In the night, an oceanic light

[sovay]

It is pouring right now, but this morning we had a fantastic sunrise. spatch got the best picture of it, melding the literary angles of my office into the commercial-residential lines of Somerville. Edward Steichen, eat your heart out.



I watched Pen Tennyson's Convoy (1940) because I couldn't get hold of The Cruel Sea (1953) and I'm glad it was the most popular British film of 1940 according to Kinematograph Weekly because it had to have something going for it. I overstate—I can't totally hate any war film that answers a German "Heil Hitler!" with a British "Heil my fanny!"—but despite its efforts away from triumphalism and some impressive if awkwardly integrated location shooting in the North Sea, it's the most conventional propaganda I've seen from Ealing. I like that its love triangle isn't and that both the ex-husband and the ex-lover who have been performing their accustomed roles of cuckold and cad get snapped out of it by the reappearance of the woman who's cheerful to be on friendly terms with both of them and no more, but in a naval picture it is probably not ideal that Clive Brook's most interesting scenes should be with Judy Campbell and not HMS Apollo. John Clements remains an ornament to every film in which I've seen him and until he's overtaken by the moralistic necessities of self-sacrifice, I enjoy how ironically he plays down to his reputation as a dashing slacker on a ship where he's best known for breaking up the captain's marriage. "Glass must be falling," he remarks to no one in particular, rapping the barometer in the wardroom his mere presence drinking has cleared. "Deep depression." In other news, I seem to be able to watch and think about movies again. Unfortunately, what I need to be able to think about is my job.

Comments

[sovay]

I have two great Patreon reviews from you to catch up on! This short-form musing on film is an enticing tidbit to remind me of what I'm missing.

Thank you! I am hoping to be able to keep the space to think. There has not been enough of it this month.

--man I hate those roles, hate the conventions of love triangles so much.

It can't have been the first one I encountered, but I can identify the earliest one I hated: Jean Auel's The Mammoth Hunters (1985). I read it in eighth grade and explicitly in-text it could have been solved with poly and everyone behaved with the emotional maturity and communication skills of eighth-graders and I may never have re-read it since.

Glad this one wasn't, though it sounds like that wasn't enough to change the tenor of the film.

It started promisingly and then sort of got sucked into the undertow of war clichés. I still like that the scope of its action is deliberately small-scale: escorting a convoy and fending off U-boats instead of taking on some secret decisive mission; the crew of the cruiser Apollo who have just been seeing more conventional action in the North Atlantic feel resentful of the job, as if they've been made babysitters instead of heroes for sinking a German submarine; and of course they discover that escort duty is just as dangerous as regular manoeuvres, only with the additional need to protect the civilians and not go haring off into the jaws of a wolf-pack. And then somehow things got very dramatic and Deutschland got involved and I could just have hunted down Powell and Pressburger's The Battle of the River Plate (1956) if I wanted to see a pocket battleship sunk, right? The resolution of the not-a-love-triangle also rolled aggravatingly back on itself—my tolerance for death by redemption was never very high to begin with and has plummeted over the years, but especially once we have established that Clements has nothing to atone for because Campbell broke up her own marriage to Brook (she ran off with Clements, sure, but he didn't seduce and abandon her as popularly reported; it's so refreshing when she unapologetically sets the record straight), what's he doing heroically flooding the magazine at the cost of his own life? Let him stick around and make a better first officer, for God's sake, now that he and his captain have got the melodrama out of their systems. Somewhere in the ether of alternate film there must have been a second half to this movie more in line with the first and it might not have been a masterpiece, but I might not have spent this much time complaining about it, either.

[ETA How did I neglect to comment on the photo? I missed sunrise here, so it was great to see yours--thank you. The colors are wonderful.]

You're welcome! All credit goes to spatch and the sky.

what's he doing heroically flooding the magazine at the cost of his own life?

[lauradi7dw]

I have no personal experience of making a propaganda film, but it just occurred to me that maybe this was meant to be a comfort to some bereaved member of the audience - the lost loved one saved others, making the death seem not necessarily noble or heroic but an act of friendship (the famous doing it for one's mates).

Usually I hate that trope, as it seems to be added to prompt personal growth in some other character, but this was a sudden flash of a possibility to me.

Re: what's he doing heroically flooding the magazine at the cost of his own life?

[sovay]

Usually I hate that trope, as it seems to be added to prompt personal growth in some other character, but this was a sudden flash of a possibility to me.

I seem to have missed this comment when you left it, but that's a much better interpretation than mine, so I shall hope that was it.