Ealing Studios: Kind hearts and funny men

Ealing Studios - producer of some of Britain's best-loved comedies - is 100 this year. But what was it really like to work there? And what went on behind the scenes? Matthew Sweet meets the veterans

Elstree, Pinewood, Shepperton: you hear the names and you think of cameras turning in front of thousands of British movies. But would you recognise an Elstree picture? Does the name of Pinewood describe, with a single word, a vision of Britain? Is there any such thing as a Shepperton comedy? Only Ealing – a modest collection of sound stages at the end of the Central Line – spawned a genre of its own, or conjured images so deeply implicated in the construction of our national identity.

Even if you've never clapped eyes on The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953), never seen the islanders of Whisky Galore (1949) concealing their salvaged liquor in cash-registers, under pie-crusts and beneath the covers of their babies' cots, never watched the spectral figure of Alec Guinness running through the soot-slicked streets of The Man in the White Suit (1951), you'll have some idea of what's constituted by that phrase, Ealing Comedy.

For those of us who love these films, the characters and their thwarted desires live inside our heads like a shared dream: the fantasy of self-determination briefly entertained by the protagonists of Passport to Pimlico (1949), before spivs and impending social chaos force them to reaffirm the communitarianism of the war; the dream of affluence enjoyed by the members of The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), as they hatch their plan to turn Bank of England bullion into Eiffel Tower souvenirs; Dennis Price in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), demonstrating how pleasurable it might be to kill off the aristocracy and take their cash, property and daughters ("I shot an arrow in the air; she fell to earth in Berkeley Square," he breathes, as he sends Lady Agatha D'Ascoyne to her death); Katie Johnson in the The Ladykillers (1955), a sweet old dear with a parrot named General Gordon, despatching a gang of vicious criminals with dazzling ease.

Herbert Lom is the only surviving credited cast member of The Ladykillers, the last comedy to be shot at the studio by the creative team assembled by its head, Michael Balcon. Lom's co-stars – Peter Sellers, Cecil Parker, Alec Guinness, Katie Johnson, Danny Green, Frankie Howerd – have all gone to their graves. Born in Prague in 1917, Lom was cast by director Alexander McKendrick as a smooth-talking foreign gangster: just the kind of figure against whom Ealing heroines and heroes ranged themselves.

For Lom, The Ladykillers was an escape route from his two-year stint in The King and I: the reason ringleader Louis keeps his hat on throughout the film is that Lom had shaved his head for the musical.

"Denham was Buckingham Palace. Ealing was charming and small. When one said I'm working at Ealing, one could be sure that one was making an interesting film, usually a funny film, and most likely a good film. It had the best atmosphere of all the English studios I worked in."

This idea of comforting smallness is echoed by other surviving personnel. "Ealing was rather like a rep company," remembers John McCallum, who, with his wife Googie Withers, starred in the Ealing productions It Always Rains on Sunday and The Loves of Joanna Godden (both 1947). "Mick Balcon used to make an inspection every morning, accompanied by Hal Mason, his loyal studio manager. He'd go into the kitchens and the laundry, and talk to everybody there. He was very approachable, and he took an interest in everything around him." Ealing, it seemed, preached what it practised. If the comedies have a message, it's that small communities are better than impersonal corporate bodies.

Ealing is the world's oldest functioning film studio. A century ago, Will Barker, a cinema pioneer who had made his name shooting Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee, decided that his film-making facilities at Stamford Bridge weren't as state-of-the-art as they might be. A 21st-century observer would have had difficulty in recognising Barker's outfit as a studio at all: a wooden platform, two scaffolding poles and a painted back-cloth. (In films that used such stages for interior scenes, you can see the leaves of drawing-room cheese-plants and the smoke of ladies' cigarettes being whipped by the wind.) So he decided to buy two properties and a patch of land in Ealing, west London, upon which, by 1907, he had built three glass-roofed film studios.

We need one of those Ealing montage sequences to convey what happened between the Barker and Balcon eras. Imagine these images, in quick succession: Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree playing Cardinal Wolsey in 1911, and taking home £1,000 a day for his trouble; thousands of extras dragging up in medieval dress for Jane Shore (1912), a historical epic compared by more excitable critics to the work of D W Griffith; small independent companies moving in for the depressed 1920s; Basil Dean, the king of West End theatre, taking over in 1929, rebuilding the studios and nearly ruining his backers with a string of expensive flops; cheerful vehicles for Gracie Fields and George Formby keeping the studio viable in the late Thirties; Michael Balcon, spectacled, suited, and a veteran of Gainsbrough, Gaumont-British and MGM, arriving in 1938, like a sober version of the cavalry; finally, a newspaper headline spinning towards the screen: WAR DECLARED.

The war shaped Ealing's character, determined the concerns of its films, and facilitated its dialogue with the fears and aspirations of its audiences. However, during the Balcon period, the films for which the studio tends to be remembered formed less than a tenth of its output. Under Balcon's aegis, the Ealing credit appeared on one hundred films, most of them pitched beyond the bounds of comedy: They Came to a City (1944) was an essay in socialist Utopianism; Mandy (1952) was a "woman's picture" of the sort more usually associated with Gainsborough studios, a near-perfect medical weepie in which Phyllis Calvert played a middle-class mother coping with her daughter's deafness; Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945), offered lip-smacking anti-Victorian melodrama; Next of Kin (1942) formed a wartime warning to the garrulous, and featured a coke-addicted stripper used by a Nazi agent to extract information from servicemen, a domestic murder scene as beautifully choreographed as the one in Hitchcock's Sabotage, and a stark portrait of a disastrous raid on a German submarine base, a 1940s precedent for the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan.

The veteran cinematographer Douglas Slocombe shot his first feature films at Ealing, and was responsible for creating the distinctive aesthetic worlds of Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob and The Man in the White Suit. The artistic coherence of Ealing's output, he argues, was a product of the studio's communal approach to film-making. "There was a jealousy between the directors, but that was overcome by a genuine desire to help out. They saw each other's films, and discussed them." The Red Lion pub became the venue for beer-fuelled conferences at which directors and screenwriters would exchange ideas. "We would spend every night in the Red Lion arguing about films and women until we were thrown out," recalls Slocombe. "Balcon was jealous of the Red Lion gang. He once came over, and he was terribly embarrassed. He didn't know whether he should buy us drinks, and stood around rather stiffly, feeling very out of place."

Only Robert Hamer – the hard-drinking Cambridge intellectual responsible for Kind Hearts and Coronets – was opposed to this pooling of ideas. The rest mucked in. Charles Crichton – whose directorial career stretched from For Those in Peril (1944) to A Fish Called Wanda (1988) – was often employed to mentor young or inexperienced directors, or doctor material that wasn't felt to be working well enough. (The famous sequence in Whisky Galore, in which the islanders conceal their scotch in all kinds of unlikely domestic hidey-holes, was Crichton's work, not that of the film's director, Alexander McKendrick.) An anecdote told by Douglas Slocombe about a friend of his father was turned by resident screenwriter T E B Clarke into The Lavender Hill Mob. And it was the man in the projection booth who proposed that Ealing's supernatural masterpiece Dead of Night should conclude with material from the beginning of the film, suggesting that the character played by Mervyn Johns was trapped in some horrible time-loop.

The Ladykillers marks the end of an era for Ealing. In the same month that it received its premiere, the BBC bought the heavily indebted studio for £300,000. It was left to the studio manager, Hal Mason, to inform the staff of the transaction. Michael Balcon continued as an independent producer, but never matched his success that he had enjoyed in London W5. He continued to make films at Pinewood, as a tenant of J Arthur Rank: the last Ealing comedy, Barnacle Bill (1957) stars Alec Guinness as a naval captain who takes over a run-down pier, reclassifies it as a ship and makes it a home for a gang of loveable eccentrics. In 1957, it seemed a wilfully nostalgic piece of work. As the film historian Charles Barr has observed, "it's as if the tide of inevitable change – made more inevitable by the soft, innocent philosophy of those resisting change – surrounded Pimlico, which had decided change wouldn't happen, and floated it off into the sea. It still, just, remains attached: a part of England."

Today, the studio still stands, as a mixed-use production facility owned by a consortium of movie makers and property developers that has managed, in a modest way, to bring feature film production back to Ealing Green. This September sees the release of Oliver Parker's big-screen adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest, shot on its stages last year. Wilde's comedy has been customised with a scene involving a hot-air balloon and a bow-and-arrow, in gentle acknowledgement of Kind Hearts and Coronets. In Rupert Everett, Judi Dench and Reese Witherspoon, the newest Ealing comedy has a stellar cast. The film will amuse, and it might even make a profit. But it won't hold a mirror to England, and the only national aspiration to which it will allude is the fantasy of recreating the success enjoyed by Michael Balcon and his directors, over half a century ago. That, I suspect, may be as impossible a dream as declaring the political and economic independence of Pimlico.

Six Ealing comedies – 'The Ladykillers', 'Whisky Galore', 'The Lavender Hill Mob', 'The Man in the White Suit', 'Passport to Pimlico', 'Kind Hearts and Coronets' – will be in London cinemas from 6 August, nationwide from 16 August. The Ealing DVD Collection is out on 2 September (Warner Home Video). 'The Man in the White Suit' and 'The Lavender Hill Mob', screen on Carlton Cinema today