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I've been looking for you
It really is not true of all the shorts I see, but I wish Channel Incident (1940) were a feature film. At nine and a half minutes, it has little time for more than a tableau of the Dunkirk evacuation, but its twist on national heroism so folklorically anticipates more inclusive revisions that the Ministry of Information should have put some other propaganda in the five-minute weekly free slot and let Two Cities or Ealing have a crack at the human interest.
The phlegmatically anonymous title gives no hint that its plot is the stuff of broadside ballads: when the all-hands call comes in from the Admiralty, the heroine wiping the engine grease off her hands sees no sense in turning over the motor yacht registered in her husband's name when she might take it out herself in hopes of finding him among the stranded soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force. "But you know what it's for, don't you, miss?" she's warned anxiously. "I mean, they won't let a woman." Her reply is confident as conspiracy: "They needn't know." She has a young lion's face; in trousers and a man's loose oilskin, her brown curls packed beneath a knit balaclava and a tin hat and her voice clipped low for the naval officer on the docks at Ramsgate, she looks like many a woman who went to war before her, a credible boy. She doesn't pass so well that the soldier who offered the services of his Bren gun isn't shortly rapping on her helmet with a mock-reproving "Here, does your mother know you're out?" but he settles down with a grin when she coolly replies in the middle of the night and the Channel, "Does the sergeant-major know you're here?" She holds her course under the whines and crashes of bombing and strafing runs, hauls the jetsam weight of men from the debris of swimming-deep water, calls to each new cargo of evacuees that she ferries to the minesweepers and naval trawlers standing out past the shallows of the beaches, "Any of you seen Number Three Company, 4th Division, REs?" Time and again the answer is no; she turns back toward the lines of wading, waiting men.
Even without the title card of the MOI, the film would never be accused of disguising its propaganda. Peggy Ashcroft is playing such an Everywoman that her never-named protagonist is actually credited as "She," rather in the same way that the Wanderer is tied up at the jetty of the helpfully archetypal "North Island Sailing Club." Since the National Service Act 1941 has not yet made women liable to conscription into the auxiliary services such as the ATS, the WRNS, or the WAAF, her patriotism is domestically inflected, signaled by her wistful fingering of the pipe which is her missing man's sigil and then spelled out as she steers through the salt-spray night: "You mean the real skipper? He's over there, Johnnie. We're going to fetch him back." As the relentless work of the evacuation wears on without a familiar face among the rounds of wounded and waterlogged men, she begins to ask herself dizzily, "Where is he? Oh, God, where is he?" Could the Bechdel–Wallace test have been introduced to cinema-going lesbians of the Blitz era, they would have agreed en masse that Channel Incident fails it like a shot. Even so, its can-do spirit means it wastes no time on special pleading for its heroine's competence and initiative, which are taken as read by the men she de facto commands for her share of Operation Dynamo. Gordon Harker's Ferris and Kenneth Griffith's Johnnie may be respectively too old and too young for military service and therefore suitable for relegation to the blurring lines of women's work, but Robert Newton's Tanner is able-bodied and in uniform and cheerfully affirms their positions with that first night's "Okay, skipper!" None of the men she drives herself to exhaustion rescuing seem to find anything strange about a woman lending them a hand over the gunwales, not even the joker who remonstrates with the sailor who throws him a boat hook, "Who do you think you are, Bo bloody Peep?" Most importantly, the collective miracle of the little ships keeps her heroism from revolving entirely around her husband. She hasn't failed when she finds him ashore in England, a wounded man carefully unloaded from a destroyer with a cigarette between his fingers even as he's rolled up to the ambulance. Some strangers with a motor launch or a barge or a fishing smack helped him to safety, just as she relayed her own strangers home. In different places, they were still in it together. "Well, here I am."
Channel Incident was produced and directed by Anthony Asquith in September 1940, his first foray into the subject matter of war that would furnish as wide a range of films as the espionage quirks of Cottage to Let (1941) or the well-made attrition of The Way to the Stars (1945); it was written by Dallas Bower and Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie under his naval pen name of Bartimeus and may eschew almost all of the popular myths of Dunkirk. The photography by Bernard Knowles is documentary-style on a budget—tight and close on the characters so that if the water isn't open, the audience'll never know—and the interpolation of historical footage allows the smoke-billowed beaches of Dunkirk and their straggling soldiers in long shot to play themselves, a trick repeated at the end of the film to intercut Ashcroft at the end of her hope among the tired, daylit troops disembarking onto British soil at last. Perhaps at feature length it would have slackened if not sufficiently built out from its field-stripped premise, but as a one-reeler it's so compact that it feels spring-loaded. I shall fantasize that it might have been directed by Leslie Howard, who co-directed my beloved Pygmalion (1938) with Asquith and demonstrated his respect for the wartime heroism of women with The Gentle Sex (1943), itself originally conceived by Moie Charles as a short documentary for the MOI. In the universe of films we actually got, I'd pair the two as short and feature, or just yield to the obvious and screen this one before Dunkirk (1958). It can be viewed on its own thanks to the digitization efforts of the Imperial War Museum. I cannot but imagine it was on the radar of Lissa Evans when writing Their Finest Hour and a Half (2009). It is apparently the case that Winston Churchill really liked it. This company brought to you by my looking backers at Patreon.
The phlegmatically anonymous title gives no hint that its plot is the stuff of broadside ballads: when the all-hands call comes in from the Admiralty, the heroine wiping the engine grease off her hands sees no sense in turning over the motor yacht registered in her husband's name when she might take it out herself in hopes of finding him among the stranded soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force. "But you know what it's for, don't you, miss?" she's warned anxiously. "I mean, they won't let a woman." Her reply is confident as conspiracy: "They needn't know." She has a young lion's face; in trousers and a man's loose oilskin, her brown curls packed beneath a knit balaclava and a tin hat and her voice clipped low for the naval officer on the docks at Ramsgate, she looks like many a woman who went to war before her, a credible boy. She doesn't pass so well that the soldier who offered the services of his Bren gun isn't shortly rapping on her helmet with a mock-reproving "Here, does your mother know you're out?" but he settles down with a grin when she coolly replies in the middle of the night and the Channel, "Does the sergeant-major know you're here?" She holds her course under the whines and crashes of bombing and strafing runs, hauls the jetsam weight of men from the debris of swimming-deep water, calls to each new cargo of evacuees that she ferries to the minesweepers and naval trawlers standing out past the shallows of the beaches, "Any of you seen Number Three Company, 4th Division, REs?" Time and again the answer is no; she turns back toward the lines of wading, waiting men.
Even without the title card of the MOI, the film would never be accused of disguising its propaganda. Peggy Ashcroft is playing such an Everywoman that her never-named protagonist is actually credited as "She," rather in the same way that the Wanderer is tied up at the jetty of the helpfully archetypal "North Island Sailing Club." Since the National Service Act 1941 has not yet made women liable to conscription into the auxiliary services such as the ATS, the WRNS, or the WAAF, her patriotism is domestically inflected, signaled by her wistful fingering of the pipe which is her missing man's sigil and then spelled out as she steers through the salt-spray night: "You mean the real skipper? He's over there, Johnnie. We're going to fetch him back." As the relentless work of the evacuation wears on without a familiar face among the rounds of wounded and waterlogged men, she begins to ask herself dizzily, "Where is he? Oh, God, where is he?" Could the Bechdel–Wallace test have been introduced to cinema-going lesbians of the Blitz era, they would have agreed en masse that Channel Incident fails it like a shot. Even so, its can-do spirit means it wastes no time on special pleading for its heroine's competence and initiative, which are taken as read by the men she de facto commands for her share of Operation Dynamo. Gordon Harker's Ferris and Kenneth Griffith's Johnnie may be respectively too old and too young for military service and therefore suitable for relegation to the blurring lines of women's work, but Robert Newton's Tanner is able-bodied and in uniform and cheerfully affirms their positions with that first night's "Okay, skipper!" None of the men she drives herself to exhaustion rescuing seem to find anything strange about a woman lending them a hand over the gunwales, not even the joker who remonstrates with the sailor who throws him a boat hook, "Who do you think you are, Bo bloody Peep?" Most importantly, the collective miracle of the little ships keeps her heroism from revolving entirely around her husband. She hasn't failed when she finds him ashore in England, a wounded man carefully unloaded from a destroyer with a cigarette between his fingers even as he's rolled up to the ambulance. Some strangers with a motor launch or a barge or a fishing smack helped him to safety, just as she relayed her own strangers home. In different places, they were still in it together. "Well, here I am."
Channel Incident was produced and directed by Anthony Asquith in September 1940, his first foray into the subject matter of war that would furnish as wide a range of films as the espionage quirks of Cottage to Let (1941) or the well-made attrition of The Way to the Stars (1945); it was written by Dallas Bower and Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie under his naval pen name of Bartimeus and may eschew almost all of the popular myths of Dunkirk. The photography by Bernard Knowles is documentary-style on a budget—tight and close on the characters so that if the water isn't open, the audience'll never know—and the interpolation of historical footage allows the smoke-billowed beaches of Dunkirk and their straggling soldiers in long shot to play themselves, a trick repeated at the end of the film to intercut Ashcroft at the end of her hope among the tired, daylit troops disembarking onto British soil at last. Perhaps at feature length it would have slackened if not sufficiently built out from its field-stripped premise, but as a one-reeler it's so compact that it feels spring-loaded. I shall fantasize that it might have been directed by Leslie Howard, who co-directed my beloved Pygmalion (1938) with Asquith and demonstrated his respect for the wartime heroism of women with The Gentle Sex (1943), itself originally conceived by Moie Charles as a short documentary for the MOI. In the universe of films we actually got, I'd pair the two as short and feature, or just yield to the obvious and screen this one before Dunkirk (1958). It can be viewed on its own thanks to the digitization efforts of the Imperial War Museum. I cannot but imagine it was on the radar of Lissa Evans when writing Their Finest Hour and a Half (2009). It is apparently the case that Winston Churchill really liked it. This company brought to you by my looking backers at Patreon.
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Her reply is confident as conspiracy: "They needn't know." --I love this line. You often have great metaphors, but this one is absolutely perfect, and part of that is because it is hardly even metaphor: They needn't know is the invitation to/creation of conspiracy. Beautiful.
She hasn't failed when she finds him ashore in England, a wounded man carefully unloaded from a destroyer with a cigarette between his fingers even as he's rolled up to the ambulance. Some strangers with a motor launch or a barge or a fishing smack helped him to safety, just as she relayed her own strangers home. --And that's a heart-achingly true way of portraying what it is to be in a thing together. We don't save our own: I save yours and you save mine.
Wakanomori is more enthusiastic about giving war films a try than I am--I often leave him to watch England-at-War films on his own. But here's a short, publicly available, that we'll both enjoy. Thank you!
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I would love to hear it if you do.
--I love this line. You often have great metaphors, but this one is absolutely perfect, and part of that is because it is hardly even metaphor
Thank you!
--And that's a heart-achingly true way of portraying what it is to be in a thing together. We don't save our own: I save yours and you save mine.
Yes! That was so important to me. Dramatically it would have been too pat for her to find him on the beaches, but really it means so much more if someone else does: reciprocal, never-known. That's more than propaganda. It's how people are supposed to take care of one another.
But here's a short, publicly available, that we'll both enjoy. Thank you!
You're welcome! I very much hope you both do.
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Thank you for telling me! I'm so glad it worked for you. I watched it as a curiosity and liked it very much.
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I would have loved a beat to check in with them, too. But that density is part of the reason I feel the story could have sustained the feature treatment. It isn't thin, it's just over very fast.
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(On a related note, The Way To The Stars is apparently getting fic soon, via
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She was an inspiration for Lissa Evans! And that entire series sounds phenomenal and I bitterly resent not having known to impose on some UK-based friend to see it in the alternate universe where I could have afforded to travel. I especially approve of the inclusion of A Canterbury Tale.
Prior to this short, I had only seen Peggy Ashcroft much older—and she was wonderful, but I want a time machine now for her performances opposite Michael Redgrave and Paul Robeson and Ralph Richardson.
This was great, thank you for sharing it! I'd pair it with The Snow Goose, which I love, but I appreciate that this one has a happier ending!
You're welcome! I don't think I knew there was a film of The Snow Goose! I grew up on a version of the book illustrated by Beth Peck. It was one of the first ways I heard of Dunkirk, actually, along with Mary Renault's The Charioteer.
(On a related note, The Way To The Stars is apparently getting fic soon, via bethefirst! I'm looking forward to it, and thought you'd like to know too!)
Absolutely. Thank you for letting me know! I look forward to it and incidentally I hope your fic is coming along as you would want it to.
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and incidentally I hope your fic is coming along as you would want it to.
Thank you! <3
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Oh, how handy! I will check it out. I love that it inspired an album, like a fictional soundtrack.
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She: "You'd better get some tin hats from the ARP. Get three, we'll take Johnnie."
Ferris: "Johnnie?! Ooh, he's a bit young, Miss, I mean Madam, and simple."
So Johnnie's not even going to age into being eligible to serve. Different times, etc, but I'm still a bit uncomfortable with it. Also seems like a peculiar tangent to introduce, unless they were looking at the everyone can serve in some way/"all in it together" angle.
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I caught that line. I wasn't sure what to do with it, partly because it wasn't clear to me how "simple" the character was meant to be: he's sort of minimally verbal, but he has no trouble following conversations (the heroine specifies three tin hats rather than two because of his reaction at 1:48–50 as soon as she mentions getting some from the ARP) and he seems completely handy around the boat (she does say as much in the first scene, but when she's dead on her feet in the aftermath of the evacuation, Ferris at 8:00 tells her to lie down and wakes up Johnnie to take the wheel and they obviously get back all right). I couldn't tell what the combination meant for his military eligibility and decided for purposes of this review it was more important that he was underage than to fall down a rabbit hole trying to find out. I agree with you that it's an odd detail to include.