Against the Wind

England was still recovering from the devastation of World War II when Ealing Studios began production on the resistance thriller Against the Wind (1948). The film is centered on the British Special Operations Executive, a covert military branch that trains agents to operate behind enemy lines to sabotage German operations and smuggle intelligence to the Allies, and the diverse group of soldiers and civilians that are brought together for a mission in Nazi-occupied Belgium. The group includes a Catholic priest (Robert Beatty, Odd Man Out, 1947) who is placed in a Belgian parish, a young munitions expert (Gordon Jackson, The Great Escape, 1963) who builds the explosives for their missions, and a partisan (Simone Signoret) who fled Belgium for England and itches to return to the fight. The imposing James Robertson Justice (Sir Lancelot Spratt in the long-running series of Doctor comedies) has the small but central role as the unit commander, making the hard calls and giving orders that will invariably lead to the deaths of squad members. Director Charles Crichton, working from a screenplay by T.E.B. Clarke (who had actually served in the Belgian resistance) and Michael Pertwee, opens the film like a low-key spy thriller: the priest arrives at a museum to visit the Prehistoric Room, which is closed for renovations. In fact, it is the secret headquarters for the hidden division and we're given a tour of their school for saboteurs and secret agents as part of his education. For the scenes in Belgium, with characters working covertly under assumed identities, Clarke drew from his own experiences and the stories of fellow resistance fighters. One such anecdote was the basis for a scene where they risk exposure to get their young dynamite man (who speaks no French) to a local dentist to treat a blinding toothache. Signoret was a rising star in France, having graduated from uncredited parts to leading roles in Jacques Feyder's Macadam (1946) and Jean Sacha's Fantomas (1947), when she was cast in the film as the Belgian partisan in exile. She had never performed in English but she spoke the language fluently, thanks to a summer spent with a British family in Sussex in the late 1930s. "In three months I was supposed to gain complete mastery of the language of Shakespeare, as we jokingly say in French, though what in fact we mean is to get to grips with the finer complexities of everyday spoken English--not Elizabethan," she related in her autobiography. It served her well for her English language film debut a decade later. Against the Wind "gave me my first contact with the English film world, where I was to have my greatest opportunity in 1958." The title of the film comes from Lord Byron, a quote from his narrative poem "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" that ends the film: "Yet, Freedom! yet thy banners, torn, but flying / Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind." The cost of freedom is high, as we see in the sacrifices made. The film, however, was a box-office disappointment, "a classic example of a mistimed film," as Clarke describes it in his autobiography. The war movie resurgence was still a few years away and audiences apparently weren't ready to return to the dark days of World War II quite yet. Crichton and Clarke, however, had great careers ahead of them, and they reunited on two successful Ealing comedies: the comic caper The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953). Sources: This is where I came in, T.E.B. Clarke. Michael Joseph, 1974. Forever Ealing: a celebration of the great British film studio, George C. Perry. Pavilion, 1981. Nostalgia isn't what it used to be, Simone Signoret. Harper & Row, 1978. IMDb By Sean Axmaker