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McCrillis I "Simply try for one hour to behave like gentlemen": British Cinema during the Early Cold War, 1945-1960 "Simply try for one hour to behave like gentlemen": British Cinema during the Early Cold War, 1945-1960 Neal R. McCrillis Columbus State University With that era now clearly over, interest in the Cold War period has shifted from diplomacy to broader analyses of culture . What was the culture that sustained Britain and other western nations during the immediate postwar decades? This essay is a preliminary study of British films during the Cold War era. As one of the most popular entertainment mediums of its day, films produced during the years from 1945 to 1960 both expressed and shaped the popular attitudes of the day. Recent works such as Stephen Whitfield's The Culture of the Cold War (1996) and Robert Corber's In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia , and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America (1993) explore and attempt to explain the nature of Cold War American culture. Several recent works also analyze American Cold War filmmaking. The most notable ofthese is Joyce Evans' Celluloid Mushroom Clouds (1998).1 On the other hand, very little work has been done on British Cold War culture. In fact, there are few works on British cinema during the immediate postwar years. The British Film Institute's authoritative Source Book (1995) lists books on each film era. Counting publications covering each decade, there are eighteen works on the 1920s and ten publications on the 1960s. For the 1950s, however, the Source Book lists only two works, one of which is a fifteen-page pamphlet. For the second half ofthe 1940s, the situation is better with seven works listed. However, none of these works is concerned with Cold War culture or filmmaking. Yet one filmographer calculates that Britain had the second highest output of Cold War genre films, with 12 percent of the total world production.2 Throughout the golden age of cinema, Britain and the United States had the highest levels of cinema viewership in the world. In the peak year of cinema attendance, 1946, the British The Ladykillers (1955), one of many British Cold War comedies, reveals a national desire to maintain old social patterns and traditions. public (roughly 50m) made 1.635 billion visits to the cinema, or 33 films per person. Even in 1960, after television had made massive inroads into viewership (a process which bottomed out in the 1970s), the British public made 515 million visits to the cinema each year.3 The majority of the films viewed were not British (on average fewer than one-fourth were), but once it began to recover from the war, on average Britain produced more than 131 films per year.4 What do these films tell us about Cold War British culture? This question ought to be addressed with skepticism about films as historical documents. In his autobiography Michael Balcon, one of Britain's greatest producers , referring to the 1930s, wrote, "Hardly a single film of the period reflects the agony of the period."5 Although films can not be taken as prima facie evidence, they are evocative of an era and its cultural mood. Scholars are still debating the character of the Cold War, even its starting and ending points. While some argue it extends from the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, others argue for a more limited definition. For convenience the period under study is from the end of the Second World War to the first easing of tensions by I960.6 Cinematically, the Cold War began in 1948 with the release ofthree American films: The Boy with Green Hair, The Iron Curtain, and Sofia. The year before, the United States government proclaimed the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, and the House Un-American Activities Committee began investigating Communist activity in Hollywood. By mid-1948 West Berlin was under a Soviet blockade and Communists were on the verge ofcapturing Beijing and threatening the newly created Republic of South Korea. Hollywood reflected and reinforced the red scare in America. By October 1947 a Gallup poll found 76 percent...

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