Anthony Asquith (1945)
The first hour of The Way to the Stars is by some way the best thing by Anthony Asquith that I’ve seen, except perhaps for Pygmalion (1938). Although this story of an RAF base between 1940 and approaching the end of the Second World War is less impressive later on, it’s a fine, intelligent film, all in all. There are several reasons why the opening part is so strong. It begins with the camera roving around the now deserted airfield, on which the action – divided into three episodes set in 1940, 1942 and 1944 – will be centred. The Way to the Stars was released in Britain only a matter of weeks after VE Day (and before Hiroshima) yet the visual tone of this prologue, and the accompanying narrative, is almost presciently elegiac. It seems extraordinary for Asquith and Terence Rattigan, who did the screenplay, to be lamenting in 1945 the fact that this place of war, so recently full of life (and death), is now abandoned and desolate. Yet the effect of their doing so is undeniably powerful.
Once the story gets underway, you feel less equivocal about its grip. I found myself wondering how many of the actors concerned had seen active service in the war that was just coming to an end when The Way to the Stars was being filmed[1]. The characterisations are, for the most part, much fresher than in later British WW2 pictures; the actors aren’t trying to mythicise the men they’re playing. They include people I don’t usually care for – Basil Radford (especially good when he’s giving a wedding speech), Bill Owen, David Tomlinson and, although he’s playing a civilian, Stanley Holloway. All do well with what might seem on paper generic roles. Then there are people who are fine actors anyway, like Felix Aylmer as a vicar. Trevor Howard, in his screen debut, is such a vivid presence as (Squadron Leader) Carter that when his death is reported, matter of factly, the news is shocking. He’s gone in a moment – Asquith gets across something of how the men who knew Carter experience his sudden absence, and that death is part of their lives.
The later death in action of (Flight Lieutenant) David Archdale is much more prepared for in terms of foreboding detail: he’s unnerved by mislaying his talisman before the fatal flight; his young wife Toddy (Rosamund John) watches the other planes return with a sense of dread. Michael Redgrave has made such a powerful impression that Archdale’s death is the emotional heart (and, I think, climax) of The Way to the Stars. Sometimes you can tell that a character’s going to be dispatched because the actor is evidently making the most of their short time on screen but that’s not the case with Redgrave (or Trevor Howard). Yet Asquith and Redgrave also understand that Archdale is pivotal to the film as a whole and that he needs to stay in the audience’s mind all the way through. Redgrave too may be playing a type – a poetry-writing war hero – but he makes Archdale thoroughly individual and, through the vitally alert intelligence he conveys, piercingly real. He makes Rattigan’s dialogue pretty real too. There’s plenty of incident in the screenplay, which helps: the characters, impelled by events as much as psychology, have less time for explaining themselves than is often the case in a Rattigan script – the soul-baring, because it’s rationed, has more impact. Asquith, whose admiring sympathy for Rattigan’s writing was at best a mixed blessing in their later collaborations, directs the cast so well here that the stiff upper lip comes to mean more than usual. It isn’t something simply to be proud of – it suggests a realisation on the part of the characters that if you ever let yourself start crying in these circumstances you’d never stop. Rosamund John suggests this particularly strongly when Toddy is given the news of Archdale’s death. John Mills, as Archdale’s pal (Pilot Officer) Penrose, who has to break this news is surprisingly sensitive, here and throughout the film.
We hear two poems written by Archdale (actually by John Pudney) – both about airmen whose death is described or foreseen, both simple and affecting. The first poem is the stronger one because it’s heard only once – as Archdale is drying glasses that Toddy’s washed up. (She’s a hotel manageress before they marry and, after the birth of their son and her husband’s death, goes back to that job.) Michael Redgrave reads it beautifully – so memorably that, when Penrose reads the other poem to Toddy (at her request) when Archdale has been killed, you almost hear it being spoken by Redgrave: John Mills reads with feeling but unshowily and unselfishly – he doesn’t interpose himself between the poem and Toddy’s (and the audience’s) thoughts of Redgrave. Asquith goes to the well at least once too often, though, with this second poem, which is called ‘Johnny Head in Clouds’ (an alternative title for the film according to Wikipedia). The main American flyer in the story is called Johnny; the lines of the poem turn increasingly specific and portentous. When Redgrave’s voice speaks the lines over the final shot of The Way to the Stars, the effect, because it’s so designed to supply an apt climax, is anti-climactic. The film loses its way, and part of its distinctiveness, when the American airmen move into the base and the centre of the story. There’s some pretty uninspired two-nations-divided-by-a-common-language humour and, although the actors playing the Yanks (Bonar Colleano and Douglass Montgomery) are likeable enough, they’re not much more.
There’s a striking foreshadowing of the tyrant mother-downtrodden daughter relationship in Separate Tables, except that here the gorgon is a spinster aunt (Joyce Carey) and the worm that turns (Renée Asherson, very likeable) is her niece. Rattigan is utterly unforgiving of these older women: when the niece stands up to the aunt, it’s a cue for Toddy to tell the old bag what she thinks of her too, and how glad she’ll be to see her leave the hotel. Jean Simmons, in one of her earliest roles, has a cameo singing ‘Let Him Go, Let Him Tarry’ at a village hall social.
29 April 2011
[1] According to their Wikipedia entries, Trevor Howard, John Mills, Michael Redgrave and DavidTomlinson were all engaged in some kind of military service during World War II; Stanley Holloway and Basil Radford both fought in the trenches in the Great War.
