2 - The Overlanders (1946) and Ealing Down Under

Summary

TOUCHING AND GOING

[They] should be primarily outdoor stories. They should … be on a large enough canvas to appeal to world-wide audiences. And they should compensate with action what they will lose through lack of polish in the actors. (Kemp 1999: 151)

In 1955, Ealing made its last films at its studios in West London prior to commencing short allegiances with production facilities owned by larger, often monopolistic corporations Rank Organisation and British MGM, before ceasing operations in 1959. The final two films made by Ealing at its famed, boutique studios, the generally forgotten Touch and Go (Michael Truman) and the widely celebrated The Ladykillers (Alexander Mackendrick), bear striking similarities in their rendering of highly restrictive and patently artificial physical environments. This sense of artifice and of an antiquated, patently unreal world plays into the insularity of the former film and the heightened, disarmingly murderous fantasy of the latter. Each is largely isolated to a single London street or neighbourhood and relies extensively on the control afforded by such contained and highly regulated studio production.

The first of these, Touch and Go, is an oddly desiccated and largely uneventful film focusing on the failure of an upper-middle-class English family to emigrate to Australia. As Charles Barr has ironically argued, one of the most striking things about this film is its disinterest in presenting Australia as anything other than a ‘card played’ or an ‘abstraction’ (1977: 175), a vision that helps stage these characters’ frustration and dissatisfaction with their place in a bland, conservative and cosy postwar Britain: ‘It has never been revived, which is not surprising … [It is] an example of late, mainstream Ealing at its most suffocating’ (1977: 174). In Touch and Go, the momentous decision to emigrate to Australia is taken by the father alone (played by a stalwart but blustery and constantly irritated Jack Hawkins), and is little more than a tantrum aimed at the staidness of the design company he works for which won't embrace his plans for Scandinavian ‘innovation’. Revealingly, his firm continues to favour the comfiness and ugliness of overstuffed, chunky British furniture, a style that perhaps resonates with Hawkins’ stiff-upper-lip star image and common accounts of the personal predilections of Ealing's production head, Michael Balcon.