Bruce Babington analyses the achievement of one of the central partnerships in British film history, the screenwriters of famous films by Hitchcock and Carol Reed, who became the producer-writer-directors of a succession of famous and well-loved films including Millions Like Us, Two Thousand Women, Waterloo Road, The Rake’s Progress, I See a Dark Stranger, The Blue Lagoon and The Happiest Days of Your Life.

This study of the pair is notable both for its contextualising of them within English and British culture over four decades, including British cinema’s ‘golden age’ of the war and immediate post-war years, and for its close reading of films that have been critically neglected, despite their popularity. Scholarly but not pedantic, the book shows its subjects to be not ordinary mainstream practitioners but deceptively serious filmmakers registering the ‘ideological weather’ of wartime and post-war Britain in engaging and creative ways.