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The driving subtext is the entertainer during wartime (cp. Berkeley's For Me and My Gal), and there's the repartee-meister in his gallant uniform before a weary naval crew: "Today, I'm afraid I've run out of jokes..." From its inception in molten metal and champagne christening to its sinking in the Battle of Crete, the destroyer carrying a trim cross-section of England, "a well-found ship." Survivors of the bombardment cling to a rubber raft and slip in and out of flashbacks, undulating dissolves introduce backstories from patrician captain (Noël Coward) to working-class sailor (John Mills). Between singalongs in cramped trains and smoky halls, a voice cameo from the Prime Minister on the blow of declaring war. "It ain't exactly a bank holiday for us!" Coward wears every hat (leading man, writer, producer, composer) except the one of cinema, that falls to David Lean with extended tracking shots and punchy sense of montage. (Ronald Neame's cinematography is one facet in this nexus of British filmmaking, Guy Green and Michael Anderson also have early parts.) "Sort of pent-up and emotional" is the register, it's all in the way Celia Johnson's voice sidesteps a crack and a sob while toasting the vessel that is her rival. The pregnant lass (Kay Walsh) under the bombed-out staircase, the stubborn wife (Joyce Carey) who goes down with her house during the Blitz—her husband (Bernard Miles) receives the tragic news and gazes out of the windy deck, just a crumpled letter and a clenched jaw. (Amid all these stiff upper lips, Richard Attenborough's trembling eyes provide an indelible crack-up.) Coward sums it up with an exhausted bow of the head as the ship pulls into the port to great fanfare, "where art parts company with reality." With Michael Wilding, Leslie Dwyer, James Donald, Philip Friend, Frederick Piper, Kathleen Harrison, Dora Gregory, and Daniel Massey. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |