The Foreman Went to France (1942) - film review

June 1940.   With the German armies poised to sweep into France, Fred Carrick, the foreman at a British munitions factory, takes it upon himself to recover three special purpose machines that have been loaned to the French.  By deceiving his superiors, Fred manages to wangle the necessary authorisation papers and is soon on his way to the factory in France where the machines are located.  When he reaches his destination, he finds the town has been evacuated and the factory deserted, apart from a young American secretary, Ann, who has stayed behind to destroy her employers’ paper records.  With the help of two British soldiers, Tommy and Jock, Fred and Ann manage to load the three vital machines onto a lorry and take to the road - their destination being a seaport in the southwest of France.   What follows is a harrowing odyssey across war-scarred France which will test the resolve of Fred and his new friends to the limit...

One of the most successful of Ealing Studios’ propaganda war films, The Foreman Went to France represented a significant shift from the company’s previous war films.  Prior to this, Ealing had pretty well stuck with the pattern of the 1930s war film, in which the heroes were invariably upper-crust English officers and the villains demonic Germans; the production values were generally shoddy, with most of the film shot on a soundstage with unconvincing back projection - a prime example of this is Pen Tennyson’s Convoy (1940).   The Foreman Went to France is an altogether different proposition, using real locations (admittedly Cornwall rather than France) and convincing model-work to achieve a far greater sense of realism.  The heroes are ordinary people of the kind that a contemporary audience could readily engage with - the fact that they include four nationalities (English, Welsh, Scottish and American) is an obvious attempt to foster solidarity between the wartime Allies of the kind that would be repeated in Ealing’s subsequent war films.  The plot (adapted from a story by J.B. Priestley) may appear contrived, but it is in fact based on the real-life experiences of munitions worker Melbourne Johns.  

The film is directed with considerable panache by Charles Frend, an Ealing regular who had previously made one notable war film,  The Big Blockade (1942), and would direct two more: San Demetrio London (1943) and The Cruel Sea (1953).  Assisted by Wilkie Cooper, arguably Britain’s finest cinematographer at the time, Frend delivers a tense, well-paced war-time drama that effortlessly combines exciting action sequences with powerful moments of intense reflection on the inhumanity of war, providing a template for subsequent British war films.  The film’s editor Robert Hamer and associate producer Alberto Cavalcanti would both later direct some of Ealing’s best-known films.  The score was supplied by William Walton, one of a number composed during his war years as a quid pro quo with the war office for being excused from military service.  

Topping the bill in his first dramatic role is Tommy Trinder, a one-time musical hall comedian who proved to be a major box office draw when he started appearing in films in the late 1930s.  Trinder’s presence in the cast list allows for some humorous digressions (including such cracking lines as: "It’s a pity that foreigners have to grow up..."), although this comes at the cost of weakening the film’s dramatic impact in its darker moments.  To his credit, Trinder avoids the screen-hogging tendency he showed in his comic films and gives a respectable character performance, one that effectively complements the more sober contributions from his co-stars Clifford Evans and Constance Cummings (who are both excellent).  An impossibly young Gordon Jackson makes his screen debut as Trinder’s likeable Scottish sidekick, whilst Robert Morlay does his best for the entente cordiale by imitating a treacherous French mayor (with limited success).  Although the propaganda subtext is laid on a bit thickly in places (particularly in the gratuitously francophilic ending), The Foreman Went to France is assuredly one of Ealing’s more respectable war films - one that vividly captures the mood of its time and faithfully reports some of the horrors visited on France in the days that preceded its inescapable fall to Nazi Germany.

© Derek Adamson 2011

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