Re-watching Kind Hearts and Coronets for the sake of this blog post (the film is one of the Ealing films I've seen several times in my life, although admittedly not in recent years), I'd forgotten how sexual a film it is.

Between 1938 and 1940, director Robert Stevenson, cinematographer Ronald Neame and scriptwriter Roland Pertwee were part of the creative bridge between Basil Dean's Associated Talking Pictures (which were based at the studios in Ealing) and Michael Balcon's new production company called Ealing Studios.

Mandy is a film that can be defined in various ways.

The idea that the mother-child relationship was a recurring one in Ealing might seem a strange observation, even coming from the man who ran the studio between 1938 and 1959.

His Excellency is one of those films that is difficult to love, partly because it often fails to deliver a coherent experience or meaning: it has moments of jingoism and anti-foreigner attitudes that feel alien to a 21st century audience, yet also goes to great pains to mock the British patriarchal attitude to 'the colonies'; it mocks socialism yet offers a partial celebration of unionism and collective action; ridicules military might but ultimately relies on it to resolve narrative issues; celebrates a particular 'northern' personality within Britain but dilutes that through the imposition of upper class knowledge and restraint.

When discussing Young Man's Fancy (1939), it was noted that these early Ealing films act as a bridge between the Basil Dean / Associated Talking Picture films produced at Ealing and the Balcon-produced films that the production company called 'Ealing Studios' would become known for. Yet even using that framework to approach these films, The Ware Case is an odd and generically unstable contribution to the Ealing back catalogue.

Nowhere to Go was the second-last Ealing film produced and, suitably, is also the second-last film to be viewed and written about for this challenge.

And so, it came to an end. Not with a whimper, but with a bang: Passport to Pimlico, one of the best known 'Ealing comedies', one of the films that (it is claimed) speaks for the whole of the studio's output and thematic interests, and one of the films that first sparked my love of Ealing many years ago.