The Media Studies Conference 2008
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BRITISH CINEMA INSTITUTIONS
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oth Ealing and Hammer studios made considerable contributions to the
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British film industry. They can be compared to Hollywood studios with their influential heads of production and repertory company of directors, actors
and creative personnel. In their different ways they represent the peak of British filmmaking in the years that followed World War 11. They can be said to be unmistakably British, painting a "picture of England" between the late 1930s (the "Golden age of British Cinema") and the early 1970s when British Cinema was near collapse. They succeeded in attracting audiences who were drawn to their distinctive styles of screenwriting, production design and performance. Study of these studios is particularly relevant to AS Film Studies FM2 British and American Film (WJEC)
• Section A Producers and Audiences • Section B British Film Topics Genre: Comedy or Horror • Section B British Film Topics Production Company: Ealing Studios
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HAMMER STUDIOS
EALING STUDIOS Studio closure
1955
1973
Head of production
Sir Michael Salcon
Sir James Carreras
Regular Directors
Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Alexander Mackendrick Charles Frend, Robert Hamer, Harry Watt
Terence Fisher, Freddie Francis, Peter Sasdy, John Gilling
Themes
Small enterprises take on large businesses. Traditional values are preserved; class differences overcome through cooperation and sense of communit . Sex is absent.
The weak are destroyed by authoritative masculine figures. Communities fractured. Female characters are a sexual threat.
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Mostly X certificates
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aling Studios wa no
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This small studio on Ealing Green, West London epitomised a strong sense of community, a cooperative spirit and a set of traditional values. The "family" atmosphere of the films was underlined by many of the employees who lived nearby and gathered to drink in the Red Lion public house over the road. The plaque left by Balcon in 1955 sums up the ethos: "Here, during a quarter of a century, were made many films projecting Britain and the British character'
The Formation of Ealing Studios 1907
First Ealing studio under Will Barker
1931
Associated Talking Pictures (ATP) built the studio at Ealing, equipped to make sound films. Basil Dean, owner of ATP, took over from Barker
1938
British Film industry in crisis. Several studios closed down. The Government responded by revising the quota system that had been devised to protect British films. American producers such as MGM set up studios in Britain where they made "transatlantic" films with American stars and British technicians. Michael Balcon, who had been MGM's head of production, resigned and joined Dean as Head of Production
1944
Ealing came to an agreement with J Arthur Rank that guaranteed top billing for all Ealing films whilst still maintaining creative control. Rank put up half the finance, the rest coming from the National Provincial Bank and Courtaulds
Michael Balcon
M
ichael Balcon, in his position as head of Ealing Studios, was a key figure
in the emergence of a British national cinema that was represented by
realistic settings and characters who restrained their emotions. In a 1931
article about the distinctive nature of British films he referred to "making pictures which express England". Stephanie Muir May 2008
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•
He described Ealing as "The studio with the team spirit" and saw his role as "keeping his finger on the pulse of the organisation" and employed a "repertory company" of actors and permanent creative staff that made an average of five films a year on modest budgets of £120,000 to £200,000.
•
He believed that British cinema had both a social and a political role to play "clearly the need is great for a projection of the true Britain to the rest of the world". This belief extended to the protection of the British home market and opposition to large impersonal enterprises and American cultural domination.
•
He remained head of production until 1955.
THE WAR FILMS
T
he Second World War had a big impact on British cinema. In the early days all cinemas were closed because of the threat of air raids; there was increased censorship, personnel were conscripted, studios were
requisitioned and photographic materials and equipment were restricted. However politicians soon realised that films were of great value as propaganda, and could make important contributions to the war effort and national morale. There were fewer films made, but their quality greatly improved. Cinemas were re-opened and cinema admissions rose. •
Ealing was one of the three major film studios to continue production during the War. It played an important role making films designed to boost the country's morale.
•
Its approach increasingly focussed on realism. In 1942 Salcon brought in Alberto Cavalcanti, a Brazilian who was to exert great influence on the development of a documentary drama style. Cavalcanti was followed by other documentary filmmakers from the Crown Film Unit, an organisation set up within the Government's Ministry of Information.
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Went the Day Well? Alberto Cavalcanti 1942 Ealing Studios
"People of the kindest character, such as the people in that small English village, as soon as the War touches them, become complete monsters" (Cavalcanti)
Went the Day Well? was made when Britain faced invasion. The message of the film was"Be on your guard. The enemy could be someone you Jeast expect" The setting for the film, a cosy English village in wartime, could be seen to stand for Britain itself under attack. â&#x20AC;˘
The villagers, especially the women, behave in a very "unBritish" way, discovering an uncharacteristic brutality within them. "For once the English people are shown as capable of individual and concentrated resourcefulness in a fight and not merely steady in disaster... The essential virtue of the film is its expression of an English tradition: the tradition of the rural community, self contained... stiJl drawing strength from the past, still adding to its own experience to the common store of village history... At last it seems, we are learning to make films with our own native material" (Dilys Powell Sunday Times)
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The Cruel Sea Charles Frend 1953 Ealing Studios
'The heroes are the men, the heroines are the ships, and the villain is the cruel sea."
The 50s were seen as a "new Elizabethan era" but there was also nostalgia for Britain's "finest hour". The Cruel Sea was a big commercial success in 1953 reminding its audience of the horror of the war which had ended eight years before. â&#x20AC;˘
The film examines the damage that has been inflicted on Britain both emotionally and psychologically. At the same time the image of the War was being reconstructed as a male province. The positive and energetic roles played by women in films such as Went the Day well? were forgotten, as women were reduced to either waiting for their men or making cocoa.
â&#x20AC;˘
Unlike the films made during the war, the characters respond to situations with some emotion. The decisions that the characters have to make are shown to give rise to misgivings and anxieties.
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EALING COMEDIES UReal people in impossible situations" "We were middle class people brought up with middle class backgrounds and rather conventional educations. Though we were radical in our points of view, we did not want to tear down institutions ... We were people of the immediate post-war generation and we voted Labour for the first time after the war; this was our mild revolution. We had great affection for British institutions: the comedies were done with affection ... a mild protest, but not protests at anything more sinister than the regimentation of the time. " (Michael Balcon) uring the immediate post war years there was a great desire for major
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social reforms and changes. The Labour Government (1945-51) led by
Clement Atlee was elected on a programme of change. They set up the
welfare state: the National Health Service, the nationalisation of the key industries of coal, iron and steel. India was granted independence in 1947, which began the break-up of the British Empire. •
Meanwhile wartime rationing, restrictions and shortages continued. Making comic fantasies about restriction was one way to cope with the reality of them, a "letting off steam" seen by Balcon as "mild anarchy... in a sense our comedies were a reflection of this mood... a safety valve for our more antisocial impulses".
•
In contrast the later comedies made in the mid-to late1950s reflected an England which was moving into a new more affluent age but looking backwards to a cosier world.
The "mild anarchy" of T.E.B.Clarke egular Ealing screenwriter T. E. B. Clarke wrote nostalgic whimsical
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narratives which he called "what if?" films. The characters, in realistic
recognisable settings, are faced with extraordinary situations. Initially they
break free from their restrictions and are allowed to explore their dreams before the narrative returns them back to the conformity of the "real" world. •
Clarke had worked as a journalist as well as in advertising and the police force. He depicted a cosy England that was nostalgic in the face of change,
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and where eccentricity was part of the national character and small enterprises could take on large bureaucratic organisations. •
The films poked fun at the establishment but did not attack it too forcibly. Clarke exemplified Balcon's philosophy of "no point in hankering after things beyond your reach".
•
Clarke also wrote dramas such as The Blue Lamp (Basil Dearden 1949)
Passport to Pimlico Henry Cornelius 1949 Ealing Studios
"Blimey, I'm
a foreigner!"
Passport to Pimlico was made
during a time when "austerity" Britain was experiencing the aftermath of six years of war. Food, clothes and other goods were rationed. The film looks back nostalgically at the recent past and the wartime spirit •
The film begins with a very un-British heat wave. The community of Miramont Gardens in Pimlico discover they are legally part of Burgundy and therefore not subject to post war restrictions. Their foray into independence leads to a supposed casting off of British inhibitions experiencing a kind of Utopia but the end of the film sees the weather change to rain and the Burgundian rebels rejoin Britain.
•
The values of the film express the desire to dream but recognise that these dreams are an outlet, a way of letting off steam and an understanding of how dreams and reality must be reconciled "You never know when you're well off till you aren't"
•
"This is the achievement of the film, and its formal breakthrough: to make 'poverty of desire' into something romantic" (Charles Barr)
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The Lavender Hill Mob Charles Crichton 1951 Ealing Studios
The Lavender Hill Mob was the second of three Ealing collaborations between Clarke and Charles Crichton. The others were Hue and Cry (1947) and The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953). The title refers to Lavender Hill, a street in Battersea.
•
Alec Guinness plays a mild Bank of England employee whose fantasy is to commit the perfect robbery. He leads a gang of British eccentrics who steal £1,000,000 in gold bullion from the Bank and smuggle it into France made up into Eiffel Tower paperweights. Holland's dream allows him to challenge the establishment.
•
The comic situations construct an almost anarchic situation as the characters break away from conformity but the ending of the narrative restores normality as the fantasy is taken away. "The Lavender Hill Mob is as enjoyable as it is lightweight, and absolutely characteristic of Ealing, with its gang of likeable eccentrics who briefly challenge authority before passively accepting defeat. n (Mark Duguid)
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"SUBVERSIVE EALING": HAMER AND MACKENDRICK aling comedies such as Passport to Pimlico and The Lavender Hill Mob use
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what John Ellis has called "the disruption of social reality, sometimes what is often described as the playing out of 'base urges': the enactment of
desires that are not socially sanctioned". The films of Robert Hamer and Alexander
Mackendrick represent another side of Ealing, a "dark commentary" on the values of the studio. â&#x20AC;˘
Mackendrick is quoted as saying "Personally I am very attracted to comedy, at least a certain form of comedy, because I think there are things which comedy alone can say. It allows you to make things happen that are too dangerous, or that a certain public cannot (otherwise) accept" He used comedy to
deliberately subvert the essential cosiness of Ealing films. â&#x20AC;˘
Robert Hamer's films also threatened to disturb the cosy backwater of middle class Britain. In his films sex and violence break out through the desires of repressed individuals.
Kind Hearts and Coronets Robert Hamer 1949 Ealing Studios
Kind Hearts and Coronets was Hamer's fourth film assignment for Ealing. It is the
only period piece among the Ealing comedies. Its mannered style and artificiality go against the "cosy reality" of Ealing. Hamer's aim was to useulhe English language, which I love, in
a more varied and, to me,
more interesting way than I had previously had the chance of doing in
a film". His screenplay is full of
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literary allusions - Chaucer, Shakespeare, Longfellow and Tennyson. •
In the 1960s the director Lindsay Anderson wrote about the barrenness of British cinema. He singled out Kind Hearts as an example of this, describing it as "emotionally quite frozen". The apparently "frozen" nature of the film is, however, as Louis d'Ascoyne himself, a surface covering a mass of tensions and emotions that centre on patriarchy, snobbery, culture and inheritance. The film can be seen as a radical criticism of England's class system, British society in microcosm reflected in the rituals and class distinctions of the prison.
•
Louis Mazzini narrates the story in flashback. The stoicism and restraint that epitomise the British "stiff upper lip" allow him to murder six of his relatives to gain revenge and at the same time a title, privilege and wealth.
•
The violence of the murders is set against the sexual theme concerning the two women who vie for Louis' attention - Edith who is aristocratic and frigid, and Sibella who is upper-middle class and sexually passionate Hamer found the sexual conflict the most interesting and stressed the erotic aspects. This brought him into conflict with Salcon.
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The Ladykillers Alexander Mackendrick 1955 Ealing Studios
Alexander Mackendrick was born in the USA and educated in Scotland. He joined the studio in 1946 as a screenwriter and made seven films there as director, including four comedies: Whisky Galore! (1949) The Man in the White Suit (1951) The Maggie (1954) and The Ladykillers. He then went to Hollywood, where his first film as was The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) â&#x20AC;˘
The tensions between Mackendrick and the studio surfaced within the comedies where he was able to use parody to depict things that were not overtly stated. He said of The Ladykillers "... It's obviously a parody of Britain in its subsidence. That we were all aware of at a certain level. But it was never openly discussed, and it would have been fatal to discuss it".
â&#x20AC;˘
The Ladykillers is one of Mackendrick's "condition of England" films, portraying a country that is inhibited and complacent. The Conservative Government, led by Winston Churchill, had been elected in 1951 just as austerity came to an end. They were able to use rising productivity and full
il :~
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employment to end rationing and restrictions, and promote a new era of affluence and consumerism. "I knew that I was trying to work on a fable. The characters are all caricatures ...none of them is real for a moment.. .its very dangerous when you let a single note of reality creep into something that's as inflated, in terms of near-fantasy, as this. You have to keep within an enclosed, fabulous world. " â&#x20AC;˘
William Rose, an American, wrote the screenplay. The tone of the film is very different from Ealing Studios' aim of documentary realism. The plot for the film came to him in a dream. This can be contrasted with the "daydream" scenarios of T.E.B.Clarke. Rose's England is one of lingering Victorian values and memories of Britain as a world power. Mrs Wilberforce and her genteel friends are a monument to the age. Her subsiding house is old fashioned with an absence of modern conveniences.
â&#x20AC;˘
The Gang represent a cross section of character stereotypes: Professor Marcus is the mad intellectual, Louis is foreign and sinister, Major Courtney is upper class, One Round is working class and dumb, Harry, sporting "Teddy Boy" clothes is also not very bright
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EALING MELODRAMA
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s well as the comedies and War films Ealing is notable for its melodramas, representations of British family life. The Ealing style emphasises realism and restraints - the characters' emotions are repressed. This repression is
seen as being necessary for the survival of the family unit.
It Always Rains on Sunday Robert Hamer 1947
<lA sordid and dreary affair' Monthly Film Bulletin 1947 It Always Rains on Sunday's East End working class settings are a serious and
outwardly authentic representation of drab post war existence. Rose, the central female character has had to renounce sexual passion and excitement for the security of an unexciting marriage to an older widower with grown up daughters. â&#x20AC;˘
"Hamer shows people trapped in situations where their family and community and daily life have already had passion (and the word is meant to have wide connotations) drained out of them. It forces its way back, but in distorted and destructive forms, and there is no alternative but to stamp it out" (Charles Barr)
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Mandy Alexander Mackendrick 1952 Ealing Studios
"I find Mandy. .. one of the most affecting of all British films. Its modest story is worked out with such scrupulous care and craft, and it moves to an ending which, in a very honest combination, is both momentous and tentative" (Charles Barr) Mandywas Mackendrick's only Ealing film that was not a comedy, but a "social problem" film (a genre it shares with The Blue Lamp Basil Dearden 1950) In Mandy family is middle class but equally repressed. The realism of the fictional settings and characters is combined with actual documentary footage, shot at the Royal Residential School for the Deaf. â&#x20AC;˘
Barr points out that although the film is about deafness it is also about a failure to see. Mandy, the deaf child struggles to communicate, but the adults in the film also fail to understand each other. They are absorbed in their own insular world
â&#x20AC;˘
Mandy's mother Christine is central to the film. She reflects post war anxieties about a woman's place within the family, a recognition that attitudes were having to shift, and an unease about female independence
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THE END OF EALING STUDIOS
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n 1952 Steven Courtauld the major shareholder resigned for health reasons and
Ealing Jost the backing he had secured from the National Provincial Bank. BaIcon
negotiated a loan from the National Film Finance Corporation.
â&#x20AC;˘
The 1953 Coronation of Queen Elizabeth 11 boosted the popularity of TV, further eroding cinema audiences. British filmmakers were in trouble and Ealing Studios was sold to the BBC in 1955, in the month that The Ladykillers was released.
â&#x20AC;˘
It could be said that the traditions of Ealing were to be carried on in British television, with its emphasis on realism and the emergence of its comedy writers and performers.
EALING STUDIOS SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY The Proud Valley Penrose Tennyson 1940
The Lavender Hill Mob Charles Crichton 1947
Convoy Penrose Tennyson1940
Passport to Pimlico Henry Cornelius 1949
Let George Do It Marcel Varnel 1940 The Foreman Went to France Charles Frend 1942
Kind Hearts and Coronets Robert Hamer 1949 The Blue Lamp Basil Dearden1950
Went the Day Weln Alberto Cavalcanti 1943
The Man in the White Suit Alexander Mackendrick 1951
Dead of Night Alberto Cavalcanti, Robert Hamer, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden 1945 It Always Rains on Sunday Robert Hamer 1947 Hue and Cry Charles Crichton 1947
Mandy Alexander Mackendrick 1952 The Titfield Thunderbolt Charles Crichton 1953 The Ladykillers Alexander Mackendrick 1955
BIBLIOGRAPHY BARR Charles Ealing Studios (Expanded Edition) University of California Press 1999 CURRAN J & PORTER V (Eds) British Cinema History London Weidenfeld and Nicholson 1983 RICHARDS J & ALDGATE A Best of British Cinema and Society 1930-1970 I. B. Taurus 1999
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HAMMER STUDIOS n the 1960s critics praised the films of
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the so-called 'British New Wave' for
their "reality" as well as their "frank"
and "mature" attitude to sex. Reality was signified by location photography in black and white and contemporary narratives featuring working class characters. Meanwhile British audiences were enjoying "fantasy" genres - the Carry On sexual comedies and the horror films
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produced by Hammer Studios with their anti-realist and escapist subject matter. â&#x20AC;˘
The proliferation of English horror films in the late 1950s, pioneered by Hammer, was one of the major commercial successes of British cinema. They were attacked by contemporary critics for their sadism, dismissed as a passing aberration, and ignored by film historians. Alexander Walkers Hollywood, England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties (1974) makes no mention of Hammer, even though the studio had won the prestigious Queen's Award to Industry in1968. However, in terms of popularity and therefore profit Hammer was a far more successful enterprise than either Woodfall or Bryanston, producers of the British New Wave films.
â&#x20AC;˘
At the time when both TV and "serious" films were in black and white the disreputable image of sex and violence using cheap colour systems sold the films as entertainment to a changing audience "when Christopher Lee sucked neck in Oracula, you saw the lush delights of Eastmanco/or etched indelibly on his teeth" (Bob McCabe)
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BRITISH COLD WAR CINEMA: THE SCI-FI HORROR XPERIMENT ecause of a substantial decline in cinema admissions the film industry was
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experiencing the beginnings of an economic crisis that would almost lead to its collapse in the 1970s. Horror films were an attempt to reverse this crisis
by exploiting the relaxation of censorship - the X certificate had been introduced in Britain in January 1951. The Obscene Publications Act, passed in 1959, heralded the general liberalisation of the 1960s. Films could show audiences things that had previously been forbidden.
The Quafermass Xperimenf Val Guest 1955 Hammer Film Productions
The Quatermass X-periment is an awesome film - still unnerving, way ahead of its time, and of course, the beginning of British Horror's golden age. (British Horror Films) This is the best and nastiest horror film that I have seen since the War. How jolly that it is also British! (Paul Dehn 1955) The Quatermass Experiment was adapted from a popular TV series, first broadcast
by the BBC in 1953. The genre of horrorlsci-fi was new to British cinema. The film began to break box office records.
Quatermass "Val Guest 1956 Hammer Film Productions
Hammer immediately went into production of two more horrorlsci-fi films, X the Unknown and Quatermass 11. Both display the violence that came to distinguish Hammer films and reflect a general paranoia about authority. Alien invaders have taken over British Intelligence; the Government is part of the conspiracy.
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â&#x20AC;˘
David Pirie suggests that this is "British Cold War Cinema", reflecting the anxiety of the period, the year of Suez and the testing of the first hydrogen bomb. In taking invasions from outer space as their subject matter they share similar fears to those of Hollywood films made at the same time, such as Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).
â&#x20AC;˘
All three Hammer films had 'X' certificates and were marketed as 'adult' films Quaterrnass Xperiment and X the Unknown both capitalised on this. ABC, unlike Rank with their policy of "family entertainment", was willing to try adult material in their cinemas. At the same time the American Motion Picture Producers Association relaxed their Production Code, which gave the new Hammer films a market in the U.S.A.
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(fngltsb ~otbtt .OttOt
The Nightmare John Henry Fuseli 1781
T
he term "gothic", meaning tasteress or bizarre, is linked with the Romantic Movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Romanticism is a style of extreme emotion; it depicts both the fascination of fear and the thrill of the
sublime, rejecting the rationality of the Neoclassical style where things could be measured. Artists shared an obsession with death and inevitable decay. â&#x20AC;˘
In reclaiming the Gothic ethos and returning to a period setting Hammer films turned their back on the prevailing realism of British New Wave cinema. With its emphasis on the Unknown and the Uncanny it solicited extreme reactions from both critics and censors "We are concerned about the flavour of this script, which, in its preoccupation with horror and gruesome detail, goes far beyond what we are accustomed to allow even for the X' category" (BBFC).
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The Curse of Frankenstein Terence Fisher 1957 Hammer Film Productions
In spite of the fact that the industry saw the horror boom as temporary, and' X' certificate films often had problems with censors and distributors, Hammer began an ambitious building programme at Down Place, Bray in 1957 and made The Curse of Frankenstein, the first British horror film in colour
•
Although condemned by critics the film broke all box-office records in Britain and in the U.S.A. where it was released by Warner Brothers. The criticisms of the film ("sickening", "nauseating", 'repulsive", "degrading", "depressing", "for sadists only" "among the half dozen most repulsive films I have encountered") were based on its physicality and lack of delicacy. Instead of suggesting horror through cut away and reaction shots they showed the bright red blood.
•
The Curse of Frankenstein initiated the screen partnership of Peter Cushing (playing Baron Frankenstein as a rational unemotional man of science) and Christopher Lee (as the unstable monster). "Hammer's Baron is a chilly scientist, forerunner of the consciencefree obsessives who pioneered rocketry under the Nazis and nuclear weapons throughout the Cold War" (Kim Newman)
•
Mary Shelley's novel had been made by Universal Studios in 1931, starring Baris Karlaff. Universal's copyright forbade the imitation of Karloff's monster make-up.
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Dracula Terence Fisher 1958 Hammer Film Productions
''The curse of this thing is the Technicolor blood.. .Certainly strong cautions will be necessary on shots of blood. And of course, some of the stake-work is prohibitive. (BBFC)
fl
t eir entire horror cye 'r
'rican and European films, but the character's upper class English accents. . ritish aristocracy. The "expressionist" desi ,eir exteriors in the studio. Hammer's Drac, Ictorian,';" r· teriors, the exterior shot in the natural SUITOOr(, :'
",j'
9the house-. ...There is little use of darkness or shado , -.; , ~':'i
"1897 - avfCfi.Firie su·
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Hammer were reclaiming the Frcl'nke· stein and Dracola .l~~
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Victorian England with its violen~ '?~'q repressed sexua'fitY. Wh~reas Bela q
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'tugosi was a foreign, mysterious C~urit Dracula, Christqpher "
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The sexual content of the Dracula myth was a considerable elemen~~' ~
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ss and can go some way in accounting for the
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extrem~.
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The Plague of the Zombies John Gilling 1966 Hammer Film Productions
The Plague of the Zombies is not set in Europe but in a 19th century Cornish village. It moves the monstrous nearer to home. The brutality of the English aristocracy, exemplified at the beginning of the film by Squire Hamilton's henchmen in the pursuit of a fox, knocking down everyone who gets in their way, including a funeral procession. The same henchmen act as slave masters to the zombies that are brought back from the dead through voodoo practices to labour in the squire's dangerous tin mine. The squire's evil hold over the village is challenged by the Doctor, a respected man of science. â&#x20AC;˘
Squire Hamilton, like Dracula, is an evil aristocrat. He has spent time in the colony of Haiti where he was part of the British Imperialist ruling class. The "primitive" practices and imagery that he has brought back to his Cornish estate contrast with the countryside.
â&#x20AC;˘
A key sequence of the film takes place in the graveyard where Doctor Thompson experiences a disturbing dream where zombies claw their way out of the ground, foreshadowing those of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, made two years later in 1968
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Taste the Blood of Dracula Peter Sasdy 1970 Hammer Film Productions
"Even by Hammer's standards this is an extraordinarily overt Freudian allegory" (Oavid Pirie) In the 1970s British horror films began to use sex and violence in a much more exploitative way, a combination not only of relaxed censorship and the more explicit films coming from both European and American independent filmmakers but also of the withdrawal of American money.
â&#x20AC;˘
Taste the Blood of Dracula marked a change in formula to a much more lurid and overtly sexual vampire cycle.
â&#x20AC;˘
Themes of repression and decadence are even more marked. The film centers round the Victorian family, ruled over by corrupt fathers who visit sleazy brothels and dabble in black magic whilst dominating their daughters and their wives. Again Dracula is the disruptive force, turning young women into vampires whose rampant sexuality empowers them to kill their abusive fathers. ~,
".
ACAV
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FEMALE PREDATORS AND EXPLOITATION: THE 'KARNSTEIN' TRILOGY
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JJAdmitfedly we must allow stronger meat in horror films for the new ')('. But the very great emphasis on lesbianism here goes far beyond anything we have aI/owed except the uncut version of Sister George which was after aI/ a film about lesbians ... we are ve!}' concerned with the combination of nudity (transparent nightdresses, pubic hair showing etc.) with horror - there are some ve!}' sick things here" (BBFC censor)
Lust for a Vampire Jimmy Sangster 1970 Hammer Film Productions
"Sangster ...uses all the visual devices at his disposal to convey and aura of potent cloying sensuality" (David Pirie) "It was a tasteless film and I regret having anything to do with it." (Ralph Bates)
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Twins of Evil John Hough, 1971 Hammer Film Productions
"Not one character meets the standard movie template of a heroic role model". This mark.s the final instalment of the Karnstein trilogy. Playboy centrefolds Madeleine and Mary Collinson play the twins of the title, one of whom is good (a shy virgin) whilst the other is unrestrained and evil. This sets the tone for the film, the opposition of repression and immorality
•
UPlaying against type as a religious zealot, Gushing turns in one of his most assured performances; an agonised block of sexual repression and blind hatred, tempered with crippling self-doubt" (Channel 4.com)
•
Sexually repressed Puritanism (also a feature of Witchfinder General Michael Reeves 1968 and made by Tigon, one of Hammer's rival horror studios) can be examined in the tone of the sexual liberation of the early 1970s.
•
"the vampires' defeat and the restoration of patriarchal authority in a new, more subtle, hegemonic form at the film's climax remind us ..... where the limits of the inquiry lie: The natural, right, order of things is taken as given. A Sadean inversion, where virtue is punished and vice triumphs, was never on the cards. Nor was there any prospect that a Female Vampire could sUNive to live freely and independently. "(Kinocite)
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The Media Studies Conference 2008
THE END OF HAMMER STUDIOS
S
ensationalism could not save the studio. As Kim Newman writes "In 1973,
the merciful coup de grace was delivered. The perpetually shaky economy
of the British film industry had already made the slender returns of the small-
scale gothic horror film a dubious business proposition. The public acceptance of The Exorcist: with its big budget reading of the horror movie formula, rendered the British product obsolete" In the 30 plus years since its demise however, Hammer has been re-evaluated for the part it played in the creation of a truly British cinema. To quote Michael Carreras
"when the National Film Theatre gave us a two-week season I was horrified. I thought if they made us respectable it would ruin our image"
HAMMER STUDIOS SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY The Quatermass Xperiment Val
Taste the Blood of Dracula Peter
Guest 1955
Sasdy 1970
Quatermass IIVal Guest 1956
The Plague of the Zombies John Gilling 1966
The Curse of Frankenstein T erence The Devil Rides Out Terence Fisher
Fisher 1957
1967
Dracula Terence Fisher 1958 The Brides of Dracula Terence Fisher 1960
The Vampire Lovers Ray Ward Baker
Dracula: Prince of Darkness Terence
Lust for a Vampire Jimmy Sangster
Fisher 1965
1970
The Mummy Terence Fisher 1959
Twins of Evil John Hough 1971
1970
BIBLIOGRAPHY CHIBNALL Steve & PETLEY Julian (eds.) British Horror Cinema London: Routledge 2002 HUTCHINGS Peter Hammer and Beyond - The British Horror Film (Manchester University Press, 1993) PIRIE, David A New Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema (London, 18 Taurus 2008) PORTER, Vincent The Context of Creativity' In Curran and Porter (Ed) British Cinema History (London, Wiedenfeld and Nicholson 1983)
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