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Just as the Cahiers du Cinéma tyros cast several worthy French film-makers into undeserved oblivion, so Basil Dearden fell victim to the angry young men who championed British social realism. They deemed his bourgeois liberal sentiments to be as timid as his technical competence. Yet, such ardent iconoclasm recklessly overlooked the genuine achievements of the director ... [+]

Just as the Cahiers du Cinéma tyros cast several worthy French film-makers into undeserved oblivion, so Basil Dearden fell victim to the angry young men who championed British social realism. They deemed his bourgeois liberal sentiments to be as timid as his technical competence. Yet, such ardent iconoclasm recklessly overlooked the genuine achievements of the director most synonymous with the Ealing ethos established by its much-vaunted production chief, Michael Balcon. When Ealing was sold to the BBC in 1955, Balcon erected a plaque that read: 'Here during a quarter of a century many films were made projecting Britain and the British character.' The statement could equally have applied to Dearden's output from his solo directorial debut, The Bells Go Down (1943), to Who Done It? (1956), a Benny Hill vehicle that turned out to be the last Ealing comedy.

Born in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex on 1 January 1911, Basil Dear started out in stage management. However, he followed boss Basil Dean to Ealing to work for Associated Talking Pictures and changed his name to Dearden to avoid confusion around the lot. When Michael Balcon succeeded Dean, he entrusted Dearden with associate producing duties on three George Formby comedies and eventually allowed him to co-direct three more romps with the great Will Hay, including The Goose Steps Out (1942) and My Learned Friend (1943).

While making The Bells Go Down, Dearden forged a friendship with art director Michael Relph that evolved into a creative partnership that lasted nearly three decades. Having collaborated on Ealing's first peacetime picture, the POW saga, The Captive Heart (1946), they embarked upon the studio's first Technicolor outing, Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948), a tale of romantic intrigue set at the court of George I. However, it was the contemporary scene that most fascinated Dearden and Relph and they began to explore the postwar crisis in British masculinity in melodramas like The Blue Lamp (1950), The Square Ring (1953) and The Rainbow Jacket (1954).

The Ship That Died of Shame (1955) also fits into this Hawksian category and it is overdue a DVD release, as is Sapphire (1959), the story of a murdered black girl who has been passing herself off as white, which followed Pool of London (1951) in assessing attitudes to Britain's burgeoning black community. This refusal to flinch in the face of contentious issues also informed Victim (1961), which tackled the persecution of homosexuals, and Life for Ruth (1962), which examined the moral clash between religious belief and scientific responsibility, which found further echo in the espionage thriller, The Mind Benders (1963).

In 1959, Dearden and Relph joined Richard Attenborough, Bryan Forbes, Jack Hawkins and Guy Green to form Allied Film Makers. But while Dearden enjoyed box-office success with The League of Gentlemen and Man on the Moon (both 1960), his faith in national institutions and community spirit began to seem increasingly conservative against the flowering of Sixties permissiveness. He sought refuge in such big-budget United Artists assigments as Woman of Straw (1964), Masquerade (1965) and Khartoum (1966) - the first two of which remain unreleased on DVD, as does his final feature, The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970), which eerily anticipated Dearden's car crash death on 23 March 1971 with its disconcerting tale of businessman Roger Moore's posthumous alter ago. [-]