THE WAY TO THE STARS (58)

Directed by: Anthony Asquith (1945)

Starring: John Mills, Rosamund John, Michael Redgrave, Douglass Montgomery

The Pitch: Life, love and death at an RAF airfield during the War, as it affects both the soldiers and the residents of a nearby village.

Theo Sez: Typical dialogue at a moment of high emotion : "I'm terribly sorry" ; "It's perfectly all right". It's a fine line between repressed feeling that's immensely moving (TOPSY-TURVY being the most recent example) and the same thing coming off quaint and artificial ; not entirely sure why this famous film fell on the wrong side (for me), but I suspect it may be a question of context, set as it is during WW2, with sudden death very explicitly a fact of life (we're constantly being introduced to characters who disappear just as we're getting to know them). The stiff upper lip has become something of a stylisation nowadays - when Mamet showed characters betraying no emotion in THE WINSLOW BOY (from the play by Terence Rattigan, who also wrote this one), it served as a kind of short-cut to another world (implicitly urging us to use our imaginations, both to fill in what the people were feeling and to get a handle on their world) ; it's a little obscene to see the same behaviour being applied to the real, recent wounds of a war just ended - and equally disconcerting to see the film milking the war's tragedies for all they're worth (the final death is especially egregious) then having everyone react to them so phlegmatically : it almost seems to cheapen our own emotions, mocking us for being moved. What's truly weird is of course that the film was a big hit at the time - and, according to "Halliwell's Film Guide", "instantly brings back the atmosphere of the war in Britain for anyone who was involved" - suggesting both that people used repression as a defence mechanism in a time of great stress and that DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES was even more accurate than it seemed : certainly, the film only comes alive in the pub sing-a-longs, bursting through its stultifying veneer of formality. Fascinating in many ways, and notably well acted, but these plucky Englanders (stolidly resisting both the Hun and the encroachment of American vulgarity) are very dated ; Rattigan did a more complex job on the national psyche in another flying movie 7 years later - THE SOUND BARRIER, where the stiff-upper-lip brigade court senseless death for the sake of national pride while the modern, scientific world slowly and surely renders them obsolete... [Irrelevant note : I stand by the above, but feel very foolish and embarrassed after re-reading Harlan Kennedy's wonderfully written, much more insightful appreciation of the film in the September / October 1996 issue of "Film Comment". If anyone connected with the current version of "FC" happens to be reading this, for God's sake get some real writers back in there!!! Thank you.]