The National Council of Public Moral was a body, which compromised of organizations that did not like the cinema, pushed for a state enquiry on its effects on the public, namely crime. The enquiry gave the industry its over all approval.
The industry gained respectability by building cinema halls and when in 1925 the King and Queen attended the Marble Arch Pavilion to watch their first film. The cinema then began to attract people from all walks of life and the middle classes began to get involved in the industry.
The economic factors
Filmmakers found it very difficult to finance their projects at first, but as the respectability of the cinema grew prejudices that were associated, were forgotten. Financers began to see the profit on the horizon. The idea was to build theatre halls all over Britain. The War caused the steady growth of the cinema theatres to fall because of the tax issued on Imported Goods in 1915 and the Entertainment Tax in 1916.
British Cinema and the rest of the world
Although all this change was happening in Britain it was to slow compared to the rest of Europe and America. Films were being produced by Hollywood and the British could not compete. By 1924 nearly every British studio was closed. The very existence of the British cinema Industry only became an economic possibility with the passing of Cinematograph Films Act in 1927, which required distributors and exhibitors to distribute an annual increasing number of British-made films. This was to try and protect the industry from the competition. Before that 95 per cent of films on British screens were American. These films were usually popular with audiences and cheaper for exhibitors to rent than British made films.
Hollywood versus British Cinema Industry
Although cinema attendance was high in the 1930s, and quality films were being produced e.g. ‘Sally in Our Alley’ (1931) and ‘Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Thirty Nine Steps’ (1935). British films only accounted for 30 per cent of releases in any one year in the 1930s, profits was not being made by British establishments. Hollywood however was growing in strength
The British Film Industry tried to compete in the American market through the production of ‘ The Private Life of Henry VIII’ in the 1930s; a joint American and British production; Richard Norton the producer and Alexander Korda the American distributor, were very successful, The film was made for £94,000, the film broke into the American market and took £200,000. Convinced by its achievement, producers attempted to capture the American market. This was a failure as the cultural divide was too great as stated by the American film critic Richard Griffith: “ The audiences which came to these small theatres were city slum dwellers, audiences small town proletarians, farmers and cowboys. Even if they could understand the West End accent, which was more than doubtful, they could not understand the films”- ‘The Finest Years British Cinema of the 1940’s’.
The boom of film production did not last. Korda London Films made a loss of £330 000 in 1936. Gaumont – British also in 1937 reported a trading debt of
£100 000. By 1937 only 20 production companies remained. The industry was left in scandal and left a debt for those that had invested in it.
World War Two
During the war cinema attendances were at a record levels and confidence in the British Cinema Industry had never been higher. The War loosened the hold of Hollywood on Britain. It gave British producers a subject that American films could not compete with. For example Charlie Chaplin’s first all-dialogue feature, ‘The Great Dictator, was released in October of 1940, amidst Hitler’s greatest triumphs in Europe. Staunchly antifascist, the movie satirizes Hitler and his allies, most notably Mussolini. Very soon, all major studios became involved in producing anti-Natzi films. Another example is ‘To be or Not to Be’ (1942), said to be one of the greatest anti Natzi comedies made during the war years. One of the most convincing portrayals of how civilians were affected in the War was William Wyler’s ‘Mrs Miniver’ film loosely based on Jan Struther’s book.
After the War
By contrast with the despair of the interwar period, the late 1940s showed a positive attitude towards cinema the belief that film had been accepted as an art form and British Cinema was now valued as a serious and respect –worthy national cinema. This optimism took the form of the foundation of the British Film Academy in 1946, the launching of the Penguin Film Review in 1946, the revitalization of the British Film Institute and surge of book publishing on British Cinema issues.
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References
Kevin Williams (1998), Get me a Murder Day A History of Mass Communications in Britain, Arnold.
Roy Armes (1978), A Critical History of British Cinema, Martin Secker & Warburg Limited.
Jarek Kupsc (1989), The History of Cinema for Beginners, Writers and Readers Ltd.
Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (2000), British Cinema, Past and Present, Routledge.
Charles Drazin (1998), The Finest Years British Cinema of the 1940s, Andre Deutsch Limited.
