Public Memory or Public Amnesia? British Women of the Second World War in Popular Films of the 1950s and 1960s

Whatever else it was, the Second World War cannot be regarded as a forgotten war, at least as far as Britain is concerned. The memory of the Second World War was kept vigorously alive in British popular culture in the twenty-five years after 1945, above all in the war film. This article is primarily concerned with representations of women and femininity in four of the fifty most popular war films released in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s: Odette (1950), A Town Like Alice (1956), Carve Her Name with Pride (1958), and Conspiracy of Hearts (1960). It explores the films' negotiation of the attributes of the male-dominated war films: comforting versions of national identity, conservative representations of social class, and accounts of gender in which war encourages male bonding and enhances masculinity. It also asks whether the depiction of war was different in the films to which women were central and seeks to understand the films in terms of their contribution to the memory of the Second World War. It is thus premised on the idea that there is a link between widely circulated films and what is popularly remembered about the past.