The Stars Look Down **** (1940, Michael Redgrave, Margaret Lockwood, Edward Rigby) – 2015 Classic Movie Review 2205

Director Carol Reed’s admirable 1940 movie version of A J Cronin’s novel is meticulously crafted, crisply scripted and expertly performed by a fine cast. It stars an ideally cast Michael Redgrave as Davey Fenwick, a concerned but ambitious Thirties upwardly mobile Englishman, who rises from British pitman’s son to Labour member of Parliament, via college and marriage to Jenny Sunley (Margaret Lockwood).

He leaves his mining village for university with a scholarship, planning afterwards to return to support the troubled miners against the cynical owners. But he falls in love with Jenny, so he quits uni, marries her and returns home as local schoolteacher, a job he’s uncomfortable in. He finds that Jenny still loves her former boyfriend and that his father and the other miners are working on a dangerous coal seam.

It is distinguished by its presentation of lots of realistic and gritty detail that are rare in British films of the period — about strikes, mine conditions, difficult personal relationships and so on, However, in bad payback for good behaviour, this overtly serious-minded film has worn less well than escapist entertainment, for example Reed’s Night Train to Munich with these same stars, or the other film with the same stars, Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, which also features Cecil Parker and Linden Travers.

Also in the cast are Edward Rigby, Emlyn Williams, Nancy Price, Allan Jeayes, Cecil Parker, Linden Travers, Milton Rosmer, George Carney, Ivor Barnard, Olga Lindo, Desmond Tester, David Markham, Aubrey Mallalieu, Kynaston Reeves, Clive Baxter, James Harcourt, Frederick Burwell, Dorothy Hamilton, David Horne, Edmund Willard, Bernard Miles, Ben Williams, Frank Atkinson and Scott Harrold.

As a committed socialist, Redgrave was proud he starred in The Stars Look Down. Reed called the film ‘a gloomy little piece’, expecting it to be a box office flop and was surprised when wartime audiences warmed to it.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2205

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