The Big Screen (28 page)

Korda and Churchill had been social acquaintances through much of the 1930s—they had the same tastes and a similar sense of cinema. Korda had gone so far as to buy the rights to Churchill's book about the Duke of Marlborough, as a way of cementing friendship. He never made that film, though decades later the BBC would do it as a very successful miniseries. Then, in the awkward interval between Churchill's becoming prime minister and America's entry into the war, Korda yielded to Churchill's pleas for a truly patriotic picture that might help erase isolationist feelings in America.

So Korda set up an American office (to make a film about Lord Nelson, and to serve as a cover for some secret service operations that kept an eye on Nazi movements in the United States as well as sentiments in Washington). This gentlemanly espionage was for real, but it appealed to the boys in Winston and Alex—it may also be felt as a harbinger of the British playfulness that would dream up James Bond.

Nelson was the subject, but Korda insisted on a love story to humanize the hero, so the picture became
That Hamilton Woman
, which also took advantage of the stranded status of Olivier and Leigh in Hollywood. There is a strong likelihood that, amid the passion that united these famous lovers, Korda himself had moments with Vivien Leigh and moments enough to discover that the celebrated lovers (Viv and Larry) nursed a serious competitive gulf. Scarlett O'Hara had swept Vivien past Larry—and he had little appreciation for such things. Whatever,
That Hamilton Woman
, with airy sets (by Vincent Korda), rich costumes, and model ships for Trafalgar, was shot in six weeks at the General Services Studio in Los Angeles, with Alex directing personally. Olivier looked like a ghost; he had so many Nelsonian wounds to accommodate, and research was never quite sure which arm or which eye the great man had lost. Churchill himself wrote one or two key speeches, and the picture was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Some in Washington were suspicious of Korda's game, and he had been subpoenaed to appear before a Senate committee on December 12, 1941. Five days ahead of that deadline, the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor and he was excused. Thus the knighthood for a resourceful and brave Hungarian who took Britishness so seriously.

Meanwhile, at Ealing, Michael Balcon pursued a very different course. He saw that the war itself was filled with dramatic potential, and he trusted that a documentary-like approach would be in order. To that end, he was impressed by the work done in Britain in the 1930s by several government agencies inspired to make documentary films.

The driving force behind this work was John Grierson, born in Deanstown, Scotland, in 1898. (Another Scot, John Reith, would play a similar role in the foundation of the BBC and in the formulation of its duties.) Grierson attended the University of Glasgow and then went on a Rockefeller fellowship to the University of Chicago. On his return, he joined the film unit of the Empire Marketing Board and directed and produced a fifty-minute documentary,
Drifters
(1929), about the fishing industry. In 1933 he moved over to the GPO Film Unit, which in time became the Crown Film Unit.

Grierson was less a filmmaker than a preacher, a leader, and a managerial inspiration. He was also part of a British movement in the 1930s, leftist in sentiment, that believed in the precise factual observation of society. This led to the magazine
Picture Post
and to a sociological study known as Mass Observation. In the process, Grierson attracted a number of considerable talents, including the Brazilian Alberto Cavalcanti and filmmakers such as Harry Watt and Basil Wright.

The British documentary that evolved under Grierson could be sharply critical of society, but it had an educational thrust to let the citizen know how his country worked. (Of course, that depended on the shaky premise that the filmmakers knew the answers.) A key film made in this spirit was
Night Mail
(1936), produced by Grierson, directed and produced by Harry Watt and Basil Wright, with music by Benjamin Britten and a verse commentary by W. H. Auden, and sound supervision by Cavalcanti. The whole thing was just twenty-five minutes, and it was innocently admiring of the Post Office, but to this day it is a touching demonstration of the idea that movie could be a collaboration of all the arts in which the nation might commune with itself.

Grierson left for Canada before the war broke out (and he would prove a key figure on the Canadian Film Board), but at Ealing, Balcon snapped up Cavalcanti and Harry Watt and began to apply the lessons of documentary to the war effort. A real piece of heroism was recalled: a factory foreman had retrieved important machinery parts as the Germans invaded France. J. B. Priestley made a script of it, and Charles Frend directed
The Foreman Went to France
(1942), with actors in all the parts. Harry Watt was sent to a sand dune beach in South Wales to make
Nine Men
(1943), ostensibly about the North African desert war. With a script by Graham Greene, Cavalcanti made
Went the Day Well?
, a film about an English village taken over by German invasion. And Charles Frend made
San Demetrio London
(1943), on the travails of Atlantic convoys. At the same time, Ealing was making very broad Will Hay comedies, such as
The Black Sheep of Whitehall
(1942) and
The Goose Steps Out
(1942). (In the latter, Hay impersonates a Nazi officer and addresses Germans on how to behave in Britain.) There was also Basil Dearden's
The Bells Go Down
(1943), a dramatization of the work of the London Fire Brigade during the Blitz.

The Bells Go Down
used actors such as Tommy Trinder, Finlay Currie, and James Mason, but it had the misfortune of opening at the same time as
Fires Were Started
, a feature-length documentary made by the Crown Film Unit and directed by Humphrey Jennings.

Jennings was born in Suffolk in 1907 and educated at Cambridge. He was an intellectual, a part of Mass Observation, and the part-time compiler of
Pandemonium
, an immense anthology of Englishness. By all rights and qualification, he should have been a don at Cambridge, but he was interested in visual art (he was a surrealist by taste) and thus was drawn into documentary films. He was very productive in the war years, when his best works are
Listen to Britain
(1942), a montage of British scenes driven by sound;
Fires Were Started
; and
A Diary for Timothy
(1944–45), a kind of open letter to a baby born as the war ends, written by E. M. Forster and spoken by Michael Redgrave, with music by Richard Addinsell.

Jennings seemed lost after the war, and he died in 1950 in Greece, in a climbing accident. But he remains a British hero, and a man who could make
Fires Were Started
like a painter in his studio, with not a reference to the enemy. Moreover,
A Diary for Timothy
makes it clear that Jennings knew that victory in the war was a prelude to more intractable social problems. Had he been American, his work might have been banned, as he was marked down as un-American. In Britain, however, the feeling endures that Jennings was close to the national endeavor and a filmmaker touched by genius.

His career is a reminder of the difficulties Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger overcame at the same time in their film
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
(1943). Powell had worked steadily through the 1930s, but seldom with the means to demonstrate his florid visual sense. But in 1937 his
The Edge of the World
impressed Alexander Korda, who introduced Powell to Pressburger, one of his many Hungarian hirings. The two men were very different, but that seemed to encourage them. Pressburger was the writer, Powell the director. They combined for the first time on
The Spy in Black
(1939), starring Conrad Veidt, and within a few years they had formed a company, the Archers.
Colonel Blimp
was their second film under this logo.

It was highly ambitious and daring: it was cut first at 163 minutes and was in Technicolor—the sets by Alfred Junge (who had worked for Balcon), the camerawork by Georges Périnal, who had worked with René Clair in the early 1930s and who had later shot
The Private Life of Henry VIII
and
Rembrandt
. The scale of
Blimp
was risky under wartime conditions, but the real problem in the film—and it would trouble Churchill himself—was that the story was a tribute to a lasting friendship between an Englishman, Clive Candy (Roger Livesey), and a German, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook). In addition, by taking on the name Blimp—a figure in cartoons by David Low meant to ridicule idiocy in the British officer class—the Archers risked offending the army and the War Office. Churchill himself asked his aides for ways “To stop this foolish production before it gets any further. I am not prepared to allow propaganda detrimental to the morale of the Army.”

Of course, we know now that
Blimp
is the first great film made by the Archers, and we know that it is as sympathetic toward the foolish Candy as it is to several redheaded women all played by the young Deborah Kerr. But in a history, it deserves its place for extra reasons—chiefly that it was made and shown despite official alarm. By 1943, I doubt any such picture could have come from the other major participants in the war. Late in the film, the aging Theo gives a long, hesitant speech about what has happened in Germany between 1919 and 1939 that is so absorbing we hardly realize how unexpected it would have been at the time. It is a scene that establishes Anton Walbrook as a great actor.

Powell and Pressburger had become a dynamic team in a way that neither of them would ever quite manage on his own. And as the war closed, they moved into their glory years, working for the Rank Organisation or for Korda. Their list is famous now:
A Canterbury Tale
, (1944),
I Know Where I'm Going,
(1945),
A Matter of Life and Death
(1946),
Black Narcissus
(1947),
The Red Shoes
(1948), and
The Small Back Room
(1949). Yes,
The Red Shoes
is the most famous—also the most beautiful and the one most devoted to artistic creation (Powell's godhead). But we should note the cheeky wit of the films, the irreverence in days of rationing, a superb sense of craft collaboration, and the sultry performances—think of Walbrook's Lermontov in
The Red Shoes
, or David Farrar's cripple in
The Small Back Room
. Think of the redheads: Kerr, Kathleen Byron, Moira Shearer (and Pamela Brown—in black and white, but red in Powell's heart). There is one scene of Kerr in
Blimp
, with auburn hair and in a cornflower blue dress, in shadow and firelight, that must be among the most romantic shots made during the war. No one in Britain before—not even Korda with Oberon—had seen that you could make a film just because you were crazy about a girl.

For all their originality, the Archers were not exceptional in those postwar years. The country was dirt poor, but the English were wild for movies. A boy from South London, born a Quaker and raised so that he was not allowed to see movies, had gone into the industry as a teenager, to make tea and carry messages. He had chosen to be an editor and he had caught the eye of Noel Coward. His name was David Lean, and he had his list, too:
In Which We Serve
(1942; codirected with Coward and a bizarre tribute to a figure very like Louis Mountbatten),
This Happy Breed
(1944),
Blithe Spirit
(1945),
Brief Encounter
(1945),
Great Expectations
(1946),
Oliver Twist
(1948)
The Passionate Friends
(1949),
Madeleine
(1950). You may know David Lean because of later, bigger films—
The Bridge on the River Kwai
(1957),
Lawrence of Arabia
(1962),
Doctor Zhivago
(1965),
Ryan's Daughter
(1970)—but I'd like to suggest that these later pictures are not as satisfying as the films he made in the 1940s.