British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years (review)

Virginia Woolf’s notorious coinage in her 1923 essay, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, is a recurrent point of reference in this admirable, amply illustrated, book. The Battle of the Brows is presented here as a reaction to social mobility, with self-appointed arbiters of taste often regarding the people whom they presumed enjoyed middle-brow culture with disdain, while equally despising the manifestations of that culture. The judgments of various critics, notes Napper, started from cultural prejudice rather than arriving at it, “using cinematic taste primarily to mark out cultural territory . . . good cinema is defined by qualities found elsewhere than in the British entertainment film, thus it must de facto be inferior” (120). Rather than assuming that British cinema and the middlebrow are settled and safe terrains, Napper presents both categories as contested.

The book is organized chronologically around three purposefully chosen case studies: Adrian Brunel’s 1928 film adaptation of Margaret Kennedy’s novel and stageplay The Constant Nymph; Victor Saville’s 1933 film adaptation of J. B. Priestley’s 1929 best-seller The Good Companions and stage, screen, and documented Mass-Observation interpretations of The Lambeth Walk, 1937–1939 (with a brief discussion of the musical’s subsequent revivals). In The Constant Nymph, Napper finds “a text constructed around the apparent tension between artistic integrity and the marketplace” (36), arguing for, “and embodied (in its adaptation from novel to play to film), a rapprochement between artistic and commercial concerns” (37), while The Good Companions, as novel and film appears “to be passionately committed to the project of articulating the modern nation through the metaphors of physical, social and cultural transition” (83). Both The Constant Nymph and The Good Companions jibe at high-brow pretension, “Priestley (smarting perhaps from his dismissal as a commercial writer)”, preferring “to turn his satire on those remote elite intellectual groups who claimed a role as the dictators of taste, rather than on their audience” (102). In response to Woolf’s disapproval of the sheer bulk of Priestley’s output (novels, screenplays, newspaper articles, radio broadcasts), Napper points out that Priestley was writing from necessity, in order to support himself and his family. He was also writing with the Great War much in his memory, in full knowledge that he owed his life to the accident of his being buried alive together with his platoon’s supplies. Furthermore, Napper places Priestley in a broader historical framework, regarding The Good Companions not only as a conscious intervention in the contemporary Battle of the Brows but also as “an attempt to democratize the novel (or rather, to make the novel democratic again—its allusions to Fielding and Dickens are based, after all, on the notion, shared also by the Leavises, that those writers appealed to a genuinely unified reading market)” (96).

Certain artists are shown to have proven themselves peculiarly adept at embracing new forms of mass culture: Edward Elgar, for instance, happily wrote pieces of the right length to fit comfortably on a 12-inch 78rpm record, and with the exact tonal range most suited to the limited recording technology available. He formed a lifelong partnership with HMV. Other public and private institutions, including the BBC and Allen Lane’s Penguin Books, are discussed as promoters of middlebrow culture, as emulsifiers (superb coinage) of distinct cultural interests: in a spectacular and daring gamble with social codes, Penguins were sold by Woolworth’s. Suburbia is introduced into the debate as both a physical and a psychic space (though it could have been more thoroughly supported with illustrations from British cinema, for instance, in the current London Transport Museum exhibition).

Crucially, Napper argues that the terms of the 1927 Cinematograph Act fostered a middlebrow national culture, protectively positioning it between the “low-brow” popular product of Hollywood and the “high-brow” art cinema of Europe. He demonstrates close links between the publishing industry and cinema in this period. The national appeal of Jessie Matthews (as Susie Dean...