eastlondonhistory.com

THE death of reclusive film-maker Stanley Kubrick earlier this month resurrected one of the unlikeliest stories, even in a business where nothing is quite what it seems.
For the last years of his
life, the Hollywood director refused to set foot out of England – so it was that the apocalyptic battle scenes in Full Metal Jacket were shot on the blasted no-man’s land of the Royal Docks at Beckton.
But it was only one of the most recent appearances of East London in the movies. Since the cameras started rolling 100 years ago, the East End has been the set, star and subject matter of countless films – both fiction and documentary, comedy and drama.
Tower Hamlets first starred in the newsreels – the documentaries that used to accompany feature films at the cinema. One of its earliest appearances was in The Great East End Anarchists Battle, a dimly-lit newsreel of the 1911 Sidney Street Siege. Run in the movie theatres of the time, it propagated the myth that the East End was wild and dangerous, peopled by foreigners and revolutionaries.
In fact, Tower Hamlets was always fertile ground for documentary makers. The Peaceful Years (1948) was a broad-
ranging look at London in the 30 years between the wars, featuring footage of a smiling Oswald Mosley as he prepared to address thousands of his Blackshirts at a Whitechapel meeting in 1935.
Much of the early footage was naïve by today’s standards. Often, the cameraman would simply point his machine and log what he saw – giving us films like Hoxton… Saturday July 3rd (1920). Not much explanation needed there, but it gives a modern viewer a
fascinating slice of street life of the time.
Of course, that life – and the streets – were soon to change. A series of Government documentaries chart the problems and redevelopment of the slum-blighted East End. Housing Problems (1935) and London Can Take It (1940) chart an East End in decay and being rebuilt after the destruction of the Blitz. And Homes For All (1947) provides a nostalgic view of the prefabs that once peppered the bombed-out Tower Hamlets.
It wasn’t till the socially realistic films of the 1950s and 1960s that the East End made a real entrance in feature films. Carry On star Barbara Windsor starred as a dissatisfied Bethnal Green housewife in the 1962 movie Sparrows Can’t Sing. The film was shot around Cambridge Heath Road, and in a strange twist of fact and fiction, Ronnie and Reggie Kray were hired to provide security on the film set. A quarter of a century later, the Krays’ own East End story would be immortalised in The Krays, starring Gary and Martin Kemp of pop group Spandau Ballet. Martin can now be
seen in EastEnders with one Barbara Windsor.
With its moody and dramatic wharfs, warehouses and waterways, Docklands always made a great set for gangster movies, even if some of the older features, like Pool of London (1950) were corny takes on a Hollywood theme. One of the delights of that movie, though, were the interior shots of the Queen’s Theatre in Poplar, and the chase scenes in a starkly-lit Wapping.
The decline and rebirth of Docklands was charted in
1979 gangster movie The Long Good Friday, starring Bob Hoskins as a psychopathic gang boss whose dream was the rebirth of the redundant docks as a bustling new city. Twenty years on, and fact
at last seems to be copying
film fiction.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 6:47 am and is filed under London film makers, London places. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.