DB7

Political comedy at its best
New Statesman, by Jonathan Coe.

Everyone knows about the Ealing comedies; or at least everyone has an opinion about them, which is perhaps not quite the same thing. You can still find diehard nostalgics who will swear that no British films were ever more delightful. They will twitter on about charm and eccentricity, and seem to think Ealing was responsible for every bit of humorous whimsy that ever appeared on British cinema screens, including Genevieve and Oh, Mr Porter. Mention the Ealing comedies to any cineaste under about 40, on the other hand, and you can brace yourself for a torrent of invective about provincial narrow-mindedness, snobbery, sexual repression, verbosity, archhess and sentimental nationalism.

Almost half a century after the studio's heyday, Ealing still looms large in the British cinematic consciousness, and that is a tribute to the lasting achievements of Michael Balcon and his fluctuating roster of writers, producers and directors. There's a sense, it's true, in which his legacy was a baneful one. Few good comedies have come out of Britain in the last three decades (could anyone name half a dozen?) and the explanation for that must lie, in part, with our filmmakers' horror at the thought of falling back into the twee complacencies of Passport to Pimlico and The Titfield Thunderbolt.

But there was also a harder undercurrent to some of the Ealing comedies usually whenever the directors Robert Hamer and Alexander Mackendrick managed to smuggle it under Balcon's nose - and a couple of them still look like masterpieces. For its literary (not filmic) sensibility and comic heartlessness, Kind Hearts and Coronets can stand comparison with the best novels of Evelyn Waugh. And better still is Mackendrick's The Man in the White Suit which, 46 years on, has some claim to be considered the only really mature and generous political comedy ever to be made in this country.

The Man in the White Suit, as few people need to be reminded, is a comedy about a scientist (Alec Guinness) who invents a new kind of fabric that never wears out and never gets dirty. The story unfolds in an unspecified northern town and spirals into farcical chaos when management and labour finally join forces to suppress an invention which will undoubtedly make both of them obsolete. Oddly enough, Mackendrick originally conceived the film as "a comic way to deal with the moral issue of the invention of nuclear weapons": Guinness was supposed to represent "the so-called disinterested scientist, totally reckless and totally inconsiderate of the consequences of his actions". But somewhere along the line, the theme of industrial relations took over and Mackendrick's rigorous intelligence - abetted by fine, sympathetic performances from the likes of Cecil Parker and Vida Hope - treated it with far more warmth and agility than the Boulting brothers managed with their sour plagueon-both-your-houses approach in I'm All Right, Jack a few years later.

I thought about Mackendrick's film some weeks ago while watching The Full Monty, a political comedy about a group of disillusioned men from Sheffield - former steelworkers, now unemployed and impoverished - who take up stripping in order to raise some cash. Though slightly rough around the edges it's very funny and very likeable; but to watch it alongside The Man in the White Suit is still to sense that something fundamental has gone missing from our film-making culture.

Of course the social landscape has changed almost beyond recognition between the making of these two films. Both contain sequences that hymn the romance and excitement of industry: White Suit with its documentary-style montages of spinning looms and busy production lines, The Full Monty with clips from a grisly 1970s advertising film for "Sheffield, City of Steel". But Cattaneo has a brutal sense of irony, and immediately cuts from this to a deserted factory 20 years later, with bits of industrial debris flapping in the breeze around its gutted interior. In a few seconds we have been made to realise that the entire world on which The Man in the White Suit was predicated - all its comic stand-offs between management and labour, its polite but deadly class warfare, its social nuance - has vanished for ever. And the void that has been left by this wholesale collapse of manufacturing industry can only be filled by one thing: sex.

Sex is present in The Man in the White Suit but as in all of the Ealing films it is dealt with obliquely, through layers of embarrassed understatement. Alec Guinness seduces Joan Greenwood by babbling on at her about chemical formulae, and her arousal is signalled by nothing more blatant than the spread of a slow, delighted pout across her puzzled face. By the time of The Full Monty, however, the world has become thoroughly, monomaniacally sexualised: the power relations imposed by the labour market have dissolved and all that remains is a leering, animal curiosity between the sexes. In the postindustrial landscape, working men who find no takers for their traditional skills have only one marketable commodity left: their bodies, which must be offered up to the inspection of baying women, themselves victims of sexually unsatisfying marriages.

By this description, it sounds as though TheFull Monty is offering a far bleaker and more extreme portrait of Britain than Ealing would ever have dared in the 1950s; but somehow it still feels the more conservative film. If our sense of social and economic opportunity seems to have shrivelled to nothing in the past few decades, perhaps it has taken our sense of cinematic possibility with it. There's so much poetry, so much confidence in The Man in the White Suit:. it believes in a breadth of register that can encompass comedy of manners, romantic melodrama and social satire, combine outright caricature with plausible characterisation, and tell a complex story economically while still finding room for visual images of a startling, surreal beauty such as the sight of a horizontal Alec Guinness, the glow of his luminescent suit against the night sky turning him into a photographic negative, hanging from the wall of an industrialist's mansion by a single unbreakable thread.

And yet in the 1990s, just as the heroes of The Full Monty can only think of one way to earn a living, so British political comedy seems to know only one way of handling a narrative: soap-opera realism, with dialogue and performances never straying from the naturalistic path and cinematography so drab that only the size of the screen reminds us we're not watching television. The career choices available to working men and women in the industrial north may have withered to nothingness since The Man in the White Suit was made. Need the film-maker's options really have dwindled so fearfully as well?

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Film-makers horror?Twee complacencies?Has this person ever watched "Passport to Pimlico"?I agree that British comedy films have dwindled,but to put the blame at Ealing's door?...I have a feeling we have another "hip" critic that believes anything older than five years was produced by Noah!

"and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock"