LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION

When Gone With the Wind opened in Britain in 1940, audiences lined up outside the cinema first thing in the morning, even as fires from the previous night’s bombing were still burning nearby. Starring British actor Vivien Leigh and the USA’s Clark Gable, it was one of the most popular films of the era. It played in London’s Leicester Square for four years, from the tail end of the ‘Phoney War’ in 1940 until D-Day in 1944.

The Government had closed cinemas at the outbreak of the Second World War because of the fear of air raids. In a letter to on 5 September 1939, playwright George Bernard Shaw criticised the move as “a masterstroke of unimaginative stupidity”. Once the raids failed to materialise cinemas quickly reopened again, mostly with a curfew, and stayed open for the duration. Audiences were less likely to pay attention to air-raid sirens by 1941, as is(1940): “At 7.45 an announcement was made from the screen that an alert had sounded but the house remained full.”