John Mills, Forever English
September 11–October
17, 2003
Handsome and dapper, John Mills has been
the British screen actor par excellence for more than seventy years.
Born in 1908, Mills began
as a chorus boy, made his film debut in The Midshipmaid in 1932,
and impressed as the hero of Forever England in 1935, foreshadowing
many uniformed roles to come. One of these, famously, was in the
naval epic In Which We Serve (1942), which saw the emergence of Mills
as a new kind of British film actor—naturalistic and unaffected.
Mills was the first of his breed to cross
class barriers convincingly, becoming everybody’s ideal of a national hero—iconically
so in Scott of the Antarctic (1948). But a more versatile Mills,
mischievous and comic, was never far from the surface, a quality
recognized by David Lean, who cast him in This Happy Breed (1944),
Great Expectations (1946), Hobson’s Choice (1954), and Ryan’s
Daughter (1970), the latter winning Mills an Oscar.
The father of actors Hayley and Juliet, Sir
John (he was knighted in 1977) still thrives and performs at ninety-five
years of age,
despite virtual blindness. This program, made possible by prints
preserved by the bfi National Film and Television Archive in London,
pays tribute to one of British cinema’s most likeable and enduring
screen stars.
Curated by Clyde Jeavons, film historian and former Curator of the
bfi NFTVA, and organized for MoMA by Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator,
Department of Film and Media. The Department thanks the Mills family,
Bryony Dixon, and Barry Day for helping make this tribute possible.
. 1954. Great Britain. Directed by David Lean.
Screenplay by Lean, Wynyard Browne, Norman Spencer. With John Mills,
Charles Laughton, Brenda De Banzie. Mills takes on the formidable
Laughton in this satisfying version of Harold Brighouse’s stage
comedy, and comes through with flying colors. Mills is the timid
assistant of tyrannical bootmaker Laughton in 1900s Lancashire, until
the latter’s strong-willed daughter (De Banzie) inspires
the worm to turn. 107 min.
. 1935. Great Britain. Directed
by Walter Forde. Screenplay by Michael Hogan, Gerard Fairlie, J.
O. C. Orton. With
John Mills, Betty Balfour, Barry MacKay. Mills’s first attention-grabbing
role was as the hero of this adaptation of C. S. Forester’s
classic WWI novel Brown on Resolution, in which a young seaman, armed
with just a rifle, earns a posthumous Victoria Cross by laying siege
to a crippled German cruiser. 70 min.
. 1933. Great Britain. Directed by Bernard Vorhaus.
Screenplay by H. Fowler Mear. With John Mills, Henry Kendall, Ida
Lupino. Remarkable for its subjective camera shots and the fast,
low-budget methods, location work, and dynamic editing of guest American
director Vorhaus (he influenced David Lean), this mystery thriller
about the search for a camera bearing evidence of murder and the
theft of a valuable diamond paired Mills with a fifteen-year-old
Ida Lupino. 68 min.
. 1932. Great Britain. Directed by Albert de Courville.
Screenplay by Stafford Dickens. With John Mills, Jessie Matthews,
Fred Kerr. Mills left the revue-theater chorus line to support popular
English dancing star Jessie Matthews in this frivolous musical comedy-romance,
his first film. 84 min.
. 1948. Great Britain.
Directed by Charles Frend. Screenplay by Ivor Montagu, Walter Meade,
Mary Hayley Bell.
With John Mills, Derek Bond, James Robertson Justice. Forget that
this prestige production glorified a foolish undertaking—Captain
Scott’s ill-prepared and fatal expedition to the South Pole
in 1912—and instead enjoy the spectacular Norwegian and Swiss
locations, the sumptuous Technicolor photography by Jack Cardiff
and others, and Mills’s flawless study in distressed heroism.
111 min.
. 1940. Great Britain. Directed by John Paddy Carstairs.
With John Mills. One of three World War II Careless Talk propaganda
films produced by Ealing Studios for the Ministry of Information.
10 min.
. 1942. Great Britain. Directed by Noël Coward,
David Lean. Screenplay by Coward. With Coward, John Mills, Bernard
Miles, Celia Johnson. Coward’s hugely successful patriotic
wartime paean to Lord Mountbatten, the Royal Navy, and the British
class system. Mills is Able Seaman Shorty Blake, one of the crew
of a destroyer sunk off Crete. Somewhat condescending, yet moving
in its restraint and documentary realism. Richard Attenborough debuts
below decks as a cowardly stoker. 115 min.
. 1944. Great Britain. Directed by Jessie Matthews.
With John Mills, Dulcie Gray. A World War II propaganda short, in
which a soldier returns home from the war to win back his girl. 10
min.
. 1944. Great Britain. Directed by David Lean. Screenplay
by Lean, Ronald Neame, Anthony Havelock-Allan, based on the play
by Noël Coward. With John Mills, Robert Newton, Celia Johnson,
Kay Walsh. Coward’s lower-middle-class roots surface in this
adaptation of his play about a suburban family between the wars,
set against public events. Mills is the boy next door, wooing and
winning Walsh. Lean’s nostalgic direction and Neame’s
muted Technicolor camerawork helped make This Happy Breed a big success.
115 min.
. 1945. Great Britain. Directed
by Sidney Gilliat. Screenplay by Val Valentine. With John Mills,
Stewart Granger, Alastair
Sim, Joy Shelton. Mills is a cockney soldier who goes AWOL to “set
about” the “spiv” (Granger) who’s trying
to seduce his wife. Using authentic war-torn South London locations,
a hard-bitten acting style, and a tangibly angry atmosphere, this
intriguing and underrated home-front melodrama anticipates the British
realist movement of the 1960s. 73 min.
. 1943. Great Britain. Directed
by Anthony Asquith. Screenplay by J. B. Williams, Val Valentine,
Frank Launder. With
John Mills, Eric Portman, Reginald Purdell. Asquith’s quietly
absorbing tribute to the submarine service has beautifully understated
performances by Mills and Portman as members of a sub hunting down
a German battleship in the Baltic Sea. This was Mills’s first
acting promotion into the officer class, but he continued to move
up and down the ranks with ease. 98 min.
. 1945. Great Britain.
Directed by Anthony Asquith. Screenplay by Terence Rattigan, Anatole
de Grunwald. With John Mills,
Michael Redgrave, Rosamund John. One of the best-loved and most poignant
films about World War II, The Way to the Stars lyrically portrays
the lives, loves, and deaths of British and American bomber pilots
on an English airfield. Mills is a fatalistic pilot reluctant to
marry his girlfriend, the Limeys try to get on with the Yanks, and
sixteen-year-old Jean Simmons sings “Let Him Go, Let Him Tarry.” 87
min.
. 1946. Great Britain. Directed by David Lean.
Screenplay by Ronald Neame, Lean. With John Mills, Valerie Hobson,
Alec Guinness, Jean Simmons, Martita Hunt. Mills clearly relished
the role of Pip in this wonderful adaptation of Dickens, and despite
looking a little mature for the part he made it his own, aided by
definitive performances from Hunt as Miss Havisham, Simmons as the
young Estella, and Guinness as a scene-stealing Herbert Pocket. 118
min.
. 1960. Great Britain. Directed
by Ronald Neame. Screenplay by James Kennaway. With John Mills,
Alec Guinness, Dennis Price,
Kay Walsh. In his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson
points out the irony of Mills’s character: a strict colonel
warring with reprobate officer Alec Guinness—cracking up, as
if from “the strain of so many stiff upper lips.” This
is one of Mills’s most admired performances (he outplays a
rather overwrought Guinness), in a superior drama of military stress.
106 min.
. 1933. Great Britain.
Directed by Thomas Bentley. Screenplay by Jack Jordan, Frank Launder,
Frank Miller, Frederick
A. Thompson. With John Mills, Will Hay, Iris Hoey. A rarely seen
adaptation of Arthur Pinero’s 1895 farce The Magistrate, with
Hay making his debut as a stern Victorian judge, Mills as his wayward
stepson, and a marvelous supporting cast of English music-hall comedians
and performers. 80 min.
.
1949. Great Britain. Produced by John Mills. Directed
by Anthony Pelissier. With John Mills, John Howard Davies, Valerie
Hobson. "In introducing D.H. Lawrence to the screen, the Mills/Pelissier
team made a strange choice with this brief, terse evocation of Oedipal
love (a sensitive child, threatened by a rift between extravagant
mother and jobless father, discovers an ability to predict racing
winners while pretending to be a jockey, frenziedly astride his rocking
horse). Though no one noticed at the time, the Lawrentian sexual
undertones are clearly transposed to the film. The boy's masturbatory
riding is given a frightening potency, and his attempt to win the
love of his glitteringly powerful mother has little to do with filial
affection. As the groom who feeds the boy's fantasies, Mills is admirably
restrained, obviously relishing the opportunity to use his native
Suffolk accent, and a British film which explores the complex links
between sex, money and power is rare indeed" (Time Out Film
Guide). 90 min.
. 1959. Great Britain. Directed
by J. Lee Thompson. Screenplay by John Hawkesworth, Shelley Smith.
With John Mills, Horst Buchholz,
Hayley Mills. Mills’s prodigiously talented thirteen-year-old
daughter Hayley made her eye-catching debut in this excellently directed,
Cardiff-set thriller about a child who witnesses a murder and is
kidnapped by the killer. Mills senior, playing a policeman, sensibly
and self-effacingly let her carry the picture—and his pride
shows in his understated performance. 105 min.
. 1970. Great Britain. Directed
by David Lean. Screenplay by Robert Bolt. With John Mills, Sarah
Miles, Robert Mitchum. Set in Ireland during "The Troubles" in 1916,
Lean's film, about a schoolmaster's wife who falls for a shell-shocked
officer and pays the moral price, won Mills an Oscar for Best Supporting
Actor. Courtesy Warner Bros., Los Angeles. 187 min.
. 1949. Written and
directed by Anthony Pelissier. With John Mills, Sally Ann Howes,
Finlay Currie. Mills demonstrates a latent talent for comedy in
this delightful adaptation of H. G. Wells's turn-of-the-century
story of a draper who rebels against his drab existence. Courtesy
Winstone Film Distributors, London. 95 min.
. 1955. Great Britain. Directed
by Guy Hamilton. Screenplay by P. R. Reid, Ivan Foxwell, William
Douglas Home. With John Mills, Eric Portman. This entertaining example
of a British prisoner-of-war film is adapted from Captain P. R. Reid's
riveting accounts of life in a supposedly escape-proof World War
II officers' prison camp in Saxony. 94 min.
. 1969. Great Britain. Directed
by Richard Attenborough. Screenplay by Len Deighton. With John Mills,
Dirk Bogarde, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud. This musical satire
of World War I has a tragic undertow and counterpoint of trench songs
that still move powerfully. Courtesy Paramount Pictures, Los Angeles.
144 min.
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