Film Forum

ONCE MORE WITH EALING

MUST END TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 26

FESTIVAL OF CLASSIC COMEDIES, FILM NOIR, AND HORROR
FROM LONDON’S FAMED EALING STUDIOS

“England's Ealing Studies made more than just funny movies, but the films it produced in the postwar era (many of them starring the great Alec Guinness) practically defined what we now know as black comedy.”
– Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine

In his time as powerful a British mogul as J. Arthur Rank and Alexander Korda, producer Michael Balcon (discoverer of Hitchcock and grandfather of Daniel Day-Lewis) created, through the family atmosphere he fostered at his suburban London Ealing Studios, a body of work as distinctive as any classic genre: The Ealing Comedy, featuring the farcically ingenious plots of writer T.E.B. Clark, the wry direction of Charles Crichton, Robert Hamer, and Alexander Mackendrick (who’d go on to make the rather un-Ealing SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS), and a world-renowned stock company of eccentrics including Margaret Rutherford, Stanley Holloway, Alastair Sim, Joan Greenwood, and especially Alec Guinness, who stars in five films (in twelve different roles) in the series. But comedy was only a small part of an output that spanned everything from Dickens adaptations and war movies to classic horror and Film Noir.

The festival includes 4K restorations from Studiocanal of the comedy classics KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS (cited by Time Out as “Ealing’s blackest comedy”), THE LAVENDER HILL MOB, PASSPORT TO PIMLICO, THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT, and THE LADYKILLERS. Non-comedies in the festival include the highly regarded police procedurals THE BLUE LAMP and POOL OF LONDON; THE PROUD VALLEY, starring the legendary American actor and singer Paul Robeson; Ealing’s superb adaptation of Dickens’ NICHOLAS NICKLEBY; Robert Hamer’s IT ALWAYS RAINS ON SUNDAY, starring Googie Withers, considered the greatest of all British Noirs; WENT THE DAY WELL?, a little-seen wartime thriller, based on a Graham Greene story, imagining the German occupation of a small English village; and DEAD OF NIGHT, recently named by Variety as one of the greatest horror movies of all time.