“This Land Is Mine” is a good example of a writer’s movie (Dudley Nichols) and of a trend—the graduation of the better Hollywood script writers from typewriters into producers’ chairs. Some other writers who now have full say over what they have written are Nunnally Johnson (“The Pied Piper”), Albert Lewin (“Moon and Sixpence”) and Michael Powell (“One of Our Aircraft Is Missing”). According to Leo Rosten’s survey of Hollywood, that control is what they wanted most. The evidence of their work so far points to movies of a greater seriousness in intention, more social comment and a clearer, less gingerbread form. But this type of movie has also shown serious lacks. “This Land Is Mine” hasn’t any romantic chases, or love affairs—the one chase ends in the hero’s death, the two love affairs are minute and unresolved—and there are no jokes. Its plot concerns the regeneration of a cowardly schoolteacher in an occupied country. It is a tribute to the movie that there is nothing silly about it as it does what it sets out to do: instruct our schoolteachers in their spiritual task during wartime; condemn overzealous mothers who hoard milk; show the grocer, the mayor and the station master the price they pay for collaboration with the Nazis. One of its best passages is an ironical scene showing the entrance of the Nazis into the city against and around a monument to the Unknown Soldier in the city square. It is concise and well thought out, and the differences between the Nazi and democratic ideology are completely discernible.
But all of these first writer-produced movies have propelled their ideas out of the intellectual idiom of the writer rather than the visual one of the movies; so that in spite of their wisdom, lack of sentimentality, straightforward, formal clarity, they have been, as yet, unemotional and powerless. Most simply, it is a matter of attitude toward a story, of telling rather than showing it. The ideology of the free peoples is expressed in “This Land Is Mine” by giving the schoolteachers the Bill of Rights to read to their classes, which they do, from the first article through the last. The character of the resistance as it affects the middle-class shopkeeper is one in a long, wearisome speech from a witness stand. Essentially the method’s weakness is in straitjacketing behavior to the written word instead of seeking the idea in the visual world of action and movement, which is the more suitable, and so more emotionally vital, manner for the movies.
There is a pseudo quality pervading the city in this movie where the people are regulated neatly and logically and mechanically. The character of the resistance cannot be that simple, to judge from the scraps of information that seep through to us from such places. The people of Czecho-Slovakia, France and Holland are starved and terrorized, and what they accomplish must happen quickly, with little time to show a change of heart or to explain motives to the whole populace. A Quisling is poisoned or an Underground hero is blown to bits, with little of the ordered logic, the individualistic momentousness, that attaches to each event and person in this movie. To this extent it reads more like a commendable textbook in civics than a movie, and misses the life in occupied countries, its tragedies, accidents, unknown deaths, complete horror.
The picture just about hits the jackpot as far as miscasting goes. Since the author implies no definite country or people, no dialect or national custom, the cast becomes pretty much a hodgepodge of unmatched actors, who also suffer from the superficialities that go with all talk and no play. Charles Laughton seems to be unable to do anything at all with his role of schoolteacher.
These writer-produced movies have without exception been commendable jobs. They are the necessary wedge of integrity and earnestness which must first break through the wall of Hays Office and producers before there will be the freedom which is essential to artistic expression, in the movies as well as anywhere else. And they are bound to reexamine their movie-making methods when they find that their good works are coming forth somewhat stolid and unemotional.
April 26, 1943