While there are more romantic films in Ealing’s back
catalogue, this one – with its love letters flying back and forth between British
prisoners-of-war held in a German camp and the British women patiently waiting
for news on the homefront – felt apt for Valentine’s Day, and offers a nice (if
not overly challenging) mix of drama, comedy, unrequited love and hopelessly
unbelievable characterisation. But we’ll come back to that last point later...
At first, this appears to be a traditional Ealing /
British war movie. The captured soldiers from Dunkirk and elsewhere are marched
across Europe to a POW camp. If there was a British war film bingo card, this
film would sweep the board: Welsh, Scottish, cockney, working class, posh,
crook, and extra points for the Czech soldier who’s taken on another man’s
identity. As they march, we get brief flashbacks to their lives pre-war, and
the women they were involved with: Ted Horsfall (Jack Warner) and Evans (Mervyn
Johns) run a decorating business and are happily married, although Evans and wife Dilys (Rachel Thomas) are struggling to have a child; Stephen Harley (Derek Bond) is in love with
Caroline (Jane Barrett), who leaves her current boyfriend Robert Marsden
(Robert Wyndham) for him; Lennox (Gordon Jackson) says goodbye to Elspeth
(Margot Fitzsimons) as his train pulls away... At one point, it feels like this
could be the whole film – an elaborate portmanteau of flashbacks and wartime
love affairs like Dead of Night
(1945) or Train of Events (1949) –
but then the men arrive at the POW camp, and that becomes the focus of the
narrative. Interspersed through, however, is the story of the women who were
left behind – they aren’t just a series of flashbacks, we see a parallel
narrative about their lives, worries and interests during wartime.
While the film has a broad cross-section of British
soldiers, it is most interested in Geoffrey Mitchell (Michael Redgrave) – or,
rather, Captain Karel Hasek, the Czech soldier on the run who takes Mitchell’s
identity from his dead body. The film toys briefly with the mystery of who
Mitchell really is – the men are suspicious when he speaks German and appears
interested in their escape plans – but that isn’t the heart of the film.
Instead, it is the arrival of the first letters and packages from home and the
men’s interactions with their wives and girlfriends that reveals the film’s
main interest: Hasek’s need to pretend to be Mitchell for Mitchell’s wife Celia
(Rachel Kempson) and to avoid the suspicion of Gestapo officer Forster (Karel
Stepanek), who recognises Hasek from a Czech concentration camp. It is a shame
then that Redgrave is a blank slate throughout: he has the good looks but his
performance is largely one-note, controlled and emotionless. While this is suitable
for the initial set-up, the character necessarily has to become more open and
emotional, particularly for the (unsatisfying) final scenes (which, again, more
of in a moment).
The drama and camaraderie of the POW camp is well-played,
but by 1946 Ealing was an old hand at this kind of consensus-building wartime
bonding structure. There are minor dramas – Lennox loses his sight and calls
off his engagement, Evans learns of the death of his wife during childbirth,
the men attempt to get Hasek back to Britain – which are ably supported by more
comic turns from reliable stalwarts like Basil Radford (as the wonderfully
named Major Ossy Dalrymple), who cheerfully describes himself as ‘a social
parasite... the sort we’re fighting to get rid of’ (there are echoes of Sir
George Gedney (A.E. Matthews) here, the landed gentry character in They Came to a City; although Dalrymple
doesn’t hate his fellow man, actively joins in with camp activities, and is
self-aware about his nature, it is also clear he would prefer to be alone with
his horses). The women of the film aren’t quite as varied as the POWs, and we
spend less time with them. The bulk of that time is given to the middle/upper
class Celia and Caroline, with only brief scenes with Dilys and Elspeth.
Caroline is the most interesting here, if only because she takes the initiative
with both the men in her life (she drops Robert, chooses Stephen, and then
announces they have to get married – with the overt subtext, particularly for
an Ealing film, of wanting to have sex before he is called up).
Given my usual preference to look beyond narrative and
received wisdom on these films, I once again found myself drawn to the
cinematography: and once again, I find director of photography Douglas
Slocombe’s name in the credits. It’s not that the film is obviously showy or
spectacular, but there are some strong visual choices made throughout: most
noticeably, the decision for landscape shots to be dominated by the sky. From
the first images, where lines of POWs walk horizontally across the image, the
sky takes up eighty per cent of the screen, often reducing the men to a mass of
interchangeable bodies, but also mocking their captivity. The sky is wide,
open, and free: all things the characters cannot be. This emphasis on the scale
of the natural world continues in longer shots in the camp itself, including
shots where Mervyn Johns and Michael Redgrave walk away from the camera, almost
shrinking in the image, dominated by their surroundings. The film also features
subtle camerawork that often moves around the room and characters, calling in
at the different stories and emotions: one of the strongest examples comes when
Mitchell/Hasek reads Celia’s letter aloud, and the camera circles round to
catch each man’s face, as they react to a description of life back home. It is
a subtle moment, but it plays to the power of silent performance from all the
actors.
It is also a moment that, I think, Charles Barr would
claim supports the film’s celebration of the camps as ‘little England.’ Yet I
am unsure the film is that clear-cut: the moments where Jack Warner leads
everyone in ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ to drown out a German anthem stresses this,
but there are other times where the unease and uncertainties of these men come
to the fore, and they become individual pieces of England as much as a
celebration of a cohesive little England. The camps are described as ‘a little
piece of England’ but the film is equally interested in being able to ‘pass’
for English – not just the ‘fake’ Mitchell, but also the camp Kommandant, who
is practising his English with Dalrymple. The sense here is that English-ness
is something that can be learned, it isn’t intrinsic or natural – perhaps most
clearly stated in Hasek’s ability to ‘become’ Mitchell and win Celia, an event
that is celebrated with a fireworks display at the end of the film.
But, that ending... it requires a huge suspension of disbelief,
and one the film fails to sell to the audience (or to this audience at least). Celia
starts as an interesting character – coming out of an unhappy marriage,
accepting her husband has left her, bringing up their children on her own – but
the demands of the plot mean that her actions become increasingly unlikely. The
arrival of letters from her husband – actually written by another man (the
difference in handwriting explained away by Hasek using his left hand) and
presenting a completely different character and opinion on life – cause her to
fall in love with him again. When she hears her husband is to be repatriated,
she rushes to the docks (and rushes past Hasek: Redgrave’s stoic performance
serves him well here, showing Hasek’s realisation that Celia doesn’t know him);
when Hasek tells her about his deception, she visibly deflates; yet a few
months later, as victory in Europe is celebrated, she’s ecstatic that Hasek has
got back in touch, and appears to have fallen in love with him.
While in one sense it is understandable why the narrative
ends like this – everyone likes a happy ending, it stresses the inevitable
heterosexual pairing-off that happens in many films – but for me it strikes a false
note, and one that actually sours the other relationships of the returning POWs
(Lennox and Elspeth, Stephen and Caroline, and Ted and his wife are all
reunited; while Evans meets his daughter). While all the relationships were
tested by miscommunication or crossed lines, Hasek and Celia never felt
anything more than an artificial narrative device. It is an unconvincing end
that mars an otherwise solid film.
Next time, Dirk Bogarde takes on the long arm of the law in The Blue Lamp (1950)...
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