‘Is it his war as well as hers?’ – the view from Ealing

Abstract

For Britain between 1939 and 1945, cinema became a crucial medium of propaganda, but in neutral Ireland its war-effort films could be shown, if at all, only in severely cut versions. The output of Ealing Studios, run by the fiercely patriotic Michael Balcon, was treated with particular severity by the Irish censor under the Emergency Powers Order. The 1944 Ealing film The Halfway House incorporates a response to this problem, and provides the article's main focus. One of its main characters is an Irish diplomat who defends his country's neutrality, but ends up by changing his stance; his scenes were edited out before the film was sent to Ireland, ensuring that it was exhibited there, while the full version made its polemical point in other markets. The episode is seen as characteristic of Ealing's Anglocentrism, which is counterbalanced, decades later, by the committed Irish work of Balcon's own grandson, Daniel Day-Lewis.

Keywords:

• Ealing Studios
• Second World War
• Michael Balcon
• censorship
• neutrality

Notes

 1. For an overview of the Ealing enterprise, and of the films, close to a hundred of them, made there in Balcon's time, see my Ealing Studios (1999).

 2. Michael Balcon, from an interview quoted in the BBC TV Omnibus programme on Ealing, 1986.

 3. Wills in That Neutral Island gives an extensive account of the workings of the Emergency Powers Order, in the context of – in the words of the book's subtitle – its ‘Cultural History of Ireland during the Second World War’. Cinema is referenced several times.

 4. 1 May 1942, Record 17006.

 5. 5 January 1944, Record 18463.

 6. Today's Cinema (British trade paper), 10 December 1943. Frustratingly, the file on San Demetrio London held in the Michael Balcon collection at the British Film Institute contains no correspondence related to this episode.

 7. The negotiations over San Demetrio are dealt with thoroughly in Kevin Rockett's Irish Film Censorship, a book to whose enterprise and scholarship I am much indebted. See 351, and notes on 458.

 8. Irish Times, 10 July 1944.

 9. Connacht Tribune, 22 January 1949.

10. See Tennyson Jesse, The Saga of ‘San Demetrio’.

11. The key post-war film is I See a Dark Stranger (1946), a successful comedy-drama directed by Frank Launder, in which Deborah Kerr plays a young Irishwoman converted from her wartime pro-German stance by the love of a good Englishman (Trevor Howard). A balanced account of the film, which is less schematic than it may sound, is given by Babington, Launder and Gilliat, 115–33. The 1955 film The Man who Never Was (20th Century Fox, but made in England by an English team, with Ronald Neame as director) includes an Irishman, played by Stephen Boyd, who comes from Dublin to London in mid-war on a spying mission and transmits messages to Berlin. This character has no equivalent in the real-life story on which the film is based, and understandably provoked resentful comment when it was shown in Ireland: see reviews in the Irish Times and The Irish Independent, both 2 April 1956. See also Lance Pettitt on Brian Desmond Hurst's Dangerous Moonlight (1941) in this special issue.

12. The Times, 29 May 1940.

13. 2 November 1944, Record 19081.

14. George Orwell made this point at the time. ‘Last night went to see Denis Ogden's play The Peaceful Inn. The most fearful tripe. The interesting point was that though the film was cast [i.e. set] in 1940, it contained no reference direct or indirect to the war’. Entry for 31 May 1940, from his Diaries, 247.

15. Ogden, The Peaceful Inn.

16. Despite his name and his Irish birth, McGrath regularly played very English characters, as in the Powell-Pressburger films The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and The Volunteer (both 1943), his best-known roles; even in The Halfway House, his accent is more English than Irish.

17. , Ealing Studios, 185–6.

18. See my article ‘Deserter or Honored Exile?’ Balcon had given Hitchcock his first chance as director, and produced many of his British films.

19. Kevin Rockett has suggested to me that by the start of 1945, with the end of the war in sight, censorship under the EPO may have been loosening up. This may be so, but it could never have gone as far as allowing these scenes from The Halfway House. The censor was still concerned to cut all combat references from this film, as from so many others before it, such as the radio broadcast giving news of the fall of Tobruk, which the characters listen to in the inn. The list of cuts was given on 14 June 1944: Reserve 6040.

20. ‘A remote inn in Wales where an escaped convict, a black marketeer, an R.A.F. officer, and an Irish diplomat meet in search of peace.’ Connacht Tribune, 3 March 1945. Pat McGrath is listed third among the cast.

21. Hill, in Cinema and Ireland, 160–4. This is part of a chapter by Hill, ‘Images of Violence’, in Rockett, Hill, and Gibbons, Cinema and Ireland, that covers a wider range of films.

22. Ealing's other post-war Irish production, Another Shore (1948), an apolitical comedy centred on a stereotyped Irish idler, had a similar lack of success.

23. Bridging the generations, Cecil Day-Lewis himself did one piece of work for his father-in-law's company, writing some voiceover material for its film of Dunkirk (1958); in the event only a few words of this were used, and he was uncredited. I have checked the records of the production, held in the Balcon Collection at the British Film Institute, to see whether there is by any chance any Irish element in Day-Lewis's unused input, but there is not, nor is there any such element anywhere in the film. Ealing takes care, in handling this archetypally patriotic subject, to include characters who stand, by casting and accent, for England, Scotland, and Wales, but there is no one from any part of Ireland.