Once More With Ealing at HOME

Discover classic British cinema at HOME this Spring as the cinema remembers the golden age of Ealing Studios and the films it produced in the 1940s and 1950s. The legendary West London film studio is probably best known for its smart, whimsical comedies, but HOME have put together a season of seven films that showcase the full range and versatility of the studio’s output under the stewardship of producer Michael Balcon.

So, while Once More with Ealing opens on Sunday 5 May with a presentation of a new 4K restoration of Ealing’s 1951 classic comedy crime caper, The Lavender Hill Mob, the season also makes room for melodrama, thrillers, film noir and even horror, with the 1945 anthology film and season closer Dead of Night on Friday 31 May. In between there are well-known classics, and a few deeper cuts, but audiences can expect that particular Ealing charm, and a window into post-war Britain.

On Tuesday 14 May, there’s a chance to see Alec Guinness in Alexander Mackendrick’s 1951 comedy The Man in the White Suit. One of five Ealing films directed by Mackendrick, the film follows a genius inventor who is surprised when his newly developed fabric that never dirties or wears out is met by hostility from the garment industry.

In between there are well-known classics, and a few deeper cuts, but audiences can expect that particular Ealing charm, and a window into post-war Britain.

That’s followed by Basil Dearden’s terrific 1951 Pool of London (Thu 16 May) in which two seamen get caught up in crime and romance on their London shore leave. Combining genre thrills with social issues, Pool of London is notable as the first British-made film to depict an interracial relationship in the post-Windrush years.

Also showing is Robert Hamer’s atmospheric British Noir, It Always Rains on Sunday (Sun 19 May), a 1947 film set in the rain-drenched streets of London’s East End. While Dance Hall is marked as another Ealing outlier thanks to its foregrounding of female characters in a story about factory workers who spend their nights living it up to the sounds of sounds of Ted Heath’s Big Band in the local dance hall.

Rounding out the season is a stone cold Ealing classic in Henry Cornelius’ 1949 Passport to Pimlico. Screening on Sunday 26 May, this quintessential Ealing comedy sees an unexploded WWII bomb detonate in Pimlico, leading to the discovery that the area is in fact a part of Burgundy, France and therefore exempt from British rationing rules. Like much of the studio’s output and HOME’s season, the film works as a time capsule, illuminating style and attitudes of the post-war period, while remaining incredibly entertaining.