Film Review
When it was first released in the UK just a few months after the
outbreak of the Second World War,
The
Stars Look Down had an immediate impact and added further
impetus to the demands for the full nationalisation of the British coal
industry, which finally came about in 1946. The film, a truncated
adaptation of A. J. Cronin's bestselling 1935 novel of the same title,
also had a significant impact on the British film industry after the
war. Not only did it establish Carol Reed as an internationally
renowned filmmaker, it also anticipated the gritty social realist
dramas that came to the fore in the 1950s. Today, like the novel
that inspired it,
The Stars Look Down
can so easily be dismissed as trite socialist propaganda, but it
remains one of the most important films in British cinema
history. Despite its obvious shortcomings, it still has the power
to move an audience with its brutally graphic portrayal of the social
injustices of the 1930s.
The film begins almost as a documentary, with a montage sequence that
eloquently depicts life in a typical mining community before the
war. This provides an effective prelude for the first of the
three acts that make up the film, an account of an unofficial strike
that results in a harrowing breakdown in social cohesion, morale and
the rule of law. The film's middle section is the weakest, a
cliché-sodden descent into Hollywood-style melodrama that is
best overlooked as it painfully exposes the shallowness of the
characterisation. Not even actors of the calibre of Michael
Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood can make their characters appear more
than dull two-dimensional archetypes, and the failure of the
screenwriters' attempts to render the main characters convincing is
what ultimately robs the film of its credibility and undermines its
impact.
Where
The Stars Look Down
redeems itself is in its spectacular final act which depicts the all
too predictable pit disaster, an outcome that was too visibly
signposted from the very start of the film. From the
expressionistic camera set-ups and high contrast lighting it is
tempting to think that Reed drew some inspiration from Georg Wilhelm
Pabst's
Kameradschaft (1931), which
contains a similarly horrific account of an avoidable mining
calamity. Whilst the disaster in Reed's films doesn't quite have
the terrifying visual impact of the subterranean nightmare conjured up
by Pabst in his film, it is a notable achievement for a British film of
this time, its emotional power heightened by the incredibly moving
performances by the actors playing the entombed miners.
The Stars Look Down may have
been a box office success that caught the British Zeitgeist for social
change in the early 1940s but it drew criticism in some quarters for
its relentlessly grim tone. The film was deemed so bleak that its
American release was delayed by eighteen months. When it was
finally released in the United States, the opening and closing
sequences were removed and replaced with a tacky narration piece voiced
by Lionel Barrymore. Even with these attempts to soften its
pessimistic mood, the film still has an apocalyptic gloom about it, one
of cinema's grimmer onslaughts against the sin of human greed and the
excesses of capitalism.
© James Travers 2013
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Carol Reed film:
Kipps (1941)
Film Synopsis
Miners at Neptune Colliery in Sleescale, a small town in the northeast
of England, refuse to work on a seam which threatens to flood the
mine. The stoppage is led by Bob Fenwick, an old miner whose son
David has recently won a scholarship to university and who hopes to use
his qualifications to improve the lot of ordinary miners. After
weeks without pay, near-starvation drives the miners to ransack a
butcher's shop. Some time later, David is assiduously pursuing
his studies at college when he runs into a former miner Joe Gowlan, now
a thriving bookmaker. It is through Joe that David meets
Jenny Sunley, a selfish opportunist who, when Joe dumps her, feigns an
interest in David. In love with Jenny, David marries her in haste
and gives up his studies. He manages to find a low-paid teaching
post at a school in his home town but loses this when his superiors
disapprove of his modern teaching methods. David ends up giving
private lessons to the son of the colliery's owner, Richard Barras.
Meanwhile, Jenny has become a social pariah, shunned by the miners and
their wives whom she obviously considers an inferior class. Bored
with her husband, she resumes her former relationship with Joe, who is
getting rich as a speculator. Through Barras' son, David discovers that
the pit owner is planning to re-open the seam which had previously been
abandoned because of the risk of flooding. When David's attempts
to oppose these reckless plans fail, a tragedy appears unavoidable...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.