He goes on to say that 'comedy at Ealing usually starts with an original filmic idea rather than a bestselling book', and certainly among the charms of the films is their quirky freshness and oroginality, their cinematic inventiveness. (Compare them with some of the stiffly theatrical comedies whose production Balcon oversaw at Gainsborough in the '30s) Elsewhere, he wrote that 'film producers want good authors to work for them and with them...provided they are prepared to acquire...an understanding of films and a skill in writing for them'. And it's true that Ealing films avoid debilitating literariness. But Ealing offered more than comedy, and its war films (e.g. San Demetrio, London) and its post-war dramas (e.g. Mandy) were much praised for their realism. In their way, they also projected 'Britain and the British character'. In its representations of courage, fortitude and consensual effort, the Ealing ethos was characterised by a low-key realism which was the legacy of 'the men who kept realism going on the screen': by these 'men', he meant the documentary filmmakers he praised in a lecture he gave to the Film Workers' Association in 1943.

The worst that could be said of Balcon's achievement is that it was sometimes too suburbanly cosy; against this it may be said that he brought a new naturalness into British feature films.