The Lasting Influence of the War on Postwar British Film [Hardcover]

Many of the most celebrated British films of the immediate post-war period (1945-55) seem to be occupied with getting on with life and offering distraction for postwar audiences. It is the time of the celebrated Ealing comedies, Hue and Cry (1946) and Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), Dickens adaptations, and the most ambitious projects of the Archers. While the war itself is rarely mentioned in these films, the war and the conditions of postwar society lie at the heart of understanding them. While various studies have focused on lesser known realist films, few consider how deeply and completely the war affected British film. Michael W. Boyce considers the preoccupation of these films with profound anxieties and uncertainties about what life was going to be like for postwar Britain, what roles men and women would play, how children would grow up, even what it meant - and what it still means today - to be British.PART I: GENDER The Power of Choice: Complicating Traditional Female Identity Celia Johnson Deborah Kerr Performing Masculinity: Duty, Confinement, and Stiff Upper Lips Michael Redgrave Alec Guinness PART II: GENRE Toward a Reading of British Film Noir: Expatriates &Ancient Cities Carol Reed's The Third Man Jules Dassin's Night and the City PART III: RETELLING NATIONAL NARRATIVE Adapting Shakespeare: Once More Unto the Breach Laurence Olivier's Henry V, Hamlet, and Richard III Adapting Dickens: Orphans, Parents, and Post-War Britain David Lean's Great Expectations David Lean's Oliver Twist Alberto Calvalcanti's Nicholas Nickleby Brian Desmond Hurst's Scrooge

With scrupulous and brilliant close analysis of key films and stars, Boyce reveals and complicates a new era of 'Britishness' in the immediate postwar years, one irrevocably marked by war trauma. In remarkably clear prose, The Lasting Influence of the War on Postwar British Film illustrates a social and historical unconscious that has largely been ignored yet emerges as a crucial period in tlS×