Stephen Poliakoff (2009)

Stephen Poliakoff (a) demonstrates that there was a powerful pro-appeasement movement before (and after) Britain went to war with Germany in 1939 and (b) proposes – ironically, in view of (a) – that the English upper classes close ranks against outsiders in their midst.  These familiar insights seem to be the only ones Glorious 39 has to offer.  The two premises are combined so that when Anne, the adopted eldest daughter of Conservative MP Alexander Keyes, chances upon startling proof of what the appeasers are up to, she puts herself in the firing line.  An aspiring film actress, Anne is an alien in the patrician Keyes family through more than a lack of biological connection (the parents thought they couldn’t have children of their own, then had two after they’d adopted her).  Her younger brother Ralph tells Anne (whom he also nicknames Glorious) that she has gipsy blood in her veins.  The appeasers either kill or cause to kill themselves a sequence of men that Anne’s taken a shine to:  Hector Haldane, a dynamic young Scottish Tory MP, who’s a vociferous opponent of appeasement; Gilbert, an unsuccessful actor colleague of Anne’s, who takes a lively interest in politics; eventually her lover Lawrence, who works at the Foreign Office.  The other two men who really matter to Anne, her father and brother, are at the heart of the appeasement movement, along with a suavely sinister government official called Balcombe.  He visits the Keyes home and leaves behind him crucial evidence – recordings of secret meetings and interviews disguised as 78s of innocuous popular songs and dances.

There’s no doubt an audience (and a motley one) for this kind of material, with its historical setting, period frocks and country house appurtenances, skewering of the English class system.  Danny Cohen’s lighting creates some brilliantly-coloured pictures of the summer before the outbreak of war and the images in a shed full of euthanised animals are striking but Glorious 39 is a poor show.  It barely deserves to be described as drama at all, let alone as the thriller it purports to be – what happens is over the top yet unexciting.  In perhaps the only shocking moment in the whole film, Anne puts on a record that plays a telephone conversation, in which a distressed Haldane begs his political opponents to stop pestering him and his parents; a maid barges in, knocking over the gramophone and smashing the record in pieces.  Anne doesn’t seem much bothered either by what she’s heard or by what the maid has done.  Otherwise, Romola Garai does pretty well in the main part, given what she has to shoulder.  Characters seem to get killed off not because they oppose the Nazis but because they give decent performances – David Tennant (Haldane), Hugh Bonneville (Gilbert) and Charlie Cox (Lawrence) are just about believable and likeable against the odds (and, in Bonneville’s case, despite very ropy lines to speak).  I was pleased Anne survived because I thought Romola Garai deserved to.

Which is more than can be said for the senior members of the cast.  (Or for Eddie Redmayne as Ralph, who telegraphs that he’s a rotter.  Juno Temple, the other sister, doesn’t register much.)   As Alexander Keyes, Bill Nighy sustains the same tone of voice throughout:  it’s meant to be paternally reassuring at first and chilling once Keyes is exposed but it’s such a studied and improbable effect that it marks him out as dodgy from the word go.   A miscast Julie Christie provides a commentary on, rather than a characterisation of, smiley-nasty Aunt Elizabeth, although Jenny Agutter is rather effective as Keyes’s strangely distrait wife.  The subtlety of Jeremy Northam (Balcombe) isn’t much help to him in a role as crudely conceived as this one.  Worst of all, are Corin Redgrave and, especially, Christopher Lee as the old men that two young boys in the main story grew into:  it isn’t the latter’s fault that Poliakoff gives him a load of clumsy exposition to introduce the flashback to 1939 that occupies most of the film; but Lee delivers the reminiscence with such hollow sonority that he makes it even more laughable.

2 September 2011