World Film and Television Progress (1937-1938)

•• BLAST THE NAVY! Stick to the Shop, Boys, Stick to the SHOP ! IT is not improbable that, more than any other corporation of men, the Royal Navy has suffered at the hands of the cinema. For much longer than one cares to remember have its officers and men and their ships been made silly to serve the almighty Box-Office. There has been a surfeit of comic admirals with seductively unseduceable daughters, of Hentyish officers and low comedy men. Fortunately the ships themselves have retained much of their dignity; even the very smartest men about Wardour Street are up against something in the case of thirty or forty thousand tons of steel. Though they may rust, ferrous metals are not easily made febrile. But in Our Island Nation — an E.G.S. production in six reels — the Navy does not suffer in this old fashioned way. Up to a point the film is valid and magnificent, and never, I consider, have there hitherto been assembled such thousands of feet of good downright documentary film of ships' companies at work and of august photography of their ships at sea. Because of "the close and continuous co-operation of the Admiralty in the production of this film" — to quote E.G.S. — "the unit of ten cameramen worked in ships, aircraft and aircraft carriers of the Home and Mediterranean Fleets during the combined manoeuvres in the Atlantic last March, and at Gibraltar and Malta and in the Mediterranean during January, February and March." Greater facilities indeed could hardly have been afforded. There are sequences of admirable shots illustrating aspects of the routine on board a battleship on an ordinary day in harbour — the keeping of the ship and her armament clean ; the training of young seamen ; the work of boats' crews; minor refitting work on 14 machinery ; the Royal Marines at small arm drill, and all the rest of it ; also recreational activities on board and ashore after working hours. All this is informative and in every way good in the documentary tradition. But of course it is when the ships are at sea that we get the high lights. Ships gliding out of the Grand Harbour at Malta at dawn, with the mists smoking about the looming fortress walls ; battleships wallowing and plunging in a seaway — shot after shot superbly taken; the nine great 16-inch guns of Nelson or Rodney, all within the frame, firing their salvoes and, between them, for re-loading, swinging like chorus girls' legs ; the javelinlike destroyers weaving their lovely patterns against turbulent sea and sky; an aircraft attack on the fleet and the impression of the terrific repelling force of the multiple pompoms ; and a tremendous shot — taken broadside on — of a Queen Elizabeth class battleship shoving her bows into a big head sea as if she were pretending to be a submarine. If God ever answers cameramen's prayers then on that occasion he very certainly handed it to Raymond Elton on a salver. And, indeed, throughout the naval shots of the film, one takes one's hat off to those cameramen. What they must have had to put up with, one way and another, is just no armchair critic's business. Admitting that the film in effect is propaganda for the Navy, the angle of presentation of the main theme — that the job of the Fleet, the work of all these officers and men in their steel ships, is to ensure their country's food supply — is impeccable. Democratically it is pleasing that the hero — the human symbol of their devotion to duty — is not an officer but a rating; a chief yeoman of signals. Yes, up to a point — a high point — the film is valid and, in parts, magnificent. But what? There is our old college chum — that fetish for fiction at any cost. We are unconcerned here with whose fault that may be— we merely take note of it as a plain symptomatic fact. The Great Big Box-Office Bogey Who Lives In A Great Big Wood In Wardour Street must be propitiated. So even the august majesty of the Fleet must toe the line. Thus, superimposed upon its tremendous seastrewn activities, upon that valid documentary and that august beauty of great ships at sea, is this Story. The hero, the chief yeoman of signals,