Rent Piccadilly Incident (1946)

Wartime Fantasy (spoiler). - Piccadilly Incident review by Steve

Between 1946 and '51, Herbert Wilcox directed half a dozen films starring Anna Neagle (his wife) and Michael Wilding, which were huge hits with the British public. In the social revolution of the fifties and sixties these were disparaged by the next generation of film makers. In particular the attitude to class became outdated.

The first and best of these is Piccadilly Incident. The stars meet cute in the blackout and hastily get married before she is posted to Singapore. Only she gets torpedoed in transit and spends the rest of the war on a desert island with the navy. When she is rescued and returns home, her husband has has an American wife and a baby daughter.

It's a familiar tale which is normally played for laughs, but this is sentimental. These people are so bourgeois that when Neagle is injured in an air raid at the end, it feels like she dies rather than cause a scandal. Wilding has a batman who, when he is not serving tea, is dispatched to the roof on watch duty. His death barely merits a line of dialogue.

The past is a foreign country. Yet, the film evokes well the separation and loss which was the familiar ache of the war years. Interestingly, it conveys a feeling of nostalgia for the horror of the blitz, now war is over. And Anna Neagle gives a sincere performance much better than the material deserves. Despite the many absurdities, it's a quietly moving film.