Flames of Passion: The Other Side of British Cinema

From the Second World War to the early 1960s, British movies were hugely popular with British audiences. Yet leaving aside an acknowledged classic or two, the mainstream films of these years have been dismissed by filmmakers and critics as unexciting and unremarkable, emotionally dead and lacking any sense of true cinematic flair. The French director Francois Truffaut suggested that "there is a certain incompatibility between the terms cinema and Britain", and Pauline Kael, America's most famous critic, reflected that "British cinema has always been a sad joke". With a wealth of vibrant extracts from forgotten and over-looked movies, Flames of Passion celebrates the British cinema of the 1940s and 1950s. The melodramas, crime films and horror shockers of these years, almost all of which were derided by contemporary critics, reveal a flamboyant, sometimes spectacular, poetic, perverse, and surprisingly sexy cinema. Yet this is also a cinema of great feeling and emotional complexity, dealing with the difficulties and occasional traumas of women and men as they come to terms with the post-war world. And it is a cinema that is centrally and compellingly about Britain and the British, about our ideas of who we were and who we are. Flames of Passion, produced for BBC2's Arena strand, is a film created entirely from film extracts and stills. Among the key films featured are the mystical wartime story A Canterbury Tale (1944), the noir classic They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), the bizarre melodrama Madonna of the Seven Moons (1944), the taut kidnap drama Obsession (1948) and the gritty, edgy Hell Drivers (1957).