ABSTRACT
The tendency of middlebrow culture to blur boundaries was one of the main charges levelled against it by critics in the interwar years. The boundaries across which middlebrow culture trespassed were not limited to those of culture and medium; they were also to do with space and time. Since the 1930s, the suburbs have been widely understood to be the middlebrow space par excellence. The film received mixed reviews and some reports suggest that its distribution was patchy. George Elvin, of the Association of Cinematograph Technicians, claimed that it was not shown by the major cinema chains in Britain because they tended to avoid films that threatened their interests. The Ealing films, with their wordy emphasis on the rational discussion of time problems among collections of highly articulate but tweedily restrained characters, suggest a firmly middle-class version of middlebrow cinematic taste.
