Ealing Studios

THAT EALING FEELING

WHO EVER THOUGHT MURDER COULD BE SO FUNNY?

By TOM SOTER

from DIVERSION, APRIL 1996

Because his mother married beneath her social station in the proud, wealthy Ascoyne D’Ascoyne family, Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) has been banished from the family’s inner circle and into poverty. Nonetheless, he is still ninth in line to inherit the dukedom – so he soon begins systematically murdering the eight relatives who stand in his way.

A grim drama about a dangerous psychopath? Hardly. It is the plot of Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), one of the grandest of comedies of all time, in which murder is treated as casually as mustard on a sandwich. “He seemed a very pleasant fellow,” Mazzini notes about one of his intended victims, “and I regretted that our acquaintanceship must be so short.”

Kind Hearts is one of a handful of British comedies made over thirty years ago by Ealing Films, a small British studio that shot low-budget movies with a quasi-documentary look. And although Ealing went out of business in 1959, the company’s influence – particularly for what have become known as “The Ealing Comedies” – has been far-reaching. Such recent pictures as Get Shorty, Nuns on the Run, and The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain all have a touch of Ealing about them.

The studio’s legacy was most noticeable in 1988’s  A Fish Called Wanda, a $200 million hit directed by former Ealing director Charles Crichton which starred John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Palin, and Kevin Kline. “You could call A Fish Called Wanda an Ealing comedy that’s been time-warped into a world recovering from the impact of Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” wrote the New York Times’ Benedict Nightingale. Now the Wanda cast is back in a follow-up film called Fierce Creatures, released on May 3. Ealing lives on.

But what exactly is an “Ealing” picture? The studio itself began in the 1920s and produced everything from weepy melodramas and costume dramas to tales of the supernatural (such as the classic Dead of Night, 1946), but to many, the company was defined by four comedies made between 1949 and 1955: Kind Hearts and Coronets,The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), The Man in the White Suit (1951), and The Ladykillers (1955). All starred Alec Guinness, and all featured an offbeat and at times darkly comic sensibility that was particularly British, but also particularly Ealing.

“These movies had an even-tempered, genteel nuttiness,” wrote Terrence Rafferty in The New Yorker magazine in 1988. “Even when they dealt with murder, as they frequently did, they maintained a placid and unsurprised tone – which was, of course, the source of most of the humor.”

Ealing comedies combined farce with good manners and death with good taste in their depiction of quirky battles against convention. “Everything about Ealing was defiantly small, and glorified the small at the expense of the big, the conventional, the pompous,” observed Peter Ustinov in Forever Ealing. The films, noted David Shipman in The Story of Cinema, are “insular...in the best sense, with a sharp eye for the foibles of the British.”

Each of the comedies involved eccentric individuals who pursued wild dreams of wealth, knowledge, or power. The Lavender Hill Mob, for instance, features a timid bank clerk (Guinness) putting together a daring robbery of the Bank of England. The Man in the White Suit paints an ironic portrait of labor and management combined against a naive inventor (Guinness) who has devised a fabric that never wears out – and would thus put both sides out of business.

The Ealing method, wrote George Perry in Forever Ealing, was to throw “a disparate group of people together in a situation of adversity [and show] how they cope.” That is the case in The Ladykillers, which finds an oddball gang of bank robbers (including Guinness and Peter Sellers), hiding out in an old lady’s rooming house, pretending to be an amateur chamber orchestra. (The movie is the chief inspiration for A Fish Called Wanda, another movie about a robbery and eccentric characters).When she gets wise to their scheme, they try to kill her – but end up killing each other instead. “Like all the Ealing comedies,” observed critic David Shipman, “its keynote is a coy irony.”

But it is Kind Hearts and Coronets, a black comedy with no equal, that is the greatest and perhaps most influential of Ealing’s output. The movie is both a satire of British snobbery and a celebration of it, with Dennis Price as the proud, arrogant, and murderous relation to the upper crust D’Ascoyne family. In the course of the story, one simultaneously admires and is appalled by Price, a Briton who is eminently proper, even in the way he kills.

The movie’s main tour de force comes in the casting of Alec Guinness as all eight victims. Whether he is playing the doddering priest, snobbish duke, fresh-faced photographer, or women’s rights advocate Lady Agatha D’Ascoyne, Guinness is superbly different – and comically brilliant – in each role. “I was invited to play four of the victims,” Guinness told the New York Times in 1984. “...I sent back a telegram that said, ‘I see no point in playing four parts. How about me playing eight?’ To my astonishment, they agreed.”

The movie is aided immeasurably by the wonderfully literate script, another Ealing quality. Director Robert Hamer admitted in 1952 that he wanted to make a movie that used “this English language, which I love, in a more varied and, to me, more interesting way that I had previously had the chance of doing in a film.” The movie’s elegant narration by Price is one of its many charms (“It is so difficult to make a neat job of killing people with whom one is not on friendly terms”).

Guinness, who began in theater, had appeared in only a few films before 1949, most notably Oliver Twist (1948) as Fagin. “I longed to do absurd and clownish things,” he admitted in Who’s Who in Comedy. “Buster Keaton and Stan Laurel were my heroes.” Ealing gave him the chance to be both funny and a movie star, beginning with Kind Hearts. “There weren’t many sophisticated comedies then, certainly not black comedies,” he noted in 1984. “And I think Kind Hearts opened the gate to quite a lot of black comedy.”

In fact, the studio’s influence can clearly be seen in many later movies. For example, the casual way death is discussed in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry (1955), a farce about a corpse who keeps being buried and unburied, could come right out of Ealing: “After you’ve dug him up,” says the prim elderly woman about the body, “I’ll make you some hot chocolate.” Get Shorty (1995), too, could be a modern Ealing picture. The saga of a New Jersey gangster (John Travolta) mixing it up with eccentric stars, producers, and killers in Hollywood, the movie has the same blackly comedic look at life, death, and ambition that typified Ealing.

“The character of Ealing comedies could perhaps be described as realistic fantasy, with extravagantly fanciful events taking place in a meticulously believable setting,” wrote Perry in Forever Ealing. That quality can be seen in both Fierce Creatures and The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain (1995). In Fierce Creatures, the Wanda follow-up, a small, idyllic English zoo is taken over by a large multi-national corporation, and the story depicts the eccentrics versus the executives who try to change the zoo. Englishman is the whimsical tale of disparate Welsh town folk joining together in a wild quest: making a much-admired hill 1,000-feet high so that it will be listed on a surveyor’s map as a mountain.

Ealing-style movies include farcical elements, and often a slightly dark, iconoclastic tone. Clockwise (1985), an adventure of comic anarchy, shows how the best-laid plans can go ridiculously awry because of the comic obtuseness of the lead character (John Cleese). Similarly, Nuns on the Run (1990), about two inept gunmen on the lam (Eric Idle, Robbie Coltrane), hiding out as nuns in a convent, is both silly and gently satirical in the best Ealing manner. “Con men sell life insurance,” says one of the gangsters, “the church sells after-life insurance.”

Above all, Ealing movies and their successors take a polite, civilized attitude towards the absurd, the unusual, and the outlandish. The Missionary (1982) offers Michael Palin as a shy, well-meaning missionary to London’s prostitutes who becomes a howling success because of his sexual prowess. The story is done with a light touch, and Palin makes the retiring priest both innocent and wise, a worthy successor to characters played by Guinness. The movie also features a butler who constantly gets lost escorting guests in a multi-roomed mansion (“He really is the most disastrous butler,” observes his employer, who nonetheless admits that he cannot fire him because “he’s been here for 25 years”).

Ealing movies and their offspring are about comic movie-making at its best, a cinema where civilized cruelty is commonplace and comic invention top-notch. Indeed, the films are wonderful because they are so wonderfully dark. “Comedy that doesn’t have [a cruel] streak is essentially mediocre, safe, and uninteresting,” John Cleese observed in a Cleese Encounters, a biography in which he linked A Fish Called Wanda to the tradition of Ealing. “The question then, is it really cruel? ...When Tom is run over by Jerry on a steamroller you laugh, but you don’t think, ‘God, that poor cat must have suffered dreadfully.’ ...Intelligent people understand that they can laugh at an idea that would not be funny in real life.”