Nostalgia for a mythical past: Ealing films portrayed a 'nice' England that never existed, writes Robin Buss

THE PAST is always a safer place, and for my generation the current revival of the Ealing Studios films (on video and in a sell-out season at the Barbican) is an opportunity to recall the security of childhood and the pleasures of cinema-going when that was still a regular family activity. But the version of the past enshrined in them lends itself to a variety of interpretations. In the Spectator on 7 August, Simon Heffer claimed that the renewed popularity of the Ealing films is evidence of a longing for a world of clear moral values and social hierarchies, which was already being destroyed by the socialism of the post- war Attlee government. In the Guardian last Monday, Larry Elliott argued precisely the opposite: that films like Passport to Pimlico express values of social cohesion and cooperation that we now are rediscovering in the aftermath of free- market Thatcherism. You pays your money and you takes your pick.

Most of those who made the films were probably keen Labour supporters, but the personality of the studio was shaped by one man, Sir Michael Balcon, who had a distinctive, already somewhat outdated concept of 'Britishness'. It found expression in the studio's patriotic war films, and a quieter version of it can be seen in one of the lesser known Ealing comedies, The Magnet.

Forty years on, the film has some ironic resonances. At one point, the magnet in the title is auctioned as part of a campaign to buy an iron lung for a 'disclaimed' hospital - one outside the newly established National Health Service. The boy at the centre of the story appears to be a typical product of a prep-school education and middle-class upbringing: inquisitive, inventive, self- assured, deferential to his parents and other grown-ups. His father, a psychiatrist, is presented as an object of ridicule, whose psychological theories are treated by his wife with well-founded scepticism. But there is no sense of incongruity in the idea that she should also bow to his authority and that this crank is the master in his own house.

No wonder the society depicted here has a nostalgic appeal for those who may need a mythical version of the past to justify their vision of the future. The England of The Magnet is one that has recognisable parallels in an England of opted-out schools and attainment tests, budget-holding GPs and self-managing hospitals, privatised industries and sold-off council houses.

It bore only a vague relation to the country and the time in which the films were made - though even those of us who lived through the period may come to trust these public fantasies more than our private memories. We should recall that, for contemporary critics, the essential of these comedies - and, in fact, of the whole genre of English comedy - was its improbability. Censorship and convention meant that cinema was obliged to adopt an astonishingly narrow focus on life: it could say little directly about any controversial matter or criticise any major national institution. Sex was almost entirely absent. Kind Hearts and Coronets timidly suggests an adulterous relationship between Louis Mazzini, the character played by Dennis Price, and Sibylla (Joan Greenwood). The film could never have passed a British censor if it had even hinted at the homosexuality that lay behind Dennis Price's broken marriage, suicide attempts and two bankruptcies: he claimed his financial difficulties were due to gambling debts when they were almost certainly the result of blackmail.

'I have little patience with people who . . . shelter behind the argument that films must reflect the society in which we live,' wrote Balcon, who never imagined his studio gave more than a highly selective image of British life. 'The flaw in this cliche is that it provides a hypocritical justification for sensationalism, squalor and licence - usually sexual.' Whether from the right or left, the better, safer and altogether nicer world of the Ealing films was always a myth, and nostalgia for it is nostalgia for a time when cinema was allowed to give only the good news, with no whisper of sensationalism, squalor or licence.

The directors who Balcon employed did not always espouse his ideal of Britishness, and the most famous of the comedies put the power of fantasy to work to subvert it. The inhabitants of Pimlico opt out of Britishness altogether and become Burgundians; the police procedures depicted in The Blue Lamp are mocked by the chaotic inefficiency of the police in The Lavender Hill Mob; and everyone, management, unions and lone scientist, is satirised in The Man in the White Suit.

Balcon's lasting achievement was not to give us an abiding model of Britain, either in reality or in myth, but the creation of the studios themselves. Here at Ealing, in microcosm, was a hierarchical society, but one where people recruited to the cutting room could rise to become directors or producers; where the success of the product depended on communal effort; and where there was a security of employment that the British film industry had seldom known before, and has certainly not known since. Now there is legitimate cause for nostalgia.

(Photograph omitted)