POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
Yes, sadly, long ago.
David Lean was a fine director, but what about Carol Reed? Hitchcock, of course, was British.
The era after WWII up into the 1960s produced a flow of interesting and thoughtful pictures.
Lawrence Harvey, Dirk Bogarde, Tom Courtenay, Alec Guiness, James Fox, James Mason, John Mills, Margaret Rutherford, Ralph Richardson, Basil Rathbone, Jack Hawkins, Peter Cushing, and so many more - just a generous sampling of the remarkable talent that was at work in Britain, and they all made memorable films.
Costs were relatively low and the talent pool - from British theater - was unbelievably rich. A profit could be made without big international distribution.
One disadvantage British film suffered from in international distribution was American mass audiences' inability to understand the accents.
Of course, today, British accents, in their full richness and variety, are fading under the wave of American influence, and so are uniquely British expressions. Many British actors do succeed in Hollywood today with the kind of “clean” BBC accent widely learned by young people coming to London in the 1970s to find careers.
There are many fine British actors since - in recent decades one thinks of Ian Richardson, Vanessa Redgrave, Judi Dench, Anthony Hopkins, Richard Shaw, Malcolm McDowell, Gary Oldman, and others, but they didn't/don't get to appear in that many original British films.
Hollywood has established a formula that takes the hog's share of the international film market. Big, dumb pictures full explosions with scripts so unimportant that anyone in the world can "get" them without subtitles.
Such pictures are in effect amusement park rides - not films in the best sense.
Costs are high too in the industry, making it almost impossible to make the kind of films Britain made decades ago.
