The film opens with workers srewing the last bolts on the future next great destroyer: the HMS Torrin. Later comes the christening with the bottle of champagne wishing her the best of luck if not the safest missions. But fate abandons the proud vessel in action in the Mediterranean sea when the last object that smashes into her metallic body is a German torpedo. Near Crete, in 1941, HMS Torrin sunk leaving less than half of survivors, some of which managed to cling in a life raft.
"This is the story of a ship" announced the narrator with a vibrant voice that sets the patriotic tone of "In Which We Serve". Processing my thoughts right now, I feel that "life" was more fitting a word than "story" as we literally witness the conception, the birth, the baptism and the death of a ship. This is a film that humanizes an object as a matrix of lives (those she contains, those she protects), a mother to all sailors, a rival to their wives... after all, what pronoun do they use for a ship?
And while her fate is sealed in the opening fifteen minutes, the symbol remains: the unshakable and insubmersible British valiance and determination, commonly referred to as "stiff upper-lip", that "relax and carry on" attitude that could let houses being blitzed but not spirits. The film takes us to the different missions inside the ship and tells through punctual flashbacks the stories of the survivors, from top commanders to ordinary seamen, who have all in common that very ship in which they served.
There's the proud and charismatic Capt. E. V. Kinross (superbly played by Noel Coward himself) who encourages his men to be both a happy and an efficient team, as "one can't be efficient if he's not happy" and that goes the other way round, he rules his ship with firm hands but his capability to address his troops tells you about the kind of sacred bond that forged the legend of seamanship for centuries, reminding us that this is an insular country whose fate have depended in various instances of history. There's Bernard Miles as Chief Petty Officer Walter Hardy, a less solemn figure who devotes all his love to mistress Torrin.
Both are happily married men, Mrs. Kinross is played by Celia Johnson who incarnates the devoted and self-effacing housewife à la Mrs. Miniver, Joyce Carey is Mrs. Hardy, who's like her husband, a more down-to-earth counterpart to the too-perfect Johnson. Both actresses would star in another iconic Noel Coward's creation: David Lean's masterpiece "Brief Encounter" -sure the film had a serious bearing on that casting decision. Finally, the third story involves an ordinary seaman named Shorty Blake, and played by the mousy Mickey Rooney-like John Mills, on a leave from service, he meets and marries the pretty Freda (Kay Walsh).
The military parts are so riveting thanks to David Lean's inspired cutting as we can never really tell the difference between fiction and archive footage when it comes to big scope scenes. There's such a documentary-like precision that I was often misled by the title thinking it was a documentary. The special effects, sound editing, and the haunting black-and-white photography completes the picture. Lean's pivotal contribution would be so grand that Coward will accept to credit him as a co-director, starting the career of one of the greatest British film-makers.
But the editing shines beyond the war sequences, when it takes us to the intimacy of these couples and the way they live war from within. We see women trying to keep their moral on and sowing while the wheezing sounds of the Luftwaffe pierce in the sky in the scary ominousness that reminded of "Mrs. Miniver"; speaking of which, I was afraid that one of the civilians would know an ending similar to one of the characters from the Best Picture winner. The tragedy isn't that some soldiers died but that they survived but lost someone in the Blitz.
But the film has its share of joyous interludes: an engaging singing session of "Beer Barrel Polka" with Mr. Hardy, two parallel toast scenes, one where the proud Harry raises his glass making an almost indecent declaration of love to the HMS Torrin, and a second where Mrs. Kinross admits her resignation as a seaman's wife that her greatest rival will always be a ship and there's nothing to do about it. Some family scenes kind of drag on but like in the happy/efficiency equation; one doesn't go without the other, it's because we see these men in their privacy that we live the war with them. The film shares also some similarities with another Best Picture winner William Wyler's "The Best Years of Our Lives".
Overall, this is a spectacular and convincingly emotional movie that allowed one director named David Lean to emerge. Based on the Lord Mountbatten's story of the HMS Kelly, it's remarkably synthetic in the way it shows all three forces collaborating together -infantry, Navy and RAF- in sheer comradeship. But beyond its "morale-boosting" premise, the film unveils a more nuanced side by portraying a young stoker who left his place in action, I didn't even recognize the young Richard Attenborough.
Now, from our distant perspective, the convenience of labelling a movie such as "In Which We Serve" as a propaganda war movie shouldn't undermine any attempt to analyse the film on a pure cinematic and narrative basis. On the level of both, Noel Coward's superproduction, endorsed by the Ministry of Information, is a triumph. This is a film that engages the viewer into the reality of wartime seamanship but rather than focusing on the military element, it also present us the aspects of the war on a pure domestic and human level.
We see military men fighting, throwing torpedoes into enemy vessels, getting sunk, drifting on floating drafts and reminiscing within their common misfortune on their family lives. The best war movies aren't just about the physical battles but also their emotional implications from the civilians' perspective, and both sides inspire rather exhaustive experiences.