British Cinema in the 1950s A celebration

by MacKillop, Ian; Sinyard, Neil

• ISBN13: 9780719064890
• ISBN10: 0719064899
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-03-27
• Publisher: Oxford

Summary

This Book Offers a welcome revaluation of an underrated period of British cinema. Twenty writers contribute essays that rediscover and reassess the films of the Festival of Britain decade, during which the vitality of wartime film-making flowed into new forms. They write about genres (B-picture, war film, woman's picture), theatre adaptation, Festival celebrations, censorship, film criticism, gender, comedy and the representation of childhood. There are fresh assessments of Pat Jackson, Robert Hamer and Joseph Losey, and the critic Raymond Durgnat. There are also three personal views from people individually implicated in 1950s cinema: Corin Redgrave on Michael Redgrave, Isabel Quigly on film reviewing of the 1950s, and Bryony Dixon of the British Film Institute on film archiving and preservation. In the 1950s British cinema enjoyed unprecedented popularity with home audiences: this book offers the most exhilarating survey yet of 1950s British film. By challenging conventional attitudes to movies of the decade, it will prove indispensible to students of the cinema at all levels and a stimulating companion for the critic and the historian. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Ian MacKillop is Professor of English Literature, Unviersity of Sheffield.

Neil Sinyard is Senior Lecturer in English, University of Hull.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vii
A 1950s timeline	viii
Celebrating British cinema of the 1950s	1	(1)
Ian Mackillop
Neil Sinyard
Critics
Raymond Durgnat and A Mirror for England	1	(22)
Robert Murphy
Lindsay Anderson: Sequence and the rise of auteurism in 1950s Britain	23	(12)
Erik Hedling
Mirroring England
National snapshots: fixing the past in English war films	35	(16)
Fred Inglis
Film and the Festival of Britain	51	(13)
Sarah Easen
The national health: Pat Jackson's White Corridors	64	(10)
Charles Barr
The long shadow: Robert Hamer after Ealing	74	(13)
Philip Kemp
`If they want culture, they pay': consumerism and alienation in 1950s comedies	87	(11)
Dave Rolinson
Boys, ballet and begonias: The Spanish Gardener and its analogues	98	(13)
Alison Platt
Intimate stranger: the early British films of Joseph Losey	111	(16)
Neil Sinyard
Painfully squalid?
Women of Twilight	127	(3)
Kerry Kidd
Yield to the Night	130	(3)
Melanie Williams
From script to screen: Serious Charge and film censorship	133	(10)
Tony Aldgate
Housewife's choice: Woman in a Dressing Gown	143	(14)
Melanie Williams
Adaptability
Too theatrical by half? The Admirable Crichton and Look Back in Anger	157	(11)
Stephen Lacey
A Tale of Two Cities and the Cold War	168	(8)
Robert Giddings
Value for money: Baker and Berman, and Tempean Films	176	(14)
Brian Mcfarlane
Adaptable Terence Rattigan: Separate Tables, separate entities?	190	(15)
Dominic Shellard
Personal views
Archiving the 1950s	205	(8)
Bryony Dixon
Being a film reviewer in the 1950s	213	(8)
Isabel Quigly
Michael Redgrave and The Mountebank's Tale	221	(10)
Corin Redgrave
Index	231