Neutral Port

Will Fyffe was a well established music hall performer who like many in his profession made some films but with very little success.His acting is far too broad for the cinema and he comes over as a caricature Scotsman.He is not helped by a truly awful script,poor direction and model shots which appear to have been filmed in someones bathtub.I know that many of the films at the time had a propaganda element but this was really taking matters to an extreme.the plot was incoherent,badly developed and improbably resolved.The acting was uneven.Leslie Banks was fairly laid back.However despite a reasonable cast nothing could save this mish mash from disaster.Clearly at this point in the war the British film industry was in rather a trough from which it would soon recover.

"Neutral Port" (1940) stars Will Fyffe, Leslie Banks, Yvonne Arnaud, Phyllis Calvert, Hugh McDermott, and many others in what can be considered a British WWII propaganda film, this, just post (3 months) the blitz occurring in London. It begins just prior to the declaration of war between Britain and Germany. A German submarine has just sunk Will Fyffe's boat, and now Fyffe comes into a neutral port where he hears of a German boat he can hi-jack as compensation for the one that was sunk. This "neutral" port is one he's been coming to often, as Yvonne Arnaud is now seeking Fyffe to become her fifth husband! This cute little war fluff has very deep underlying motives, but plays like fluff comedy, with Scottish actor Fyffe pulling out all the stops by being a crusty, but somewhat - and that's an operative word - canny Brit sea captain. He couldn't care less that war's been declared; he wants his own boat - again... Period. Oh, what he'll do to get it!

Lots of fun, though it's obvious that this is a plea for Brit unity against a formidable foe. With the year long blitz in progress as this was released, it became obvious, too, that this kind of fluff was not what was needed to win the war. With 1941 the seriousness of what was occurring changed forever the tenor of films about WW II. Will Fyffe shines, and Leslie Banks continues his series of very officious Brit characters (as opposed, say, to his 1932 characterization in "The Most Dangerous Game"! Where he played Zaroff). Yvonne Arnaud, who was already 47 when she made this film, was a French actress who spent her sometime career in films in British films until her last film, Jacques Tati's "Mon Oncle" (1958), the year of her death. She's a pip. Phyllis Calvert and Hugh McDermott have the most serious rôles in "Neutral Port", and though McDermott comes to the ultimate rescue of all involved, still plays lover to Calvert, daughter of Banks, and that love affair keeps an air of normalcy about this raucous play-up of war.

Directed by Marcel Varnel who's possibly best remembered as the director of things like "Chandu the Magician" (1932) and the two Will Hay films, "Oh, Mr. Porter!" (1937) and "Convict 99" (1938), among many others. Look quickly here, too, for Hugh Griffith in his second film. This is the debut film of Anton Diffring who ended up for decades as nasties in Brit and American films, usually as Nazis with nefarious intent.

For a movie that has that classic scene stolen for Casablanca in Rick's Americaine between Germans singing Deutschland Uber Alles and French supporters singing the Internationale.

Skipper Will Fyffe and most of his crew row their lifeboat into the neutral port of Esperanto, where the local officials wear comic-opera uniforms and the language is probably Interlingua. He explains to British consul Leslie Banks that the Germans sank his ship before war was declared, and they're going to provide him a new one. Meanwhile, Banks is distracted by daughter Phyllis Calvert's cowardly commando boyfriend, Hugh McDermott. Besides a sunk ship, Fyffe has the problem of bar owner Yvonne Arnaud, who wants him for her sixth husband, and the fact the locals throw him in jail every time he steals a German ship, which seems to happen every ten or fifteen minutes.

This comedy-drama is ably directed by cut-glass farce expert Marcel Varnel, who takes the script and keeps the gags to a minimum, allowing the actors the chance to play comedy the best way: absolutely straight.

See if you can spot 28-year-old Hugh Griffith in his uncredited screen debut. I couldn't.