Comedy - William Cook on the kind hearts who saved Ealing studios

This summer, one of the world's most famous film studios celebrated its 100th birthday. For once, this studio isn't in Hollywood - it's in a leafy suburb of west London. And to mark its centenary, the Ealing comedies return to the cinema, and make their debut on DVD. You can now revisit the films that became a byword for the British sense of humour.

Made in a brief but frantic burst of creativity, between 1949 and 1955, these enchanting tales of lovable rogues, plucky underdogs and heroic eccentrics reveal how the British liked to see themselves 50 years ago. Yet they still feel fresh today. Like all great movies, they're timeless - but they also provide a vivid glimpse of that lost world of ration books, demob suits and bomb sites in which they were made.

Ealing Studios opened in 1902, when silent-movie pioneer Will Barker bought and converted two houses on Ealing Green. In 1931, Basil Dean transformed Barker's cottage industry into Europe's first purpose-built sound studio, for home-grown stars such as Gracie Fields and George Formby. Yet Ealing only really took off in 1937, when Michael Balcon took charge. Balcon's reign was rudely interrupted by Adolf Hitler, but after the war he quickly made up for lost time. In 1949 alone, he produced three classic comedies - Passport to Pimlico, Kind Hearts and Coronets and Whisky Galore! In 1951, he produced two more - The Lavender Hill Mob and The Man in the White Suit. The Ladykillers, made in 1955, completes the six classics you can see again this summer.

Ealing Comedies are usually acclaimed for their warmth and humanity, but beneath this cosy surface they are remarkably subversive. Whisky Galore! is about some Scottish islanders who salvage a shipload of Scotch and try to keep it. Passport to Pimlico is about a unilateral declaration of independence by a working-class community a few miles from Whitehall. Kind Hearts and Coronets is about an aristocratic outcast who bumps off all the relatives who stand between him and a dukedom. The Lavender Hill Mob is about a browbeaten bank clerk who fleeces his employers out of a fortune. The only film where the baddies really are baddies is The Ladykillers - but even these murderous armed robbers are mere pantomime villains, and the little old lady they try to kill gets to keep their stolen money.

Despite their deep affection for Britain and its people, these Ealing comedies are discreetly critical of the intrinsic snobbery and hypocrisy of British society, and the petty bureaucracy and innate conservatism of the British state.

Like Shakespearean comedies, the Ealing comedies are custom-built for actors, and these profoundly funny films showcase some of the finest comic acting of the century. Peter Sellers, Sid James and Herbert Lom are all superb in supporting roles, but the undisputed star of this quirky genre is Alec Guinness, and the secret of his comedic success is that he plays all these parts dead straight. True, his criminal mastermind in The Ladykillers has a touch of the Fagin he played a few years earlier in the film of Oliver Twist, which was banned in America amid accusations of anti-Semitism. Yet his downtrodden genius in The Man in the White Suit teeters on the edge of tragedy, and his bank-clerk-turned-bank-robber epitomised the qualities that prompted Peter Ustinov to call him "the outstanding poet of anonymity". Even in Kind Hearts and Coronets, where he plays eight contrasting cameos, he's still an actor playing characters, rather than a comedian playing for laughs.

In 1955, the studios were sold to the BBC, and although some of the old magic rubbed off on superior BBC series such as Colditz, The Singing Detective and Fortunes of War, for the 45 years that followed, Ealing was largely a sleeping giant. Two years ago, however, the studios were bought by a partnership straddling movie-making, new media and real estate, which promises to transform not just the fortunes but also the physical fabric of this historic site.

There have been some great British films since the golden age of Ealing, but there hasn't been a great British film studio, and without the continuity that a great studio provides, too often British film-makers have had to work in lonely isolation, or head for Hollywood. And although there's nothing wrong with Hollywood, it's hard to make British movies in California. Whether its new owners can recreate a great British film studio at Ealing is anyone's guess, but if their Ealing comedies are half as good as the originals, they'll have done more for the British film industry than anyone since Michael Balcon.

The films mentioned in this piece are currently in cinemas around the country. They are also available from Warner Home Video from 2 September, in a DVD box set (£39.99)

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