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ABSTRACT
This paper examines the development of British film stars and fan club culture during the mid to late 1940s, through studio-sanctioned fan or star-produced magazines for the official fan clubs of British actors Jean Kent, Anne Crawford, Patricia Roc and Richard Attenborough and the British fan club for American actor Deanna Durbin. These previously unexamined resources are contextualised with contemporaneous newspaper articles, novels, film magazines andindustry publications that discuss the British star system and film star fandom. Combined, these artefacts raise prescient issues around the uncredited but essential star labour that nurtured and maintained stars’ brands, star capital and fan followings and around stars as signifiers of Britishness, wealth and status during a period of socio-cultural and film industry upheaval in austerity Britain . By considering the labour and ideologies at the heart of British film star personae and film star fan culture at its zenith, this paper broadens understandings of the British film industry and its relationship with Hollywood, and offers valuable new insights into film fandom more generally, revealing a more complex, differentiated culture of British film fan consumption and authority, British star construction and dissemination, studio control, reflexivity and economic function, than commonly assumed.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Referring to Dyer (Citation1998) and Gledhill (Citation1991), MacNab (Citation1993, p. 142) notes: ‘stars are ‘an economic necessity … a production value … an insurance value … a trademark value’, and the British film industry, some noticeable exceptions apart, has struggled to ‘manufacture’ them.
2. In February 1948, British industry publication The Screen Writer observed that along with government restrictions, and comparatively small budgets, in the British film industry, the key difficulty ‘preventing the building of studios’, was the ‘shortage of star material’ exacerbated by predatory practices by Hollywood studios: ‘The few star-sized players we had were soon mopped up by the rapacious film machines. Rank has a charm school from which, at intervals, interesting new people emerge. But from its inception to the time of writing I have not seen any sensational discoveries’. (p. 30)Earlier discussion of star poaching can be found in a November 1946 article in American industry publication Variety which draws attention to ‘Rank’s Curb on H’Wood Raiding’ through ‘Term Contracts for Top Talent’ ‘with the aim of heading off a threatened grab of British pix talent by American film companies.’ The piece continues ‘[the] past inability of UK producers to hold talent on the upswing stemmed from their financial insecurity’ and quotes Rank himself, criticising ‘American companies’ who ‘frequently obtained stars whose reputation were made in British films by offering them 10 times their British pay.’ (p. 9).
3. As Wood (Citation1947, p. 320) observed ‘during the closing stages of the war Rank had met many American soldiers and talked to them about films. They told him what they considered were the defects of British films, that the girls in them were uninteresting, the male actors effeminate, the delivery of the dialogue too clipped, and the pace of the films too slow, and that generally speaking, British productions were skimped and cheese-paring by Hollywood standards.’
4. Earlier instances can be found in ‘Unique “Fan” Club’ (Motography Citation1916); ‘The Bushman Club’ (Motion Picture News Citation1918) or ‘Reel Folk’ in Mutual’s (Reel Life Citation1915).
5. For example, see oral accounts on the Women In Publishing: An Oral History project website.
6. A copy of which is held at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum Archive in Exeter, UK.
7. As Barbas (Citation2001, p. 113) notes, ‘Unlike casual fans, who wrote an occasional letter to an actor or sometimes perused movie magazines, the fan club member made a commitment, both to the group and to the honoured star. Even the least involved club member was expected to pay dues, help with the club journal, and, if the fan lived near club headquarters, to attend meetings. Fans were also encouraged to help with annual membership drives by urging friends to join the group’.
8. Examples of which can be found in Picture-Play article ‘When Fans Get Together’ (Fohn Citation1921).
9. For example, a Stapleton Citation1945 Picturegoer article entitled ‘Ladies or Dames?’ makes explicit these distinctions between British and American screen femininity; with ‘Ladies’ being positively cast as the skilled British ‘actresses’ (such as Phyllis Calvert who is pictured in the feature) and ‘Dames’ being derogatively cast as ‘stars’ who are unladylike and cannot act so instead rely upon their glamour (the given pictorial example being 20th Century Fox star and pin-up favourite, Betty Grable.) p. 11.
10. In a similar vein, MacNab cites Attenborough’s contemporary, Dirk Bogarde’s weariness at ‘the inanities of judging Beauty Queens, opening swimming pools in civic centres, giving bouquets to the most Glamorous Grannies of Hull or Gipsy Hill.’ (Citation1993, p. 144).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Ellen Wright
Dr Ellen Wright is VC2020 Senior Lecturer in Cinema and Television History in the Cinema and Television History Institute at De Montfort University, Leicester. She has taught film studies, media studies, and photographic theory, and specializes in the representation of gender in the leisure industries, consumer culture, and broader social contexts, surrounding classical Hollywood cinema. Her academic publications include ‘Spectacular Bodies: The Swimsuit, Sexuality and Hollywood,’ in Sport in History 35, no. 3 (2015), and ‘Having her Cheesecake and Eating It: Performance, Professionalism and the Politics of the Gaze in the Pin-Up Self-Portraiture and Celebrity of Bunny Yeager’ Feminist Media Histories Special Edition ‘Histories of Celebrity’ (Fall, 2016). She has a regular podcast on the intersections of gender, sexuality and performance in film and theatre called Here’s Looking At You, available on iTunes and she is currently researching the phenomenon of Hollywood Homes.
Phyll Smith
Phyll Smith researches and teaches in the Department of Film Television and Media at the University of East Anglia. His work investigates the regulation of cinema and other media and the regulation of their audiences, through the cultural politics and archival objects that shape the narratives of cinemagoing. He is particularly interested in the cultural economy of fringe media texts (serials, non-fiction film, fan-texts, grey publications) and the class and gender politics of their audiences, seen through the material culture of cinema, particularly ancillary or unofficial media (by)products. His work includes a biography of political activist and pamphleteer Tom Wintringham The Last English Revolutionary (LSE/Sussex Academic, 2012); ‘This is Where We Came In: the economics of unruly audiences from Serial houses to Grind houses’ in Grindhouse Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street (Bloomsbury, 2016); and (co-written with Ellen Wright) ‘Coming Attractions: Tijuana bibles and the pornographic reimagining of Hollywood ‘ in Mapping Movie Magazines (Palgrave, 2019).