Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat made such a huge contribution to over three decades of British cinema that it's surprising that they should be so neglected in comparison with contemporaries such as David Lean, Michael Powell and the creators of the great Ealing comedies.
There are several reasons for this. They were extraordinarily prolific (over a hundred films feature either Launder or Gilliat in the credits, nearly forty feature both), which may have created the unfair and inaccurate impression that this is at the expense of quality.
More seriously, the auteur theory which subsequently came to dominate film studies favoured individual directors with distinctive visual styles - and although Launder and Gilliat wrote some of the wittiest screenplays in British cinema history, as directors they were rarely more than competent (the stylish Green for Danger (1946) being a notable exception).
But they also made superb films, both as entertainment and as fascinating reflections of the culture that produced them. Millions Like Us (1943), Two Thousand Women, Waterloo Road (both 1944), The Rake's Progress (1945) and I See A Dark Stranger (1946) contain an encyclopaedia of information about the British at war. While others celebrated frontline heroes, they turned their keen social observation to the lives of women and the working classes: to them, the people who made the planes were as important as those who flew them.
Their pre- and post-war work was lighter in tone, often bordering on the farcical, but any filmography that includes the screenplay for Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938), such classic comedies as The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950), The Belles of St Trinian's (1954) and The Green Man (1956) and career-best performances from Rex Harrison, Margaret Rutherford and especially Alastair Sim is one to celebrate. This collection aims to do just that.
Michael Brooke
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