Louis B Mayer at MGM did offer a low-keyed story, The Mortal Storm, about Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany and Britisher Alfred Hitchcock had a more gritty view of what was going on in Europe with Foreign Correspondent. General acknowledgement that there was anything amiss with the world passed isolationist America by. At the end of the film Joel McCrae did give a dire warning of things to come. With bombs raining down on London he does his broadcast to the US ending with: “The lights are going out in Europe. Ring yourself around with steel, America”. Someone must have heard the call because a couple of months later the studios pushed out A Yank in the RAF. This was about an American pilot, Tyrone Power, who joins the RAF to impress his girl friend, Betty Grable, (a noble sacrifice) but then realises what is at stake and becomes a fighting ace. Also in 1941 Gary Cooper appeared as a pacifist forced to fight a European war in Sergeant York. The film was a fantastic success and made the Americans even more determined to stay at home. As the war went on and bombing, rationing and death became the norm, the productions acted as morale boosters. Instead of showing individual heroes they projected everyone as a hero. John Mills and Dickie Attenborough seemed to be everywhere. John Mills usually playing a likeable cockney character and Dickie, more often than not, as a coward. But a redeemable coward to show that even Britishers who looked upon themselves as cowards have the true Brit deep inside. In Which We Serve (1942) not only had John and Dickie but, for good measure, that arch-Brit, Noel Coward. The story is about the survivors of HMS Torrin clinging to a lifeboat while being strafed by the devilish Hun and, while their mates silently slip, away keeping up their spirits by reminiscing about the past. It was written, acted, produced and directed by Coward, with a little help from a friend, David Lean. Mills played his staunch cockney character and Attenborough took charge of the cowarding department. By this time America had had its Damascus moment and were limbering up to join the war. Pearl Harbour convinced them that sending their young and unemployed to war while racking up the flagging industries wasn’t all bad. While the British cinema stuck to the stories of a stoic home front and the comradeship of all being bombed together, Hollywood’s approach was, typically, more flamboyant. America’s ambiguous approach to the war up until 1942 is revealed in a film made and released in late 1941, So Ends Our Night, before the Yanks were bombed into the war. It is a story about Nazi oppression and its genocidal hatred of the Jews. It had a story to tell but it was manacled by the fact that America didn’t want to come out overtly against a powerful country which still might turn out to be one of its best customers. Hitler isn’t mentioned and the whole approach is woolly. In direct contrast we have Mrs Miniver. Although the film was very British in concept it was actually made by MGM in 1941 before Pearl Harbour was hit. It came from a long running diary in The Times which became very popular in America. It showed how one family, the Minivers, played by Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon, weathered the gathering storm. It was said by Winston Churchill that the film had done more for the Allied cause than a flotilla of battleships. It, too, had a Nazi interloper who comes to a sticky end at the hands of the fragrant Garson while hubby Pidgeon is away in his little boat saving the army at Dunkirk.. As the war wore on and it became only a question of time before the Allies won, other types of film began to appear. Now it was possible to depict some of the worries that servicemen had about what their footloose wives might be doing on the home front. Waterloo Road (1943) was a good example. Cuckolded John Mills receives a letter from his sister saying his wife is having it away with a local spiv, played by Stewart Granger. Mills, about to be sent overseas, goes AWOL, sorts his rival, Granger, out in a fist fight which is one of the longest ever filmed, regains the loyalty of his pretty wife and goes to sea happy in the knowledge that Granger has gone to jail for draft-dodging. In the same year a film came out which was very bold for the time. Pressburger and Powell’s film, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Roger Livesey plays Blimp bringing all the tenets of previous conflicts with him to the Second World War. It spews up all the arguments about patriotism and the futility of war without really getting anywhere. A daring departure from the norm in bomb-cratered Britain. The war done and dusted the studios turned away from war and went silly with films showing the rebuilding of the nations. Ealing Studios did a particularly good job of this with films such as Kind Hearts and Coronets, a study by Dennis Price in how to murder the same person, Alec Guinness, eight times and find a get out of the noose card at the eleventh hour. There was also Whiskey Galore! and Passport to Pimlico to raise the spirits before returning to the day to day life of rationing, lung festering fogs and war torn streets. The Americans also thought it was time to get away from war and the memories of war. William Powell indulged in a little puff of froth with Mr Peabody and the Mermaid (1948) before moving on to more serious stuff with Bogart, Bacall and Robinson sweating it out on Key Largo while a hurricane threatens to blow their hotel into the sea. Great performances from all concerned. Orson Welles followed this up with The Third Man, on location in war torn Berlin, hiding out in a giant Ferris Wheel, and being enigmatic. As the world began to settle down, in the hiatus between World War 2 and the Cold War, films began to get more mercenary. What else could have spurred the furore about Guiseppe De Santis’s Bitter Rice with the curvaceous Silvano Mongana up to her thighs in a paddy field? As the Forties faded into history, cinema made a big discovery. Colour was an extra dimension. and it was needed to combat the inroads black and white TV was making into the cinema’s grip on world entertainment. Colour had been around almost as long a celluloid – but in the Fifties it was coming of age. Big time! Ingrid Pitt writes every Tuesday at Den of Geek; you can read her last column here.
