Millions Like Us

It was not until the invention of photography that we began to know what history was really like. Before that we had to rely on representations through art, writings and imaginings. But with the Crimean and American Civil War we could see the actual people who took part so that their suffering began to take on a poignancy that we never quite experienced from depictions of previous conflicts. Two dimensions were still missing that were to give records of history added immediacy, movement and sound. The first was in place to capture the cataclysmic events of World War I and the second was there to give the period of World War II a vividness that could be grasped by all future historians. As if to back up all that acreage of newsreel footage we have the feature films of the period often shown in the dead offpeak viewing times of morning and afternoon television to give us some idea of what people felt during what is rapidly becoming long ago. Although generally highly fictionalised they gave closeup substance to what in newsreels were extras in crowd scenes. As a boy who grew up in the '40's I feel equipped to vouch for those films of the period that conveyed something of the authenticity of what things were like then. I would rate "Millions Like Us" pretty highly in this respect. As a film it cannot compare with several others such as Carol Reed's "The Way Ahead" or Cavalcanti's "Went the Day Well". It lacks their sense of style, is often clumsy in continuity - the transition from peace to war is none too clearly presented - and has some unconvincing miniature mockups such as the oft repeated shot of a factory roofscape at night with toy searchlights beaming away in the background. Much of the photography has the amateurish look that afflicted much British cinema of the period, that the critic C.A. Lejeune once referred to as "like photographs from a plumbing catalogue". (Someone please let me know if I have got this wrong as I am quoting from vague memory). But in spite of these reservations it gets close to how people looked and spoke in those days, what their homes looked like and how they passed their time. It does it without recourse to caricatures of class stereotypes or sentimentality so that it remains one of the most honest films of its type. I have vivid memories of my mother working part-time in a munitions workshop just along the road from our house in Pinner. It wasn't a vast factory like the one in the film, more like a converted garage. I remember her making a part of a shell just like the ones that Patricia Roc, Anne Crawford and Megs Jenkins made. There was even a foreman figure dressed in the same type of overall as Eric Portman. For me those factory scenes in particular accurately represent a small part of our history.