The Way Ahead

To be shown: 10 December 2007
To be introduced by JFS Patron, David Gainsborough-Roberts

UK 1944.
Director: Carol Reed
Starring: David Niven, Stanley Holloway, William Hartnell.
Certificate U. 91 mins.

Synopsis

In celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Jersey Film Society’s foundation on 11 December 1947, the newly constituted Jersey Film Society 2007 is screening a movie from the original society’s very first season.
Made in 1944, The Way Ahead was intended to be a recruitment film for the Army. The fact that a film society should want to show it two years after the war ended proves that it turned out to be much more than that. (It also admirably achieved its initial purpose. It was shown as a training film at Sandhurst for years thanks to the accuracy with which it portrayed Army training.)
Here is one of Britain’s most important film directors, Carol Reed, getting to grips with the gritty style of visualisation that would become his trademark. Thanks to rapid editing, hand-held camera work and disorientating explosions he delivers action sequences that Stephen Spielberg might have been pleased with for Saving Private Ryan.
Aided by a sterling cast and a smart script from a young Peter Ustinov, The Way Ahead, is a down-to-earth and engaging story of ordinary men called up to fight for their country. Yes it’s a propaganda film – and so for a war movie is particularly upbeat – and yes, it is not without cliché. But it’s a far more realistic effort than many of its American counterparts.
Where the protagonists in Sands of Iwo Jima are a crack unit, our unlikely band of brothers are a motley crew gathered from a variety of civilian jobs. They grumble and moan their way through training under the supervision of Lieutenant Jim Perry (David Niven) until reality hits when they finally engage the enemy in North Africa.
The point, that the ordinary man can make a difference, is well made by the cast, some of whom, like Niven, were serving officers at the time.

Notes

The Way Ahead started life as The New Lot, a training film written for the Army by Peter Ustinov and Eric Ambler. But The New Lot upset some senior officers with its frankness and was suppressed, the project finally re-emerging a year later as The Way Ahead.

The Way Ahead was still used for officer training in Australia as recently as 1983.

At the time the film was made, David Niven, who plays a Lieutenant, was actually a serving British Army major.

Niven had attended Sandhurst and served with the Highland Light Infantry in Malta before becoming an actor. At the outbreak of World War II, though a major movie star, he left Hollywood to join up. He consented to appear in only two films during the war, both with strong propaganda purposes. One was The Way Ahead, the other was The First of the Few (1942).

Carol Reed spent much of his war making movies to help the cause but, as with The Way Ahead, they were a cut above the standard war effort fare. His documentary The True Glory, co-directed with Garson Kanin in 1945, won the 1946 Oscar for Best Documentary.

Reed won a further Oscar, as Best Director, in 1969 for the film Oliver! and was nominated in 1950 and 1951 for The Fallen Idol and The Third Man, respectively.

Billy Hartnell, who plays Sgt Ned Fletcher, also served in the war. He was invalided out of the Royal Armoured Corps after suffering a nervous breakdown. He would go on in 1963, under his full name of William Hartnell, to become the very first Doctor in the BBC’s new science fiction series, Doctor Who.