Millions Like Us

One of the many war effort films Britain churned out between 1940 and 1945, this one attempted to get women recruited into industry. We watch Celia as she gets her call-up and has to leave her family to work in a factory and stay in a hostel. There she meets college graduate Gwen, flighty Sloane Jenny, and common as brass Annie, amongst others. She grows to like her job, and also finds love with a Scots flyer, Fred Blake. But this being a semi-documentary war film, things don't end up as happily as you'd hope.

The cast is fine - Patricia Roc and Gordon Jackson headline as Celia and Fred, with Anne Crawford as Jenny and Eric Portman as down-to-earth foreman Charlie. There's also a bit for Radford and Wayne to do (an amusing scene where their travelling soldiers in a railway carriage get overrun with evacuees). Megs Jenkins also plays Gwen with some style and pathos. Patriotic hokum it may be, but I like the foregrounding it gives to the women (especially Jenny, who I quite like by the end of it) and the respect it gives to the factory girls and what they did for their country.

Yesterday evening Turner Classic Movies previewed "Millions Like Us," so it was the first time I saw the film. It may not be the best British wartime movie, but it is truly a gem in its own way. I was a child during the war, growing up in a small town in the Midwest of the U.S. Although I didn't have knowledge of what Britain was going through, I heard about it and knew how Americans reacted once we were in the war. The family interactions in "Millions Like Us" were totally believable...the family getting ready to go on holiday in the summer of 1939 and later the scene in the kitchen when Celia announces she has been called up.

My father recruited workers in Missouri and Oklahoma for an ordinance plant during the war. Most of the workers he recruited--whom he personally put on trains headed north--were women who were happy to leave those depressed areas for higher pay, excitement and contribution to the war effort. Women were glad to go to work in factories, and in 1945 they were happy to give it up for marriage and so returning soldiers could have jobs. That's just the way it was then, and one can't put a different spin on how people behaved.

I hope to see this film again.

Millions Like Us (1943)

This fast paced, light hearted and heartbreaking film about England during WWII starts great and gets better as it goes. The amazing thing, really, is that it was shot during the war and maintains a grim honesty as well as a necessary optimism. Hitler has to be defeated—but the movie makers, and all the actresses in their homespun honesty, did not know he would be.

There are some who label this purely a propaganda war film, and that the gritty lack of romanticizing is part of preparing the populace for the overwhelming nature of the problem. And somehow in an hour and a half you really sense how a country could be turned inside out. The cheerful holiday at the shore that starts the movie turns to families being broken up, women having to work in factories, and eventually news of family members never to return, killed in action.

The American documentary that comes to mind here is "Rosie the Riveter," about the enormous contributions of women in hard core industry (the poster to that shows a woman with a jackhammer). This is a fictional telling of the same idea, and it's far more enjoyable and in fact moving. (The poster for this film just shows a woman's face, with family members in the background—this is about the hearts and souls of the situation.)

I don't think of this as a true "propaganda" film for some simple reasons (all of which make me like the movie more). Foremost, it's not a government sponsored or requested movie—it's not technically in service to some greater force (as propaganda really has to be). It does of course support the home cause, the war against Hitler, and it does so in a way that the audience will pay to see. That's the bottom line here—this is a really compelling romance about real people in a real contemporary world that the audience knows very well. There are countless people to relate to, and details to recognize. The love story aspects are not developed very well, but they are overflowing with sincerity.

Wikipedia mentions that the movie was a "hit" in the USSR, which was also fighting Hitler. And the reason (to me) is simple: it's about regular people, the plight of the working class. There are few pretensions here (if any). And the filming is unusually tightly framed, by which I mean the compositions fill the frame, almost cramping the space on the screen, and it makes for a pleasure to watch, and makes for a lot to look at in every frame. And then the acting itself, without star power, is so straight forward and believable, even the slower moments make you pay attention.

A great film in a vein very very different than, say, "Casablanca" in 1942 (which some people also label as propaganda!). And it came out the same year, and in a way had the same larger context, though beyond that there is nothing in common at all. The point being that this is a terrific film on many levels once you let go of the more polished, and more immediately impressive American films of the same time.

It was not until the invention of photography that we began to know what history was really like. Before that we had to rely on representations through art, writings and imaginings. But with the Crimean and American Civil War we could see the actual people who took part so that their suffering began to take on a poignancy that we never quite experienced from depictions of previous conflicts. Two dimensions were still missing that were to give records of history added immediacy, movement and sound. The first was in place to capture the cataclysmic events of World War I and the second was there to give the period of World War II a vividness that could be grasped by all future historians. As if to back up all that acreage of newsreel footage we have the feature films of the period often shown in the dead offpeak viewing times of morning and afternoon television to give us some idea of what people felt during what is rapidly becoming long ago. Although generally highly fictionalised they gave closeup substance to what in newsreels were extras in crowd scenes. As a boy who grew up in the '40's I feel equipped to vouch for those films of the period that conveyed something of the authenticity of what things were like then. I would rate "Millions Like Us" pretty highly in this respect. As a film it cannot compare with several others such as Carol Reed's "The Way Ahead" or Cavalcanti's "Went the Day Well". It lacks their sense of style, is often clumsy in continuity - the transition from peace to war is none too clearly presented - and has some unconvincing miniature mockups such as the oft repeated shot of a factory roofscape at night with toy searchlights beaming away in the background. Much of the photography has the amateurish look that afflicted much British cinema of the period, that the critic C.A. Lejeune once referred to as "like photographs from a plumbing catalogue". (Someone please let me know if I have got this wrong as I am quoting from vague memory). But in spite of these reservations it gets close to how people looked and spoke in those days, what their homes looked like and how they passed their time. It does it without recourse to caricatures of class stereotypes or sentimentality so that it remains one of the most honest films of its type. I have vivid memories of my mother working part-time in a munitions workshop just along the road from our house in Pinner. It wasn't a vast factory like the one in the film, more like a converted garage. I remember her making a part of a shell just like the ones that Patricia Roc, Anne Crawford and Megs Jenkins made. There was even a foreman figure dressed in the same type of overall as Eric Portman. For me those factory scenes in particular accurately represent a small part of our history.

To modern sensibilities the title may sound patronising, but if you're tempted to dismiss this as standard WWII propaganda fare, think again. Set among the female workforce of a heavy engineering factory, this perceptive and thoughtful screenplay explores the disruptive effect of Total War upon family life, established behavioural norms and, crucially, the class distinctions that were still dominating British society at this time. As Time Out critic Nigel Floyd put it: "Raises pertinent questions about what exactly was being fought for: the restoration of the old order, or the foundation of a new one? Intelligent entertainment at its best."

It is also unusual for the era in its unabashed portrayal of young women as actively sexual beings with a healthy, even predatory, interest in men. The sole - and glaring - exception to this model is the central heroine, Celia. Patricia Roc's portrayal of her is so overwhelmingly timid, self-effacing and prudish, it comes as little less than miraculous that she manages to bag Fred: a young Airman in the shape of Gordon Jackson. Mind you, he's no firebrand either: together, they make an infuriatingly ineffectual couple.

Far more interesting is the spiky relationship of social opposites Jennifer (Anne Crawford) - privileged/haughty/indolent - and no-nonsense factory foreman Charlie (Eric Portman). In this pair's uneasy mutual attraction and verbal sparring we see echoes of Shakespeare's Beatrice & Benedick.

N.B.: Watch out for a lovely cameo by Irene Handl as the newlyweds' landlady.