This was Ealing’s big prestige picture of its year, and you can tell – there is this feeling of weight about it, as if everyone concerned was going “this is a really important film about one of our beloved heroes so let’s try not to make any mistakes.” Unfortunately this risk-averse approach means we don’t really have a film about characters, just a bunch of actors portraying real people in the least offensive manner. (The humour comes from a colourful lower class type). By sticking to the facts, the film at least hints that Scott’s expedition was perhaps not the best organised in the world. (He doesn’t want to use dogs because for the English dogs “are like our friends” – and Amundsen is “damned unsporting” for going to the South Pole when he said he wouldn’t).
Fortunately, the picks up once they hit the Antarctic, with some terrific production design, and some incredible location work. The film is in colour but actually might have been better in black and white; still, it looks terrific, and the actors really seem as though they’re there (NB is this the influence of the British WW2 documentary movement?). And the last section is brilliant – it can’t help but be moving, one of the great losers of British history going down stoically but the handling is sensitive, it is very well done and it really packs a wallop.
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