The simple reason why the United Kingdom could not develop a film industry on par with the United States is that the United Kingdom, especially after the disillusion of the British Empire, simply did not have the manpower and level of widespread technological development needed to compete with the United States. The comparison of music to film is not necessarily the best one to make. First, it should be noted that at least in terms of the American music industry, the successes of the British invasion of the 60’s did not continue into later decades. This Rate Your Music User helpfully collects all of the artists who scored top-ten hits in the 1970’s. And you will see that Elton John is accompanied by one other Brit, Paul McCartney. The Bee Gee’s, an Australian act comes in at number 2, but the rest are American. If you expand your sample down the list, you find fewer and fewer British acts. This isn’t how we remember the era today, because many people still love Elton John and Paul McCartney, but at the time there were a great many more acts that found popularity, and the “British Invasion” that is really limited to the second half of the 1960’s is not nearly as widespread as the wording of the question would imply.

The other reason to give pause to this is filmmaking is not nearly the same as a group of four guys from Liverpool recording music. When the Beatles arrived at Abbey Road, that studio was not nearly as advanced as what could be found in Los Angeles. In fact, it was the rudimentary nature of this studio that drove these four men and their producers to be so creative, or so the popular narrative might have you believe. If you expand that level of technological development to what is necessary to produce a film, you get a different level of investment of money, manpower, and technology that the United Kingdom, on the heels of Two World Wars and a complete collapse of their empire, at the same time that the United States was becoming the global power to rival the USSR, the reason why the British Film Industry could not directly compete with the American should be apparent.

That said, I think two things should be noted about the British film industry. One, if we measure its success by comparing it to other European countries, we find that there is a reasonable amount of success. Certainly, if you remove the Bond films, one of the longest-running and successful film franchises of the post-war era, the success of the British Film industry is someone tempered, but I’m sorry, there is no French Bond. I prefer the Italian neorealists and the French New Wave as much as the next film lover, but La jetee isn’t exactly on the lips of average film consumers today. In fact, I don’t think many millennials (my generation) have much knowledge of films produced much before their birth. I think judging one’s own perception of movies today is not exactly the right metric to judge the success of British film.

The UK government take active steps to promote British Film even before the British Invasion of the 1960s. The results, as I shall relate below were mixed at first, but if we consider the British film industry in terms of the entire process of making a movie: actors, film crews, set designers, etc. you will find that the British film industry was remarkably successful for a small European country.

Film historian Laraine Porter sums up the point I am trying to make here in “”Temporary Citizens: British Cinema in the 1920s”, “The British film industry, like its other once world-leading European counterparts, emerged from the Great War into a very different set of economic and cultural conditions. Hollywood had risen to dominance, Chaplain was the most famous person in the world and the emerging American Studio System had created an indomitable global industry producing popular entertainment and stars. The depleted European industries simply could not compete. Audiences had developed a taste for American production values, genres and stars and were now loyal to Hollywood. Once world-leading and pioneering British director-producers like Cecil Hepworth and George Person, so significant in creating the early British film industry, found it hard to survive in this new era, with their low-key, domestic production outfits.” Despite this, the 1930s is remembered as the “classic” era of British film, as Charles Drazin’s entry in the same volume elucidates.

The Cinematograph Films Act of 1927 was crucial to this. This act tried to stimulate the film production industry and increased the number of british films screened in the United Kingdom from a mere 5 percent at the time of the laws passage to 45 percent in 1948. New vertical combines, Gaumont-British Picture Corporation and British International Pictures were created in an attempt to fill this demand. The Film industry tried to compete with the American film industry in the US, but this was unsuccessful at first. The opinion of Motion Picture News review of Hitchcock’s first talkie is illustrative “If this is a sample of the best that the English can turn out, we have only to say that it is of the quality that in this country is usually booked into Class B and C houses and never gets into the deluxe first runs. To bring it to Broadway and offer it at $2 top is going a little too far.” Going on to say “There is no one in the cast that matters in this market.”

Hitchcock is illustrative of the problems of scale that British filmmakers. This is because he made the same movie twice, first in Britain and second in the United States. In 1937 he made his first version of The Man Who knew too Much. This was a film that Hitchcock himself referred to as “the work of a talented amature and the second was made by a professional.” The 1956 version is more polished, with much higher production values and artistry, made by American professionals used to making big budget films. And it stars James Stewart and Doris day. It is, quite simply a better film in every way and made at a scale simply not possible in 1956 England.

Despite this discrepancy in scale, Britain’s films have succeeded on their own terms. First, auteur American directors who could not find success in the straightjacketed film industry of the United States found overseas success in Britain. First, and most obviously Orson Welles. Today, Citizen Kane is remembered as one of the greatest films of all time, but that was not the critical reception at the time. American studios did not want to support Welles’s vision, and studio RKO cut up his film The magnificent ambersons. He would frequently go back and forth between Hollywood and Europe where he could find funding for his projects. Additionally, Stanley Kubrick, one of the most influential American filmmakers of all time made many of his notable films, namely Dr. Strangelove and his adaptation of A Clockwork Orange in Britain using British actors and other industry professionals. This would not have been possible without the quota system imposed in 1937.

And it was not just American filmmakers that found both funding and technical expertise needed to execute their vision. Antonioni, one of the last great directors of the Italian golden age made Blow out using entirely British film professionals. There is actually an interesting anecdote in this regard. Antonioni wanted to use the great jazz pianist Herbie Hancock to do the score, but funding was contingent on using british musicians. Unfortunately, Hancock could not find musicians in London capable of playing his sophisticated compositions. But since Canada was technically part of the commonwealth, they went to Toronto and contracted Canadian musicians to play the pieces, and then snuck across the border to NY where musicians capable of playing the pieces could be found.

The professionalism of the British film industry meant that British films could finally compete, if not dominate in the American market by the 60’s, the decade of the British invasion. We can see this if we look at the nominations for best picture at the Academy Awards during this decade. Now, the Academy awards have always been notorious for getting best picture “wrong”, but I believe that they are a reliable metric for judging the success of a film in this era. This is because the Academy Awards are fundamentally industry awards, and they are the industry awards for what was the largest and most successful film industry at the time. This is buttressed by the fact that there were fewer films released by a smaller number of production houses, so mere nomination is going to be indicative of some box office success.

1963: Lawrence of Arabia wins, a british production, directed by David Lean, one of the great british directors of the era. 1964: Tom Jones, a british comedy beats Cleopatra and Lillies of the Field, and British director Tony Richardson beat out Elia Kazan, Otto Preminger, and Federico Fellini (robbed, 8 ½ is one of the best movies of all time) for director. 1965: Becket, a british production, with a british director and cast, along with British production Dr. Strangelove are both nominated, losing to My Fair Lady. 1966: David Lean returns with Doctor Zhivago, another British production (and one I actually prefer to Lawrence of Arabia) 1967: An absolute success for British filmmaking. Remembered as a hallmark in the Oscars “getting in wrong”, because Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf lost to British Produciton, A Man for All seaons, while Alfie (featuring a very young Michael Caine) and british production Blowup also received major nomination in best film or director. 1968 had no british production in best picture, but Britain returned with Oliver! (winner) and The Lion in Winter in 1969.

I am not going to continue this exercise, but even if you discount the global success of British film series James Bond, for a small European country, I think the British Film Industry can be called a moderate success at least.