Downloading Films in the Public Domain

In Which We Serve (1942) Noël Coward and David Lean

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I came to torpedo this movie not to praise it, but it has not worked out that way.

It is hard for me to take Noël Coward seriously as a straight actor. Although he was a distinguished old boy of my school, I was there in the 1950s, the years of "The Angry Young Men", when Coward and the bright young things from the 1930s about whom he wrote were mocked, in the review columns and by our teachers. (Terence Rattigan was another who took a lot of flak). Osborne, Wesker, Pinter, etc, were then all the rage. I always think of Coward as the camp self-parody in The Italian Job (1969).

Coward conceived this film as his contribution to the war effort. He wrote the screenplay, co-produced it, co-directed it with David Lean, co-wrote the score with Clifton Parker, and took the leading role as God (at least, that is how he played the role of the destroyer's captain). By coincidence, I have just watched another major war film, War and Peace (1966), in which Sergei Bondarchuk carried out a similar multi-tasking role. His film lasted seven-plus hours, although he did not produce it nor write the musical score, so honors are even. The Russian masterpiece was five years in the making. Coward had to rush his film out in double-quick time. For all he knew, the studio might have been making films for the Nazi occupation forces within a few months. This film shows one of the reasons the latter situation did not arise.

It is based on the wartime exploits of Louis Mountbatten and his command, HMS Kelly. Mountbatten later became First Lord of the Admiralty (roughly equivalent to the Secretary of the Navy in the USA). It is a blatant propaganda piece with enough stiff upper lips to sink an armada if they broke loose, and all sections of society singing from the same hymn-sheet, literally so in two scenes. No hint here of the "forget the war, let's get on with the departmental in-fighting" attitudes portrayed in The Small Back Room (see my review above). Mentioning that film reminds me how contrived Coward's film is compared with, for example, The Cruel Sea (1953), which shows a more realistic and gutsy view of the naval war.

Coward's delivery is affected and unmodulated. I just checked video clips of Mountbatten speaking and his voice was more relaxed and less mannered. He was upper-class while Coward was just mimicking upper-class, although he knew Mountbatten quite well and had every opportunity to get the voice spot on. He also speaks too rapidly, and even though we came from the same area and attended the same school, I found it difficult to understand him at times.

Celia Johnson makes her screen debut, and she is much the same woman as in Brief Encounter (1945) but in the latter film she gives a more layered performance which maybe reflected the difference between being married to a tolerant town doctor, as against to a man wedded to a 1,780 ton steel death-machine. Still, one of the high spots of this movie is the speech she gives on this very topic at a Christmas dinner. It signalled a new star had arrived on cinema screens.

Richard Attenborough is another making his screen debut, but for some reason he is not credited in the titles although he had a prominent little part as the ship's coward, a role he was to repeat in later movies until James Kenney (a classmate of my elder brother at that same school) made it his specialty. Attenborough's death scene at the end is one of the few mawkish moments in a movie set up for dozens of them, but it was the script's fault, not Dickie's. Another acting embarrassment is Bernard Miles hamming it up in the early battle scene, though in the domestic scenes he was fine. The other main leads are John Mills and Kay Walsh who are very convincing.

Another debutant who went on to better parts is Daniel Massey as Coward's irritatingly precocious young son. No surprise he was maladjusted as his father, on his very infrequent days at home, treated him like a midshipman. I know displays of affection were dashed poor form, especially with a war on, but this approached child cruelty.

So plenty to poke fun at, but this film had me close to tears at times. I could plead the excuse that my uncle was killed by a stray jettisoned bomb on his house in the next town, or that another uncle lost both legs through frostbite on Arctic convoys, but in truth I was too young to take those events to heart. I think this movie, despite all the speeches, class condescension, and flag-waving, was made by a team who sincerely believed in what they were doing, and that somehow shines through.

And if we take a step back, what a strange propaganda film this is! How different from the ones shortly to be made in the USA, full of bombast and optimism. We know the ship is sunk, right from the start, as its story and that of representative crew members is told in flashbacks while they are in, or clinging to, a rubber raft. (Incidentally, I think this flashback schema is a mistake. Firstly, the transitions to "memories" become rather repetitive, and secondly, leaving the ship's fate until the end of the film would have added a dramatic yet perfectly truthful climax that most screenwriters would give their non-writing arm for, as our fictional vessel replicates the fate of HMS Kelly in the Crete campaign). And we later learn that over half the crew were lost. Two of the female characters were killed in an air raid, though no babies were harmed. The aftermath of Dunkirk with beaten and dispirited troops is shown. There are no MacArthurs to say ,"Cheer up lads, we will be back to kick their asses in no time!". Nor there any John Waynes or Errol Flynns, winning the war single-handed. It is all teamwork and everyone knowing their place in the class system and in the war machine based on it. (Privately educated: Captain / Grammar School educated: Chief Petty Officer /  Secondary School uneducated: Seaman). There are no confident predictions of victory, just exhortations to keep going. And indeed while it was being made, and even when first released in cinemas, there was no surety of victory or national survival. As resources and energy drained away it was a case of grimly hanging on. The men in the life-raft were a metaphor for the country as a whole.

I forgot to mention the most important debut of all, and perhaps the film's most lasting  legacy. David Lean was co-scriptwriter turned co-director. Sounds like a recipe for disaster with those two notorious perfectionists wrestling for the tiller. But there was a war on, and few enough resources to fight over, so they knuckled down and worked harmoniously once Coward agreed to give Lean equal billing. Some have suggested Lean actually did most of the directing.