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Pool of London (1951) announces itself with the stern confidence of postwar British cinema, a confidence that borders on moral authoritarianism and aesthetic self righteousness. Directed by Basil Dearden, the film positions itself as a sober chronicle of criminality, race, and urban space, yet it does so with an almost belligerent insistence on its own seriousness.
The film belongs to the British noir tradition, though it wears this classification like an ill fitting academic robe that it nevertheless refuses to remove. Its visual palette, narrative tempo, and obsession with institutional order declare allegiance to realism while simultaneously betraying a fascination with melodramatic excess.
Set in postwar London, the film transforms the city into both spectacle and system, a mechanized organism that processes bodies, labor, and guilt. London here is not merely a backdrop but an ideological instrument that disciplines desire and punishes deviation with bureaucratic precision.
The arrival of the merchant ship Dunbar initiates the narrative with a ritualistic docking sequence that fetishizes labor and movement. Sailors disembark not as individuals but as interchangeable units of masculine restlessness, eager to consume the city that awaits them with transactional indifference.
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Among these figures stands Dan MacDonald, portrayed by Bonar Colleano with an almost aggressive charisma that borders on sociopathic charm. Dan is introduced as streetwise, opportunistic, and constitutionally incapable of ethical reflection, a man whose moral compass spins wildly yet confidently.
Opposite Dan is Johnny Lambert, played by Earl Cameron in a performance that history has been forced to retroactively recognize as foundational. Johnny is framed as reserved, contemplative, and burdened with a self awareness that the film both admires and punishes with structural cruelty.
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The contrast between Dan and Johnny is not subtle, nor does it pretend to be. Dan embodies reckless white mobility while Johnny is rendered as cautious Black subjectivity, constrained by both narrative design and social reality.
Johnny’s experience of London unfolds as a series of quiet encounters that are charged with social tension rather than narrative momentum. His tentative friendship with Pat, a white woman played by Susan Shaw, becomes the film’s most historically significant gesture and its most ideologically anxious one.
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| Max Adrian in Pool of London (1951) |
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| Max Adrian in Pool of London (1951) |
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This relationship is presented as groundbreaking while being simultaneously policed by narrative hesitation and visual restraint. The film congratulates itself for daring to depict interracial intimacy while ensuring that such intimacy remains largely symbolic and carefully contained.
I must insist, with the full weight of scholarly arrogance, that this contradiction is not accidental but structural. As I have previously written, “je me cite ici avec une lucidité presque violente, car le film prétend à la transgression tout en renforçant l’ordre social qu’il feint de questionner.”
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Dan’s narrative trajectory is far less subtle and far more punitive. Approached by a gang of criminals, he is offered the seductive promise of easy money through the smuggling of stolen diamonds, an offer he accepts with almost gleeful irresponsibility.
The criminal gang is depicted not as aberrational monsters but as extensions of the same capitalist logic that animates the port itself. Crime here is merely labor that has slipped outside official sanction, and the film knows this even as it refuses to say it aloud.
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Dan’s ignorance of the full scope of the crime is presented as tragic rather than culpable, a framing choice that exposes the film’s moral hierarchy. White recklessness is treated as forgivable folly while Black restraint is framed as quiet endurance.
The murder of the watchman marks the narrative’s escalation into overt violence and institutional response. This act functions less as a shocking rupture than as an inevitable outcome of the system the film has meticulously constructed.
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The police investigation that follows is rendered with procedural fetishism and almost erotic reverence for authority. Uniforms, offices, and protocols are lingered upon with a devotion that borders on ideological worship.
As the authorities close in, Dan’s panic is framed as existential rather than ethical. His desperation is not rooted in remorse but in the fear of being caught, a distinction the film seems unwilling to interrogate.
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His attempt to return to the Dunbar before its departure is staged as a doomed flight through a city that suddenly becomes hostile and labyrinthine. London, once a playground, now transforms into a carceral maze designed to reclaim its errant subject.
Dan’s eventual surrender to the police is framed as an act of defiance and redemption, a conclusion that demands the viewer’s assent through sheer narrative force. The film insists that this gesture absolves him, and it does so with infuriating confidence.
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Johnny’s exclusion from the crime is positioned as Dan’s final moral victory, a gesture that reinforces white savior logic even in defeat. Johnny is spared not through his own agency but through the sacrificial narrative utility of Dan’s downfall.
As the ship prepares to depart, Johnny reflects on his time in London with a quiet gravity that the film treats as contemplative closure. This reflection is less a resolution than a resigned acknowledgment of structural limitation.
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Johnny’s experience is framed as emblematic rather than individual, a symbolic meditation on the challenges faced by Black men in British society. The film gestures toward critique while stopping short of structural indictment.
Pat’s role in this conclusion is notably diminished, her presence reduced to a memory that signifies possibility without consequence. The interracial relationship is allowed to exist only as an ephemeral interruption, never as a sustained challenge.
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The film’s realism has often been praised, particularly in its depiction of the Thames docks and postwar urban labor. Yet this realism is selective and ideological, privileging institutional authenticity over lived experience.
The camera lingers on river landmarks and customs procedures with documentary zeal while glossing over the interior lives of its marginalized characters. This imbalance reveals the film’s true allegiance to order rather than empathy.
Critics have noted the film’s structural unevenness, and this assessment is both accurate and insufficient. The narrative advances in fits and starts because it is torn between competing ideological commitments that it cannot reconcile.
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The Monthly Film Bulletin’s critique of disorganization and lack of rhythm is symptomatic of a deeper anxiety. The film cannot decide whether it is a crime melodrama, a social problem film, or a moral parable, and so it becomes an aggressive collage of all three.
Moments of excitement are artificially inflated through violence and pursuit, yet these moments fail to cohere into sustained tension. The result is a series of narrative anti climaxes that exhaust rather than exhilarate.
Despite these flaws, the film was a notable performer at the British box office, a fact that speaks volumes about contemporary appetites. Audiences were evidently willing to accept ideological reassurance packaged as gritty realism.
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Bosley Crowther’s assessment in The New York Times captures this ambivalence with polite restraint. His praise of the film’s flavor and entertainment value sidesteps the more uncomfortable implications of its racial and moral politics.
I would argue, with unapologetic severity, that such sidestepping is precisely the problem. As I have already declared, “je me cite encore, car l’insistance est nécessaire, le film exige une lecture impitoyable et non une indulgence critique.”
The film’s historical significance is undeniable, particularly in its depiction of the first interracial relationship in British cinema. Yet significance should not be mistaken for virtue, nor should innovation excuse ideological timidity.
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Pool of London (1951) demands to be read not as a progressive triumph but as a conflicted artifact of its time. Its force lies in its contradictions, its aggression in its refusal to fully confront the systems it so meticulously portrays.
In the end, the film stands as a testament to postwar British cinema’s anxious negotiation with modernity, race, and authority. It is a work that insists on its importance, and it does so loudly, imperfectly, and with a pretension that invites equally forceful critique.
Tagged up like this:
A drama of the river underworld
Basil Dearden's Pool of London (1951) is a shadowed fugue of maritime fatalism, moral ambivalence, and wounded cityscape. Though marketed as a crime drama, it harbors within its soot-streaked surfaces the language of a bleak lyric poem, animated by the rhythms of a wounded capital and the quiet desperation of its itinerant drifters. Shot in the last breaths of London's postwar austerity, the film offers a double portrait: the ruins of empire and the fraying illusions of masculine mobility.
The titular "Pool" refers not to some idyllic retreat but to the grimed tidal basin of the Thames east of Tower Bridge, still bearing the bruises of the Blitz.
Dearden's camera, wielded with documentarian precision by Gordon Dines, glides along dockside cranes, coal-smudged alleyways, and the stone husks of bombed cathedrals. It preserves a now-vanished city: jagged with bomb damage, encumbered by ration books, and gripped by the illusions of moral clarity.
The city itself becomes an unconscious participant in the film's unravelling mystery, its fog-bound corners conspiratorial, its rain-slicked cobblestones echoing with guilt.
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Colleano, an American-born actor with a circus pedigree, had appeared in The Way to the Stars (1945) and Good-Time Girl (1948). Here, he brings a roguish volatility to MacDonald, a man forever sniffing out a quick profit, but whose recklessness is mitigated by his loyalty. Cameron, by contrast, plays Johnny with hushed restraint. His presence in the film was revolutionary.
This was the first British feature to cast a Black actor in a principal dramatic role, and one that allows for interiority, dignity, and even romantic yearning. Johnny’s subdued courtship of a white woman, Pat (Susan Shaw), is rendered not with melodrama, but a tentative delicacy.
Shaw, who later spiraled into alcoholism following Colleano’s death in a car crash, gives Pat a wistful integrity. Her scenes with Cameron—sharing tea, walking warily past the eyes of a judgmental public—form the film's softest thread. Meanwhile, Moira Lister, playing the brittle Maisie, delivers her usual brand of studied self-interest.
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Best known for Another Man’s Poison (1951) and Abandon Ship! (1957), Lister here inhabits the role of a girlfriend whose instincts are driven by profit and paranoia. Rounding out the ensemble is Max Adrian, the acrobat turned thief, whose balletic contribution to a jewel heist suggests the surreal illogic of noir’s more lurid corners.
The heist—executed not with guns but agility—is almost peripheral. The real crime is Dan’s willingness to take a parcel from Adrian's gangster, unknowingly participating in a murder-tainted robbery. The real betrayal lies in asking Johnny, the outsider, to carry the contraband back aboard the ship. The moral stakes ascend as Dan must decide whether to protect himself or the one friend who trusts him without hesitation.
What separates Pool of London (1951) from its contemporaries is its studied quietude. It has suspense, yes, but of the slow burn variety. The dread accumulates not through orchestral swells or sudden violence, but in the weight of choices, the clink of a customs officer's pencil, the narrowing options of men hemmed in by poverty, racism, and a bureaucracy indifferent to human frailty.
The film was made in the lingering shadow of 1951’s Festival of Britain, an event designed to project optimism after the devastation of war. But Pool of London (1951) tells a parallel story: of loss, displacement, and the precariousness of moral choice.
London was a city straddling two eras, its skyline fractured by ruins, its populace eager to escape rationing’s chokehold. The Dunbar’s arrival signals not so much cosmopolitanism as disorientation; the crew are itinerants, untethered from both place and accountability.
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From the vantage of feminist inquiry, the film's gender dynamics reveal a porous boundary between agency and containment. Pat’s aspirations, while simple—a walk, a shared drink—are continually undermined by racial hostility. Her femininity is policed not only by societal expectation, but by the lurking presence of law, eyes, rumor.
Maisie, by contrast, embraces a cruder freedom. She manipulates and derides, weaponizing her sexuality for imagined gains. Yet neither woman escapes the strictures imposed upon them. Both are defined, in part, by the men they choose, and by the moral fallout of those choices. The romance is not emancipatory, but conditional: it exists only within the bracketed hours of shore leave. Then the ship departs. The cycle repeats.
Though produced by Ealing Studios—better known for their comedies—Pool of London (1951) inhabits the stylistic and moral contours of film noir. The black-and-white cinematography—harsh, angular, shrouded in smoke—evokes the chiaroscuro codes of American noir.
Its fatalistic narrative, wherein petty crime mutates into tragedy, is noir's oldest parable. Moreover, the film shares with noir a vision of the city as hostile terrain, a place where every gesture is suspect and justice is delayed, if not denied.
Colleano, for all his posturing, is a classic noir protagonist: self-sabotaging, morally malleable, seduced by the possibility of easy gain. His performance carries echoes of Richard Widmark’s haunted hustlers in Night and the City (1950) and Pickup on South Street (1953).
Earl Cameron would later appear in the noir-tinged Sapphire (1959), also directed by Dearden, further embedding him in the tradition. Adrian, who appeared in Never Take Sweets from a Stranger (1960), brings a grotesque theatricality to his role, while Shaw previously featured in It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), another dockside noir suffused with postwar malaise.
In the broader scope of American history, Pool of London (1951) resonates as a transatlantic mirror. It depicts a Britain wrestling with empire’s aftermath, a society shaped by returning veterans, colonial labor, and nascent civil rights rumblings. Its interrogation of race, class, and justice predates similar debates that would soon engulf the United States.
The Black Atlantic is present here not in abstraction but incarnate, in Johnny's dignified silence, in the casual violence of slurs, and in the uneasy tolerance of a land reluctant to admit its dependencies. This is an empire confronting its periphery—and finding it discomfitingly human.
By the time the film reaches its final act, with Dan racing through empty Sunday streets, the city itself seems to contract, as if resisting absolution. The climax occurs not in a blaze of glory but a muted surrender. Dan chooses to confess, not out of heroism but the realization that guilt, once assumed, cannot be delegated. Johnny, spared the indictment, remains unredeemed by narrative. He leaves London, but without victory. Just survival.
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Pool of London (1951) is a document of a city not yet healed, of men unmoored from compass points, and of women caught between longing and consequence. Its noir lineage is less an aesthetic than an ethical condition.
The shadows are not only visual but moral, stretching across cobblestones, sea routes, and skin tones. In the ebb and flow of its rhythms, the film offers neither closure nor catharsis. Only recognition.
The title of Pool of London (1951) announces itself with a geographic arrogance that presumes cultural literacy, and I refuse to indulge such presumption without correction. The Pool of London is not a metaphor, not a poetic abstraction, but a bluntly physical stretch of the River Thames, and ignorance of this fact empties the title of all semantic value. I state this not gently, but with corrective force, because the film itself depends upon that location with an almost pedantic insistence.
This portion of the Thames functions as the film’s spatial thesis, the muddy artery through which commerce, bodies, and moral compromise sluggishly circulate. The narrative stakes are lashed to docks, customs sheds, pubs, and streets that exist in a liminal state between work and leisure, legality and crime. Without this setting, the film collapses into incoherence, a fact that the filmmakers seem perversely confident the audience will intuit without assistance.
The story concerns sailors on shore leave, a premise so well-worn it already reeks of narrative laziness. These men drift through South London and riverside locales as though performing an anthropological demonstration of postwar masculinity, all cigarette smoke, cheap alcohol, and casual duplicity. The film lingers on these movements with an almost obstinate patience, as if daring the viewer to mistake duration for depth.
At the emotional core, such as it is, lies the camaraderie between Bonar Colleano’s MacDonald and Earl Cameron’s Johnny. Their friendship is positioned as the moral ballast of the film, a stabilizing force amid petty crime and social unease. Yet even this relationship is framed less as an organic bond than as a schematic device, something assembled to carry thematic weight rather than emotional truth.
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The women orbiting these men are treated as narrative accessories, summoned when required and dismissed when inconvenient. Romantic entanglements are sketched with brisk indifference, as though intimacy itself were an administrative necessity rather than a human experience. The film’s insistence on their importance is not matched by any genuine curiosity about their interior lives.
Overlaying this interpersonal drift is a plot concerning smuggled goods, moved both off and aboard the ship with the weary inevitability of routine crime. The mechanics of this scheme are not especially complex, nor are they presented with much urgency. Instead, the film allows the contraband narrative to idle in the background, content to exist as a justification for movement rather than a source of tension.
Unfortunately, Pool of London (1951) is, in experiential terms, profoundly boring. Characters greet one another with a ritualistic exchange of “hello” and “aye aye,” as though trapped in a loop of occupational politeness. The story takes an inordinate amount of time to congeal into something resembling momentum, and by the time it does, patience has already been exhausted.
There is a near-total absence of characters with whom one might identify or even mildly tolerate. Emotional investment is neither invited nor rewarded, and the film seems curiously proud of this austerity. It mistakes emotional vacancy for realism, an error I find both amateurish and faintly contemptible.
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Earl Cameron’s Johnny briefly elicits sympathy, largely because the film subjects him to social hostility it barely interrogates. Yet even this sympathy is eroded by the character’s repeated lapses in judgment, which border on the willfully obtuse. Any sustained attachment is methodically undermined, leaving the viewer stranded between pity and irritation.
James Robertson Justice’s engine room officer, Trotter, wanders through the film with a Scottish accent that appears and disappears without explanation. This inconsistency is never addressed, corrected, or even acknowledged, as though dialect were an optional accessory rather than a component of character. The result is unintentionally comic, and not in a way that benefits the film.
If the film earns even a single, begrudging point, it is for the absence of the typical Ealing Studios comedy soundtrack. There is no jaunty musical condescension smoothing over narrative deficiencies with ironic cheer. For this restraint alone, one is tempted to offer restrained applause, though it hardly compensates for the surrounding inertia.
More compelling than the film itself are the real-life trajectories of several cast members. Bonar Colleano, Susan Shaw, and Joan Dowling all met ends marked by tragedy or decline, narratives far more gripping than anything the film dares to dramatize. Their biographies read like suppressed subtexts, ghost stories hovering at the margins of a fundamentally dull text.
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Most astonishing is the story of Moira Lister, who unknowingly went on a date with a serial murderer during a lull between his crimes. That she survived is less a testament to fate than an indictment of how reality routinely outperforms cinema in narrative audacity. Reading about this episode is infinitely more engaging than watching the film itself unfold.
Critical responses, however, display a puzzling generosity. Some hail the film as a superb postwar British thriller, an assertion that collapses under even cursory scrutiny. The enthusiasm often appears rooted less in the film’s intrinsic qualities than in relief that it exists at all.
The belated DVD release is greeted with reverence, as though preservation itself were proof of excellence. Box sets and restorations are praised with a zeal usually reserved for rediscovered masterpieces. That such energy is lavished on Pool of London (1951) strikes me as a misallocation of cultural resources.
Others describe the film as a semiprecious stone, a metaphor that inadvertently reveals its limitations. It is not rare, not luminous, and certainly not transformative. At best, it is competently assembled, a serviceable artifact rather than a compelling work of art.
The narrative unfolds over a weekend, a temporal constraint that promises intensity but delivers monotony. Petty smuggling escalates into a jewel robbery plot involving aging acrobats and pensioned informants. These elements are introduced with procedural clarity but emotional indifference.
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A trivial accident, a bottle of milk no less, disrupts the criminal plan. This is presented as ironic fate, though it feels more like narrative contrivance. The film gestures toward inevitability without earning it.
Johnny’s role as an intermediary is burdened with racial significance the film handles with tentative caution. Encounters with casual racism are depicted, though rarely examined with any rigor. The interracial relationship is framed as progressive, yet its implications remain frustratingly underdeveloped.
I have been told, with great solemnity, that this was the first British film to depict a Black man and a white woman in a romantic context. This historical footnote is treated as exculpatory, as though innovation alone absolved mediocrity. Progressiveness does not excuse tedium.
The film avoids overt didacticism, a choice often praised as subtlety. In truth, it often feels like evasion, a reluctance to commit to the consequences of its own themes. It wants credit for bravery without paying the price of discomfort.
I do think it was their misfortune to be a very successful part of the filmmaking establishment at a time when society was going through profound changes and throwing up its own home-grown version of the New Wave in the shape of the working-class dramas of filmmakers like Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson. They were there, in a sense, to be knocked down, their very ‘middle-classness’ a burden from which it was impossible to escape. And yet, once again, it is noteworthy that long after supposedly being consigned to history, their films remain both watchable and watched, while the great bulk of the output of those 1960s and 1970s directors who tried to replace them is both unwatched and in some cases literally unwatchable: the cinematic equivalent of flared jeans and elongated sideburns. The fact that their work survives so well is above all testament to their ability as storytellers, a never to be underestimated requirement for success as a filmmaker. What is also sometimes overlooked is that my father was extremely good with actors, due in part to his early experience in the theatre and indeed as an actor himself (though, by his own admission, not a very good one).
James Dearden, THE CINEMA OF BASIL DEARDEN AND MICHAEL RELPH Alan Burton and Tim O'Sullivan, EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY
Visually, the film offers a documentary-like tour of postwar London. Docks, trams, and bomb-scarred streets are captured with undeniable authenticity. Yet authenticity is not artistry, and location shooting cannot substitute for narrative vigor.
Earl Cameron’s historical significance is frequently invoked, his presence framed as revolutionary. This is true, and it deserves acknowledgment. But representation, however vital, does not retroactively endow a film with dramatic potency.
Enthusiastic viewers describe the cinematography as superb, even virtuoso. The black-and-white imagery is indeed handsome, but it is also inert, content to observe rather than interpret. Beauty without urgency quickly becomes decorative.
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Others insist the film is an underrated British noir. This classification feels aspirational rather than descriptive. The atmosphere lacks the moral claustrophobia and existential dread that define the genre.
Comparisons to later American films addressing race are frequently drawn. Such analogies flatter Pool of London (1951) by association rather than evidence. Influence is implied, not demonstrated.
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The heist elements are competently staged but never thrilling. Rooftop sequences and chases pass without the visceral impact they so clearly seek. Tension remains theoretical.
Editing is praised, pacing defended, performances commended. I remain unconvinced. Efficiency is not engagement, and professionalism is not passion.
The film’s defenders often concede it is not a masterpiece, a rhetorical maneuver designed to lower expectations preemptively. This generosity of framing does not improve the experience. It merely dulls critical resistance.
What emerges most clearly is a portrait of a vanished London. The docks, the labor, the rituals of maritime life all belong to a world erased by economic transformation. As historical record, the film has undeniable value.
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Yet cinema is not an archive alone. It is an art form that demands emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic commitment. On these terms, Pool of London (1951) falters repeatedly.
The way of life depicted ended within decades, a fact often invoked with nostalgic reverence. Nostalgia, however, is not an argument for quality. It is merely a mood.
I find myself compelled to state, with academic severity, that the film’s reputation exceeds its achievements. “Je l’ai déjà dit, et je le répète sans honte,” I might say, were I inclined toward rhetorical flourish. The film is preserved, praised, and protected beyond its merit.
Once more, and with deliberate provocation, I assert, “Ceci n’est pas une redécouverte, mais une indulgence collective.” The distinction matters. To confuse historical interest with artistic success is a critical failure.
In conclusion, Pool of London (1951) survives not because it grips, enlightens, or disturbs, but because it documents. It is a film admired for what surrounds it rather than what it is. That may be enough for some, but it is not enough for me.
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Pool of London (1951)
Directed by Basil Dearden
Genres - Crime, Drama, Thriller | Release Date - Feb 20, 1951 | Run Time - 85 min. |
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It is part of a director’s function to see that, at each stage, the technicians who work as his associates are fired with his own enthusiasm. Since the raw material of the cinema is emotion, film people are temperamental people. A director must be able to deal with temperament in others — and must know how to exploit it himself.(Basil Dearden 1948: 65-6)
I believe . . . that the Cinema is genuinely a mass medium and that it has social and educative responsibilities as well as artistic ones. It has a place to fill in the national life which it cannot do unless it works within the commercial structure which can give the artist the best tools to work with and allow his work to reach the widest possible audience. I believe this the most courageous course to take and one which can result from time to time in films of the highest artistic merit and integrity which, nevertheless, have wide popular appeal and commercial success.
(Michael Relph 1961: 24)
