LONDON: Piffle was the ruin of the British film industry. That was the firm conviction of British writer-producer-director Sidney Gilliat. Gilliat, who died in 1994, is one of the unsung heroes of British cinema, an extraordinarily versatile figure who wrote and directed rip-roaring thrillers, satirical comedies and home-front social dramas. In the 1930s, he wrote comedies for Jack Hulbert and Cicely Courtneidge, and for Will Hay. Together with his film-making partner Frank Launder, he scripted Hitchcock’s 1938 thriller, The Lady Vanishes, and was personally responsible for creating that film’s bumbling, cricket-loving Englishmen-abroad, Caldicott and Charters.

I never met Gilliat but, toward the end of his life, when he was living in retirement in the west of England, I corresponded with him while I was researching a book on J Arthur Rank. This was when I learned of his hatred of Piffle. Piffle was the nickname Rank’s producers gave his servicing organisation, Production Facilities (Films) Ltd. Rank had set up PFFL in 1944 to stop his stable of film-makers overspending and competing with one another for cast, facilities and other resources. Piffle very quickly mutated into a bureaucratic, red-tape-spewing monster that utterly undermined British cinema in one of its rare golden ages.

Gilliat was very much part of that golden age. He and Launder had their own production company, Individual. Together with the Archers (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger) and Cineguild (David Lean, Ronald Neame and Anthony Havelock-Allan), they were key members of Rank’s film-making consortium, Independent Producers Ltd (IPL). Gilliat drafted a special memo for me on the history of IPL. Most of those great British films of the 1940s you may have watched on TV on Sunday afternoons came from its members – The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death, Lean’s Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, and Launder and Gilliat’s I See a Dark Stranger. Then the bureaucrats took over.

Piffle stretched its tentacles into every corner of the film-production process. In a misguided attempt to help his film-makers, Rank even bought a weather company, International Meteorological Consultants, that could predict when it was going to rain. “It was a waste of time and money and helped nobody,” grumbled Gilliat of IMCOS, which soon became famous for being spectacularly wrong about the sun’s likely whereabouts.

Gilliat, writing from his home near Pewsey, Wiltshire, confided that Piffle wasn’t the only problem confronting Rank’s stable of film-makers. In the summer of 1991, he wrote to me about one of his and Launder’s best-known films: “Rank had started out making religious films and he was a devoted and practising Methodist. His wife was, if anything, more so. She had thought (I discovered a year or two later) Waterloo Road to be immoral.” If she didn’t like a film, then nor “did the chaps who had suddenly discovered the merits of being Methodist, especially if J Arthur Rank was your boss”. The irony was that Gilliat himself was probably “the only chap apart from [Rank] who’d been baptised a Wesleyan Methodist! Probably the only one in the entire Rank Org.”

While the Methodist thought police tutted disapprovingly about perceived immorality in movies by Rank film-makers, the Piffle people – lawyers, accountants, weather forecasters, casting agents, financial experts, etc – began to lord it over the artists they were ostensibly there to service. Gilliat bemoaned the way Piffle tried to foist stars into “pictures for which they were not necessarily suitable”.

“By the summer of 1948, the sky was black with chickens coming home to roost,” Gilliat wrote to me. “A string [of films] were so awful that cynics said they not only kept people out of the cinema while they were showing, but kept the audiences away the week before and the week after.”

The triumph of Piffle was only to be expected. IPL was soon disbanded. Gilliat, like Powell and Lean, greatly lamented its passing. The golden days when, as Gilliat put it, “each company was independent and could, in theory, make any film it wanted” were over for good. Gilliat continued to do sterling work, collaborating with Launder on the St Trinians movies and directing films such as State Secret and The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan. However, the optimism and artistic ambition of the mid-1940s were gone for good ... extinguished by a tide of Piffle.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service