2 - The Paradoxical Glamour of the Phoney War: Examining the Design of Picturegoer

Summary

By the 1940s, Picturegoer was the UK's longest running and most popular film periodical, with an estimated readership of 500,000 per issue (Glancy 2011, 458). Published by Odhams Press, it had started as a weekly magazine in 1913, and after going monthly between 1921 and 1931 returned to weekly frequency in 1931, before merging with Film Weekly in September 1939. In this chapter, I will be considering a single issue of Picturegoer, from 2 March 1940. On this date, the quiet period of the ‘phoney war’ portion of the Second World War (1939–1945) ended for Britain, with the bombing of a cargo liner off the Isle of Wight and the loss of more than 100 British lives. By April, the war had begun in earnest. It was a liminal moment, when the transatlantic countries were both on the cusp of the transition to total war. I will be examining this issue of Picturegoer, in order to explore its presentation of glamour, assumptions about proper gendered behaviour during wartime, and how these coalesce in the pages of a British film fan magazine, while excavating ‘hidden histories’ in relation to everyday lives and wider popular culture.

In his 2011 article ‘Picturegoer, the Fan Magazine and Popular Film Culture in Britain During the Second World War’, Mark Glancy gives an overview of this movie magazine's historical evolution within the context of cinemagoing in the UK, locating it in relation to its main rival: the less popular British fan magazine Picture Show and Film Pictorial. Glancy analyses the effects of the war on all aspects of Picturegoer's content and production. He argues that, although the magazine addresses women, it is the male point of view that dominates, as it was assumed that the masculine voice ‘represented a more intelligent and patriotic perspective on films’ (Glancy 2011, 459). He analyses the tone, content and significance of the cover images, reviews, editorials, adverts and letters pages, revealing the ways in which the publication mediated between film audiences and the films and their stars. Although he does not directly cite the 2 March 1940 issue of Picturegoer in this article, he does mention it elsewhere as revealing much about British treatment of ex-pat Hollywood stars Cary Grant (2020) and Vivien Leigh (2013).