Angus MacPhail's Frozen Credits: Film Authorship and Collaboration in British Middlebrow and Celebrity Culture

Abstract

This article, taking its cue from Charles Drazin's pioneering work, is the first extended analysis of the career of British screenwriter Angus MacPhail, described as one of the key figures who helped to lay the groundwork for the golden age of British cinema. MacPhail worked as scenario editor for producer Michael Balcon at the leading British studios Gainsborough, Gaumont-British and Ealing from the late 1920s to the late 1940s. The article considers MacPhail's work in relation to debates about authorship, collaboration and celebrity culture during this period. It explores his intellectual and cultural formation as a Cambridge undergraduate who studied for the newly established English Tripos during the early 1920s; and highlights MacPhail's ambivalent relationship to modernism, through his opposition to Virginia Woolf's reconfiguration of literary values during the 1920s, and his penchant for what Leonard Diepeveen has described as ‘mock modernism’. It goes on to analyse the circumscribed power and influence MacPhail exercised within the British studio system during the late 1920s to the late 1940s, before considering his career in relation to other key figures of this period such as Ivor Montagu and Elliot Stannard, and his relationship to British middlebrow culture. Finally, it explores how MacPhail's specialised, circumscribed focus on film writing set him apart from what Alexis Weedon describes as a new type of author-celebrity during this period, the emergent ‘transmedia storyteller’.