Reeling Backward: "The League of Gentlemen" (1960)

There was a time when Jack Hawkins was Britain's top movie star. This might not seem likely, since he didn't get serious about acting until he was about 40 and, while certainly handsome, his bulldog-like visage did not naturally lend itself to romantic or leading roles.

Nevertheless, his skills as a thespian kept him quite busy in movie-making even after his star fell, usually in supporting roles as authoritarian figures -- sometimes deluded ones -- in "The Bridge on the River Kwai," "Lawrence of Arabia" and many others. A heavy smoker, Hawkins even continued to act after having his larynx removed in 1965 due to throat cancer; other actors dubbed his lines until his death at age 62.

"The League of Gentlemen" represents one of his few post-1950s leading roles. It's a bank heist movie directed by Basil Dearden with a distinctive, clever twist: the robbers are not professional criminals but former British military officers who have fallen on hard times. Not only is it a chance for the eight men to collect £100,000 each -- about $2 million in today's dollars -- but they get to use their wartime skills in a peacetime setting.

As Lt. Col. Norman Hyde, Hawkins is the unctuous brains of the operation. The only one lacking a criminal record or black mark on his military dossier, he's incensed at being cashiered after 25 years of loyal service, dismissed "redundant." He certainly doesn't appear to want for money -- Hyde lives in a large, secluded mansion and drives a Rolls-Royce. In the film's tipsy opening sequence, he emerges from a sewer grate at night wearing a natty black tuxedo.

There appears to be more backstory there, but screenwriter John Boland, adapting the novel by Bryan Forbes, purposefully keeps it close to the vest. Hyde lives alone, out of choice rather than economic necessity, and lets the dishes pile up in the kitchen. There is a large portrait of a handsome woman in the foyer -- actually Deborah Kerr -- and when asked if she is his wife and is she alive, he announces, "Regrettably, the bitch is still going strong."

Testy language for 1960! I was also surprised by a brief shot of a chestful of nudie magazines, with bare breasts clearly visible.

Hyde researches the military records to find the perfect other seven men for the job:

• Lt. Edward Lexy (Richard Attenborough ... I know, I'm fixated) -- Radio man and somewhat weaselly ladies' man.
• Maj. Peter Race (Nigel Patrick) -- An itinerant gambler and black marketeer of impeccable breeding, he becomes Hyde's second-in-command after an initial antagonism.
• Captain "Padre" Mycroft (Roger Livesey) -- A quartermaster dismissed for gross indecency, he now impersonates a priest.
• Maj. Rupert Rutland-Smith (Terence Alexander) -- A decent, reserved chap kept economic cuckold by his wealthy, younger wife.
• Capt. Frank Weaver (Norman Bird) -- Bomb disposal leader who was drunk when his squad was blown up.
• Capt. Stevens (Kieron Moore) -- Ousted for homosexuality -- "odd man out" is how Hyde describes him, in the only suitable language for the time -- he's reliable muscle.
• Capt. Martin Porthill (Bryan Forbes) -- Booted for killing Greek separatists, he now sponges off older women.

Despite a limited amount of time to personalize each character, the actors do a wonderful job of building a distinctive persona that allows them to stand out from each other. Attenborough and Livesey in particularly are quite charismatic, in very different ways. Livesey steals the show in a sequence where they impersonate active-duty military officers to steal arms from the local army station. He pretends to be a general and uses the opportunity to lord it over Hyde and Race.

There's a lovely fun scene where Hyde first gathers them all at a swanky club, after having invited them to read an American pulp fiction novel, "The Golden Fleece," that describes exactly the sort of bank robbery Hyde is proposing. After declaring them all "crooks of one sort or another," he proceeds to detail each man's shame individually, and then declare the operation as their chance to get their revenge on the system that betrayed them.

The rest of the movie proceeds as a fairly typical crime caper: the planning of the job, brushes with danger, internal conflicts between the men, followed by the actual heist itself. It goes off perfectly, but their little company -- which they cheekily dub "Co-Operative Removals Ltd." -- is betrayed by the one small detail they overlooked.

British movies were not covered by the Hollywood Production Code, in which lawbreakers always had to be shown receiving their comeuppance. But that appears to be the case with "The League of Gentlemen," in which they are all carted off in the same policy lorry at the end.

The robbery scene is almost anticlimactic. It's mostly notable for the scary-looking gas masks the men wear after smoking out the whole block around the bank. Complete with breathing tubes and a metallic voice projection device used by Hyde, they make for a positively frightening bunch.

I enjoyed "League" for what it is, a rapscallion crime caper, though I admit to being a bit disappointed that it was not what I thought it would be. I expected a harder-edged serious crime drama, something like Stanley Kubrick's early work, in which Hyde is consumed by rage at British societal structure and bent on revenge.

But this isn't existential crisis; it's fun 'n' games. That's all well and fine, but I'd like to see the version where Hawkins gets to play a homicidal maniac in a tux.

Reeling Backward: "A Bridge Too Far" (1977)

Recently this column focused on "Theirs Is the Glory," a fairly unique film in which the actual participants of the failed Allied stratagem to end World War II by Christmas 1944, Operation Market Garden, returned to the site of the battles one year after the fact to recreate the action for a motion picture. The same military operation later became the basis for the 1977 feature film, "A Bridge Too Far."

In my essay on "Theirs Is the Glory," I mostly concentrated on the similarities between it and "Bridge," wondering if screenwriter William Goldman or author Cornelius Ryan, on whose book the latter film is based, were influenced by the earlier picture. That inspired me to go back to "A Bridge Too Far," and see how it has held up to my memory.

It only reinforced my opinion: "A Bridge Too Far" is one of the great WWII epics, and an incredible marriage of narrative structure, inspired direction, gritty performances and technical mastery from the support crew, particularly the musical score by John Addison (who himself served as a soldier in Market Garden).

Market Garden would remain a forgotten bit of history for 30 years until Cornelius Ryan wrote his book about the adventure, in which the Allies dropped 35,000 paratroopers behind enemy lines to capture a series of bridges. The plan was to have XXX Corp, the British armor column, punch up the road to connect the bridges, thus creating a hole directly into Germany.

Except, the Allies ignored evidence of a great deal of German resistance along the route, including an entire Panzer tank division near Arnhem, the last and most important of the bridges, since it spanned the Rhine River and the border into Germany itself. The British paratroopers, who were only supposed to have to hold the bridge for two days, gave up after nine, leaving behind 80% of their men as casualties or prisoners of war.

That's a lot of story to cram into a feature film, even a three-hour one, but Goldman's screenplay is an exercise in elegant structure. The story begins and ends with generals, both Allied and German, as they plan bold stratagems and then later try to pick up the pieces of where things went wrong. The middle section focuses on the lower ranks of soldiers, the dogfaces who actually have to carry out the fight their superiors dreamed up.

You've heard of "all-star casts," but this one is simply jaw-dropping. For the Brits: Anthony Hopkins, Dirk Bogarde, Michael Caine, Edward Fox, Sean Connery. For the Germans: Hardy Krüger, Maximilian Schell, Wolfgang Preiss. For the Americans: Robert Redford, Elliot Gould, Gene Hackman, James Cann, Ryan O'Neal. Not to mention Liv Ullman and Laurience Olivier  as Dutch civilians. And Denholm Elliott and John Ratzenberger turning up in bit roles.

Redford, arguably the biggest movie star in the world at the time, doesn't even show up until after the two-hour mark. 

I found it interesting how the script is laid out into essentially four sections. The first is the planning of Operation Market Garden, in which British heads are swelled and the first seeds of doubt creep in. Frank Grimes has a terrific role as a nervous major who unsuccessfully points out the presence of tanks, and is sent on medical leave as a result. The second section is the actual drop, a beautiful and daunting ballet of parachutes -- more than 1,000 men jumped out of planes for the sequence -- and the Allies' initial success in taking their objectives. The third is what I call the "American vignettes," and the last act is when everything goes to hell.

The vignettes are a quick succession of three stories centered around American characters. Elliott Gould is up first in a semi-comedic bit about his regiment failing to take the first bridge before the Germans blow it up, necessitating the building of a claptrap "Bailey bridge" to get the tanks across -- but not before delaying them 36 hours. Gould is terrific and charismatic, chomping on a cigar and shouting jokes in between the orders. Addison's music goes into a jazzy, bouncy mode.

Then we get James Caan as a nearly monosyllabic sergeant who protects his young captain -- he doesn't put on his coat at first, so we think he's just a punk private or something -- even guaranteeing the officer that he won't die. He appears to fail in his mission, as the captain is left for dead after being shot in the head. But the sergeant carries the body in a jeep through enemy lines to a mobile Army hospital and, at gunpoint, forces the surgeon (a spot-on Arthur Hill) to examine the wounded lad, revealing that he's still alive. 

(This may sound like Hollywood bullshit, but other than the part about being chased in a jeep by German soldiers, it really happened.)

The last and most harrowing of the vignettes is Redford as the major tasked with crossing the Waal River and taking the bridge at Nijmegen. Due to logistical snafus, they had to make a daytime crossing in flimsy portable boats, the wind blew away their smoke cover, and the unit was cut to pieces. Watching Redford with his helmeted head tucked down, pulling his rifle butt through the water like an oar, all the while chanting "Hail Mary, full of grace..." remains one of my seminal cinematic moments. (Again, this really happened.)

Sean Connery also gets a mini-vignette of his own as Major General Roy Urquhart, commander of the British airborne division dropped near Arnhem, who gets cut off from his own command and has to hide out in a little Dutch enclave, dodging from house to house, during which time he is presumed dead.

Lieutenant-General Frederick Browning, played by Dirk Bogarde, more or less acts as the heavy, playing the gung-ho Brit general who will not cancel the operation for any reason. Those who "rock the boat" are encouraged to clam up or suffer the consequences. 

At the end of the film Browning is depicted as duplicitously claiming to always have been skeptical about the operation -- "As you know I've always thought we tried to go a bridge too far" -- rather than an unreserved booster. In reality, Browning raised his doubts prior to the operation, and he and his family -- Bogarde actually served alongside Browning during the war -- were outraged at his villainous portrayal.

It being only three decades and a bit after the events depicted, many of the actors had an opportunity to talk with and even befriend the men they were playing. Edward Fox knew Lt. Gen. Brian Horrocks, commander of XXX Corp, prior to filming and later cited it as his favorite movie role. Michael Caine changed some of his dialogue after asking his counterpart how he would have issued orders, and the real Lt. Col. Johnny Frost had to explain to Anthony Hopkins that he would never have run too quickly between cover, because he had to show his men how contemptuous he was of enemy fire.

The production of "Bridge" is a Homeric story unto itself, and one others have already told better than I could -- notably by Goldman himself, who wrote a making-of book, "Story of a Bridge Too Far," and also included an entire chapter about it in his seminal showbiz tome, "Adventures in the Screenwriting Trade." 

(Extremely short version: Joseph E. Levine, a lifelong maverick producer, personally financed the film's $22 million budget -- about $86 million in today's dollars -- himself, then convinced some of the biggest global movie stars to participate by all accepting the same weekly pay rate. He recruited Richard Attenborough (him again) to direct, undertaking an incredible logistical and artistic challenge. Then as some of the amazing footage of the airdrops and battle scenes started to come back in, Levine showed the rushes to distributors who bid on the international distribution rights to the film. As a result, "Bridge" was already in the black before the first ticket was sold.)

The ultimate result was surprising, and not. Everywhere but the U.S. the film was a smash hit. Here, American and audiences and critics used to rousing pro-Allies depictions of the war collectively shrugged their shoulders at a massive production about a colossal military screw-up. Thus, "A Bridge Too Far" is barely known on these shores.

Their loss; "A Bridge Too Far" was perhaps the last of the great World War II epics.

Reeling Backward: "Gandhi" (1982)

"Gandhi" may just be the most resented Best Picture Oscar winner of all time. Which is ironic for a biopic about the iconic advocate of peaceful resistance to oppression. The "little brown man in a loincloth" stole hearts and minds all across the globe, and also the Academy Award from the rightful winner.

At least, that was the standard saw at the time. "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" was (then) the top-grossing movie of all time, beloved by American audiences of all ages, made by the Baby Boomers' wunderkind filmmaker, Steven Spielberg. "Gandhi," meanwhile," was very British, very long (3 hours, 11 minutes), and (to many) felt more like a history lesson than a movie.

I don't think I'd seen the film since it came out 32 years ago. Now having watched it again with the improved perspective that comes with the passage of time, I've analyzed my feelings about both movies and come to the considered conclusion that ... "E.T." really did get hosed.

Which isn't to say that "Gandhi" isn't a good film. Actually, it's very good. The acting is splendid, anchored by a then-unknown Ben Kingsley in the title role. It's beautiful to look at and epic in scope, with director Richard Attenborough's camera sweeping across landscapes and seas of people, and then settling in close for intimate moments with Gandhi puttering around his ashram, dispensing wisdom in between spinnings of looms and milkings of goats.

I don't mind lengthy pictures that fill that time with important and engaging events, but you could easily lop a half-hour out of "Gandhi" without losing much of the narrative momentum. For me, the first half is best, as we watch young lawyer Mohandas Gandhi agitating for the rights of Indian immigrants in South Africa, and later returning to his homeland as a middle-aged man and spending a year or two assimilating himself back into his native culture before taking a stand on independence for India.

It's a period of self-discovery, as Gandhi morphs from a standard-issue activist to quasi-holy man.

The second half becomes a bit repetitive, as Gandhi is now a revered international figure and official Great Man. Now going alternately by the names Mahatma ("great soul"), Bapu ("father") or Gandhiji (a familiarization), he ceases to speak to other people as individuals but makes pronouncements for the masses -- even if there is only one other person in the room.

Largely drawn from the real Gandhi's utterances ("an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind"), they nonetheless add to the stilted nature of the film's latter portion.

I was struck by the depiction of Gandhi's reliance on the media to spread his message. It seems he always has an entourage of Western journalists following him around (Martin Sheen and Candice Bergen among them). He cajoles and charms them, extending his friendship -- offers that, at least in the depiction of the movie, reporters are more than happy to turn into an exchange.

There is relatively little depiction of Gandhi's personal life. His four sons are barely seen, and there are essentially two scenes exploring his relationship with his wife, Kasturba (Rohini Hattangadi), whom he married in an arranged ceremony when they were both just 13.

The most notable is when Gandhi first organizes an ashram -- essentially a farming commune -- and insists that everyone share all the work, including cleaning out the latrine. Kasturba objects that this is the work of "untouchables," the lowest caste of Indians relegated to the dregs of society. Gandhi becomes angry and even physically violent with her, but quickly finds his peaceful center.

The primary relationships are with Gandhi's fellow Indian National Congress activists: Pandit Nehru (Roshan Seth), a moderate Hindu who would later become India's first prime minster; Maulana Azad (Virendra Razdan), a younger scholar who doesn't say much; Vallabhbhai Patel (Saeed Jaffrey), an exuberant man of the people; and Muhammad Ali Jinnah (Alyque Padamsee), the peevish and aristocratic chief of India's Muslim faction, who would eventually splinter away from the group and become the founding father of Pakistan.

The best parts of the latter portion of the movie are these men holes up in various rooms, discussing how they will best gain their independence from the British Empire and map out the beginnings of their own country. There's a sense of grandiosity in the moment, but also that these were human beings who could be petty and flawed.

I enjoyed the tight little smile that Kingsley gives Gandhi, who uses it as a sort of imperturbable mask he presented to the world. He employs the same expression both in greeting old friends and in surrendering to the various military or police authorities who come to arrest him from time to time.

Perhaps the most harrowing sequence in the movie is the depiction of the Amritsar massacre, in which British forces fired open a crowd of completely peaceful demonstrators, resulting in more than 1,200 casualties, with something like 370 killed, including women and children.

Edward Fox plays the steely general who ordered his troops to fire for 10 minutes straight into the thickest parts of the crowd as they tried to escape. At the inquest hearing, asked if he would have used machine guns if the armored cars carrying them had been able to fit into the square, he tersely replies, "I think probably, yes."

A great number of actors enjoy small roles in the film, most of them British: Nigel Hawhthorne, Bernard Hill, Richard Griffiths, Trevor Howard, Ian Bannen, John Gielgud, even a very young Daniel Day-Lewis as a South African street punk who threatens Gandhi. John Ratzenberger even turns up as a jeep driver, though I swear his distinctive nasal honk has been dubbed.

"Gandhi" was nominated for 11 Oscars and won eight, including Best Picture, Actor, Director, Original Screenplay (by John Briley) and Original Score.

I don't really begrudge "Gandhi" its Best Picture win all that much. The Academy has a predilection toward certain pedigrees of filmmaking: historical, biographical costume dramas with a sense of profundity and gravitas. (This was part of the reason "12 Years a Slave" was such an easy pick to make earlier this year.) 

"E.T.," for all its wondrous magic, is still seen as a children's picture, and Oscars tend not to go the way of feel-good family pictures (or comedies).

The one Oscar I do think was a serious injustice was Best Costumes, which won over "TRON." Whatever you want to say about the video game adventure, it had a lot of groundbreaking special effects combined with elaborate, vividly original costumes.

For years I had made light of the Gandhi vs. TRON costume donnybrook by saying of the former film, "It was a guy in a white sheet!" Now that I've seen the movie again, I confess that there was much more to the costumes in "Gandhi" than the little man's simple homespun wrap. Gandhi wears natty period suits in the early period, and some of the other notable Indian figures are quite snappy dressers. Nehru, of course, even had a classic mid-century style of suit named after him, faithfully replicated in the film.

Still, I place more value on doing something differently from the way anyone has done it before than executing a familiar thing well. So even upon further reflection, I still think "TRON" got robbed in the costume award.

Actually, this sums up well my feelings about "Gandhi" as a whole. It's overall a pretty marvelous film, but in the end it's a fairly standard "great man" biopic. Perhaps that's why the movie's reputation has waned rather than waxed with the passing of years, and it is mainly remembered only as the film that "E.T." lost to.

 

Reeling Backward: "Magic" (1978)

"Magic" is one of those good movies that, for whatever reason, saw its reputation fade as the years went by. It got good reviews and box office when it came out in 1978, and arrived right around the beginning of the horror film boom of the late '70s and 1980s. But it didn't have the lasting cultural impact of, say, "Halloween," which came out the same year.

It's probably a mistake to toss "Magic" into the horror bin, since it's more a psychological portrait of a deranged mind than a movie whose primary vocation is to scare you. Certainly, director Richard Attenborough and screenwriter William Goldman (who adapted his own novel) are not names associated with cheap slasher flicks.

Still, it features a lot of the same tropes of horror films, and what fame it does have is usually framed in terms of Anthony Hopkins' performance as a creepy precursor to that in "Silence of the Lambs." And, of course, the kicker ending is in the classic horror mold -- giving the audience a final thrill while setting up the possibility of a sequel (wisely left unmade).

For the movie Hopkins had to learn a number of difficult skills: magic tricks with cards, coins, and of course ventriloquism. His work with the puppet Fats -- a leering, oversexed, R-rated version of his character's own crushingly repressed id -- is so good, in fact, that we wonder if there wasn't a little help from the sound looping department.

Hopkins' lips and teeth barely seem to move at all, and if it weren't for a slight tremor under the jawline, I'd chalk it up to Hollywood trickery.

Voice has often seemed an important element to Hopkins' body of work, much more so than most actors. The flat, metallic sound he gave Hannibal Lecter reflected the timbre of a man who had barely spoken for more than a decade (mostly because he deemed his few visitors unworthy of his speech). Hopkins is also known to be a really good mimic -- including dubbing the lines of the late Laurence Olivier for the restored footage of "Spartacus."

Here he employs a high, reedy tone that tip-toes right up to the edge of being shrill. For the dummy, it jumps whole hog right into screechy. In this sense the way Fats sounds parallels his looks, which are meant as a crude caricature of his partner's own visage.

Hopkins plays Corky Withers, a failed apprentice magician whose first attempt to appear on stage is a horrible disaster. The story opens with him relating the tale of his bombing in flashback to his dying mentor. The old man advises him that since he lacks anything like charisma or showbiz flair, he needs a gimmick.

Flash to a year later, and Corky is on the verge of hitting it big, playing sold out performances and appearing several times on "the Carson show." He has now incorporated Fats into the act, using him to tell off-color jokes and operate as his own personal court jester, hurling insults and put-downs at the guy working his levers.

His own TV show is in the works, and eel-ish agent Ben Greene (Burgess Meredith) advises him that the only formality is a medical exam. This sends Corky running off into hiding, leaving New York City for his hometown in the Catskills. It appears he knows the doctors would conclude something is wrong with his head, so he doesn't give them a chance.

There he hooks up with his old high school love interest, Peggy Ann Snow (Ann-Margret), whom he never had the courage to approach when they were youngsters. Now trapped in an unhappy marriage to a brute (Ed Lauter), she at first resists Corky's overtures -- played mostly through Fats' persona, who can flirt and cajole while Corky can't get past a stammer.

Ann-Margret has verve and sass, and seems to exist as a thinking, independent character who isn't just there to be acted upon by the male protagonist. That wasn't always an assured thing in the 1970s (or now).

Attenborough and Goldman tease the audience with the possibility of something supernatural going on with Fats -- that he's actually a sentient being who only plays the part of a ventriloquist's dummy. On a couple of occasions we seem to catch his head moving on its own, but it's always in the corner of the screen and/or out of focus.

Of course, the most glaring evidence is when Fats stabs Peggy Ann's husband to death with a switchblade -- it's shot to suggest that the dummy is wielding the knife. But we can see it's a human hand holding the blade, and after the man falls dead, dragging Fats to the ground with him, the curtain behind where the dummy was sitting parts to reveal Corky.

The point is that while Fats isn't really alive, Corky thinks he is. Their ongoing conversations with each other are actually symptoms of a split personality, or at least a manifestation of Corky's darker instincts. (Of course, this doesn't explain the ending, where Peggy Ann starts talking in a voice similar to Fats', suggesting Corky's delusion has been passed on to her.)

One of the things I most liked about the movie was the distinction Corky makes between "magic" and "tricks." Tricks, to him, are a set-up -- something the magician has arranged in advance with special equipment or a volunteer who's in on the gag. Corky insists that he performs magic, which he defines as simply a skill that has been practiced and honed so that it appears to be extraordinary.

Fats, for his part, tells Peggy Ann that "Corky does magic. I just do tricks," emphasizing the opposition between their warring personalities. In essence Fats is Corky's trick, the prop he uses to get the audience to pay attention to his magic act, which otherwise wouldn't impress them.

I haven't read Goldman's book, but I wonder if it explores the process of how Corky evolved from nobody loser to huge ventriloquism success. My guess is no.

It's merely supposition, but if I were to fill in the blanks for Corky's missing year, I would say he forced himself to sell out his purist magic principles by adopting the cheapest, moldiest carny sideshow trick: the ventriloquist dummy. Self-hatred drove him to endow the object of his parallel success and degradation with seething hatred.

Here's one thing I know: I would've loved to have seen the Corker & Fats television show.

"Magic" is a very good and borderline terrific proto-horror film that showcases Anthony Hopkins at his nervy best. Hopefully the movie can conjure up a new generation of admirers.

Reeling Backward: "In Which We Serve"

"In Which We Serve" starts off as an annoyingly British bit of World War II propaganda. You know the type -- lots of really fast talking, airy upper-crust accents, and stiff upper lip type of bravery.

In the first scene the H.M.S. Torrin is fatally crippled by a German dive bomber. After the captain -- played by Noel Coward, who also wrote the screenplay, co-directed, produced, wrote the musical score and, I think, personally provided all the catering -- gives the order to abandon ship, he and the other survivors give the sinking vessel three cheers.

The first half of the film is also filled with many cutaway scenes of the sailors' personal lives back home -- saying hello and goodbye to their wives, meeting soon-to-be wives, etc. They happen so rapidly that there's more smoochy time than fighting for a good long while, a when you're expecting a good ripping war movie, one feels like quoting the little kid from "The Princess Bride": "They're kissing again!"

But as the picture wore on I found myself liking it more and more. As the captain and his crew cling to a life raft awaiting rescue as German fighter planes strafe them, picking off more and more of them, they reflect on their lives aboard the Torrin, how it shaped them, and how they struggled to maintain that famously imperturbable English facade.

This was the only movie that Coward directed, reportedly at the behest of Winston Churchill himself, who was friend of the prolific playwright/composer. Coward decided he needed an able assistant to lean on, and chose a fellow named David Lean, who'd done some assistant directing and gained a reputation as a top-notch editor. Lean insisted on being listed as co-director, so "In Which We Serve" marks the first time Lean was credited as a director.

A number of young British actors have small roles in this picture, including James Donald and a very young Richard Attenborough, making his screen debut as a sailor who loses his nerve during a fight and deserts his post. Despite not receiving a screen credit, Attenborough has a considerable amount of screen time, including a great scene where the captain addresses his cowardice in front of the entire crew without naming him.

The battle scenes are a bit hammy -- there wasn't a lot of resources to put into a war picture in 1942, as one might imagine. So Coward/Lean rely upon a lot of stock footage that is only haphazardly woven together.

As I say, the second half of the film contains many very moving moments. The biggest impact is the scene in which Shorty Blake (John Mills), a low-ranking seaman, receives a letter from his wife.

She had been staying at the house of the chief petty officer when it was bombed, killing the officer's wife and mother. Blake goes up to the mess to let the chief, Hardy (Bernard Miles), know that the only members of his family were killed. His own wife was unhurt, and successfully gave birth to a baby boy. So the chief, in the midst of his own grief, congratulates the seaman for becoming a father.

What a moment -- and just one reason why I left "In Which We Serve" much more impressed than when I started.

3.5 stars