Original subtitles

Imminently suitable for business premises or a factory site,

heart of busy training centre, unlimited prospects.

Full transport facilities to hand.

Special appeal to purchaser of vision.

No obstruction to future development.

Thoroughly safe investment.

One of the great British comedies,

the plot of Passport To Pimlico is gloriously absurd.

The idea of this film, not only was relevant at the time,

it has continued and increased.

It's a film that has got a universal theme to it

that will never, never go out of date.

I think it's combination of fantasy and realism,

making something serious out of their comedy.

And it was kind of smuggling social commentary into their comedy.

Of course, that existed before Passport To Pimlico, too,

but a lot of these Ealing comedies

are very, very good at making you laugh,

and also going, "Actually, but isn't this ridiculous?

Isn't this something that we should think about seriously?"

So where do you think it stands

in sort of the pantheon of British comedy?

Well, I think Passport To Pimlico

is a remarkable film as a British comedy.

It... There may be, have been funnier British comedies,

you know, there may have been more glamorous British comedies.

There's lots of... But what this is,

is there is no other comedy I think,

that's caught the nature of Britishness,

the question of Britishness, the idea,

the everyday struggle and parallel existences.

The idea that to be British is to be many, many things

all at the same time, to contain those multitudes,

and say, "Well, of course, because I'm British. And Burgundian."

When the good folk of that London borough unearthed proof

that they are in fact an outpost of ancient Burgundy,

they spot the chance to escape the petty fogging rules

of post-war austerity and declare immediate independence.

Over this way a bit.

Miramont Place. Now come on, step lively all you aliens.

Belgrave Road? No, lady, we're going to England.

The irony is that their new identity,

if anything, makes them more patriotic.

As grocer's wife Betty Warren defiantly cries,

"It is only because we're English

that we're sticking out for the right to be Burgundians."

Every day in Britain, housewives have to queue up

to purchase even the necessities of life.

For most of us, meat in any form is a very rare treat.

Each person is permitted to buy only 23 cents' worth a week,

which is not exactly a banquet.

The political mood in Britain in 1948/49

was very much one of flux.

People were still hurting from the war.

Rationing was still in place,

although it was about to actually to be taken away.

But there was still a sense that they were in the final stages

of the shadows of impoverishment from war

and they had yet to think that they were going to come out of it.

So the situation in 1949 in England

was still very much one of privation

in the years following the Second World War.

Rationing had actually increased,

which must have been a pretty bitter pill to swallow

for a lot of ordinary English people,

given the difficulties of the wartime period.

You know, they have been triumphant,

but still there was this kind of slightly colourless existence

of you know, needing to ration sugar

and nylons and lipsticks and sweets for children

and all these various important household items.

And so there was some frustration growing,

I think, with this austerity.

And equally, England was trying to, in a larger sense,

figure out where it stood in the post-war world

in terms of diplomatic relations,

whether to be isolationist or to, you know,

foster a bigger sense of internationalism.

And so all of these things are very much in the backdrop

and at play in Passport To Pimlico.

And do you think the film in particular,

was a response to the ongoing rationing

and the need for identity cards?

The fact that four years after the war, things hadn't changed.

Yes, I think that the... I mean, what was the war fought for?

It was to, you know... It was a war for freedom

from the kind of petty tyranny

and sort of the oversight of uniformed masters

who demanded identity papers and limited what you could do.

And suddenly you find that Britain, the victor,

was dealing with a situation where bureaucrats had a say-so

over every part of their lives, where you had to queue up for food.

Nothing really had changed.

Nothing, no, it didn't feel like anything had been won.

So I think this idea that you would be in a situation

where you suddenly felt the opportunity for liberty,

you suddenly discovered the potential to be free again,

must have seemed exhilarating as a concept in plot terms.

Escalating into a stand-off with supercilious Whitehall,

this is a biting satire on bureaucracy

and a portrait of a community

refusing to return to the confines of class.

All the idiosyncrasy, humour,

and bloody-mindedness of the country

are captured in the sense of liberation let loose in Pimlico.

..one to think of. This one is me all right.

Think it'll go with my taffeta?

That check skirt I got up west.

Lovely. Three guineas, dear.

Oh. Make it pounds, I'm easy.

Ta, Edie. I've got three coupons somewhere.

Four, dear. Same as Bond Street.

Oh, go on, be a pal.

I wanted a Miss Pimlico Night at the Palais.

Oh, that. Proper old fiddle, always was.

OK, I'll put it by.

Oh, no. Look, I'll tell you what.

Oh, all right.

I mean, the film is definitely a response to the post-war austerity

and certainly, although it's set in 1947,

and, I mean, just a year before the film was actually being made.

There is this sense that it's a...

It's a kickback against the austerity,

the deprivation, the...

And also, to a certain extent, the government.

I mean, the... the idea that a community of people,

a small community of people,

could actually sort of rise up,

and challenge, actually, the sort of status quo

as laid down by the mandarins of Whitehall.

But also, it was a class struggle to a certain extent,

as shown in the film,

because all of these people are very ordinary working-class people

who live in supposedly Pimlico, and they are the ones who -

through this extraordinary set of circumstances -

find themselves actually able to challenge Westminster and Whitehall.

Yeah, there is a sense, especially in 1949,

again, Britain has come through the war,

and so it does feel like this kind of great push of solidarity

to not take anything out of the army's pockets,

to not hurt the war effort.

That feeling has slightly subsided,

and so there's a huge rise in the black market,

and black marketeering and people pooling resources together,

and just trying to get those little extras.

You're on the cusp of the 1950s, so you're looking at this era

which was going to become one of huge consumerism,

and much bigger free market capitalism, certainly in America,

and England would eventually want to follow suit in many ways.

And so, yeah, people are a bit fed up,

and they're interested in probably finding ways to game the system.

Desperately sick of threadbare existence,

tempers were growing short.

Exasperation flared up among British housewives

when the world food situation made new restrictions necessary.

How would you describe the political climate in Britain

in 1949 when Passport To Pimlico came out?

Well, the British people were very disillusioned

with their political leaders at that point.

The following year, there'd be an election

at which no party would win a majority,

so the electorate were not impressed

with anyone who was standing for leadership.

The energy that the Labour government had inherited

at the end of the Second World War had not produced the change,

I think, that people had hoped, in the way that they had hoped.

There were still bomb sites, there had been austerity and rationing,

people didn't feel that they were being well looked after.

And at the same time, you'd had this working-class population

who had been given enormous responsibility

and control over their own destiny during the Second World War,

who were now being expected to return to the status quo,

that there was a feeling that we're going back

to everything that we'd rejected and we hadn't wanted.

This was the beginning of the period

where the Australians would offer the £10 Pom scheme,

where you could go to Australia for just £10,

and millions of Britons were preparing to leave the country.

There was just this feeling

that this is not the country that we fought for.

It-It's a mess.

So there was a lot of doubt,

and, you know, disillusionment, quite febrile, I would say.

Led by such comic marvels

as Stanley Holloway and Margaret Rutherford,

Passport To Pimlico is a deeply passionate film

about what binds society together.

I reckon two pounds will cover this. Hey! How many in your litter?

You need 40 ration books for that lot!

Ration books? This is Burgundy.

Burgundy!

Cor! Someone's been saving up for a rainy day.

Look at all this lot.

Look, there's a coat of arms.

Look at this. Must be hundreds of years old.

Inspiration came from real life.

A newspaper story about Princess Juliana of Holland,

who while exiled in Canada during the war, became pregnant.

This had major repercussions.

According to Dutch law, if the baby was born on foreign soil,

it was no longer eligible for the throne.

So an obliging Canadian parliament passed a decree

that a delivery room in Ottawa was to be Dutch territory.

In Canada, Queen Wilhelmina of The Netherlands

sees Princess Juliana and her granddaughters

for the first time since the Nazis invaded their homeland.

For the 62-year-old Queen,

the trans-Atlantic crossing was her first,

and incidentally, her first time in a plane.

A Queen for more than 50 years,

Wilhelmina ruled an Empire of 75 million subjects.

Now she lives for the day the House of Orange will rise again.

There's this slightly nutty story

which almost feels too ridiculous to be true,

but in fact was true.

That during the Second World War,

a Dutch princess was in Ottawa in Canada, and was pregnant,

and began to give birth on the maternity ward there in Canada.

And there was some issue around the idea of wanting this infant,

this heir to the throne, to be born on Dutch soil.

It was a very, very interesting story.

It all worked, it was fine,

it was done through sort of a bureaucratic sort of system

that gave them temporary leave to actually call it The Netherlands,

right in the middle of Ottawa.

It was peculiar, it was a very singular situation.

Under a contract at Ealing Studios, the writer, TEB Clarke,

known to all as Tibby Clarke, was a great talent.

He had a gift for what might be called logical absurdity -

taking a ridiculous concept and figuring out the logical outcome.

His Oscar-nominated screenplay for Passport To Pimlico

was a true original.

Indeed, it is a foundational text

for the what-if school of situational comedy, the sitcom.

This is the skill of the writer, TEB Clarke, isn't it?

You know, he described it as logical absurdity.

You take a frankly ludicrous concept,

a country within a country, but you follow it logically.

So everything you apply from then on, you know, is politically sound,

is sort of sound in terms of character,

that has a kind of basis in reality.

Yes. And by the nature of the logical series of steps you take,

things become ever more impossibly absurd,

and ever more, you know, farcical.

So once you... Once people take an absurd situation at face value

as being 100% serious and have to react to it,

logically within the rules of society,

they go further and further away from the rational and the sane,

and into these kind of entirely fantastical worlds,

which are referenced by a series

of extremely recognisable everyday rules.

And that's the beauty of a particular kind of surrealism,

which British comedy has played with, you know.

In a sense, it's slightly Swiftian, you know,

this idea of something that you recognise,

and something that you can see where it's connected.

But it has just moved into this place where it's clearly mad.

And... But that's what he was able to do,

take this idea of okay, what happens if we just twist a tiny thing

and then see how everyone continues to behave.

The plot in detail goes like this.

In the heart of London,

a 15th-century document is discovered in a bomb site.

This royal decree reveals that a square mile of Pimlico

belongs to the Duchy of Burgundy.

It dawns on the salt-of-the-earth locals that as Burgundians,

they are no longer beholden to the stringent rules

of rationing in 1949.

Now it has always been known

that Miramont House was occupied by a Burgundian nobleman,

styling himself the Count Maurice de Charolais.

With the help of this document, I now intend to prove

that Maurice de Charolais and the Duke of Burgundy

were one and the same person.

For it is a royal charter, signed by King Edward IV,

making the Duke not only a grant of Miramont House,

but decreeing that the entire estate

shall be recognised henceforth as Burgundian soil.

Now, Edward IV would never have made such a grant-

One moment, Professor.

Are you implying that this treasure does not belong to the Crown?

Oh no, it belongs to the people in the area covered by the old estate,

since this charter specifically makes them natives of Burgundy.

Do you mean that these Londoners are technically Burgundians?

Indubitably. This royal charter has never been repealed.

It is as valid today as on the day it was signed

by the founder of the House of York.

Blimey. I'm a foreigner.

So Tibby Clarke had been working at Ealing Studios

as a writer for some time, and would go on to.

He made over a dozen films with them.

Not all of them were comedies, there were some dramas as well.

And he had a real taste for kind of a combination of absurdity

and a real kind of governing intellect and logic to it.

He sort of takes very serious situations

and makes them flippant, or takes, you know,

the silliness of a situation and tries to treat it with seriousness.

So there is a really interesting tonal thing that goes on

in a lot of his writing for the screen.

With Passport To Pimlico,

he takes that inspiration from the Dutch monarchy

to new extremes.

TEB Clarke wanted to sort of spin it out of this original idea

into something that was very London-based,

very interesting, and actually would grab the attention of the audience.

And he came up with this absolutely fabulous idea.

The Duke of Burgundy claimed

that particular part of London as his own. Obviously, I mean,

he was Charles the Rash, as he was then known,

and it is something that has never been rescinded.

Now of course they come up, they don't know anything about this,

they call in an historian to sort of verify the document,

the historian played by Margaret Rutherford

absolutely brilliantly, totally eccentric,

dotty as anything, but knows her history.

Goes through the documents and says, "It's absolutely true."

This area of Pimlico is not London,

it's not Great Britain, it belongs to Burgundy.

And having established the facts of this...

...they then decide as a sort of collective around them,

that if it's Burgundian,

then they are not subject to the laws

that are applying to the rest of the British Isles,

especially they don't have to have rationing,

they don't have to have policing,

they can actually call their own shots,

and create their own sort of identity.

When Whitehall resists, the situation grows more and more bizarre,

as if the whole story is a fever dream

brought on by the unnatural heat.

You can't throw me out of my own country.

Don't be absurd, man.

If you seriously think that an obscure point of the law-

Obscure or not, legally, this is Burgundy.

Head office no longer has any jurisdiction over this bank.

This is my bank.

So tell me a bit about what are the consequences of these...

these Pimlicans suddenly wanting to be Burgundians,

and how does it affect Britain, the outside world?

Well, this I think is where the magic comes in,

because you know, actually, if you were to be genuinely logical,

there are these places in lots of countries where there are,

you know, effectively tax shelters or something like that.

You could have a very rational response to this.

But what they do is they decide to build quite a utopian society.

They decide that they will rule themselves,

and that they will act in the best interests of the community,

to give themselves the freedoms that they've been missing.

Looks like a fine weekend. Yes, sir.

You'll be back.

The unusual thing about Passport To Pimlico

is that it was one of the first films

that dealt with working-class people,

working-class society. There had been very, very few.

The Stars Look Down, Carol Reed's film in 1940,

was considered a working-class piece.

But generally speaking,

if they were films that were dealing with the working-class,

they were usually crime films.

It Always Rains on a Sunday, things like that.

But this was not about sort of working-class gangsters

or criminals, this was about a real community.

And the films about the working class of Britain

didn't really come into their own until the very late '50s

and the early '60s, and that's when they sort of, they start...

Well, it came in with the Angry Young Men playwrights.

That's when those kind of films,

that... that was the sea change in the culture.

So this was pretty unusual, it was pretty unusual to actually...

for Londoners, especially,

to see themselves represented on film.

So Clarke's screenplay actually went on to be nominated

for an Academy award, which is interesting in 1949 as well,

because I think Americans were looking,

and Hollywood, was looking to England,

who was so much closer to the actual site of war

and understood that the suffering the English people had been through

was much different than the American,

in terms of it actually being in London.

So people were interested, I think, in seeing depictions

of what was happening there in that immediate post-war period.

The power of Passport To Pimlico

lies in the contrast between the flights of fancy

and the humdrum surroundings.

The film teems with era-specific references.

Beneath the hilarious shenanigans of grocers, fishmongers,

and a bumbling bobby, who finds himself a one-man police force,

lies a picture of the growing disillusionment within British life.

Come to think of it, I shan't need this any more, either!

That's the stuff! Scrap them all!

Oi, stop it, you idiots!

Mr Wix, you're a responsible man. Can't you do something?

Certainly.

This is a job for Scotland Yard.

Whitehall one two, one two.

♪ Knees up, knees up Get those knees up

♪ Knees up, Mother Brown ♪

♪ A world on fire

♪ I just want to start

♪ A little flame in your heart

♪ In my heart

♪ I have but one desire... ♪

The nature of the story called for a large ensemble.

The film effectively stars an entire London community

hemmed in by railway lines.

Yet a soap opera of lives

emerges from the quirky precision of actors such as Barbara Murray

as the grocer's forward-thinking daughter,

Raymond Huntley as the down-trodden bank manager,

Carry On's Charles Hawtry as a local scamp.

And the great Hermione Baddeley from Brighton Rock

as a crafty dressmaker.

And it had an extraordinary cast of British talent,

even, you know, even sort of down to the small roles.

And everybody could sort of recognise something of themselves

if they were say, lower middle class,

or even working class, because there they were on the screen.

It's a really vivid and textured ensemble cast in this film,

and that kind of very much reflects the theme of Passport To Pimlico,

which is about individualism versus community spirit.

So it doesn't completely focus... You have your protagonists,

but it wasn't completely focused in on singular characters

who are only concerned with themselves.

It is very much about the wider community.

And a lot of those roles were also filled by musical entertainers,

or-or, you know, popular figures

and character actors in England at the time.

So these would've been familiar to the audience as well,

and there's that sense of familiarity

that tides you through that... you know,

it gives you a sense of something when you watch the film.

If there is a protagonist, then it is Stanley Holloway's Arthur Pemberton,

the grocer who is duly elected prime minister of Burgundy,

and thrills at the chance for a little polite anarchy.

Holloway had done Shakespeare and Dickens,

and would go on to be nominated

for another big-hearted cockney in My Fair lady.

Few actors represented the mischievous working-class spirit

better than him.

He really is the thread through this.

He is the community leader.

We see him at the beginning arguing for his community.

And he becomes prime minister of Burgundy, doesn't he?

Yes, yes, and he is the one who discovers the gold.

So he is very much the sort of, if you like, the spirit of Burgundy.

But then Margaret Rutherford plays the historian,

and she is essential to justify the plot.

If she doesn't arrive and say all of this is true,

then all it is is a discovery of a piece of paper.

She has to be the person who is constantly arriving,

constantly validating when the Duke of Burgundy does turn up,

she validates this, validates the-

She is just a joy, isn't she? Yeah.

Good morning, sir, I hope you'll pardon us for-

I am the culprit.

This is Professor Hatton-Jones of the London University.

The moment our good friend told me the news,

I was Arion, I was Zephyrus!

Nothing could detain me from instant communion

with a living survivor of the House of Charolais.

The pivotal part of dotty historian Professor Hatton-Jones

was written for Alastair Sim.

When he dropped out,

Margaret Rutherford stepped into his place without changing a line.

She was, frankly, born to play dotty professors.

The diminutive academic is there for pivotal historical exposition.

The joke is Rutherford's enthusiastic ramblings are mostly unintelligible.

Forgive me, are you a bleeder? I beg your pardon?

Do you suffer from haemophilia?

When you cut yourself, do you bleed interminably?

No, I don't think so. Oh, pity. It's in the family.

Definitely in the family. Oh, I am very sorry.

She also talks about sort of, you know,

very, very obscure moments in history at high speed.

"Well everyone fought on the battlefield of so and so...

no, not true at all.

And everyone's sort of staring at her madly.

"Wait, what do you mean? Do you mean..."

and off she goes like that. So she's...

But also what's great about her

is that she's clearly enormously enthused by the project,

so she keeps turning up. She's...

You know, she's a professor from miles away, but she can't be...

She can't leave this place alone, she's like, you know,

effectively, she becomes part of the community as the film goes on.

Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne

offer the confounded face of officialdom.

This is knowing casting - the actors were famous

as the double act Charters and Caldicott in thrillers

such as The Lady Vanishes and Night Train To Munich.

They defined a breed of upper-class befuddlement.

Clutching incessantly ringing telephones

and nursing tumblers of Alka-Seltzer,

they expend most of their energy

fobbing off the problem to other departments.

Soap.

Were you issued with this?

No, I pinched it from the French embassy.

Oh.

This situation though, it's an absolute deadlock.

Oh, no, not quite.

Now that this Duke has been officially recognised,

we can at least talk to them. Towel?

Time for talk's passed.

Any more talk and we've had it. We've got to do something.

We've got to tell this Duke where he gets off.

Oh. Well, I hope the old man won't put me onto it.

The main outsiders, the main Whitehall characters,

the two of them, played by Basil Radford

and Naunton Wayne.

And these are... These are a double act.

They would have been very, very familiar to the audience

from The Lady Vanishes,

which was the first time that they appeared on film together.

They are basically a kind of bachelor duo,

who are obsessed, mutually obsessed, with cricket.

And they...

It doesn't matter what peril they're in or what adventures

they get up to, or... The main thing is

that they are talking about the current cricket scores.

They are sort of... typical English sort of upper-class types,

who, you know, they're not cowards, they're not... whatever,

they're-they're just, their main concern is cricket,

even if the bullets are whizzing over their heads.

And they became so popular

after their appearance in Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes,

that they were cast again in Night Train To Munich,

as a... as a double act, as Charters and Caldicott,

which is what their names were.

So they became almost sort of a trademark.

They're not called Charters and Caldicott in this,

but the very fact that they appear together as the Whitehall mandarins,

one is the head of one department, the other is another,

and they are constantly trying to sort of pass on,

pass the buck as to who is going to deal with this situation,

because neither of them have ever had to face it before,

they don't know what to do.

And of course, they are just as hysterical,

and sort of authoritative.

I mean, they've got the authority.

Everybody who would see them would know who they are,

and realise that, "Ah, yes, it's them.

We're in safe hands there.

It may be if the government isn't in safe hands,

then at least we are as an audience."

Passport To Pimlico wasn't actually shot in Pimlico,

but a mile away over the river,

where a cleared bomb site off the Lambeth Road

offered the perfect setting.

However outlandish, the film gives us an unparalleled depiction

of a city still bearing the scars of the Blitz.

With life imitating comedy,

the production became a local novelty.

As they do in the story,

huge crowds gathered at the perimeter to gawp.

That's one of the things to say about Passport To Pimlico,

it is just an extraordinary social document of 1949.

I can't think of another film that shows you London quite like this.

No. I mean, I can't think of another film that shows,

in particular the bomb sites,

without them being artfully constructed

or put in a very deliberate and fey way. They...

This is something that takes the camera out,

and just points it into London,

and then shoots the film then and there, again,

coming from that... you know, those European schools of filmmaking

like the Italian and French sort of realism,

which was just like, "Well, let's get out of the studio,

let's show what's really going on."

Again, something that's not common in comedy,

to tell these stories in the way they ought to be told,

or had not been until this point common in comedy.

I think this sets up a whole tradition in British comedy,

which is about the realism in British comedy.

You know, this is why it's such an important film,

and why it's so important that the decision was made

to shoot on location.

Because it sets up the future direction

of lots of British comedy.

Director Henry Cornelius keeps his comic entanglements moving

with a series of wonderfully eccentric motifs.

The increasingly excitable newspaper headlines,

rival tannoy systems,

customs checks and crowded tubes.

And the Greek chorus of unkempt schoolboys

always in the thick of things.

There is even a film within a film

as Gaumont British News recounts the siege of Burgundy.

By the final act,

the situation has risen to a parody of contemporary Berlin,

with Pimlico blockaded by the furious authorities.

This week's exclusive camera report

tells of growing tension on both sides

of Burgundy's self-imposed iron curtain.

For the first time since World War II,

Britain's party politics have been forgotten.

The nation's leaders have come together to seek a solution

to this unprecedented crisis.

Henry Cornelius had quite an interesting background.

He was German-Jewish,

he was raised part of the time in South Africa,

and later in Berlin, always very interested in the stage.

And then eventually moved to England

and worked on propaganda and documentary films.

It was there that he met Alberto Cavalcanti,

who, of course, ended up being one of the great luminaries

of Ealing Studios as a director.

He also worked a little bit with Charles Crichton,

another important director for Ealing.

And so through those connections that he made,

and through working as a producer, sometimes a writer,

and mostly an assistant, an assistant director on various films,

some of which were quite successful,

he eventually got Michael Balcon's attention.

He worked on the great crime film It Always Rains On Sunday

in a supporting kind of role on the set.

So that kind of set him up to get the chance

to direct his first feature with Passport To Pimlico.

However, there was quite a contentious relationship

between him and the head of the studio.

He was over budget and over schedule on the film.

Some of that was not his fault.

The film is set in the summer of 1947,

and a very important part of that is that there is a huge heatwave,

and there are water shortages in this little... small...

sort of island unto itself that is Burgundy,

and it's a huge plot point in the film.

However, when they filmed it in the summer of 1948,

it was one of the wettest summers on record.

So there were just constant delays and issues around the weather.

The great drought caused by London's longest heatwave

is the one serious threat to Burgundy's independence.

80-year-old records for lack of rainfall have all gone overboard.

Water is cut off, but liquor makes do.

So Burgundy washes up in a pint of bitter

and makes tea with a kettle of boiling gin.

In fact, Burgundians are spending their water like money.

But he infuriated his boss, Michael Balcon,

which is kind of the theme of the film as well,

so it's entirely in keeping.

Yes, I mean the tension between the authorities

and the people of Burgundy

was enacted between the producer and the director.

There's a... This film has a lot of meta moments.

So in the opening titles,

there is a piece of graffiti shown, which says "Corny is a rotter",

and Corny was Cornelius's nickname, so Balcon had obviously gone in

and put in a little... a little comment to Cornelius.

So there was this war.

Some of the younger actors had found

Cornelius's very stern way of directing

a little intimidating, and so they found the rows,

the daily rows on set between Balcon and Cornelius

to be entertaining because they felt scared of Cornelius.

But yeah, it was daily.

They would daily have a set-to about what was going on.

As a satire of British bureaucracy,

it is as much a film about language,

how the working-class folk of Burgundy

begin to adopt the highfalutin flannel of their foes.

There is a socialist parable inherent in Clarke's script

about a community of people who grow increasingly unsure

that they want to relinquish the stability of the past.

They have the choice

of accepting the government's evacuation offer,

or of subjecting themselves and their children

to the hardships of what would be virtually a siege.

Come along, children.

Cor, look at that! The Siege Of Burgundy.

Like to see that.

Look at them pictures.

Fuelled by contrasting themes of individuality and togetherness,

Passport To Pimlico is the archetypal Ealing comedy.

A community bands together in good-natured rebellion,

but victory is not all it's cracked up to be.

The Burgundians are soon faced with the perils of free-market economics.

For every good intention, there is a spiv lurking around the corner.

And it's amazing to think that there was a comedy made in 1949

basically about free market economics.

It is. Well, it's...

I mean, this is why I always think of it sometimes

as a libertarian Marxist idea,

because it's about the freedom of the community

set against the way the market comes in.

Actually the arrival of the free market is seen as a threat,

ironically - once the spivs and the market arrive,

the community is threatened so they then have to work

on this kind of charitable basis with the people of Britain.

So there's really...

I mean, it explores all sorts of ideas with jokes,

which is the wonderful thing about it is.

The ideas being discussed here are immense historical ideas

that have been coursing through European dialogues for 200 years,

and they do them in two hours with some gags.

Then in 1948,

when the Russians sealed off the land corridors

leading to Western Berlin,

the United States, England and France

countered with the famous Berlin airlift.

From their bases outside the iron curtain,

a steady stream of airplanes flew night and day,

supplying West Berlin's two million residents with food,

fuel and medicine.

Finally, the communists capitulated and reopened the land corridor.

What Clarke also manages to pull in

into this story is - and it was very current -

was the Berlin airlift, the Berlin blockade,

when the Soviets actually stopped supplies

coming in to parts of Berlin.

And so the great Berlin airlift started,

and packages would be dropped from above,

or brought in somehow or other, to people who were under siege.

He uses this in a brilliant way in Passport To Pimlico,

where the only thing that the authorities can do

is actually cut off all supplies,

cut off communication and cut off trade.

And so they basically put Burgundy under siege - Pimlico, under siege.

This gives rise to not only a fantastic scene

where they're running out of water, and so at night,

they crawl under barbed wire,

and attach a hose and then run it back into the reservoir,

which is actually a crater, to fill it up.

That whole scene is like a scene from a war film.

I mean, it's quite exciting.

Ooh, it's good.

I think Passport To Pimlico has one foot

very firmly in social realism,

particularly for the time when again, you know,

I think audiences were probably primed

to want a little more escapism from their comedies.

This... you know, is extremely close

to the material circumstances of real life.

You know, the main character Pemberton has a daughter

who... you know, as a young woman coming up in this environment,

and who wants some of the nicer things, right?

Wants to be able to look nice and go out.

And so you see these daily struggles

with people who, you know, could have been...

Back then, certainly, could have been your neighbour,

could have been the guy down the road,

could have been the guy, you know, in the pub.

And so I think that gives something to the film,

because everything that's built out of that,

is... might be ridiculous, but it's grounded in the real.

As the film is being finished, disaster struck.

The British government repealed rationing,

and they were rendered out of date in an instant.

Thus, Cornelius made the inspired choice

of adding the insert to the end of the opening titles,

dedicating the film to the memory of ration cards.

In 1949, audiences hooted with laughter.

It became a triumphal comedy of the recent past

and a beckoning future.

There was a hitch because before the film was actually completed,

rationing came to an end.

Cornelius got around this unfortunate set of circumstances

by having a dedication.

It said "This film..." on screen.

"This film is dedicated to..."

And then he showed pictures of the ration cards and the coupons,

which of course is a very, very funny way

of visualising the idea that,

you know, thank God, you know, it's all over.

In fact, it wasn't over because unbeknown to him at the time,

rationing came back in the early '50s.

But there is no music soundtrack to that part of the film,

because they had used all the music throughout the film.

And so they just basically shot that piece, stuck it on,

and then the film went out.

So it was a very, very last minute sort of piece of...

"Well, we quickly have to deal with the truth of..."

Because this is a film which is being made

as events change all the time,

and that harks back to its reference to the Berlin blockade

and the Berlin airlift, and directly deals with the end of rationing.

It's constantly dealing with what's happening in real time

around the making of it.

This wry take on the contradictions of Britishness

still resonates today.

Especially in the complicated relationship

the country has with its own sense of identity.

In its Mouse That Roared theme,

Passport To Pimlico established a comic tradition

of plucky social climbers up against an indomitable system.

It could easily be remade as a sitcom.

Here, too, are the seeds of the great British urban soap opera.

The film on release was very popular.

It was a critical success.

Most of the critics aimed for the script,

they said this is a really brilliant script,

but they also praised the direction and the performances.

Quite rightly.

The film is not only still relevant,

I think it has increased in relevancy over the last few years.

Because of the nature of sovereignty,

because of the nature and the arguments and the debates

that continue... continue with us.

Passport To Pimlico has some really fun moments in it as well.

I particularly like the scene of them

trying to take an underground train through the Burgundy territory

and being stopped and trying to go through customs.

The idea of taking a tube train through customs

as if getting on the tube in and of itself

isn't already enough of a difficulty...

...is still just, like, a really entertaining concept.

And it kind of taps into something which still true about you know,

they call it, like, the Little England mentality,

which is you know, just very red tape,

very by the book, very bureaucratic thing of like,

"Oh, no, we're very sensible, and you must do this properly."

And I know I'm American, so maybe I'm not allowed to say that,

but Passport To Pimlico does poke fun at that attitude

and that-that kind of element of Englishness.

Would you say the film's themes were still relevant today?

Yes, I think so. And I think the film...

I mean, the genius of any idea

is that everyone is allowed to own it,

whether it be right, left, up or down,

that's why all the world is everybody's.

And this film is everybody's in a way.

So it's used sometimes, at the time of Brexit it was used,

at the time of lockdown it was used.

The ideas are always part of the discourse, if you like.

It's this concept of what it is to be British in Britain

is something that is still being debated,

and this film is constantly being referred to

as a point of storytelling around that.

The lasting strength of the film lies not in its absurdity,

but in its truth.

Reinforced by a milieu of a city still getting back to its feet,

and in the heartfelt determination of this tight-knit community,

there lies a moving tribute to the spirit

that saw London through the Blitz.

Passport To Pimlico is a piece of history.

We're back in England!

Subtitles by Sky Access Services www.skyaccessibility.sky