World Film and Television Progress (1938)

Walter Vv angers BLOCKADE Reviewed by /Vlarion fraser IT is a pity that Blockade is a war picture. It is a very great pity that it is a picture of a war that is happening so very near to us. The picture may be a success in America. America is very far away from Spain. But it will not be a success in Britain. Word will get around. It is an unpleasant picture to see. Children are shown crying, starving and hoping without reason. Women are shown despairing, dying. The fact of war is shown naked. That fact is food or lack of it, destruction, suffering, betrayal. And at the crux of it is the human heart and mind that is capable at the same time of sympathy and callousness; capable of sacrificingthelivesand untold sufferings of others for the sake of one wretched life that happens to be one's own. The film will fell you that this precious life, this precious self is walking the pavements of London, and the pavements in all the towns of Britain. Its eyes are shut and because they are, children are starving, limbs are being torn asunder, families are being parted, human affections and human emotions are being petrified. This is the message of Blockade: "Where is the conscience of the world?" Blockade is a film directed by William Dieterle and in it Madeleine Carroll and Henry Fonda play the principal parts. Despite all the trappings of studios: assistant directors, continuity girls, back projection, niggers, booms, blimps and all the rest : despite numerous crudities and cliches, a good deal of sincerity has crept into the film. And how it has happened is really a miracle. One has the sensation that a play is being acted and that the players are about to push the camera aside and take their bow for an indifferent but conscientious performance. At the end Henry Fonda faces the audience, schoolboyishly, crudely earnest and asks "Where is there peace?" The film is pointed to this question mark. Boy and girl romance, parting, misunderstanding, reconciliation, reward — all are there, but there is no felicity and little happiness. There is no happy ending. The sweethearts know that there is no such thing and the film tries to say that there is no such thing for sweethearts anywhere — a truth that the screen has seldom revealed. BZ.OCA'/i.Di: is not the sort of picture we pay to see. It takes the flesh off the bones of our conventions; it strips off respectability and habit and tradition. It kills our dreams and if we are cowards it makes us afraid. It is very much too near the truth and too near home. It is not really important that the air warfare is taking place in Spain : it would not be really important that the bombs were falling in Kensington Gardens among the prams and nursemaids. The important thing is that the cause of these horrors is in our own minds that shift with every wind of propaganda, that make cowards or heroes of us at will, that shut out the main issues and concern themselves with the minor ones, that seek ease and comfort for the body at the expense of a thousand other bodies that are broken and gangrened. No doubt you will refuse to see Blockade now that you have been told what it is all about. Indifference is the greatest panacea for what ails us. There is one hope — that we have used the drug so long it will refuse to work. However, an account of the film story may tempt you to see it. It follows all the rules of movie scenarios. The story begins in Spain with a stock situation. An expensive young woman in an expensive car has a road accident. A young peasant (with the help of picturesque, fluteplaying sheep-herd) succours her. They fall in love. War breaks out. The peasant leads the neighbours in defending his land against the enemy, and is given a special commission to track down spies. The girl's father is a spy. The peasant shoots him and the two meet over his dead body. He arrests the girl and a convenient tete-a-tete is arranged by an air raid. The girl escapes to headquarters where she meets the villain (already known to her) and his superior officer, both of whom are working against the party to which they ostensibly belong. They enrol her as a spy and she is to arrange for the destruction of a food ship. This food ship is to save from starvation the entire population of a beleaguered town. She conveys the message to destroy the ship, but on seeing the frightful conditions in the town, repents and tries to cancel instructions. This is unsuccessful and a ship entering harbour is blown up. But the ship is a decoy, not the food-ship. The girl has cleared herself as far as the peasant is concerned but she has betrayed her chiefs. She and the peasant are about to be shot when at the psychological moment the villains are revealed, the sweethearts saved and, of course, the people are fed. The astonishing truthful moments in the film come not from the story but from the material it has used from contemporary history. That this should happen in Hollywood is indeed a miracle. 127