ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the tropes of naming and interpellation in British cinema of the post-war period by taking two films of the early 1950s, Basil Dearden’s The Blue Lamp (1950) and Robert Hamer’s The Long Memory (1953) to build a comparison with the late-1940s films that dominate the discussion in this book. This chapter shows that the concerns with gender, sexuality, and nationality explored in films of the immediate post-war period remain relevant as the decade changes. The films in this chapter reflect on multiple issues in post-war Britain in which both demobilised soldiers and their families needed to adjust ‘back to normal’, returning to once familiar relationships and social situations which now appear as uncanny rather than ‘normal’. This chapter analyses the queer mock family formed by Dirk Bogarde’s character in The Blue Lamp and looks at uneasy social ‘calls’ and the presentations of women as distorted mirrors for male national subjects in Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947) and Bernard Knowles’ The Magic Bow (1946). The chapter focusses on the problematic of reconstructing the family and renegotiating gender roles and national and sexual identities, which is a significant feature of these films.
