Cinema, propaganda and national identity: British film and the Second World War

Abstract

By common consent among film critics and historians, the Second World War is regarded as a ‘golden age’ for British cinema. Not only was it the period when the cinema as a social institution was at its most popular, but it was also a time when British films found greater success with both critics and audiences than ever before. ‘Everyone recognises now that there has been an extraordinary renaissance in British feature-film production since about 1940,’ Roger Manvell remarked immediately after the war.1 Although the number of British feature films produced annually dropped in comparison to the 1930s, due to the closure of studios and the recruitment of industry personnel into the services, commentators such as Manvell perceived an increase in the quality of films produced. Just as the nation’s health improved due to food rationing, so too did the health of British cinema. The profligate expenditure of producers like Alexander Korda in the 1930s became undesirable under the austerity regime of the war years; in its place, British cinema was deemed to have discovered a new aesthetic of sober, responsible realism, derived in large measure from the documentary movement. It was a time when a genuinely British national cinema was seen to have emerged, one that dealt with the current realities of British life, and particularly with the various processes of social change brought about by the impact of war.