Millions Like Us

Millions Like Us

Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder (1943)

Widely considered a classic of its kind, this film is certainly full of interest to historians of British cinema and of the home front during World War II.  Appreciating what Millions Like Us must have meant to many who saw it on its original release shouldn’t, however, require overrating it as something more than effective propaganda.  As a piece of drama, it’s mostly stodgy – much inferior to, for example, the post-war Ealing picture Dance Hall, which so satisfyingly combines social history and engaging human stories.

At first, Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, who also wrote the screenplay, address their audience directly.   The names of the main actors in the opening credits, which appear over shots of people going about their daily business, are followed by the following words on screen:  ‘and millions like you in … Millions Like Us’.  A brisk, chummy voiceover asks:

‘Remember that summer before the War – those gay, coupon-free days when eggs still came out of shells and the government only took some of your money?’

Accompanying footage of seaside holiday crowds, the voiceover recalls the time ‘when you could still slip up on a piece of orange peel’.  A jokey legend appears to remind people who’ve not seen one in years that ‘The orange is a spherical pulpish fruit of reddish-yellow colour’.  Gilliat and Launder then introduce us to a particular group of holiday-makers.  The Crowson family sets out for their annual trip to the south coast and arrives at the boarding house where they always stay.   The camera follows demure Celia Crowson (Patricia Roc) and her savvy, flighty elder sister Phyllis (Joy Shelton) into the social life of the resort before suddenly switching attention to a concert party.  Two of its members talk backstage about whether war with Germany is imminent.  One of them is complacent (‘They said that last year but it blew over …’), the other more anxious.

The abrupt shift from this conversation into Britain at war and under siege is striking, and raises hopes of an ambitious patchwork narrative.  Those hopes are short lived.  There’s a semi-documentary interest in the sequences shot in actual dance halls, factories and so on but Millions Like Us soon settles into more conventional storytelling.  The plot centres on Celia Crowson’s experiences working in a factory making aircraft components, her romance with Fred Blake (Gordon Jackson), a shy, courteous flight sergeant, based at a nearby RAF bomber station, and their tragically brief marriage.  In the event, Celia and Fred are increasingly upstaged by the livelier verbal sparring of a couple who are chalk and cheese rather than made for each other.  Jennifer Knowles (Anne Crawford) fancies herself a cut above and resents slumming it in a factory.  Charlie Forbes (Eric Portman), the decidedly unromantic factory supervisor, has no time for Jennifer’s la-di-da ways but is still attracted to her.  (Anne Crawford is amusing.  Eric Portman’s acting genuinely is a cut above.)

The cast also includes Moore Marriott (as Celia and Phyllis’s father) and the reliably good Meg Jenkins (Celia’s good-hearted, university-educated factory colleague and hostel roommate).  Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne provide supposed light relief in a railway carriage – a lame attempt to repeat the success of their Charters-and-Caldicott turns in The Lady Vanishes and Night Train to Munich (the latter written by Gilliat and Launder).  In stark contrast, the essential solemnity of Millions Like Us is conveyed throughout by the use of Beethoven’s Fifth on the soundtrack.  The music may be German but it’s unarguably impressive.

22 April 2017

Author: Old Yorker