George Orwell, film critic

Between October 1940 and August 1941 George Orwell wrote twenty-six film review columns – which were omitted from the four volumes of his Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters – for Time and Tide. This politically independent weekly magazine was edited by the lively Lady Rhondda, the plump and curly-haired daughter of a Welsh coal magnate. Most of the films Orwell reviewed were undistinguished escapist entertainment, which he mostly disapproved of and disliked. But they also included minor works by major directors: Rene Clair’s The Flame of New Orleans and Fritz Lang’s Western Union; and a few which he took more seriously: the Mormon epic Brigham Young, the anti-Nazi melodrama Escape and, most notably, Chaplin’s The Great Dictator.

By 1940 Orwell had had an adventurous but not particularly successful life. He was born in India, had won a scholarship to Eton, served for five years in the Burma police, been down and out with the tramps of Paris and London, lived with the miners of Wigan, contracted tuberculosis, fought and been shot in the Spanish Civil War. He spent most of the 1930s writing prophetic books about the dangers of Communism and Fascism, and warning about the impending war. He had written three books of reportage and four novels, whose honesty and integrity earned him a respectful reputation but no money. The outbreak of war led to a period of waste and frustration. He was desperately poor, medically unfit for the army and unable to find work that would help the war effort. He published Inside the Whale, a collection of essays, in March 1940; and wrote the propagandist Lion and the Unicorn between August and October. When he completed this tract, he began reviewing films and writing the ‘London Letter’ for the Partisan Review; but abandoned his stopgap career as a film critic when he joined the Indian section of the BBC in August 1941.

Orwell’s criticism was permeated by a battered idealism and powerfully influenced by the massive defeats of the Allied armies during 1939-41. The invasion of Poland; the occupation of Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland and France; the evacuation of Dunkirk and the air raids on England; the conquest of Yugoslavia and Greece; the destruction of shipping by U-boats and the siege of Leningrad, placed all of Europe under the domination of Hitler and threatened the very existence of Britain. America had not entered the War; and the victories at Stalingrad and El Alamein were not yet in sight. Orwell’s fears and hopes about the war affect all his reviews. He specifically mentions the Athenia, which was torpedoed, with 1400 people aboard, two days after the War began; Russian tank battles; and Wavell’s first bright triumphs in Libya and Abyssinia in February 1941. ‘What rot it all is!’ he comments on One Night in Lisbon. ‘How dare anyone present the war in these colours when thousands of tanks are battling on the plains of Poland and tired workers are slinking into the tobacconist’s shop to plead humbly for a small Woodbine. And yet as current films go this is a good film.’

Orwell, who rarely mentions the directors and is not interested in film as a distinct form of art, does not write brilliantly illuminating criticism, like his contemporaries James Agee and Graham Greene. He is primarily concerned with the political, social and moral content of films; their propaganda value; the way they reflect the progress of the war; and the difference between English and American cinema. His reviews are generally short and formulary: an opening comment, discussion of the plot, snap judgment on the film and remarks on the cast, with particular praise for veteran English character actors like Edmund Gwenn, C. Aubrey Smith and Eric Blore. But his wit at the expense of the more tedious films shows the engaging side of his character that was also revealed in his ‘As I Please’ columns for Tribune. The top hat in Quiet Wedding, ‘symbol throughout half the world of British plutocracy, is now only worn by schoolboys, undertakers and bank messengers.’ The school in Little Men is ‘the 1870 equivalent of Dartington Hall.’ I Married Adventure, an African jungle film by Osa Johnson, is excellent for those ‘who are distressed by the present depleted state of the Zoo.’ The horrible quality of the colour in Noel Coward’s Bitter Sweet makes the actors’ faces ‘marzipan pink, garish magenta and poisonous green.’ (Orwell rather exaggerates, a year after Gone with the Wind, the general defects of colour film.)

Orwell’s intensely hostile response to the manifest defects of American escapist films, which make a blank cartridge fired in a studio more exciting than the bomb that drops next door, is reinforced by his anger at the isolationist position of the United States during the first two years of the War. He assumes that English and European films are more serious if less technically expert than American ones, and condemns the sheer idiocy of the absurd plot of a romantic tearjerker like Waterloo Bridge. But he is interested in the audience’s response to the lively dialogue and their acceptance of the appalling banality. (He quotes a nice exchange from two women sitting behind him : ‘Of course, she can’t marry him after that.”Why can’t she?’ – ‘Well, I mean to say, she couldn’t.’ – ‘Why not? I would. I just wouldn’t say anything about it.’ – ‘No, she’ll kill herself. You’ll see.’)

He notes that the interest in adventure films would increase enormously if in ‘five per cent of the cases the heroine did not escape!’ He objects to the oppressive conventional morality and wryly comments that only in films do beautiful women ever starve. And in a critique of The Lady in Question, a remake of La Gribouille directed by Charles Vidor, he condemns ‘the intellectual contempt which American film producers seem to feel for their audience. It is always assumed that anything demanding thought, or even suggesting thought, must be avoided like the plague. An American film actor shown reading a book always handles it in the manner of an illiterate person.’ In a thriller like Tim Whelan’s A Date with Destiny (‘an old-fashioned murder story dolled up with a few “psychological” trappings for the benefit of an audience who are assumed to have heard far-off rumours of Freud’), the producers ‘cannot resist denouncing the whole science of psychiatry as something sinister, wicked and probably an imposture. The moral, beloved of English-speaking audiences, is that the “intellectual” is always wrong.’ What disgusts him and offends his Socialist beliefs in George Cukor’s film of The Gay Mrs. Trexel, ‘as in so many American films, is the utter lack of any decent, intelligent vision of life … It does not seem to strike them that the whole manner of life which depends on Paris dresses, servants, riding horses, etc., etc., is futile in itself.’

Another distasteful aspect of American culture, which Orwell also discusses in his comparison of English and American detective novels, ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’, is the gratuitous violence. For Orwell, the Raoul Walsh gangster film High Sierra represents the ne plus ultra of sadism, bully worship and gunplay, repugnantly combined with sentimentality and perverse morality: ‘Humphrey Bogart is the Big Shot who smashes people in the face with the butt of his pistol and watches fellow gangsters burn to death with the casual comment, “They were only small-town guys,” but is kind to dogs and is supposed to be deeply touching when he is smitten with a “pure” affection for a crippled girl, who knows nothing of his past. In the end he is killed, but we are evidently expected to sympathise with him and even to admire him.’

By contrast, he praises Henry Hathaway’s unusual and more ambitious film Brigham Young, because ‘the heroism of the Mormon pioneers is well brought out and Brigham Young’s own spiritual struggles are taken seriously.’ Orwell, who notes that the Mormons claimed divine inspiration, preached polygamy and were persecuted in the nineteenth century, states ‘The film is an interesting example of the way in which important events lose their moral colour as they drop backwards into history. It is more or less pro-Mormon, the polygamy [Young had nineteen wives and fifty-six children] being played down as much as possible and the methods by which the Mormons secured their extra wives ignored.’

Orwell finds that the cinematic representations of English social life and history are also highly idealised. He notes that the portrayal of ‘county’ society in Anthony Asquith’s Quiet Wedding, ‘a charming little film, which kept the jaded press audience laughing rapturously’, ignores the fact that the English gentry have lost contact with agriculture and live mainly on dividends. Yet he admires the deep charm of country life, its casualness and lack of ceremony with the feudally familiar servants; and says the film is chiefly interesting as a record of vanished time: ‘for it ignores the war and seems to belong to some period before Hitler definitely filled the horizon.’ The nostalgic longing for a world of peace, and the desire to establish a continuity between the England of the past and of the present, were the dominant themes of Orwell’s most recent novel, Coming up for Air (1939).

This England, a historical pageant, also sustains the myth that England is an agricultural country and that its inhabitants – who could not tell a turnip from a broccoli if they saw them growing in a field – ‘derive their patriotism from a passionate love of the English soil.’ Yet he affirms that such films are probably good for morale in wartime and patriotically states (as he does in his essay on Kipling) that ‘many of the events which the jingo history-books make the most noise about are things to be proud of.’ Orwell believes that propaganda films are a major weapon in war and that it is vital to learn how to rouse resentment against the enemy. He criticises two British propaganda films for their amateurishness, their use of the dreadful BBC voice ‘which antagonises the whole English-speaking world,’ and their failure to realise that most people are more disturbed by the destruction of a house than of a church. (‘Surely we can find something more effective to say than that the Germans have a spite against Gothic architecture?’)

Orwell is fascinated by the effect of war on the cinema. He notes a welcome change from the tinge of isolationist feeling in Escape to Glory to the sudden outbreak of Anglophilia in Nice Girl?. He remarks that Tony, the Californian grape-grower in They Knew What They Wanted, is ‘one of those big-hearted, child-like Italians who were favourites on the American screen before Mussolini lined up with Hitler.’ He is pleased to see, in Mitchell Leisen’s Arise, My Love, that the refusal to deal with reality and the rigid pattern of the American happy ending were finally breaking down under the intense pressure of contemporary events. Foreign politics, wars and assassinations are no longer treated – as they had been in England during the 30s – as a fantastic joke, or as material for a news ‘scoop’. At the end of this film Ray Milland and Claudette Colbert survive a shipwreck and ‘decide to stay in Europe and work for the defeat of Fascism. So, somewhat less rosily and more credibly than is usual in a film intended as a popular success, the story ends.’

So Ends Our Night, an adaptation of Erich Remarque’s novel about the sacrificial death of a German refugee, directed by John Cromwell, also reveals a welcome development of political consciousness: ‘Two years ago this anti-Nazi film =… would have been impossibly highbrow and dangerously “left”. It can now be safely assumed that “S.A.”, “S.S.”, “Ogpu”, “Gestapo”, etc., will convey approximately the right meanings and that the average filmgoer is somewhat ahead of the magistrate who remarked recently to a German refugee, “You must have done something wrong or they wouldn’t have put you in the concentration camp.” ‘

Orwell’s critique of another anti-Nazi film, Escape, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, foreshadows with extraordinary clarity the even more dehumanised and dangerous world of 1984. He believes the film fails because of its unwillingness to be too ‘political’, and has rather unrealistic expectations of what a film might hope to portray: ‘It makes play, fairly effectively, with the horror of the Gestapo, but as to why the Gestapo exists, how Hitler reached his present position, what he is trying to achieve, it utters not a word.’ Though the end of the film degenerates into absurdity, the first part, which includes Bonita Granville as ‘one of those spying and eavesdropping children whom all the totalitarian States specialise in producing’, captures ‘the nightmare atmosphere of a totalitarian country, the utter helplessness of the ordinary person, the complete disappearance of the concepts of justice and objective truth.’ The ‘nightmare’ of 1984 – which he saw in films like Escape – realistically portrayed the political terrorism of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, transposed into the austere landscape of wartime London.

Orwell’s most substantial and significant review, which synthesises the dominant themes of his film criticism, concerns The Great Dictator. Orwell, who is primarily interested in the effective presentation of serious ideas, praises the ‘glorious scenes of fights against Storm Troopers which are not less, perhaps actually more moving because the tragedy of wrecked Jewish households is mixed up with [slapstick] humour.’ He describes how the little Jewish barber is mistaken for Hynkel, the Dictator of Tomania, and says the great moment of the film occurs when the barber is surrounded by Nazi dignitaries, waiting to hear his triumphal speech: ‘Instead of making the speech that is expected of him, Charlie makes a powerful fighting speech in favour of democracy, tolerance, and common decency. It is really a tremendous speech, a sort of version of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address done into Hollywood English, one of the strongest pieces of propaganda I have heard for a long time.’ He adds, less enthusiastically, that it has almost no connection with the rest of the film, which fades out after the speech without revealing if the oration takes effect or if the Nazis shoot the impostor.

Though Orwell believes the film is technically weak, has no more unity than a pantomime and gives the ‘impression of being tied together with bits of string’, he finds it deeply moving because he identifies with Chaplin’s peculiar gift: ‘His power to stand for a sort of concentrated essence of the common man, for the ineradicable belief in decency that exists in the hearts of ordinary people, at any rate in the West. We live in a period in which democracy is almost everywhere in retreat, super-men in control of three-quarters of the world, liberty explained away by sleek professors, Jew-baiting defended by pacifists… The common man is wiser than the intellectuals, just as animals are wiser than men… Chaplin’s appeal lies in his power to reassert the fact, overlaid by Fascism and, ironically enough, by Socialism, that vox populi is vox Dei and giants are vermin.’ Orwell adds that pro-Fascist writers like Wyndham Lewis (who also wrote for Time ‘and Tide) have always pursued Chaplin with a venomous hatred. Lewis actually attacked Chaplin in Time and Western Man (1927) not for political reasons, but for popularising infantile attitudes.

Orwell concludes by affirming the propagandist value of Chaplin’s films, which had been banned in Germany since Hitler (his near-twin) came to power: ‘If our Government had a little more imagination they would subsidise The Great Dictator heavily and would make every effort to get a few copies into Germany – a thing that ought not to be beyond human ingenuity… The allure of power politics will be a fraction weaker for every human being who sees this film.’

Orwell’s criticism is limited by the mainly uninspiring quality of the films he reviewed during 1940-41 and by his lack of interest in the theory and technique of the cinema. But his commonsensical reviews are enlivened by his exposure of Hollywood’s pretensions (‘Nearly all American films are intellectually pretentious… The synopses handed out to representatives of the press “analyse” their absurd subject-matter as though it were the work of Ibsen’), and strengthened by his social commitment and moral intensity. They reflect his values, especially the concern with his distillation of English virtues – the concept of decency. And they clearly anticipate his acute insights about the terrifying atmosphere of totalitarianism in his two masterpieces: Animal Farm and 1984.