In Which We Serve

 “God bless our ships, and all who sail in them.” 

In Which We Serve is a film about the brave men who served in the British Navy during the Second World War; men who left behind families, friends, and comfort in order to defend their home country from the threat of the Nazis. Men who sacrificed their all for the good of their fellow man. This is a film about such men, made at a time when these actual events were still going on, and shown to an audience, many of whom had loved ones on board one such ship. For those people, this was an opportunity to see what their loved ones were doing in the war effort and to bring them just a little closer together during a turbulent time in the history of the world. 

While the general audience anmd critics appreciated the film and made it one of the most profitable films of the year, the men in the Navy were less enthusiastic with it. Some in the Admiralty dubbed the movie “In Which We Sink,” a snarky commentary on the plot structure and the depiction of a British Naval Vessel’s demise early on in the film. Despite that, this film was a hit and went on to be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. It competed against For Whom the Bell Tolls and Casablanca, though, and lost the race to the latter film. 

In Which We Serve is quite obviously a propaganda film. The title alone betrays that motive. This was 1942 after all, and the world was at war. Morale was down, and there was a desperate need for encouragement as the battles with Germany and Japan mounted. Anthony Havelock-Allan, a British filmmaker working with the production company Two Cities Films, approached Noël Coward, a stage actor and director, about making a propaganda film. The founder of Two Cities Films was looking for someone well known to write the screenplay, someone who British audiences would be well familiar with. Coward was interested in the project under two major conditions: he had to have complete control, and the subject of the film had to be the Royal Navy. The recent sinking of the HMS Kelly would have been on people’s minds at the time, so opening the film on a sinking would have hit audiences hard.  

When Coward presented the producers his initial plans for the film, it was deemed unwieldy, and he was required to trim it down, eliminating lengthy sequences in Paris, China, and the West Indies, narrowing the focus of the plot down to the bare minimum. A great deal of focus was placed on the mechanics of serving on board a Royal Navy ship, showing us just how commands are relayed, how ammunition is transferred from below decks up to the giant guns above, and just how things like the chain of command work and communicate on a day-to-day basis. This type of stuff is done in such fine detail that it can, at times, become too focused on the minutia, especially when the dialogue is rapid-fire and heavy with abbreviations and numbers. This film treats the ship like a big machine and the people on board as just parts of the mechanism, there to keep it running smoothly.

Films like this remind me of why I could never get into Tom Clancy novels. Tom Clancy loved the details. He loved to spend pages upon pages breaking down things like how to assemble a rifle or how the inner workings of a submarine worked. If that is of interest, then you would love his literature. For me, I found that level of detail to be too much, and I never could finish one of his novels, no matter how much I might have enjoyed one of the films based on them. 

As I started watching In Which We Serve, I got the same feeling I got from those Clancy novels. The film opens with the main ship we will be following being assembled. We see how rivets are superheated and then pounded into place, sealing out the potential of water leakage. We will later follow artillery shells as they are removed from storage, carried to a conveyor belt, sent on their way up to the top deck, loaded into the big guns, fired off, and their spent shells ejected. The only thing we don’t get to see is the manufacturing of the shells at a plant. For scholars and military buffs, this will be endlessly fascinating. For laymen like me who prefer to follow characters and stories, this was just too much detail. 

We spend a lot of time observing battle footage, too. The opening of the film, right after the HMS Torrin is launched, is an extended sequence of airplane attacks, battleship attacks, and the Torrin firing its big guns over and over. It runs too long and didn’t take long to begin trying my patience. Once it finally ends, there is a torpedo attack that sinks the Torrin. A handful of men, including Captain E.V. Kinross (Noël Coward), manage to get to a lifeboat only to be attacked over and over again by strafing German aircraft. Within the first twenty minutes of the film, the HMS Torrin, the ship we are told in the beginning we will be following, has been defeated and is slowly sinking into the ocean. The rest of the film is told in flashback, repeatedly cutting back to the present for a few seconds to remind us of where all this is headed. 

This film works best when it is focused on the sacrifices the men are making back home to be in the service of their country. We get moments with Kinross and his wife and kids to remind you that he is more than just the leader of a ship; he is a family man. We also see Shorty Blake (John Mills) meet, then marry his wife, Freda (Kay Walsh). Freda is friends with the family of another sailor, Chief Petty Officer Walter Hardy (Bernard Miles), and moves in with his family while the two men are off to war. Perhaps the best moment, emotionally, in this film is when Blake gets news that his wife has just delivered their first child. The news arrives with some sad news, too, though. A bombing raid in England has destroyed the Hardy’s home, and Walter’s wife and mother-in-law are both killed. Hardy is in the middle of writing his wife, wondering why he hasn’t heard from her, when Blake finds him and has to break the news, feeling the joys of having a new child mixed in with the sorrows of Walter’s losses. 

War is an ugly business, but sometimes it is an unavoidable business. People living in Britain at the time were stuck right in the heap of it all while their men were out defending them from the Nazi menace. America had just entered the war, but the ultimate outcome was unknown in 1942. This film helped the families of those that stayed behind get an inside look into what their young men were doing for the cause, and it helped them feel closer to the ones they loved. It helped boost morale at a time when the world was at its bleakest. For that alone, it is a great film. For me, though, watching it over eighty years removed from the events being depicted, I felt that there were ways it could have been tightened up and shifted the focus even more towards the personal dramas and not the technical details. But that’s a quibble that is specific to me and what I enjoy in a war film, propaganda or otherwise. 

Academy Award Nominations:

Best Picture: Noël Coward

Best Original Screenplay: Noël Coward

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Release Date: September 17, 1942

Running Time: 115 Minutes

Not Rated

Starring: Noël Coward, John Mills, Bernard Miles, and Celia Johnson

Directed By: Noël Coward and David Lean