January

Director Pen Tennyson began studio shooting of Ealing’s The Proud Valley on 23 August 1939, the day the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact locked the Russians and Germans into their war-footing. Eleven days later, Neville Chamberlain’s declaration of war with Germany was broadcast from Downing Street. The King’s message to the nation warned of ‘dark days ahead’, urging the public to ‘fervently commit our cause to God’. Throughout the 1930s, British cinema, and indubitably the British musical film, had observed an unwritten mandate not only to entertain but divert attention from the country’s Depression. Once people were inside the doors of the local Norvic or Odeon, film offered the possibility of shuffling off everyday care. As the 1930s progressed the threat of war increased, and when war broke out (although it was considered ‘phoney’ between September 1939 and May 1940) the situation had a radical effect on British film production. Nevertheless, between 1940 and the end of war in 1945, British studios produced musical films that attempted to respond to the times. Creatively and artistically, the attempt was by no means consistently successful. Some studios blithely continued churning out stuff as if nothing had changed, during a period when cinema – even the froth of the least ambitious of musical films – might be expected to serve more purpose than in peacetime.

The BBC approved of The Proud Valley. A month after its release, it broadcast a shortened version of the soundtrack on radio. This signal honour said something about the film’s potency, the screenplay by Tennyson, Jack Jones and Louis Golding, based on a story by Herbert Marshall and Alfredda Brilliant. Charles Barr identifies the film as ‘the first in the Ealing cycle of war-effort films which dramatize the contribution that a section of the nation, military or civilian, can make to the whole’.