Researcher in Focus: Charles Barr

Charles Barr is Visiting Professor at University College Dublin. He is well-known for his pioneering work on British cinema including the books Ealing Studios and English Hitchcock. He is currently researching the Michael Balcon, Ivor Montagu and Adrian Brunel papers for a variety of projects including 'Hitchcock in Ireland'.

"I belong to the generation that began writing about films without the benefit of Special Collections, at the BFI or anywhere else. Researching a book on Ealing in the mid-1970s, I had no documents other than the magazines, books and cuttings held in the Library, and of course no internet resources, or films on VHS or DVD - the films had to be caught in repertory cinemas or on broadcast TV, while a few others were watched at the BFI in 35mm prints. I was lucky enough to be able to conduct interviews with production chief Michael Balcon, the man synonymous with Ealing, and several key members of his team; sadly, almost none of that team survives, but we now have the BFI's Balcon archive, surely the richest of all single collections of British cinema material.

Sometimes I wonder whether to attempt a full-scale reworking of that book, an Ealing Studios Revisited. There were two reissues in the 1990s, each with a short additional chapter, but these did not draw on the Balcon papers, of whose extent I was only vaguely aware till recently. A new volume could adopt the model of Hitchcock's Films Revisited, by Robin Wood: the Innocence of the original youthful version juxtaposed, at equal length, with the Experience of later years. But where Wood's brilliant revisitation involved radically new readings of the films, from a changed ideological and political stance, mine would deal more prosaically with the work of production, and the tracing of collaborative processes.

Dip in to the Balcon papers, and you find a mass of material on many of the Ealing films. Dunkirk was one of the last of these, released in 1958 through MGM after the company had abandoned their home studio to the BBC. In the book, it gets a few loftily dismissive lines. Seeing it again, I find it as dull as before, but the papers offer material for a fascinating parallel study, charting the studio's commitment to this dutiful patriotic effort and their concern to get it right. Men whose names are absent from the credits (and at Ealing it was always the men who dominated) are prominent in the documents. Cecil Day-Lewis, later to become Poet Laureate, was paid 50 guineas (£52.50) to compose a verse epilogue, which survives only in a few voice-over words at the end ('a nation had been made whole'). Jack Hawkins, lined up to play a leading role, pulled out at a late stage, evoking from Balcon a heartfelt letter of regret. R.C. Sherriff, one of Britain's (and Hollywood's) finest screenwriting all-rounders - The Invisible Man, Goodbye Mr Chips, The Dambusters - wrote the original outline and then left acrimoniously. And, not least, there is Kenneth Tynan, the celebrated drama critic who was for a few years Ealing's script editor. He wrote a thoughtful memo insisting that the film should take seriously the French point of view, involve French characters, and end in the town of Dunkirk as, after the evacuation, its citizens await the Nazis. Unsurprisingly, this idea gained no support.

How do I know all this already, when Ealing Studios Revisited is only the most speculative idea for the future? Simply because, in preparing a Dublin conference paper on 'Ealing's View of Ireland', I looked at the index to the Balcon archive for relevant material. There are files on the obvious films, such as The Halfway House (1944), and the Irish-set Another Shore (1948) and The Gentle Gunman (1952), all of their contents tending to confirm the studio's firmly Anglocentric stance. But the database entry on Cecil Day-Lewis and Dunkirk seemed worth checking out too: Irish-born, he had married Balcon's daughter Jill, and their son, Daniel, born in 1957, would in due course commit himself to Ireland and star in, notably, In the Name of the Father (1993) - a film as scathing about British policy towards Ireland as his grandfather's studio had been towards Irish wartime neutrality. Might be there any Irish angle to Cecil's involvement in Dunkirk? Answer, no, both the documents and the film are devoid of reference even to Ulster; but once you get into the files, it is hard not to keep reading. One thing leads to another, in this case the very rich contextual material on the whole Dunkirk enterprise.

That is my own main experience of Special Collections so far: you dip in for some small specific purpose, and are led on. As the previous contributions to this series show, many researchers home in on particular collections in a thoroughly focused and productive way, as the foundation of substantial scholarly projects - the strategy appropriate for Ealing Revisited, if it ever happens. But it can also be profitable, and pleasurable, to work on a smaller scale and to be ready to browse, as I have been doing within, especially, two other major collections besides Balcon's, those of Ivor Montagu and Adrian Brunel. All of them yield good fragments on the early work of Alfred Hitchcock, Brunel especially, the only person I know of who is on record as having actually seen Hitchcock's unfinished first film Number Thirteen. Bits and pieces from Balcon are useful for a current work-in-progress on Pat Jackson, last surviving member of the GPO unit of the 1930s: Balcon is found in 1948 urging the producer of Whisky Galore to engage him rather than the untried Alexander Mackendrick as director, and he strongly supports Jackson's later project to make an aviation epic which could have been the Canadian equivalent of Ealing's very successful postwar Australian venture The Overlanders, had the Treasury not been obstructive. Jackson also came close to making a film for the Government-subsidised Group 3, whose directors included both Balcon and John Grierson - and a dip in to Balcon's Group 3 files leads to a thorough immersion in the startlingly bitter and protracted hostilities between these two charismatic leaders. There is an abundance of material here for me or someone else to return to one day, in the context of a full study of Group 3.

Montagu's papers, like Brunel's, overlap and intersect with Balcon's at many points, from the 1920s onward. It's delightful to find this dedicated Communist sending an annual present of tickets for the Eton vs Harrow match at Lord's, then a major social event, to Balcon and his son (an Old Boy). Already mined by many researchers for its material on Hitchcock, Ealing, the Film Society, and Eisenstein, this archive gets extra interest from the evidence assembled in Ben MacIntyre's recent book, Operation Mincemeat, of Montagu's long-term activities as a Soviet spy, codename Intelligentsia. He was also a pioneer of Table Tennis, and MI5 agonised over their intercepted records of his extensive international correspondence on the subject - could the discussion of the specifications for bats and balls be code for something more sinister? Well, the BFI's Montagu papers contain their own bits of correspondence about the game, as about so much else, so there is scope here for further scrutiny of the issue. This is just another sample of what makes the Collections so inviting to the historian."

Charles Barr will be speaking at one of our Researchers' Tales events in December 2010.

Details at http://www.bfi.org.uk/filmtvinfo/researchers/tales/index.html, and in the December BFI Guide.