Tag: Virginia McKenna

Film Review: A Town Like Alice

I’m not sure what I was expecting when, a few days ago, I sat down to watch this film. It was one I’d heard of but never before given a viewing for whatever reason. The title suggests something domestic and perhaps slightly delicate and pretty and yet the blurb on the TV guide said it was a WW2 drama starring Virginia McKenna and Peter Finch. So after two hours of well-crafted cinema, intrigue became enlightenment and awe.

A Town Like Alice is a gripping 1956 British drama film based on the book of the same name by Nevil Shute. It tells the harrowing story of a group of women and children forced to march hundreds of miles across Malaya from village to village by the occupying Japanese forces who refuse to take responsibility for them. It is at once awful to witness the hardship and suffering the group has to endure and yet uplifting to behold the strength of the human spirit in times of woe.

The film opens with Jean Paget (played by Virginia McKenna), in a London solicitor’s office shortly after the war. The solicitor informs her that she has a large inheritance and, asked what she wants to do, Jean decides to go to Malaya to build a well in a small village. As work gets under way, she recalls her three years of living in the village and the journey she endured to get there during the war.

Flashback to 1942 and Jean is working in an office in Kuala Lumpur when the Japanese invade and take everyone prisoner. The men are sent off to labour camps and the women and children are told they must walk to a women’s camp fifty miles away. Jean being fluent in Malay, is therefore a prominent figure within the group and helps arrange the acquisition of food and medicines they require from the locals. But after an arduous march in unbearable heat and mosquito infested swamps, the women are told by the camp commanders that they are not wanted and are therefore forced to march on in search of another camp. And so their journey continues with disease and danger always close behind.

Along the way, the group meets young Australian soldier, Joe Harman (Peter Finch), also a prisoner of war, who drives a truck for the Japanese. He and Jean quickly forge a friendship and often meet behind their guard’s back to share a cigarette and swap stories. It is here that he tells her about his hometown of Alice Springs and this is where the story’s title comes from. Joe is appalled by the suffering the group has to endure and helps them by stealing food and medical supplies from his Japanese captors. However, a theft of chickens is investigated and with Jean being the initial suspect, Joe confesses his guilt to save her and the rest of the group. For his troubles, he is beaten and crucified to a tree and left to die. The women are forced to march away but a while later, when their guard dies, Jean begs that the group be allowed to stay in a village where they will gladly work and become part of the community. This they do until the end of the war when they are repatriated.

Returning to the present day in the village where the well is being built, Jean learns that Joe Harman didn’t die against that tree and that he survived the war and returned to Australia. She therefore travels there to search for him. Likewise, he travels to London in search of her and after some disappointment, the two finally meet in the airport at Alice Springs. Very moving it is too.

This is where the film differs from the book because where the cinematic story ends, the novel continues to explore Jean’s new life in the Australian outback and examines all the joys and difficulties that that throws up.

The film was shot mainly at Pinewood studios although some exteriors were filmed in Malaya and Australia. It was directed by Jack Lee (arguably his best known work) and distributed by The Rank Organisation. It was the third most popular film at the British box office in 1956 and won BAFTAs for both McKenna and Finch. Give it a look and you’ll see why. Their performances are faultless. But then, the same could be said of the entire cast. The film itself was nominated too as was the screenplay. The pacing is spot on – your attention and interest in the characters never wanes – and the look of the film is frighteningly real.

All in all, an incredible tale of triumph over adversity – a great film made from a great novel.

 

Film Review: Carve Her Name with Pride

This 1958 British movie set during the Second World War tells the story of the courageous Special Operations Executive agent, Violette Szabo. It’s based on R.J. Minney’s book of the same name which is itself based on fact.

Violette’s parents were a French mother and an English taxi-driver father who had met during World War I. She was born Violette Reine Elizabeth Bushell in Paris on 26 June 1921 and that’s where she spent her early years. Some time later the family moved to London where Violette attended Brixton Secondary School until she was fourteen. She found work as a hairdressing assistant and then as a department store sales assistant.

The movie doesn’t cover that early part of her life but it picks it up around this time, when she was a young woman working in London. It was on 14 July 1940 that she met Etienne Szabo, an officer in the Free French Army, at the Bastille Day parade in London and after a whirlwind romance, the couple were married just 42 day later on 21 August.

Their happiness seemed complete when Violette became pregnant with their daughter, Tania, but then Etienne was sent to North Africa where he died at the Battle of El Alamein in October ’42. He never saw his child.

It may have been for reasons of revenge or simply because she felt she had to do her bit for the war effort in the hope that her husband’s death wouldn’t have been in vain but whatever the reason, some time after receiving this tragic news Violette agreed to work for the Special Operations Executive (SOE).

She underwent intense training in everything from weaponry and explosives to cryptography and unarmed combat and on 5 April 1944 with little Tania tucked up in bed under the roof of her parents’ house, she was sent on her first mission into German-occupied France. Together with an SOE colleague, her task was to reorganise a resistance network that had been broken up by the Nazis and under the code name “Louise”, which also happened to be her nickname, she led the reformed group into blowing up a railway viaduct. Despite being picked up and questioned by a suspicious Gestapo, she was released and managed to return to England on 30 April. Mission accomplished. She’d proved herself to be courageous, capable and reliable.

Unfortunately, her second mission wouldn’t go quite so well. She was flown into central France on 7 June ’44, the day after D-Day, with the task of coordinating the activities of the local Maquis to sabotage German communication lines to aid the Allied invasion of Normandy. She was riding in a car that came upon an unexpected roadblock and after a brief running gun fight, during which she remained behind to allow her Resistance accomplice to escape, she was captured and taken for interrogation to Limoges.

Refusing to give up any information, she was transferred to Gestapo headquarters in Paris for further interrogation and torture but she remained uncooperative to the Germans and was moved to Ravensbrück concentration camp in August ’44. There she endured hard labour and malnutrition. Having been reunited in Paris with two recently caught fellow agents whom she had befriended during their initial training, Lilian Rolfe and Denise Bloch, the three women were executed by SS firing squad in February 1945. Violette was just 23 years old. Her body was cremated in the camp’s crematorium. The film ends with her daughter Tania, accompanied by her grandparents to Buckingham Palace, accepting the George Cross from the King.

As a movie, it’s perky and, in the right places gripping. Director Lewis Gilbert, whose career spanned six decades and included titles like Reach for the Sky (1956), Sink the Bismarck! (1960), Alfie (1966), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Educating Rita (1983) does a great job in pacing the action. Virginia McKenna who plays Szabo in a BAFTA nominated role, really got her teeth into the character and spent weeks training physically for the part. She manages to portray Szabo with a realism that leaves you feeling terribly sad as the end credits roll and yet so thankful to her and all those other individuals who gave their help and in many cases, their lives, to defeat Nazi Germany.

I remember (albeit a little vaguely now) what I was doing when I was 23 years old and it certainly wasn’t dodging bullets, blowing up viaducts and having my body scarred by torture. If you’ve never seen this movie or heard of Violette Szabo, then I recommend you check it out. She was a true heroine and paid the ultimate price for the risks she took but her memory will live on.