This extraordinary film is now available to watch free in the UK on BFI Player. Outside the UK it is available on DVD. I term it extraordinary for its portrayal of Clydeside shipbuilding in 1933. It almost inadvertently offers a documentary account of the industry, despite being a ‘quota quickie’ costing no more than £15,000 according to Powell’s autobiography. (Quota quickies were low budget British films that met the requirement that cinemas must show British films following the 1927 Cinematograph Act. The aim was to break the Hollywood monopoly, but some Hollywood studios with takings from the British box office simply created subsidiaries in the UK to make such films as ‘British’.)
The film runs less than 70 minutes and the plot is not complex. Leslie Banks plays David Barr, a ship designer, yard manager and one of the principal shareholders of the Clydeside shipbuilding company Burns, McKinnon. Because of the Great Depression, British shipyards are silent with little prospect of selling ships when international trade is so depressed. British ships, flying the Red Ensign, constitute the most important merchant fleet in the world. Banks has created a new design to cost less to build and be far more efficient. He believes it will re-start merchant shipping because of its low operating costs. He wants to build 20 ships but he has to raise the money. Lord Dean, the chair of the board and the other board members refuse to invest. The young June McKinnon (Carol Goodner) is perhaps more amenable, but Barr doesn’t seem to notice how beautiful and intelligent she is. This seems like a mistake. Barr decides to go ahead without securing the funds he needs but he faces a cunning enemy in Manning, owner of a shipping line that runs vessels under foreign flags. The principled Barr won’t countenance selling ships to Manning.
I won’t spoil any more of the plot, only report that it becomes dramatic, not because of a strike as the American distributors seem to have believed (renaming the film Strike!) and which is even implied by Steve Crook of the Powell & Pressburger website. I just want to note the aspects of the film that intrigued me as not being something to be expected in a ‘quota quickie’. Barr, Dean and Ms McKinnon fly back to Glasgow from London in a three-engined biplane carrying 20 passengers. The aircraft in question is an Armstrong Whitworth Argosy of Imperial Airways. The flight allows us to see aerial views of the shipyards on the Clyde. Later we tour the different stages in production of a cargo ship with wonderful images of steel production, riveting and so on. There is no strike and no ‘militancy’ among the workers, instead there are non-union agitators paid to disrupt production by Barr’s enemies. Barr is passionate about his design and patriotic in terms of the shipping companies he supports. He is something of a paternalistic employer but is prepared to go to any lengths to get the job done. Powell was certainly not a socialist and he was a co-writer of the script. However, there is perhaps an unconscious plea for a more Keynesian approach here – spending money to build ships will stimulate the local economy. (Powell had two co-writers, his working partner Jerry Jackson, an American, and L. du Garde Peach, an older writer.) Powell also has a sense of humour. The leading riveter is named ‘Grierson’, Powell having relatively little time for the documentary movement in the UK but admiring the professionalism of Grierson. My only disappointment with the film is that Powell himself seems to have thought little of it. I think parts of it are excellent but the romance between Barr and Ms McKinnon is rather quickly dealt with.
The film was made by Gainsborough at the Shepherd’s Bush studios of Gaumont British. Powell used the rather stolid Leslie Banks twice more during the 1940s. Carol Goodner was an American who also worked on the stage and she appeared, with Banks, in Powell’s previous film, The Fire Raisers (1934) at Gainsborough. She later worked at several British studios, slowly falling down the cast list until she went back to the theatre and then to the US in 1939, later to work in TV. I was impressed with her appearance in Red Ensign and I don’t know what went wrong. We have to remember that this was a film Powell made when he was 28/29. Later he leased a cottage she owned and in his autobiography he praises her as one of the best actors he worked with, but arguing that she enjoyed cooking and entertaining more than acting. He refers to her two films with himself as being “for Michael Balcon” then in charge of Gaumont British production. It’s odd to think of Powell and Balcon together. I wonder how Powell would have got on at Ealing in later years?
Various sources suggest that, contrary to Powell’s autobiography, he did think highly of the film and that the Leslie Banks character is a forerunner of those Powell alter egos such as Eric Portman’s Colpeper in A Canterbury Tale and Dr. Reeves in A Matter of Life and Death. I can see that this is an argument. But in A Life in Movies he just points out that similar films, with a social edge, were being made in France and other parts of Europe all the time. Also worth noting is that Variety‘s viewer at the trade show for Red Ensign in London takes the film to be a propaganda piece for the shipping industry in the UK but also praises the cast and the presentation of the shipyard. I think this film rose far above my expectations of a quota quickie.
Red Ensign was remade in 1943 as The Shipbuilders, directed by John Baxter and with Clive Brook in the role of the shipyard owner. It appears to be a completely different script for wartime.
itp Global Film 
An interesting comment by Roy. However, the question of the ‘strike’ needs to be addressed. The trope of ‘agitators’ stirring up industrial action in industry is a common in British films, even recently. I note two reactionary examples in the career of Richard Attenborough. [see tribute post]. This is an expression of the values and interests of the capitalist class in Britain. To write that Michael Powell is ‘not a socialist’ is typical British understatement. He was a very conservative character. His best films have a complexity when dealing with issues such as class, gender and ethnicity; this is not one of his best films.
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I’m glad you recognise the ‘understatement’ Keith. I tend to describe Michael Powell as a ‘High Tory’. He felt comfortable with his own class and they often featured in his films and those of The Archers. I have seen comments suggesting that Emeric Pressburger was a member of the Conservative Party, but I’m not aware of Powell ever publicly supporting any Tory policies or making party political statements (I’m happy to be corrected with references to specific statements).
The ‘strike’ is a different issue. There is no strike in the film but the workers are on the verge of anger whipped up by the paid agitators – paid to disrupt for commercial gain, not as an attack on unions which don’t, I think, appear in the film. Essentially this is a narrative about three different capitalists. Barr is patriotic, ego-driven and paternalistic. I don’t think he is necessarily heroic. He is opposed by Dean, a typical short-termist only interested in ‘rate of return’ and Manning a quasi-criminal figure willing to use low wages and foreign flags to undercut British workers. He reminds me of some current UK Tory politicians. Keynes’ General Theory was not published until 1936 which is why I suggest, that the script is inadvertently Keynesian (and therefore for me, a ‘good thing’). Investing in new ships would have precisely the multiplier effect associated with Keynes’ writings.
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Roy’s comments do not address the central issue that I raised; perhaps I did not set this out in a clear enough fashion. There is a long tradition in British culture, certainly in the mass media and in the mainstream cinema, of blaming industrial action on subversives. This is the trope that is used in the plot of ‘Red Ensign’. This is an invented conspiracy; seen nowadays with reference to climate change and pro-Palestinian activists. And this also insults the working class who are deemed of being incapable of autonomous action. That the agitation takes a different form does not change the problem of representation.
As for Keynes you can search his writings for any explanation of surplus value which is how capitalist of either type in the film make their profits.
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I’m sorry to have to repeat myself but I’ve watched the film again and there is NO STRIKE. There is not any form of industrial dispute. There is a paternalistic manager/owner who convinces the men to wait to get paid their wages. This may be unrealistic and perhaps insulting or patronising towards the workers, but although the workers would be justified in downing tools, they don’t. I take your point about the trope of blaming industrial action on ‘subversives’ but it doesn’t apply here. In 1933 the capitalist economies of the West were depressed and the economic policies being applied weren’t working. Marxian economists may well have come up with a solution but at this point they were not being listened to. Industries recovered partly through re-armament and partly through programmes like those of the New Deal in the US. Keynesian ideas helped change post-war policies about tackling negative growth. My comments are aimed simply at a conjunctural analysis of the ideas in the film related to the events around the time that the film was made. They make the film interesting for me.
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Roy’s comments on the use of strike. In my first comment I included the term ‘strike’ because it appeared in Roy’s post. This was followed by “The trope of ‘agitators’ stirring up industrial action in industry is a common in British films”. My second comment noted “blaming industrial action on subversives.” The plot of ‘Red Ensign’ clearly includes agitators attempting to provoke industrial action. At one point, once the shipyard has re-opened and labour is involved, Barr on a tour of the yard sees an agitator, [sent by a rival but Barr does not know this], raising the issue of overtime pay, “making trouble among the men”. The man is summarily dismissed and thrown out of the yard. So much for worker protection at the site. Later when Barr cannot pay the workers’ wages, due to a lack of capital, we see a gathering of workers being addressed by an agitator, “the right to a week’s pay”. It is worth noting that Karl Marx exposes the illusion of a ‘fair day’ pay’ in Capital, Volume 1. Barr strides through the ranks of the workers and pushes the agitator off the stand and he falls into the waters of the yard. Bar then makes a speech which is greeted by ‘three cheers’. Given this is a Glasgow shipyard, the centre of industrial militancy then and earlier, this is clearly unrealistic. The film represents a deferential workforce and a completer absence of trade union activity. It is worth adding that by the end of the film we have still not seen the workforce receiving the wages due.
This fits with the representation of the working class and the capitalist class. The capitalist clearly enjoy considerable affluence; whilst we see little of the workers’ conditions but scant dialogue suggests some form of deprivation.
Roy goes on to make comments about the actual economy of the period and of John Maynard Keynes. I am uncertain what is the point of this but it seems it supposes that Barr’s analysis is correct. It is worth noting that in the film Barr is found guilty of fraud but is spared prison by clemency.
The film is set in what is a recognizable ‘great depression’. Early in the film there are shots of idle shipping and at one point Barr proposes to scrap idle ships and build a new fleet. This ties in with the idea in the plot of a ‘quota policy’ for the shipping industry. It is explained that this policy will produce subsidies funded by savings from dole payments when unemployed workers become employed. There were acts of assistance to shipping; later in 1935 and 1936. It seems unlikely that they were funded from saving in dole payments as the National Government had already cut these.
What we have here is another action analyses by Karl Marx; destroying capital in a crisis so as to lead to a fresh round of capital and then a fresh round of surplus value.
It is true that the British economy recovered in the late 1930s, one important factor being the rearmament in preparation for the coming imperialist war. However the ideas of Keynes did not resolve the recurring crises in capital identified by Marx and Frederick Engels. These continue; most recently only a decade ago.
Roy refers to ‘Marxian economists’; this is a misnomer, there was a socialist alternative in Britain in this decade in the programme of the Communist Party of Great Britain. An organisation that the British state tried to suppress and which the mainstream media vilified. The effects of the economics and politics of the decade led in 1945 to the election of a Labour Government; unfortunately committed to reformism.
I find ‘Red Ensign’ a reactionary drama and representation; something common among British films in this period. There were more sympathetic representations in the work of the British Documentary Movement and there were more progressive film portraits outside the mainstream industry with works like those of The Film and Photo League. Representations improved in the 1940s but there were still these derogatory representations. An example is ‘The Agitator’ (1945) in which William Hartnell plays an ill-defined ‘socialist’ and union leader who, offered an opportunity to implement an alternative, fails and is alienated from his now ex-members.
It is worth noting that in the 1930s British film failed to produce the sort of independent productions addressing working class is that can be found on the continent. In Germany there was ‘Kuhle Vampe or Who Owns the World (1932), involving the revolutionary playwright Bertolt Brecht.
In France one finds ‘Life Is Ours’ / ‘La vie est à nous’ (1936), involving among others Jean Renoir. It is only with the television work in the 1960s by Tony Garnett and Ken Loach that one finds British equivalents.
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I think we should end this rather odd discussion. I don’t disagree with your ideological analysis but despite presentation of the shipyard and its processes I don’t think I suggested the film is ‘realist’.
‘Marxian economics’ or ‘Marxian economists’ is not a misnomer. It is a recognised school of economic thought, deriving originally from Marx himself but later slightly removed from other aspects of Marxian thought. My point was that no economists of this persuasion had the ear of government in 1933. The same was true of economists like Keynes.
I should have commented that the idea of a Clydeside shipyard without union representation was ludicrous and in that respect I’m grateful for your comment. I did indicate that Variety‘s reviewer suggested the film was propaganda for shipbuilders and that is a potential avenue for further study. I bow to your superior knowledge of early 1930s British cinema, but for me the film is still remarkable for a so-called ‘quota quickie’. Comments are now closed.
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