Millions Like Us

Screenwriters Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, who penned the script for Alfred Hitchcock's 1938 film The Lady Vanishes (Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne from that film are recycled here with the same character names) turned their hand to co-directing in this wartime propaganda film that combines a fictional story of a working class family much in the manner of the Lean-Coward classic, This Happy Breed (1944), with semi-documentary footage of Britain at war, shot by cinematographers Jack Cox and Roy Fogwell who had been collecting such footage since its outbreak.

It is a solid film that like so much of its kind meant to warm the cockles of the British heart, along with the inevitable cups of tea, is a mixture of understated national pride and self-effacing conformity to time-honoured traditions, Gilliat and Launder dishing it up with some wry humour and delivering a wonderfully effective ending that has the toiling masses singing along as British bombers fly overhead on their way to giving Jerry a hiding.

 

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