Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser
Marking the magnificence of one of Britain’s best actors
This month’s Advertiser article spotlights one of Britain’s most revered actors.
Starring in more than 120 films in a career spanning seven decades, John Mills played everything from a classic Dickens character to someone with challenging disabilities.
He made his film debut in 1932’s The Midshipmaid and his rise to stardom a decade later was largely due to his work with the great director David Lean.
During World War II, the cinema was a flagwaver for archetypal British films of national propaganda value.
Mills achieved critical acclaim as common seaman Shorty Blake in the Noel Coward/david Lean classic In Which We Serve, based on true events about the sinking of HMS Kelly.
According to the Kinematograph Weekly, it was the most popular and successful film at the time both here and in America, where it took in more than $1 million.
Mills and Lean followed up with another hit, This Happy Breed, in which he starred as a mildmannered everyman sailor.
Lean insisted that the film be shot in three-strip Technicolor, although the film stock was difficult to obtain during the war. The story of the trials and tribulations of a post-war British working-class family at the end of World War I was a scenario with real characters with whom wartime audiences could readily identify.
The movie also sketched the advances in technology, showing the arrival of crystal radio sets, the telephone, gaslights replaced by electricity and mass radio broadcast.
The film is regarded as one of Lean’s best and actually considered the fifth greatest British film
of all time.
Within a few years, however, Mills’ career was in a slump, mainly because the film industry did not make the most of his talents, Lean once again came to his rescue in 1954 by casting him in Hobson’s Choice.
This led to several roles in popular films such as The Colditz Story, Dunkirk and Ice Cold in Alex.
In 1960 Mills delivered one of his greatest performances in The Tunes of Glory as Colonel Barrow, an Etonian and strict disciplinarian who takes over the command of a battalion from Major Jock Sinclair, played by Alex Guinness.
The movie is a dark psychological drama which ends in the suicide of Barrow, and the remorse of Sinclair that leads to a nervous breakdown.
The Tunes of Glory is a masterwork of believable and engrossing acting and Alfred Hitchcock once said it was one of the best British films ever made.
For his excellent performance, Mills won a best actor award at the 1960 Venice film festival.
Even now, I find the performances and production retain their relevance in a story that will always have something to say to each generation.
Disney’s Swiss Family Robinson was also released in 1960 and is a hugely entertaining adventure film.
John Mills played the father of the Robinson family opposite Dorothy Mcguire as the mother.
Disney sensed the key ingredient for success right from the start; create a paradise-like situation and have the family give the audience the vicarious pleasure of doing exciting, amusing things everyone would love to be able to do.
This is the film’s great appeal, making it one of the studio’s all-time biggest moneymakers. I’m glad to say it also hasn’t dated and is as entertaining today as it was 60 years ago.