The films have interesting content on social history:

‘The Great Game’ – starring Diana Dors, Thora Hird and a young Prunella Scales – is about professional football in the 1950s. It exposes the maximum wage for footballers (£14 per week) and compares it to the large transfer fees of the time and consequent ‘sweetners’ for players. It also provides a sideline comment on some early “footballers wives” the position of women at the time and how a wife could act the part of the dumb blonde while in reality being an astute business woman and skilled negotiator.

‘The Crowded Day’ shows us life behind the ‘glamorous façade’ of a group of shop girls working in a department store. The shop assistants all live together in a hostel – which alone seems extraordinary today – and takes in several themes including unwanted pregnancy for a single woman and the awful consequences of job loss and destitution as a social outcast. It is quite clear that although all the main characters are independent working women, women’s liberation was not yet on the horizon and marriage was the clear and only possible goal for each of them. It also stars John Gregson accompanied by a vintagecar (the film was made in the same year as the landmark Rank film “Genevieve”).

‘High Jinks in Society’ is a comedy based on class divisions and snobbery.

‘Father and Son’ starring James Mason is about the stigma of prison as well as snobbery.