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1952
- 1952 Legislation As a result of changes to the Cinematograph Act, the X certificate is introduced. No children under the age of 16 are allowed to see an X film. This is the first mandatory age-restricted category.
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The X certificate was unchanged but renamed 18 due to the lewd reputation that the letter X had acquired. A new R18 certificate was introduced for sexually explicit films. In order to show R18 films, cinemas must be licensed members-only clubs (previously, a loophole allowed these clubs to show such films unrated).
- Island of Lost Souls (1932) Director: Erle C. Kenton. Moral standards change with the times. Although BBFC records were destroyed during World War II, references to human vivisection and animal cruelty were probably the chief reasons that the censorship body refused in 1933 to grant even the new advisory H classification to Erle C. Kenton’s talkie adaptation of H. G. Wells’ novel The Island of Dr Moreau.
- La Ronde (1950) Director: Max Ophüls. Max Ophüls’ film seemingly had everything going for it: an internationally respected director who, though German, had been a Jewish refugee from the Nazis; a literary pedigree (albeit from a controversial 1897 play by Arthur Schnitzler); the prestige of being a ‘foreign film;’ and a sophisticated structure of episodes in relay, replicating the circular carousel ride from which it took its title.
- Beat Girl (1960) Director: Edmond T. Gréville. In the Fifties, juvenile delinquency began to concern both society and the BBFC. After refusing a certificate to László Benedek’s The Wild One (1953), the BBFC grudgingly granted X ratings to Nicolas Ray’s Rebel Without A Cause (1955) and Richard Brook’s The Blackboard Jungle (both 1955) on condition of substantial cuts.
- Psycho (1960) Director: Alfred Hitchcock. If you are looking for a film that demands the X rating while stretching its limits, Alfred Hitchcock’s most profitable film hits the mother lode.
- The Gainsborough Melodramas
- The Ealing Comedies
- The Studios’ Legacy
- Conclusion
The first major studio that pioneered their own genre of film was Gainsborough Studios, based in London, which was founded in 1924. Although it produced a plethora of films between its foundation and its closure in 1951, it is most famously remembered for the Gainsborough melodramas, a collection of films produced in the 1940s. These films became i...
Another major name in the studio film boom was Ealing Studios, a London-based studio that started in 1902. Ealing still produces films, TV and music videos to this day, but one of the most important eras of its history was the popularity of the Ealing comedy. Beginning in 1947, the year after the final commonly-accepted Gainsborough melodrama was r...
The popularity of both of these strains of studio film can be compared to modern day trends in cinema. Although to directly link cinematic movements over half a century would be a foolish overstatement, various elements of both Gainsborough melodramas and Ealing comedies can be seen in films to this day. Gainsborough melodramas, being mostly period...
The rise of studio films as important cinematic movements had no previous precedent in the history of British cinema, but the economic success of a series of thematically linked films would clearly be at home in the twenty-first century. Using the same sets, recurring crew and casts, and stories that spoke to British experiences in the war, the stu...
- Tom Bedford
1940s-50s. Coined the ‘Golden Era’ of British cinema, tickets sales and movie production peaked in the decade of the Fabulous Forties. In 1940, cinemas were closed due to fears the buildings would become targets for air raids in the newest World War.
While film production reached an all-time high in 1936, [ 6 ] the "golden age" of British cinema is usually thought to have occurred in the 1940s, during which the directors David Lean, [ 7 ] Michael Powell, [ 8 ] and Carol Reed [ 9 ] produced their most critically acclaimed works.
There have been some notable exceptions – particularly in the 1970s when the board allowed films such as Last Tango in Paris (1972) and The Exorcist (1973) to be released with an X certificate (essentially the same as today's "18") – but many local authorities chose to ban the films regardless.
Jan 13, 2017 · The British ‘nudie’ film had arrived. But, if Naked as Nature Intended and such followers as Around the World with Nothing On (1960) or, a year later, Michael Winner’s Some Like It Cool shortchanged devotees of naturism, there was a place where the ever elusive nude could be seen.
