“The Weak and the Wicked: Images of non-Conscripted Masculinity in British Cinema 1939 - 1945”

The BBC series Dad’s Army is a ubiquitous classic of the British sitcom. Often cited as an exemplar of comic form and characterisation it also, as Jeffrey Richards details, existed as a quasi-mythical vision of a Golden age of Englishness, where “a nation of eccentric individualists could be blended together to defend the county in wartime” (Richards, 1997, 362). In this chapter, however, I want to suggest that, underneath the jokes, the men of Dad’s Army shed light on what was a very real problem for filmmakers in the war itself: how to depict non-enlisted, non-conscripted males and, at the same time, aid in the war effort. Privates Jones, Pike and Walker especially (as the pensioner, the mummy’s boy, and the spiv) represented, as Summerfield and Peniston-Bird (2007, 170–190) convincingly detail, reoccurring and preformed versions of non-conscripted masculinity that also appeared time and time again in British wartime films. They directly mirrored character types that provided a noticeable counterpoint to the more dominant hegemonic versions of maleness proliferated by the mainstream and government-sanctioned culture.