THE English film, “Young Mr. Pitt,” is a costume piece of the late 1700’s, featuring the dress of the time but hardly the life inside it, and presenting the historical parallel between England’s first defense against a dictator, Napoleon, and the one going on now. What the picture hasn’t got most of all is a bloodstream or a heartbeat, either of its own or of William Pitt. It is, actually, hundreds of good-looking, accurate stills, put together with considerable art. Among them are some telling things: the senile vegetables who composed Commons, who could carry on like chattering monkeys when the twenty-four-year-old Pitt showed up as their Prime Minister, and who otherwise ate peanuts when they weren’t asleep. There is the elder Pitt’s speech in defense of the American Revolution—the only one of a dozen in the movie which catches fire. There is Charles Fox halting his speech to Parliament to ask the hulk next him, “Milord, how’s your gout?” and then hurrying on to denounce Pitt without finding out. Best of all, there is that very shrewd, stupid man, George III, taking a bath in a small roped-off square of water at Weymouth (Pitt said that telling George anything was like blowing porridge through a blanket).
The picture, like so many English films, suffers from overrestraint. Billy Pitt, as played by Robert Donat, has a frozen, wide-eyed, pained expression, and a pair of heavy-set legs—and little more. Neither the writing nor the acting here is enough to fill up a biography or make it very much alive. Pitt, it is said, was austere and dignified, but he must have had an occasional fling, depression, period of doubt, boredom or desire (at least it would seem so, considering that his indebtedness for hats alone was six hundred pounds). On the other hand, the picture restrains itself from pointing up any frigid zones in the man, using his only indulgence, an incredible avidity for port, to make him seem more human. The love affair enters the picture with the gutlessness of a Gainsborough painting and then evaporates. Such inconsequence makes the picture fall away throughout. Lord Nelson, though played with a threatening, exciting spark by the late Stephen Haggard, is seen hardly at all, and his battle none.
It is undoubtedly true that drawing parallels in movie histories between a past era and our own negates a lot of important life that was going on outside the strictures of the imposed parallel. (The movie tries to show that England learned, at the time of Napoleon as well as Hitler, that isolation was impractical, and that a conqueror must be stopped some time.) In fact, an important part of Pitt’s life, and a part important to audiences now—the about-face of his government from its pre-war liberalism to a wartime reaction, one that squelched all reforms and reformers, the habeas-corpus act, trade unions and anti-slave movements, and permitted child (six-year-old) labor—has been left out. The movie leaves you with the feeling that Britain’s war and her troubles stopped at Pitt’s death and the battle of Trafalgar. The completely ignoble portrait of Fox—who fought for the civil liberties Pitt repressed—as simply a loose-living, evil man, is inexplicable in any light, historical or otherwise.
But if the picture is somewhat impotent in nearly all ways, it does show Director Carol Reed’s eye for pictorial expression, his care and intelligence as to details. The playing, in the cases of George III, Napoleon, Nelson, Fox and Talleyrand is very good. The whole thing proves that Director Reed, who can be superb, as in “The Stars Look Down” and “Night Train,” can never be wholly bad, but sometimes dull. And though on the whole dull, this one is interesting in detail.
March 22, 1943