Some successful directors were carried away – Powell and Pressburger, I think, lost touch with an audience; Lean became “international”, to great success; Reed lost his knack for hits; Mackendrick went to America, did Sweet Smell of Success and faltered Korda died in 1956 The Rank Company became more powerful and more stupid. There were acting nominations for Olivier as Henry V and Hamlet, for Richard Todd in The Hasty Heart, for Guinness in The Lavender Hill Mob, for Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter, for Simmons in Hamlet, for Muriel and Sidney Box for writing The Seventh Veil, for three writers on Brief Encounter and Great Expectations, for Greene for The Fallen Idol, for Clarke for Passport to Pimlico, for Paul Dehn and James Bernard for Seven Days to Noon (1951), in which a troubled scientist threatens to blow up a great bomb in London if his demands are not met. Dickinson made The Queen of Spades (1949), from Pushkin, with Edith Evans and Anton Walbrook. Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliatt did Green for Danger (with Alistair Sim) and The Rake’s Progress (with Rex Harrison). There was Richard Attenborough, brilliant as Pinkie in Brighton Rock (1947), directed by John Boulting from Graham Greene’s novel. Greene, the one-time film critic, proved a deft screenwriter, and his influence showed all the way from Went the Day Well? to The Third Man.The impact went far overseas, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences became a British club Henry V was nominated for best picture So was Great Expectations. A year later, Hamlet won (the first British victory), and one of the films it beat was The Red Shoes.

Lean was nominated for Brief Encounter (a film I’ve not managed to mention before) and Great Expectations; Olivier for Hamlet; Reed for The Fallen Idol and The Third Man. Jack Cardiff (working for the Archers) was one of the great cameramen. Tibby Clarke had the same reputation among screenwriters.And then there were the actors, so many emerging or fulfilling their promise: James Mason, Granger, Price, Withers, Joan Greenwood, Margaret Lockwood, Kay Walsh, Jean Simmons (Ophelia to Olivier, an Indian dancing girl in Black Narcissus and Estella in Great Expectations), Deborah Kerr, Dirk Bogarde (the hoodlum in The Blue Lamp). And Guinness was everywhere: eight roles in Kind Hearts and Coronets, Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations, Fagin in Oliver Twist, a bank clerk turned robber in The Lavender Hill Mob, and so on.And then there was Gainsborough, a small studio with a taste for lush melodrama and period clothes: Mason and Lockwood in The Man in Grey (1943) and The Wicked Lady (1945), both directed by Leslie Arliss; The Seventh Veil (1945), a psychological love story, with Mason and Ann Todd.

And there was John Mills as Scott of the Antarctic (1948), not too accurate an account of what happened in 1911-12, but with a great score from Vaughan Williams. One of the notable things about this period was the quality of the “technical’ work. Olivier made his Hamlet in 1948 as a black-and-white film noir version of the play. Lean did two outstanding dramatisations of Dickens – Oliver Twist (1948) and Great Expectations (1946) – and Cavalcanti made a version of Nicholas Nickleby (1947). Far less successful, but much vaunted in its day, was Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948), a colour romance, set in the 18th century and starring Stewart Granger and Joan Greenwood as frustrated lovers. You’d have to start that run with The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), a venture that survived the disapproval of Churchill himself; A Canterbury Tale (1944), which harks back to the Chaucerian age but includes a quite disturbing modern magician; I Know Where I’m Going (1945), another hymn to magic and mad love; A Matter of Life and Death (1946); Black Narcissus (1947), about a convent in the Himalayas but shot at Pinewood; The Red Shoes (1948), that great but frightening tribute to dance and art; and The Small Back Room (1949), where David Farrar plays a crippled wartime bomb-disposal officer.There was also a return to the classics. It’s about a sadly married woman (Googie Withers) whose life is suddenly altered when an old boyfriend breaks out of prison and seeks her aid.These are major films, and they mark a kind of movie that treated criminal life as a natural result of social upheaval and poverty – films like They Made Me a Criminal (with Trevor Howard); The Blue Lamp, that tribute to the ordinary copper that established Jack Warner on television as Dixon of Dock Green; Pool of London (about the docks and inter-racial romance); and even Night and the City, in which the American director Jules Dassin came to London and did a film set in the world of professional wrestling.And in those same years, Powell and Pressburger, with their company, the Archers, working variously for J Arthur Rank or Alexander Korda, ran into their goden age.