The Lasting Influence of the War on Postwar British Film

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

   PDF

2. Introduction: Don’t Mention the War

   1. Introduction: Don’t Mention the War

      • Michael W. Boyce

      Pages 1-7

3. Gender

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 9-9

      PDF

   2. The Power of Choice: Complicating Traditional Female Identity

      • Michael W. Boyce

      Pages 11-46

   3. British Masculinities: Duty, Confinement, and Stiff Upper Lips

      • Michael W. Boyce

      Pages 47-75

4. Genre

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 77-77

      PDF

   2. Toward a Reading of British Film Noir: Expatriates and Ancient Cities

      • Michael W. Boyce

      Pages 79-115

5. Reframing National Narratives

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 117-117

      PDF

   2. Adapting Shakespeare: Once More unto the Breach

      • Michael W. Boyce

      Pages 119-141

   3. Adapting Dickens: Orphans, Parents, and Postwar Britain

      • Michael W. Boyce

      Pages 143-174

   4. Conclusions: Going Home

      • Michael W. Boyce

      Pages 175-177

6. Back Matter

   Pages 179-212

   PDF

Many of the most celebrated British films of the immediate post-war period (1945-55) seem to be occupied with "getting on" with life and offering distraction for postwar audiences. It is the time of the celebrated Ealing comedies, Hue and Cry (1946) and Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), Dickens adaptations, and the most ambitious projects of the Archers. While the war itself is rarely mentioned in these films, the war and the conditions of postwar society lie at the heart of understanding them. While various studies have focused on lesser known realist films, few consider how deeply and completely the war affected British film. Michael W. Boyce considers the preoccupation of these films with profound anxieties and uncertainties about what life was going to be like for postwar Britain, what roles men and women would play, how children would grow up, even what it meant - and what it still means today - to be British.

• Britain
• Charles Dickens
• cities
• culture
• expectation
• film
• gender
• genre
• Great Britain
• Hamlet
• identity
• stars
• tradition
• William Shakespeare

"With scrupulous and brilliant close analysis of key films and stars, Boyce reveals and complicates a new era of 'Britishness' in the immediate postwar years, one irrevocably marked by war trauma. In remarkably clear prose, The Lasting Influence of the War on Postwar British Film illustrates a social and historical unconscious that has largely been ignored yet emerges as a crucial period in the history of British cinema and nation (re)building." - Dina Smith, associate professor of English, Drake University

'Like Raymond Durgnat's and Charles Barr's exceptional studies of English cinema, Michael Boyce's work combines highly informed and nuanced cultural commentary with elegant close readings of individual films. Boyce offers surprising insights on a great many topics, from the strained rhetoric of accommodation and the beleaguered assertions of resistance dramatized in such 'conservative' films as Brief Encounter and In Which We Serve to the oblique, searching commentary on children displaced from their homes during the war in the adaptations of Dickens novels. Again and again, Boyce overturns received ideas about performers and genres in the austere, post-war environment, and does so in a manner that is witty, self-questioning, and alive to narrative pleasures of every sort.' - George Toles, University of Manitoba

MICHAEL W. BOYCEAssistant Professor and Chair of the English and Film Studies Program at Booth University College, Canada.

Policies and ethics