The Good Companions

Let’s Be Happy

The Tommy Steele Story

Rock You Sinners

After the Ball

These Dangerous Years

Davy

Seen in the context of the mid-, approaching late, 1950s, the British musical film presents what can only be described as a bland response to the confluence of social change when the tectonic plates of domestic life were skidding beneath the nation’s feet. Change seemed to be everywhere, in a country that, remarkably, had only recently disposed of its ration books (meat was the last commodity to be restricted, in 1954), but the country’s severe housing problems, exacerbated by the slum properties that proliferated throughout the country during the Depression of the 1930s, and the war-shattered buildings that scarred London and other cities, persisted as a grim reminder of what the country had been through.

The social whirl so favoured and promulgated through to the end of the decade and beyond by Herbert Wilcox and Anna Neagle was so entrenched in the British cinemagoer’s expectation of what films were that nothing seemed to threaten its continuance, even though Mr and Mrs Wilcox did their bit in recognising that the landscape beyond the studio floor had altered. Their trick was to preserve the status quo by acknowledging, as if out of the corners of their eyes, shades of a perplexing modernity that they had no hope of representing. They spoke, as it were, for the Opposition, so desperately off-piste that they seemed to suggest that the star of their These Dangerous Years might even be a teenager.

Teenagers, of course, had much to answer for, having been invented (and in America, too) only in the mid-1940s before becoming an identifiable, viable reality in 1950s Britain. Their relevance to economic prosperity was recognised, apparent from an awakened interest in teen fashions in a society that for decades had forced British men to wear distressingly unattractive apparel. Trousers out, jeans in. The sales of sheet music (unrivalled since the age of the parlour song) declined as sales of gramophone records sold to teenagers soared. Throughout the country, the listening booth was a direct call to the teenage market, a place of refuge, sanctuary.