The Next of Kin

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.

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.

This film's message was so important and serious that it was originally intended by the authorities in wartime Britain for military circulation only. However, the original project for a simple training film warning of the terrible danger of Nazi espionage grew into a full-blown Ealing Studios feature, largely because the director (the great and nowadays relatively unsung Thorold Dickinson) was able to convince the 'top brass' that the message of his film should also be brought to the attention of the 'next of kin' on the home front.

The paradoxical result was that a film at first only intended for strictly limited circulation amongst those with security clearance became a great box office hit. Equally paradoxical was the degree of really quite startling realism - especially for the time - with which it convincingly presented certain uncomfortable realities of war to the domestic audience; the only concession to any kind of comforting assurance being the explosive finale when, despite horrifying casualties amongst the invasion force whose plans have been compromised by enemy agents, the commandos are able to press on and successfully sabotage their strategic military objective on the coast of occupied France.

The location filming of authentic training manoeuvres in and around the Cornish village of Megavissey is superb, and does not pull its punches in showing bodies blown to bits, etc. The remarkable live sound recording gives a really stomach-tightening sense of the military hardware being unleashed: The sounds of the actual artillery, bombs, and powerful engines actually mobilized for War contribute to a far greater urgency than what audiences were used to. Even now, it is abundantly clear that CGI pyrotechnics, by comparison, just do not pack the requisite punch.

The script cleverly and effectively alerts its audience to the very real danger of 'careless talk' and even deals unblinkingly with such unsavoury real-life scenarios as a cocaine-addicted stripper being blackmailed into spying on her soldier boyfriend by her Nazi-sympathising dresser; or a cultivated bookshop owner who is in reality a ruthless Nazi agent, and perfectly prepared to blackmail his young assistant into obtaining information by threatening to arrange that her Jewish parents, whom she has had to leave behind in occupied Amsterdam when she became a refugee, are detained in 'protective custody;' or the mild little businessman from Wales who strolls around undetected and undetained throughout the film, stealing information with alarming ease, to the untold advantage of his country's deadly foe.

These Nazi spies are not the usual easily-defeated Prussian blockheads beloved of more naive propaganda films, but intelligent, sophisticated and well-trained agents, supplied with detailed cover, a network of contacts, and portable radios. They represent an all-too-believable and imminent threat to Britain's survival.

One cannot help reflecting that this clear-eyed view of Britain's predicament stands now in stark contrast to the present era of lies and dissimulation. Churchill thought - quite reasonably during such an extreme emergency - of banning this film, but eventually reconsidered, since the military authorities of the time were ultimately prepared to trust the people of Britain with something surprisingly close to the truth. I venture to state that, evidently, people were trusted more by their governors during the global crisis of a World War, when national survival unquestionably stood in far greater danger of sudden catastrophe, than they are today!

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.

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!