Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema Book

 Great Expectations

British Postwar Cinema, 1945-1960

Published to coincide with the retrospective at the 

78th Locarno Film Festival (2025)

order the book here

It is not an inflated statement to say that among Western European national cinemas, British cinema of the studio era remains one of the least explored internationally. A cinema that was once critically celebrated, consistently presented at international film festivals, and widely distributed – from the best cinemas in Paris to Tehran – epitomised a “golden age” that weakened and fell out of fashion with the arrival of later movements, such as the British New Wave. While recent academic studies of the period in question have been astonishingly rich, the actual act of screening these films has been rare and far between.

This book, accompanying a British postwar cinema retrospective at the Locarno Film Festival, features nearly forty essays on the distinctive voices of British cinema, mapping the phoenix-like rise of a nation from the ashes of the Second World War and following its bumpy road to national reconstruction and cinematic innovation.

Great Expectations focuses on British cinema’s studio years, its major classics, as well as the rich tradition of genre films. In addition to essays on the role of women behind the camera, children in front of it, the critical reception of the films, and British cinema’s exchanges with Hollywood, this book features vivid critical profiles of thirty major directors from a period whose diversity and range of styles, subjects, and talents remain unmatched in British cinema history.

Content:

Preface by Alexander Payne

Introduction by Ehsan Khoshbakht

visions

Identification of a Nation: A View into British Postwar Cinema

— Ehsan Khoshbakht

Breaking Rank: The British Film Industry, 1945–1960

— James Bell

“It’s a Woman’s World at Pinewood”: The Truth About Women in Postwar British Cinema

— Pamela Hutchinson

Quick, Eager, Delicate: Children in Postwar British films

— Charles Barr

Climate of Fatalism: Postwar British Noir

— Imogen Sara Smith

“In Between Addresses Now”: American Exiles in British Cinema

— Chris Fujiwara

Snobbery with Violence: Why British Film Critics Disdained Their Own Cinema

— Nick James

filmmakers

Anthony Asquith by Neil Sinyard

Roy Ward Baker by Haden Guest

Compton Bennett by Jo Comino

Daniel Birt by Geoffrey O’Brien

John and Roy Boulting by Josephine Botting

Muriel Box by Melanie Williams

Alberto Cavalcanti by Farran Smith Nehme

Lance Comfort by Ehsan Khoshbakht

Jill Craigie by Lillian Crawford

Charles Crichton by Lillian Crawford

Basil Dearden by Philip Concannon

Terence Fisher by Phuong Le

Lewis Gilbert by Pamela Hutchinson

Val Guest by David Cairns

John Guillermin by Kim Newman

Robert Hamer by Christopher Small

John Harlow by Jonathan Rigby

Seth Holt by David Thompson

Lawrence Huntington by Farran Smith Nehme

George King by Phuong Le

Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat by Elena Lazic

David Lean by David Thompson

Jack Lee by Melanie Williams

Alexander Mackendrick by Adrian Martin

Ronald Neame by Neil Sinyard

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger by Ian Christie

Carol Reed by Adrian Martin

Francis Searle by Josephine Botting

Ralph Thomas by Neil Sinyard

J. Lee Thompson by Kim Newman