A BRITISH Ministry of Information short movie titled “I Was a Fireman” accounts for a spectacular night’s activity in the life of a Fire Service unit as it sets about stopping a London waterfront fire during a particularly heavy Luftwaffe raid in 1940. The men involved are real firemen. A good part of their film has been cut severely to fit in between double bills when it is shown in this country (it is almost impossible to place government films in theatres here when they run beyond forty minutes—and it is hard enough to place them then, even for free). But the film is very fine anyway.
I think that the sequences in which the men go through their fire fighting on the roof of a warehouse, where one of them is injured by a falling beam and tied to the top of the hook and ladder and so lowered to the ground, while another is killed when the building’s roof caves in, are in the best sense emotionally true. (Hollywood’s version of the same action would have lost all the detail, the uneven, hazardous movement and the spontaneity by lackadaisically following the hero around. Reason—the hero is what’s popular at the box office, not the fire.) The direction and photography of this Humphrey Jennings film are extremely loving and sensitive. There is a morning sequence where the exhausted men, who have struggled against the fire all night and have now been relieved, slowly and wearily go about getting their gear together to leave the scene, while they talk to Londoners going to their jobs in the early morning, that has a bright, warm movie way (Hollywood would have skipped it to get to another fire, funeral or medal-pinning). But the real virtue of the movie is its exact respect for the instinctive behavior and responses of men working. This is the kind of thing that gets lost in the movie attitude that treats an action as though it has happened already and is now being reënacted—so the hero uses the action as a foil rather than interacting with it.
The tension set up by the problems in all violent work, which have to be answered effectively and immediately, produces a surliness and aggressiveness in the relations between workmen that usual movie scripts do not realize. This one does. The fire chief is dictatorial, exasperated, he yells the same orders over and over, forgetting what he has been yelling from moment to moment—“Get it down! Get it down!” he shrieks at two of the men and pushes down the hose they have been aiming too high over the fire. The men take orders or give them to one another, and the need for hurry, the anxiety that the job will get away from them, cuts all the niceties away from the action and leaves it tense and raw. Such incidents, which construct a movie character in depth faster than any amount of polished heroics, are something every moviegoer should see to find out all the things the movies are not in the habit of giving us.
“Before the Raid” is a British short of equal length, which retells a tale that many films have already told—about a Norwegian village people’s bravery (with a neat variation: the Norwegians lure the German officers off to fishing grounds and then pen them up in the middle of a forest of small fishing craft). Like “The Silent Village,” which retold the Lidice story, this film is lyric and economical, but suffers from depending solely on real-life actors and half-good photography to carry a too pat story. But its early sequences on board a raiding Commando ship are good, and non-actor Norwegians give it an invigorating native grain; and there is a very worth-while bit of symbolism in a scene that cuts abruptly from a pleasant fishing genre to the German soldier idly throwing rocks into the water.
In case you didn’t see “Action in the North Atlantic” and Noel Coward’s “In Which We Serve,” but are interested in seeing a picture like them, “Corvette K-225,” made by Howard Hawks, will provide you with the plot of the former and some of the plot of the latter and more besides. In addition to being a picture about a convoy’s itinerary, and a stiff-jointed captain who is in love with a ship, this movie’s captain also needles his girl’s brothers, who are sub-lieutenants, because he doesn’t believe sparing the rod helps at all, and this leads to some arguments between the captain and his girl, and the boys turn up nasty. (You may have seen this new material somewhere else during your life, in pictures with Pat O’Brien.) This is a stock contraption all the way, with evidence that Hollywood has its eye but not its mind on films like “I Was a Fireman.” It has one good scene during a convoy conference, which adds a wrinkle to other film convoy conferences, some minor characters who do very well, and there is a new lacquered Canadian actress, Ella Raines, to look at and hear speak platitudinous matter in a cello voice.
November 15, 1943