Basil Dearden (1944)
An unsuccessful film but a fascinating piece of British film history (and unusually short – only seventy-eight minutes – so easy to get through). ‘Postscripts’, J B Priestley’s regular Sunday evening radio broadcasts in 1940, attracted large audiences and were credited with boosting public morale during the Battle of Britain. They also looked forward to a socialist – or, at least, a more socially aware and just – post-war Britain. In 1943, Priestley dramatised that theme in his stage play, They Came to a City, which ran for nearly eight months in London’s West End. The following year, the play was adapted for cinema by Priestley, Sidney Cole and the film’s director, Basil Dearden. The stage version of They Came to a City comprises nine characters. All reappear in the screen version; all nine cast members concerned are the actors reprising their theatre roles. None of the several additional characters in Dearden’s film was credited but one is highly significant. An avuncular, self-assured, middle-aged man is played by J B Priestley, appearing, to all intents and purposes, as himself. He thereby links They Came to a City to the persona he developed and the political outlook he conveyed through those earlier radio broadcasts.
A young couple, both in military uniform, sit on a hillside overlooking an industrial English town (Priestley’s native Bradford, where the play of They Came to a City premiered before London?). They debate how different or otherwise the country will be once the war is over. Jimmy (Ralph Michael), with a sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve, thinks nothing much will change. His unnamed WAAF companion (Brenda Bruce) vigorously disagrees. Along comes a pipe-smoking stranger (Priestley), who asks Jimmy for a light, and whether the argument going on between the couple is public or private. They explain their feelings, and the WAAF asks the older man’s opinion: does he agree with her that ‘people will insist on being seen differently’? ‘Some will, some won’t,’ Priestley replies, summarising the story to follow.
He then starts to outline a motley collection of people, from different walks of life and social classes. As the stranger talks, Basil Dearden cuts away into a brisk introduction of the nine individuals who’ll play out the scenario that Priestley has begun to describe. Each of these short scenes ends with a character, or pair of characters, heading out of an environment that they know and into darkness. All nine next find themselves in wholly alien surroundings – an extensive, otherwise unpeopled, castle-like structure. As they look down from its heights, they at first can’t see what’s below but, after a time, make out a city there. Once a door in the castle opens, all of the nine can visit the city and briefly experience how its people live and work – happily with, and for, each other, according to what some of the nine report back. Each visitor must then decide – before sundown, when the door in the castle will shut – whether to stay in the city or return whence they came.
For overworked, elderly cleaner Mrs Batley (Ada Reeve), the city is utopia. For lonely spinster Philippa Loxfield (Frances Rowe), it’s certainly preferable to the world she currently inhabits. For Philippa’s mother, Lady Loxfield (Mabel Terry-Lewis), who scornfully tyrannises her meek daughter, the ways of the city are beneath contempt – a view shared by the other titled member of the company, baronet and landowner Sir George Gedney (A E Matthews). The other couple in the group, Malcolm Stritton (Raymond Huntley) and his wife Dorothy (Renee Gadd), like the Loxfields, disagree. Fearful, querulous Dorothy is anxious to return to normal life, even though she’s evidently miserable in it. Malcolm, who works in a provincial bank, is dissatisfied with the political status quo, and likes what the city seems to promise. Another money man, ruthless businessman Cudworth (Norman Shelley), can’t wait to get back to exploiting others in the mercenary world. The two remaining characters are also the two central figures in They Came to a City. Alice Foster (Googie Withers) has spent her working life as a barmaid and waitress, and wants better. So does Joe Dinmore (John Clements), a jack of all trades, currently a seaman, and a self-admitted ‘revolutionary who doesn’t believe in the revolution’.
Critics at the time of the film’s release – and doubtless plenty of others who bought tickets to see it – reasonably disparaged They Came to a City as all talk, no action: what action there is, consists almost entirely of characters telling each other what they’ve done. Besides, the talk is often repetitive. Theatre audiences would hardly have expected to see the city; on a cinema screen, its invisibility is frustrating. They Came to a City’s outstanding (just about its only) visual achievement is Michael Relph’s sinister castellar design. His setting for the characters’ debate suggests both early brutalist (verging on fascist) architecture and de Chirico landscapes. (The film was shot in black and white by Stanley Pavey.)
The material also betrays its stage origins in mostly stagy acting, though Raymond Huntley is an honourable exception – and accents are less of a problem than might have been expected. While Googie Withers and John Clements are too classy for their characters (and she speaks far too quickly in Alice’s bit in the introductory scenes), vocal precision matters less here than it would have in a realistic context. (It’s a real plus that, in their small roles as the disputant couple on the hillside, Brenda Bruce and Ralph Michael are nicely naturalistic.) Withers and Clements’ accents are unconvincing but, for the purposes of the story, Alice and Joe need only sound different from their middle-class and upper-class companions, which they do. And Googie Withers does draw, and hold, the camera.
They Came to a City is more interesting when Priestley manages to yoke his political message to a more grounded relationship between characters – or even refract the message in revealing what makes a particular individual tick: it’s a striking moment when Sir George Gedney admits he wants nothing to do with the city because he’s misanthropic (he’d rather be back on his estate shooting game and hunting foxes than mix with people). Philippa Loxfield, once she’s made up her mind, isn’t to be dissuaded: she says she would like her mother to come with her to the city but, if her ladyship won’t, then tough – and they part company. The unhappily married Strittons look set to follow suit, until Malcolm’s compassion for his frightened, narrow wife prevents him from abandoning her. He resolves to do what he can to achieve social progress in the real world – as, eventually, do Joe Dinmore and Alice Foster, even though both like the city (an afternoon there is enough to restore Joe’s political belief). The love-hate ups-and-downs between them are mechanical, but Joe and Alice’s final decision to join forces romantically and politically, is quite effective.
There are untidy elements to the climax and finale, though. Dearden’s staging of the sequence where Joe, returned from the city, vainly tries to stop the door in the castle from closing, leaves it unclear if he’s motivated by a longing to get back to the city or fear of separation from Alice. It’s only when they’re reunited on one side of the unyielding door that the pair seem to decide that the real world, rather than utopia, is where they should be – and would rather be. It’s a bit puzzling that Priestley doesn’t contrive for all the characters attracted to the city to recognise this moral imperative and make the same choice. Canny Mrs Batley and desperate Philippa Loxfield, who opt for utopia, are forgotten about in the closing stages: it’s hard to know what their staying in the city signifies in Priestley’s scheme. The narrative finally returns, of course, to the sergeant, the WAAF and the stranger: Jimmy is the one whose mind has been changed by the story that’s been told. Parable delivered and mission accomplished, Priestley, in the film’s closing shot, walks away along the hillside.
J B Priestley’s title derives from lines in Walt Whitman’s ‘The City’, quoted in voiceover near the end of the film: ‘I dream’d in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth,/ I dream’d that was the new city of friends …’. The plentiful music is not an original score but excerpts from Scriabin’s third symphony (‘The Divine Poem’), selected by musical director Ernest Irving. They Came to a City is perhaps the least typical film ever made by Michael Balcon’s Ealing Studios, although Charles Barr’s fine history of Ealing rightly brackets it with the surreal The Halfway House, also directed by Basil Dearden and released earlier in the same year. The latter film, though similarly homiletic, is mainstream WW2 propaganda: through the lessons that its characters learn, it exhorts its audience to abandon personal grudges for the sake of the greater good – but specifically in the context of the war being fought. They Came to a City, though in many respects just as ropy as cinema, is unique: a British film of the war years that looks ahead to, and promotes a particular political solution for, Britain in the post-war world to come.
27 May 2026
