Appendix: ‘Inside Ealing’: Michael Relph

Summary

The following unpublished essay is Michael Relph's brief recollection of his colleagues at Ealing Studios in the 1940s and 1950s. Ostensibly, it was written as a proposal or preface for a fuller study, to serve as a corrective to ‘academic’ studies that appeared in the 1970s and to the ‘front office’ view as presented in Michael Balcon's autobiography, published at the end of the 1960s. Idiosyncrasies of spelling and inconsistencies of capitalisation have been retained, and there has been no attempt to correct some factual errors. Although undated, the document was probably written in the early 1990s and now provides a glimpse into a hitherto unknown Ealing.

‘INSIDE EALING’>

BY

MICHAEL RELPH

Until now Michael Balcon's reign at Ealing Studios, which established a genre of British film making famous throughout the world, has been treated only from the point of view of the academic outsider. Charles Barr's Ealing Studios covers the films from a critics' viewpoint and give his ideas of the social significance of the Studio's output. However interesting and significant such theories may be, the films were usually embarked upon for quite different reasons which only an ‘insider’ can know about. Balcon, in his staid autobiography, gives only the front office version and he was often ignorant of the machinations of the film makers in persuading him to put the studio's resources behind a particular project.