The Instant Expert's Guide to Basil Dearden

Half a century has passed since Basil Dearden directed his final feature. The name may not be readily familiar, but the 38 pictures that Dearden produced provide a route map through the history of British cinema during and after the Second World War. If you're not sure where to start viewing, Cinema Paradiso's Instant Expert profile makes the perfect guide.

The most celebrated British film-maker of all time only spent a fraction of his career working in his native land. Unlike Alfred Hitchcock, Basil Dearden chose to remain at home and explore the problems facing his compatriots as they stood alone against the Nazis and then struggled to come to terms with the very different world that emerged after their defeat. A versatile craftsman rather than a conscious stylist, Dearden made notable films in a range of genres. But, while he was admired in his day for his professionalism, he was never fashionable with the critics, who considered the 'problem pictures' he made with producer Michael Relph to be wishy-washily liberal and simplistic in their resolution of complex issues.

Advocates of auteur theory have made back-handed comparisons with such Hollywood stalwarts as Michael Curtiz and George Cukor. But Dearden was much more than a journeyman for hire. He formed his own production company to ensure that he got to make films that mattered to him and his empathy with demobbed British blokes finding it hard to adjust to Civvy Street after fighting for King and Country nudges him in the direction of such muscular American mavericks as William Wellman, John Huston and Howard Hawks. Dearden may not have had a recognisable visual signature, but his imagery was always appropriately authentic. He was also a solid storyteller who knew how to get the best out of his actors. Moreover, he understood his audience and how to coax them into addressing such contentious topics as racism, homophobia, middle-class complacency and the aloofness of the British establishment.

From Essex to Ealing

Basil Clive Dear was born on New Year's Day 1911 in Southend. His father, Charles, was an electrical engineer. But, when he died at sea during the Great War, Basil and his five brothers and sisters were raised by his mother, Dorothy, who often found it hard to make ends meet. Consequently, Basil (who spent some time in an orphanage) left school early and took a job as an office boy with a London insurance broker. However, like three of his siblings, he was fascinated by the theatre and spent his work holidays taking walk-on parts in productions staged by the Ben Greet Company. Following a spell as an assistant stage manager at the Grand Theatre in Fulham, Basil rejoined the Greet troupe and took on both acting and backstage chores during an extensive Shakespearean tour of the United States in the early 1930s.

On his return, Basil was hired as production manager by theatrical impresario Basil Dean and decided to elongate his surname to Dearden in order to avoid causing confusion around the office. Initially, he focused solely on the stage side, while Dean concentrated on running Associated Talking Pictures, which he had founded at Ealing Studios in 1929. The initial plan had been to exploit the talkie boom by featuring big names in hit West End plays by the likes of John Galsworthy, W. Somerset Maugham, JB Priestley, Dodie Smith, Clemence Dane and Noël Coward, who had all worked profitably with Dean in the 1920s. However, Dean had shown little aptitude for cinema and he often relied on such uncredited assistants as Carol Reed, Thorold Dickinson and David Lean to help him call the shots.

Cinema Paradiso users can assess Dean's efforts, as several of his pictures are contained in the Ealing Studios Rarities Collection. Curiously, Dean enjoyed his greatest successes in conjunction with Rochdale songstress Gracie Fields on lively musical comedy vehicles as Looking on the Bright Side (1932) and The Show Goes On (1937).

By the time the latter feature was released, Dearden had left Shaftesbury Avenue for Ealing Green, where he familiarised himself with the filming process as an on-set assistant and dialogue director before graduating to scriptwriting. Having assisted Carol Reed on Penny Paradise (1938; Ealing Vol.1), Dearden teamed so effectively with director Anthony Kimmins on a couple of George Formby comedies, It's in the Air (1938) and Come On George! (1939), that he was given writing and associate producer credits on three more: John Paddy Carstairs's Spare a Copper and Marcel Varnel's Let George Do It! (both 1940) and Turned Out Nice Again (1941). And all six films can be found on The George Formby Collection, Volume 1.

Dearden was reunited as a screenwriter with John Paddy Carstairs on the Ministry of Information propaganda film, Now You're Talking (1940). He would later direct wartime short of his own, Did You Ever See a Dream Talking (1943), which can be rented from Cinema Paradiso on the BFI compilation, Ration Books and Rabbit Pies: Films from the Home Front (1944). More importantly, Dearden forged a link with peerless performer Will Hay while acting as associate producer on Marcel Varnel's The Ghost of St Michael's (1941) and the music-hall veteran asked new Ealing production chief Michael Balcon to let Dearden be his co-director on Black Sheep of Whitehall, The Goose Steps Out (both 1942) and My Learned Friend (1943).

Winning the People's War

Dearden made his feature bow with a tribute to one of the key branches of the Civil Defence Service. In focusing on the heroics of the Auxiliary Fire Service during the London Blitz, Dearden was in good company, as Humphrey Jennings did likewise in Fires Were Started. But, while Jennings cast actual firefighters in his docufiction, The Bells Go Down (both 1943) teamed comedian Tommy Trinder with James Mason and such character dependables as Mervyn Johns and William Hartnell to sell the messages of the importance of teamwork within the East End fire crews and the need for the local community to pull together in order to survive the air raids that Adolf Hitler hoped would break the British spirit.

Marking Dearden's first collaboration with art director Michael Relph, this involving drama harked back to a defining moment of resistance in order to prepare audiences for the big push that was cautiously predicted after the tide of the war had started to turn against the Germans in North Africa and on the Soviet front. The sense that the end was in sight prompted Balcon to contemplate the future and Dearden played a key role in this shift of emphasis with The Halfway House and They Came to a City (both 1944).

Scripted by Angus MacPhail and Diana Morgan from Donald Ogden's play, The Peaceful Inn, the former is set in a remote Welsh inn run by father and daughter Mervyn and Glynis Johns. Ten guests stumble across the Halfway House and, during the course of their stays, they experience epiphanies that enable them to face their individual crises with a fresh perspective on life and humanity. Complete with a twist ending, this thoughtful reflection on the psychological strains of wartime is suffused with a melancholic optimism that contrasts with the more strident confidence that pervades, They Came to a City, an adaptation of a JB Priestley play that lures nine strangers from across the class spectrum to the gates of a walled bastion that appears to be a utopia to some and a living hell to others. With imposing sets by Michael Relph, this is more of an exchange of ideas than a drama. But, with many of the issues under discussion still being pertinent today, it provides a fascinating insight into the British character and the difficulty of achieving political consensus even in a time of peril.

Such was Dearden's growing status within the studio that he was entrusted with Ealing's first postwar picture. As the plight of prisoners of war had been taboo during the conflict, The Captive Heart (1946) proved something of a landmark in showing how a Czechoslovakian Dachau escapee poses as a deceased RAF captain after the Fall of France. Forever watching against making slips that would betray him to either his fellow POWs or the guards at the Marlag and Milag North camp, Michael Redgrave gives one of the performances of his career opposite real-life wife, Rachel Kempson, who plays the war widow with whom he forges a long-distance epistolary friendship.

Centring on a POW (Laurence Payne) on the run in postwar London with his devoted sweetheart (Joan Dowling), 'The Prisoner of War' was one of two segments that Dearden directed in the 1949 portmanteau, Train of Events. The second, 'The Actor', accompanies a guilt-ridden thespian (Peter Finch) on the Euston express bound for Liverpool that is also carrying composer John Clements and engine driver Jack Warner, whose stories are respectively told in flashback by Charles Crichton and Sidney Cole. But it was Dearden's vignettes that best captured the sense of a country ill at ease with itself that he had previously explored in Frieda (1947), an adaptation of a Ronald Millar play (that can be found on Ealing Rarities Vol.3), in which Mai Zetterling had excelled as the German bride who is given frosty reception in an Oxfordshire village despite having helped new husband David Farrar escape from a POW camp. Farrar would play a less heroic airman in Cage of Gold (1950), which was the first of several films in which Dearden and Relph examined the concept of post-combat stress. But their first colour collaboration took them in a very different direction.

No Laughing Matter

Closer in tone to a Gainsborough bodice-ripper than anything usually associated with Ealing, Saraband For Dead Lovers (1948) was Ealing's first film in colour. Adapted by John Dighton and Alexander Mackendrick from a novel by Helen Simpson, it transported jaded Austerity audiences to the Hanoverian court in the early 18th century to show how the future George I (Peter Bull) almost lost his wife, Sophie Dorothea (Joan Greenwood). to the dashing Count Philip Konigsmark (Stewart Granger). Such was the lavish nature of the production that Relph earned an Oscar nomination for his production design. But two decades were to pass before Dearden was tempted to venture into the past again.

Instead, he concentrated on the here and now and became one of British cinema's most committed and perceptive, if not always particularly nuanced socio-political commentators. Perhaps because Balcon associated him with old-school comics like George Formby and Will Hay, Dearden was never considered for one of Ealing's famous comedies. So, he and Relph took it upon themselves to become chroniclers of the contemporary scene, with a special emphasis on the crisis in masculinity that many ex-servicemen experienced on discovering the bitter truths of living in a land (un) fit for heroes.

Close to retirement, PC George Dixon (Jack Warner) would have served throughout the Blitz and this would have made his murder in The Blue Lamp (1950) by young thug Tom Riley (Dirk Bogarde) all the more shocking to postwar audiences. Of course, Dixon made a remarkable recovery, as Warner went on to feature in all 432 episodes of the landmark BBC police series, Dixon of Dock Green (1955-76). Three volumes of classic episodes are available to rent from Cinema Paradiso, as is Volume 6 of the Ealing Studios Rarities Collection, which contains Believe in You (1952), another investigation into delinquency that stars Cecil Parker as a returning colonial administrator who seeks a new challenge as a probation officer learning the ropes alongside the eminently sensible Celia Johnson.

Providing early roles for Joan Collins, Harry Fowler and Laurence Harvey, this studied drama rather typified Dearden and Relph's bourgeois approach to Britain's shifting attitudes towards class, age and race, as they continued to emphasise the sense of shared values, traditions and experience that had united the population during the war. Yet the pair can't be faulted for striving to push boundaries by confronting audiences with the kind of problems that, for many, would have been their everyday reality. In Pool of London (1951), for example, Dearden and producer Michael Balcon had sought to explore the impact of the influx of West Indian migrants following the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948. Consequently, they had screenwriters Jack Whittingham and John Eldridge include an interracial relationship between merchant seaman Earl Cameron and Susan Shaw to run alongside the smuggling plot strand involving brash American shipmate, Bonar Colleano.

Another crisis of conscience and camaraderie informs The Gentle Gunman (1952), an adaptation of a Roger MacDougall play that teams John Mills and Dirk Bogarde as IRA men debating whether to plant a bomb in a London Underground station at the height of the Second World War. Like I Believe In You, this earnest offering reunited Dearden with Basil Dean, who co-produced with Relph. But Dean was very much yesterday's man and these proved to be his final screen credits (even though he outlived Dearden by dying in 1978). But Dearden and Relph had become part of the furniture at Ealing and they used their position to produce four consecutive films about the difficulty of reacclimatising to ordinary life after having been trained to fight and kill for the greater good.

The concept of fair play loomed large in two studies of sporting ethics, The Square Ring (1953) and The Rainbow Jacket (1954). Based on a play by Australian Ralph Peterson (which bears more than a passing resemblance to Robert Wise's superior noir, The Set-Up, 1949), the former profiles a number of low-ranking boxers hanging around a changing room before being called for their bouts at a rundown London venue. Ensemble stalwarts Sid James and Bill Owen also made the cut for The Rainbow Jacket, a horse-racing saga that took its title from the colours worn by jockeys. Reuniting Dearden with Ealing's star scribe, TEB Clarke, the story centres on a former rider seeking to make his name as a trainer after being implicated in a betting scandal. Critics have dismissed these pictures for their cosy resolutions, but their insights into damaged psyches seeking redemption have an unassuming ring of authenticity and. moreover, are non-judgementally empathetic.

Popular Canadian actor Robert Beatty picked himself up from the canvas and reached for the skies in Out of the Clouds (1955), which was adapted by Relph and John Eldridge from John Fores's novel, The Springboard. However, a health scare has jeopardised the ex-RAF ace's future in the cockpit and Beatty has to come to terms with his feet being planted firmly on the ground at London Airport, as he juggles flight schedules, safety rubrics and an on-off romance with stewardess Eunice Gayson, who has also caught the eye of rival pilot Anthony Steele, whose gambling problems have landed him in hot water with a smuggling ring. The same issue confronts Richard Attenborough, George Baker and Bill Owen in The Ship That Died of Shame (1955), a reworking of a Nicholas Monsarrat story that sees three war heroes resort to smuggling black market goods, counterfeit currency and weapons after purchasing the motor gunboat on which they had served with distinction during the war. They rediscover their sense of honour, however, when they learn that a furtive passenger has a guilty secret.

Seemingly genial hotel guest Alastair Sim also has something to hide in The Green Man (1956), a masterly black farce scripted by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat that saw Dearden act as an uncredited supervisor to Robert Day, who was making the step up from camera operator to director. Clearly this brush with the lighter side appealed to Dearden, as he took on Who Done It? (1956), an espionage romp that afforded Benny Hill his feature debut. Moreover, Dearden also acted as producer on the trio of comedies directed around this period by Michael Relph: Rockets Galore, Davy (both 1957) and Desert Mice (1959). The middle part of the triptych had the distinction of being the last comedy produced by Ealing and it can be found on Volume 4 of the Rarities Collection.

State of Independence

Ealing had been acquired by the Rank Organisation in 1944. But when it sold the studio complex to the BBC in 1955, Balcon jumped ship and set up his own Ealing Films company with a distribution deal with MGM at Borehamwood. Despite having been loyal to Balcon for 15 years, Dearden and Relph felt it was time to sever the ties and they launched their own production unit with The Smallest Show on Earth (1957). An Ealing comedy in all but name, the delightful story followed the efforts of a married couple to run the fleapit Bijou Kinema in the face of competition from the Grand Cinema in Sloughborough. Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna were beautifully supported by Bernand Miles, Margaret Rutherford and Peter Sellers as the ageing commissioner, cashier and projectionist. But Dearden would only return to comedy twice more, with Man in the Moon (1960) and Only When I Larf (1968), the latter currently unavailable to rent.

Instead, Dearden and Relph began to specialise in what were called 'problem pictures' after the string of postwar Hollywood melodramas addressing such issues as alcoholism, veteran rehabilitation, anti-Semitism and racism. They started by heading to Liverpool to examine the topic of delinquency in Violent Playground (1957). The accents aren't great and there's a degree of southern patronisation in the depiction of Scouse society. But Stanley Baker is typically compelling as the Juvenile Liaison Officer convinced that Anne Heywood's street thug brother, David McCallum, is the arsonist nicknamed 'The Firefly'.

Nigel Patrick is even more impressive as the Scotland Yard superintendent investigating a Hampstead Heath stabbing in Sapphire (1959). Scripted by Janet Green, this raw thriller won the BAFTA for Best British Film and puts a British/Caribbean spin on the notion of 'passing' that had previously been explored in such Hollywood items as John M. Stahl's versions of Fannie Hurst's Imitation of Life (1934) and George Sidney's Technicolor take on Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein's musical, Show Boat. Indeed, so pressing was this issue that Fred M. Wilcox also tackled it in I Passed for White (1960), which was adapted from the novel by Reba Lee 'as told to' Mary Hastings Bradley.

As homosexuality was still illegal in Britain when Dearden and Relph reunited with Janet Green (and her co-writer husband, John McCormick) for Victim (1961), this has to be regarded as their most audacious achievement. Dirk Bogarde (who was gay) took an even bigger risk in playing the married lawyer who is blackmailed by a casual pick-up, as he had been the poster boy for UK cinema for much of the 1950s. But he was vindicated with a BAFTA nomination for Best Actor after the BBFC had passed the picture with an X certificate. But Dearden, Relph and Green still had windmills at which to tilt and Life For Ruth (1962) took aim at organised religion, as doctor Patrick McGoohan sues Jehovah's Witness Michael Craig after he ignores the pleadings of wife Janet Munro and refuses to allow his dying daughter to receive the blood transfusion that might have saved her life.

Despite the sincerity of the enterprise, the box-office failure of this emotive drama brought about the bankruptcy of Allied Film Makers, which Dearden and Relph had formed in 1959 with Richard Attenborough, Bryan Forbes, Jack Hawkins and Guy Green. Things had started promisingly with The League of Gentlemen (1960), which Forbes had adapted from a John Boland thriller. Forbes and Attenborough had also co-starred with Hawkins, who excels as the embittered veteran who organises a heist to pay society back for turning its back on its war heroes.

It was a familiar Dearden theme and it was one that would have been fresh in his mind after having directed 13 of the 39 episodes in the TV series, The Four Just Men (1959-60), which centres on the exploits of Richard Conte, Dan Dailey, Jack Hawkins and Vittorio De Sica, who form a troubleshooting team after having been reunited by the death of Anthony Bushell, their commanding officer during the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943. Despite Victim doing respectable business, Dearden proved unable to match the commercial appeal of the Forbes duo of Whistle Down the Wind (1961) and Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964) and, as a result, he found himself without a base after AFM folded.

A Man Out of His Time

Despite being lower class than the Oxbridge-educated angry young men who brought the kitchen sink saga to the UK's cinema screens, Dearden found himself blindsided by Jack Clayton's Room At the Top (1958), Tony Richardson's The Entertainer (1960), Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and John Schlesinger's Billy Liar (1963) among others. He marked time with the underrated thriller, The Secret Partner, before he put a jazz spin on William Shakespeare's Othello in All Night Long (both 1961), which sees scheming drummer Patrick McGoohan seek to convince bandmate Paul Harris that his singer wife, Marti Stevens, is having an affair with manager Keith Michell. But, even when he joined forces with Rita Tushingham after her breakthrough performance in Richardson's A Taste of Honey (1961), Dearden proved unable to capture the social realist vibe in his study of East End slum housing, A Place to Go (1963).

Seeming to recognise that there was no point in trying to compete with the bright young things, Dearden trusted in his tested storytelling skills and enlisted the support of Dirk Bogarde for his adaptation of James Kennaway's thriller, The Mind Benders (1963), in which a boffin strives to prove that a colleague didn't kill himself because he had sold secrets to the Soviet Union but because his reasoning had been warped by the sensory deprivation experiments he had been conducting. A suicide also proves crucial to the action in Woman of Straw (1964), as Sean Connery resents the fact that uncle Ralph Richardson had married his mother with indecent haste after his father's death. However, when Richardson's own health begins to decline, Connery forges a bond with Italian nurse Gina Lollobrigida in the hope of recovering his lost inheritance.

The following year, Dearden reteamed with Jack Hawkins on Masquerade, a comedy thriller that Relph had adapted from Victor Canning's novel, Castle Minerva, with rising American scenarist, William Goldman. Dearden did such a capable job that United Artists persuaded him temporarily to part company with Relph to direct Charlton Heston as Major General Charles George Gordon in Khartoum (1966), an epic recreation of the British rearguard against the siege laid by Sudanese leader, Muhammad Ahmed. The year taking the lead in Stuart Burge's Othello (1965), Laurence Olivier again donned blackface to play the Mahdi, but BAFTA was more impressed by Ralph Richardson's performance as Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone and rewarded him with a Best Actor nomination.

Having enjoyed himself in reuniting with Relph to guide Oliver Reed and Diana Rigg through the murderous skullduggery in The Assassination Bureau (1969), Dearden signed up to direct three episodes of the boisterous cult TV series, The Persuaders! (1971-72), which paired Tony Curtis and Roger Moore as maverick millionaire playboys Danny Wilde and Lord Brett Sinclair. He rejoined forces with Moore on The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970), an adaptation of Anthony Armstrong's The Strange Case of Mr Pelham, in which a marine technology executive undergoes a drastic personality change after surviving a car crash.

In a hideous twist of fate, this proved to be the 60 year-old Dearden's final film, as he was killed while driving home from Pinewood to Belgravia in an accident on the M4 motorway near Heathrow Airport on 23 March 1971. He was survived by his wife and two sons, one of whom, James, would follow in his father's footsteps in directing such diverse titles as The Cold Room (1984), A Kiss Before Dying (1991), Rogue Trader (1995) and Surviving Christmas with the Relatives (2018).

Almost half a century after his passing, Dearden remains a divisive figure among critics. Academic snobbery partly explains his dismissal as a well-meaning journeyman who resorted to melodramatic gambits to excuse wider society by restricting racial and homophobic prejudice to warped individuals. That said, neither he nor Relph were exactly radical in terms of their politics or their film-making. By tackling hot-button topics with integrity and in a grown-up manner, however, they contributed to the debate about a changing Britain's future direction and, in the process, helped pave the way for the social realism that has dominated issue cinema in this country for the last six decades.

Dearden could do little about the conditions pertaining at Ealing and had no option but to work with actors who had been trained to speak with the Received Pronunciation accents that often made the depiction of lower-class characters seem platitudinous and patronising. Yet he used his brief period of creative autonomy to present what novelist Graham Greene called during his time as a critic, life as it is lived and life as it ought to be lived. No one else was addressing the ethical and moral dilemmas of the day with such consistent, concerted or considered focus and, for this alone, Dearden deserves to be remembered as much more than a naïve middlebrow with his heart in the right place. He understood and reflected his times and, in so doing, he sought to show how they could be improved by everyone remembering their common humanity and treating each other with a little decency, tolerance and respect.