The home fires, burning… Blighty (1927), BFI with Costas Fotopoulos

A film about the Great War that doesn’t feature any battlefield action, Blighty was originally to be called Apres le Guerre which more accurately reflects the intended audience than the action. It’s pretty much all about the Home Front and is a like a silent-WWI version of a Family At War.

In his introduction, King’s College’s Dr Lawrence Napper, author of The Great War in British Cinema of the 1920s*, explained that the war had been a subject for the British film industry pretty much from the Armistice and far from films such as Blighty being considered “anti-war” they were plugging into the mind-set of audiences who having experienced loss were all aware of the horrors of war yet were proud of the contribution they had made to peace. Films re-enacting battles like Walter Summers’ Battles of the Coronel and Falklands Islands (1927), Mons (1926) and Ypres (1925) as well as AV Bramble’s Zeebrugge (1924) (recently screened in Portsmouth on 28^th September**) were popular as indeed was this one which was being screened as part of the BFI’s World War One: Regenerations strand.

Directed by Adrian Brunel, Blighty focuses on the experience of the Villiers family who live in a well-upholstered Georgian pile in Park Lane and are so loaded they can even afford to have Jameson Thomas as a chauffeur. It’s interesting, that despite Mr Thomas’ best efforts this film is uplifted by the performances of the three main female actors.

Alright you 'orrible lot!

Nadia Sibirskaïa films are as rare as hen’s teeth and I’ve seen two in the last few days with this and the marvellous Au Bonheur des Dames. Best known for the extraordinary visual experiments of Menimentant she’s a fascinating player to add to the mix on this very British film. She has a febrile visage and features that quiver with emotion in an expressionistic and natural way instantly drawing the eye and the sympathy. Here she plays a refugee in France who meets, falls in love with, marries and has a child with the Villiers’ only son Robin (Godfrey Winn – a fascinating character in himself).

Robin starts the film off at university in old Heidelberg with lots of German friends all of whom enjoy a healthy duel as part of their studies. Robin is hearty enough to join in the fun but his first duel is called off as news breaks of the Russians mobilising after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand – those scars of honour will have to wait for the real thing.

The film recreates the assassination and features extensive footage from newsreels all of which would have felt as raw to the audience as images of 9/11 or 7/7. This mix of real and the imagined connected with audience sentiment whereas in 2017 people are complaining about the use of actual BBC reporters in the drama series The Bodyguard. It’s not so much that we’ve gone soft just that we don’t have the experience of suffering loss on this scale.

Lil and some bloke (Jameson T...)

Robin’s sister Ann is played by the remarkable Lillian Hall-Davis who brings her own emotional power to the screen with subtlety, utter control and the star power of a souped-up Keira Knightly. When Robin returns home to say that he has enlisted she hides her response in ways that leaves you in no doubt of the fear and quiet desperation just beneath the surface. She’s also concerned for chauffeur David Marshall although a number of experts doubted his suitability…

Sir Francis Villiers is played by Annesley Healey and his wife by Ellaline Terriss, the third of the terrific leading ladies (literally in her character’s case). She has perhaps the toughest role, carryong the pressure of playing the mother of a soldier, to be watched by thousands who had experienced the same anxieties and, ultimately, the same loss. It’s a role she carries with care and respect and she is so powerful.

These women are the emotional heart of a narrative that occasionally telegraphs its moves but, sadly, that was the reality of a situation in which men went off to war and lost their health or their lives.

The lack of gunfighting only serves to strengthen the unreality of the daily dread and the stabs of happiness that punctuate the fear only serve to heighten the tension and the sure knowledge that tragedy is only a telegram away… The audience had been there, felt that and wanted the comfort that this had not been in vain and that the future was positively underway.

Godfrey Winn and Jameson Thomas put it there!

Blighty does not disappoint in that respect and pays fair dues to the women who fought an agonising war of wait and see; keeping the home fires burning as brightly as they could.

Costas Fotopoulos marched along in spirited fashion on piano occasionally racing ahead of a narrative that struck most effectively in undemonstrative silence.

Further details of the other screenings in the BFI’s World War One: Regenerations programme are on the website.

*Dr Lawrence Napper’s The Great War in British Cinema of the 1920s is available from Amazon and all good bookstores.

**My post on the screening of Maurice Elevy’s epic Nelson (1918) and Zeebrugge (1924) at Number 6, Portsmouth is available here.