A Chorus of Raspberries. British Film Comedy 1929-1939 (review)

Book Reviews | Regular Feature Holiday. As an examination of this firebrand's film career, Peter Hanson's Dalton Trumbo, Hollywood Rebel clearly details every facet of his subject's career with warmth, praise, and intelligence . From any angle—research, filmography, orhistory— this is a refreshing book, a marvelous homage for a true Hollywood maverick. Angela Schwarz University of Duisburg dr.a.schwarz@uni-duisburg.de David Sutton. A Chorus of Raspberries. British Film Comedy 1929-1939. University of Exeter Press, 2000. 304 pages; $75.00. Persistent Genre One of the most popular British film genres in the decade after the advent of sound was comedy. Though American productions continued to dominate the cinemas in the United Kingdom as they had done in the 1920's, the years following 1929 saw a considerable increase in the number of British film comedies produced. In part this was a result of two factors: the Cinematography Films Act of 1927 with its quota regulations and the introduction of sound. Out of a total of 1,741 British features released between 1930 and 1939 over 600 films were comedies. A film's— and a genre's—success or failure was, of course, decided at the box office. Though contemporary critics were, to put it mildly, restrained in giving approval or praise of this type of film, the general audience was not. Britons in the 1930s went to the cinema not once but several times a week, enjoying, among other genres, film comedies produced in their country, comedies ofa kind which seemed to incorporate elements ofa specifically British tradition, making it a profitable and persistent genre of the British cinema. Consequently, one would expect a wealth of studies having dealt with nearly every important aspect ofthe genre by now, from the traditions it was based upon via types of comedies and actors' comic performance to the elements that gave it its distinctively British character. Surprisingly enough, film historiography neglected the film comedy for decades. In a way, film historians followed in the footsteps ofcontemporary critics who, if they chose not to ignore film comedy altogether, disparaged the genre as vulgar, synthetic and superficial, in short, not worth serious consideration. Instead, contemporary critical discourse called for a film that was art or committed to marketing national virtues, to projecting England, as the secretary of the Empire Marketing Board, Sir Stephen Tallents, had put it in 1932. And comedy was not held fit to meet these high hopes. It is only recently that the film comedies have come into focus. And this book is the most thorough investigation into the matter, concentrating on an period of growth for the British film industry in which, as David Sutton convincingly argues, British film comedy reached its maturity. Against the background of the wider context of British film culture in the first decades of the twentieth century, Sutton discusses existing theories on British film comedy and offers a definition of his own. To him, film comedy must be seen as part of a popular aesthetic, as the product of a mixed pedigree of entertainment forms rooted firmly not in middle, but in working -class culture. Pre-cinematic entertainment forms as the music -hall, the variety and revue - whose milieu had absorbed the new medium film in turn of the century Britain - provided film comedy with, among others, elements of the burlesque, the parody, of the non-narrative tradition, with forms of a popular culture oflaughter. The new sound cinema offered the means to tap into this extra-cinematic material, to combine nostalgia and modernity, thus to create a distinctively British film comedy, free to explore current issues of class, gender and sexuality as only cultural forms outside the high-brow culture can, connected to people's everyday lives, to forms of expression legible to the masses, in short, a true mass medium. The comedies released in the decade after 1929 (listed in the filmography on pages 246-282) are analyzed in four separate chapters, turning from working-class to middle-class comedy and then from female comedy to situation comedy. It is in this categorization that one might differ from the author most strongly, though it is true that each taxonomy...