(1947)

Alastair Sim, Jack Warner, Rhona Watson; dir: Charles Chrichton

This is the first Ealing comedy and it shows. Their long string of classics would become virtually a genre, defining a golden age within British cinema to the extent that one categorises all the great British, black and white, socially conscious but deeply ironic comedies under this rubric whether they emanated from there or not. (Peter Sellers’ non-Ealing I’m All Right Jack [1960] is my personal example.)

The great Ealing comedies economically establish a central – typically male – character and, by placing him in situations emblematic of the era’s social tensions, draw out the stresses and absurdities of a time of involuntary change. As schematically circular as an O.Henry short story, they delivered audience payoff in spades. They also knew how to breathe, being carefully modulated in pace to enable contrasts to bring out the drama seemingly unwittingly (though of course they were anything but).

Hue and Cry was a serendipitous start to the great series no one foresaw. Its success was unexpected and today it is unheralded and rarely seen. This is not surprising as it only fitfully lives up to its provenance. Self-mocking credits and circular construction lay down guides to the better Ealing comedies that would follow. Inbetween however it’s quite overwrought and never finds a groove that the viewer can derive pleasure from. It’s wound too tight from the get-go and never establishes the necessarily flawed everyman protagonist. Assigning that task to a semi-amorphous group of lads means it was never going to, really. Still, Hue and Cry has its moments and some of its gags – I’m thinking of the manhole cover blocked by a police car – are so good as to be endlessly recycled, as this scene was, perhaps inadvertantly, just a year later in the deadly serious noir procedural He Walked By Night.

Ealing supremo Michael Balcon was determined to make popular films that eschewed what he saw as the superficial glitz of American styles. This antipathy to the values of Hollywood was foreshadowed in 1939 in his friendship-snapping attack on Alfred Hitchcock for leaving England during its darkest hour, an unfair swipe suggesting a rat leaving a sinking ship when Selznick finally offered Hitch a suitable deal in what became Rebecca, winner of Best Picture.

Much of Hue and Cry’s humour comes from its numerous clever sendups of Hollywood pulp clichés, spanning genres from the Western (an Apache war whoop) to more numerous crime/gangster/noir pulp reflexes. It’s as if Balcon had to acknowledge Hollywood as his point of departure by burying it before creating an indigenously British form of comedy.

As we know he and Ealing achieved that, mostly successfully, and the rest is history. If you want to see where that history began, start with Hue and Cry, but don’t if you want to relive its glorious highs, few of which are in evidence here.