Carve Her Name with Pride (1958) - film review

London, 1940.  On the pretext of celebrating Bastille Day with a Frenchman, Violet Bushell accosts Etienne Szabo, an officer in the French Foreign Legion, and invites him back to her home for dinner.  Within a few days, they have fallen in love and decide to marry.  Three years later, Etienne is dead, killed in action at El Alamein, but Violet is consoled by the fact that he gave her a beautiful daughter.  A few months later, Violet is contacted by British Intelligence and persuaded to work as a spy.  Her first mission is to liaise with a resistance group in Rouen and report back on how many members of the group are still in operation.  Her work done, Violet returns to England and intends to stay there to bring up her daughter.  But then she is offered a second mission, far more dangerous than the first, and she knows that her wartime adventure is far from over...

Carve Her Name with Pride was a valiant attempt to apply the social realist style that had become prevalent in British cinema from the mid-1950s to a conventional wartime melodrama.  The results are not entirely successful – the story is predictable, the pace is uneven and the sparse action sequences appear half-hearted and lacking in tension.   With its stiff-upper-lip portrayal of heroism, the film occasionally has the feel of an old wartime propaganda piece.  What saves it is a captivating performance from Virginia McKenna who, in one of her career-defining roles, paints a potent portrait of courage and resolve by conveying the ordinariness of the character she plays.  It is McKenna who gives the film its appeal and stark emotional power.  

The film is a faithful adaptation of R.J. Minney’s novel of the same title which recounts the wartime exploits of Violette Szabo.  The cryptographer and writer Leo Marks collaborated on the screenplay and allowed his well-known poem The life that I have is all that I have to be used.   In addition to McKenna, the film features several well-known British actors of the period, notably Paul Scofield and Jack Warner (better known to British TV audiences at the time as Dixon of Dock Green), and French cinema star Maurice Ronet.   

Lewis Gilbert directed the film, after having recently made another inspirational wartime drama, Reach for the Sky (1956).  Although Gilbert is best remembered for his uncompromising, documentary-style dramas, he is also known as the man who directed three of the most lavish James Bond movies, including The Spy Who Loved Me (1977).  Watch out for Michael Caine in a small uncredited role – he would subsequently play the lead in Lewis Gilbert’s classic Alfie (1966).

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