A mirror for England? Cinematic representations of politicians and party politics, circa 1944-1964

Journal of British Studies

Volumn 47, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 107-128

  Fielding, Steven ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149638490     PISSN: 00219371     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/522346     Document Type: Article

References (142)

1. Robert MacKenzie, British Political Parties (London, 1955), 586
2. Raphael Samuel, "The Lost World of British Communism," New Left Review 154 (March-April 1985): 8-9
3. Alexander Lee, "The Changing Electoral Landscape," in The End of Politics, ed. Alexander Lee and Timothy Stanley (London, 2006), 1-25
4. Edward Shils and Michael Young, "The Meaning of the Coronation," Sociological Review 1, no. 1 (1953): 63-81
5. and Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, NJ, 1963)
6. Rob Colls, "The Constitution of the English," History Workshop Journal 46 (Autumn 1998): 105-7
7. For assessments of this "new political history," see Lawrence Black, "'What Kind of People Are You?' Labour, the People, and the 'New Political History,'" in Interpreting the Labour Party: Approaches to Labour Politics and History, ed. John Callaghan, Steven Fielding, and Steve Ludlam (Manchester, 2003), 23-38
8. Martin Francis and Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, eds., introduction to The Conservatives and British Society, 1880-1990 (Cardiff, 1996)
9. Steven Fielding, Peter Thompson, and Nick Tiratsoo, "England Arise!" The Labour Party and Popular Politics in 1940s Britain (Manchester, 1995)
10. and Lawrence Black, The Political Culture of the Left in "Affluent" Britain, 1951-1964 (London, 2003)
11. James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815-1867 (Cambridge, 1993)
12. and Jon Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language, and Popular Politics in England, 1867-1914 (Cambridge, 1998)
13. For more on this literature, see Steven Fielding, "Rethinking the 'Rise and Fall' of Two-Party Politics," in The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British History, 1939-2000, ed. Paul Addison and Harriet Jones (Oxford, 2005), 351-70
14. Roberto Biorcio and Renato Mannheimer, "Relationships between Citizens and Political Parties," in Beliefs in Government, vol. 1, Citizens and the State, ed. Hans-Dieter Klingemann and Dieter Fuchs (Oxford, 1995), 206
15. For a more general analysis of the impact of contemporary political science on the writing of political history, see Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor, eds., introduction to Party, State, and Society (Aldershot, 1997), 1-26
16. Bo Sarlvik and Ivor Crewe, Decade of Dealignment: The Conservative Victory of 1979 and Electoral Trends in the 1970s (Cambridge, 1983)
17. Hans Daalder, "A Crisis of Party," Scandinavian Political Studies 15, no. 4 (1992): 269-87
18. Geoff Mulgan, Politics in an Antipolitical Age (Cambridge, 1994), 7-36
19. Joseph N. Cappella and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Spiral of Cynicism: The Press and the Public Good (Oxford, 1997)
20. Russell J. Dalton, Citizen Politics: Public Opinion and Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Chatham, 1996)
21. Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right (Cambridge, 1994), 5-7
22. Cas Mudde, "The Populist Zeitgeist," Government and Opposition 39, no. 4 (Autumn 2004): 543-46
23. See also Peter Wiles, "A Syndrome, Not a Doctrine: Some Elementary Theses on Populism," in Populism: Its Meaning and National Characteristics, ed. Ghita Ionescu and Ernest Gellner (London, 1969), 167
24. Alexander Lee, "Minor Parties, Independents, and the Problem of Pluralism," in Lee and Stanley, End of Politics, 131-38
25. Mudde, "Populist Zeitgeist," 550-51
26. Steven Fielding, "The Second World War and Popular Radicalism: The Significance of the 'Movement away from Party,'" History 80, no. 258 (1995): 38-58
27. Barry Herald and Glamorgan Times, 26 June 1942
28. Irene Ward, "The Future of Parliament," News-Letter, April 1942, 183-86
29. and Norman Bower, "Political Education," News-Letter, August 1942, 322-23
30. Paul Addison, "By-Elections of the Second World War," in By-Elections in British History, ed. Chris Cook and John Ramsden (London, 1973), 166
31. Hugh Gaitskell, In Defence of Politics (London, 1954), 17
32. Harold Nicolson, The Independent Member of Parliament, Hansard Society pamphlet no. 2 (London, 1946), 2, 18
33. Norman W. Wilding, Books about Parliament, Hansard Society pamphlet no. 1 (London, 1946), 1-2
34. and Stephen King-Hall, "The Hansard Society," Parliamentary Affairs 1, no. 1 (January 1947): 6
35. The first such survey was Granada Television, The State of the Nation: Parliament (London, 1973)
36. The Gallup poll findings cited in this article are taken from George H. Gallup, The Gallup International Public Opinion Polls: Great Britain, 1937-1975, vol. 1 (New York, 1977)
37. Mass-Observation, The Journey Home (London, 1944), 107
38. Ferdynand Zweig, The British Worker (Harmondsworth, 1952), 189
39. Robert S. Milne and Hugh C. H. Mackenzie, Straight Eight: A Study of Voting Behaviour in the Constituency of Bristol North-East at the General Election of 1951 (London, 1954), 87-89, 96
40. Mark Benney and Phyliss Geiss, "Social Class and Politics in Greenwich," British Journal of Sociology 1, no. 4 (June 1950): 320
41. and News Chronicle, Behind the Gallup Poll (London, 1951), 22
42. Cited in Steven Fielding, "What Did 'the People' Want? The Meaning of the 1945 General Election," Historical Journal 35, no. 3 (1992): 629
43. Dennis Wells, "Now It's All Over: (1) The Hustings," News-Letter, August 1945, 204-5
44. Ivor Crewe, Neil Day, and Anthony Fox, The British Electorate 1963-1987: A Compendium of Data from the British Election Survey (Cambridge, 1991), 153, 162, 171-72, 179
45. Political and Economic Planning, "Watling Revisited," Planning 14, no. 270 (1947): 79-80
46. For an assessment of the cultural significance of cinema, see Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918-1951 (Oxford, 2000), 419-56
47. Louis Moss and Kathleen Box, The Cinema Audience (London, 1943)
48. and Political and Economic Planning, The British Film Industry (London, 1952), 181
49. Barry Doyle, "The Geography of Cinemagoing in Great Britain, 1934-1994: A Comment," Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 23, no. 1 (2003): 59-61, 65-66
50. See also Christine Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre, and the "New Look" (London, 2000), 11-20
51. as well as Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference (Oxford, 2003), 243-17
52. Michael Balcon, Michael Balcon Presents ...: A Lifetime of Films (London, 1969), 159
53. See also Robert Murphy, "British Films Production, 1939 to 1945," in National Fictions: World War II in British Films and Television, ed. Geoff Hurd (London, 1984), 17
54. and Charles Barr, Ealing Studios, rev. ed. (1977; repr., London, 1993), 8
55. Arthur Marwick, Class: Image and Reality in Britain, France, and the USA since 1930 (London, 1980), 22
56. Vincent Porter, "Methodism versus the Market Place: The Rank Organisation and British Cinema," in The British Cinema Book, ed. Robert Murphy (London, 1997), 122-32
57. Jeffrey Richards, "British Film Censorship," in Murphy, British Cinema Book, 167-77
58. Guy Phelps, Film Censorship (London, 1974), 146
59. Gore Vidal, Screening History (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 6, 32
60. See, e.g., Steven J. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton, NJ, 1998)
61. Douglas A. Spencer and Hugh D. Waley, The Cinema To-Day (Oxford, 1956), 153
62. Balcon, Lifetime, 159
63. Robert Durgnat, Films and Feeling (London, 1967), 135
64. Jeffrey Richards and Anthony Aldgate, Best of British: Cinema and Society, 1930-1970 (Oxford, 1983), 1-2, 5, 10
65. Marcia Landy, British Film Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930-1960 (Princeton, NJ, 1991), 4-5
66. Andy Medhurst, "'Victim': Text as Context," Screen 25, nos. 4-5 (July-October 1984): 35
67. Jane Thumin, Celluloid Sisters: Women and Popular Cinema (London, 1992), 33-34
68. See, e.g., Sue Harper, "A Lower Middle-Class Taste-Community in the 1930s: Admissions Figures at the Regent Cinema, Portsmouth, UK," Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 24, no. 4 (2004): 565-87
69. Julian Poole, "British Cinema Attendance in Wartime: Audience Preference at the Majestic, Macclesfield, 1939-1946," Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 7, no. 1 (1987): 15-34
70. For a heroic attempt to establish the relative national popularity of films, see John Sedgwick, Popular Filmgoing in 1930s Britain: A Choice of Pleasures (Exeter, 2000)
71. Thumin, Celluloid Sisters, 33-34
72. Mass-Observation, "Film and the Public: Chance of a Lifetime," Sight and Sound 19, no. 9 (January 1951): 349-50. More generally, see Jeffrey Richards and Dorothy Sheridan, Mass Observation at the Movies (London, 1987)
73. Annette Kuhn, "Cinema-Going in Britain in the 1930s: Report of a Questionnaire Survey," Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 19, no. 4 (1999): 531-43
74. and Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties, 4-11
75. Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, "Moved to Tears: Weeping in the Cinema in Postwar Britain," Screen 37 (1996): 173
76. Graeme Turner, Film as Social Practice (London, 1991), 122
77. William Hughes, "The Evaluation of Film as Evidence," in The Historian and Film, ed. Paul Smith (Cambridge, 1976), 67-71
78. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Harmondsworth, 1957), 62-63
79. Mikhail Bakhtin first broached the notion of comedy as "carnival" in The Dialogic Imagination (Austin, TX, 1982)
80. For an application of Bakhtin's ideas to British film comedies see Landy, British Film Genres, 332-33
81. For a general view of films during the conflict, see Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Britain Can Take It: The British Cinema in the Second World War (Oxford, 1986)
82. A. L. Kennedy, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (London, 1997). 54 Penelope Houston, Went the Day Well? (London, 1992)
83. For example, see Andy Medhurst, "Myths of Consensus and Fables of Escape: British Cinema, 1945-1951," in Labour's Promised Land? Culture and Society in Britain, 1945-1951, ed. Jim Fyrth (London, 1995), 39-46
84. On the politics of the studio, see Barr, Faling Studios
85. Andrew Spicer, Sydney Box (Manchester, 2006), 148-51
86. Robert Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1939-1949 (London, 1992), 88-89
87. The Happy Family, directed by Muriel Box (1952)
88. Sarah Street, British National Cinema (London, 1997), 64
89. Caroline Levine, "Propaganda for Democracy: The Curious Case of Love on the Dole," Journal of British Studies 45, no. 4 (October 2006): 846-74
90. Richards and Aldgate, Best of British, 84-85
91. Political and Economic Planning, British Film Industry, 203-8
92. T. J. Hollins, "The Conservative Party and Film Propaganda between the Wars," English Historical Review 96, no. 379 (1981): 366-69
93. Peter Forster, "J. Arthur Rank and the Shrinking Screen," in Age of Austerity, 1945-1951, ed. Phillip Sissons and Michael French (Harmondsworth, 1964), 287-305
94. Harper and Porter, Decline of Deference, 267
95. Fielding, Thompson, and Tiratsoo, England Arise! 156-58
96. Geoffrey MacNabb, J. Arthur Rank and the British Film Industry (London, 1993), 202-3
97. Spicer, Sydney Box, 148
98. Levine, "Propaganda for Democracy," 849-50
99. Betty Box, Lifting the Lid: The Autobiography of Film Producer Betty Box, OBE (Lewes, 2000), 212
100. Cited in Jo Fox, "Millions Like Us? Accented Language and the 'Ordinary' in British Films of the Second World War," Journal of British Studies 45, no. 4 (October 2006): 837-38
101. Murphy, Realism and Tinsel, 191
102. Cited in Alan Randall and Ray Seaton, George Formby (London, 1974), 27-28
103. Philip Gillett, The British Working Class in Postwar Film (Manchester, 2003), 80-87
104. Andrew Spicer, Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema (London, 2001), 82-86
105. Spicer, Sydney Box, 84, 111-12
106. Philip Martin Williams and David L. Williams, Hooray for Jollywood (Ashton-under-Lyne,2001), 87-91
107. Bruce Babington, Launder and Gilliat (Manchester, 2002), 190, 196-201
108. Brian McFarlane, "Fame Is the Spur: An Honourable Failure," in The Family Way: The Boutling Brothers and British Film Culture, ed. Alan Burton, Tim O'Sullivan, and Paul Wells (Trowbridge, 2000), 122-33
109. Melanie Williams, "No Love for Johnnie," in 24 Frames: The Cinema of Britain and Ireland, ed. Brian McFarlane and Roy Ward Baker (London, 2005), 127-28
110. The Years Between, directed by Compton Bennett (1946)
111. Vote for Huggett, directed by Ken Annakin (1948)
112. Just for Fun! directed by Gordon Flemyng (1963)
113. Fielding, Thompson, and Tiratsoo, England Arise! 36-38, 61-62
114. No Love for Johnnie, directed by Ralph Thomas (1961)
115. Isabel Quigly, "Being a Film Reviewer in the 1950s," in British Cinema of the 1950s: A Celebration, ed. Ian MacKillop and Neil Sinyard (Manchester, 2003), 213-20
116. Randall and Seaton, George Formby, 127-28
117. Daily Mirror, 11 February 1949
118. Daily Graphic, 11 February 1949
119. Penelope Houston, "Conscience and Comedy," Sight and Sound 29, no. 4 (Summer - Autumn 1959): 163
120. Sunday Express, 19 July 1959
121. Star, 16 July 1959
122. Alan Lovell, "Film Chronicle," New Left Review 1, no. 8 (March-April 1961): 54-55
123. Manchester Guardian, 13 February 1961
124. News of the World, 12 February 1961
125. Houston, "Conscience and Comedy," 163
126. Tribune, 24 July 1959
127. Graham Green, The Pleasure Dome: The Collected Film Criticism, 1935-1940, ed. J. Russell Taylor (Oxford, 1980), 41
128. Steven Fielding, The Labour Governments, 1964-1970, vol. 1, Labour and Cultural Change (Manchester, 2003), 43-49
129. Fielding, Thompson, and Tiratsoo, England Arise! 182, 187
130. James H. Robb, Working-Class Anti-Semite: A Psychological Study in a London Borough (London, 1954), 187
131. For an earlier attempt to question the meaning of turnout at this time, see Steven Fielding, '"Don't Know and Don't Care': Popular Political Attitudes in Labour's Britain, 1945-1951," in The Attlee Years, ed. Nick Tiratsoo (London, 1991), 16-25
132. Peter Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge, 1971), 346
133. Ross McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class (Oxford, 1990), 259-93
134. Steven Fielding, "Labourism in the 1940s," Twentieth Century British History 3, no. 2 (1992): 143-45
135. and "Revisiting Labour's 1964 Campaign," Contemporary British History 21, no. 3 (September 2007): 309-24
136. Frank Strickner, "Representing the Working Class: Individualism and the Masses in Frank Capra's Films," Labor History 31, no. 4 (1990): 454-67
137. As outlined in Gareth Stedman Jones, "Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870-1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class," in his Languages of Class (Cambridge, 1983), 179-238
138. John Hill, Sex, Class, and Realism: British Cinema, 1956-1963 (London, 1986), 145-47
139. Tom Harrisson, Britain Revisited (London, 1961), 85
140. Notes by Prime Minister on a General Election," 26 September 1931, Papers of Herbert Louis Samuel, 1st Viscount Samuel, A/81, CP 247 (31), House of Lords Record Office
141. See Margaret Canovan, "'Trust the People': Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy," Political Studies 47, no. 1 (March 1999): 2-16
142. and "'People,' Politicians, Populism," Government and Opposition 19, no. 3 (July 1984): 312-27