THE STARS LOOK DOWN

This 1940 film is an adaptation of the best selling novel by AJ Cronin about a mining community.  As a work of social realism centred on the working class it was ahead of its time in that we had to wait another twenty years or so before the wave of British kitchen sink dramas such as 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning' and 'This Sporting Life' started appearing. 

This is also the film that confirmed the director Carol Reed as a major talent.

Cronin was involved in the process of adapting his long novel (over 700 pages) which necessarily meant some streamlining. For example World War I features prominently in the novel but is not present in the film, which I took to be set in the 1930s.

The lead protagonist in the film is Davey Fenwick a bright young man, the son of a coal miner, who passionately believes in the need to nationalise coal mining. He is very well played by Michael Redgrave even if he is, at 32 years of age, too old for the part.

A few years earlier Redgrave had starred in ‘The Lady Vanishes’ alongside Margaret Lockwood, who also appears here, no doubt to improve the film’s appeal.  I guess most cinemagoers, seeing Redgrave and Lockwood on the poster, would have expected a romance between them.  If so they were disappointed because although Davey does marry Jenny (Lockwood’s character) it is a disastrous decision for them both. Not only are they ill suited to each other but in marrying when they do Davey jeopardises his career prospects.

If I have any criticism of the film it is that the relationship between Davey and Jenny (much expanded and changed from the novel) is not especially well integrated into the larger, more important, narrative of the risks taken by miners in those days, which inevitably leads to a climactic disaster in which Davey’s father and brother, among many others, die.

In 'Busman's Honeymoon' Dorothy L Sayers has a character dismissing Cronin’s novel as too depressing and preachy.  Fortunately the film avoids being either through simply being a high quality production all round.  The dialogue rings true, the portrayal of the community is unpatronising and unsentimental, the acting is of a very high standard (I was particularly impressed by Edward Rigby and Nancy Price as Davey’s father and mother), it is shot on location, and the cinematography has a stark beauty to it.