The Blue Lamp (1950); I Believe in You (1952); Violent Playground (1958); Sapphire (1959) and Victim (1961)

Basil Dearden's work as a director constitutes a sustained body of films that are exemplary of the social problem film in the post-war era. At Ealing, Dearden worked on a wide range of topics – post-war reconstruction, generational conflict, juvenile delinquency, racial tension, and homosexuality – but his work is characterized by a consistent vision deriving in part from Ealing's emphasis on social issues and community.

The post-war films of Dearden are less concerned with a literal reconstruction of wartime community than with the exploration of the conditions necessary to the construction of a new community or consensus appropriate to peacetime. To this extent, the concern of Dearden's films with social problems can be understood; for it is precisely such problems (for example, youth and race) which threaten social stability and undermine the community or consensus of post-war Britain. The logic of the Dearden social problem picture is then towards an integration, or an assimilation, of troubling elements through an appeal to ‘good sense’ and reason.

Time, having exposed their ideological assumptions and prejudices, their fictions become less important than the realities of the attitudes they embody, turning them into cultural artefacts.