Introduction

The forties are considered the golden age of the British film industry, though that reputation rests on a very small sample of films: The Way Ahead, San Demetrio-London, In Which We Serve, Fires Were Started, Millions Like Us, Henry V, The Way to the Stars, Brief Encounter, Passport to Pimlico, Kind Hearts and Coronets, Whisky Galore, and The Third Man. At the time these films and a few more like them were enthusiastically adopted by the film critics as evidence that at last the British film industry had come of age and could produce films of which to be proud. Their defining characteristics (with the exception of The Third Man) were a concentration on authentically British subjects, and a realistic approach which owed a debt to the British documentary movement of the thirties. Dilys Powell in her influential pamphlet, Films Since 1939, wrote in praise of ‘the new movement in the British cinema: the movement towards documentary truth in the entertainment film’,1 and along with other enthusiasts for the new realism, such as Sidney Bernstein, Michael Balcon, Richard Winnington, and Roger Manvell, she welcomed these films as a progressive force which would wean people away from their dependence on unhealthy fantasies and help them to become more worthy and responsible citizens.