The Next of Kin

I loved this film. It is so genuine, all the persons playing part in it are so very much alive and convincing, that you get under the skin of them all, whether they end up badly or not, even the spies and the crooks. This is not the only war film Winston Churchill wanted to ban, there were a number and several of the best, and this is one of them. Fortunately he didn't succeed in banning any of them.

Especially so long afterwards, 76 years later to be exact, it's immensely rewarding to see such an example of supreme realism all the way, of ordinary people, officers and soldiers, spies and victims, in their very various precarious situations, all under severe pressure, some under threats of death or worse, but all keeping on working and straining themselves for what everyone of them believes is for the best of all. The Germans are not depicted as crooks and villains, they are rather very well objectively filmed, like also the Britishers. They are all doing an extremely difficult job under extreme strain, and this was during the year when the war reached its deepest crisis. It is almost perfectly documentary in character all the way.

As ruthless as it is engrossing, this film deliberately lets us know early on who the spies are so we know precisely when the moments of peril subsequently arise.

There is as usual the dry humour one associates with even the most single-minded British wartime propaganda (some of the peripheral detail is even quite racy, and the wartime censor permitted a reference to cocaine addiction)!

Among a large cast of familiar faces the use of Mary Clare is particularly striking, while Phyllis Stanley is a fox as the film's Mata Hari. But the final scene with two old favourites manages to surpass all that has gone before.

Essential viewing: I would love to know what Goebbels made of it!

Considering I was hitherto unaware of this excellent film prior to it's being shown on "Talking Pictures" tv, what a revelation it was. With a stellar cast and a "careless talk costs lives" propaganda backcloth, this film ticks along nicely and, whilst providing a very serious message also manages to give the viewer a genuine thriller. Some fine performances here and good to see the likes of Jack Hawkins, Nova Pilbeam, Mervyn Johns, Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, to mention but a few, getting involved. Overall, a really terrific effort and yet another old British war story that leaves so many more recent movies standing.

This is a really good war film with none of the old boys club class divisions of so many other films. Action is very believable with the men being shot collapsing very realistically and the British soldier using his rifle back on the neck of a Nazi is as realistic as can be. Only annoyance was the British soldiers failure to look before running round corners or bunching up instead of spacing apart. It's not generally known but in late 30s huge numbers of German 'tourists' travelled UK photographing all military and industrial sites. It's well worth watching.

You're transported back to 1942. You, yourself are sitting in a cinema praying to God that you have personally not caused the deaths of hundreds of people. This isn't just a movie, it's a vital life or death message you need to heed.

These days we're familiar with spy stories. We've seen so many of those films that we know the tricks of the trade. To us now its hammer over the head approach in getting the message across seems oddly unsubtle but this was aimed at a 1942 population. The audience back then didn't have our experience, they didn't know what we now know. Without wanting to sound patronising, they did need educating, they needed to be told. The pitfalls of having loose lips had to be spelled out in black and white.

This isn't like a normal picture but neither is it a dry preachy lecture on how to behave. The filmmakers knew what they were doing: they knew how to engage with their audience, they knew they had to make this both informative, exciting and above all else, entertaining. It's very different to most wartime morale boosting movies, in fact as Churchill noted, it's quite depressing. That's what is so powerful about it - if you aren't careful, you, yes you might personally plunge the world into a living nightmare.

Besides being a genuinely entertaining piece of cinema, it's a genuinely important piece of history, an actual part of the war effort which we can now experience for ourselves.