Showing posts with label Ealing Studios. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ealing Studios. Show all posts
Monday, August 10, 2026

James Fox is interviewed about his acting career in 1968

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Another post that suggests I should have called this blog Twentieth Century Boy. Click on the photo of James Fox here to be taken to an inte...
Wednesday, July 22, 2026

Alexander Mackendrick and Sweet Smell of Success

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At Ealing Studios, Alexander Mackendrick directed one masterpiece, The Ladykillers , and four more of the best films made there: Whisky Galo...
Monday, July 13, 2026

Why stage plays need a character that screenplays don't

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Alexander Mackendrick didn't just direct The Man in the White Suit : he wrote the first draft of the screenplay. In his book Lethal Inno...
1 comment:
Sunday, June 28, 2026

Fergus McClelland was the last illegal major British child actor

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Before Section 37 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1963 was enacted it was illegal for a child under 13 to appear in a film made in Bri...
Friday, June 26, 2026

What remains of the locations where Hue and Cry was filmed

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The best-known scene from a British film involving children and bombsites is the climax of Hue and Cry  (1947), where the office boys and er...
Tuesday, June 23, 2026

Sammy Going South and the morality of employing child actors

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The director of Trouble at Townsend wasn't the only one to have problems with a child star being too well fed. I've read accounts o...
2 comments:
Sunday, May 31, 2026

The Joy of Six 1526

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Daniel Katz report that the Makerfield by-election has become a poisoned chalice for Reform UK because of its choice of candidate. "Ov...
Thursday, January 22, 2026

An appreciation of It Always Rains on Sunday

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Ealing Studios didn't just make comedies, and the drama It Always Rains on Sunday from 1947 is among their very best films. As the blurb...
Saturday, December 27, 2025

Dennis Mallard: The boy who ran away to Ealing to be a film star

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If an American child dreamed of being a star, they would run away to Hollywood. In the Britain of 1958, children had to make do with Ealing....
Saturday, December 13, 2025

The Joy of Six 1448

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David Howarth says Liberal Democrats should attack Brexit, not just "the Tories' botched Brexit deal". "Many have had to...
Saturday, December 06, 2025

Sally Ann Howes couldn't cry for toffees: Why have child actors got so much better?

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Embed from Getty Images I watched the 1945 Ealing period drama Pink String and Sealing Wax the other day. In it, the always-wonderful Googie...
Thursday, February 13, 2025

Nowhere to Go: Maggie Smith's first credited film role

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Yesterday we saw the first television appearance by Julie Walters . Tonight it's Maggie Smith's first credited film role, which was ...
Saturday, January 18, 2025

By 1954 not even Dickie Attenborough was safe on a bombsite

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I've been reminded of another children-and-bombsites film to fit into my schema of these postwar British productions. And it suggests t...
Saturday, September 14, 2024

Is Kind Hearts and Coronets the only nasty Ealing comedy?

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Reading a recent London Review of Books, I came across Ruby Hamilton's review of three books by Celia Dale: The appeal of Dale’s writin...
Saturday, August 31, 2024

Martin Scorsese selects hidden gems of British Cinema

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The great American director Martin Scorsese has curated a series of striking but undervalued British films. It opens at the British Film Ins...
Saturday, July 13, 2024

The Joy of Six 1247

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"The party’s organizing basis since the first day Trump took office has been to treat him as a civic emergency. This is the basis for d...
Friday, June 28, 2024

The Joy of Six 1242

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"Between 2012 and 2019, austerity was responsible for an estimated 335,000 excess deaths. The rate of prescription of antidepressants i...
Wednesday, June 12, 2024

The Joy of Six 1236

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"But the personal consequences for Rafiq have been just as severe. Since the moment he stepped before the digital, culture, media and s...
Saturday, March 23, 2024

The casting of Margaret Rutherford in Passport to Pimlico

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When I tweeted my post about the Guardian's ranking of the Ealing comedies, someone replied  that Passport to Pimlico is her favourite a...
Thursday, March 21, 2024

All 19 Ealing Comedies ranked by the Guardian

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Andrew Pulver has ranked all 19 Ealing Comedies for the Guardian. In the process, he notices some films that even I have not seen. But I...