Reconstructing boundaries: Gender, war and empire in British cinema, 1945-1950

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

Volumn 23, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 43-57

  Webster, Wendy ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL LANCASHIRE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34147117903     PISSN: 01439685     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/0143968022000055267     Document Type: Review

References (34)

1. Against the Wind (Charles Crichton, 1947).
2. I See a Dark Stranger (Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, 1946).
3. Odette (Herbert Wilcox, 1950).
4. Antonia Lant, The female spy: gender, nationality, and war in 'I See a Dark Stranger', in Robert Sklar and Charles Musser (eds), Resisting Images: essays on cinema and history (Philadelphia, 1990), p. 173.
5. Antonia Lant, Blackout: reinventing women for wartime British cinema (Princeton, 1991), p. 53.
6. They Flew Alone (Herbert Wilcox, 1941) is an interesting text in this context. It celebrates Amy Johnson's pioneering achievements as an airwoman between the wars. The advent of the Second World War is problematic in this celebration since, on joining the WAAF, Johnson is confined to a subordinate role where she can pilot aircraft only for transport.
7. Antonia Lant has noted the tendency of films made during the war to produce pseudofamilies rather than conventional families - diverse groups of characters who are united through their war-work. See Lant, Blackout, pp. 47-48.
8. Frieda (Basil Dearden, 1947).
9. See Wendy Webster, Imagining Home: gender, 'race' and national identity (London, 1998), pp. 1-24.
10. Millions Like Us (Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, 1943);
11. The Gentle Sex (Leslie Howard and Maurice Elvey, 1943);
12. A Canterbury Tale (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1944).
13. A Diary for Timothy (Humphrey Jennings, 1945).
14. The Captive Heart (Basil Dearden, 1946).
15. Charlotte Brunsdon and Rachel Moseley, 'She's a foreigner who's become a British subject': Frieda, in Alan Burton, Tim O'Sullivan and Paul Wells (eds), Liberal Directions: Basil Dearden and postwar British film culture (Trowbridge, 1997), p. 132.
16. A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946).
17. Picadilly Incident (Herbert Wilcox, 1946).
18. See Webster, Imagining Home, pp. 6-15.
19. I Live in Grosvenor Square (Herbert Wilcox, 1945);
20. The Way to the Stars (Anthony Asquith, 1945).
21. From Psychological Problems of Troops Overseas (1943)
22. quoted in Barry Turner and Tony Rennell, When Daddy Came Home: how family life changed forever in 1945 (London, 1995), p. 117.
23. Men of Two Worlds (Thorold Dickinson, 1946);
24. Black Narcissus (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1947).
25. For developments in the Second World War film in the 1950s, see Andy Medhurst, 1950s war films, in Geoff Hurd (ed.), National Fictions (London, 1984), pp. 35-39;
26. Nicholas Pronay, The British post-bellum cinema: a survey of the films relating to World War II made in Britain between 1945 and 1960, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 8 (1988), pp. 39-54;
27. Neil Rattigan, The last gasp of the middle class: British war films of the 1950s, in Wheeler Dixon (ed.), Reviewing British Cinema, 1900-1992 (New York, 1994), pp. 143-152;
28. John Ramsden, Refocusing 'the people's war': British war films of the 1950s, Journal of Contemporary History, 33 (1998), pp. 35-63;
29. Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: images of war in British popular culture 1850-2000 (London, 2000), pp. 222-230.
30. Developments in the empire genre in the 1950s have attracted little attention, but see Marcia Landy, British Genres: cinema and society 1930-1960 (Princeton, 1991), pp. 110-120;
31. Wendy Webster, 'There'll always be an England': representations of colonial wars and immigration, 1945-1968, Journal of British Studies, 40 (2000), pp. 557-584.
32. There has been considerable scholarly interest in exploring the meanings of white British femininity in a range of British films and television programmes of the 1980s which, through their focus on India, earned the label 'raj nostalgia'. See, for example, Laura Kipnis, The phantom twitchings of an amputated limb: sexual spectacle in the post-colonial epic, Wide Angle, 11 (1989), pp. 42-51;
33. Richard Dyer, There's nothing I can do! Nothing!, in Richard Dyer, White (London, 1997), pp. 184-206;
34. John Hill, British Cinema in the 1980s (Oxford, 1999), Chapter 5.