HOME CINEMA
88 | Sight&Sound | November 2019
Lost and found
By Jo Botting
With European nationalism and debates about
immigration on the rise, it is a good moment
to look back to another time of crisis in the
continent’s recent history. When World War II
ended, thousands of people found themselves
far from home, displaced by the conflict. Some
had been liberated from concentration camps,
others had fled Nazi occupation, but all were
anxious about what they would find when
they returned. The 1949 Gainsborough film The
Lost People attempted to depict their plight: in
a disused theatre in Germany, several hundred
‘DPs’ (displaced persons) await dispersal under
the watchful eyes of the British army, in the shape
of Dennis Price and William Hartnell, who find
that, now the common enemy has been defeated,
old tensions and rivalries begin to surface again.
The Lost People was based on Cockpit, a play by
Bridget Boland, an Anglo-Irish writer who was
with the Army Bureau of Current Affairs in the
war. She was sent out to Germany in May 1945 to
gather ideas for plays to be performed to British
troops to prepare them for the conditions they
would find in Europe. Boland wrote: “I watched
the displaced people on the roads. There was
a weird surrealistic, dream-like quality about
their movements... Instead of swinging back
in triumph with victorious armies, they were
crawling footsore miles, lost without maps, in
a country where the bridges were all blown up
and the signposts down.” On her return to Britain
Boland was told that a play about displaced people
was not required, but after demobilisation, still
haunted by what she had seen, she wrote Cockpit.
The play opened at the Playhouse in London
in February 1948. It was an example of immersive
theatre before the phrase had been coined:
characters screamed down from the gallery and
came rushing through the stalls, a suspected
case of bubonic plague was housed in one of
the boxes;. and the multilingual cast performed
in their own languages. The Times called it “a
hazardous but entirely successful experiment
in applying the technique of documentary film
to the stage”, yet it only ran for 58 performances,
one critic attributing its failure to the fact that
“London isn’t half intelligent enough for it.”
The play’s lukewarm reception makes its
selection for film treatment surprising, all the
more so since its more avant-garde elements
could not be translated to the screen; the film
actors, for example, all speak English. The
production had other problems: the French
actress Mila Parély, star of Renoir’s La Règle du
jeu (1939) and Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (1946),
had to be recast late into filming because her
dialogue was incomprehensible. Replacement
by Siobhan McKenna, of Dublin’s Abbey
Theatre, necessitated reshoots, presumably
overseen by Muriel Box, who is credited as co-
director with Bernard Knowles. According to
the memoirs of actor Peter Bull, Parély later sued
Gainsborough, not for firing her but because
some of her scenes remained in the film, making
it look as though she was merely an extra.
The rest of the cast is of a high calibre, even
if it is not fully exploited. Swedish import Mai
Zetterling has a substantial role, paired with
Richard Attenborough in the film’s love story,
though she is impeded by a Harpo Marx hairdo.
Herbert Lom flits round as the stage manager,
brandishing a feather duster, and Maxwell
Reed attempts a Russian accent with variable
success. McKenna maintains her integrity
as a French resistance fighter who stirs up
discontent among the refugees, and William
Hartnell is convincing as Price’s second-in-
command, his cynical view of the DPs proving
more realistic than Price’s naive optimism.
On 1 July 1948, the trade journal Film Industry
visited the set and was impressed to find Elstree’s
tiny Gate Studio occupied by 15 principals and
150 crowd artists waiting to film the wedding of
Zetterling and Attenborough’s characters. The
finished film didn’t reach the screen for another
year, presumably held up by the reshoots, and
its release in August 1949 was greeted with
little enthusiasm. Audiences stayed away,
perhaps tired of downbeat wartime subjects,
while critics were sniffy. One highlighted the
film’s cultural clangers, such as mismatched
accents and a Polish Christmas carol sung at the
wedding. News Chronicle named it the worst film
of the year. Others were kinder, C.A. Lejeune
finding “the drifting masses of humanity in
the huge, faded theatre... exciting to look at”.
The film’s interest today lies in its portrayal
of a little documented moment in 20th-century
history, and it contains some genuinely
poignant moments. After I introduced a
screening at BFI Southbank earlier this year,
I had a letter from an audience member
objecting to my comparison of the post-war
situation to the turmoil in Europe today:
“Back then”, he wrote, “we had optimism.”
In 1949, a film about the plight of
refugees in post-war Europe met
with indifference. But perhaps now
is a good time to hear its message
Truly, madly, DP: displaced person Mila Parély pleads with British soldier Dennis Price
Mila Parély sued the studio, not
for firing her but because some
of her scenes remained, making
it look as if she was an extra
THE LOST PEOPLE
‘Price and Hartnell make
a brilliant team and,
of the D.P.s, splendid
performances are given
by Richard Attenborough,
Mai Zetterling and
Siobhan McKenna’
‘News of the World’, 28
August, 1949
‘Siobhan McKenna as a French anti-Fascist
is the storm centre and round her whirl
in bitter, voluble, murderous eddies, the
flotsam of Europe’
‘Evening Standard’, 1 September 1949
WHAT THE PAPERS SAID
OVERLOOKED FILMS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE ON UK DVD OR BLU-RAY
A RT
PRODUCTION
CLIENT
SUBS
REPRO OP
VERSION
Home cinema, 7
