A new approach pokes tentatively out in a tiny group of films, notably Jack Lee's Children on Trial (1946), Paul Dickson's The Undefeated (1950) and David (1951), and Philip Leacock's Out of True (1951). They find their inspiration not in schoolmasterish beautifying of superficialities, but in sociology; charting new attitudes to crime, to nursing, to mental illness, to a Welsh miner's renunciation of his poetic vocation for the sake of his wife and child. Here was a more fertile soil, both for the redemption of documentary, and for its merging with fiction traditions. Such tasks could have led to a responsible questioning of the consensus, to richer treatments of social issues, and their relationship to human experience in its fullest depth. But the new school, however, hardly shakes itself free from the view of the common man as oaken-hearted in his pious simplicities. There is a significant contrast, not only with the sense of temptation in the ordinary fiction feature, but with most people's awareness of human weakness, meanness and nastiness.
