| RATING: | 60% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
The theme here is one of knowing one’s place in the context of an alleged national family unchanging over the years.
There is a conflict here between Noel Coward’s view of steadfast humor, courage, determination and endurance and artistic insensibility, gentleness, respect for legality, xenophobia, sentimentality about animals, hypocrisy, exaggerated class distinctions and sport obsession.
Old-fashioned when it was made, this positively creaks with inauthenticity and wishful thinking. This would-be model for the tv Eastenders sums up what is good and bad about the White British; using characters that are supposed to represent national characteristics. A national family - if you will - that is a petit-bourgeois counterpart to the British Royals.
Inevitably, a domestic drama is woman-centered and both Celia JOHNSON and Kay WALSH steal the show with the sheer brilliance of their acting. The former supports the values of a dull, "respectable" (ie, obedient in the fascist sense; thereby contradicting its explicit anti-Hitler stance), underachieving and insubstantial life as the mother, while the daughter rebels against all of these. Politically reactionary and rose-tinted, the only realism here comes from the accurate and plain depiction of these two characters’ flaws.
The color scheme of the Technicolor here is extremely rich, striking and warm; suggesting an underlying humanity to the visual grime and dourness of those half-starved by wartime food rationing.
This is funny, too, in litotes; while never managing successfully to escape its stage origins to become a fully-fledged movie. The elliptical narrative just about hangs together by the quality of the wordsmithing and acting, but the audience’s empathy is somewhat stillborn by a drama trying to cover twenty years in less than two hours.
The great flaw in Coward’s writing is that he presents no viable alternatives to his own values, as if such did not exist when he knows that they do. This makes his more serious dramas one-sided affairs that suggest no real solutions to his characters’ problems - even when such solutions exist. Instead, he indulges in the creation and destruction of straw men like Karl Marx, as if he were a complete irrelevancy despite that fact that millions died because of him. This ivory-tower attitude is precisely what makes him such a very well-named playwright.
The corollary of this is that Coward worships values not for any intrinsic merit, but because he lacks the insight to perceive a valid alternative. Therefore, this depiction of Anglo-Britishness falls into Kipling’s inevitable trap of "And what should they know of England who only England know?"
Coward should have gotten out more.
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