What a fabulous film! Its description certainly doesn't do justice to this very entertaining and addictive soap-like story about a group people you are immediately interested in. It leaves you wanting more - in just an hour and a half you get to know these people so much so that when it ends you miss them.
I am astonished just how well this as made. Not just in terms of production, acting, writing and all that - in terms of it doing what a film should do, getting inside you, making you feel part of the story, making you live with its characters. To engender an audience's engagement with so many lead characters in a picture is not an easy task but Carol Reed manages to do this instantaneously with everyone. All the stars were aligned for this - there's nothing I can think of which could have been done better, everything blends together perfectly.
I'm not a soap fan but I know that to enjoy those shows takes a while until you get to know the characters. That's what's so exceptional about this - by using stereotypical but not clichéd characters, you know whom these people are right from the start. Because they're so rounded without being clichéd (well ok, a bit clichéd), you instantly like them. You know how they think, how they feel, how they love. You know what they like to do, what they eat, where they're from and where they're going in life. If you had to, you'd probably figure out the names of their pets as well.
A few people have commented that it's a marvellous snapshot in time of life in the late thirties but this is so much more than just something just to watch to get the feel of what it was like to live in 1938. It's a superbly produced drama about what love is. Wuthering Heights' Hindley thinks he's in love with Margaret Lockwood's Cat with whom he's arranged a 'dirty weekend.' She however bizarrely believes she's in love with a man she's only met for about a hour whose wife has literally just died giving birth. And then there's the secondary characters: Rene Ray and her best friend have a deep and loving supportive friendship, is that love? And there's the cockney family - he seems just to want to go to the pub, even at times leaving his wife and family waiting outside in the street for hours. He wouldn't know romance if it punched him in the face but these too seem to love each other in their own way.
Even the most ardent 1930s film fans will admit that a lot of films made in the 1930s were terrible - especially, as much as it pains me to say, films made in England. This however is as professionally produced and as beautifully photographed and scored as anything made decades later - the reason may of course be Carrol Reed. Another reason may be that this was made by Edward Black's Rank-funded Gainsborough Pictures. Another reason may be some of the best acting you'll see in any film from any country in the 1930s. We can fool ourselves into believing that say Jessie Matthews or Joan Blondell are great actresses but then you see Margaret Lockwood and realise, like Edward Black, head of Gainsborough did that she's on a different level altogether. She is particularly outstanding in this, her first headline role. The way she conveys a million emotions in the most subtle gesture is exceptional.
