Film Review
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
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Sidney Gilliat film:
Waterloo Road (1945)
Film Synopsis
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...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.