In the late 1940s there was much talk of a ‘crisis’ in the British film industry: film production was in a perilous state, costs were increasing, revenues were falling, studios were closing and the sources of capital investment had all but dried up. Although British films enjoyed much cultural prestige – this was the era of such classics as Great Expectations, The Red Shoes, Hamlet, Oliver Twist, The Fallen Idol and The Third Man – relatively few of them made a profit and film production overall was losing money. In 1948 the government was obliged to bail out the ailing British Lion Film Corporation to the tune of £3 million in order to prevent it from going out of business. And in 1949 the Rank Organisation – the largest producer-distributor- exhibitor in Britain and the only British corporation operating on the same scale as the major Hollywood studios – announced that it would be cutting back its production programme after recording a loss of £3.3 million on film production and distribution over the previous financial year. Rank was widely seen as a barometer of the state of the industry and the extent of its losses sent shockwaves through the trade. An editorial in the trade paper Kinematograph Weekly described it as ‘a major tragedy for the British film industry’.

However, as the report into the film industry published by the independent think tank Political and Economic Planning in 1952 correctly pointed out, there was a sense that the British film industry was almost perpetually in a state of crisis.