Sous le regard des étoiles

I have to begin this review by saying I saw the U.S. edit of the movie. According to wikipedia, the unfortunate intro and outro are not in the English version, and there's an extra scene at the end.

Once you get past the useless introductory speech, this movie begins quite well, portraying a grim world and immediately giving one a feel for the plight of the miners.

For me, a difficulty came with the introduction of Margaret Lockwood's character. I admit there are selfish, empty headed people in the world, but they make for poor film characters. Fortunately it's a fairly small role, but it felt unnecessary to have her at all. She represents a melodramatic streak that unfortunately runs through the movie and lessens the overall impact.

While some parts were problematic, other parts are terrific, such as the mother's stoic attitude as her son goes off to college in which you see her feelings only when no one is looking. And the inevitable disaster is impressively handled.

I also didn't find Michael Redgrave complete believable. I'm not convinced he could develop such an upperclass accent no matter how hard he studied at the local schools.

While worth seeing, this could have been a better movie with a little less melodrama.

I recently purchased this outstanding movie on video. Michael Redgrave has always been one of the finest actors of his generation and his performance in this film only serves to strenghten my opinion. I was very surprised by the way a film of this era, concentrated so much on the social and economic deprivation of the mining community in Great Britan, surely one of the largest workforce of the time. The struggle for better conditions and the respect of their employers as workers and human beings is perhaps the crux of this story but the underlying sub-plots of human greed and subterfuge made sure my interest never waned. It is to me most memorable as a story of the ordinary man, struggling through adversity, always with dignity and self-respect. Despite the often bleak surroudings and the fact that it is also shot in B&W to maximize this atmosphere, it never depressed me and left me feeling good,long after the last of the credits had rolled.

Michael Redgrave is the local boy done good, when he wins a scholarship to go to university to train to be a teacher. Unfortunately, he has fallen in love with the rather fickle "Jenny" (Margaret Lockwood) who has a bit of a venal streak. Curtailing his studies, he returns to live with her in his boyhood town intent on improving the lot of his community - but he is soon disillusioned when he sees his wife still keen on her flashy old flame "Joe" (Emlyn Williams) and that his elderly father looks set to have to work the mines for years to come... He accidentally discovers that the mine is unsafe, and determines to bring this to the attention of the council to avert disaster, but will they listen? Carol Reed allows this story plenty of room to breathe. Though not complex, we can see the characterisations develop as the story seems to head, unstoppably, towards disaster in quite a compelling fashion. Redgrave, Williams and Allan Jeayes as mine owner "Barras" work well to create a solid, if a bit dryly told, story of greed and exploitation with some superbly claustrophobic mining photography to add authenticity.

I'm obsessed with the Third Man, and forever looking for similar movies. I get the impression that Carol Reed never made anything comparable to that classic, but this is an interesting, unusual film that is worth seeing in its own right.

It is a political drama about the struggle to control the means of production - no, really. Michael Redgrave and Emlyn Williams play two young men from a dour north-east mining town who escape, separately, to the bright lights of Newcastle. Redgrave's character is a scholarship kid at the university, while Williams plays a spiv who starts out working as a bookie but soon finds other dubious business interests.

They return home for different reasons, and clash over the future of the mine, which the workers suspect is unsafe. It's a surprisingly anti-establishment film for 1940, when Britain was deep into the Second World War, especially given Churchill's famously harsh treatment of striking miners in the 1920s.

I watched and thoroughly enjoyed "The Stars Look Down" which was screened today as part of the BBC's Summer Festival of historic British movies, having read and enjoyed the novel many years ago but having never previously had an opportunity to see the movie.

It was of particular interest because the novelist, A.J. Cronin actually set the novel near my home town of Ashington in the North East of England, and got it pretty well right as he'd worked as a medic in the area for some years. Interestingly enough, I noticed that many US critics refer to it as being set in a "Welsh" mining village. This may well be because they recognised Emlyn Williams's accent as Welsh and the rest were a pretty mixed bunch - I spotted only one genuine North-East accent! Like all "Socialist Realism" the melodrama was overplayed - nonetheless, there was some truth and accuracy in there and it was fascinating to see how the movie treats coal miners - rightly, in my opinion - as heroic figures.

An unjustly neglected classic.