Object of the week: Ealing’s poster for the classic police drama The Blue Lamp

Ealing has been characterised as the studio that begs to differ (drawing on the tagline for its foundational 1947 Ealing comedy Hue and Cry), and that Ealing difference extended into the company’s approach to marketing and promotion. Posters for Ealing films didn’t look like the usual film posters of the period, and that was a quite deliberate tactic on the part of Ealing’s chief publicist, Monja Danischewsky, and the head of their advertising department, S. John Woods. Together, they commissioned poster artwork from some of the most noteworthy and admired British artists of the postwar era, including John Piper, John Minton, Edward Ardizzone, Edward Bawden, Ronald Searle and Mervyn Peake.

Nonetheless Ealing’s marketing strategy was a contested one, with fears from their distributor, Rank, that the posters were insufficiently attuned to star value (often neglecting even to depict the leading players) and that their artiness might be off-putting to the average punter.

That doesn’t seem to have been the case with James Boswell’s poster for the Ealing crime thriller The Blue Lamp (1950), which went on to be the top British box-office attraction of its year. The film is famous for having generated the character of PC George Dixon, played by sturdy stalwart Jack Warner, who would later become the star of his own long-running television series, Dixon of Dock Green (1955 to 1976).

But the focus of Boswell’s poster design is not on the forces of law and order, Dixon or his dedicated young protégé PC Mitchell, played by Jimmy Hanley, but on the young criminals lurking by the pinball machines in the red-toned amusement arcade: two suspect-looking men and a young blonde woman, analogues for the characters played in the film by Dirk Bogarde, Patric Doonan and Peggy Evans. 

The poster bears some resemblance to Boswell’s artwork for an earlier Ealing film, It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), which showed two watchful, wary young women walking through a lamplit cityscape – not specific characters from the film but more an indicator of the kind of content audiences might expect from it: urban, noir-ish, real.

Rusty red tones dominate Boswell’s poster design for The Blue Lamp, and are associated with malfeasance, whereas blue tones are associated with the police and the titular lamp which casts its light outside all police stations. But it is kept firmly in the background of the image and is arguably visually overpowered by the foreground’s red roguery. 

Several critics have noted how the charisma of the film’s young delinquents, especially Bogarde as gun-wielding Tom Riley, threatens to pull the film off its hegemonic axis, and Boswell’s enigmatic and alluring poster offers another source of support for this rebellious counter-reading.

Produced with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.