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3 British Film Renaissance Asmall but dedicated audience for British films existed in the United States at war’s end, cultivated in part by the Alexander Korda prestige pictures of the 1930s. Bosley Crowther insisted that British film aficionados “are not the sort who go to the movies with untrained or juvenile minds.” On the contrary, “they have had some considerable advantages in the cultivation of their tastes. They know a good thing when they see it and react favorably to sense and style.”1 This was precisely the audience Hollywood generally ignored . British films experienced a renaissance after the war, and the patron who backed it was J. Arthur Rank. The Rank films that stimulated the emerging art film market included: David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1946) and Great Expectations (1947); Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1946) and Hamlet (1948); Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947); Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948); the Sydney Box production of Quartet (1949); and Anthony Asquith’s The Winslow Boy (1950). Unlike the Italians, who found inspiration for their films in recent history and economic conditions of their country, British filmmakers turned to Shakespeare , Charles Dickens, and contemporary authors such as Graham Greene, Rumer Godden, Noël Coward, and Terence Rattigan for source material. Their films followed conventional narrative lines and were often crafted by director-writer teams such as David Lean and playwright Noël Coward (Brief Encounter), Carol Reed and novelist Graham Greene (Fallen Idol and The Third Man), and Anthony Asquith and playwright Terence Rattigan (The Winslow Boy). The defining characteristic of the trend was “theatrical class,” which Crowther defined as “a literate quality, an honest restraint in visual treatment 62 and excellent acting.”2 The actors in these films were drawn from London’s West End theater, and a distinguished lot they were: Laurence Olivier, Trevor Howard, James Mason, Margaret Leighton, Wendy Hiller, Cedric Hardwicke, and Ralph Richardson, to name just a few. “The British produce good actors. That’s a recognized fact,” said Crowther, “just as the Irish produce good politicians and the French produce good wines. Perhaps it’s because British actors usually get more experience on the legitimate stage. Perhaps they have a tradition of the theatre that our people do not have. Perhaps on the whole, in British pictures there is a greater tendency toward restraint. Anyhow, good British acting is hard to beat.”3 If the Italian imports were distinguished by their location shooting and their documentary visual style, the British imports were products of a studio tradition organized around skilled craftsmen. Many of the films contained distinctive elements that set them apart. For example, Robert Hatch said of Great Expectations: “This new film is made with great care and taste—almost lovingly. The English do period movies better than we do. There is a slick, expensive perfection about Hollywood costume plays that asks to be looked at and that reduces the performers, however competent, to a kind of puppetry. In the English movies the locale, the sets, and particularly the costumes, even after the research departments are through with them, seem so real, so commonplace even, that you are not conscious of extras passing before canvas-and-lath sets in getups hired for the day.”4 J. Arthur Rank had no abiding interest in supplying prestige films for the American art film market; like his Italian counterparts, he wanted access to the mainstream.5 The dominant figure in the British film industry, Rank owned more than half of the studio facilities in the country and financed a full roster of around twenty-five films a year through affiliated production companies. In the realm of exhibition, Rank owned two of the three big theater circuits. In the realm of distribution, his General Film Distributors regulated the flow of pictures to the two circuits. Rank also had extensive motion picture holdings in the Commonwealth. The British market was not large enough to support indigenous production, and Rank had to export to survive. To get playing time in the United States, he had to convince the majors to make room for his pictures in theaters they owned and to allow his pictures to compete against those the majors produced. Alexander Korda attempted to do just that during the 1930s and failed. Rank had much more clout. On a goodwill tour of the United States during the summer of 1945, Rank told studio bosses...

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