Everyone loves (or hates) a lord: the aristocracy in British interwar cinema

ABSTRACT

There was a significant number and proportion of interwar British films with aristocrats among their major protagonists. The predominance of the romantic drama during the period of ‘silent’ films gave way to comedies and musicals with the coming of sound. With respect to the societal context, although there was a continuation of an overall decline of the wealth and political power of the aristocrat class in society, the class retained considerable social and cultural importance and even greater coverage in popular media. Aristocrat heroes who put their lives in danger were mostly confined to costume films, and it was lower-class females who saved or redeemed the aristocrat male whose courage frequently took the form of his standing up to his family’s opposition to his romance with a lower-class female. Aristocrat villains sometimes signaled the decline or degeneracy of the class, the males by their madness and the females by their immorality. The most positive representations of aristocrats were those who worked, who mixed freely with other classes, and adapted to modernity. The divergent representations of the aristocracy were the work of writers and filmmakers who were predominantly from the middle class.

KEYWORDS:

• Aristocracy
• heroes
• villains
• genres

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Notes

1. The 1934 survey by Rowson (1936) found that the majority of cinemas were located in working-class industrial towns and that the great majority of cinema admissions were in the cheap seats. The nation-wide survey by Mayer (1948), carried out in the summer of 1943, found that respondents in the lower income, lower education and lower occupation categories were the most frequent cinema goers. See also Richards (1994).

2. Gifford’s catalogue of British films is an invaluable resource. I used the 1987 edition. For many of the films that I briefly mention I supplemented Gifford’s one sentence summaries with reviews from the contemporary press, trade press and film journals. I was able to view most of the films that I write about in detail. Where those films are lost or unavailable for viewing I cite my sources.

3. On the importance of comedies in 1930s British cinema see Sutton (2000).

4. When the aristocracy made somewhat of a ‘come-back’ in the ‘heritage’ films and television series in the 1980s and 1990s, it was the historical aristocracy, including from the recent vantage point the interwar aristocracy, rather than the contemporary aristocracy that was the major subject of interest. This contrasts with the interwar years when most films with aristocrat protagonists focused on the then contemporary aristocracy.

5. Platt writes that although the ‘aristocracies of fiction’ declined in number, the aristocracy survived in film and television, but here he restricts his attention to costume melodramas, the Gainsborough films made during and after World War II and the later television series.

6. A number of aristocrat interwar films were based on pre-World War I novels and plays, but there were also many based on post-World War I novels and plays. On the large number of literary adaptations in interwar British cinema see McFarlane (1986), Bamford (1999, 73–84) for the 1920s, and Shafer (1997, 3–4) for the 1930s.

7. For example, Elinor Glyn was the daughter of a civil engineer, Marie Corelli (Mary Mackay) was the daughter of a minor author, M. E. Braddon was the daughter of a solicitor, and P. G. Wodehouse was the son of a colonial magistrate.

8. Among the producers Michael Balcon was the son of Jewish immigrants and began work as an apprentice to a jeweler, Alexander Korda was a Jewish-Hungarian immigrant and had worked in journalism, and Herbert Wilcox had sold American films to exhibitors. Among the prominent directors Michael Powell was the son of a hotelier and first worked in a bank, Maurice Elvey had worked as a kitchen hand and hotel pageboy, Graham Cutts trained as a marine engineer, Tom Walls was the son of a plumber, Victor Saville was the son of an art dealer, and John Baxter had worked in provincial music hall as a performer and as a tour manager.

9. Extensive discussions of The Passionate Adventure are to be found in (Napper 2015, 180–183; Gledhill 2003, 141–144).

10. Another version under the title The Story of Shirley York was released in 1948.

11. There were two American film versions in 1912 and 1915, the latter with Theda Bara.

12. Chibnall (2007) writes that Lazybones can be read as a comment on the dependency of the British film industry on Hollywood finance, which was resented by its director Michael Powell (223).

13. Wedding Rehearsal was number five on Film Weekly’s list of the Best British Films of 1933. Film Weekly, 4 May 1934, 9 (James 2010, 215).

14. For the stage and earlier film versions I am depending on contemporary reviews that are to be found in the site www.robertbuchanan.co.uk.

15. One of the members of the British Board of Film Censors opposed this film’s production because ‘it shows our foreign affairs in the hands of a hopeless, pompous fool’, but it had already been approved by another member (Richards 1981, 110).

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Stephen Sharot

Stephen Sharot is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. His articles on popular cinema have been published in Screen, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Journal of American Studies, Journal of Popular Culture, and Journal of Gender Studies. His book Love and Marriage Across Social Classes in American Cinema (2017) is published by Palgrave-Macmillan.