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224 pages

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Ripping England! investigates a fertile moment for British satire—the period between 1947 and 1953, which produced the films Passport to Pimlico, Kind Hearts and Coronets, and The Lavender Hill Mob, as well as the seminal radio program The Goon Show. Against the postwar background of fading empire, universal rationing, and the implementation of a welfare state, these satires laid the foundation for a new British cultural identity later fleshed out by the Angry Young Men, the Movement poets, the Social Realists, and those involved in the satire boom of the 1960s, which lives on even to this day.

The peculiarity of these satires and the British identity they shaped is better understood when seen in relief against postwar cinematic cultures of Italy, France, and the United States. Roger Rawlings places postwar British film in the context of contemporaneous European national film movements and contrasts it with Hollywood's comedies and satires of the same period. British satires of the late forties and early fifties held up a mirror to a nation that was in the throes of change, moving from a colonial empire to an inward-turning island culture. Ripping England! looks at the all too often neglected miracle of postwar British cinema and popular culture.
List of Images
Acknowledgments
Introduction

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

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

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

4. The Ealing Satires’ Annus Mirabilus (1949)

5. Ealing at a Turning Point (1949 and After)

6. The Special Relationship: American Satires of the 1940s

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

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

Epilogue
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

Reino Unido

Película fotográfica

Visual culture

United Kingdom

History of Europe

History of film

Great Britain

Film

Royaume-Uni

Informations

Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	04 décembre 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438467351
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1648€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Ripping England!
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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
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 A Nation Turns Inward: The Setting of Economic and Artistic Postwar Britain
2 “Fog in Channel, Continent Cut Off”: Postwar British Filmmakers Look Inward
3 The Great Bloodless Revolution: Postwar British Film and the Ealing Satires (to 1949)
4 The Ealing Satires’ Annus Mirabilus (1949)
5 Ealing at a Turning Point (1949 and After)
6 The Special Relationship: American Satires of the 1940s
7 Postwar Britain Faces Its Subconscious: Spike Milligan and the Goons’ Postmodern Schizophrenia
8 The Post-1950s Satire Boom: Satire Explodes into Late Twentieth-Century British and American Popular Culture
Epilogue
Notes
Works Cited
Index
List of Images
Figure 1.1 Princess Elizabeth, 1949.
Figure 1.2 Clement Attlee, 1950.
Figure 1.3 William Beveridge, c. 1950s.
Figure 1.4 Kingsley Amis, c. 1950s.
Figure 2.1 Michael Balcon, c. 1938.
Figure 2.2 Gracie Fields, 1943.
Figure 3.1 Hue and Cry (Charles Crichton, 1947).
Figure 4.1 Winter, 1947.
Figure 4.2 Passport to Pimlico (Henry Cornelius, 1947).
Figure 4.3 Whisky Galore! (Alexander Mackendrick, 1949).
Figure 4.4 Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949).
Figure 4.5 Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949).
Figure 5.1 The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951).
Figure 5.2 The Man in the White Suit (Alexander Mackendrick, 1951).
Figure 5.3 The Titfield Thunderbolt (Charles Crichton, 1953).
Figure 5.4 The Ladykillers (Alexander Mackendrick, 1955).
Figure 6.1 To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942).
Figure 6.2 The Paleface (Norman Z. McLeod, 1948).
Figure 7.1 The Original Goons with Michael Bentine, c. 1951.
Figure 7.2 The Goon Show on the BBC (1951–60).
Figure 7.3 Later Milligan, with Peter Sellers in The Great McGonagall (Joseph McGrath, 1975).
Figure 8.1 Withnail and I (Bruce Robinson, 1987).
Figure 8.2 Mark E. Smith and The Fall, 1980s.
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, 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

T HIS IS A STUDY OF POSTWAR B RITISH 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