THE remarkable fact that the English are making better films than anyone else is the result of their movie makers’ faith in the ordinary—ordinary behavior, ordinary people and small talk. It is true that the English scrape no further below the surface than other people who make movies, but they are the only ones who consistently show the surface the way it really is. Whatever they achieve in movie effects comes from their acute perception of the walk, look and manner of speech of their characters. The action of their plots is always within the possibilities of the characters they create. The first Hitchcock pictures capitalized superbly on the willingness of an audience to accept the fact that horror can be latent in an ordinary situation. In an English film the psychological factors are made visual, and to do this and keep the audience from snickering at the far-fetched, the characters and environment of the movie have to be honestly handled.
Two of their latest pictures, “Next of Kin” and “Letter from Ireland,” trade on this attitude and owe their success to it. “Next of Kin” is a feature-length admonition against loose talk in wartime; “Letter from Ireland” is a twenty- minute glimpse of American soldiers in Ireland, a mild heartwarming for the folks back home.
“Next of Kin” impresses the whole weight of war on its audience by using inconsequential people and endowing them with the greatest responsibility for the prosecution of the war. A frightened soldier tells a burlesque performer where his division is training. An overworked, petulant, ordnance man bemoans the fact that so much is asked of him—for instance, that two divisions need outfitting, etc., etc. These details themselves are insignificant and unrelated, but the Germans put them together—a raid on the French coast is anticipated and half a division is lost. The important point is that these people do not realize the importance of the information they possess. The hard lesson is that a superhuman effort to be careful must be made by people who are overworked and overwrought; for the odds lie with the enemy. And the lesson is made grimly moving. The visual character of the people who count most in the picture is made depressingly real, their faces have a pinched quality, a lack of charm and humor; their deadly seriousness, combined with the knowledge of their responsibility for any number of lives far removed from them, makes you sense the extraordinary pressure under which they live.
This is purely an instruction film, but the intent is to present the case in its precise nature, no tin schoolroom form. Giving vital information is something you usually do unwittingly, and that is how this movie shows it is done. It is a small masterpiece of skillful education. It set out to turn war-poster reading into movie entertainment, and came out with a great deal more—a good picture of wartime England.
The twenty-minute letter from two American brothers stationed in Ireland to their parents could have been as distressing as one of Eddie Cantor’s serious oratoricals on what you should do that people should love you. But the movie has been controlled to a sensible degree and is actually heartwarming. The idea is said to have been suggested by an actual incident, but it could have been figured out by anyone with a head on his shoulders. An officer in an artillery regiment notices that two boys haven’t been getting any mail. He finds that the reason is they don’t write any; so he makes them turn out some fifty pages, etc. To be exact, the boys write about Carrickfergus Castle, the printing shop of Thomas Gray and Son at Strabane, and a Catholic church in Londonderry. You don’t learn much about castles, printing or the boys, and the war seems far away. But the movie achieves what it set out to achieve, a small human warmth: the dry, reticent humor of the Americans, their lack of interest in what they are visiting, their unhurried walk in an unhurried country. The effortless dialogue is the most commendable thing about it. The two heroes are Private Wally Newfield and Sergeant Don Prill, not brothers but both from Minneapolis.
May 24, 1943