The Ealing Comedies - Making Light of Crime?

When the studio was sold in 1955, [Michael] Balcon wrote the inscription for a plaque erected there: 'here during a quarter of a century many films were made projecting Britain and the British character.' The Ealing comedies have, by critics, been accused of provincial narrow-mindedness, snobbery, sexual repression, verbosity, archness and sentimental nationalism. Sarah Street identifies the key films in the Ealing comedy cycle as Hue and Cry (Charles Crichton, 1947), Passport to Pimlico (Henry Cornelius, 1949), …

…place in Latin America, where millionaire-in-exile Alec Guinness is recounting the saga behind his ill-gotten fortune. But the closing scene reveals that his confidant is a Scotland Yard man, to whom he is handcuffed in readiness for the journey home to retribution. This undercuts the screenplay's contention that 'the saddest words in the world are "it might have been"', reducing the action to a game which the powers-that-be have an inbuilt right to win.