Jack Lee (1956)

This adaptation of Nevil Shute’s famous novel, with a screenplay by W P Lipscomb and Richard Mason, is impressively tough-minded.  In 1942, a group of British women and children, taken prisoner in Kuala Lumpur by the Japanese, are forced by their captors to trek through heat and jungle, from one Malayan village to the next, having to do what they can for food and water.   (The men with whom they were captured have been taken away by the Japanese to a POW camp.)  Some of these women aren’t young; only one of them, Jean Paget, who becomes in effect their leader, speaks Malay; none of the party of course has any experience of coping with such conditions; several of the women and children die.  Those who don’t survive are not minor characters.  You sense from early on that the director Jack Lee isn’t going to offer the comforts an audience might expect; you know it from the moment that attempts to save a young boy’s life by sucking the poison from a snake-bite prove unavailing.  Later on, the main male character, an Australian POW called Joe Harman, is assumed – by the female lead, Jean, and by the audience – to be dead:  the miracle that he isn’t and the concluding post-war reunion of Joe and Jean feel earned because this isn’t a film that tends inevitably towards a happy ending.  (Nevil Shute’s novel takes the story further, into the early years of Joe and Jean’s marriage.)

Although the presentation of character isn’t innovative, the picture acquires the quality of a true human drama.  The placing of the figures in the landscape and Geoffrey Unsworth’s lighting of these images give a documentary feel to A Town Like Alice and the conventionally suspenseful moments are brought off in ways that make them sharp and fresh.  The film succeeds in doing what films often aren’t good at doing:  Lee gets across the effects on people of time passed in arduous circumstances, and this isn’t just a matter of good make-up (by George Blackler).  The characters aren’t transformed suddenly but they develop.  Nora Nicholson plays Mrs Frith, an elderly hypochondriac with an iron constitution:  deprived of some of her jealously-guarded medications, which are desperately needed by others in the group, the old lady is asked to care for one of the children, and she does – even though she never loses interest in her own state of health.  There’s more to Mrs Frith than you realised – the same goes for the battleaxes played by Marie Lohr and Renee Houston.   Lee also directs the children (Margaret Eaden, Geoffrey Hawkins, Peter John and Cameron Moore) with great skill.   Jean Anderson, as a schoolteacher, is, as usual, conscientious if limited – within those limits, though, her acting is strongly felt and she’s sometimes affecting.  Occasionally, Anderson makes a movement that’s stagy and, in the world of this film, conspicuously artificial; the same is true of Virginia McKenna as Jean Paget but, for the most part, this is by miles the best acting I’ve seen from her.  McKenna – because she tends to be self-aware and pretty wooden – is the prime example of how the actresses in A Town Like Alice are transformed under Jack Lee’s intelligent direction:  when the camera concentrates on McKenna, she’s expressive without moving or speaking or appearing to do anything.

There’s a moment when Jean Paget is urged by the others to make a wish.  She says she can’t think of what to wish for but her face tells you it’s to see Joe Harman again.   Virginia McKenna has a real, natural connection with Peter Finch, who is superb as Joe.  I couldn’t get the hang of what Joe and his fellow Australian Ben (well played by Vincent Ball) were and weren’t allowed to do as POWs of the Japanese:  one moment they’re driving a jeep, the next they’re with  a crowd of other prisoners behind barbed wire.  But, from the moment Joe first appears, working under the jeep (and bumping his head on it as he and Ben hear English voices and come out from beneath the vehicle), Peter Finch lifts the film.  He makes it a more personal and accessible drama without violating the other elements.  When Joe is crucified by the Japanese, the very form of the execution has an unusual and inescapable power – this is increased by Jack Lee concentrating on the agony of those watching rather than on Joe himself.  Finch – handsome, charismatic, and emotionally agile – doesn’t have that much screen time but his impact is such that, when Jean, thinking Joe is dead, recounts the moments she shared with him, they’re vivid in your own mind too.  Lee must have been tempted, given that Finch is pure gold in the role, to make more use of him but the director’s self-discipline is richly rewarded in this moment of Jean’s recollection.   There’s a fine performance too from Kenji Takaki as the middle-aged Japanese soldier who is the only guard assigned to the women and children on their journey – and who seems almost dazed by the conflict between his military duty and his compassionate instinct.   The effective score is by Matyas Seiber.

24 January 2014