After
researching far-flung locations for the Worldwide
Guide, focusing solely on my home city for the WGML
London Guide promised a case of serious glamour withdrawal.
No towering palm treess or snow-capped mountain ranges,
then, or endless desertscapes.
But there was a whole history of a city I thought I knew well.
Feature films in London go way back, though the city was more
often than not recreated in the studio for confections such
as Herbert Wilcox's 1948 Spring in
Park Lane and 1949 Maytime
in Mayfair.
St Martinís Lane (1938,
with Charles
Laughton and Vivien
Leigh), known in the US as Sidewalks
of London (erm, London doesn't have sidewalks,
it has pavements) offers a fascinating picture of the West
Endís theatreland, mixing studio recreations with real locations.
Hollywood conjured up its own version of the capital with
the likes of the 1945 melodrama Hangover
Square, peopled with Gower Gulch Cockerneys and
ex-pat aristocrats, a London perpetually fog-shrouded, yet
with a clear view of Big Ben and St Paulís from every window.
The
real London can occasionally be glimpsed in the thirties,
but itís after WWII that cameras really began to leave the
confines of the studio.
In 1947 Robert
Hamer put the working class centre-screen with the East
End-set It Always Rains On Sunday,
and in 1950 Jules Dassin achieved the seemingly impossible
by successfully transplanting that most American of genres,
film noir, to London with the hard-as-diamonds Night
and the City.
The
Ealing studios gave their name to a whole genre of comedies
celebrating the triumph of the individual over bureaucracy,
often with a streak of surprisingly dark humour.
The Free Cinema movement was more po-faced, as cineastes such
as Lindsay Anderson and Karel
Reisz produced ever-so-slightly patronising documentaries
about chirpy working class Londoners (Every
Day Except Christmas, We
Are The Lambeth Boys) before the New Wave finally
broke over England in the early sixties.
Although Tony Richardsonís film of Look
Back in Anger still has the stagy feel of stage
actors slumming, the director was soon out on the streets
with A Taste of Honey
and a new generation of film actors. London provided an ideal
backdrop.
Notting Hill, an area of ruthless landlords and immigrant
tenants, became a crucible for social tensions, while Carnaby
Street and the Kingís Road were packaged for cinema audiences
long after the real swingers had moved on. In fact, Carnaby
Street still crops up on screen – you can see its touristy
glory in Gurinder Chadhu's Bend It
Like Beckham.
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