If you know the name “Ealing Studios,” chances are it makes you think of a string of astonishing comedies the British studio cranked out in the decade or so after World War II, usually starring Alec Guinness, including such essentials as The Lavender Hill Mob (1951, seen above and airing this Saturday, September 10), The Ladykillers (1955), Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), The Man in the White Suit (1951), and Whiskey Galore! (1949). If you haven’t seen any of those, put them at the top of your “to watch” list pronto! However, there’s much, much more to the Ealing name than most Americans ever saw, and only in recent years has it been possible to really appreciate the scope of its output.
I could easily turn this into a top 10 or top 20 list of Ealing titles, but instead I’d like to touch on what makes its output so appealing and point out a few titles that fell through the cracks but are well worth seeking out. Ealing Studios is actually the world’s oldest operating film studio, with its current facilities open since 1931 and still in use today. However, when you think of an Ealing film that really refers to its output from 1930 to 1959, spanning many genres and styles. What becomes obvious after you’ve seen even a couple of Ealing films is the large family of familiar names and faces you keep bumping into, with memorable actors shifting back and forth between supporting and leading roles at will. One good way to get your feet wet if you haven’t seen it already is the sole bona fide horror film from Ealing, Dead of Night (1945), which is most famous for starring Michard Redgrave but also offers a showcase for regular players like Mervyn Johns, Sally Ann Howes, Googie Withers, Naunton Wayne, Basil Radford, and Ralph Michael, who would pop up in other titles like the superb war drama The Captive Heart (1946) and the hilarious Passport to Pimlico (1949). However, one great way to see several Ealing key players at their best is the woefully underrated 1945 thriller, Pink String and Sealing Wax, which offers a rare chance to see Googie Withers as the main star.
Here she pulls out all the stops as a Victorian femme fatale who uses her manipulative wiles to lure an assistant chemist into providing the poison she wants to use against her abusive pub owner hubby. In addition to featuring plum parts for Howes and Johns, this was the first solo feature for director Robert Hamer, who had earlier excelled with the haunted mirror tale in Dead of Night and would go on to direct Kind Hearts and Coronets, 1947′s It Always Rains on Sunday (another wonderful Ealing thriller with Withers), and a 1960 comedy classic often mistaken for Ealing, School for Scoundrels. Unfortunately finding Pink String and Sealing Wax can be a bit tricky in the United States if you don’t keep a very close eye on TV listings, but if you have a multi-region Blu-ray player, there’s a spectacular restored edition available in the U.K. that’s well worth seeking out.
Speaking of multi-region players, if you have a DVD player that’s Region 2 compatible, there’s been a major godsend for Ealing fans over the past few years thanks to the label Network. Since 2013 they’ve issued fourteen separate two-disc sets in their Ealing Studios Rarities line, each containing four films never released on home video before (and most unseen on any screens of any kind since their initial releases). It’s an eye-opening experience to say the least as you get to sample everything from car-racing dramas to musicals to melodramas, including a hefty sampler of more obscure titles made in the ’30s during the leadership of Basil Dean. For example there’s an early adaptation of The Water Gipsies (1932) with Ann Todd or the very first sound version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (1932), dropping that extra “the” from the original novel’s title, with Arthur Wontner as Sherlock Holmes.
It’s a dark, stylish adaptation with some surprisingly ambitious imagery at times; there’s never been a complete, watchable version of this in America in any form, so Holmes buffs should hunt this one down. Actor Ian Hunter (who later went on to appear as King Richard in the classic 1938 version of The Adventures of Robin Hood) makes for a sturdier Watson than usual and actually gets more screen time and dialogue than the main star, which is a nice change of pace among other versions of this oft-adapted novel.
Ealing Studios had become a significant comedic force by 1953 when it unleashed one of its strangest and least-seen later farces, a real oddity called Meet Mr. Lucifer (1953). It’s well known that Hollywood was in a state of complete panic at the time over the encroaching menace of television, but nothing — not even Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957) — compares to the hostility to the glass teat you’ll find in this film. Here the boob tube is quite literally an instrument of the devil as a television gifted to one retiree causes headaches, mayhem, and misery among apartment dwellers, all instigated by Old Scratch himself embodied by none other than a pre-My Fair Lady Stanley Holloway, himself an Ealing vet with titles like The Lavender Hill Mob and The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953) under his belt. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Holloway dressed up in theatrical devil drag laughing about the cathode misfortune he’s heaping on the human race, and on top of that you’ll find a wild roster of character actors including Ernest Thesiger, Kay Kendall, and Peggy Cummins. I’m still not sure I didn’t hallucinate the whole thing.
However, if there’s one Ealing rarity worth seeking out among all these, I’d have to give the prize to an unsung little masterpiece: Frieda (1947), a remarkable study in prejudice and compassion made as Europe was still recovering from the devastation of World War II and former enemies were trying to learn to coexist in peace again. Our title character (played by Mai Zetterling) is a German woman who helps English officer David Farrar (the libido-triggering Mr. Dean from the same year’s Black Narcissus) escape from a prison camp.
In the stylish opening sequence that could have stepped out of a German Expressionist film, the two are married in a bombed-out church and make their way to England where she can now possess a valid passport. However, some of the village townspeople and even David’s family are less than receptive to having a German in their midst near the end of the war. When Frieda’s Nazi-sympathizing brother shows up, she finds herself in an even more difficult position.
If that sounds like a typical wartime drama in narrative terms, Frieda is anything but. The performances are superb across the board, with the deeply sympathetic Zetterling (who would keep acting well into the ’90s with Nicolas Roeg’s The Witches) and the always excellent Farrar (who retired far too young) supported by welcome faces like Glynis Johns and trump card Flora Robson, who gets some fascinating shading as the initially intolerant Aunt Eleanor. However, the real star here is director Basil Dearden, one of the very best Ealing directors who was responsible for the incredible framing story scenes in Dead of Night and also directed The Captive Heart, the atmospheric fantasy anthology The Halfway House (1944), and the riveting cop drama The Blue Lamp (1950), among many others. You don’t hear Dearden’s name thrown around much despite a fine Eclipse boxed set of DVDs from Criterion several years ago, a fine representation of his post-Ealing work including Sapphire (1959), The League of Gentlemen (1960), Victim (1961), and All Night Long (1962).
Sort of the British answer to Anthony Mann, Basil Dearden never seemed to make a bad film, or even an uninteresting one. You can find his skill with balancing gorgeous visuals and potent storytelling in full force in all of his Ealing work and this film in particular, easily placing him among such other vaunted Ealing directors as Hamer and Charles Crichton.
Hopefully this has been enough to encourage you to keep an eye out for the Ealing name, be it on TCM or browsing around for a video choice for the evening. Even when you dig deeply into the vaults there’s always something else to discover, and the more you watch, the more you’ll want to explore.