British Cinema History Assignment TwoShane Gladstone12/9/02 A cultural and social analysis of Rank's 1959 film "Sapphire" by Ralph Deardon and Michael Relph in 1,500 words. no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The relaxation of film censorship laws in post-war Britain had brought many changes to British cinema by the late 1950s. The most striking of these changes has been his growing willingness to address both social and artistic issues—the more contemporary the better. 1956-1963 could be seen as the "golden age" of the social problem film (as it was now being dubbed) with classics such as "Cosh Boy" (1959), "Violent Playground" (1958) and "My Teenage Daughter" (1956) appearing on our screens. These films dealt with contemporary issues such as juvenile delinquency, prostitution, homosexuality, and race. However, the above problems have always been caused by the problem of youth and the advent of the adolescent. Something unheard of just five years earlier, but now a major force, steering the good ship Albion through a turbulent sea of ​​social change through sex, music and drug abuse. Causing what Stanley Cohen dubbed "moral panic" in the media and the predominantly conservative attitudes of the adult world. The advent of this novelty created by advertisers and called "The Teenage" is mainly due to the abolition of the national service. Suddenly there was something that separated father and son and created a kind of new class division. Literally thousands of teenagers were now working for real money and earning a lot of it. They are no longer required to conform to the infrastructure of society as their parents and older siblings had known it. They enjoyed a well-being never seen among their peers. "The Sunday Chart of 1960 found a boy who could hang 127 suits worth in his parents' yard, another who owned five suits, two pairs of pants, one pair of jeans, five pairs of shoes, twenty-five ties and a overcoat" (Sex, Class and Racism, John Hill 1986) The main distributor of the Social Problem films was the Rank Organization. It was here that, from the early 1940s onwards, producer Michael Relph and director Ralph Deardon forged a strong working partnership born of respect and social awareness. The pair spent nearly a decade making a series of these images, all synonymous with the country's morals and social conscience. In their eyes cinema was the mass medium and the aforementioned relaxation of censorship allowed them to address relevant issues. This was done through the development of their own unique, genre-defining house style. Taking an already established existing genre such as crime or romance and following its core format, codes, conventions and narrative style (generally linear) before juxtaposing it with a relevant social issue. In this way they achieved their initial goals: to give the masses a social consciousness and educate, entertain and inform the intended target audience. "Sapphire", the film I chose to represent this genre, was made by Deardon & Relph in 1959 and released on a restless society, where only half were happy with the aforementioned advances regarding sex, race and the arts in general. Taking the established mystery genre (damsel in distress, various suspects, quintessential English attitudes, charming detective, controversial outcome) but adding a distinct film noir style to the narrative andstaging in particular (dark, dark lighting, moody characters, tension-increasing background music, seedy underground/alley locations, femme fatale) had created a film about social issues that gave the viewer an almost novelistic snapshot of London life around the end of the 1950s. "In 1958, the young and the restless - the Absolute Beginners - were busy creating a new world of great music, bars and free love, as different from Mrs Dale and the traditional green and pleasant land of England as they dared to create it" ( taken from the preface of "Absolute Beginners" by Colin MacInnes, 1959). The main narrative of the film is developed in a linear and clichéd style. Centered on the murder investigation of a white-skinned African girl who had been engaged to the son of a self-educated, lower-middle-class white man, a blatant social stereotype who in no way approved of her only son, whose same blood generates a mixed-race child. A number of relevant subplots operate around this: the advent of the teenage "young meteors" (Jonathon Aitkin 1964), the racial tension in London at the time. : starting with the derogatory attitude of whites towards the Jamaican race and culminating with the Notting Hill riots in 1959. And the plight of David's divorced sister and single mother, Milly. By adapting this narrative, they drew on four social issues and intentionally created a number of binary oppositions that operate around the narrative: black versus white, good versus evil, permissiveness versus frigidity, wealth versus work. The narrative continues its linear path until almost the last scene in which the true identity of the killer (Milly) is revealed and we discover that we have witnessed a crime of passion rather than a crime of racial hatred. Once again Deardon and Relph highlight how amoral the society we live in is. The fact that we could even suspect that a girl was killed for nothing more than the color of her skin proves it. As I mentioned briefly in the previous paragraph, there are four social issues: We watched them all operate around each other in unison. When the film was released, we were experiencing the dawn of British youth culture, and the decline in teenage sexual standards was perceived as one of many things threatening the nation's values ​​and interests. find courage, like mice, hunting only in packs..." (Dr George Simpson, president of Margate Court, Mod and Rocker beach riots, May 1964) Along with the creation of this new permissive society, the traditional female stereotype beliefs were affected harsh and age-old regarding premarital chastity and low expectations endured. The media and advertising agencies constantly targeted women as both housewives and sexy playmates. This caused confusion among the female population, half of whom were now embarking on one search for personal fulfillment and enlightenment, while the other half still believed that marriage and hard work were the main route to independence and social status Before adolescence women who did not conform to this were classified as marginalized. The female gender models I mentioned above are represented almost clinically in the narrative of “Sapphire”. The presence of the deceased Sapphire was constructed to correlate with society's fears and anxieties regarding sexuality. The fact that she manages to transgress the accepted stereotype of femininity and actively pursue her dreams while her future creator, the character of David's sister Milly, is cemented in a dead-end job with two children and no husband, seems.