Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Biography and Career Notes
- Introduction: ‘Two on a Tandem’? Dearden and Relph: Authorship and British Cinema
- 1 Apprenticeship and Beyond: Comedy Traditions and Film Design
- 2 The Formative Period: The War Years and the Ethos of Ealing
- 3 Dramas of Masculine Adjustment I: Tragic Melodramas
- 4 Dramas of Masculine Adjustment II: Men in Action
- 5 Dramas of Social Tension and Adjustment
- 6 Ethical Dilemmas
- 7 The International Years
- Appendix: ‘Inside Ealing’: Michael Relph
- Filmography
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Ethical Dilemmas
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Biography and Career Notes
- Introduction: ‘Two on a Tandem’? Dearden and Relph: Authorship and British Cinema
- 1 Apprenticeship and Beyond: Comedy Traditions and Film Design
- 2 The Formative Period: The War Years and the Ethos of Ealing
- 3 Dramas of Masculine Adjustment I: Tragic Melodramas
- 4 Dramas of Masculine Adjustment II: Men in Action
- 5 Dramas of Social Tension and Adjustment
- 6 Ethical Dilemmas
- 7 The International Years
- Appendix: ‘Inside Ealing’: Michael Relph
- Filmography
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Frieda (1947); The Gentle Gunman (1952); Life for Ruth (1962); The Mind Benders (1963)
I should like to see a detailed breakdown of the different kinds of difficult moral situations in which human beings, living as they do in societies, find themselves, because in my opinion too much attention has been paid in contemporary ethical writing to the easy, rule-guided, moral situation … Such an analysis will require sympathetic treatment of real moral problems considered in detail, and it will require a proper analysis of the concepts of choice and decision – active moral concepts, rather than the passive, spectator like, concepts of good and right. Secondly, I would like to see a proper discussion of the arguments that go to resolve moral dilemmas … This will entail saying what constitutes a good and a bad moral reason for making a moral decision, and so will bring the moral philosopher out from his corner, where I think he has been too long, and back into the familiar but forgotten Socratic position of trying to answer the ever-present but ever-changing question: how should a man live?
(E. J. Lemmon 1962: 158)Often regarded as social problem films, the four films discussed in this chapter are distinctive variants, separated out by virtue of their attention to individual characters confronting acute ethical decisions and embodying dilemmas rather than problems shared across society. They represent a series of substantial emotional melodramas concerning nationalism and post-war identity; the politics of terrorism; the limits to religious belief; and the ethics of modern psychology.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cinema of Basil Dearden and Michael Relph , pp. 249 - 286Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2009