News & Views

The ‘Girls Like Us: British Women and WWII Cinema’ season continues at the National Film Theatre in May with more great films on offer. As in April, and despite the fact that these 1940s films have been selected for their strong female content, all of them were directed by men. But, also as in April, if we look more closely we will still find women in key roles not just on screen but also behind the camera.

The latest batch of History Project interviews uploaded to our website this month include:

Interview number 532  Peter Graham Scott  Peter was an film producer, film director and screenwriter. One of the producers and directors who shaped British television drama in its formative years, He was a key figure in television drama in the seventies and eighties and was responsible for top rating series including The Avengers, Mogul, The Troubleshooters, and, most successfully, The Onedin Line, which ran for 9 years. He was much admired by fellow directors as well as actors and was renowned for his film editing skills, which he had honed in the forties while working for J Arthur Rank on films such as Brighton Rock.

In February 2017 the National Film Theatre (NFT) has been screening Robert Hamer’s 1947 classic It Always Rains On Sunday – a dark and complex domestic thriller from Ealing Studios, from a time before it became overwhelmingly associated with ‘Ealing Comedies’. (The first ‘Ealing Comedy’, Hue and Cry, was in fact produced in the same year).

It Always Rains On Sunday stars Googie Withers in perhaps her finest role. In a bleak portrayal of post-war East End working class life, she plays Rose, a woman with a past, forced to choose between a decent but unexciting husband and family, and a glamorous but dangerous old flame who turns up out of the blue, on the run from the law. I won’t say more: if you haven’t seen it, you’re in for a morally-compromised treat.