The first is the Introduction to a paper I am writing about the 1950 movie, Chance of a Lifetime. I have been thinking about this subject for quite some time, and I am delighted I can now get around to writing. Comments welcome.
Looking back, the
black-and-white postwar images seem appropriate. Life in peacetime Britain was
grey, threadbare, dreary and hopeless. There was a national sense of “Was this
what we fought for?” As one American commentator put it, the British certainly
believed they had won the war, but they behaved as though they had lost it
(McCrum, 2009: 6).
Chance of a Lifetime (1950,
dir. Bernard Miles) represents a cinematic bridge from British movies made in
the Second World War to the realism of the ‘angry young men’ kitchen sink
dramas of the late 1950s and 1960s. Conceived by director/actor Bernard Miles
in 1947 (the year of Britain’s coldest winter of the century), Chance depicts in microcosm
worker-management relations at a time of economic austerity, continued
rationing, strikes, and the British government’s export push for the
manufacturing sector.
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| Writer, director, actor, Bernard Miles |
This paper
centres on the film’s portrayal of class relations and in particular the
recovery of the middle classes, represented in Chance by Adam Watson (played by Kenneth More). When neither owner
nor worker can run the factory successfully or efficiently, the middle class
takes over its management in co-operation
with the owner. While offering a narrative around cross-class collaboration
in difficult times – a legacy of the war movies made in the 1940s – Chance positions the middle class and
the owning class as the saviours of the factory. At the end of the film, the
workers are apparently happy to return to their rightful place on the workshop
floor, albeit with greater respect for the responsibilities of management.
My analysis
takes as its starting point Neil Rattigan’s essay, ‘The Last Gasp of the Middle
Class: British War Films of the 1950s’, written for Wheeler W. Dixon’s
collection, Reviewing British Cinema,
1900-1992: Essays and Interviews (1994: 143-53). Rattigan argues British
films made in the 1950s about the Second World War attempted ‘to bring about a
return of the repressed middle class’ and reflect a ‘fear that the middle class
had lost social and cultural centrality within British society during the war
because of the demands of a people’s war’ (ibid.: 145). The election of the
Labour government in 1945 following the largest swing ever recorded in a
British General Election (10.7 percent from the Conservative Party to Labour)
confirmed that returning to the status quo ante bellum was not an option.
Rattigan claims that the war films of the 1940s ‘rewarded’ the working class
for the part they played in the conflict, but portrayed them using stereotypes
and comical motifs. Robert Murphy writes that British films during the war were
concerned with the conflict’s ‘transforming effect … turning timid, ineffectual
civilians into warriors and war workers, as if the war were a blessing which
enabled people to realise their potential’ (Murphy, 2009: 223).
In
contrast, the war films of the 1950s ‘represented a reflection of and a
contribution to a last-ditch effort by the dominant culture to “keep the lid
on” the British social revolution, an effort complicated by a middle-class
“backlash” against the way in which images of a people’s war had given emphasis
to the working class and taken the middle class for granted in wartime
propaganda’ (Rattigan, 1994: 149). We might even go so far as to suggest that Chance of a Lifetime confirms Rattigan’s
thesis of nostalgia for a time when ‘the British stood together in their various social positions,
united in common goals and communality’ (Rattigan, 1994: 150, original
emphasis). By the end of the film both
workers and management have worked together as they did in the war, but this
time for the benefit of the factory, and they all return to their rightful
positions in the social hierarchy. Only More’s character, Adam Watson, has been
elevated to management. This was the basis of the communist Daily Worker’s
critique of the film:
[T]he film sets up a situation
where the workers are bound to fail, and then gives the impression from the
failure that workers everywhere could never run a business without the boss.
Anyone seeing it would come away with one main impression- that the workers
can’t do without the boss, that they should collaborate with him’ (Daily Worker, 11 May 1950).
While this assessment is not without its merits, it fails to
understand the contribution of the middle class in pulling the factory into a
modern era of both production and management.
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| Basil Radford as factory owner, Mr Dickinson, Josephine Wilson as Miss Cooper, and Kenneth More as Adam Watson |
I acknowledge the detailed
history of Chance provided by Vincent
Porter (1999: 181-199) in his essay, ‘Feature Film and the Mediation of
Historical Reality: Chance of a Lifetime
– a case study’. Porter offers deep background on the development and
production of the film based on interviews (most notably with Bernard Miles)
and archival research, as well as audience responses to the film gleaned from
Mass Observation surveys. Porter describes how, ‘In a sense, Chance of a Lifetime was the first truly
neo-realist British film. It was not only one of the first non-studio feature
films to be made in Great Britain, but was also the first to be made about a
contemporary subject which used real locations, both out-of-doors and inside genuine
houses, factories and pubs’ (Porter, 1999: 187).
References
Porter, Vincent (1999), 'Feature Film and the Mediation of Historical Reality: Chance of a Lifetime - a case study, Media History, Vol.5, No.2: 181-199.
Murphy, Robert (2009), 'The Heart of Britain: British Cinema at War', in Robert Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book, 3rd edn. (London: BFI), pp.223-231.
Rattigan, Neil (1994), 'The Last Gasp of the Middle Class: British War Films of the 1950s', in Wheeler Winston Dixon (ed.), Re-Viewing British Cinema, 1900-1992 (New York: State University of New York Press), pp.143-153.
McCrum, Robert (2009), 'The Second World War: Six years that changed this country for ever', The Observer, 23 August.
