Films Since 1939

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FILMS SINCE 1939
Every week in Great Britain roughly twenty-five million people go to the cinema. It is the chief urban entertainment; in cities and industrial centres it has long supplanted the theatre as the great popular recreation, and gradually it is gaining a hold over the countryside too, bringing its fantasies and its records of fact into mining villages, rural communities, into the tiniest hamlets and centres of country life. In Britain all classes go to the cinema; intellectuals, professional classes, artisans, workers, everybody from the Prime Minister to the mill-hand, hurrying out of the Lancashire cotton mill in clogs and a shawl. The war has done two things for the British cinema. It has greatly extended the range of subjects dealt with by films. And it has brought films to new and varied audiences. But this has been a gradual process. At one time it looked as if the conditions of tot^l war might mean the end of the cinema as an entertainment and an industry in Britain.
When, on 3rd September 1939, the air-raid sirens soimded immediately after Mr. Chamberlain's announcement of a state of war, many people felt that an end had come to the old ways of life. Nobody would care to go out in the evening in a black-out which was, at the start, complete. The population of the big cities suffered an immediate change in character; hundreds of thousands of children, often accompanied by their mothers, were moved from areas exposed to bombing to so-called safe areas. Places of entertainment closed their doors early; in any case transport for getting to a cinema and back again was severely curtailed. As for the production of films in Great Britain, it looked as if that might come to a stop altogether. Many British studios, in the early stages of the war, were requisitioned by the Government, some of them for use as storage depots; British actors and technicians were called up; the materials for film production were drastically cut. At least one leading London newspaper thought of dispensing with the services of its film critic: this, it said, was no time for such luxuries. The stages by which Britain came, while using all
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