Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Biography and Career Notes
- Introduction: ‘Two on a Tandem’? Dearden and Relph: Authorship and British Cinema
- 1 Apprenticeship and Beyond: Comedy Traditions and Film Design
- 2 The Formative Period: The War Years and the Ethos of Ealing
- 3 Dramas of Masculine Adjustment I: Tragic Melodramas
- 4 Dramas of Masculine Adjustment II: Men in Action
- 5 Dramas of Social Tension and Adjustment
- 6 Ethical Dilemmas
- 7 The International Years
- Appendix: ‘Inside Ealing’: Michael Relph
- Filmography
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction: ‘Two on a Tandem’? Dearden and Relph: Authorship and British Cinema
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Biography and Career Notes
- Introduction: ‘Two on a Tandem’? Dearden and Relph: Authorship and British Cinema
- 1 Apprenticeship and Beyond: Comedy Traditions and Film Design
- 2 The Formative Period: The War Years and the Ethos of Ealing
- 3 Dramas of Masculine Adjustment I: Tragic Melodramas
- 4 Dramas of Masculine Adjustment II: Men in Action
- 5 Dramas of Social Tension and Adjustment
- 6 Ethical Dilemmas
- 7 The International Years
- Appendix: ‘Inside Ealing’: Michael Relph
- Filmography
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
[Dearden's] films are decent, empty and plodding and his association with Michael Relph is a fair representative of the British preference for bureaucratic cinema. It stands for the underlining of obvious meanings, for the showy resort to ‘realism’, for the middle-brow ticking off of ‘serious’ subjects, for the lack of cinematic sensibility, for the acceptance of all the technical shortcomings of British productions, for the complacent description of problems and the resolute refusal to adopt critical intelligence for dealing with them.
(David Thomson 1980: 137)Until we have a more detailed picture of the roles of direction within the collaborative and hierarchical interactions that constitute film production, the figure of the director, for all the critical value assigned to it, will remain something of an enigma.
(Peter Hutchings 2000: 188)The films of Basil Dearden and his producing partner Michael Relph have for too long been treated as exemplars of a safe, unimaginative and essentially dull British cinema. So, while problem pictures like Frieda(1947) and Victim(1961) have been acknowledged for their worthy liberal statements, the stifling requirements of balance and fair play, coupled with a perceived cautious cinematic treatment, are seen to deaden and defeat any effectiveness such films might offer. In the early 1960s, when a new generation of thrusting young critics set out to proclaim a cinema of auteurs, it was largely on Hollywood that they set their sights, resolutely turning their backs on their own national film industry, which was dismissed out of hand as inept and completely lacking in any artistic sensibility or merit.
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- Information
- The Cinema of Basil Dearden and Michael Relph , pp. 1 - 13Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2009