Frederick Penrose "Pen" Tennyson (26 August 1912 – 7 July 1941) was a British film director whose promising career was cut short when he died in a plane crash.
Under Balcon, Tennyson made his first feature as a director, There Ain't No Justice (1939), a contemporary drama about a young boxer, which writer Matthew Sweet describes as "one of the first British films of the sound era to make a serious attempt to represent the lives of working-class Londoners".
[6] Tennyson's second film, The Proud Valley (1940), stars Paul Robeson as an American sailor who goes to work in a Welsh coal mine and is co-opted into the town's choir.
The impending war forced Balcon and Tennyson to tone down the radical political content contained in the original script of The Proud Valley, and on its release its commercial prospects were sabotaged after Robeson spoke out about the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939 and Britain's unwillingness to unite with the Soviet Union against Germany.
According to later revelations by Michael Foot, Robeson's comments enraged press baron Lord Beaverbrook, who placed the actor on a secret blacklist (which also included Noël Coward), boycotting any mention of the film or its star in his newspapers.