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Why was 1948 the greatest ever year for British cinema?

Laurence Olivier's Hamlet won Best Motion Picture at the Oscars in 1949 - Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
Laurence Olivier's Hamlet won Best Motion Picture at the Oscars in 1949 - Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

Do you remember 1948? I do, just, because it was the year I was taken as a newly toddling infant to see where I would be living alone with my parents. After my grandmother’s house, crammed with objects collected over decades, an empty flat in a different seaside town was a shock. An iron bedstead, unmattressed. A dangling light-socket with no bulb. And outside, a bewildering world – bewildering no doubt even to the adults, whose adjustment to post-war life was not yet complete.

Change was everywhere. Something astonishing called the National Health Service was suddenly there to look after us. The Empire Windrush had docked, with its cargo of hopeful workers. New things “came in”, in time for me to assume they’d always been there: the Land Rover, Polo mints, Princess Elizabeth’s baby, the present King. It seems potty that an appallingly battered London even hosted the Olympic Games that year, but then there was a lot of defiant energy about, 75 years ago.

It’s clear, in fact, that 1948 was the year British life came back into focus. The realisation that peace had returned unaccompanied by plenty had been dismaying, and 1947 was gravely sabotaged in any case by a truly ghastly winter. But now confidence was building, along with a new eclecticism which, among other things, readmitted fun to the party, after a decade of relentless seriousness.

And the best place to relive that feeling now is unquestionably the cinema. The 1940s in general were remarkably rich in British films, but 1948 was special. The pace of production was so frantic that J Arthur Rank alone – he of the trademark oiled-up Gongman – financed more than 30 films that year. Among them were the Best Motion Picture Oscar winner at the 21st Academy Awards (1949), Hamlet, whose director-star Laurence Olivier also won the Best Actor prize, and another nominee, The Red Shoes, a hymn to the ballet and perhaps the people’s favourite. The others ranged from Meet the Huggetts, a homely tribute to the cinema-going public themselves (“Britain’s very own family”), with Jack Warner and Petula Clark, to the extraordinary Oliver Twist.

David Lean’s film came as a prompt follow-up to his successful Great Expectations of 1946. Lean returned in 1948 with much the same production team, plus his own wife Kay Walsh as Nancy, and his version was convincing enough to change our idea of Dickens’s narrative. Lean configured the rooftop demise of Bill Sikes so vividly that in the collective memory, it has virtually replaced the ending provided by the novel – with the help of the later musical Oliver!, which followed Lean rather than Dickens.

The works of Dickens and Shakespeare were reminding us comfortingly of the British culture we had fought to save for six years. (Orson Welles helped too, with his own 1948 movie version of Macbeth.) But in the 1940s it became possible for a Briton to make a new kind of authorial reputation as a writer of screenplays. Two such, T E B Clarke and Terence Rattigan, were very active in 1948. Rattigan, a former RAF tail-gunner, wrote Bond Street, a portmanteau film linking four stories, and then The Winslow Boy, a well-regarded adaptation of his own stage play.

But more attention-getting than either was Brighton Rock, where he shared credit with Graham Greene, author of the original novel. Again, the ending was changed, somewhat to Greene’s displeasure, but the film still stands up well, with its presentation of a villainous Richard Attenborough (star of another of the year’s notable films, the suspenseful, socially realistic London Belongs to Me) who, in spite of playing further sinister parts in middle age, became famous for universal affability. Greene went on to earn double credit that year, with The Fallen Idol, an excellent mystery developed from his own short story, and a wonderful moment of stardom for Ralph Richardson. Even Pauline Kael, a notably sharp critic, later judged its plot to be “just about perfect”. While that film was making its 1948 money, its director Carol Reed was plotting The Third Man for 1949, again with Greene.

Headliner: Richard Attenborough in Sidney Gilliat’s London Belongs to Me - Glasshouse Images / Alamy Stock Photo
Headliner: Richard Attenborough in Sidney Gilliat’s London Belongs to Me - Glasshouse Images / Alamy Stock Photo

“Tibby” Clarke will always be remembered for his ingenious and good-hearted Ealing Comedies, which is why Hue and Cry (1947) is often nominated as the first of those. It’s in fact not a comedy at all, but a kind of inspired children’s film with adult overtones. Even viewers not engaged by its story see its views of shattered north-bank London as a grim attraction in themselves. Bombsites, as I discovered, were used as unofficial children’s playgrounds for at least a decade afterwards. The shooting of a proper Ealing comedy by Clarke did begin in 1948, but not without difficulties. The celebrated Passport to Pimlico, whose relevance has been enhanced by the complications of the Brexit era, was set – much of it in the open air – during the notorious British heatwave of 1947, but the summer a year later proved disobligingly wet.

That was not such a problem for Whisky Galore, a non-Clarke Ealing Comedy that began shooting in the Outer Hebrides in July 1948, nor for Kind Hearts and Coronets, whose cameras first rolled in September that year. Here an odd yet familiar situation arose over the naming of the central character whose campaign of semi-comical murders occupies most of the picture. In the Roy Horniman novel from which the film was adapted, he had been called Israel Rank, and acknowledged as half-Jewish. Since the film’s distributor was a sub-division of the J Arthur Rank empire, this coincidence was unhelpful. Besides, Rank himself, a highly committed Methodist, was soon made aware that backstage fears had arisen over offence that might be taken by the Jewish community; so Dennis Price glided through his homicidal programme not as Israel Rank but as Louis Mazzini, the surname borrowing a certain historical depth from the pioneering Italian nationalist.

 A hymn to ballet: Moira Shearer and Leonide Massine in The Red Shoes - Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
A hymn to ballet: Moira Shearer and Leonide Massine in The Red Shoes - Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

All that was settled within 1948, though the film’s release belongs to the following year. As Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger once remarked of their own output, “When we start work on a new idea we must be a year ahead, not only of our competitors, but also of the times. A real film, from idea to universal release, takes a year. Or more.” 1948 had been a year of upheaval for their partnership, for in spite of the huge and enduring success of The Red Shoes, they had tired of the quibbles of Rank, and so returned to Alexander Korda’s stable. It wasn’t an altogether happy reunion: they came to feel that Korda was using their reputation as leverage to finance other projects.

It so happens that as I began writing this, BBC Two was about to show The Red Shoes this very afternoon. The same source screened Scott of the Antarctic (1948), with John Mills in the fallible-hero role. Produced by Michael Balcon of Ealing Films and distributed by the tireless Rank, it became the third biggest British earner of 1949, and still commands a four-star rating in the television listings. The day before that, the Talking Pictures TV channel dipped deeper into the 1948 archive with The Calendar, starring a name more fragrantly redolent of those days, Greta Gynt. Naturally I was much too young to enjoy all this at the time. But catching up with 1948, however belatedly, seems an almost inexhaustible pleasure.


Have you watched any movies made in 1948? If so, which one is your favourite? Share your thoughts in the comments section below