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9. Orwell as Film Critic
- University of Illinois Press
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Nine Orwell as Film Critic This was the first (and perhaps the only) essay to be published on Orwell in Sight and Sound. It explored a little known aspect of his career, and showed that his film criticism was strongly influenced by the overwhelming Nazi victories in Europe in 1940–41. Orwell disliked escapist entertainment, criticized the low intellectual level of American movies and had no interest in film as art. He concentrated, instead, on the political and propagandistic content, and particularly liked Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. Between October 1940 and August 1941 George Orwell wrote twenty-six film review columns—which were omitted from the four volumes of his Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters—for Time and Tide. This politically independent weekly magazine was edited by the lively Lady Rhondda, the plump and curly-haired daughter of a Welsh coal magnate. Most of the films Orwell reviewed were undistinguished escapist entertainment, which he mostly disapproved of and disliked. But they also included minor works by major directors: Rene Clair’s The Flame of New Orleans and Fritz Lang’s Western Union; and a few which he took more seriously: the Mormon epic Brigham Young, the anti-Nazi melodrama Escape and, most notably, Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. By 1940 Orwell had had an adventurous but not particularly successful life. He was born in India, had won a scholarship to Eton, served for five years in the Burma police, been down and out with the tramps of Paris and London, lived with the miners of Wigan, contracted tuberculosis, fought and been shot in the Spanish Civil War. He spent most of the 1930s writing prophetic books about the dangers of Communism and Fascism, and warning about the impending war. He had written three books of reportage and 9. orwell as film critic 95 four novels, whose honesty and integrity earned him a respectful reputation but no money. The outbreak of war led to a period of waste and frustration . He was desperately poor, medically unfit for the army and unable to find work that would help the war effort. He published Inside the Whale, a collection of essays, in March 1940; and wrote the propagandist Lion and the Unicorn between August and October. When he completed this tract, he began reviewing films and writing the “London Letter” for the Partisan Review; but he abandoned his stopgap career as a film critic when he joined the Indian section of the BBC in August 1941. Orwell’s criticism was permeated by a battered idealism and powerfully influenced by the massive defeats of the Allied armies during 1939–41. The invasion of Poland; the occupation of Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland and France; the evacuation of Dunkirk and the air raids on England; the conquest of Yugoslavia and Greece; the destruction of shipping by U-boats and the siege of Leningrad, placed all of Europe under the domination of Hitler and threatened the very existence of Britain.America had not entered the war; and the victories at Stalingrad and El Alamein were not yet in sight. Orwell’s fears and hopes about the war affect all his reviews. He specifically mentions the Athenia, which was torpedoed, with fourteen hundred people aboard, two days after the war began; Russian tank battles; and Wavell’s first bright triumphs in Libya and Abyssinia in February 1941. “What rot it all is!” he comments on One Night in Lisbon. “How dare anyone present the war in these colours when thousands of tanks are battling on the plains of Poland and tired workers are slinking into the tobacconist’s shop to plead humbly for a small Woodbine. And yet as current films go this is a good film.” Orwell, who rarely mentions the directors and is not interested in film as a distinct form of art, does not write brilliantly illuminating criticism, like his contemporaries James Agee and Graham Greene. He is primarily concerned with the political, social and moral content of films; their propaganda value; the way they reflect the progress of the war; and the difference between English and American cinema. His reviews are generally short and formulary: an opening comment, discussion of the plot, snap judgment on the film and remarks on the cast, with particular praise for veteran English character actors like Edmund Gwenn, C. Aubrey Smith and Eric Blore. But his wit at the expense of the more tedious films shows the engaging side of his character that was also revealed in his...