MOVIE REVIEW: They Came To A City (1944)
Normally when I sit down to write these reviews, it’s on a Saturday and I pick the movie right then and there. I had an idea to stick to a spooky-season themed movie (horror, thriller, etc.), but my eyes fell on a movie called They Came To A City. It was adapted from a British play written by J.B. Priestley, who plays a bit part in the film. It’s an interesting piece of British wartime propaganda filmmaking, as it was produced while England was still in the throes of the Second World War.
Two young people serving in the Royal Air Force — a woman (Brenda Bruce, Nightmare [1964], Splitting Heirs [1993]) and a man (Ralph Michael, A Night to Remember [1958], Empire of the Sun [1987]) — sit on a hill and argue about the way the world will be once the war is over. She says people will want things to change and be different; the man thinks everyone will want things to go back to the way it was and stay the same. Their quarrel catches the passing interest of a bystander (J.B. Priestley), who decides to take a seat and explain to these young people how he believes the world will work out. Some will want to the new and others will want the old, the bystander explains, usually for the sake of a bit of power: whether to gain or to hold, all based on the attitudes of people in different states of being like poverty, wealth, gender, political power, gentry, and so-on. The bystander uses an analogy of a city, based on two lines in a poem by Walt Whitman called “Friendship and Loving Touch”:
“…I dream’d in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth,
I dream’d that was the new city of friends…”
The bystander goes on to place a group of nine people into a situation to discover the city:
- Mrs. Batley (British pantomime legend Ada Reeve, The Passionate Stranger [1958]), an old domestic servant wearied of work
- Dorothy Stritton (Renee Gadd, David Copperfield [1935], Good-Time Girl [1948]), a deeply insecure woman who makes it everyone else’s problem
- Joe (John Clements, Things to Come [1938], Oh! What a Lovely War [1969]), a worldly itinerant sailor with revolution on his mind
- Sir George Gedney (A.E. Matthews, Something Money Can’t Buy [1952]), a mush-mouthed who loves hunting and hates people
- Alice (Googie Withers, Country Life [1994], Night and the City [1950]), a strong-willed and free-spirited waitress looking for something better
- Lady Loxfield (Mabel Terry-Lewis, The Scarlet Pimpernel [1934]), an overbearing socialite mother to…
- Phillipa Loxfield (Fanny Rowe, Miss Robin Hood [1952], The Moonraker [1958]), the stifled heiress to the Loxfield family line
- Malcolm Stritton (Raymond Huntley, I See a Dark Stranger [1946]), Dorothy’s henpecked banker husband who is more than what he seems
- Mr. Cudley (Norman Shelley, The Monkey’s Paw [1948], Sink the Bismarck! [1960]), a financier firmly set in the status quo
All these people are transported from their familiar surroundings to a strange purgatory made from blocky symmetrical architecture blended with Cyclopean masonry. The overcast and open-air plaza sits atop walls surrounded by fog that fades with the rising sun to reveal a magnificent city the audience never sees. The only way our players can reach the city below is a massive metal door bearing an eight-pointed star. Once the door opens, everyone eventually goes through…and they all come back with stories of an egalitarian utopia. We soon learn the door will only stay open for a day, so our players must decide which way to go before the door shuts on them forever. The analogy the bystander uses to illustrate his point is an interesting one, and these film thespians do their best to endear themselves to the viewer and put the question to them as well:
If the door to utopia was open for you, would you walk through?
I can imagine the person writing subtitles had a lot of problems with the accents of the actors. While the actors spoke as clearly as possible, the audio quality wasn’t exactly the best in the 1940s. Every charming accent relative to the disparate origins of each character makes it very hard for anyone who doesn’t know how British people speak, and I thank God for cable channels that show British TV shows and cartoons (“Are You Being Served?”, “Doctor Who”, “Fawlty Towers”, “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”, “Danger Mouse”, “Count Duckula”) and for being the child of former British citizens or I would have been in the same boat. Since the subtitler couldn’t understand the accents to get a clean transcription, they used the term “[INAUDIBLE]”…and it was hilarious. I haven’t seen anything this funny involving accents of the British diaspora since Haile Gerima’s 1993 movie Sankofa — if you know, you know.
Another Tubi treasure in the bag, this movie held me with every frame of film despite being very talky, because I was expecting something different. The Cyclopean masonry suggested a trip into Lovecraftian territory, as all the players wandered into dark doorways in the Mortal Realm and out of strange mists before the new purgatory. Then I remembered Lovecraft became famous posthumously (dying in 1936, popular in the 1970s), and the door opened to new possibilities of what the film could be...of what was possible.
CHOICE CUTS <<spoilers beyond this point>>
- This was Fanny Rowe’s first film role. On a related note, this was Mabel Terry-Lewis’ final film role. While neither actress knew it, the pairing seemed fitting.
- SYMBOLIC ARCHITECTURE: Doorways are a symbol of change in this film, shifting from reality to purgatory, from purgatory to utopia. You’ll also notice there’s not many ceilings or walls to stop the heights and goals which we can reach.
- “Finding the way back” was an interesting turn of phrase used a lot in this movie. It has its roots in the original argument that started in the film: the United Kingdom must have been wondering how they would go back to normal when the war ended. Since this film was propaganda for the British masses, this might have been intended as a guide.
- If there’s ever been a face that would evoke sadness, it’s Malcolm’s face as he held his wife Dorothy after she insisted he not leave her because she promised she would change.
- “Mush-mouthed” doesn’t begin to describe Sir Gedney! Compared to Marlon Brando in 1972’s The Godfather (he famously had cotton balls in his mouth as he delivered his lines), Sir Gedney’s unintelligible British accent is…seen as a sign of good breeding? MAKE IT MAKE SENSE.
- The idea of death or being dead never left the minds of the players. Indeed, Mrs. Stritton believed through the entire film that it would be better to be safely dead than to live in such a world.
- The choice not to show the city or its inhabitants or any cultural artifacts was a a great one, allowing the audience’s ideas to run rampant on what was down there — because utopia (much like the analogous idea of paradise) is different for everyone.
