Ealing Studios' comedy history
Published: Monday 8th July 2013
Film historian Charles Barr looks back at the comedy heritage of the world-famous Ealing Studios.
Any British comedy enthusiast will have been excited by DVD distributor Network's project to release an abundance of 'Ealing Rarities'. Since Ealing is famous above all for comedies, we might hope for a lot of elusive ones to emerge. In fact, most of the comedies are already available on DVD: all of the post-war classics like The Lavender Hill Mob and The Ladykillers, plus the earlier, less classy but highly popular films of Will Hay, Tommy Trinder, George Formby and Gracie Fields. Network has managed, however, to dig up some unfamiliar treasures.
The label 'Ealing' commonly refers to films produced by Michael Balcon after he took over the studio in 1938 - but he inherited a going concern from Basil Dean, whose company built the studio at the start of the decade to exploit the new medium of talking pictures. It was Dean who put the celebrated slogan 'The Studio with the Team Spirit' up on the studio wall, and who first used the end title, 'A British Picture Made and Recorded at Ealing Studios', set against a Union Flag background. So there are definite continuities - not least in the production of comedy.
As well as launching the two profitable comedy series with Formby (who continued into the Balcon period) and with Fields, Dean gave a chance to a young director, Carol Reed, who had worked for him in the theatre. Reed, who left Ealing shortly before Balcon took over, is best remembered for post-war noir films like Odd Man Out and The Third Man, but his early work has an attractive light touch. His first film, Midshipman Easy from 1935, is released in Volume 2 of Ealing Rarities, and his sixth, Penny Paradise (1938), in Volume 1. Each film in itself makes the set worth acquiring, quite apart from the bonus of the other three films that are thrown in (and Brief Ecstasy, in Volume 2, is essential viewing in its own right).
Midshipman Easy is a period naval film, a boys' adventure story blending comedy with action. Viewers of a certain age will be startled to recognise the teenage Midshipman of the title as Hughie Green, later to be the creepy host of TV shows like Opportunity Knocks, but here he is fine, and the energy with which he and young comrades like Desmond Tester (best known for his role as the bomb victim in Hitchcock's Sabotage) defy stuffy authority and then defeat the Spaniards has absolutely the same kind of spirit as Hue And Cry (1947): an early example of 'official' Ealing Comedy by members of Michael Balcon's team (T.E.B. Clarke as writer, Charles Crichton as director) in which a gang of boys triumphantly overcome London crooks. It makes you wonder if they might have drawn on Midshipman Easy for inspiration.
Penny Paradise (left) is even more of an Ealing Comedy ahead of its time, evoking a film with a comparably alliterative title, Passport To Pimlico (1949: again written by Clarke, with a different director in Henry Cornelius). In both, dreams of freedom are exhilaratingly realised, and celebrated in the local pub by the whole community: but things go wrong, and community and protagonists renounce the dream and return happily to things as they were.
Like Midshipman Easy, Penny Paradise has a future TV star in Betty Driver, who as Betty Turpin in Coronation Street would still be serving up Betty's Hotpot in the new millennium. Here in youth, being groomed as a successor to Gracie Fields, she sings pleasantly, and, as the daughter - this time Betty Higgins - of an apparent pools winner, is crucial in carrying the typically-Ealing anti-acquisitive message. Her flashy car-driving suitor turns out to have been attracted only by the money, and she reverts happily to his modest but loyal rival, played by the Dublin comedian Jimmy O'Dea.
A further Irish connection had been shrewdly pointed out by the Irish critic Anthony Roche, author of definitive books on playwrights John Synge and Brian Friel. He notes "the indebtedness of the script to O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock". The central figure is likewise 'the Captain', who seems to come into money and celebrates on the strength of it, and whose daughter has rival suitors. Jimmy O'Dea as the faithful Pat is comparable to O'Casey's 'Joxer' Daly. In Roche's words, "The most interesting feature is how the O'Dea character develops from (at the outset) the 'buddy' character shadowing the Captain, a bit of an idler and a drinker with a string of jokes and ad libs, into the romantic lead, who in the end wins the daughter after the other man has thrown her over. (In O'Casey's work the 'good' suitor rejects her when he finds out she is pregnant; like all the men in Juno he has feet of clay.) One ends a tragedy, the other a comedy. Fascinating."
This certainly provides food for thought. In the past, commentators (me included) have suggested links between Ealing Comedy and, for instance, Oscar Wilde (Kind Hearts And Coronets, 1949) and Charles Dickens (Cheer Boys Cheer, 1939). Penny Paradise provides a link back from postwar Ealing Comedy to pre-war, and beyond that to a then very current dramatist. This simply emphasises the status of Ealing Comedy within British culture: not a quirky isolated phenomenon but one with deep and widely-spread roots. At the same time it is always, and this is far from a contradiction, closely tied to its time and place: Penny Paradise is set in the Liverpool of the 1930s depression, just as Passport To Pimlico belongs absolutely to the ration-book era of post-war austerity London, giving visionary expression to some of its underlying tensions and conflicts.
The three early Volumes of Ealing Rarities offer other pleasures, some of them comedic. Volume 1 has a divertingly lightweight musical comedy in Cheer Up! (right), a forgotten title whose rescue is welcome: especially striking is the witty central performance of Roddy Hughes, so often a brief comic presence in post-war films such as Ealing's Nicholas Nickleby (1947) and The Man In The White Suit (1951). Volume 2 has Will Hay in a small but memorable comedy vignette in a ship at sea, helping to sugar the pill of the wartime propaganda message of The Big Blockade (top right).
Volume 3, a collection of four strong melodramas, includes a fine comic role for Frank Atkinson as a motor mechanic in Death Drives Through (1935). Like Roddy Hughes, he would dwindle into small cameo roles post-war (including, again, The Man In The White Suit). The evidence of the substantial earlier roles reminds us of the sheer professional expertise that underpinned even the fringe performances by actors like these in the later Ealing films.
Despite the invaluable work of Network and others, a few Ealing Comedies still remain unavailable. One is Meet Mister Lucifer (1953): of interest less, in fact, for its laughs than for the fascinating snapshot it provides of the technology, and cultural status, of early British television. Another is Cheer Boys Cheer (1939), a more serious omission. As I argued decades ago in a book on Ealing Studios, this eve-of-war early-Balcon film in effect creates the template for the form of Ealing Comedy that would be refined later on; and it again links back to the comedy of Dean's time in giving a central role, as in Penny Paradise, to Jimmy O'Dea.
Let's hope that in due course Network can give us these two films as well - and perhaps further comedy surprises excavated from the Ealing years of Basil Dean.
 | The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection Volume 1
Includes comedies Penny Paradise (1938) and Cheer Up! (1936), as well as dramas Escape (1930) and West Of Zanzibar (1954). |
 | The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection Volume 2
Includes comic wartime propaganda film The Big Blockade (1942) and comic adventure story Midshipman Easy (1935), plus dramas Brief Ecstasy (1938) and The Four Just Men (1939). |
 | The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection Volume 3
Includes melodramas Frieda (1947), Cage Of Gold (1950), Death Drives Through (1935), and The Impassive Footman (1932). |
 | The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection Volume 4
Includes comedies The Secret Of The Loch (1934) and Davy (1958), alongside The Loves Of Joanna Godden (1947) and Birds Of Prey (1930). |
 | The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection Volume 5
Includes four dramas: The Ware Case (1938), The Shiralee (1957), The House Of The Spaniard (1936) and The Beloved Vagabond (1936). |
 | The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection Volume 6
Includes just one comedy, The Fortunate Fool (1933), plus Calling The Tune (1936), I Believe In You (1952) and The Girl In The Taxi (1937). |
 | The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection Volume 7
Includes the comedies, Play Up The Band (1935) and Take A Chance (1937), as well as dramas Eureka Stockade (1949) and The Gaunt Stranger (1938). |
 | The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection Volume 8
Includes comedies Young Man's Fancy (1939) and The Feminine Touch (1956), plus There Ain't No Justice (1939) and The Silent Passenger (1935). |
 | The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection Volume 9
This set includes another two comedies: Meet Mr Lucifer (1953), and Cheer Boys Cheer (1939). It also includes the dramas Whom The Gods Love (1936) and A Honeymoon Adventure (1931). |
 | The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection Volume 10
Includes the two comedies Let's Be Famous (1939) and His Excellency (1952), alongside the dramas The Divided Heart (1954) and Saloon Bar (1940). |
 /td> | The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection Volume 11
Includes four dramas: Return To Yesterday (1940), Lorna Doone (1935), Lease Of Life (1954) and Calling The Tune (1936). |
 | The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection Volume 12
Collection 12 includes three comedies: The Bailiffs (1932), Three Men In A Boat (1933), Laburnum Grove (1936). They are joined by the drama Loyalties (1933). |
Further volumes are expected to be released over the next few years.
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