“Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema 1945-1960” is the theme of this year’s Locarno Film Festival Retrospective, unveiled in London on Monday. It follows the festival’s 2024 look back at Columbia Pictures at 100.
Described as “a tribute” to British cinema from that period promising to be “painting a rich and diverse picture of life in the postwar years as reflected in British popular cinema,” the retrospective will feature more than 40 films and is produced in partnership with the BFI National Archive and the Cinémathèque Suisse, with the support of StudioCanal and curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht.
“After the end of the Second World War – and as its overseas empire began to crumble – Britain embarked on the rocky road to national reconstruction and revival,” Locarno organizers said. “Featuring everything from beloved classics by legendary filmmakers like David Lean, Carol Reed, and Powell and Pressburger (themselves the subject of a major Locarno retrospective in 1982 and BFI retrospective in 2023) to unheralded genre gems by lesser-known craftsmen like Seth Holt or Lance Comfort, the program celebrates British studio filmmakers from 1945 to 1960, when a new wave washed up on Britain’s shores.”
And they highlighted: “The significant role women played in that earlier period – in films directed by Muriel Box, Wendy Toye, Margaret Tait, and Jill Craigie – as well as the role of American filmmakers exiled by the anti-Communist blacklist – like Joseph Losey, Cy Endfield, and Edward Dmytryk – will also play a major part.”
Among the movies that will be featured in the retrospective are Pool of London, a noir crime film directed by Basil Dearden and starring Bonar Colleano, Earl Cameron, and Susan Shaw, credited with portraying the first interracial relationship in a British film; Edward Dmytryk’s crime movie Obsession with Robert Newton, Sally Gray, Phil Brown, and Naunton Wayne; George King’s The Shop at Sly Corner with Oscar Homolka, Derek Farr, and Muriel Pavlow; and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, a psychological horror-thriller starring Carl Boehm, Moira Shearer, Anna Massey, and Maxine Audley.
The program will bring together digital restorations and archival prints from the collection of the BFI National Archive, which celebrates its 90th anniversary this year. The retrospective will be accompanied by an English-language book, published by Les Éditions de l’Œil, edited by Ehsan Khoshbakht and featuring contributions from international writers. The program will travel internationally once the 78th edition of the Locarno Film Festival is finished, including at the Cinémathèque Suisse in August and September.
“It’s hard to believe that one of the most refined and remarkable European national cinemas – one that also gifted some of the finest artists and technicians to Hollywood – remains so underexplored beyond its borders,” said Khoshbakht. “British cinema made in the studio system managed to blend popular entertainment with some of the most stylistically innovative forms, elevating it to the status of art. By focusing exclusively on contemporary films (and omitting period, fantasy, and war films), we aimed to tell the story of a nation in search of its identity – sometimes dark and brooding, and at other times, as in the finest tradition of British comedies, hilarious and biting.”
Giona A. Nazzaro, artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival highlighted: “Beloved and championed by Martin Scorsese, the postwar years of British cinema will now be systematically explored in a major retrospective in Locarno. From the end of World War II to the advent of Free Cinema, this is a fertile era of filmmaking that would profoundly influence the subsequent evolution of cinema on the British Isles and elsewhere.”
Added James Bell, BFI National Archive senior curator: “The years between the end of the war and the cultural explosions of the 1960s were turbulent ones for Britain. There were challenges at home and a changing status abroad, but they fed a rich – if too often misunderstood – period in British cinema.”
The 78th Locarno festival runs Aug. 6-16.