Cinema

This entry focuses on the British film industry, to distinguish it from the material covered under Hollywood. The distinction is not absolute, since there have been considerable and increasing collaboration and migration of talented filmmakers and scriptwriters, especially in the direction of Hollywood, and many films have been hybrids. Furthermore, while the name Hollywood usually denotes the major studios, there are also a number of independent filmmakers operating there and elsewhere.

Notions about what is proper to see and hear in public will usually be more rigorous than what can be read in private. While the British film industry has never been subject to the preemptive American Production Code, it has obviously been constrained by the laws governing obscenity and the notions of public decency as interpreted by the Lord Chamberlain, which have profoundly affected the history of the theater in the United Kingdom. The authority for distributing films rests with the national British Board of Film Censors, set up in 1912 to standardize ratings, but local authorities may override the board’s decisions. In 1916 the board drew up a list of forty-three topics for deletion, ranging from “scenes laid in disorderly houses,” “cruelty to animals,” and “‘First Night’ scenes” to “excessively passionate love scenes,” but there was no prohibition on language per se . With the introduction of the X certificate (1951) came changes of language, such as “lust” to “passion” and “lecherous fantasies” to “unspeakable dreams” (in Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night ). John Trevelyan, who was involved in the licensing and rating of films from 1951 to 1971, has given valuable insights into his modus operandi in his memoir What the Censor Saw (1973). He valued collaboration with the filmmakers, encouraging them to show him unfinished scripts so that he could advise on whether acceptance was likely and which certificate they might expect.

Up to the 1960s the dominant tenor of British cinema was that of restraint: in language, in sexuality, and in crime and violence. There was also a curious disjunction between content and style, in that even serious topics were treated with a light touch. Films came in fairly predictable genres, namely comedy, which was formulaic, situational, and witty; gritty war films and stylized crime stories, in which the detectives (and often the criminals) were upper-class, urbane, and well-spoken in the manner of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, and Leslie Charteris’s the Saint. Most crime was treated in a comic or absurd fashion, most notably in the classic Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), a comedy of revenge in which an entire unsympathetic upper-class family is murdered in bizarre ways by a unsuspected distant relative. The absurdity of the plot was emphasized by having Alec Guinness playing all eight victims. The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955) were typical in their comic depiction of incompetent criminals, leading to the farcical detective Clouseau of Peter Sellers’s Pink Panther series of the 1960s. Captain’s Paradise (1953) presented adultery in a similar light vein, with a plot of a ship’s captain who bigamously maintains two wives in different ports. Sexual passion was either suppressed or idealized, notably in David Lean’s early classic Brief Encounter (1945), scripted by Noel Coward. Even in the early war films strong language did not truly feature: The Cruel Sea (1953), The Dam Busters (1954), and The Battle of Britain (1970) maintained the stereotype of the stoical British hero.

Farce, with its long stage history in England, continued in films, indecent language being disguised by double-entendres of the “slap and tickle” or “wink wink, nudge nudge” variety, or Cockney rhyming slang codes, as in “Up the Khyber” (which decodes as Khyber Pass = arse). An alternative mode was the dilution of serious content into a genre of the musical, notably in Oliver! (1968), a saccharine version of Charles Dickens’s grimly realistic novel of underworld crime, Oliver Twist (1837–1839), previously made into a classic by David Lean in 1948. In Oliver! the sinister criminal godfather Fagin becomes a largely comic figure, leading his apprentices in crime in jaunty choruses like “You’ve got to pick a pocket or two.” However, the film won an Academy Award.

A major landmark of realism was the British Lion screen adaptation of John Braine’s novel Room at the Top (1959). In an article in the Saturday Review (April 11, 1959), Arthur Knight noted that the term “adult” applied to the film in a number of new ways: “Its characters swear, curse, connive, commit adultery like recognizable (and not altogether unlikable) human beings. And the effect is startling” (cited in Wolf, 1979, 239). More significantly, although the film broke most of the Production Code rules, it won two Oscars, one by Simone Signoret as the mistress. Other British films reflecting “the permissive society” in showing more candor in sex and coarse speech were Look Back in Anger (1959), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961), and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962). The scripts, however, were tame in comparison with those of subsequent decades, since they had been doctored by the British Board of Film Censors and the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. Anthony Aldgate’s study Censorship and the Permissive Society (1995) details these interventions, which were numerous.

Furthermore, there were still major cases of banning or suppression. Joseph Strick’s film of Ulysses appeared in 1967, nearly half a century after James Joyce had published his controversial novel, and provides a revealing case history. Although the initial ban on the book had been lifted in the United States in 1933, more than a hundred theaters canceled their bookings. The British censor John Trevelyan ordered the excision of two scenes and 400 words of dialogue in twenty-nine sections. Strick called a press conference, threatening to distrib-ute a press release with the excised words, which were broadcast in an interview he gave on the B.B.C. television program “24 Hours.” He arrived at an ingeniously drastic solution: “I complied with the cuts Trevelyan had ordered by making them intolerable, by screeches on the sound track and the film going blank” (Wolf 1979, 283). Trevelyan subsequently wrote: “I could not understand why he had done this since I thought it very unlikely that anyone would show the film like this” (1973, 114). The film was granted an X certificate. More astonishingly, at the Cannes Film Festival, the sound track was replaced with subtitles approved by the Académie Française and the screening committee. At the jury showing, even these had been obliterated. Strick tried to stop the projection by switching off the power, and then withdrew the film when the jury refused to intercede on his behalf. The festival director, Favre-Le Bret, argued that it was quite different to hear the words than to read them (Wolf 1979, 283).

The main area of censorship was, expectedly, Molly Bloom’s long soliloquy concluding the novel, a remarkable piece of stream of consciousness, mainly an erotic reverie of extraordinary frankness, recalling an adulterous liaison with a British soldier. The ending thus becomes an ironic parody of Homer’s Odyssey and the enduring fidelity of Penelope, Ulysses’s wife. Although the sound track was censored (in terms of “word count” only one four-letter word, fuck , had been admitted), in the words of Alexander Walker, “There was also the vocal virtuosity of Barbara Jefford … bringing the film to an amazing close of pure aural orgasm” (1977, 221).

Many film critics have observed that the visual and verbal suggestiveness of earlier films is more effective than the blatant nudity, copulation, crudity, and obscenity of their more recent successors. This is evident in many of the most admired and awarded films of both the American and British tradition, such as Rebecca (1940), Citizen Kane (1941), Casablanca (1943), Gone with the Wind (1949), The Third Man (1949), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), My Fair Lady (1964), A Man for All Seasons (1966), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Chariots of Fire (1981), Gandhi (1982), Amadeus (1985), Shakespeare in Love (1998), and American Beauty (1999). Virtually none of the films of Alfred Hitchcock has any salacious or obscene features in the scripts. All the enormously successful James Bond films, originally derived from the plots of Ian Fleming, follow the stylistic formula of the earlier British detective films, with both hero and villain being well spoken and verbally restrained and using witty puns rather than coarse abuse, which would demean them.

However, since the 1990s profanity and obscenity have become almost the order of the day in major British-based films, such as the Irish political drama The Commitments (1991), Trainspotting (1996), and the comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), in which the “dialogue” started with the word fuck being reiterated four times in different contexts. In many ways the development of the modern cinema is epitomized in the two treatments of The Ladykillers: The original British production (1955) was a clean-spoken farce; the remake by the Cohen Brothers (2004), set in the Deep South, is gratuitously foul-mouthed. Yet both the original reticence and the subsequent excess are unrealistic.