During the late 1930s, several top British filmmakers would make their way across the sea, among them were Alfred Hitchcock, Alexander Korda and Herbert Wilcox. Michael Balcon would however turn his back on the American market, opting to spend the whole of his career in the British cinema. Balcon would reassemble his former Gaumont team and persevere with the fine Ealing tradition of providing vehicles for music-hall comedians, but in certain other films he introduced a decidedly more realistic treatment of ordinary people and themes. 1939's There Ain't No Justice was one of those films with its unassuming nature that starred Jimmy Hanley as a young pugilist, the film went ironically unnoticed as the forerunner of the shapes of things to come that would be Ealing's signature style.
By the decade's end, British film technicians and directors who proved their salt worth in the make or break training school of quota quickies and documentary filmmaking were now ready to take on the daunting task of filming the war. On its own the 1938 Quota act is hardly likely to have fostered a prosperous national industry. Early in 1939, an influential daily newspaper carried the headline ' Films Act Has Failed.' The following day its correspondence column had a letter from a seething Basil Deen who barked ' I told you so.' Whether the making of quality American films would have continued into the Forties is hard to reconcile; with the outbreak of war the American majors withdrew from Britain and the character of the native industry was to change beyond recognition.