Orwell (18 page)

While working on
Coming Up
, Orwell wrote to Cyril Connolly in Gadarene imagery: “Everything one writes now is overshadowed by this ghastly feeling that we are rushing towards a precipice and, though we shan't actually prevent ourselves or anyone else from going over, must put up some sort of fight.” Despite the grim prognostications, Bowling opposes the threatening cataclysm. His imaginative preservation of the past is the positive core in the novel that survives the present horrors and ultimately conveys the most powerful effect in the book. As Bowling says, “I'm fat but I'm thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there's a thin man [the past] inside every fat man [the present]?” (23). This preservation of the past in the free minds of helpless yet resisting men was one of Orwell's central concerns in both
Animal Farm
and
Nineteen Eighty-Four.

 

 

 

This was the first (and perhaps the only) essay to be published on Orwell in
Sight and Sound.
It explored a little known aspect of his career, and showed that his film criticism was strongly influenced by the overwhelming Nazi victories in Europe in 1940–41. Orwell disliked escapist entertainment, criticized the low intellectual level of American movies and had no interest in film as art. He concentrated, instead, on the political and propagandistic content, and particularly liked Chaplin's
The Great Dictator.

Between October 1940 and August 1941 George Orwell wrote twenty-six film review columns—which were omitted from the four volumes of his
Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters
—for
Time and Tide.
This politically independent weekly magazine was edited by the lively Lady Rhondda, the plump and curly-haired daughter of a Welsh coal magnate. Most of the films Orwell reviewed were undistinguished escapist entertainment, which he mostly disapproved of and disliked. But they also included minor works by major directors: Rene Clair's
The Flame of New Orleans
and Fritz Lang's
Western Union;
and a few which he took more seriously: the Mormon epic
Brigham Young
, the anti-Nazi melodrama
Escape
and, most notably, Chaplin's
The Great Dictator.

By 1940 Orwell had had an adventurous but not particularly successful life. He was born in India, had won a scholarship to Eton, served for five years in the Burma police, been down and out with the tramps of Paris and London, lived with the miners of Wigan, contracted tuberculosis, fought and been shot in the Spanish Civil War. He spent most of the 1930s writing prophetic books about the dangers of Communism and Fascism, and warning about the impending war. He had written three books of reportage and
four novels, whose honesty and integrity earned him a respectful reputation but no money. The outbreak of war led to a period of waste and frustration. He was desperately poor, medically unfit for the army and unable to find work that would help the war effort. He published
Inside the Whale
, a collection of essays, in March 1940; and wrote the propagandist
Lion and the Unicorn
between August and October. When he completed this tract, he began reviewing films and writing the “London Letter” for the
Partisan Review
; but he abandoned his stopgap career as a film critic when he joined the Indian section of the BBC in August 1941.

Orwell's criticism was permeated by a battered idealism and powerfully influenced by the massive defeats of the Allied armies during 1939–41. The invasion of Poland; the occupation of Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland and France; the evacuation of Dunkirk and the air raids on England; the conquest of Yugoslavia and Greece; the destruction of shipping by U-boats and the siege of Leningrad, placed all of Europe under the domination of Hitler and threatened the very existence of Britain. America had not entered the war; and the victories at Stalingrad and El Alamein were not yet in sight. Orwell's fears and hopes about the war affect all his reviews. He specifically mentions the
Athenia
, which was torpedoed, with fourteen hundred people aboard, two days after the war began; Russian tank battles; and Wavell's first bright triumphs in Libya and Abyssinia in February 1941. “What rot it all is!” he comments on
One Night in Lisbon.
“How dare anyone present the war in these colours when thousands of tanks are battling on the plains of Poland and tired workers are slinking into the tobacconist's shop to plead humbly for a small Woodbine. And yet as current films go this is a good film.”

Orwell, who rarely mentions the directors and is not interested in film as a distinct form of art, does not write brilliantly illuminating criticism, like his contemporaries James Agee and Graham Greene. He is primarily concerned with the political, social and moral content of films; their propaganda value; the way they reflect the progress of the war; and the difference between English and American cinema. His reviews are generally short and formulary: an opening comment, discussion of the plot, snap judgment on the film and remarks on the cast, with particular praise for veteran English character actors like Edmund Gwenn, C. Aubrey Smith and Eric Blore. But his wit at the expense of the more tedious films shows the engaging side of his character that was also revealed in his “As I Please” columns for
Tribune.
The top hat in
Quiet Wedding
, “symbol throughout half the world of British plutocracy, is now only worn by schoolboys, undertakers and bank messengers.” The school in
Little Men
is “the 1870 equivalent
of Dartington Hall.”
I Married Adventure
, an African jungle film by Osa Johnson, is excellent for those “who are distressed by the present depleted state of the Zoo.” The horrible quality of the color in Noel Coward's
Bitter Sweet
makes the actors' faces “marzipan pink, garish magenta and poisonous green.” (Orwell rather exaggerates, a year after
Gone With the Wind
, the general defects of color film.)

Orwell's intensely hostile response to the manifest defects of American escapist films, which make a blank cartridge fired in a studio more exciting than the bomb that drops next door, is reinforced by his anger at the isolationist position of the United States during the first two years of the war. He assumes that English and European films are more serious if less technically expert than American ones, and condemns the sheer idiocy of the absurd plot of a romantic tearjerker like
Waterloo Bridge.
But he is interested in the audience's response to the lively dialogue and their acceptance of the appalling banality. (He quotes a nice exchange from two women sitting behind him: “Of course, she can't marry him after that.”—“Why can't she?”—“Well, I mean to say, she couldn't.”—“Why not? I would. I just wouldn't say anything about it.”—“No, she'll kill herself. You'll see.”)

He notes that the interest in adventure films would increase enormously if in “five per cent of the cases the heroine did
not
escape!” He objects to the oppressive conventional morality and wryly comments that only in films do beautiful women ever starve. And in a critique of
The Lady in Question
, a remake of
La Gribouille [The Simpleton]
directed by Charles Vidor, he condemns “the intellectual contempt which American film producers seem to feel for their audience. It is always assumed that anything demanding thought, or even suggesting thought, must be avoided like the plague. An American film actor shown reading a book always handles it in the manner of an illiterate person.” In a thriller like Tim Whelan's
A Date with Destiny
(“an old-fashioned murder story dolled up with a few ‘psychological' trappings for the benefit of an audience who are assumed to have heard far-off rumours of Freud”), the producers “cannot resist denouncing the whole science of psychiatry as something sinister, wicked and probably an imposture. The moral, beloved of English-speaking audiences, is that the ‘intellectual' is always wrong.” What disgusts him and offends his Socialist beliefs in George Cukor's film of
The Gay Mrs. Trexel
, “as in so many American films, is the utter lack of any decent, intelligent vision of life…. It does not seem to strike them that the whole manner of life which depends on Paris dresses, servants, riding horses, etc., etc., is futile in itself.”

Another distasteful aspect of American culture, which Orwell also discusses in his comparison of English and American detective novels, “Raffles
and Miss Blandish,” is the gratuitous violence. For Orwell, the Raoul Walsh gangster film
High Sierra
represents the
ne plus ultra
of sadism, bully worship and gunplay, repugnantly combined with sentimentality and perverse morality: “Humphrey Bogart is the Big Shot who smashes people in the face with the butt of his pistol and watches fellow gangsters burn to death with the casual comment, ‘They were only small-town guys,' but is kind to dogs and is supposed to be deeply touching when he is smitten with a ‘pure' affection for a crippled girl, who knows nothing of his past. In the end he is killed, but we are evidently expected to sympathise with him and even to admire him.”

By contrast, he praises Henry Hathaway's unusual and more ambitious film
Brigham Young
, because “the heroism of the Mormon pioneers is well brought out and Brigham Young's own spiritual struggles are taken seriously.” Orwell, who notes that the Mormons claimed divine inspiration, preached polygamy and were persecuted in the nineteenth century, states “The film is an interesting example of the way in which important events lose their moral colour as they drop backwards into history. It is more or less pro-Mormon, the polygamy [Young had nineteen wives and fifty-six children] being played down as much as possible and the methods by which the Mormons secured their extra wives ignored.”

Orwell finds that the cinematic representations of English social life and history are also highly idealized. He notes that the portrayal of “county” society in Anthony Asquith's
Quiet Wedding
, “a charming little film, which kept the jaded press audience laughing rapturously,” ignores the fact that the English gentry have lost contact with agriculture and live mainly on dividends. Yet he admires the deep charm of country life, its casualness and lack of ceremony with the feudally familiar servants; and says the film is chiefly interesting as a record of vanished time: “for it ignores the war and seems to belong to some period before Hitler definitely filled the horizon.” The nostalgic longing for a world of peace, and the desire to establish a continuity between the England of the past and of the present, were the dominant themes of Orwell's most recent novel,
Coming Up For Air
(1939).

This England
, a historical pageant, also sustains the myth that England is an agricultural country and that its inhabitants—who could not tell a turnip from a broccoli if they saw them growing in a field—“derive their patriotism from a passionate love of the English soil.” Yet he affirms that such films are probably good for morale in wartime and patriotically states (as he does in his essay on Kipling) that “many of the events which the jingo history-books make the most noise about are things to be proud of.” Orwell believes that propaganda films are a major weapon in war and that it is
vital to learn how to rouse resentment against the enemy. He criticizes two British propaganda films for their amateurishness, their use of the dreadful BBC voice “which antagonises the whole English-speaking world” and their failure to realize that most people are more disturbed by the destruction of a house than of a church. (“Surely we can find something more effective to say than that the Germans have a spite against Gothic architecture?”)

Orwell is fascinated by the effect of war on the cinema. He notes a welcome change from the tinge of isolationist feeling in
Escape to Glory
to the sudden outbreak of Anglophilia in
Nice Girl?
He remarks that Tony, the Californian grape-grower in
They Knew What They Wanted
, is “one of those big-hearted, child-like Italians who were favourites on the American screen before Mussolini lined up with Hitler.” He is pleased to see, in Mitchell Leisen's
Arise, My Love
, that the refusal to deal with reality and the rigid pattern of the American happy ending were finally breaking down under the intense pressure of contemporary events. Foreign politics, wars and assassinations are no longer treated—as they had been in England during the 1930s—as a fantastic joke, or as material for a news “scoop.” At the end of this film Ray Milland and Claudette Colbert survive a shipwreck and “decide to stay in Europe and work for the defeat of Fascism. So, somewhat less rosily and more credibly than is usual in a film intended as a popular success, the story ends.”

So Ends Our Night
, an adaptation of Erich Remarque's novel about the sacrificial death of a German refugee, directed by John Cromwell, also reveals a welcome development of political consciousness: “Two years ago this anti-Nazi film … would have been impossibly highbrow and dangerously ‘left.' It can now be safely assumed that ‘S.A.,' ‘S.S.,' ‘Ogpu,' ‘Gestapo,' etc., will convey approximately the right meanings and that the average filmgoer is somewhat ahead of the magistrate who remarked recently to a German refugee, ‘You must have done something wrong or they wouldn't have put you in the concentration camp.'”

Orwell's critique of another anti-Nazi film,
Escape
, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, foreshadows with extraordinary clarity the even more dehumanized and dangerous world of
Nineteen Eighty-Four.
He believes the film fails because of its unwillingness to be too “political,” and has rather unrealistic expectations of what a film might hope to portray: “It makes play, fairly effectively, with the horror of the Gestapo, but as to why the Gestapo exists, how Hitler reached his present position, what he is trying to achieve, it utters not a word.” Though the end of the film degenerates into absurdity, the first part, which includes Bonita Granville as “one of those spying and eavesdropping children whom all the totalitarian States specialise in pro
ducing,” captures “the nightmare atmosphere of a totalitarian country, the utter helplessness of the ordinary person, the complete disappearance of the concepts of justice and objective truth.” The “nightmare” of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
—which he saw in films like
Escape
—realistically portrayed the political terrorism of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, transposed into the austere landscape of wartime London.