy (herbivore compassion) toward the human soul that is his legacy—another Leacock influence. Leacock pre-figured Milligan, and by the early 1920s, Leacock was recognized as one of the world’s best-known (English-speaking anyway) humorists (probably along with Will Rogers and Groucho Marx). Leacock produced more than twenty-five books of humor, including Literary Lapses (1910), Nonsense Novels (1911), Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), Behind the Beyond, and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge (1913), Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914), Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy (1915), Further Foolishness: Sketches and Satires on the Follies of the Day (1916), Frenzied Fiction (1918), The Hohenzollerns in America: with the Bolsheviks in Berlin, and Other Impossibilities (1919), Winsome Winnie and Other New Nonsense Novels (1920), and Last Leaves (1945). 61. “A Russian Love Song,” (music and lyrics by Milligan and Stephens) from “The Space Age,” Series No. 8, Episode 6, originally aired November 4, 1957. Producer: Roy Speer; Scriptwriters: Milligan and Stephens. Note that date: it was exactly one month to the day after Sputnik’s first launch on October 4, 1957, 7:28 p.m. 62. The Goons, interestingly, were satirizing the traditional British literary staples the BBC (Auntie) and the other English studios (Rank, Gainsborough, etc.) turned to (in fact, their need to have turned to) to reassert British national identity. 63. Though not always adventure stories, this basic structure did become the model for all future television sitcoms in the UK and the States, so audiences could locate themselves no matter where they tuned in; the ’60s and ’70s variety shows were much more music hall–like, from Carol Burnett (1967–78) to Saturday Night Live (begun in 1975). 64. Eton was so tough on the narrative structure and keeping to strict melodramas, he called the Goons, in Sinatra-like tough-guy scat, “bums” for their inability to discipline themselves. 65. These character descriptions are directly from the Goon Show scripts (http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts.asp.): “Moriarty’s Background: (French scrag and lackey to Grytpype-Thynne) Born 1920 Paris. Educated—Sorbonne and St. Cyr Military Academy. Captained French Moron Racing Car Team at Brooklands 1927—became the Latin darling of the Motoring Set, lionized by London, seen at all smart places—The Cafe

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Royal—the Ritz—danced the Tango all night long with Lady Astor. Wall Street crash—family fortune decimated. Started work as a gigolo at New Cron Palais de Danse, was befriended by Hercules Grytpype-Thynne, who offered to ‘manage’ his career. Under Grytpype’s careful ‘management’ he is now bald, daft, deaf and worthless.” 66. Also self-reflexive was how often the actors themselves constantly mentioned their own real-life names, including constantly announcing the reallife composers and band-leaders Max Geldray and Ray Ellington, and always announcer Wallace Greenslade. It was paying props and respect to fellow muzos. 67. Bluebottle always breaks the story and narrates his own actions. Another example in an earlier show: “Hurriedly wraps up Captain in brown paper parcel labeled ‘Explosives’ and stuffs him through headquarter letter box. Jumps on to passing dustcart and exits left to buy bowler before price goes up. Thinks, “That wasn’t a very big part for Bluebottle.” Bluebottle’s best catchphrases were: “Niddle-naddle-noo!” “I don’t wish to know that!” 68. “The Phantom Head Shaver (of Brighton),” (1954). 69. It’s actually amazing the thinly veiled gay references the Goons got away with in the early 1950s, on the BBC no-less, with Bluebottle and his blatant homoerotic suggestions of his own attraction to Seagoon. Though the “Wolfenden Report” was published in 1957, it wouldn’t be until the late 1960s that homosexuality would be decriminalized in British society with the “Sexual Offenses Act of 1967.” Certainly, one can read the Goon’s including Bluebottle’s actions as terribly homophobic, but barriers were being broken down all the same. The best queer studies analysis of pre- and postwar gay humor is easily Andy Medhurst’s A National Joke: Popular Comedy and English National Identities (Sussex: Routledge, 2007). 70. Crun also appears as an inventor in several episodes, providing Seagoon with the resources for many of his insane expeditions. These have included underwater gas stoves and supplier of clues in order to solve the mystery of “The Dreaded-Batter-Pudding-Hurler (of-Bexhall-on-Sea),” October 12, 1954. Producer: Peter Eton; Scriptwriter: Spike Milligan. 71. Amazingly, The Honeymooners ran for only one year, 1955–56, though it started as a sketch on an early variety show, Cavalcade of Stars, on the DuMont Network in 1951. 72. He is the only non-English character, pretentiously, yet devilishly, French. 73. The actual description from the script is even more scathing: “Grytpype-Thynne’s Background: A plausible public school villain and cad; Son of Lord “Sticky” Thynne and Miss Vera Colin, a waitress at Paddington Station. Educated at Eton “Mixed” Grammar School, Penge was manager for the rugby team, 15th man at cricket. Eventually left school at 20—did two years at Oxford, subject of a police investigation on homosexuality with Masai goat herd. Joined Household Cavalry; served throughout the war at Knightsbridge barracks; on release became a life member of Harrow Labour exchange. Joined the Foreign Office; roving Ambassador to the Outer Hebrides.” . . . “(Some of his most

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fiendish plans have included sending Neddie to Africa in order to catch the International Christmas Pudding, boxing up snow for Seagoon to sell abroad in parts of the world which lack snow and using him to convince parliament that the “Lurgi”—a new disease—has infected Britain in order to sell vast quantities of brass band instruments when Seagoon reveals that all those immune to the disease play in a brass band).” (See the scripts site at Goons.net). Another of Milligan’s muzo-jazz in-jokes. 74. Highet, Ibid., 210–11. 75. From “The Lost Emperor.” Series No. 6, episode 3, originally broadcast October 4, 1955. Producer: Peter Eton; Scriptwriter: Milligan. 76. Described mainly by Grytpype as “you silly twisted boy,” Neddie is often on the receiving end of Bluebottle’s dreading, sending him into places where Neddie is afraid to go. Although incredibly gullible, Seagoon is a likeable character who often loses his wallet, personal possessions, and even clothes to Major Bloodnoc. He is always incredibly bad at cracking jokes. 77. As Milligan simply put it, “Eccles could not be defeated by logic.” 78. Such was his anger at that institution for saddling him with acute PTSD for the rest of his life, Milligan sent up the military every chance he got, no matter the script setting or scenario—it was almost obligatory to him. Today, however, in the UK or US, it is very difficult to make fun of the military in any form. A recent Larry Wilmore program (Comedy Central, February 17, 2015) had a panel discussing the film American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, 2015), and Wilmore tried to get a joke in somewhere, anywhere, but it was too touchy a topic. This is the new post-Postmodern political correct world today’s satirists have to navigate, and comedians complain about it incessantly. 79. “The Phantom Head Shaver (of Brighton),” October 19, 1954. Producer: Peter Eton; Scriptwriter: Milligan. 80. Dryden, “Mac Flecknoe,” ll. 15ff. 81. Dryden, Ibid., ll., 25 ff. 82. This craziness would foreshadow one of the great 1960s Cold War satires, Dr. Strangelove, also starring Sellers. Kubrick adored the Goons after he heard them while filming Lolita in Britain in 1962. That film was due to be released on November 23, 1963; needless to say, rightly, it was delayed until the following year and finally came out on January 29, 1964, exactly two days before the Beatles landed in New York City; both artists would change the culture forever. 83. Stephanie Koziski, “The Standup Comedian as Anthropologist: Intentional Culture Critic,” The Journal of Popular Culture, Fall, 1984, 57. 84. Farnes, 89. 85. “Phantom Head Shaver (of Brighton),” (1954). 86. Farnes, 97. 87. “Phantom Head Shaver (of Brighton),” (1954). 88. See next section and The Fall’s, “The League of Bald-Headed Men,” (Mark E. Smith). To Milligan and Smith, the League consisted of all the bureaucrats who had run the country for the last few hundred years, since the Parliamentary/Prime Minister system took power from the crown.

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89. Lionel Trilling, “The Kinsey Report,” from The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, Reprint, 2000), 120. 90. Waugh’s brutal satire of ex-pat Brits who had “abandoned the barracks” (fled Britain in time of strife) for the sunny climes of Los Angeles in the 1940s was The Loved One (London: Chapman & Hall, 1948). 91. However, it is fair to note that Amis had begun writing his satire by 1949. Radio is simply more immediate than book publishing, but the satire was definitely in the postwar late-1940s air. 92. Martin Amis has said his dad was the leading satirist of his day. He wasn’t. See his own memoir about their relationship, Experience (New York: Miramax Books, 2000). 93. And especially without Sellers and Secombe to protect him. 94. There’s even a website dedicated to McGonagall’s awfulness, as only the Scots could do: http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk/. Of McGonagall, the site says, “A self-educated hand loom weaver of Irish descent, he discovered his discordant muse in 1877 and embarked upon a 25 year career as a working poet, delighting and appalling audiences across Scotland and beyond. His audiences threw rotten fish at him, the authorities banned his performances, and he died a pauper over a century ago. But his books remain in print to this day, and he’s remembered and quoted long after more talented contemporaries have been forgotten.” Was his Irish descent held against him by his fellow Celts? Hmmm. In any case, he was best known for the “Tay Bridge Disaster,” 1879, about one of the worst railway accidents (due to a fierce gale storm) ever in Scotland. Actually, his infamous poem has some very moving pathos. 95. Penelope Gilliatt, The New Yorker, February 16, 1975, 49. 96. One year at the British Comedy Awards, Milligan called Prince Charles, a “groveling little bastard!” In return, Charles knighted Milligan a few years later. 97. Moreover, the Goons were produced by George Martin, who would go on to even greater glory as a producer of a (nameless) famous musical group heavily inspired by the Goons’ style of humor and technique of attack. It was the single deciding reason for Lennon wanting to work with Martin. Lennon would also copy Milligan’s drawing style (to compare, see online copies of both artists’ work). 98. As a final note, a film was made in 2004 called The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (Stephen Hopkins), with Sellers being played by Oscar-winner Geoffrey Rush, with Charlize Theron as Britt Elkland, Sophie Dahl as Sophia Loren, Ed Tudor-Pole as Spike Milligan, and the rotund British comic Johnny Vegas playing Harry Secombe. The warts and all biopic was not well received, not only because they failed to get the Goons right, but more importantly, because by the 2000s the British public had moved on to even more absurdist satire. The film was too tame.

Chapter 8 1. Neil Norman, “Goon but not Forgotten,” The Express, October 15, 2011. http://www.express.co.uk/expressyourself/277561/Goon-but-not-forgotten.

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2. John died in 1985 and Roy in 2001. 3. As Guinness was Ealing’s main star, the Boulting films had Ian Carmichael. In I’m All Right, Jack (1959) he is Stanley Windrush, a naïve Oxford do-gooder whose worldly ideals clash with those of his greedy employers—Uncle Bertram (Dennis Price) and his sycophantic lackey, Sidney de Vere Cox (Richard Attenborough). 4. Roy Strong, The Story of Britain (London: Pimlico, 1996), 512. 5. Full employment was promised in the twenty years after World War II, no matter which party was in power. However, there was always some level (often high) of unemployment. 6. Roy Strong, Ibid., 513. 7. Though neither Britain nor America has seen runaway inflation since the stagflation 1970s. 8. From Barbara Windsor, Sid James, Joan Sims, Hattie Jacques, Kenneth Williams, and Charles Hawtry, to Bernard Bresslaw, Kenneth Connor, Fenella Fielding, Jim Dale, and Bernard Cribbins. It was also further proof that the masses needed to see authority (especially the military) figures lampooned. 9. Philip Larkin said that the swinging ’60s (as well as “sex”) began between “the end of the ban on Chatterley and the Beatles first LP.” 10. See the first-rate 1959 (New York: Wiley, 2010) by Fred Kaplan about the importance that year had in so many different areas, from film (John Cassavettes/French Nouvelle Vague) to technology (the invention of the microchip/ portable radios), music (John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Motown), literature (Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Miller’s Tropic of Cancer), and even foreign policy (the first troops were killed in Vietnam). 11. It also came with a Commons majority of over one hundred. The cartoonists called him “Supermac,” and political writers overused “unflappable.” 12. Along with his compatriots George Brown, Jim Callaghan, and Denis Healey. 13. In the 1950s, the diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were exposed to have been on the payroll of the Soviets, and they fled to Moscow. The media kept up the idea of there being a “Third Man” (fiction becomes reality), and in July 1963, the government named Kim Philby, former Foreign Office colleague of Burgess and Maclean, as their “Third Man.” The air was ripe for the new Bond films. 14. Ms. Keeler (1942– ) had had a tough childhood in the exurbs and fled to London, where she worked at Murray’s Cabaret Club. She became friends with another showgirl, Marilyn “Mandy” Rice-Davies and then with Stephen Ward, a fashionable West End osteopath. That Was the Week That Was scored a telling blow with a splendid parody of the old music hall number, “She Was Poor but She Was Honest.” The words of the new version went: “See him in the House of Commons/Making laws to put the blame/While the object of his passion/Walks the streets to hide her shame.” Another sign that satire was the genre of choice as the ’60s progressed. 15. For a terrific survey of swinging London, from music and film to fashion and politics, see Shaun Levy’s Ready, Steady, Go! (New York: Broadway Books, 2003).

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16. The DVD of the film comes with a superb documentary on the writing of the script, in which it is explained how the group and Lester set about satirizing their own popularity, especially in the absurdist style of Milligan and the Goons, and Lester made it happen, even if United Artists was wary of this approach. 17. In the 1970s and ’80s he worked on several big budget films, of which The Three Musketeers (1973) and Superman II (1980) were the biggest commercial successes. In recent years Lester has all but retired, although the re-release on DVD of A Hard Day’s Night in 2002 included an excellent behind-the-scenes documentary on its making with amazing footage of the period, adding to the feel of Britain in the mid-’60s as the place to be. 18. Murray Pomerance, “Assheton Gorton: A Life in Film,” FILM INTERNATIONAL, 13:1, 58–59. 19. As well as Miramax, which often brought British films to America, e.g., The Python’s Secret Policeman’s Other Ball, (Julien Temple, 1982). 20. Puttnam is the only Brit ever to head an American studio, Columbia Pictures, from May 1986 to October, 1987; it was a rocky tenure. Today he is Baron Puttnam and sits in the House of Lords representing Labour for Queensgate in the boroughs of Chelsea and Kensington. He also sat on the judging panel for the NCR (the U.S. National Cash Register Corporation, a computer and electronics company) book prizes in nonfiction for part of the 1990s. 21. Bruce Robinson interviewed in The Idler, No. 12, November, 1995. I myself remember seeing it at the time with about three other people in the audience. 22. The Idler, Ibid. 23. The Idler, Ibid. 24. The Idler, Ibid. 25. With censorship no longer an issue, drama in the 1970s showed two main trends: toward sardonic comedy and political polemic, best exemplified in the plays of Alan Bennet, Michael Frayn, Tom Stoppard, and David Hare. 26. Moore went on to Hollywood stardom in the 1970s and ’80s. Cook’s most lauded character was the monotone misanthrope, E.L. Wisty, who sits in a pub or on a park bench belly-aching about all sorts of modern British problems and changes in the culture at large; he was the original Archie Bunker. The attacks on sad middle-class British aspirations would be visible in the great age of the television sitcom; a wonderful tribute and overview of such programs is here, in the obituary of one of its great character actors, David Nobbs, and his sad but brilliant creation, Reggie Perrin: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/ aug/14/reginald-perrin-captured-essence-of-age-david-nobbs-comedy. 27. See Cleese’s comments in the Goons documentary. Chapman was the resident genius, but struggled with alcoholism and his sexuality. This time, however, the Pythons really were the hybrid of Oxbridge, as half came from Cambridge and half from Oxford (another product of the 1944 Butler Education Act), and their comedy was often pointedly intellectual, referencing philosophers and literary figures as if worried their audience would think them too pedestrian. 28. Cleese workshopped his brand of humor in the 1962 Cambridge Footlights Revue, the Frost Report, and the BBC radio program I’m Sorry, I’ll Read that Again (first aired in April of 1964).

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29. Most noticeably the word “masturbation” in the Proust sketch. 30. The current editor (2017) is Ian Hislop. It is also available online: http://www.private-eye.co.uk/. 31. For example, it was the first outlet to actually name the Kray twins as the gang leaders terrorizing the London underworld in the 1960s. 32. The Onion has produced the satirical history books, Our Dumb Century (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999) and Dispatches from the Tenth Circle (New York: Three Rivers, 2001). 33. See Lennon on the Peter Cook/Dudley Moore show Not Only . . . But Also (1964) reading his Milliganesque poetry (“Deaf Ted, Danoota and Me”) in a Goons-inspired short film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muSLO0v0QYQ. 34. See the Lennon documentary Imagine: John Lennon (Warner Brothers, 1988), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjUdGWgE3fM. At 1:14-ff. 35. His much older sister, Rene, died at thirty-one from a rare neurological disease brought on by a childhood bout of rheumatic fever that wouldn’t allow her to exert herself; she went out to the dance halls, anyway, and it did her in. Davies wrote “Come Dancing” in her honor; she also bought him his first guitar. 36. See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3nvJ2hmaUI. 37. “The Village Green Preservation Society” (Words and Music Ray Davies) from “The Village Green Preservation Society,” (UK: Pye, released November 22, 1968). Published by Noma Music, Inc./Hi-Count Music, Inc., BMI. © All Rights Reserved. 38. Even more than McCartney’s torch songs, which Lennon felt were too mawkish. Lennon hated their later saccharine songs such as “Yesterday,” “Hello, Goodbye,” and “Obla Di Obla Da,” but he certainly didn’t mind the royalties, as both were always credited for the writing. 39. From the opening song on their debut album Live at the Witch Trials (UK: Step Forward, 1979). It was not a live album. But it is also the intro to their album Totale’s Turn (It’s Now or Never) (Rough Trade, 1980), which was a live album. 40. Mark E Smith and Mick Muddles, The Fall (London: Omnibus Press, 2003), 54. 41. See Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs (UK: Vintage, reprint, 1993). In 1983, Britain’s gangs of football hooligans were an international embarrassment; Buford’s journalism was an important sociological investigation into the lives of these left-behind Brits of the ’80s and ’90s. 42. Words and Music by Mark E. Smith, 7” single (UK: Rough Trade Records), released September 19, 1983. Published by Fall Music Publisher Ltd. © All Rights Reserved. 43. Depending on one’s point of view, Hill was considered either a leading voice in English football or a reactionary buffoon. As for Sir Millichip, chairman of the Football Association from 1981–1996, Smith loathed a knighthood for someone so xenophobic. 44. Its master, Johan Cruyff, passed on March 25, 2016. 45. On “Kicker Conspiracy”: the irony now is that the English Premier League is almost overrun with international players with “flair,” especially at the

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big clubs like Chelsea, Manchester City, and Man United who can afford their exorbitant transfer fees and which rosters hold very few homegrown players. 46. The F.A. is the Football Association of Britain; but F.A. is also a reference to having nothing to do, as in “sweet F.A. (Fuck All) to do today,” so, off to the match they go. 47. The video for the song was filmed at Burnley Football Club. Burnley is a small town in Lancashire (remember Gracie Fields) but, as recently as the mid-1970s, they were one of the top football teams in England. By 1983, though, they had plunged down the leagues at the same time as the town was being devastated by recession (English Soccer teams play on a relegation system that mirrors the fortunes of many companies and/or individuals in the English class system; Smith is a northern Englander). Today, Burnley has made it back into the top league. 48. The Fall covered this mid-cult laugher “I’m Going to Spain” (written by Steve Bent in 1974) from a 1978 K-Tel compilation compiled by Kenny Everett called The Worst Record Ever Made (1978). The original song appeared on Steve Bent (UK: New Faces/Bradley Records, 1974), published by Intersong Music Ltd., 1976. The original was played straight; in the hands of Smith it is pure vitriol. 49. Music by Craig Scanlon, Steve Hanley, Mark Edward Smith, 7” single (UK: Rough Trade Records), released June 7, 1983. Published by Mechanical Copyright Protection Society, Ltd. 50. “The English Scheme,” from the album Grotesque (written by Mark E. Smith) (Rough Trade, 1980). Published by Minder Music Ltd. 51. See 24 Hour Party People (Michael Winterbottom, 2002), a vibrant trip through the ’80s and ’90s music scene in Manchester from Joy Division/ New Order/Factory Records and Tony Wilson (played by Steve Coogan), the Buzzcocks, Happy Mondays, and yes, even the Fall; missing are The Smiths, Oasis, The Stone Roses, The Verve (from Wigan), Inspiral Carpets, and The Charlatans. 52. A fan site is here: http://billhicks.com/Fan.html. 53. It was arranged by Jay Leno, who was aware that Bill was too controversial for the more traditional Tonight Show. 54. From the Comedy Central documentary, A Tribute to Bill Hicks. (Comedy Central, 1995). 55. John Lahr, The New Yorker, January 25, 1993, “The Goat Boy Rises,” 54. This is the most in-depth study of Hicks’s poignancy from the time, and a must-read for any understanding of American satire during the 1980s and ’90s. 56. Lahr, Ibid., 54. 57. Hennessy, 459. 58. John Lahr, Ibid., 60. 59. Revelations (first released, 1992; available today on a 2-CD and DVD set through Rykodisc, 2010). Recorded at the Dominion Theatre, London, November 1992. 60. San Francisco Chronicle, August 8, 1987, 23. 61. Recorded at the Vic Theater, Chicago, November 1990.

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62. Later Letterman dedicated an entire show to Hicks and apologized in person to Hicks’s surviving mother. 63. Again, see Lahr’s exhaustive piece. 64. Hicks in his final routine, from a bootlegged recording at Caroline’s Comedy Club, NYC, 1993. Available here: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=qrYc1dSD3SE. It is a tough watch as he is aware it is his last, which he announces right off the bat.

Epilogue 1. Victor Sebestyen, 1946. 2. Andrew Higson, The Oxford Book of Film (New York: Oxford UP, 1998), 288. 3. Harold William Chase, The Case for Democratic Capitalism, 1945–1971 (New York: Crowell, 1964), 11. 4. Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles (London: Little, Brown, 2005), 26–27. 5. Edward Lucie-Smith, The Penguin Book of Satirical Verse, from the “Introduction,” (Middlesex: Penguin, 1967), 17–18. 6. Lucie-Smith, 18. 7. Lucie-Smith, 22. 8. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (London: Allen Lane, 2011). Yuval Noah Harari in his best-seller, Sapiens, concurs with Pinker: “It is perhaps debatable whether violence within states has decreased or increased since 1945. What nobody can deny is that international violence has dropped to an all-time low. Perhaps the most obvious example is the collapse of the European empire . . . In 1945 Britain ruled a quarter of the globe. Thirty years later it ruled just a few small islands. In the intervening decades it retreated from most of its colonies in a peaceful and orderly manner . . . in most places they accepted the end of empire with a sigh rather than with a temper tantrum . . . [Harari does mention that the British did try to hang on through brute force in Malaya and Kenya]. Today humankind has broken the law of the jungle. There is at last real peace, and not just an absence of war.” Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 368–373. Yes, and it was the postwar British satirists, using their infiltration into postwar popular culture, and who have guided all those other satirists in the west and the east who came afterward, and who are the true progenitors of that new lasting peace, where today it is more profitable to trade globally than to go to war. Also see Jonathan Tepperman, The Fix (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2016) and the documentary Where to Invade Next (Michael Moore, 2015) for other worldwide peace and prosperity success stories over the past fifty years. 9. Jim Webb, quoted in The New York Times, December 23, 2014, A25, in an editorial by Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor of The National Interest. 10. Robert Kuttner, “Why Britain is Likely to Remain in the EU,” The American Prospect, June 28, 2016. http://prospect.org/article/why-britainlikely-remain-eu.

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11. See the recent article by Adrian Danks on how Pimlico relates to Brexit: “South of Ealing: Recasting a British Studio’s Antipodean Escapade,” from Studies in Australasian Cinema, edited by Ben Goldsmith and Mark Ryan. PDF can be found here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17503175.2016.1176316. 12. Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Race in America (New York: Viking, 2016). There are now more guns in the United States than people (357 million to 317 million, 2016; https://www.washingtonpost.com/ news/wonk/wp/2015/10/05/guns-in-the-united-states-one-for-every-man-womanand-child-and-then-some/). The most in-depth tracing of this Anglo-indigent genealogy in American history is David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford UP, 1989); also good from sociological perspectives are Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016) and Joan C. Williams White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2017); while Malcolm Gladwell—as he does, 10,000 hours of it!—congregates various case studies of Albion seedlings and their violent tendencies throughout Appalachia in “Harlan, Kentucky: Die Like a Man Like Your Brother Did,” from Outliers: The Story of Success (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2006), 161–76; honorable film mention also goes to Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, 2010), which introduced the world to J-Law and John Hawkes; as to a recent memoir by J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy (New York: Harper, 2016). Isenberg’s history is brilliant and well worth your time, though amazingly she never mentions either of these seminal analyses. These studies also do an expert job of explaining the electoral appeal of Donald Trump. 13. Brian Rafferty, “Only The Onion Can Save Us Now,” Wired, June 15, 2016, http://www.wired.com/2016/06/onion-can-save-us-now/. The Onion prints that headline (“No Way to Prevent This,” Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens”) every time there is a mass shooting in America. They have printed countless times since Columbine. 14. Rafferty, Ibid. 15. For an excellent dissection of today’s shaming culture, see Jon Ronson‘s So You’ve Been Publically Shamed (London: Picador, 2015); as well as Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s cantankerous Fleabag (BBC, 2016). 16. Maybe the influence they have had on American satire (from National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, to The Office and Shameless, etc.) can now begin to change America’s obsession with violence, invasion, and nation-building around the globe. 17. It’s often overlooked that Britain (along with the other Triple Entente powers France/Belgium and Russia after WWI) gave the world the Middle East mess we are still living with, because of their draconian demands and artificially drawn boundaries after the Treaty of Versailles. It should also be noted that today the new Pope is making a valiant effort to convert millions around the globe toward a more pacifist creed over so much internecine warfare and racial hatred. 18. Louis Menand, “Cat People: What Dr. Seuss Really Taught Us,” The New Yorker, December 23, 2002, 154. 19. Daily Mail, April 29, 1988.

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Articles Arendt, Hannah. “What Is This Philosophy They Call Existentialism?” January, 1946. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/books/albert-camus-stranger-ina-strange-land-new-york.html BBC Written Archives, London: Caversham, 1948, (R34/259). Billqvist, Fritiof. Ingmar Bergman: Teatermannen och filmska paren. Stockholm: Natur och Kulutr, 1960, 9–31. No English translation. Bernstein, Serge and Peter Morris. Political Consensus in France and Britain, Studies in European Culture and Society, Paper 5, European Research Centre, Loughborough University of Technology, 1991 (19–20). Bosley, Crowther. “Passport to Pimlico, British Offering, Is New Feature at TransLux 60th St.,” The New York Times, October 27, 1949. Dickstein, Morris. “Sunset Boulevard,” Grand Street, Vol. 7, No. 3, Spring 1986, (176–80). Donner, Jorn. The Personal Vision of Ingmar Bergman (Translated by Holger Lundberg, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964; first pub. Stockholm: Bokforlaget Aldus-Bonniers, 1962. Edelstein, David. “The Interview is a Truly Savage Work of Satire,” New York Magazine, December 27, 2014, http://www.vulture.com/2014/12/moviereview-the-interview.html Farber, Manny. “Jackson Pollock,” New Republic, vol. 112, no. 26, June 25, 1945. Forster, E.M. In “Notes on the English Character,” Dennis Walder, ed., Literature in the Modern World, London: Oxford University Press. Frayn, Michael. “The Festival” in The Age of Austerity, London: Penguin, 1963, also republished in the Manchester Guardian, Thursday, May 3, 2001: http:// www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/may/03/britishidentity.features11 Fridén, Ann Carpenter, ed., Nordic Theatre Studies, Vol. XI, 1998, (12–33). Galchen, Rivka. “Wild West German,” The New Yorker, April 9, 2012. Green, Ian. “Ealing: In the Comedy Frame.” In British Cinema History, James Curran and Vincent Porter, eds., London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1983. The Guardian Datablog, http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2009/nov/ 25/gdp-uk-1948-growth-economy Håkansson, Henning. In The Aftonbladet, 3 October 1944.

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Robinson, Bruce. Interview, The Idler, No. 12, November, 1995. Ronay, Barney. The Guardian, May 3, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/football/ blog/2015/may/03/jose-mourinho-chelsea-special-barney-ronay Sagittarius (pseudonym for Olga Katzin), “Let the Cowards Flinch,” The New Statesman, October 1947. Schrader, Paul. “Film Noir” in The Film Genre Reader. Austin: Texas University Press, 1998. Sheer, Robert. “Gore Vidal: Living Through History.” Truth Dig, November 21, 2006. Swann, Paul. The Hollywood Feature Film in Postwar Britain (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 9. Titmuss, Richard. Problems of Social Policy, United Kingdom Government White Paper, 1950.

Websites http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_There_Be_Light_(film) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blum%E2%80%93Byrnes_agreement http://www.bfi.org.uk http://www.thegoonshow.net https://www.theguardian.com/uk https://www.youtube.com/ http://www.talkingpix.co.uk/ http://www.screenonline.org.uk/ http://www.abc.org.uk/ http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/film/FN0552 http://www.btplc.com/bfi/bfi_jross_main.html http://www.nytimes.com/ http://www.vulture.com/ http://goons.fabcat.org/ http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts.asp/ http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk/ http://www.express.co.uk/ http://billhicks.com/ http://prospect.org/ http://www.tandfonline.com/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/ http://www.wired.com/

Index

102 Dalmatians, 184 24 Hour Party People, 247 39 Steps, The, 74, 221 42nd St., 43 Abrams, Jim, 138 Ace in the Hole, 134, 136 Addison, Paul, 13, 24, 214, 215, 223 Aesop, 77 Against the Wind, 55 Age of Anxiety, The, 133 Airplane!, 138 Aldgate, Anthony, 230 Alice in Wonderland, 36 All at Sea, 56 All That Heaven Allows, 141 Allen, Woody, 90, 138, 184, 231 Silent Generation, The, 27 Altman, Robert, 134, 234 Alvey, Maurice, 221 America’s Got Talent, 151 Amis, Kingsley, 6, 24–28, 173, 178, 190, 217 Angry Young Men, The, 27 Amis, Martin, 173, 243 Anatomy of Melancholy, The, 48 Anatomy of Satire, The, 31, 218 Anchorman, 169 Anderson, Hans Christian, 54 Anderson, Paul Thomas, 136 Anderson, Sherwood, 143

Angry Silence, The, 207 Angry Young Men, The, 6, 24–25, 29, 49, 221 Movement Poets, The, 173 Annaken, Ken, 220 Annals, 23 Annie Hall, 231 Another Shore, 55 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 184 Apollinaire, 239 Arends, Andrew, 63 Arendt, Hannah, 231 Armstrong, Louis, 146, 147 Arthur Krystal, 214, 267 Arts Council, The, 24, 40, 43 Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, 24 Associated British Picture Corporation, 54, 184 Associated Talking Pictures, 36 Astor, Lord William Waldorf, 182 Atonement, 109 Attlee, Clement, 7, 13–17, 20–22, 52, 58, 62–63, 65–66, 69, 88–92, 98, 101, 103, 170, 172, 188, 206–207, 215, 224, 228 Auden, Winston Hugh The Age of Anxiety, 117, 133 Auerbach, Eric, 7 Austen, Jane, 7, 30, 31 Austin Powers, 138

259

260

Index

Babbitt, 127 Baby Boomer Generation, The, 45–49, 137, 178, 182, 186, 222 Bacon, Francis, 31 Bacon, Lloyd, 43 Baddeley, Hermione, 62 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 31 Balaban, Barney, 130 Balcon, Michael, 36–42, 56–61, 69, 72–79, 82, 86–87, 90, 94, 97, 101, 105–106, 112–113, 219, 220–221, 226, 229 Ealing Studios, 55, 57 Bald Twit Lion, The, 173 Baldwin, Stanley, 21, 216 Bale, Christian, 5 Bank Dick, The, 124, 127, 129 Barnett, Correlli, 19, 216 Barr, Charles, 41, 102, 113, 219, 223, 226, 231 Barry, John, 45 Bass, Alfie, 90, 91 Bates, Alan Silent Generation, The, 27 Battle of Britain, The, 58 Battle of the Books, The, 31 Battleship Potemkin, The, 60 Baudelaire, 188 Bazin, André, 48 Beachcomber Lewis, Wyndham and Morton, J. B., 162 Beano, 192 Beatles, The, 4, 8, 45, 113, 115, 144, 154, 177, 181–183, 190, 195, 210, 242, 244 Beats, The, 217, 239 Beauty and the Beast, 1 Beckett, Samuel, 158, 189 Bed Sitting Room, The, 173, 184 Ben Shephard, 213, 267 Bennett, Alan, 189, 245 Benny, Jack, 5, 8, 118, 121 Bentine, Michael, 145, 148–150, 158, 235–237 Silent Generation, The, 28

Bentley, Thomas, 43 Bergen, Edgar, 126 Bergman, Ingmar, 1, 35, 46 Berkeley, Busby, 43 Bernstein, Serge, 215 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 46 Best, George, 195 Better Angels of Our Nature, The, 207, 248 Bevan, Aneurin, 216 Beveridge Report, The, 17, 18, 81 Beveridge, William, 17, 216 Bevin, Ernest, 15, 20, 64, 216 Beyond the Fringe, 4, 8, 113, 146, 174, 190, 210 Bicycle Thieves, The, 1 Bierce, Ambrose, 96 The Devil’s Dictionary, 87 Biskind, Peter, 46 Blackboard Jungle, The, 71, 223 Blair, Tony, 215 Blake, William, 186, 195 Blazing Saddles, 138, 234 Blithe Spirit, 54 Blow Up, 184 Blue Lamp, The, 220 Blue Velvet, 143 Blum-Byrne Agreement, The, 14 Bogart, Dirk, 220 Bogart, Humphrey, 52, 53 Bogdanovich, Peter, 232 Bolt, Robert, 189 Bond, James, 113 Bondi, Beula, 130 Booker, Christopher, 190 Boone, Daniel, 142, 234 Bordwell, David, 46 Bottom Line Magazine, 138, 234 Boulting Brothers, The, 177–178, 207, 244 Boulting, John, 92, 97–98 Boulting, Roy, 98 Bourdain, Anthony, 232 Bowery Boys, The, 57 Bowles, Paul, 133 Bowling for Columbine, 234

Index Bowser, Kenneth, 46 Boyle, Danny, 225 Brackett, Charles, 233 Bradbury, Malcolm, 214 Braine, John Angry Young Men, The, 25–27 Branagh, Kenneth, 192 Brando, Marlon Silent Generation, The, 27 Braudel, Fernand, 23, 217 Breathless, 47, 183 Brecht, Bertolt, 164, 189 Bresslaw, Bernard, 244 Breton, Andre, 145, 235, 239 Brideshead Revisited, 108 Brief Encounter, 54 Briggs, Susan, 66 Bright Young Things, 43, 221 Brighton Rock, 178 Brighton School, The, 36, 219 British Board of Trade, The, 53 British Broadcasting Corporation, 33, 87–89, 101, 112, 145, 147–155, 157–158, 164, 171–173, 190, 192, 203, 214, 216, 235–241, 245 Old Auntie, 174 British Film Institute, 43, 219 British Lion, 41, 54, 221 British Skiffle Silent Generation, The, 28 Bron, Eleanor, 189 Brooks, Cleanth, 28 Brooks, Mel, 90, 138, 184 Silent Generation, The, 27 Brophy, Edward, 124 Brother Theodore, 237 Brothers in Law, 178 Brown, George, 191, 244 Browning Version, The, 28 Bruce, Lenny, 237 Silent Generation, The, 27 Bruckman, Clyde, 232 Brydon, Rob, 5 Buford, Bill, 246 Bukowski, Charles, 217 Bullingdon Society, The, 158

261

Bullock, Alan, 216 Bunker, Archie, 245 Bunuel, Louis, 239 Burgess, Guy, 244 Burnley FC, 247 Burns, James MacGregor, 217 Burton, Robert, 48 Bush, George W., 169 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 234 Butler Act, The, 18 Butler, Rab, 188 Butler, Samuel, 7, 18, 188, 216, 245 Buzzcocks, The, 247 Byron, Lord Gordon, 7, 158, 164, 234 Cage, John Silent Generation, The, 28 Cahiers du Cinema, 204 Cairncross, Sir Alec, 21 Calderon, 143 Callaghan, James, 215 Cameron, David, 215 Camus, Albert, 117, 231 Candide, 164 Cannadine, David, 85 Canterbury Tale, A, 223 Capra, Frank, 123, 130, 233 Carlin, George, 184 Silent Generation, The, 27 Carlton-Browne of the F.O., 178 Carmichael, Ian, 227, 244 Carné, Marcel, 1 Carol, Madeleine, 3 Carousel, 133 Carroll, Lewis, 160 Carry On, 181 Carry On, Sergeant, 181 Cary Grant, 3 Casablanca, 93 Cat in the Hat, The, 211 Catcher in the Rye, The, 48 Caton-Jones, Michael, 184 Cavalcade, 3 Cavalcade of Stars, 241

262 Cavalcanti, Alberto, 79 Cervantes, Miguel de, 31 Chabrol, Claude, 46 Channel Four, 184 Chaplin, Charlie, 5, 118 Chaplin, Prescott, 128 Chapman, Graham, 184, 190 Charlatans, The, 247 Charlie Hebdo, 208 Chase, Harold William, 204, 248 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 85 Cheever, John, 141, 143 Chelsea F C, 247 Cherry, Don, 159 Chicago Sun Times, The, 198 Children of Paradise, 1, 2 Christ, Jesus, 201 Churchill, Winston, 8, 14, 16, 21, 26–27, 77, 88, 102–104, 115, 154–155, 170, 172, 207, 214– 215, 238, 267 Cimino, Michael, 234 Cinémathèque Française, 46 Citizen Four, 136 Citizen Kane, 117, 124, 134 Clarke, Kenneth, 233 Clarke, Thomas Ernest Bennet “Tibby,” 40, 54, 56–57, 59–62, 66, 69, 78, 90, 92, 94, 97, 101, 106, 108 Clash, The, 144, 210, 236 Cleese, John, 174, 184, 190, 245 Cleopatra, 135 Clift, Montgomery, 27, 233 Cline, Eddie, 8, 124 Clockwork Orange, A, 194 Clooney, George, 214 Cocteau, Jean, 1 Colbert Report, The, 237, 249 Cold Comfort Farm, 230 Cold War, The, 33, 112, 171, 182, 189, 190, 242 Cole, Sidney, 40, 97 Coleman, Ronald, 3 Coltraine, John Silent Generation, The, 27

Index Comeback, The, 135 Commentary, 117 Connor, Kenneth, 244 Conrad, Joseph, 76, 226 Conservation Corps, The, 108 Conservative Party, The, 14, 15, 21, 88, 89, 101, 103, 179, 181, 187, 215, 227 Coogan, Steve, 5, 169, 247 Cook, Peter, 174, 177, 189–190, 196, 245, 246 Cooke, Alistair, 4, 213, 267 Cooper, Gary, 119 Cooper, James Fenimore, 137 Copeland, Aaron Rodeo, 123 Cordon, James, 151 Cornelius, Henry, 40, 57, 61–62, 66, 69 Country House Companion, A, 109 Country Life, 85, 86 Court Jester, The, 234 Coward, Noel, 3, 43, 54, 63, 65, 68, 224 Cribbins, Bernard, 244 Crichton, Charles, 40, 56–57, 60, 90, 94–97, 101 Crines, Andrew, 222 Cripps, Sir Stafford, 30 Crisis, 1 Crowther, Bosley, 71, 225 Crucible, The, 28 Cruel Sea, The, 55 Culture and Imperialism, 78 Curtis, James, 221, 232 Cutts, Graham, 43 Dada, 238 Dahl, Sophie, 243 Daily Express, The, 113, 240 Daily Show, The, 237, 249 Dale, Jim, 244 Dali, Salvatore, 239 Dalton, Hugh, 224 Damned, The, 144 Dance Hall, 55

Index Dandy, The, 192 Danks, Adrian, 248 Dante, 143 Darwin, Charles, 12, 24 Dathorne, O. R., 231 Davie, Donald Movement, The, 24 Davies, Clement, 227 Davies, Ray, 104, 177, 191–192, 229–230, 246 Silent Generation, The, 27 Davies, Rene, 246 Davis, Miles Silent Generation, The, 27 de Gaulle, Charles, 20 de Mille, Agnes, 133 De Sica, Vittorio, 1, 35, 46 Dean, Basil, 36, 37, 222 Dean, James Silent Generation, The, 27 Dearden, Basil, 112, 220 Death at a Funeral, 4 Decade Under the Influence, A, 46 Defoe, Daniel, 33 Demme, Ted, 46 Dench, Dame Judy, 5 Dialogic Imagination, The, 31 Dickens, Charles, 2, 3, 7, 37, 54 Dickstein, Morris, 1, 8, 134, 233 Dictionary, The, 31 Didion, Joan, 136 Dighton, John, 78, 82, 85, 97, 98 Dixon of Dock Green, 220 Dixon, Pat, 149 Don Juan, 164, 168 Donat, Robert, 3 Douglas, Kirk, 136 Douglas-Home, Sir Alec, 182, 215 Downton Abbey, 5, 109, 226 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 169, 192 Dr. Strangelove, 4, 172, 177, 182, 183, 242 Drazin, Charles, 226 Dreamers, The, 46 Dryden, John, 7, 31, 78, 165, 170, 242

263

Duchamp, Marcel, 238 DuMont Network, The, 241 Dumont, Margaret, 128, 129, 139 Dunciad, The, 31, 78 Dunkirk, 17 Durbin, Deanna, 128–129, 232 Dylan, Bob, 181 Silent Generation, The, 27 Ealing, 3, 220 Ealing Studios, 7, 26–41, 47–49, 53–61, 72, 74, 77–83, 86–90, 94, 96–107, 110, 112–113, 145–148, 152, 158, 165, 171, 173, 178, 181–183, 190, 201, 203, 207, 218–221, 225, 227, 244, 248 Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, 46 Ebert, Roger, 46, 84, 227 Edelstein, David, 122, 231 Edge of the World, The, 76 Edinburgh Festival, The, 198 Education Act of 1944, The, 24, 188 Edwards, Blake, 213 Eisenhower, Dwight, 233 Eisenstein, Sergei, 60 Ekland, Britt, 243 Eliot, Thomas Sterns, 44 Ellington, Ray, 146, 162–163, 235, 241 Elliot, Robert, 77, 226 Elsaesser, Thomas, 219 English Music Hall Tradition, The, 36, 42–45, 221 English Premier League, 5, 246 Enright, Dennis Joseph Movement, The, 24 Entertainer, The, 25, 35, 134 Errand Boy, The, 184 Esquire, 141 Eton, Peter, 165, 171, 235–236, 240–242 Evans, Ray, 139 Everett, Kenny, 247 Everly Brothers Silent Generation, The, 27 Explosion of a Motor Car, 36

264

Index

Eyes on the Prize, 222 Fall, The, 5, 8, 193, 196–197, 210, 246, 247 Fallen Idol, The, 54 Family Jewels, The, 83 Famous Players-Lansky, 37 Far From Heaven, 143 Farber, Manny, 27, 217 Farouk, King, 230 Farrell, Will, 169 Fatal Glass of Beer, 232 Father Brown, 227 Faulkner, William, 230 Faust , 143 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 186 Feinberg, Leonard, 156, 238 Fellowes, Julian, 109 Ferguson, Craig, 151 Festival of Britain, The, 88, 103 Feuillade, Louis, 32 Fielding, Fenella, 244 Fields, Gracie, 43, 221–222, 247 “The Biggest Aspidistra in the World,” 43 Fields, William Claude, 5, 8, 123– 132, 137, 162, 169, 232 Fifty-Five Days at Peking, 227 Fildes, Audrey, 79 Film Forum, The, 47 Finney, Albert Silent Generation, The, 27 Fireside Theatre, 174 Fischer, David Hackett, 248 Fitzgerald, Francis Scott Key, 128 Fitzhamon, Lewin, 36 Flaherty, Robert, 75 Fleabag, 249 Flynn, Errol, 3 Fontaine, Joan, 3 Ford, John, 3, 35, 62, 74, 137, 138, 219 Foreign Correspondent, 3 Forster, Edward Morgan, 51, 74, 222 Foucault, Michel, 157, 238 Frankel, Cyril, 227

Franklin, Sidney, 3 Fraser, Liz, 180 Frayn, Michael, 88–89, 227–228, 231, 245 The Age of Austerity 1945–1951, 88 Free Cinema, 49, 75 Freidrich, Otto, 233 French Lieutenant’s Woman, The, 184 French New Wave, 2 Freud, Sigmund, 12, 54 Friar Tuck, 3 Frieda, 55 Friede, Donald, 132 Frost, David, 189 Fry, Christopher, 44 Fry, Stephen, 235 Frye, Northrop, 31, 218 Fuchs, Klaus, 112 Gable, Clark, 119 Gainsborough Studios, 37, 41 Galchen, Rivka, 234 Game of Thrones, 5, 230 Gandhi, Mahatma, 200 Garbo, Greta, 3 Gardiner, Juliet, 223 Gardner, Ava, 227 Gaumont-British, 37, 39, 226 Geisel, Theodore Dr. Suess, 211 Geldray, Max, 162, 163, 241 General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, 53 General Election of 1945, The, 23 General Film Distributors, 61 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, The, 103 Get Carter, 184 GI Bill, The, 28 Gibbon, Edward, 32 Gibney, Bruce Cannon, 232 Gillespie, Dizzy, 133, 233 Gilliam, Terry, 184, 190 Gilliatt, Penelope, 46, 174, 243 Girouard, Mark, 109, 227

Index Gladstone, William, 16 Gladwell, Malcolm, 236, 248 Glancy, Mark, 213, 219 Gleason, Jackie, 90 Glover, Jonathan, 214 Godard, Jean-Luc, 14, 32, 35, 40, 46–49, 183, 204 Golddiggers of 1933, 43 Gone with the Wind, 2 Goodbye Mr. Chips, 3 Goon Show, The, 8, 145–147, 152–153, 156, 183, 235, 236, 237, 241 “The Lost Emperor,” 168, 242 “The Mighty Wurlitzer,” 162 “The Space Age,” 162 “Ye Bandit of Sherwood Forest,” 162 Goons, The, 3, 4, 7, 26–29, 32, 47, 78, 87, 88, 100–101, 130, 137, 144–183, 190, 201–204, 207, 218, 235–245 Gorton, Assheton, 184, 245 Goulden, Joseph C., 231, 233 Goulding, Edmund, 3 Gowing, Margaret, 226 Graduate, The, 154 Graebner, William, 213 Grafton, Jimmy, 149, 150–152, 235, 237 Grafton’s Pub, 149, 235, 237 Grandma’s Reading Glasses, 36 Grant, Cary, 5 Grant, Richard E., 185 Grapes of Wrath, The, 62 Grazia, Victoria de, 215 Great British Picture Show, The, 32, 218 Great Depression, The, 15, 17, 22, 28, 39, 103, 117 Great Dictator, The, 118 Great Expectations, 54 Great McGonagall, The, 174 Great Rock and Roll Swindle, The, 184 Great Train Robbery, The, 137 Green, Danny, 106, 111 Green, Guy, 207

265

Green, Ian, 69, 225 Greene, Graham, 54 “The Basement Room,” 54 Greenslade, Wallace, 152, 164, 172, 241 Greenwald, Glenn, 136 Greenwood, Joan, 40, 80, 98 Grey Gardens, 143 Grierson, John, 204 Griffiths, Richard, 185 Grylls, Bear, 232 Guardian, The, 88–89, 109, 227, 229 Guggenheim, Peggy, 26 Guinness, Alec, 4, 40, 45, 80, 82–85, 88, 90–91, 94, 97–98, 106, 111, 218 Gulliver’s Travels, 164 Guthrie, Woody, 123 Hall, Bill, 149 Hamburger, Philip, 128, 129, 130, 232, 233 Hamer, Robert, 40, 45, 78, 79, 82, 85–86, 143, 220, 226–227 Hamlet, 118, 123 Hammer Films, 41, 54, 221 Hammerstein, Oscar, 133 Hampton, Henry, 222 Happy Mondays, 247 Hard Day’s Night, A, 177, 182–183, 245 Hardy, Tom, 5 Hare, David, 245 Harmony Heaven, 43 Harper, Sue, 58, 221, 223, 229 Harrison, George, 184 Harrison, Kathleen, 41 Hartmann, Edmund, 137 Harvey, David, 12, 171, 214, 267 Hathaway, Anne, 91 Hathaway, Henry, 219, 234 Haunted Mirror, The, 79 Hawtry, Charles, 244 Haynes, Todd, 143 Haywood, Susan, 46 Heart of Darkness, 76, 226

266

Index

Heath, Edward, 216 Heaven’s Gate, 234 Heilbrunn, Jacob, 248 Help!, 182–183 Hemingway Ernest, 238 Hennessy, Peter, 62, 63, 78, 216–217, 222, 224, 226, 228, 247 Henry V, 54 Henry VIII, 3 Hepburn, Audrey, 91, 95 Hepworth, Cecil, 36 Here Come the Huggetts, 220 Heston, Charlton, 227 Hicks, Bill, 8, 178, 197–201, 247–248 Hickson, Kevin, 222 High and Dry, 56 Highet, Gilbert, 31, 71, 161, 218, 225, 239 Higson, Andrew, 203, 248 Hill, Benny, 112, 230 Hill, George Roy, 234 Hill, Jimmy, 195 His Excellency, 55, 227 Hislop, Ian, 246 Hiss, Alger, 112 Hitchcock, Alfred, 3, 37, 74, 79, 84, 113, 219, 221, 230, 234 Hitler, Adolf, 6, 7, 72, 118, 121, 122, 123, 133, 174, 219 Hitler, My Part in his Downfall, 174 Hobbes, Thomas, 31 Hoberman, James Lewis, 47, 48, 222 Hobson, Valerie, 40, 80 Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 248 Hodge, Mike, 184 Holden, William, 233 Holiday Camp, 41 Hollinghurst, Alan, 109 Holloway, Stanley, 40, 45, 62, 64, 90, 105 Hollywood, 37, 39, 41, 46, 52–53, 57, 89, 105, 110, 116–119, 123, 128, 134–135, 219, 223, 231 Holocaust, The, 33 Holt, Seth, 40, 106 Honeymooners, The, 90, 241

Hood, Robin, 3 Hoover, Herbert, 103 Hope, Bob, 5, 115, 137–140, 186, 234 Hopkins, Harry, 29, 33, 218 Horace, 31 Horne, Kenneth, 152 Horniman, Roy, 78 Horse Feathers, 137 House of Games, 232 House Un-American Activities Committee, The, 130 How Green was My Valley, 3 How I Won the War, 177, 183 How It Feels to be Run Over, 36 How to Get Ahead in Advertising, 177 Howards End, 109 Hue and Cry, 54–60, 223 Huggetts Abroad, 220 Huggetts Series, The, 41 Hume, David, 32 Huston, John, 235 I Believe in You, 55 I Know Where I’m Going, 226 I’m a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, 2, 233 I’m Alright, Jack, 98, 178–181, 207, 244 Idle, Eric, 190 I’m Sorry, I’ll Read that Again, 245 Imitation of Life, 141 In Cold Blood, 136 In Which We Serve, 54 Indian Independence Act, The, 19 Ingrams, Richard, 190 Inspiral Carpets, 247 Interview, The, 122 Ionesco, Eugene, 189 Isenberg, Nancy, 208, 248 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 109 It Always Rains on Sunday, 55 It’s a Gift, 137 It’s a Wonderful Life, 130, 233 Ivanov, Eugene, 182 Izzard, Eddie, 5, 146

Index Jacques, Hattie, 244 Jagger, Mick, 186, 216 Silent Generation, The, 27 Jam, The, 144 Jamaica Inn, 79 James, Sid, 244 James, Sidney, 91 Jarmusch, Jim, 47 Jean, Gloria, 232 Jeremiah Johnson, 234 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 31 Johnson, Katie, 106, 111 Johnson, Malcolm Silent Generation, The, 28 Jones, Terry, 184, 190 Jones, Tom, 192 Jonson, Ben, 229 Journal of Popular Culture, 171, 242 Journey’s End, 187 Jules and Jim, 46 Juvenal, 31 Kael, Pauline, 46, 47, 174 Kaplan, Fred, 244 Kaye, Danny, 234 Keeler, Christine, 182 Kennedy, David M., 217 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 181 Kennedy, Paul, 230 Kenny, Virginia C., 108, 229 Kesey, Ken, 238 Kettlebrand, Florence Winifred, 148 Keynes, John Maynard, 18, 52, 103 Khrushchev, Nikita, 181 Killing Fields, The, 185 Killing, The, 228 Kind Hearts and Coronets, 8, 56, 61, 78–91, 98 Kinks, The, 45, 104, 113, 177, 191, 192, 193, 210, 229, 230 Kinsey Report, The, 172, 173, 243 Klein, Melanie, 157 Knack, The, 183, 184 Korda, Alexander, 3, 41, 118, 122 Korean War, 133 Koziski, Stephanie, 171, 242

267

Kracauer, Siegfried, 39 Kraisner, Lee, 26 Krugman, Paul, 102, 103, 229 Krystal, Arthur, 7 Kubrick, Stanley, 4, 8, 177, 183, 218, 226, 228, 242 Kuttner, Robert, 208, 248 Kynaston, David, 154, 216–217, 225, 237 La Belle Dame sans Merci, 135 Labour Party, The, 14–18, 20, 23, 26, 53, 88–89, 103, 179, 181–182, 188, 191, 206, 208, 215–216, 245 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 174 Ladykillers, The, 4, 8, 56, 106, 107, 108, 110, 229 LaGravenese, Richard, 46 Lahr, John, 200, 247 Laing, Ronald David, 157, 238 Lamb, Charles, 52, 222 Landy, Marcia, 46, 69, 73, 76, 100, 225–226, 228–230 Langlois, Henri, 46 Lanyer, Aemilia, 229 Larkin, Philip, 6, 24, 28, 96, 228, 244 Angry Young Men, The, 27 Last Smoking Seagoon, The, 238 Last Tycoon, The, 128 Later… with Jools Holland, 151 Laughton, Charles, 3 Lavender Hill Mob, The, 4, 8, 56, 80, 90–97 Le Roy, Mervyn, 233 Leacock, Stephen, 162, 240 Lean, David, 54, 60 Lear, Edward, 160, 162 Lease of Life, 55 Leavis, Frank Raymond, 28 Legend, 184 Leigh, Mike, 204 Leigh, Vivian, 3 Leisen, Mitchell, 130 Lend-Lease Program, The, 21, 52, 217, 223 Lengyel, Melchior, 121

268

Index

Lenin, Vladimir, 144 Lennon, John, 100, 174, 177, 183, 191, 200, 243, 246 Silent Generation, The, 27 Leno, Jay, 247 LeRoy, Mervin, 43 Lester, Richard, 4, 177, 182–184, 245 Let There be Light, 235 Letterman, David, 248 Levine, Dr. Jacob, 156 Levine, Joshua, 223 Levy, Eady, 53, 223 Levy, Shaun, 244 Lewis, Daniel Day, 236 Lewis, Jerry, 83, 184, 226 Lewis, Sinclair, 124, 132, 143 Lewis, Wyndham, 240 L’Histoire d’Adele H, 185 Life of Brian, 184 Life on the Mississippi, 75 Limmer, Wolfgang, 234 Little Big Man, 234 Little Stranger, The, 109 Livingston, Jay, 139 Lloyd, Frank, 3 Loach, Ken, 204 Lodge, David, 25, 217–218 Lolita, 4, 177, 183 Lom, Herbert, 106, 111 Lombard, Carol, 118–120 London School of Economics, The, 216 London School of Speech and Drama, The, 185 Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, The, 25 Lonsdale, Fredrick, 43 Look Back in Anger, 25 Lord of the Rings, 230 Loren, Sophia, 243 Love Lottery, The, 55 Love of Four Colonels, The, 28 Lovecraft, Howard Philips, 79 Loves of Joanna Gooden, The, 55 Lowell, Alan, 203

Lubitsch, Ernst, 8, 37, 118–123, 131, 132 Lucie-Smith, Edward, 206, 228, 248 Lucky Jim, 24–26, 29, 173, 178, 217–218 Lumières Brothers, The, 75 Lynch, David, 47, 143 MacDonald, Dwight, 90, 123 MacDougall, Roger, 97, 98 MacGrath, Joseph, 184 Mackendrick, Alexander, 40, 45, 72, 97, 98, 102, 106, 108, 110, 230 Mackenzie, Compton, 72 Maclean,Donald, 244 Macmillan, Harold, 182, 215, 216 MacMurray, Fred, 130, 131 MacPhail, Angus, 72 Magic Christian, The, 184 Magnificent Ambersons, The, 127, 236 Magnificent Obsession, 141 Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins, The, 173 Mahoney, Allison, 221 Major, John, 215 Maltese Falcon, The, 2 Maltin, Leonard, 138, 234 Mamet, David, 232 Mamoulian, Rouben, 133 Man for All Seasons, A, 189 Man in the White Suit, The, 8, 56, 97, 100–102, 179 Man of Aran, 75 Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The, 138 Manchester City FC, 247 Manchester United FC, 247 Mander, Raymond, 221 Mandy, 55 Mansfield Park, 109 Marsh, Garry, 230 Marshall Plan, The, 14, 46 Marshman, D.M., 233 Martin, George R. R., 230 Marx Brothers, The, 128, 137, 162

Index Marx, Groucho, 139, 240 Marx, Karl, 14, 178 Mary, Queen of Scots, 3 Mass-Observation, 23 Massot, Joe, 184 Master, The, 136 Maudling, Reginald, 216 May, Allan Nunn, 112 May, Elaine, 183, 184, 237, 245 Silent Generation, The, 27 May, Karl, 137, 234 May, Teresa, 215 Mayer, Edwin Justus, 121 Mayer, Louis B., 37, 40, 118, 233 Maysles Brothers, The, 143 Mc Cabe and Mrs. Miller, 234 McCarten, John, 139, 234 McCarthy, Charlie, 126 McCartney, Paul Silent Generation, The, 27 McCullers, Carson, 133 McDowell, Malcolm, 27 McEnery, John, 185 McEwan, Ian, 109 McFarlane, Brian, 223 McGann, Paul, 185 McGonagall, William Topaz, 174 McGrath, Joseph, 174, 184 McKibbin, Ross, 15, 215 McLeod, Norman Zenos, 137 McLuhan, Marshall, 218 Medhurst, Andy, 241 Meet John Doe, 123 Meet Mr. Lucifer, 55 Mellon, Andrew, 103 Menand, Louis, 210, 249 Mencken, Henry Louis, 124, 132 Merhige, E. Elias, 184 Metalious, Grace, 143 Method, The, 28 Silent Generation, The, 27 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 53, 56 Michaels, Lorne, 4 Michelson, Annette, 46 Mildred Pierce, 143

269

Mille, Agnes de Rodeo, 123 Millennium Dome, The, 88 Miller, Jonathan, 189 Miller, Max, 159, 160 Millichip, Sir Bert, 194, 195, 246 Milligan, Spike, 8, 27, 45, 123, 130– 133, 145–153, 154–162, 164–175, 178, 183, 190–191, 203–204, 207, 210, 218, 235–245 Silent Generation, The, 28 Milner, Edward, 223 Mimesis, 7, 214, 267 Mingus, Charlie, 133 Ministry of Food, The, 216 Miramax, 245 Mirren, Helen, 5 Mitchenson, Joe, 221 Modest Proposal, A, 165 Molière, 143 Monkey Business, 137 Monroe, Marilyn, 27, 134 Montgomery, Field Marshal Bernard Law, 155 Monty Python, 4, 8, 113, 146, 174, 177, 184, 190, 210, 245 Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 184 Monty Python’s Flying Circus, 190 Monuments Men, The, 214 Moore, Dudley, 174, 177, 190, 245, 246 Moore, Michael, 136, 234, 248 Moore, Roger, 192 Morley, Sheridan, 224 Morris, Peter, 215 Morrison, Blake, 109, 229 Morrison, Herbert Stanley, 15 Morton, J.B., 240 Movement, The, 24, 25, 29 Mrs. Miniver, 3 Much Binding in the Marsh, 152 Muckinese Battlehorn, The, 174 Muggeridge, Malcolm, 180 Mural, 26 Murphy, Eddie, 226

270

Index

Murphy, Robert, 41, 220 Murrow, Edward R., 4 Music Hath Charms, 43 Music Lovers, The, 185 Mutiny on the Bounty, 3 My Darling Clementine, 137–139 My Name is Joe, 4 Naked Gun, The, 138 Nasser, Gamal Abdul, 230 Nation, The, 117 National Film Board of Canada, 6 National Film Finance Corporation, The, 53 National Health Service Act, The, 18 National Interstate and Highway Act of 1956, 233 National Lampoon, 249 National Registration Identity Card, 216 NATO, 215 Neeson, Liam, 192 Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, 128, 129 Neville, John Thomas, 128 New Criticism, The, 223 New Jerusalem, The, 14, 17, 19, 92, 103, 107, 108, 112 New Journalism, The, 136 New Republic, The, 27 New Statesman, The, 11 New York Dolls, The, 144 New York Magazine, 122, 231 New York Times, The, 125 New Yorker, The, 117, 128, 139, 174, 200, 232, 234, 243 Newman, Paul Silent Generation, The, 27 News Chronicle, 89 Nicholas Nickelby, 55 Nichols, Mike, 184, 237 Silent Generation, The, 27 Nicholson, Jack Silent Generation, The, 27 Night My Number Came Up, The, 55

Ninotchka, 118 Niven, David, 227 Nobbs, David, 245 Noises Off, 228 Norman, Neil, 243 North by Northwest, 230 Northanger Abbey, 109 Not Only... But Also, 190 Not Ready for Prime Time Players, 175 Nouvelle Vague, 46 Novello, Ivor, 68 Nugent, Frank S., 233 Oasis, 247 Oblomov, 173 Observer, The, 89 Odd Man Out, 54 Office, The, 249 Ogden, Charles Kay, 28 Ogilvy, David, 220 Oklahoma, 133 Oliver Twist, 54 Olivier, Laurence, 3, 54, 60 On Approval, 43 On the Waterfront, 28 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 238 Onion, The, 191, 209, 246, 249 Open City, 1 Opportunity Knocks, 152, 236 Orwell, George, 33, 82, 84, 127, 173, 226 “Politics and the English Language,” 82 “The Decline of Murder,” 84 Osborne, John, 6 Angry Young Men, The, 25, 26, 27 Our Man in Havana, 4 Over She Goes, 43 Page, Jimmy Silent Generation, The, 27 Palance, Jack, 198 Paleface, The, 137, 138, 139, 140 Palin, Michael, 177, 190

Index Pangborn, Franklin, 124, 128, 129 Panter-Downes, Mollie, 64, 224 Paramount Pictures, 130 Parker, Cecil, 98, 106, 111 Parker, Charlie, 133 Parkinson, Michael, 235 Partisan Review, The, 117 Passport to Pimlico, 7, 54, 56, 61–72, 74, 77, 84, 90, 102, 225, 248 Paxton, Sir Joseph, 223 Payn, Graham, 224 Pearl Harbor, 121 Penn, Arthur, 234 Perry, George, 32, 218 Persius, 31 Peyton Place, 143 Phantom of the Cinemateque, The, 46 Philby, Kim, 244 Piaf, Edith, 43 Pickford, Mary, 118 Pinker, Steven, 207, 210, 248 Playboy, 27 Player, The, 134 Poitrus, Laura, 136 Political and Economic Planning Commission, The, 52 Pollock, Jackson, 26, 27, 217 Pomerance, Murray, 245 Pommer, Erich, 79 Pope, Alexander, 7, 31, 78, 188, 193 Poppins, Mary, 94 Porter, Edwin Stanton, 137 Porter, Vincent, 58, 221, 223, 229 Postman’s Knock, The, 173 Powell, Michael, 76, 143 Powell-Pressburger, 54, 226 Power, Tyrone, 219 Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549, 214 Presley, Elvis, 27 Silent Generation, The, 27 Pressburger, Emeric, 143 Prévert, Jacques, 239 Price, Dennis, 4, 40, 79, 80, 83, 85, 227, 244 Priestly, J.B., 33, 219

271

Princess Margriet of the Netherlands, 224 Private Eye, 5, 8, 177, 190, 210 Private Life of Henry the Eighth, The, 3 Private Lives, 43 Private’s Progress, 178 Problems of Social Policy (1950), 17 Producers, The, 186 Production Code, The, 153 Profumo, John, 181, 182 Pryor, Richard, 184, 234 Silent Generation, The, 27 Puckoon, 173 Pugh, Martin, 14, 18, 21, 215–216 Puttnam, David, 245 Q, 173 Queen, 45 Queen Elizabeth, 155 Queen Elizabeth II, 191 Quinion, Michael, 67, 224 Ra, Sun, 159 Rabelais, François, 31, 167–169, 239 Radcliffe, Anne, 234 Radford, Basil, 40, 62, 72 Rafferty, Brian, 209, 249 Ralph, George, 105 Ramones, The, 144 Rank Organization, The, 54, 60, 219 Rat Pack, The, 137 Rattigan, Terence, 222 Reagan, Ronald, 201, 208, 217 Realism and Tinsel, 41, 220 Rebel without a Cause, 223 Red Shoes, The, 54, 223 Redgrave, Lynn Silent Generation, The, 27 Redgrave, Vannessa Silent Generation, The, 27 Redgraves, the, 5 Reed, Carol, 54, 60 Reflections in a Golden Eye, 133 Reiner, Carl, 90

272

Index

Reisz, Karl, 184 Reisz, Reisz, 221 Relph, Michael, 220 Remains of the Day, The, 109 Remember the Night, 130–131 Remington, Frederic, 137 Renoir, Jean, 119 Rescued by Rover, 36 Resnais, Alain, 46 Return of the Soldier, 222 Revelations, 199, 247 Rice-Davies, Marilyn “Mandy,” 244 Richard, Jacques, 46 Richards, Ivor Armstrong, 28 Richards, Jeffery, 230 Richards, Keith Silent Generation, The, 27 Richardson, Tony, 35, 134 Silent Generation, The, 27 Ridealgh, Miss Mabel, 30 Ritz Brothers, The, 162 Rivera, Diego, 123 Roach, Max, 133 Rob Roy, 184 Robertson, Alex J., 217 Robertson, Willard, 131, 233 Robinson, Bruce, 177, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 245 Rock Around the Clock, 71 Rodeo, 123 Rodgers, Richard, 133 Roger and Me, 136 Rogers, Will, 119, 232, 240 Rohmer, Sax Ward, Arthur Henry, 192 Rolling Stones, The, 45, 154, 216 Romeo and Juliet, 185 Ronson, Jon, 249 Roodhouse, Mark, 225 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 21, 217 Rose, Jack, 137 Rosenbergs, The, 112 Rossellini, Roberto, 1, 46 Rouch, Jean, 75 Roughing It, 75

Roy, Derek, 149 Run for Your Money, A, 55 Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film, The, 174, 183 Runyon, Damon, 4 Rush, Geoffrey, 243 Rushton, Willie, 190 Russell, Jane, 137, 234 Russell, Ken, 185 Rutherford, Margaret, 40, 62, 64, 180 Sagittarius “Let the Cowards Flinch,” 11 Sahl, Mort, 27, 237 Said, Edward, 78, 214, 226 Salesman, 143 Sally in our Alley, 221 San Francisco Chronicle, The, 199 Sandbrook, Dominic, 248 Sarris, Andrew, 46 Sartre, Jean Paul, 117 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 25 Saturday Night Live, 4, 151, 156, 237, 240, 249 Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, 221 Savage, C.I., 228 Saville, Victor, 37, 39 Schatz, Thomas, 220 Scherfig, Lone, 220 Schlesinger, John, 230 School for Scoundrels, 227 Schulberg, Budd, 128 Scott, Ridley, 184 Screen, 204 Scrutiny, 223 Sebestyen, Victor, 203, 225, 248 Secombe, Harry, 8, 145, 148–155, 159, 164–165, 169–170, 235–237, 243 Silent Generation, The, 28 Second City TV, 174 Secret People, 55 Secret Policeman’s Other Ball, The, 245 Sellers, Peter, 4, 8, 40, 45, 106, 111, 133, 145, 148–153, 155,

Index 160–161, 165–166, 167, 172, 174–175, 178, 182–184, 207, 226, 235, 237, 242–243 Silent Generation, The, 27 Separate Tables, 28 Sereny, Gitta, 6, 213, 267 Seven Days to Noon, 178 Seven Year Itch, The, 134 Sex Pistols, The, 144 Sexual Offenses Act of 1967, The, 241 Shadow of a Vampire, 184 Shadwell, Thomas, 170 Shakespeare, William, 2, 3, 37, 48, 54, 187 Shameless, 249 Shavelson, Melville, 137 Sheer, Robert, 233 Shelley, Mary, 234 Sheltering Sky, The, 133 Shephard, Ben, 6 Shepperton Studios, 182 Shinwell, Emanuel, 62 Shohat, Ella, 214 Shoot the Piano Player, 47 Silent Generation, The, 26–28, 57, 223 Sillitoe, Alan, 6 Angry Young Men, The, 25, 26, 27 Sim, Alastair, 60, 227 Simon, Neil, 90 Sims, Joan, 244 Sing as We Go, 222 Siodmak, Robert, 3 Sirk, Douglas, 8, 106, 134, 141–143, 192 Sklar, Robert, 46 Slocombe, Douglas, 106 Smith, C. Aubrey, 3 Smith, George Albert, 36 Smith, Maggie, 5 Smith, Mark E., 5, 177, 193–198, 242, 246–247 Smith, Sir Ben, 64 Smiths, The, 247

273

Snowden, Edward, 136 Social Realism, 49 Some Like It Hot, 134 Song You Gave Me, The, 43 Soukup, Virginia, 234 Southern, Terry, 184 Spectator, The, 25 Spider and the Fly, The, 227 Spielberg, Steven, 231 Spoils of Poyton, The, 109 Spurlock, Morgan, 136 Stack, Robert, 118, 122 Stagecoach, 137 Staiger, Janet, 46 Stairway to Heaven (A Matter of Life and Death, 223 Stam, Robert, 214 Stand Up America!, 198 Stanwyck, Barbara, 130–131 Star is Born, A, 135 Stead, Peter, 150, 236 Stein, Paul Ludwig, 43 Steinbeck, John, 123 Stephens, Larry, 237 Stevens, Wallace, 13 Stevenson, Adlai, 172 Stewart, James, 118 Stiglitz, Joseph, 231 Stone Roses, The, 247 Stooges, The, 144 Stoppard,Tom, 245 Stott, Wally, 163 Strachey, John, 62, 224 Stranger’s Child, The, 109 Street, Sarah, 223 Streetcar Named Desire, A, 28, 133 Strong, Roy, 178, 244 Sturges, Preston, 5, 8, 62, 130–132 Suez Crisis, 205, 230 Sullivan’s Travels, 62 Sun, The, 191 Sunset Boulevard, 128, 134–136, 233 Superman II, 245 Supersize Me, 136 Surrealist Manifesto, The, 145

274

Index

Sutherland, James, 30, 218 Swann, Paul, 217, 222 Swanson, Gloria, 233 Sweet Smell of Success, The, 230 Swift, Jonathan, 7, 78, 164–165, 193 Sykes, Eric, 152, 160, 235–237, 240 Tales of Hoffman, 223 Talladega Nights, 169 Tarkington, Booth, 127 Tashlin, Frank, 137 Tasini, Jonathan, 125–126, 232 Taurog, Norman, 213 Taylor, D.J., 221 Technicolor, 139, 141 Telegoons, The, 239 Temple, Julian, 184 Tennyson, Penrose, 39 Tepperman, Jonathan, 248 That Fatal Sneeze, 36 Thatcher, Margaret, 211, 215, 217 Their Finest, 220 Theron, Charlize, 243 Third Man, The, 54 This Happy Breed, 54 Thomas, Donald, 67, 224, 228 Thomas, Dylan, 24 Thomas, Hugh, 224 Thomas, Terry-, 227 Thompson, Edward Palmer, 151 Thompson, Emma, 5, 236 Thompson, Hunter S., 136, 186–187 Thompson, Kristin, 46 Thomson, David, 86, 227, 233 Three Musketeers, The, 245 Tinniswood, Adrian, 229 Titfield Thunderbolt, The, 8, 56, 101–108 Titmuss, Richard, 17, 18 Problems of Social Policy (1950), 17 Tizard, Sir Henry, 77, 78 To Be or Not to Be, 118, 120, 122 To Paris with Love, 227 Todd, Selena, 216 Tonight Show, The, 247 Touch and Go, 55

Town and Country Planning Act, The, 18 Trainspotting, 4, 226 Tramp and the Dictator, The, 231 Trilling, Lionel, 172, 243 Tripartite Aggression, The, 230 True Grit, 234 Truffaut, François, 40, 46–47, 49, 185 Truman, Harry, 21, 52, 214 Truman, Michael, 40, 90, 101 Trump, Donald, 249 Tudor, Anthony, 133 Turner Classic Movies, 231 Tutor-Pole, Ed, 243 Twain, Mark, 4, 75, 124, 198 Twentieth-Century Fox, 53 United Artists, 118 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, 6 Universal Studios, 126, 128, 232 Upright Citizen’s Brigade, 175 Ustinov, Peter, 45, 222 Vance, J. D., 249 Variety Programmes Policy Guide for Writers and Producers of the BBC, 153 Vegas, Johnny, 243 Velvet Underground, The, 144 Verve, The, 247 Very Last Goon Show of All, The, 238 Vessel of Wrath, 79 Victoria and Albert Museum, 22 ‘Britain Can Make It’, 22 Victory Motion Pictures, 37 Vidal, Gore, 133, 233 Vidor, Charles, 234 Vidor, King, 37 Village Voice, 47 Voltaire, 164, 239 Vote for Huggett, 220 Wain, John Movement, The, 24 Waiting for Godot, 158, 189

Index Walder, Dennis, 222 Waller-Bridge, Phoebe, 249 Ward, Stephen, 244 Warhol, Andy, 143, 192 Warner Bros., 53, 56 Warner, Jack, 41, 220 Waters, Sarah, 109 Watkins, Dudley D., 192 Waugh, Evelyn, 13, 108, 113, 166, 173, 190, 229, 243 Waverley, 109 Wayne, John, 234 Wayne, Naunton, 62, 105 Webb, Jim, 248 Webber, Andrew Lloyd, 45 Welles, Orson, 35, 40, 127, 227, 232, 236 West, Mae, 233 West, Rebecca, 222 What Makes Sammy Run, 128 Wheeler-Bennett, John, 224 Where no Vultures Fly, 55 Where to Invade Next, 248 Whisky Galore!, 4, 8, 56, 61, 72–77, 84 Whittier, John Greenleaf “Maud Muller,” 92 Who Done It?, 112 Who, The, 45 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, 154 Wilcox, Pamela, 227 Wild One, The, 71, 223 Wilde, Oscar, 46, 48, 81 Wilder, Billy, 8, 123, 128, 134–136, 155, 186, 233 Will Barker Studios, 36 Williams, Joan C., 248 Williams, Kenneth, 244 Williams, Raymond, 110, 150, 229 Williams, Robin, 148

275

Williams, Tennessee, 133 Williams, William Carlos, 141, 234 Willkie, Wendell, 214 Wilson, Edmund, 132 Wilson, Harold, 52, 188, 215 Windsor, Barbara, 244 Winter’s Bone, 249 Winterbottom, Michael, 247 Wiseman, Frederick, 238 Withnail and I, 8, 177, 184–186 Wolfe, Tom, 136 Wollen, Peter, 203 Wonderwall, 184 Wood, Beatrice, 238 Woolton, Lord (Frederick James Marquis), 64 Wordsworth, William, 58, 186 World War I, 15, 18, 37, 42–43, 66, 88, 159, 206, 216, 238–239 World War II, 1, 2, 7, 16, 28, 32–33, 37, 43, 45, 60, 66–67, 116, 125, 133, 148, 173, 203, 207, 210, 213, 221–224, 239, 267 Written on the Wind, 141 Wuthering Heights, 3, 109 Wyler, William, 3 Wyman, Jane, 141, 143 Yates, Richard, 143 You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man, 124, 126, 232 Zanuck, Darrell, 219 Zavattini, Cesare, 46 Zeffirelli, Franco, 185 Zoglin, Richard, 137 Zucker, David, 138 Zucker, Jerry, 138 Zukor, Adolph, 130 Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Ina, 68, 225