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Two years serving your country and they have to call you up for the Army
The New Lot (1943) contains the highest ratio of grousing to action of any propaganda film of my experience and it's wonderful. Written by Eric Ambler and Peter Ustinov, directed by Carol Reed, and commissioned through the Army Kinematograph Service at the request of the Directorate of Army Psychiatry, the 42-minute training film was designed to address the anxieties and discontents of new recruits to the British Army, especially since by 1942 the parameters of conscription had broadened to include any number of people who had gotten used to civilian alternatives and had even more reason than usual to kick when their call-up papers arrived. By nature, the plot precludes any outcome other than a successful fashioning of fighting men out of raw misfits, but it gets there wittily and sympathetically and less programmatically than its documentary title card and frame of action in North Africa could have led to. The problems are ordinary, the bitching about them eternal. Plus Bernard Miles gets to yell "bullshit," which would definitely not have passed the BBFC.
Even the traditional cross-section of the "new lot" comes with the aforementioned twist that while our five protagonists are far from the bottom of the barrel, none of them would have been worth their country's trouble two years ago. Art Wallace (Philip Godfrey) waits tables in a nightclub and has run out of deferments. Bernard Barrington (Raymond Huntley) maintains it's all a clerical error that he was called up from his government job. Keith Bracken (Ustinov) has never been away from home, Harry Fife (John Laurie) has been occupied with Civil Defence, and Ted Loman (Miles) sets the bar for bolshiness when he retorts, "I don't want to win the war. I want to do bricklaying." None of them fall in line easily and the film makes the realistic and slightly subversive case that none of them should be expected to. Ted is a natural-born barrack-room lawyer even before he has a barracks to hold forth in, but worried little Art almost goes over the wall the first night for reasons that are anything but weedy. Even Harry with his civilian experience of authority in emergencies hesitantly asks a glasshouse-bound soldier what the army is like and receives a cynical look that is at once too much information and no answer at all. I would love to know if Ustinov wrote the part of Keith for himself because he's playing—barely out of his teens—the baby of the squad, awkward but not hopeless. His difficulties learning to fire the Bren gun are explicitly flagged as a matter of empathy, not cowardice: he's not afraid of the noise or even combat per se, but when we see how stricken he is to have injured one of his squadmates even fleetingly and accidentally during a moment of sparring off the clock, we understand that he can imagine all too well what will happen when his bullets are chattering through a human opponent instead of a wooden target. Otherwise he's just another green recruit, so young that he's left a mother instead of a girl behind him; poignantly, he is always seen wearing her ring, and intelligently, the film doesn't use it to type him as a mama's boy or set him up for a melodramatic loss. Some of the characters get dramatic resolutions to their predicaments, like Art and his forty-eight hours compassionate leave to see his motherless children safely settled with "some decent people in the country" for the duration of his service. Some don't really get resolutions at all. Every chance he gets, Bernie is pecking away at his pocket typewriter, eternally petitioning the Ministry of Labour to get him out of boot camp and back into his formerly reserved occupation and the payoff is that nothing happens. His letters go unanswered, he's never smacked down for his upper-middle-class shirking; we are left to conclude that at some point he just gave up the scheme, but the closest thing we see to a change of heart is his pleased surprise at finding himself tapped for the Royal Fusiliers. Except for the early scene with the Czech soldier (Albert Lieven) whose quietly related history of flight from the Nazis after the deportation of his family to Poland briefly forces the inconvenience of the British recruits into perspective, The New Lot never reaches for Why We Fight when it can get just as good an effect out of "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning!" The moral about unit cohesion comes through loud and clear when the truculent Ted is the one to figure out how to get Keith over his block about live fire, but he does it not by leaning on the kid's patriotism or shaming him for his sensitivity but by breaking the exercise down to the mechanics of the gun: "I know, it's just the idea . . . Look, piston group, breech block, see?" This theoretical approach will obviously, literally not survive contact with the enemy, but it's humane and it succeeds in its immediate goal of not washing its subject out of basic training and it's nicely underplayed that Ted isn't moved by a millions-like-us revelation but simply grows out of his griping when he recognizes that someone else is really having a rougher time than he is. The most perfunctory sequence in the picture is the successful conclusion of an exercise against the Home Guard. The team's eventual bonding is much more vividly conveyed by their reactions to a war picture starring a never-worse Robert Donat in a pitch-perfect piss-take of every stiff upper cliché rightly catcalled by our protagonists, who even after six weeks of army life can recognize the silly, sanitized disjoint between civilian images and military realities. Sitting for the group photo that brackets the film's main action, they speculate with a mix of trepidation and determination on the future: "Millions of us all sticking together because we know we can't win the war unless we do stick together. Well, it stands to reason, doesn't it, we got to go on sticking together after the war's won." Lest the viewer fear they have all gone idealistic, there is also some deserved concern that the fit-for-heroes promises of the last war will fail this time around, too. "What about steady jobs and fair wages?" What indeed.
I cannot but detect an in-joke in the soldier who explains that he got his "cushy job . . . making training films" by being "a cinema usher in civvy street," but I don't begrudge it. I know much less about the AKS than about the U.S. Army Signal Corps or the First Motion Picture Unit, but since it was headed by Thorold Dickinson and seems to have functioned almost inadvertently as an apprenticeship system for filmmakers who would go on to be major names in British cinema, I am hoping I can find more of its products than this one short film thought lost for decades before the Indian Ministry of Information did us all a solid. Because it could not be screened for the public at the time, The New Lot was adapted and expanded by Ambler, Ustinov, and Reed into the commercial feature The Way Ahead (1944), in which I am interested and vaguely afraid it will not contain nearly enough inveterate kvetching. In any case, now I can see where Carry On Sergeant (1958) came from. This idea brought to you by my cushy backers at Patreon.
Even the traditional cross-section of the "new lot" comes with the aforementioned twist that while our five protagonists are far from the bottom of the barrel, none of them would have been worth their country's trouble two years ago. Art Wallace (Philip Godfrey) waits tables in a nightclub and has run out of deferments. Bernard Barrington (Raymond Huntley) maintains it's all a clerical error that he was called up from his government job. Keith Bracken (Ustinov) has never been away from home, Harry Fife (John Laurie) has been occupied with Civil Defence, and Ted Loman (Miles) sets the bar for bolshiness when he retorts, "I don't want to win the war. I want to do bricklaying." None of them fall in line easily and the film makes the realistic and slightly subversive case that none of them should be expected to. Ted is a natural-born barrack-room lawyer even before he has a barracks to hold forth in, but worried little Art almost goes over the wall the first night for reasons that are anything but weedy. Even Harry with his civilian experience of authority in emergencies hesitantly asks a glasshouse-bound soldier what the army is like and receives a cynical look that is at once too much information and no answer at all. I would love to know if Ustinov wrote the part of Keith for himself because he's playing—barely out of his teens—the baby of the squad, awkward but not hopeless. His difficulties learning to fire the Bren gun are explicitly flagged as a matter of empathy, not cowardice: he's not afraid of the noise or even combat per se, but when we see how stricken he is to have injured one of his squadmates even fleetingly and accidentally during a moment of sparring off the clock, we understand that he can imagine all too well what will happen when his bullets are chattering through a human opponent instead of a wooden target. Otherwise he's just another green recruit, so young that he's left a mother instead of a girl behind him; poignantly, he is always seen wearing her ring, and intelligently, the film doesn't use it to type him as a mama's boy or set him up for a melodramatic loss. Some of the characters get dramatic resolutions to their predicaments, like Art and his forty-eight hours compassionate leave to see his motherless children safely settled with "some decent people in the country" for the duration of his service. Some don't really get resolutions at all. Every chance he gets, Bernie is pecking away at his pocket typewriter, eternally petitioning the Ministry of Labour to get him out of boot camp and back into his formerly reserved occupation and the payoff is that nothing happens. His letters go unanswered, he's never smacked down for his upper-middle-class shirking; we are left to conclude that at some point he just gave up the scheme, but the closest thing we see to a change of heart is his pleased surprise at finding himself tapped for the Royal Fusiliers. Except for the early scene with the Czech soldier (Albert Lieven) whose quietly related history of flight from the Nazis after the deportation of his family to Poland briefly forces the inconvenience of the British recruits into perspective, The New Lot never reaches for Why We Fight when it can get just as good an effect out of "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning!" The moral about unit cohesion comes through loud and clear when the truculent Ted is the one to figure out how to get Keith over his block about live fire, but he does it not by leaning on the kid's patriotism or shaming him for his sensitivity but by breaking the exercise down to the mechanics of the gun: "I know, it's just the idea . . . Look, piston group, breech block, see?" This theoretical approach will obviously, literally not survive contact with the enemy, but it's humane and it succeeds in its immediate goal of not washing its subject out of basic training and it's nicely underplayed that Ted isn't moved by a millions-like-us revelation but simply grows out of his griping when he recognizes that someone else is really having a rougher time than he is. The most perfunctory sequence in the picture is the successful conclusion of an exercise against the Home Guard. The team's eventual bonding is much more vividly conveyed by their reactions to a war picture starring a never-worse Robert Donat in a pitch-perfect piss-take of every stiff upper cliché rightly catcalled by our protagonists, who even after six weeks of army life can recognize the silly, sanitized disjoint between civilian images and military realities. Sitting for the group photo that brackets the film's main action, they speculate with a mix of trepidation and determination on the future: "Millions of us all sticking together because we know we can't win the war unless we do stick together. Well, it stands to reason, doesn't it, we got to go on sticking together after the war's won." Lest the viewer fear they have all gone idealistic, there is also some deserved concern that the fit-for-heroes promises of the last war will fail this time around, too. "What about steady jobs and fair wages?" What indeed.
I cannot but detect an in-joke in the soldier who explains that he got his "cushy job . . . making training films" by being "a cinema usher in civvy street," but I don't begrudge it. I know much less about the AKS than about the U.S. Army Signal Corps or the First Motion Picture Unit, but since it was headed by Thorold Dickinson and seems to have functioned almost inadvertently as an apprenticeship system for filmmakers who would go on to be major names in British cinema, I am hoping I can find more of its products than this one short film thought lost for decades before the Indian Ministry of Information did us all a solid. Because it could not be screened for the public at the time, The New Lot was adapted and expanded by Ambler, Ustinov, and Reed into the commercial feature The Way Ahead (1944), in which I am interested and vaguely afraid it will not contain nearly enough inveterate kvetching. In any case, now I can see where Carry On Sergeant (1958) came from. This idea brought to you by my cushy backers at Patreon.
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I thought so! And surprisingly accessible: I saw it in Ustinov's filmography, didn't recognize the title, threw it into an internet search to find out what it was, and there it was on YouTube. I've been searching for years for more famous movies without that kind of luck!
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I wasn't sure what to expect from it, but I ended up charmed!
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I guess they knew that anything other than a good dollop of realism would be laughed out, whereas this might actually help people.
Some one in the Directorate of Army Psychiatry had a lot of sense.
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I think very much so. And makes a better movie, too.
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the truculent Ted is the one to figure out how to get Keith over his block about live fire, but he does it not by leaning on the kid's patriotism or shaming him for his sensitivity but by breaking the exercise down to the mechanics of the gun: "I know, it's just the idea . . . Look, piston group, breech block, see?" This theoretical approach will obviously, literally not survive contact with the enemy, but it's humane --Yes. Sensitive to reality. Good.
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So much more so than I was expecting from its brief, and therefore so much more interesting! (And likeable.)
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MyGuy and I are now bathing in the warm waters of Foyle's War -- horrible things are happening off-camera while Foyle maintains his dry humor and twitches his fishing poles for trout.
This sounds like an excellent companion!
I'm pleased to report that this search string returns no Amazon/Etsy/eBay links and lots of Web 1.0 typewriter enthusiast sites.
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I watched the first four-ish seasons of that and enjoyed them very much! I still haven't managed to catch up on the rest of the series, but I wrote about one of my favorite episodes once.
This sounds like an excellent companion!
You could watch it as a short before the feature, so to speak.
I'm pleased to report that this search string returns no Amazon/Etsy/eBay links and lots of Web 1.0 typewriter enthusiast sites.
Aw! Thank you for letting me know.
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Thanks for the link -- we'd just watched that episode, and I agree that the depiction of respectful medicine was a delight.
The filk-ish duet was superlative, in particular watching the sniffy G.C. Smythe's horror.
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I have been known to sing it around the house. It gets stuck in my head not infrequently.