Vincent Porter – författare

In this definitive and long-awaited history of 1950s British cinema, Sue Harper and Vincent Porter draw extensively on previously unknown archive material to chart the growing rejection of post-war deference by both film-makers and cinema audiences. Competition from television and successive changes in government policy all forced the production industry to become more market-sensitive. The films produced by Rank and Ealing, many of which harked back to wartime structures of feeling, were challenged by those backed by Anglo-Amalgamated and Hammer. The latter knew how to address the rebellious feelings and growing sexual discontents of a new generation of consumers. Even the British Board of Film Censors had to adopt a more liberal attitude. The collapse of the studio system also meant that the screenwriters and the art directors had to cede creative control to a new generation of independent producers and film directors. Harper and Porter explore the effects of these social, cultural, industrial, and economic changes on 1950s British cinema.

In this definitive and long-awaited history of 1950s British cinema, Sue Harper and Vincent Porter draw extensively on previously unknown archive material to chart the growing rejection of post-war deference by both film-makers and cinema audiences. Competition from television and successive changes in government policy all forced the production industry to become more market-sensitive. The films produced by Rank and Ealing, many of which harked back to wartime structures of feeling, were challenged by those backed by Anglo-Amalgamated and Hammer. The latter knew how to address the rebellious feelings and growing sexual discontents of a new generation of consumers. Even the British Board of Film Censors had to adopt a more liberal attitude. The collapse of the studio system also meant that the screenwriters and the art directors had to cede creative control to a new generation of independent producers and film directors. Harper and Porter explore the effects of these social, cultural, industrial, and economic changes on 1950s British cinema.

Since the mid-1980s, broadcasting in the Federal Republic of Germany has been extensively re-regulated. The traditional duopoly of the public broadcasters Ard and ZDF has been challenged by new private networks in both radio and television. In two historic judgements handed down in 1986 and 1987, the Federal Constitutional Court set out terms for a new dual order of private and public broadcasting. But how were the guidelines of the court interpreted in practice?Pluralism, Politics and the Marketplace traces the economic and political influences which shaped the emergence of a pluralistic broadcasting system in the federal republic, and examines the conflicts between public and private broadcasting, both in West Germany and in the European Community as a whole.

Walter Charles Mycroft (1890-1959) was the film critic of the Evening Standard from 1922-1927, and also a founding member of London's Film Society. In 1928, he was appointed Head of the Scenario Department—and then Director of Production—at British International Pictures (later Associated British Pictures). In 1941 Mycroft was sacked following the death of the company's Managing Director and the requisition of Elstree studios by the British Government for war purposes. After that his career went into steady decline, although after the Second World War he worked for nearly a decade as Scenario Adviser to Robert Clark, who ran the rebuilt Elstree studios.This long-lost memoir, which Mycroft wrote mainly in the 1940s, offers a detailed account of the vagaries and complex economic vicissitudes of British film production in the 1930s. Mycroft also recalls how he selected film stories for directors Harry Lachman, E. A. Dupont and Alfred Hitchcock, and he reveals, for the first time, the true story behind Hitchcock's departure from British International Pictures. Mycroft also provides incisive portraits of British film industry captains: the charismatic Alexander Korda, C. M. Woolf, the rising J. Arthur Rank, and above all John Maxwell, the shrewd iconoclastic Scots lawyer who built Associated British into the largest and most financially successful film corporation in pre-war Britain. The memoirs conclude with the death of Maxwell and Mycroft's fall from grace at Elstree.The volume is supplemented by four appendixes consisting of Mycroft's earlier writings on the aesthetics and business of film production, along with a filmography of over 200 films on which he worked. This memoir provides both scholars and the general reader with new and fascinating insights into the worlds of British journalism during the first two decades of the twentieth century and of British film production during the 1930s. Walter Mycroft: The Time of My Life will be of interest not only to scholars of British journalism a