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18. THE ENGLISH GIRL IN UNIFORM
It is to be hoped that this above all will be preserved for all time, not only as a fundamentally true document of the war, but as a very tender document. The situations are unique in the sense that one feels they happened to that particular man and to that particular girl, but normal in the sense that such things did happen under war conditions at home. It is a fitting companion to the American
film THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES.
Whatever may have happened abroad the English girl at the outbreak of war was not as a rule used to wearing uniform and she inevitably became different and yet still the same. There was a new freedom and yet a new constraint, a new charm and a new lack of charm. There was, moreover, a mixing of the classes.
Some of the less dramatic moments of the film are the most memorable. The scene, for example, where the service girl changes from her uniform into civilian dress to please the man she is spending the week-end with, is handled with complete frankness yet with extraordinary delicacy. No praise could be too high for the simplicity of Joan Fontaine living the part of Prue; she is, as Clive says, very beautiful but she is an ordinary believable girl for all that. Nor has there been on the stage or on the screen a more believable or lovable father than Prue's father, Philip Merivale, and the scene in which she confides in him avoids all the old pitfalls of the cinema and achieves all the triumphs of sincerity of the new type of film on which it has embarked. Possibly one of the most living scenes, without a tinge of false sentiment, is Prue's meeting with the cockney fireman. She is walking amongst the ruins in the early morning after a blitz wondering whether she will find her soldier alive or dead. "We are going to win the war," the cockney fireman says with absolute conviction and without a trace of affectation. "We are going to see a better England because most of us didn't give up. So don't you give up either, ma'am."
No one would have believed some years ago when the cinema was still so full of rhetoric and rubbish that a film like this, so simple and yet so full of the meaning of
its time, could be produced. It shows once again that the cinema has proved itself in a very few years not only a sensitive and subtle means of expression but a unique and truthful method of keeping a record of bygone days in all their freshness, their humanity and charm.
THIS ABOVE ALL. (1942.)
A cockney W. A. A. F. arranges a "blind" date for Prue {Joan Fontaine) .