The Gentle Sex

The trick in this movie is keeping track of the seven girls - seven dual main characters. All are very different young ladies who, by chance, manage to travel in the same train compartment off to their base. What makes this extra fun is the commentary by Leslie Howard throughout - he spies on the bustling station and selects six candidates, so is it any coincidence that these six strangers end up together? (The seventh, Gwen, almost misses the train and is the last addition to the group)

The easiest four to keep track of are the lorry drivers. Beautiful blonde Anne who loses a loved one in the war, foreigner Erna who is desperate for revenge on the Nazis that destroyed her family, chirpy Scots lass Maggie, who always has a sweet and a smile, and no-nonsense Joan, who comes across as bossy and stand-offish, hiding the fact that she's just as shy and lonely as the rest.

Then we have the remaining three - good time girl Dot, Gwen who "won't be left behind any more" and the little half-pint, Miller, who "finally gets her gun". She's the baby of the group, and is the hardest to keep track of because she is practically Lilli Palmer's twin - it's only when they speak that one can tell the difference!

If you enjoyed films like "Millions Like Us" and "2000 Women" then you'll love this one. An easy 10/10!

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.

My view is that this film has nothing to compare it with wartime productions like "Millions like us", let alone the Powell and Pressburger masterpiece, "A Canterbury Tale". While the production and acting standards are quite good, the whole thing simply lacks pace and sufficient development of either plot or characters to keep the viewer's interest. Rather than attempting to follow the fortunes of seven new recruits to the women's forces in the second world war, (and then dissipating the time covered by the film trying to keep up with all of them), Howard would have done better to focus, (as in the two afore-mentioned films), on a small number of characters and investigate the way in which the relationships between them develop and intensify and, in THESE ways, allow the message of "why we are fighting" to come through much more clearly than in the stiff upper lip, (except, of course, for Lilli Palmer playing "the excitable foreigner"!), rendering of patriotic platitudes which the film produces. A disappointment and, in my view, now mainly of interest only for what it conveys of "established" views of women's war time endeavours in 1943 rather than as visual entertainment which, while being revelatory of its own period, ALSO far transcends this and provides entertainment and reflection of a much deeper nature as well. Right, let's roll "A Canterbury Tale" again and see how it SHOULD have been done!

This film should be watched with an understanding of its intentions, which was to bolster morale and pay tribute to the ordinary British women serving in the ATS, as well as encourage recruitment. There were many propaganda films made around this time, some better than others, but they all had a huge impact on helping the war effort. These were not career soldiers, remember. They'd been called up from offices, shops and factories from all over Britain and did a fantastic job. Practically every British family had at least one female member serving in the ATS during the second world war. We're reminded over and over again, that these women were doing the kind of work normally reserved for men and more important were valued for it! Every so often, a bystander will remark on how hard they work. The film lost no opportunity to remind a tired and increasingly demoralised British public what the war was about and why it was important not to give in.