Millions Like Us (1943) - film review

England, during WWII.  Celia Crowson is an ordinary young woman who lives at home with her sister and her old father, whilst her brother serves in the army.  She has a romantic view of the war and imagines herself serving in the air force, so she is disappointed when she is drafted into working in a munitions factory.  She soon settles into her new life and things take an unexpected turn when she meets a young airman named Fred Blake...

Millions Like Us is one of a plethora of wartime propaganda films made in England during the Second World War.  This one stands out from the crowd for a number of reasons.  Firstly, it is concerned not with the battlefield heroics of the armed services but with the hardship and sacrifice of those – mainly women – who stayed behind to support the war effort in a less adventurous but equally important capacity.  Secondly, the film adopts a strikingly realist approach – all of the characters are ordinary types that anyone in the audience would recognise, the privations of wartime are frequently alluded to, and the cinematographic and narrative style is far closer to that of a documentary than traditional melodrama.  It is this trenchant realism which made the film such an effective propaganda film in the 1940s and which makes it an important document of social history today.  

The film was directed by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, who were an established writing team, credited with such films as The Lady Vanishes (1938) and Night Train to Munich (1940).  It is one of three wartime films that Gilliat directed during WWII – the others being Two Thousand Women (1944) and Waterloo Road (1945).  Gilliat and Launder would later bring us The Belles of St. Trinian’s (1954) and its equally riotous sequels.  

Whilst the tone of Millions Like Us is, for the most part, downbeat and at times rather bleak, it is not a depressing film.  It doesn’t shy away from the fact that the war was causing immense anxiety and loss to millions of ordinary folk, but it offers plenty by way of encouragement.   There are also some nice comic touches to lighten the mood periodically.  The best of these are the cheeky asides featuring the buffoonish Charters and Caldicott (played brilliantly by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne); they were first seen in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938), and kept cropping up in several films of the 1940s.

© James Travers 2008

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