Hinterland

From captains to cockneys – in the golden age of the British war film, one star outshone all the rest

John Mills might just be the finest British cinema actor of the 20th century. Yet, since he never made a name for himself as a stage performer to rival Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson or even Michael Redgrave, he seldom gets the credit he deserves. I have written here before about the undervalued 1952 film The Long Memory

– a superb story of revenge, magnificently photographed on the bleak marshland of North

Kent, in which Mills has the starring role. But of all the old films I watched during the pandemic, Mills was in many of the best; in his golden age – from the early 1940s to the late 1950s – he rarely made a dud.

His one Oscar came for Ryan’s Daughter in 1971, and while that performance as a village idiot was extraordinary – and proof of his vast range – it was unlike the Mills we had come to know and love from nearly 40 years’ work. He made his film debut in 1932, aged 24, and during the 1930s had lead roles in numerous “quota quickies” – short, usually unmemorable films produced to enable cinemas to fulfil the stateimposed requirement to show a number of British productions. In the late 1930s he moved to supporting roles in higher-budget features: his big break came in Goodbye, Mr Chips in 1939, but he reached wider British audiences in The Black Sheep of Whitehall (1942) with Will Hay, one of the legends of the era, and sealed his reputation playing an able seaman in Noel Coward and David Lean’s In Which We Serve.

This brings us on to Mills’s versatility, in an age when even housemaids in films tended to sound as though they had been to Roedean. He could be an ex-public schoolboy, or from below decks, or even (as in the 1941 propaganda film Old Bill and Son) a convincing gor’ blimey cockney private soldier. But his first big starring role, in 1943, was as a submarine commander in We Dive at Dawn, a fine, understated account of the U-boat war, directed by Anthony Asquith. The next year he was in Coward and Lean’s This Happy Breed as a jolly, decent, lowermiddle-class type who embodies Mills’s career of social fluidity by joining the Navy as an able seaman but ending up as an officer. Then in 1945 he was a private again in Waterloo Road, one of the racier films of the war, where he plays a man who deserts in order to keep his wife from the clutches of a particularly revolting spiv, played by Stewart Granger; and then a pukka RAF type exhibiting great maturity in Terence Rattigan’s The Way to the Stars.

Critical opinion has it that in the post-war decade Mills’s career took a dive; but one must distinguish between films people went to see, and those that were no good. Before the rot supposedly set in, he made Great Expectations with Lean, which only a curmudgeon could deny was brilliant; but then cinema audiences began to decline with the spread of television, and Mills was not immune. Nonetheless, in these years he starred in one of the titanic films of British cinema, Ealing Studios’ Scott of the Antarctic, where his performance as the great explorer came to define not only his career, but also a certain national stereotype. He also made two eclectic films that deserve greater recognition than they receive: The October Man (1947), based on an Eric Ambler novel about a man wrongly accused of murder; and, in 1949, The Rocking Horse Winner, based on the story by DH Lawrence, one of the most remarkable films of a remarkable decade.

Mills said his favourite of his films was The History of Mr Polly, adapted from Wells’s novel, and also made in 1949; but he took time off from films after his next, Morning Departure, inspired by a real submarine disaster. It is grim, realistic and superbly acted, but it sank at the box office. Mills returned to prominence during the 1950s in the golden age of the British war film: in The Colditz Story, Above Us the Waves, Ice Cold in Alex – where at last we saw a slightly grittier side to him – and, best of all, as a belligerent NCO in Dunkirk, a role as powerful as that of Captain Scott. Just watching those will give anyone a clear grasp of Mills’s genius, and I look forward to returning to more of his pictures from the 1950s – Mr Denning Drives North, The Vicious Circle and Tiger Bay – for further evidence of his enormous range and talent.

Even housemaids in films tended to sound as though they had been to Roedean

g Showing his grittier side: John Mills in the 1958 film Ice Cold in Alex