The New Pictures
Random Harvest (M.G.M.) is a first-rate film made from James Hilton's second-rate novel of the same name. This English idyl brings together two veterans of Hilton films--Greer Garson (Goodbye, Mr. Chips) and Ronald Colman (Lost Horizon). Random Harvest, which is better than either of those, is distinguished by 1) a moving love story, 2) the unveiling of Miss Garson's interesting legs.
The story is about a shell-shocked soldier (Mr. Colman) who, as "John Smith," emerges in a daze from an asylum on Armistice Night, 1918. A jolly, warmblooded music-hall actress, Paula (Miss Garson), picks him up in the fog, nurses him to health and the altar. They are happily tucked away in a little cottage, complete with baby, when "Smithy," job-bent, is jolted from his amnesia by a street accident in Liverpool and remembers he is Charles Rainier, son of an aristocratic family. Unaware of cottage, wife and child, he goes home to Random Hall to resume life as an aristocrat, becomes an industrial tycoon and M.P.
Thereafter, the film resolves itself into the problem of whether Rainier or Smithy will come out on top. Hilton's novel is ramblingly and trickily told. The film tells the story more straightforwardly, makes up in charm what it loses in surprise.
In Which We Serve (Two Cities-British Lion; United Artists) is the first really great picture of World War II. Less epic than All Quiet on the Western Front, the cinema's classic on World War I, In Which is more moving. It is the story of a British destroyer, from her launching in 1939 to her sinking off Crete in 1941. So real is her story and that of the men who sailed in her that when the film was first shown in London, tears poured down the cheeks of bluejackets and hardened critics who saw it.
The picture was written, produced, directed and acted by Noel Coward. The Royal Navy helped in its making, saw that naval details were correct down to the last pompom. Its hero is widely supposed, though Coward has denied it, to be Coward's friend Lord Louis Mountbatten, who commanded and lost a destroyer (H.M.S. Kelly) before he became Commando-in-Chief. Coward plays the part.
The story starts at the end instead of the beginning, with a superbly realistic sea battle near Crete. Captain Edward Kinross (Coward) and his flotilla send a Nazi convoy to the bottom well aware that they will probably soon follow their victims. Says Coward, drinking cocoa after the battle, to his signal officer:
"Here comes the dawn of a new day, Flags. I wouldn't be surprised if it were a fairly uncomfortable one."
Flags: Yes, sir. . . . Very pretty sky, sir. Somebody sent me a calendar rather like that last Christmas.
Captain: Did it have a squadron of Dorniers in the upper right-hand corner?
Flags: No, sir.
Captain: That's where art parts company with reality.
First the Dorniers, then dive-bombers roar down for the kill, and Captain Kinross' ship goes down with more than half her crew. Then, while the Captain and a few sailors, covered with fuel oil and sprayed with machine-gun bullets, cling precariously to a raft in the scummy water, the camera flashes back to tell the whole story of the ship and her men.
The story, for which this scene in the water provides a poignant refrain, relates H.M.S. Torrin's gallant career at Dunkirk, in fog-shrouded Atlantic convoy duty, in many another action. But chiefly the tale is about three men and their families--the Captain, whose wife (Celia Johnson) and children know that the ship will always be a cruel mistress of their lives; Chief Petty Officer Walter Hardy (Bernard Miles), whose pride in his ship is exceeded only by Mrs. Hardy's pride in her husband; handsome, happy-go-lucky Ordinary Seaman Shorty Blake (John Mills), who meets a pretty girl (Kay Walsh) on a train and needs only a brief shore leave to win and marry her. Though the ship is the film's heroine, the mort moving sequence is not her sinking but the scene in which Shorty breaks the news to Hardy that during a heavy bombing of Plymouth Shorty has gained a son and Hardy has lost his wife.
Far & away the best performances are those of Actors Miles and Mills, who, in roles that could be goody-goody, manage to create two almost majestic characters. As the Captain, Noel Coward, is a satisfactory, though slightly supercilious, wearer of the old-school tie. As the film's producer, he rises grandly above his defects as an actor.
Coward's cynical, sophisticated comedies have made him one of the most successful, although not one of the most profound, of modern playwrights. In Which We Serve is in a different Coward mood. Its dramatic situations are strictly conventional, and some of its best scenes border on corn. There are a few positively embarrassing kernels. (Says Coward, addressing his crew: "Reynolds . . . what sort of ship do I want the Torrin to be?" Reynolds: "A happy ship, sir."). But at its best the film's sentimentality has a Dickensian wallop. It is a Cavalcade of war.
Words and the War. Only an evil-minded ear could have detected anything profane in In Which We Serve. But the Hays office did so. It promptly demanded the deletion of four words from the script -- God, hell, damn and bastard.* In Britain censors permitted the film to retain not only these words but also "bloody" (to Britons a much more shocking term than bastard). When news of the Hays order reached London, the House of Commons greeted it with cries of "Shame, Shame." Said Minister of Information Brendan Bracken, little knowing whereof he spoke: "I think we can leave it to the American public to see that the squeamishness and old-maiden-aunt-like apprehensions of these Hollywood censors are overcome." The Hays office finally grudgingly permitted God, hell and damn, stood adamant against bastard.
Out of the Drawing Room. In Which We Serve is Coward's first movie. (He was star, but not director, of The Scoundrel.) But Coward's inexperience with films is canceled by his experience with the theater. His first all-round effort has been seen by the King and Queen, enthusiastically applauded by His Majesty's Navy. It has also regained for Noel Coward a high standing with the British press, which had sniffed at his slightly mysterious Government wartime propaganda missions in France, the U.S. and Australia and once erroneously reported that he had been seen wearing a naval uniform in Paris.
Actually Coward has spent much of his wartime at sea, some of it on Mountbatten's destroyer. He wrote the script of In Which We Serve in twelve hours, shortly after the battle of Crete.
To make the film Coward, like ex-Playboy Mountbatten, has deserted cafe society and his drawing-room manner since war began, buckled down to businesslike discipline. When an actor turned up without makeup at 8:45 one morning, the hour set for shooting, Coward tapped his foot. When the actor also missed his lines, Director Coward said: "You don't appear to take much interest in your part. You're fired."
Coward shot part of the film in British fighting ships, had the help of the R.A.F. in bombing scenes. But most of it was made on a destroyer model constructed to exact specifications in his studio. Toughest work was making the water scenes that recur throughout the picture. For each take, dapper Mr. Coward and his fellow actors had to be doused in a mixture of thick black castor oil and water. It made the grim expression called for by the script come spontaneously to his face. After one particularly slimy day, in which he had been repeatedly smeared with oil and doused with buckets of icy water, Coward snapped: "Someone remind me to make the next one a drawing-room comedy."
* The Hays office ordered hell, damn and bastard eliminated from the MARCH OF TIME's documentary We Are the Marines on the eve of its release. Sequences the Hays office considered objectionable: A Marine officer advising a subordinate to "pick men who can fight like hell"; Colonel William T. Clement's famed order to his men at Wake Island: "Blow the bastards out of the water." M.O.T. protested, but obeyed the ruling.
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