Word: balcon
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Dunkirk (Ealing; M-G-M). Blimey! 'Ow could 'e do it? 'Ere's this bloke, see, this Mike Balcon-'e ain't no bloody amateur when there's a camera abaht. 'E did aowl' Alec's Lavender Hill Mob, an' with not much 'elp neither, financially so to speak, and they're sayin' 'e's brilliant, 'e's got it made. A ruddy, stained-glass genius, that's what they called 'im. 'E's no genius...
Lease of Life (Michael Balcon; I.F.E.) nearly puts its audience to sleep before shocking it awake with the chilling reminder that, in the midst of life, man is in death. Robert Donat is the grey, ineffectual vicar of a tiny parish in rural Yorkshire. His daily round is a dreary mixture of habit and frustrations. Carefully nurtured by his tweedy wife (Kay Walsh), pampered by his genteelly hoydenish daughter (Adrienne Corri), he has only one major problem: how to find enough money to pay for Adrienne's musical education in London...
High and Dry (J. Arthur Rank; United Artists). Laughter has always been known as healing, but in recent years the world's moviegoers have learned to call it-with an increasingly British accent-Baling. In the last five years, Executive Producer Michael Balcon has created at Baling Studios, a J. Arthur Rank affiliate just outside London, a comedy factory that puts out more and better humor than any place since Hollywood in the silent days. In such marvelously handwrought hilarities as Tight Little Island, Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob, and The Titfield Thunderbolt, the Baling people...
Efficiently and cannily, Producer Balcon takes the situation - and the spectator - for one lighthearted laugh after another, until, of course, the Scots crew gets the last laugh. Actor Douglas does astonishingly well to hold his own in such fast comic company. Alex Mackenzie, an actor who taught school in Clydebank until he was 61, is a grizzled old Scots beauty, and he can "throw a tub to a whale" (the Scottish phrase, aptly enough, for sharp practice) like few men since Sir Harry Lauder. Hubert Gregg makes a sopping good Milquetoast as Douglas' male secretary, who is haplessly stationed...
...British Producer Sir Michael (The Man in the White Suit) Balcon: "It bores the pants off me to be worrying about whether I'm seeing a picture out of my left eye or my right...