The Gentle Sex

Previous reviewers have commented on lack of character development and lack of action. While there is some truth in both assertions, I think we do have to look at the essential purpose of the film, which is to show seven very different young women (though these ones do tend to be above average in looks) being turned into soldiers.

An army in wartime is a great mincing machine, taking individuals from all walks of life in at one end and turning them out at the other as soldiers. By definition, they are then no longer individuals but a member of a team that has been trained to achieve objectives jointly. The common experience of first training together and then learning to do the jobs they are assigned means that not only do the young women in the film mature fast as people but also they cohere as soldiers. Loyalty to their mates and their unit overrides personal needs, with their own strengths and weaknesses evened out in the common effort. For example, Barbara Waring has no particular feelings about the Germans, seeing them merely as efficient, but Erna Debruski (who is probably meant to be not French but Czech) has seen their lethal efficiency at work in her country and is driven by violent hatred.

Of the tasks soldiers have to do, some are everyday and boring while others are unique and exciting. We see two young men doing very dangerous work, one a fighter pilot and one a commando, but our seven girls end up driving lorries and manning anti-aircraft guns. Even so, they are all put to the test. The lorry girls have to drive through the night to get their trucks aboard a ship sailing to the front, possibly North Africa, and then have to rush fresh ammunition to the anti- aircraft battery during a raid. There the AA girls bring an attacking bomber down in flames.

From the seven young strangers who shared a railway compartment at the start to the trained and dedicated women who are doing demanding, even hazardous, jobs to protect their country, surely there has been huge character development and surely there has been action?

PS As for that music hall sketch, should we judge it by professional standards? Isn't it meant to be an amateur, who has volunteered to amuse her chums?

A mixed lot of young ladies put their differences aside and do their bit for the war effort.

This film is more than competently made mid- WWII, both produced and narrated by Leslie Howard. Obviously the film has a strong element of propaganda to it, but this isn't laid on with a trowel and doesn't dominate proceedings.

Some reviewers complain that there is a lack of plot. Well, this is meant to be a slice of life for average folk in wartime; there isn't meant to be 'a plot' for most protagonists, because mostly they are just following orders and not asking questions. You could argue 'nothing happens' because at the start of the film the war is on and at the end of the film the war is still on.

However to argue 'nothing happens' is to lose sight of the changes in the circumstances and internal make-up of each of the seven ladies; they all change and develop in their own way, and each is a little more revealed as a person by the end of the film; by the end we see that they are perhaps more disparate than we thought at the start, but for different reasons.

Given the film only runs for 90 minutes and there are seven ladies, the character development is arguably somewhat subtly done. A good number of their trials and tribulations were ones which, at the time, a good fraction of the audience would have been able to relate to. Particularly revealing is the reaction of the ladies to successful ack-ack gunnery late on in the film.

It would have been very easy to dwell exclusively on the matter in hand but this film also discusses the future, eg how society might change in future years. All this at a time when it was by no means clear what the outcome of the war might be.

If you watch this film you might conclude that you would be able to see where you were going by the light of blackout-specification headlamps. Well this is a piece of cinematic licence; the amount of light projected through the usual two tiny slits was barely enough to be seen by let alone see by. Accident rates on wartime roads in the UK skyrocketed; some believe that the loss of life so incurred was greater than if the headlights had been left unmodified (and visible to enemy aircraft).

This film is particularly bittersweet because it was Leslie Howard's last film. Just weeks after it was released, he was lost; the Luftwaffe shot down a scheduled BOAC flight over the bay of Biscay which had only civilians on board. A great loss to cinema; we only have films like this to stand tribute to him, and the recently made (and rather good) 'The Man Who Gave a Damn' documentary.

Given the sort of film this is and when it was made, I'm giving it eight out of ten.

Read a review that said women will enjoy it better than men. Rubbish it's a nice story and a good watch. Just a story about people and their experiences. You warm to the ladies and there worries and fears and successes. I've watch it a few times, it's a great afternoon film. Spotting young versions of actors that you've seen as old men growing up, like the odd Dads Army actor looking very youthful.

So give it a try, good characters and enjoy a story from a simpler and more naive time. It will warm the cockles of your heart. I always enjoy an old black and white film, they're from a different world.

This film follows the experiences of seven women who find themselves together in the Auxillary Territorial Services during the war. The film begins at a train station where the narrator picks out six young women at random. These six ladies - charming but indistinguishable to me - end up in the same carriage of a train on their way to their base. The seventh, Gwen Hayden, joins the others as the train is about to depart. It's a promising start - we eagerly anticipate what will happen to these seven ladies throughout the course of the war. We assume that they'll all end up going their separate ways, but will perhaps reunite at the end of the war, having each been through some unique and fascinating experiences.

Unfortunately, nothing much happens to any of them. They arrive at their base, engage in some vacuous conversation, and then it's on with the mundane duties of the Auxillary Territorial Services. The first fifteen minutes or so after they arrive is basically a montage of footage showing the ladies and their colleagues being regimented by their superiors, during marching practise and so on, and contains very little entertainment value, except for a couple of attempted visual jokes, including one lady soldier who turns the wrong way and ends up marching away from all the others.

Perhaps the problem with the rest of the film is that it's a little too honest. There's no drama and there are no complications - just a group of ladies fulfilling the mundane duties of lorry driving, drilling and manning ack-ack batteries, and prattling on in between. The almost complete lack of male characters makes the conversation even more intolerable. Occasionally the characters ponder the purpose of the war and what they're really fighting for, but their discourse fails to scale any great philosophical heights. There's a melodramatic spiel by a French woman in the middle of the film, in which she tells some of our British ladies about what the Nazis did to her father and brother, but it fails to stir us amidst the jollility of life in the Services. Rather, it seems like a contrived attempt by the scriptwriters to provide some semblance of drama.

The only other drama that occurs - in fact, one of the few events that occurs in this basically plotless film - happens towards the end of the film, but unfortunately it is too little too late. This film is nothing more than a slice of British life during the war. None of the seven ladies embark on any great adventures, they never experience the hardships of war and since the film only scratches the surface of its seven main characters, at the end one is left feeling as though we hardly know them any better than we did when we first met them at the train station. Women will probably enjoy this film more than men, but there is really nothing in it to make it worthy of recommendation.

The most interesting thing about this film is that it was Leslie Howard's last film before he was killed--shot down by German planes en route to Lisbon during the war. He both directed and narrates this story which was meant both to celebrate the work of women in the army as well as bolster the spirits of the folks at home. In many ways, the film seems pretty dull...or at least kind of petty through much of the picture. After all, the women's boot camp seemed pretty easy and their work not especially hazardous. Fortunately, by the end of the picture you see real sacrifices and difficulties--something you find yourself longing for because through so much of the film the ladies don't seem exposed to many hardships. Because of this, if you see the movie, stick with it...it's worth it. For a similar sort of film, though a bit better, try "So Proudly We Hail"--the story of a group of nurses and the serious hardships they endure in the early days in the Pacific War.