THE WINSLOW BOY (1948)

Terence Rattigan’s fine, moving, fact-based play about a 13-yr-old British Naval Academy Cadet kicked out for petty theft, is ‘opened up’ to mixed results by the playwright himself in Anthony Asquith’s film. Rattigan makes the story as much about sacrifices in the boy's pre-WWI upper-middle-class family as about the case. (Health & financial setbacks for a just retired father determined to do right by his son; ruined marriage prospects for an older suffragette sister.) Asquith has a dream cast in Cedric Hardwicke’s ailing father; Margaret Leighton’s political activist; Basil Radford’s sweetly infatuated barrister; stage cameos from Cyril Ritchard & Stanley Holloway; and most strikingly in Robert Donat’s characterization of Sir Robert Morton, Tory to his toes, still taking the case. But Rattigan deflates some of the play’s strengths trying to make things ‘more cinematic,’ taking us to Parliamentary debates & courtroom action that paradoxically gains rather than loses interest when only heard about on stage, distancing making it all less conventional. And he seems to know it, jumping back to the livingroom (where the play is entirely set) for the juiciest bits.* Even so, enough comes thru to make a stirring effect, most of all when he keeps to the playscript for what is often considered the most effective First-Act Curtain in mid-twentieth century British drama as Sir Robert interviews the boy in a brutal cross-examination to decide whether or not to take the case. A free-standing tour de force theatrical event; Donat caught in excelsis by Freddie Young’s camera. If only the rest of the film had as much faith in the pure cinematic value of Rattigan’s stageworthy craft.

DOUBLE-BILL: David Mamet’s remake of 1999 keeps somewhat closer to the play, but his finicky script editing doesn’t help, and his cast has nowhere near the charisma (or chemistry) of the earlier film. In the Leighton spot, Rebecca Pidgeon (Mrs. Mamet), a particular problem. OR: *Similar stage-to-screen problems, better handled by Rattigan/Asquith in THE BROWNING VERSION/'51.