Millions like us? Accented language and the "ordinary" in British films of the second world war

Journal of British Studies

Volumn 45, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 819-845

  Fox, Jo ^a  

^a DURHAM UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61949464282     PISSN: 00219371     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/505959     Document Type: Review

References (105)

1. Letter to Radio Times, 9 February 1940
2. Quoted in Sian Nicholas, The Echo of War: Home Front Propaganda and the Wartime BBC, 1939-45 (Manchester, 1996), 239
3. Nicholas Pronay, "'The Land of Promise': The Projection of Peace Aims in Britain," in Film and Radio Propaganda in World War II, ed. K. R. M. Short (London, 1983), 72
4. M-O A: File Report (hereafter FR) 446, Tom Harrisson, "Social Research and the Film," November 1940
5. Also reproduced in Mass-Observation at the Movies, ed. Dorothy Sheridan and Jeffrey Richards (London, 1987), 209-17, 213
6. and Documentary News Letter 1, no. 11 (November 1940)
7. For more on Mass-Observation and their aims and organization, see Penny Summerfield, "Mass-Observation: Social Research or Social Movement?" Journal of Contemporary History 20, no. 3 (July 1985): 439-52
8. Tony Kushner, "The Spice of Life? Ethnic Difference, Politics and Culture in Modern Britain," in Citizenship, Nationality, and Migration in Europe, ed. David Cesarani and Mary Fulbrook (New York, 1996), 125-45, 130
9. Andrew Higson, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford, 1995), 42-43
10. John Ellis, "Victory of the Voice?" Screen 22, no. 2 (1981): 69-72, 70
11. Philip Gillett, The British Working Class in Post-war Film (Manchester, 2003), 19-20
12. Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference (Oxford, 2003), 251
13. George Perry cited in Charles Barr, Ealing Studios, 3rd ed. (Berkeley, 1998), 26
14. See also Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918-1951 (Oxford, 1998), 434
15. Quoted in Tony Aldgate, "Comedy, Class and Containment: The British Domestic Cinema of the 1930s," in British Cinema History, ed. James Curran and Vincent Porter (London, 1983), 257-71, 261
16. John Montgomery, Comedy Films (London, 1954), 179
17. Quoted in Aldgate, "Comedy, Class and Containment," 261
18. Jeff Nuttall, King Twist: A Portrait of Frank Randle (London, 1978), 14
19. For evidence of continued resistance to American culture in Britain, see Richard Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain, 1940-2000 (Basingstoke, 2002), 178
20. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 433
21. Cinema, 1 January 1941, 5
22. As Jeffrey Richards notes, "Fields was the top female star at the cinema box office from 1936-1940 and Formby the top male star from 1937-1943" (Richards, Stars in Our Eyes: Lancashire Stars of Stage, Screen, and Radio [Preston, 1994], 10)
23. Jeffrey Richards, Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad's Army (Manchester, 1997), 258
24. Richards, Stars in Our Eyes, 10
25. Richards, Films and British National Identity, 1
26. John Sedgwick, Popular Filmgoing in 1930s Britain: A Choice of Pleasures (Exeter, 2000), 102
27. Jeffrey Richards, "Cinemagoing in Worktown: Regional Film Audiences in 1930s Britain," Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 14, no. 2 (1994): 147-66, 164
28. Sedgwick, Popular Filmgoing, 111-12, 119
29. TNA: PRO INF 1/724, memorandum by the International Broadcasting and Propaganda Enquiry, 21 June 1939. Reprinted in full in Phillip M. Taylor, "Techniques of Persuasion: Basic Ground Rules of British Propaganda during the Second World War," Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 1, no. 1 (1981): 57-65. The sense of engaging the public is prevalent throughout the document
30. Ellis, "Victory of the Voice?" 71
31. Nicholas, The Echo of War, 239
32. C. E. M. Joad, The Listener (BBC house journal), 16 April 1942
33. Quoted in Nicholas, The Echo of War, 262 n. 54
34. W. E. Williams, The Listener, 2 April 1942
35. East to Hyndley, BBC Written Archive Centre R 34/672/1, 10 July 1942. Quoted in Nicholas, The Echo of War, 100
36. TNA: PRO INF 1/251, from Francis Williams to Sir Kenneth Clark, Home Planning Executive Sub-committee, 16 April 1941
37. TNA: PRO RG 23/44, Wartime Social Survey, DC 48532/1, 1943. Nicholas Pronay contends that the lower economic groups also made up the majority of cinemagoers in the prewar period (Pronay, "The 'Moving Picture' and Historical Research," in "Historians and Movies: The State of the Art, Part I," special issue, Journal of Contemporary History 18, no. 3 [July 1983]: 365-95)
38. "Films and a People's War: A Discussion of the Basic Principles of Propaganda in This War," Documentary News Letter, November 1940, 3-4
39. M-O A: FR 90, Morale: Channels of Publicity, 14 April 1940. The Griersonian style is the particular form of documentary associated with the filmmaker John Grierson. Grierson was adamant that the documentary should be as realistic as possible in its representation of the ordinary. For Grierson, film was not so much about aesthetics as observation. For more on this, see Grierson, "The Documentary Idea" (1942), in The Documentary Film- Movement: An Anthology, ed. Ian Aitken (Edinburgh, 1998), 103-15
40. "Films and a People's War," 3
41. Michael Paris, "Filming the People's War: The Dawn Guard, Desert Victory, Tunisian Victory, and Burma Victory," in The Family Way: The Boulting Brothers and Postwar British Film Culture, ed. Alan Burton, Tim O'Sullivan, and Paul Wells (Trowbridge, 2000), 97-109, 97
42. Geoff Eley, "Finding the People's War: Film, British Collective Memory, and World War II," American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (June 2001): 818-38, 837-38
43. Dilys Powell, Films since 1939 (London, 1947), 39
44. Harry Watt, quoted in "George Formby Wins the War," Times Higher Education Supplement, 20 July 1973
45. Located in British Film Institute (hereafter BFI) Subject File, "World War II and Film."
46. TNA: PRO INF 1 /292, Stephen Taylor, Home Intelligence, "Home Morale and Public Opinion," 4
47. M-O A: TC 17/ 5/A, raw materials for report on letters to Picture Goer Weekly, May-November 1940, 1,536 letters analyzed. M-O A: "Home propaganda: A Report Prepared by Mass-Observation for the Advertising Service Guild," Bulletin of the Advertising Service Guild, no. 2 (London, n.d., ca. 1942), 33
48. "The Man on the Screen," 3
49. Roger Manvell, "They Laugh at Realism," Documentary News Letter, March 1943, 188
50. A synopsis of these films can be found in Chapman, The British at War, 91
51. Also in Sheridan and Richards, Mass-Observation at the Movies, 435-37
52. M-O A: FR 458, "Fifteen Ministry of Information Shorts," Len England, 16 October 1940
53. Today's Cinema, 25 July 1941, 5
54. Higson, Waving the Flag, 208
55. David Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933-45 (London, 2001), 181-82
56. Documentary Film," Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 17, no. 2 (June 1997): 181-218, 192
57. The Times, 25 March 1943, 6
58. British press book for The Silent Village. Held at British Film Institute Library, London
59. For Dalrymple's claim, see Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Britain Can Take It: The British Cinema in the Second World War (Oxford, 1986), 232
60. BFI Special Collections, Humphrey Jennings Collection, treatment for Fires Were Started, "N. F. S. Fifth Treatment," 27 January 1942
61. Also reproduced in The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, ed. Kevin Jackson (Manchester, 1993), 44
62. Daniel Millar, " Fires Were Started," Sight and Sound (Spring 1969): 100-104, 100
63. Also reproduced in Jackson, The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, 45
64. Kevin Jackson, Humphrey Jennings (Basingstoke, 2004), 255
65. Jackson, Humphrey Jennings, 266
66. William Sansom, "The Making of Fires Were Started," Film Quarterly 15, no. 2 (Winter 1961-62): 27-29
67. Millar, "Fires Were Started," 102
68. Basil Wright, The Long View: A Personal Perspective on World Cinema (London, 1974), 109
69. Interview with Rotha in Elizabeth Sussex, The Rise and Fall of British Documentary (Berkeley, 1975), 140-41
70. Aldgate and Richards, Britain Can Take It, 219
71. British press book for Millions Like Us (1943). Held at British Film Institute Library, London
72. For a more detailed discussion of these issues, see Jo Fox, Film Propaganda in Nazi Germany and Britain: World War II Cinema (Oxford, 2006)
73. The Cinema, 24 September 1943, 8
74. The Times, 7 June 1944, 8
75. C. A. Lejeune, "London's M-Ovie News," New York Times, 16 July 1944, X3
76. The Times, 16 April 1930, 13
77. H. Mark Glancy, When Hollywood Loved Britain: The Hollywood "British" Film, 1939-1945 (Manchester, 1999), 3
78. Edgar Anstey, The Spectator, 17 July 1942
79. and Documentary News Letter, August 1942
80. Quoted in Glancy, When Hollywood Loved Britain, 155
81. Walter Pidgeon was actually Canadian, but this distinction was not recognized by contemporaries. See, e.g., The Times, 8 July 1942, 6
82. Wright, The Long View, 109
83. Kinematograph Weekly, 1 October 1942, 28
84. M-O A: 1943, directive replies on favorite films, in Sheridan and Richards, Mass-Observation at the Movies, 271-84
85. Interview with Sir Anthony Havelock Allen, June 1990, in An Autobiography of British Cinema: as Told by the Film-makers and Actors Who Made It, ed. Brian McFarlane (London, 1997), 291
86. The Times, 24 September 1942, 6
87. Kinematograph Weekly, 3 October 1940, 4
88. See, e.g., "Hays Office Objects to Great British Film," News Chronicle, 2 December 1942
89. The Tintes, 10 December 1942, 8
90. A report also appeared in The Scotsman, 10 December 1942, British Film Institute subject file, "censorship."
91. For more discussion on this, see Anthony Slide, "Banned in the USA": British Films in the United States and Their Censorship, 1933-1960 (London, 1998), 83
92. Manvell, "They Laugh at Realism," 188
93. John Blaxendale, '"You and I-All of Us Ordinary People': Renegotiating 'Britishness' in Wartime," in "Millions Like Us"? British Culture in the Second World War, ed. Nick Hayes and Jeff Hill (Liverpool, 1999), 295-323, 322
94. Sonya Rose, Which People's War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939-1945 (Oxford, 2003), 6
95. Blaxendale, "'You and I-All of Us Ordinary People,'" 322
96. Rose, Which People's War? 286
97. Steven Fielding, "The Good War: 1939-1945," in From Blitz to Blair: A New History of Britain since 1939, ed. Nick Tiratsoo (London, 1998), 34
98. Rose, Which People's War? 23
99. José Harris, "War and Social History: Britain and the Home Front during the Second World War," Contemporary European History 1, no. 1 (1992): 17-35, 20
100. For a further discussion of this issue, see James Chapman, "British Cinema and 'The People's War,'" in Hayes and Hill, "Millions Like Us"? 33-62
101. Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (London, 1994), 113
102. M-O A: FR 2120, "The Film and Family Life," 13 June 1944
103. For more on Love on the Dole, see Caroline Lewie's article in this issue: "Propaganda for DeM-Ocracy: The Curious Case of Love on the Dole,"Journal of British Studies 45, no. 4 (October 2006): 846-74
104. Noel Coward, interviewed by C. A. Lejeune, "How Coward Did a Five-Fold Job," New York Times; 14 February 1943
105. Eley, "Finding the People's War," 838