They Came to a City (1944)

This atypical Ealing film from director Basil Dearden is more a political screed than a work of entertainment and although the points it has to make are as worthy and important today as the were in 1944 it’s often hard going. Based on a play that J.B. Priestley (who appears in the film’s framing story) wrote in 1943 as a call to arms to think of a better world when the horrors of World War II ended, it’s a work of great idealism and conviction. But like a lot of films of idealism and conviction it tends to readily towards the didactic. It’s not a subtle film at all, though it is, at times, an engaging one.

A young couple (Brenda Bruce and Ralph Michael), both in uniform, are spending a lazy afternoon in the countryside debating what life will be like after the war comes to an end. He’s cynical, unsure that anything of lasting good will come the conflict, she’s more optimistic. An older man, played by Priestley himself, arrives to tell them the bulk of the story in flashback. Nine people, most of them strangers to each other and all from different walks of life, are taken out of their daily lives by a never revealed force and deposited in a mist-shrouded interzone. Joe Dinmore (John Clements) is a sailor and lapsed revolutionary; Alice (Googie Withers) an embittered and cynical barmaid; Mr and Mrs Stritton (Raymond Huntley and Renee Gadd) are an unhappily married upper middle-class couple; Mrs Barley (Ada Reeve) an old working class woman; Sir George Gedney (A. E. Matthews) an aristocrat happier shooting things than dealing with other people; Lady Loxfield (Mabel Terry-Lewis) an upper class older woman who henpecks her compliant daughter Philippa (Francis Rowe); and Mr Cudworth (Norman Shelley), the I’m-all-right-Jack businessman looking for the next avenue to easy money.

The group find themselves on a set of steps that lead up to an ornately decorated door embedded in an unidentifiable structure in the middle of nowhere on a high ledge overlooking a fabulous city far below them. The door eventually opens and those who pass through to visit the city return either captivated and inspired or utterly repelled by what appears to be the socialist utopia they find there. Some of the group decide to return to the city for good, some to return to the “real” world to spread news of what they saw, others just to just walk away and try to pretend that it all never happened.

The sometimes hectoring style of Priestley’s script is offset by a cracking cast (most of who transferred over from the West End stage production) who manage to breathe some life into the often stilted dialogue that sounds more like an impassioned lecture than anything might actually say. Googie Withers and John Clements bear the weight of the script are very good indeed as the idealistic new couple whose hopes and dreams for the future are brought into focus by their trip into the city but all of the actors give fine performances, making sure that the characters are rather more than just mouthpieces for Priestley’s ideas.

Despite some atmospherically fog-shrouded sound stages, Ray Kellino’s intricate matte paintings and Michael Relph’s angular, monolithic set designs They Came to a City never overcomes its roots as a stage play. Dearden and his co-writer Sidney Cole either didn’t have the inclination of the budget to open up Priestley’s play and so we never get to see this fabulous city that so profoundly impresses or dismays its visitors. They talk about it at great length, some of them seeing in it a glorious egalitarian utopia, others a dire socialist nightmare. But we have to take their word for it as we never see it – as indeed viewers of the play wouldn’t have seen it, but a glimpse would have been nice, a chance for us to make up our own minds about what the city meant. In a clever interlude, the film cuts back to Priestley and the young couple who actually debate whether or not the film should show the city…

Some of the characters are quicker to realise what’s happening than others – Joe notes hat “It’s not that sort of door… This door is either tight shut as it is now or else it’s wide open, That’s the sort of door it is” and it’s constantly hinted that Mrs Batley knows more about where they are and why they were brought there than she’s letting on. That we never actually get to the bottom of the whys and wherefores is perhaps beside the point – the city isn’t real anyway, just an allegory, a tool to allow Priestley to show the effect of a Utopian society on different types of people.

The characters tend to be crude stereotypes and it’s again a credit to the cast that they manage to make them even remotely interesting. Matthews draws the short straw, Sir George being an oafish caricature though Joe and Alice, the focus of Priestley’s attentions, are the most interesting of the bunch. Joe in particular gets the best of it, describing himself as a revolutionary who no longer believes in the revolution before having his faith in his political beliefs restored following his experiences in the city. His relationship with Alice, at first fractious and bickering, slowly evolving into genuine affection and eventually love as their shared beliefs pull them together is as much character development as the film offers us.

Dearden and Cole made only a few changes to the text, changes that Priestley was fine with, though Clements was upset that the film lopped off the play’s closing lines, quoting Walt Whitman short 1867 poem I Dreamed in a City: “I dreamed in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth. I dreamed that was the new city of Friends.” Sticking closely to the play meant that we get the lengthy monologues but also some of Priestley’s trademark witticisms (“Good Heavens,” exclaims an appalled Sir George when he arrives at the steps leading to the city, “this isn’t Walthamstow is it?”) and there are times when the film is very witty and it’s always thought-provoking.

For all its faults it remains a remarkable film if only for being so unapologetically left wing, railing against capitalism and social injustice and daring to suggest that the suffering of a global conflict could be rewarded by a better, fairer and more productive society that benefits the many and not the few. Even those who chose not to stay in the city are changed by their experiences, maybe for the better, maybe not, and those that choose to return to their old lives to spread the word are the ones who carry Priestley’s hopes with them. You can’t fault its beliefs, it’s idealism and its optimism – it’s just such a shame that the style is so polemical. Trusting your audience to get the point is a difficult leap of faith to make but if often pays better dividends than hammering them over the head with sermons. In an interview with media and entertainment trade union BECTU preserved in the British Film Institute’s archive, Cole recalls how Priestley saw the film for the first time with just a music track and suggested that it worked better without his own dialogue.

The film – and the play that preceded it – was an admirable voice of hope for war-weary Brits. The stage version was first performed at the Princes Theatre in Bradford before transferring to the Globe Theatre in London’s West End and perhaps because it offered a tantalising glimpse of the sort of society that could emerge from the chaos of the war, it was a success, racking up 280 performances. The film did less well and the critics were unkind, perhaps alarmed by its nakedly socialist declamations. It gives lie to the still oft-heard claim that Ealing only made “cosy” films – no other British company of the time would have even dreamed of a film as committed, passionate and unashamedly political as They Came to a City.

Ealing were no strangers to more fantastical subjects. Among their excursions into the weird and offbeat were the time travel comedy Fiddlers Three (1944), ghost story The Halfway House (1944), horror anthology Dead of Night (1945), the much-loved Passport to Pimlico (1949) and The Man in the White Suit (1951), anti-television propaganda piece Meet Mr. Lucifer (1953) and the unclassifiably off-kilter The Night My Number Came Up (1955) and The Ship That Died of Shame (1955), both dramas with a dash of the supernatural. Even the seemingly straight forward (though brilliant) war time drama Went the Day Well? (1942) is bookended by sequences set in the near future, the story told in flashback by a villager after the war has ended.