Against the Wind

This unusual but typically low-key product from Ealing Studios (best-known for a series of classic comedies made between 1946-1955) is a semi-documentary depiction of the saboteur training undergone by a band of hand-picked civilians and their subsequent missions behind enemy lines; therefore, in both theme and quality, it anticipates the later, more acclaimed Hollywood offering DECISION BEFORE DAWN (1951) which, incidentally, I just caught up with a couple of weeks ago. The cast is mostly made up of the usual familiar British faces (James Robertson Justice, Gordon Jackson, Jack Warner, Robert Beatty, etc.) but 2 major roles are, very effectively, portrayed respectively by French and Canadian actors: Simone Signoret (appearing in her first English-speaking film when on the verge of attaining stardom on her home ground) and Paul Dupuis. Being in this company, there cannot fail to be lighter moments – especially during an early sequence where our heroes are being shown the tools of their trade i.e. booby-trapped dead rats, manure and even sausages! – among the continuous perils and occasional tragedies they have to face away from home (including being forced to cold-bloodedly execute a compromised companion and swallow the omnipresent suicide pill to escape torture at the enemy's hands).

First the good bits and that mainly centres around Simone Signoret, who as usual is excellent. But this poses a problem, for the "love-affair" of the film, which involves her and a young Gordon Jackson who looks and acts as though he had never been out of Cowdenbeath. So hardly the material to interest a sophisticated European lady as played by Ms. Signoret. Not good casting, indeed one of the more ridiculous romantic combinations in the history of motion pictures.

That being said the film, in black and white, has some atmosphere, tension and you feel that you are there, which is important. The rather bizarre casting continues, however, with the unlikely scenario of a rather elderly Jack Warner playing the part of a commando. Still if he was still an active policeman at 80 years of age in Dixon of Dock Green , who are we to argue with his credentials. In addition he is part of the two most memorable scenes in the film, one when he meets the Irish girl working for the Germans and secondly when he has to contend with a very angry Ms. Signoret holding a pistol.

James Robertson Justice is, as always, very believable as the organiser of the missions working from base and there are some good supporting actors who play around his character. For some reason the part played by John Slater irritated me from start to finish, though the rest of the cast, including Robert Beatty, were sound if a touch wooden.

I would summarise this film as a pleasant and nostalgic way to spend a rainy afternoon and if it is on sale for around £5 then worth a look.

I did not know this film about French Belgian resistance army. I did not know either that Chuck Crichton made such non comedy features, and I am not disappointed at all. And Simone Signoret gives here one of the three French partisan character she had - and maybe more, I don't exactly know - in her career. Before Jean-Pierre Melville's ARMEE DES OMBRES and René Clément's LE JOUR ET L'HEURE. She is awesome here and I don't understand the reviews against this movie. I just discover it after decades of film passion. Later is better than never.

I got this as one of a number of recent acquisitions and kept putting off watching it because war films have to be very good to hold my interest and I wasn't all that interested in a British war film that would be starring Simone Signoret and Robert Beatty, expecting some kind of wartime mishmash of a love story accompanied by London blackouts. Boy, was I wrong! I found this an absolutely first-rate film all the way, and I cannot understand some of the negative reviews seen here, unless they are mainly from younger reviewers who want shoot-'em-up action before all else. And several of the reviews don't even get the story right while still nastily including 'spoilers' (one of which does not include a warning). This has to be just about the earliest film to include a crash course in the techniques of wartime infiltration and espionage, and we are given full measure of this by being walked through various training and laboratory facilities and seeing just how ingenious some of these things are and just how conscienceless even potential heroes are expected to be. The laboratory part of it, much involved in explosives of kinds most normal and upstanding people can't even imagine, is reminiscent of later tours through the latest inventions 007 will be given and made familiar with in order to accomplish his own missions. And Peter Illing makes a marvelous and quite lengthy speech to the potential spies and infiltrators, the main point of which is that they must never let their emotions interfere with their duty - which is, of course, to accomplish the mission and/or avoid being caught. If you have to sacrifice a comrade, even a good friend, you do so, because by doing so you will save many more lives than his or hers. And you WILL take that suicide pill if you are caught; your death is as unimportant as your friend's as long as the mission is served. That's a rather heady set of instructions to hear back in 1948, when Great Britain and all the rest of Europe were but three years' distant from the worst and most humanly costly war in history. And that's just for a start. In the course of the film, you will see how this training plays out, and in some cases, the least-likely characters, portrayed by the least-likely actors (considering stardom or sympathetic characterizations) are so suddenly gone from the scene or so brutally betrayed by circumstances that it is a considerable shock to the viewer to even realize what is going on before their eyes. I agree with a couple of reviewers that the Signoret-Gordon Jackson romance seems unrealistic, but that is not Jackson's fault (he is always an excellent actor), just a mistake of casting. Yet there is only two years' difference in their ages, but Signoret seems so much more mature. But when considering such duos, it is well to remember that Margaret Leighton was six years older than Laurence Harvey, and that Elizabeth Taylor, while four years younger than Eddie Fisher, was about a thousand years older than he was in experience. I mention these mundane comparisons to show that surely such pairings were not necessarily so unusual, maybe especially so in wartime, as to invalidate their inclusion in this particular storyline. Anyway, there was not a performance in the film that I didn't consider somewhere between excellent and superb, most especially those of Signoret, Illing, Beatty, Warner and Justice (what actor ever had more easy authority than Mr. Justice?). As for the reviewer who has up to this moment scored an amazing 0 - 21 where agreements with his assessment of the film are concerned, it should be noted that Mr. Warner, 54 at the time the film was made, could easily have been a decade younger in his character, and that being overweight (Mr. Warner was always overweight) is not necessarily an impediment to being in overall excellent physical condition. After all, he didn't even make his first movie until he was 48, stuck around in films for another 35 years, had a hit TV series wherein he played a policeman until he was just past 80 years of age, and died at 85. I think he was in good enough shape to be a soldier during World War Two, don't you? (Another similarly porky fellow, Ernest Borgnine, spent ten years in the U.S. Navy, lived to be 95, and made five films in the last year of his life!) All in all, I thought this a superb film, and I can't imagine why I never heard of it before recently picking it up.

Simone Signoret shines as does James Robertson Justice. In fact JRJ I have been impressed by JRJ often yet his acting is rarely praised.

A modern film about the SOE would be welcome.