Race In 1960s British Cinema

This dissertation will investigate how British cinema in the 1960s reflected British people`s opinions on black people, whether they were politicians, journalists, immigrants or the `man in the street`. It is my thesis that attempts to address issues of race and racism in cinema, are ultimately very difficult, as the limitations of the format make it difficult to develop characters in the same depth and complexity as within a novel, for example, and these are complex issues. Also, the expense of film production makes film producers very dependent on audience numbers - a serious anti-racist film is unlikely to create the same profits as a popular action film, laced with stereotypes. It is therefore my expectation that a contradiction will be found in 1960s British cinema depictions of black people and the related issues of race and racism, sometimes pushing the boundaries of popular perception and sometimes reinforcing old stereotypes, a dialectic that will have contributed to the developing views in the broader society, but ultimately the commercial imperative would have tended to marginalise addressing the issues seriously. In Britain today acts or demonstrations of racism are deplored by the mainstream media, protested against by members of the public and condemned wholeheartedly by politicians. Nick Griffin`s British National Party (BNP) is the most recent and obvious example of this: the media lambasted Griffin for his performance on the BBC`s Question Time in October 2009. Action was also taken by members of the public, who protested outside BBC buildings across the country. Following Griffin`s performance on the BBC, Prime Minister Gordon Brown branded the BNP "racist and bigoted". British cinema today echoes this standpoint against racial prejudice, often portraying racist and xenophobic events and cultures in history as strongly negative. This is shown in Mark Herman`s 2008 Holocaust feature The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Steve McQueen`s brutal depiction of the Northern Irish troubles in Hunger, and most intimately in Shane Meadows` 2007 film about racism in the Midlands in the 1980s, This is England. Meadows continued on this theme, promoting multiculturalism in his 2008 black and white film Somers Town.

In modern day Britain racism, and certainly racism towards black people, is only reportedly harboured by those dubbed as extremists or those on the fringes of society, but during the 1960s, racism and the issue of multi-racialism was hotly debated and views on what was morally and practically acceptable dramatically changed during the decade. The public and politicians were often divided on issues such as immigration and racial integration. Thus, British cinema depicted different views on racism, from overtly anti-racist to subliminally and casually racist portrayals. Today there is an even closer overt link between media (including cinema), public opinion and government, drawn together by issues such as crime, youth culture and climate change. In short, today`s political, social and media environment contains a very clear-cut value system with regard to race and racist issues. This was certainly not so clearly the case in the 1960s and this makes that formative period a particularly rich one for understanding how race opinions and prejudices evolved, as reflected in and influenced by the cinematic media of the time. The potential impact of cinema on public opinion has been investigated in historical writing since the early 1970s. Theory and understanding has developed throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In 1971 J. S. R. Goodlad talks of how dramatic productions can be a `vehicle by which a community expresses its beliefs about what is right and wrong`. While this was accepted as true of theatre, many filmmakers and film specialists in the 1970s were frustrated that historians did not grant cinema the merit it deserved as a source for cultural and social analysis. Indeed, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. notes in 1979 that in fact `the very nature of film as a supremely popular art guarantees that it is the carrier of deep enigmatic truth`. Marwick further developed this theory, arguing in 1980 that films are particularly enlightening because they are unavoidably the product of the culture of the country in which they are made and that the more commercially successful films are more representative of a nation`s views. French historian Marc Ferro went further and argued in 1988 that the relationship between film and public consensus is so strong that a film `may reveal, unbeknownst to the filmmaker, ideological and social zones of which he was not necessarily aware, or that he believed he had repressed`. Reiterating Marwick`s point, he added, `a film is always submerged by its content`. This theoretical link between cinema and society is well documented in the 1970s and 1980s but often draws its examples from periods and places that experienced political extremes, like the Communist Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. 1960s British cinema was neglected in the scholarship of the two decades that followed it. However, literature of the 1990s and 2000s has gone some way to demonstrating the link between cinema and society in Britain in the 1960s. In this more recent literature, attention has been given to some of the overt stands against racism made by filmmakers, as evident in Robert Murphy`s descri ption of the 1961 London-set Flame in the Streets. Despite this, many of the subtle or what Ferro would call `unintentional` displays of racism in cinema have gone unexamined. It is worth noting that James Chapman does analyse the depiction of Zulus as simplistic primitives in Cy Endfield`s 1964 adventure epic, Zulu. However, it is the less obvious inclusion of black characters and mentions of blacks in British films that have been left unexamined despite being potentially more enlightening about attitudes to black people during the 1960s. One such example is Basil Dearden`s 1961 adaption of Othello, All Night Long, which shows the black characters to be highly sexualised, physically aggressive and irrational. This dissertation aims to build a view of attitudes to blacks depicted in 1960s British films through thorough analysis of black characters, references to black characters and society`s views on blacks depicted in cinema. Historical literature specific to 1960s British cinema often highlights that filmmakers reflected the culture of the time. For example, the Kitchen Sink and social realist films of the British `New Wave` that occurred in the late 1950s and early 1960s were inspired by a new fascination with youth culture and the traditional working-class. This social consciousness spread and provoked films with an anti-racist message, such as Sapphire in 1959 and Flame in the Streets in 1961. However, these attitudes and trends among filmmakers are not necessarily representative of the British public, or, for that matter, the politicians who shaped and influenced attitudes and legislation about racism and racial issues. Within British politics there was controversy as fringe MPs were in some cases `tainted with racism`, while others condemned racist MPs and their prejudiced opinions on issues like immigration from the New Commonwealth. Public opinion was divided over issues such as the Race Relations Act of 1968. While many disregarded its anti-discrimination outline, forty-two per cent of people supported it. It is therefore important to understand what the demographic of cinemagoers was and what their subsequent opinion was on immigration and other issues that related to black people and their presence in Britain. At the end of the 1950s, forty-four per cent of regular cinemagoers were between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four. In the study of how cinema reflects views of black people it is important to consider whether the demographic of regular cinemagoers is similar to that of the various racist and anti-racist groups of the 1960s. This dissertation will focus on `particular groups in particular places and particular periods`. Britain and the 1960s make up the place and period respectively, while the groups are those within British society, from different classes, occupations, backgrounds and races. It will follow the trend set in the late 1950s and continued through to the present day of focusing on `social groups which [have] been disadvantaged in one-way or another`. In order to establish an understanding of the views and attitudes of the British people towards blacks during the 1960s, it has been essential to look at the developments in social history that led to developments in more modern British cultural history, particularly in the 1980s. It will also be seen that across Europe a trend was set to look at `history from below`. This is evident in Germany, with the development of `Alltagsgeschichte: the history of everyday life`, as well as in Italy, with `microstoria: the `microhistory` of the ordinary people`. This `history from below` was used in Britain as well, where E. P. Thompson, as early as the 1960s, wrote The Making of the English Working Class, looking `at how ordinary workers drew from their particular cultural roots in order to make sense of their experience of class and work`. Using this cultural approach the dissertation aims to understand the psyche of the fragmented 1960s British public, where their racial views came from and how they changed during the decade, with special regard to cinema`s role in this process. There are three main types of source used in this investigation. The first sources are audiovisual, which, due to the topic of the investigation, relates to feature length cinematic productions as opposed to television. Programmes like Till Death Do Us Part, which ran from 1965, are enlightening in their portrayal of openly racist characters like Warren Mitchell`s Alf Garnett. Despite this, this dissertation will look at only the role of the British film industry, as it can be analysed as one large and evolving industry during the 1960s, albeit with influences from television and foreign film industries, most notably the American film industry. A variety of films that had a UK release date between 1 January 1960 and 31 December 1969 have been analysed. The films that have been analysed with specific attention are those that include either key or background characters that are black, as well as generally culturally significant films, and those which were particular box office successes. Culturally significant films are particularly those grouped as either British New Wave or Swinging London films. Due to the primitive nature of the practices of recording box office figures in the 1960s, box office hits are those approximated as having taken large sums of money at the box office, or those that were regarded as `Blockbusters`. All the films were produced in the United Kingdom and have a predominantly British cast, despite some being largely financed by American companies or being set in a foreign country, for instance Zulu in 1964 and Alexander Mackendrick`s 1965 nautical tale, A High Wind in Jamaica. Films will be used as a source to establish what filmmakers understood of black culture and society`s views on blacks to be.

Additionally, what filmmakers included that was not intended originally to be displayed as a racist message, but that in the modern liberal light is potentially culturally backward. These discoveries can be enlightening when coupled with the literature on 1960s film. For example, Roy Ward Baker, the director of pro racial tolerance film Flame in the Streets is said to have thought that blacks lived `with twenty people living in one room`, until black lead actor Earl Cameron corrected him. The second type of source is the print media, which includes newspaper reports and reviews from film and other magazines. Archives of different British newspapers have been studied, as well as film industry magazines and those that the mass public would have been exposed to. Print media from the 1960s can be used to gauge opinion on both cinema and politics. Newspapers, within their own limitations, are useful in summing up public sentiments and suggesting trends. One such example is The Times` suggestion that the films about racial prejudice in the early 1960s were a trend or `cycle`. Film industry magazines offer an invaluable behind-the-scenes look at how films came to be released, with an insight into the politics and finances behind the films analysed. The third source is oral accounts, particularly from the decade in question. This includes analysis of parliamentary debates and interviews that were conducted in the 1960s, from a variety of people and parts of the United Kingdom. Oral sources have helped in trying to gain a greater understanding of the people involved in the making, viewing and reviewing of film, as well as how the rapidly changing conditions and attitudes in Britain were formed and dealt with in the 1960s. One example is the fierce debates in the House of Commons between extreme anti-immigration backbenchers and those MPs supporting the immigration and integration of black people from the West Indies and Africa. Despite this wealth of sources, there are limitations to what can be researched and what is relevant. While it is reported that an average of seventy films a year were produced in the 1960s, it is impossible to include all of these in this study. While this dissertation aims to give a greater understanding of general attitudes to race in the 1960s and the development of these attitudes throughout the decade, its specific focus is on attitudes towards black people in Britain. Attitudes towards black people in Britain in the 1960s are particularly interesting because of how they rapidly evolved. For example, many white Britons before mass immigration believed that black people were hard working, yet as they flooded over to fill surplus jobs in the late 1950s many Britons began to harbour the prejudice that blacks were lazy and were content to live off British state benefits. It is important to define the guidelines within which the term `black` is used as a racial reference. Races are not clearly defined and demarcated from each other and understandings change over time. However, for the purpose of this dissertation, the term `black` refers to immigrants from the West Indies of visible southern, central or western African descent. This includes those of mixed race, but excludes those of north-eastern African descent, as well as immigrants and cinematic depictions of Arabs, south-east Asians and Indians. While it is impossible to have a definitive guideline, it is worth noting that issues like that of the Kenyan Asians and films such as David Lean`s 1962 epic Lawrence of Arabia are considered important racially, but not in specific regard to the representation and racial discrimination of blacks. The dissertation is split into two main parts. The first of these outlines how racial policy and subsequently public opinion changed and developed, as well as the build up to the political and racial climate of the 1960s. This includes analysis of key events and figures in the dramatic changes that occurred during the decade. This provides a foundation for understanding and analysing the role of British cinema. The second part looks more closely at the British film industry itself. This includes an analysis of British films, but also the movements within the industry and the people behind the films. It is intriguing to understand why British filmmakers made the films they did, at the time they did. One example of this is Karel Reisz, who made films about communities in which he had no participation or history. As a middle-class Czechoslovakian immigrant to Britain, he was seemingly ill equipped to make films about British working-class realism. In this part the relative roles of the British New Wave and Swinging London films and the emergence of the British Blockbuster as representations of black people have been analysed. A brief outline is also given of how the British film industry came to be in the position it was at the start of the 1960s. Thus, a look back at 1950s cinema is included to contextualise the developments of the decade that followed. This dissertation concludes by tying together the role of British cinema and the political climate and evaluating the role of cinema as the public`s mouthpiece and a moral marker by which people can assess and change their lives.