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THE FILM SINCE THEN
that the Nazi who was its villain came off far better than the exponents of democracy. The action of the latter in tearing the Nazi to pieces was hardly the finest example of democracy in action. Hitchcock is now set up in independent production in the hope of regaining some of his former freedom, but it is safe to say that he will remain a master entertainer in a limited field.
Carol Reed's first film to reach America, Night Train to Munich (1939), a melodrama in the Hitchcock manner, signalled the arrival of a first-rate British film craftsman. He had, I understand, previously made Laburnum Grove (1936) and Bank Holiday (1938), unpretentious films that at least were related to everyday things although too studiobound to be convincing. The Stars Look Down, reaching America almost simultaneously with Night Train to Munich but withheld from release until John Ford's How Green Was My Valley had played the circuits in 1942, was in my opinion a major work. To compare it with Pabst's Kameradschaft, or with certain Russian films, does not altogether do it justice. It was richer, less symbolic, and more deeply rooted in human living than any film dealing with the working-class that I can recall. Stripped of all paraphernalia of ' agit-prop ', it cross-sectioned and chronicled one grim episode in Labour's struggle, displaying all the forces momentarily involved, and implying always that this is but a segment of a historic process. To appreciate this film as a step forward in the picturisation of social reality, one must compare it with the numerous films, some of them by important film-makers, which lost the actual lives of the people in a maze of argumentation and symbolism. But this, one felt, one knew, was actually what it meant to be chained to a coal mine for life. Moreover, the protagonist (played by Michael Redgrave) was not a ' class character ' but a living person. His behaviour-chart was the outcome of influences which presented themselves on the screen as parts of his environmental reality rather than as abstract dialectical forces. I would not be surprised if future historians decided that
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