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INTRODUCTION
"FULFILLING THE PROMISE"
In 1964 the managing director of the Compton Cinema Club, Tony Tenser, gave an interview to the cinema trade journal Kinematograph Weekly. Tenser began with the following declaration:
We have fulfilled our promise to provide highly commercial and exploitable programmes for theatres everywhere, and even more important ensured that the right promotion has been executed to ensure that maximum results have been attained. ("Our Promise")
This demonstrates Tenser's approach to working within the British film industry during the early 1960s and the importance to him of showmanship, marketing and the promotion of a film as a saleable product. Tenser, along with his business partner, Michael Klinger, saw the importance of taking advantage of the many avenues available to the company in the marketing of their films. And they would approach the business of exhibiting, distributing and producing films in Britain in a way very different from the mainstream British film industry.
The early critical and scholarly narrative of the history of British cinema was (and sometimes continues to be) described in disparaging terms. British cinema is regularly compared poorly to its counterparts in the American, French or Italian industries, prompting Alan Lovell to write in 1969 of "The British Cinema: the Unknown Cinema" (Lovell 5). Several attempts have been made since then to re-evaluate British cinema and to repudiate Francois Truffaut's oft-cited remark that there was "a certain incompatibility between the terms 'cinema' and 'Britain'" (Barr 1986 1). Perhaps the most succinct reply to Truffaut has been made by the British director Stephen Frears, "Well, bollocks to Truffaut" (Lovell 5). A re-evaluation has led academics such as Ian Aitken to argue for the importance of the British documentary movement and how it "can be considered a touchstone for debates on the nature and achievement of British cinema" (177).1 Other important aspects of British cinema include the relationship between literary adaptations and cinema and British Social Realism, which are explored in John Hill's excellent introduction, Sex, Class and Realism.
This early academic emphasis on establishing a British cinema that is comparable to, for example, Italian Neo-Realism, the French New Wave or classical Hollywood cinema has invariably led to an incomplete interpretation of the British film industry. These discourses are of course...