Revisiting Ealing's women

MELANIE WILLIAMS

In connection with the publication of a new book Ealing Revisited, it seems like a good moment to look back at this most famous and - dread word but accurate in this instance - iconic of British film studios, and to think about Ealing's women (for more on this, see my chapter in the aforementioned collection). Ealing was not noted for its 'feminine touch'; the critic Kenneth Tynan summarised its output as focussing on 'men at work, men engrossed in a crisis, men who communicate with their women mostly by postcard'. It had Audrey Hepburn at its disposal for a while but failed to recognise the star potential in her which would soon be so triumphantly realised by Hollywood. But its head, Michael Balcon, was slightly touchy about the accusation that his company didn't 'know how to handle women', a criticism he deemed 'a little unjust'. He had a point: after all, it was at Ealing that Googie Withers had carved out a highly distinctive niche  playing passionate, strong-willed heroines who might be flawed but who were also the most dominant figures in the narratives in which they were featured, from the femme fatale of Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945) to the feminist farmer of The Loves of Joanna Godden (1947) and the tight-lipped Bethnal Green housewife with a dark secret in It Always Rains on Sundays (1947). The director Robert Hamer had a hand in all three of those films, and for Diana Morgan (pictured above), the only female contract scriptwriter at the studio, Hamer was one of the few men working at Ealing whose films 'give such parts to women. He was the only one who liked women, really.' Morgan enjoyed working at Ealing a great deal but described it as 'a very male studio', a place where her colleagues' distinctly unchivalrous nickname for her was 'the Welsh bitch'. The final film she worked on at Ealing, Dance Hall (1950), is one of the studio's most interesting 'women's pictures', centred on the intertwined lives of four female friends (Natasha Parry, Jane Hylton, Diana Dors, Petula Clark) who work at the same factory and frequent the same Palais de Danse in their time off.

Although Balcon was a great encourager and nurturer of new talent, this didn't extend to aspiring women directors who Balcon seems to have thought lacked the necessary authority to control a crew. Kay Mander tried and failed to get in and later Jill Craigie was similarly rebuffed. She wrote to Balcon in 1958 about trying to replicate the 'fantastic circulation' of women's magazines by making films appealing to the same demographic: 'young girls at work before they're married... our films are made as though we're completely unaware of this new generation.' But her offer was not taken up. Balcon's response to Craigie's letter ('there seems to be no immediate possibility of our working together on a picture. I mean, of course, in your capacity as a director') has been read by film historian Sue Harper as 'testament to his deafness to the female voice', and this sadly rings true, as well as ironically echoing Ealing's supremely moving drama about deafness and a female finding her voice, Mandy (1952). But there's also the question of bad timing. By 1958, when Craigie wrote to Balcon, Ealing was on its last legs anyway. Even back in 1956 one critic had suggested that the studio's film about student nurses, The Feminine Touch, represented Ealing's 'dying gasp'. But in its postwar heyday, it had offered some more interesting and diverse representations of women than its reputation sometimes suggests. And some of them even had the 'feminine touch' of their sole woman writer Diana Morgan.

To be a Woman (Jill Craigie, 1951)

MELANIE WILLIAMS

One of the most interesting of filmmakers to emerge from Britain’s rich tradition of documentary, Jill Craigie, is also someone whose work is hard to see. Therefore it’s great news that her 18 minute film To be a Woman (1951) is now available on the BFI’s excellent collection of postwar British documentary, Shadows of Progress. Here’s hoping that her other films Out of Chaos (1944), The Way We Live (1946), Children of the Ruins (1948) and Blue Scar (1949) also enjoy release soon - some way, somehow. To be a Woman was co-sponsored by the National Union of Women Teachers and the Equal Pay Campaign Committee, and it makes a watertight case for equal pay legislation, addressing all the usual objections to its implementation. A man who may have a family to support should be paid more than a spinster? Well in that case, why shouldn’t bachelors and spinsters be paid exactly the same then? Why should sex be the differential factor? And what about the fact that many spinsters have dependents such as parents and more than half of male workers have no dependents at all? The documentary’s core point is that under the existing system ‘women are cheap labour’, and that this has deleterious side-effects for both male and female employment, not to mention being fundamentally unfair; as Labour politician Ian Mikardo points out in the film, ‘the same job done in the same way’ merits the ‘same rate of pay’ (it’s depressing to note that equal pay legislation was not brought into force in British law until 1975, and there still exists a significant pay gap between the sexes).

One of the glories of the film is Wendy Hiller’s wonderfully astringent voice-over narration, coldly furious in places, wittily sarcastic in others (C. E. M. Joad’s reactionary views on women are introduced as evidence that even misogynists can be ‘quite lucid’ on occasion), and never less than engaging. Elizabeth Lutyens’ timpani-dominated music for the film is aurally striking and strikes quite an ominous note, and the composer also makes an appearance in the film as one of a number of notable female professionals in areas ranging from trade unionism to engineering to the arts. Arguing for the necessity of equal pay for men and women is the immediate remit of To be a Woman – and it does this forcefully and eloquently - but the film goes beyond that single issue into a broader question: ‘What does it mean in 20^th century Britain to be a woman?’ What is the difference between the life of an everywoman in Victorian Britain and an everywoman in 1951? Library pictures of Suffragette marchers embedded in the film act as a salutary history lesson, and a reminder that rights are rarely freely given; they have to be fought for. Otherwise even legitimate demands will be indefinitely postponed: as Hiller’s voiceover states, ‘Now never is the time.’