The programming on Talking Pictures TV coupled with the availability of Ealing Studios titles in Network’s ‘Rarities’ DVD series now makes it more possible to trace the rapid changes in approaches to British propaganda films during the early part of the Second World War. It’s a long time since I’ve seen The Foreman Went to France and I’m grateful for this recent broadcast.
Ealing boss Michael Balcon had a distinctive attitude towards supporting the war effort, represented visually by the end credits of Ealing films in 1942 which proclaimed their national identity against a full screen image of a fluttering Union Jack. Balcon did take into Ealing two of the most significant members of the 1930s documentary movement, Alberto Cavalcanti and Harry Watt, but the others went to Pinewood. Up to 1942, the Ealing films that attempted to be supportive of the war effort were still imbued with the 1930s middle-class, ‘West End theatre’ ethos (with the exception of Pen Tennyson’s The Proud Valley (1940)) or conversely with the comedies featuring first George Formby and then Will Hay. Cavalcanti’s first input was to the transitionary film The Big Blockade (1942). Directed by Charles Frend in his first directorial role after ten years as an editor on a string of important films, The Big Blockade was a move in the right direction but is still an uncomfortable film to watch. It deserves a post of its own on the blog. Frend followed it up with The Foreman Went to France. It was from this point that realist elements began to figure more prominently in Ealing’s output. Cavalcanti was ‘Associate Producer’ with an onscreen credit. Also notable about the production was the editing of Robert Hamer, Wilkie Cooper’s camerawork and music by William Walton.
The Foreman Went to France is inspired by a ‘real’ character, Melbourne Johns. The film begins in 1942 with an onscreen date (the release date was April 1942) and a munitions factory about to experience an air raid. While the workers are sent to the shelter, the shopfloor foreman (‘Fred Carrick’ played by Clifford Evans) decides to go up to the roof and watch the raid. When the searchlights reveal that a German raider has been downed by a British nightfighter, he comments to the fire watchers that it was likely that the cannon shells came from the factory below. The rest of the narrative is then one long flashback to June 1940 when the foreman, as he then was, went to France largely under his own initiative to bring back three new machines for manufacturing shells that the company had lent to the French.
Evans had been a theatre actor in the 1930s and had appeared in several major films, headlining with Deborah Kerr in Love on the Dole (1941) and Penn of Pennsylvania (1942). He’d made just one Ealing film before, The Proud Valley. In 1943 he disappears from film credits. I believe he was a conscientious objector and perhaps he joined the Non-Combatant Corps? He returned to the screen in 1947. He didn’t seem to mind using a gun in this film and I thought he was very good in the role, marking the Ealing shift to more ‘capable’ men (in this case Welsh) rather than the effete officer class of the earlier war films. Fred has to use his wit and charm to find the factory in Northern France and then to find a means of transporting the equipment to the coast. He finds an American woman still in the factory after its evacuation by the French in the face of the German advance. This is Anne, played by Constance Cummings who had been in the UK since 1934. Anne speaks French and knows what’s what. Fred also discovers a pair of squaddies from the RASC (Royal Army Service Corps) clearly lost with a lorry and a consignment of curry powder. These two are played by the Cockney comedian Tommy Trinder (an Ealing contract player and the ostensible star of the film) and a young scot (Gordon Jackson in his first credited film role – he would go on to become an Ealing regular). Before this quartet can get to know each other they have to skedaddle as local French fascists led by the mayor (Robert Morley) are also after the machines.
The rest of the narrative follows the quartet as they try to reach the coast. In their way are large numbers of refugees blocking the roads, more ‘Fifth Columnists’/local fascists, the remnants of the French Army and the Germans. It was the journey that I remembered from viewings forty years ago. I thought the quartet worked well together. The presence of Gordon Jackson and the developing relationship between ‘Foreman Fred’ and the American woman summon up the successful later film about munitions factories, Millions Like Us (1943) with Eric Portman as the foreman and Anne Crawford as the upper middle-class factory worker. Jackson plays a young airman who marries Patricia Roc, the lower middle-class factory girl. JB Priestley, the Bradford novelist, wrote both original stories so perhaps it’s not a surprise. Trinder stands out against the other three in The Foreman went to France and Charles Barr in his book Ealing Studios comes down on Trinder and isn’t that impressed with Evans either. Trinder does have a different register, but it worked for me and I’ve already praised Evans. It’s also worth noting that Diana Morgan had a supporting role on the script and this was partly an inspiration for the recent and under-rated Their Finest (2016) with Gemma Arterton as a wartime screenwriter.
The film was mostly shot in Cornwall doubling for the terrain of Western France and the credits acknowledge the help of the Free French Forces. The attacks by German fighters and dive bombers on the refugees on the road remain the most impressive scenes for me and the increasing realism of the major sequences is carried through in the succeeding two films of the loose trilogy of hard-hitting ‘warning films’ about loose talk and Fifth Columnists, Next of Kin and Went the Day Well.
Here are two short clips of the quartet (uploaded as two scenes showing Constance Cummings smoking!):
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