Ripley Arts Centre is pleased to welcome Jonathan Balcon as our guest speaker. Jonathan will enlighten the audience with recollections from the era of Ealing comedies which his late father, Michael Balcon, brought to the British Film Industry in the 1940’s and 50’s.

Ealing Studio’s first acknowledged comedy, Hue & Cry, is now a notable historic document due to its vivid portrait of London following World War II. A plucky schoolboy uncovers a plot to organise robberies through codes planted in a comic strip. War-damaged London provides the backdrop of a crime-gangster plot which revolves around a working class children’s street culture and children’s secret clubs.

Awarded a BAFTA for Best British Film in 1948, this is a classic suspense film. James Mason plays Johnny McQueen who is trying to escape from the police after an ill-advised bank robbery that was meant to fill the coffers of an illegal organisation (never explicitly named but IRA-like). McQueen, wounded during the robbery, follows an increasingly surreal odyssey as he tries to avoid being caught. The bleak city (again not named but similar to Belfast), with its many havens and traps, provides a haunting background for the highly absorbing chase. The film was rapturously received when it was released, although some critics thought that it took an arguably too sympathetic stand on terrorism.