In Which We Serve

In Which We Serve is one of those famous British movies with a reputation that transcends the actual movie.  It was made in the middle of the 2nd World War, and includes many of the top British actors of the day. All the officers have posh accents; the lower classes talk in a variety of dialects. Noel Coward did practically everything on the movie: wrote the script, produced it, co-directed it with David Lean, and wrote the music. Oh, and acted in it. I've only just caught up with the film for the first time.

Ronald Neame was the cinematographer, and the only shots that don't stand out are those drawn from stock footage of battles. Otherwise, each shot is wonderfully clear and clean, beautifully lit and framed. The opening, with its documentary style of the building of the ship that is the feature of the story, has taken lessons from Eisenstein, perhaps.

It's a little difficult now to feel so emotional about the ship, but the actors - in particular, Coward - give us every reason to do so. Coward is a very upper middle-class Captain, humane and generous: the very model of a proper Naval Captain. Celia Johnson plays his wife and they have some warm scenes together in the various flashbacks that fill up most of the film's centre (Daniel Massey, aged nine, appears as Coward's young son. He would later play Coward himself in Star). Bernard Miles is the Chief Petty Officer, and we get to see some of his home life too; Joyce Carey plays his wife and Kathleen Harrison his mother-in-law.

Production shot from the movie

Coward has given all his characters some decent scenes to play; some of the 'moments' might seem unoriginal to us now, but it's mostly because they've been copied over and again by later writers and directors. A fairly young John Mills is the lowest ranking seaman; he falls in love quickly with a young girl on a train (Kay Walsh) and marries her (their baby is played by Mills' own daughter, Juliet). Their brief time together is sharply drawn without excessive sentimentality. Michael Wilding also gets a girl, but his scenes are very short and not built up in the same way as the other three.

There are many other familiar names: Richard Attenborough (as a young seaman who deserts his post), Derek Elphinstone, Philip Friend, Hubert Gregg, James Donald, Lionel Grose, Lesley Dwyer, to name just a few.

The film's shape is a little odd: it begins with a superb sea battle, moves to the loss of the ship that's so important to the film, and to the drifting of a dozen or so seamen on a raft. From this point, we shift back and forth between the raft and the characters' back stories: these are developed to a degree, but they don't contribute to a unified whole. Nor does the ship itself really make us feel it's the centre of the story, which means there's a kind of lack in the structure. For all that, the film moves along at a good pace, and the direction and acting keep us from noticing too much about how it's all put together.

It's also perhaps difficult in hindsight to feel comfortable with Coward in such an authoritarian role, but when the film was first shown there would have been little difficulty for the audiences in accepting him as shown. We've long since moved past the point when Coward was such a star in both the theatre and the movies.

Cutting tools

As soon as you step outside your knowledge zone in terms of language use, you find that English has whole groups of words that mean nothing to you...at least in the context they're found in.

For instance, in the area of cutting tools, there are a whole range of words that aren't in the least bit familiar.  They look like English, but they don't sit in my brain as meaning anything to me.   And these words are just group words - within these groups are even more words that are unfamiliar.

Broaches, indexable, chucking reamers, end mills, face mills are some examples.  As I said, they're all obviously English words, because we can read them without trying to decipher the sounds, but that's as far as it goes - for me.   (Of course, the same things applies to someone who's never done anything musical: faced with words that are commonplace to musicians, they'll struggle to make sense of them.)

Under Broaches, we have keyway broach bushings.  Under the next two headings we have words that are just extensions of the headings, but under 'end mills' [see photo on left for some examples] we have a whole pantheon of interesting tool titles: ball end mills, corner radius end mills, square end mills, to name just a few.  Again the words are familiar, but in conjunction with each other don't mean anything - to me.

Under a heading for 'hand tools' we discover some more intriguing titles: arbor presses (this is an American site I'm looking at), gasket punches, spotters and punches, and more.   I'm sure they'd make wonderful words for a surreal sort of poem....in fact I may give it a try.   I attempted my first Villanelle the other day - that's a poetic form, and you find, if you check out poetic form names, that they're even more obscure than those for cutting tools, and include words that nobody uses in everyday language.

Tiger Bay

Caught up with Tiger Bay again the other night. I hadn’t seen this since it first came out in 1959. It was Hayley Mills’ first role, and she’s excellent in it, playing the somewhat amoral Gillie, a child who is so adept at lying that she can keep her aunt, the police and even the murderer on the hook when she wants. Not that she’s an unpleasant child: we have complete sympathy with her even when she’s doing something that’s going to cause distress further along the way.
J Lee Thompson was the director, and the film stands up well to the test of time. A few scenes might have been shortened if the film was being made now, but in general things move along at a fair pace. Thompson was probably a journeyman director; there’s little sense of their being a Thompson style or of him being an auteur in the vein of Hitchcock, but he turned out a good number of thrillers expertly, and what more can you ask?
Once again it’s intriguing to see (and remember) just how free children were in those days: they played in all sorts of places adults would now consider dangerous, and they went out of their houses or flats without any great sense of restriction or curfew.
Horst Buchholz made his English-speaking debut in this movie, and there’s little trace of problem with the language. Apparently he was fluent in several languages, which served him well throughout his film career, as he made movies not only in his native Germany, but in various other European countries as well. He was about 24 at the time this film was made, and was already a big star in his native country. He went on to make some classic films (particularly The Magnificent Seven) but I have little memory of him apart from this relatively small-scale British thriller.
Yvonne Mitchell gets fourth billing in the cast list, even though she has only one (extended) scene in the movie. It’s a slightly odd bit of casting – although she’s very effective in the part; she was eight years older than Buchholz, and the age difference makes it seem as though he’s in love with an older woman, rather than one who’s his own age.
Anthony Dawson, the unwitting victim in Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder appears here too, playing the man who’s been having an affair with Mitchell while Buchholz has been at sea. And there’s the delightful Megs Jenkins, who could be relied upon to play any one of dozens of parts that called for an aunt, or a housekeeper, or servant or nurse. Movies seldom gave her strong parts; these were left for the stage.
She was apparently a good friend of a Dunedin actor, Lindsay Campbell, who went to the UK in the late fifties/early sixties, to make his career in acting. A friend of mine was Lindsay’s flatmate, and I stayed at the flat several times, though I don’t think Lindsay was actually ever there (!) Lindsay’s claim to fame is that he appeared briefly in A Clockwork Orange – for about 30 seconds. When I stayed at his flat he was often away because he was working in a long-running tv series – it must have been Weavers Green, I think, as that’s the only series that’s listed against his name on imdb.com. Megs Jenkins appeared in it at least once.

Whistle Down the Wind

The film, Whistle Down the Wind, turned up in The Warehouse’s bargain DVDs this weekend, along with Tiger Bay and another similar movie, all in one package. I saw Tiger Bay when it first came out, but hadn’t ever seen this later Hayley Mills’ movie.
It’s a wonderful small-scale piece in which three young siblings who live on a farm discover a man hiding in their father’s barn, and come to believe he’s Jesus. The implications for the children, and the other village children, and the man himself, are profound. And even though we know the man isn’t Jesus, we understand the children’s belief and their theological questioning, and appreciate why they think the way they do.
The film would be nothing without the integrity of the two younger children and a number of others who are so much part of the landscape that everything about them is believable. Hayley Mills is very good, being almost the only child with previous film experience, but she doesn’t quite belong in this environment the way the other kids do. That’s not to say she doesn’t play the part well; Mills always had a sincerity and genuineness that transcended everything else about the films she appeared in. She was a natural screen performer and deserved the accolades she got.
The film plays out almost entirely on a real farm, where the slush and mud is authentic, the buildings are as old as they look, and the craggy trees and the winter sunshine are bleak but not unbeautiful. Even though the interiors were mostly shot at Pinewood Studios, they match the exteriors well.
The story is moving, but more than anything it’s the faces of the children that are so wonderful. These Northern kids for the most part went back to their normal lives, but you’d think they’d been working in movies since the day they were born. There’s not a drop of ‘acting’ anywhere. Diane Holgate as Hayley Mills’ younger sister has that Northern stance and way of looking that was still visible on Coronation St up until a few years ago. Alan Barnes lives the part from beginning to end: the irritating little brother, the child angrily questioning Jesus as to why he didn’t keep his kitten alive, the innocent little boy quite capable of facing up to his perpetually annoyed aunt, the birthday boy demanding that his game be played because it’s his birthday.
There’s another boy in it whose face, the moment it appeared, was familiar. So strong are his features that they didn’t change a jot as he progressed into adulthood. While I wouldn’t have known his name, Roy Holder, it’s interesting to see that he’s been going strong ever since Whistle Down the Wind was made.
And then there are a host of other children: reality written all over them.
Bernard Miles, Norman Bird and Alan Bates are the main adult characters, and fit in with the milieu well.

Great Expectations

I watched David Lean's version of Great Expectations on DVD, last night. The DVD presented the film in an excellent condition, and it was a joy to watch.

Lean's film is one of his earliest, and all the better for it. (From Lawrence of Arabia onwards, his films became long-winded and had the filmic version of verbosity. I talk about it in this article.)
It tells Dickens' wonderful story with economy, but doesn't stint on details (although one surprising omission is the murder of Mrs Jo (Gargery); in the film she just dies rather suddenly.)

And the photography is wonderful, atmospheric and equally detailed. The cast are top-notch, and John Mills, who ages from around 18 to his late twenties was actually 38 at the time it was filmed. I'd never have guessed it. Jean Simmons is superb as the man-hating Estella; unfortunately, even though Simmons could have played the older version of Estella with ease, the 'adult' role is given to Valerie Hobson, who's rather lacklustre by comparison.

Hobson apart, the rest of the cast has that wonderful Dickensian feeling about them that only the British can portray.

I reckon it's more than fifty years since I last saw this movie; and it's stood up to the test of time easily. In fact, it's been voted as one of the top ten films of all time on some list.

That's Simmons with Martita Hunt in the picture on the top right: as you can see, even at 17 she was mature enough to play an adult. 32-year-old Alec Guinness plays Herbert Pocket in the other photo: he was also supposed to be a teenager at this point.