On the outbreak of the First World War, Robin Villiers, only son of a wealthy family, and Marshall, the family chauffeur, both enlist. Robin is killed in action, while Marshall, sent home injured, falls in love with the Villiers' daughter. Show full synopsis
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Blighty (1927), made for Michael Balcon's Gainsborough Pictures, was Adrian
Brunel's first feature film since 1923's independently-financed The Man Without
Desire. In the interim, Brunel had made two low-budget parodies, Crossing the
Great Sagrada (1924) and The Pathetic Gazette (1924), which had resulted in a
contract to produce a further five burlesques for Gainsborough. One of these
films, So This is Jolly Good (1925), laments the state of British production,
and Brunel consequently jumped at the offer to direct a commercial feature film
of his own.
Brunel's enthusiasm for the project was slightly tempered by the fact it was
to be a war film, a genre he objected to for moral reasons and had little faith
in commercially. However, with his friend and fellow Film Society member Ivor
Montagu devising the story, and Eliot Stannard (who was credited with most of
Alfred Hitchcock's silent screenplays) writing the scenario, Brunel was able to
create a thoughtful, rather than jingoistic, depiction of life during the First
World War.
Blighty forsakes depictions of battle, focusing instead on the impact the war
has on the lives of the wealthy Villiers family. Class barriers are broken down
as chauffeur Marshall (Jameson Thomas) enlists in the army, rises through the
ranks and then falls in love with Ann Villiers (Lilian Hall Davies). The family
lose their son Robin (Godfrey Winn), who is killed on the Front, but gain a
grandson and a daughter-in-law, the latter played by the luminously beautiful
Nadia Sibirskaïa. She had impressed Brunel and Montagu with her work in Dimitri
Kirsanoff's feature Ménilmontant (France, 1924), and as Robin's continental
bride, she strikes an incongruous note among rest of the sturdy British cast,
particularly the dignified and maternal Ellaline Terriss.
With Blighty, Brunel felt he had achieved a satisfactory compromise between
his conception of good cinema and that of his Gainsborough employers. With the
casting of Sibirskaïa and his skilful use of intercutting (particularly during
the air raid when the telegram announcing Robin's death arrives), Brunel
enriches his patriotic British story with the type of internationally-aware
filmmaking championed by critics such as fellow Film Society member Iris Barry.
Blighty would prove to be Brunel's most positive experience with Gainsborough;
later features such as The Vortex (1928) and The Constant Nymph (1928) were
subject to increasing studio interference.
Nathalie Morris
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