The Stars Look Down (1940)
Directed by Carol Reed

Film Review

When it was first released in the UK just a few months after the outbreak of the Second World War, The Stars Look Down had an immediate impact and added further impetus to the demands for the full nationalisation of the British coal industry, which finally came about in 1946.  The film, a truncated adaptation of A. J. Cronin's bestselling 1935 novel of the same title, also had a significant impact on the British film industry after the war.  Not only did it establish Carol Reed as an internationally renowned filmmaker, it also anticipated the gritty social realist dramas that came to the fore in the 1950s.  Today, like the novel that inspired it, The Stars Look Down can so easily be dismissed as trite socialist propaganda, but it remains one of the most important films in British cinema history.  Despite its obvious shortcomings, it still has the power to move an audience with its brutally graphic portrayal of the social injustices of the 1930s.

The film begins almost as a documentary, with a montage sequence that eloquently depicts life in a typical mining community before the war.  This provides an effective prelude for the first of the three acts that make up the film, an account of an unofficial strike that results in a harrowing breakdown in social cohesion, morale and the rule of law.  The film's middle section is the weakest, a cliché-sodden descent into Hollywood-style melodrama that is best overlooked as it painfully exposes the shallowness of the characterisation.  Not even actors of the calibre of Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood can make their characters appear more than dull two-dimensional archetypes, and the failure of the screenwriters' attempts to render the main characters convincing is what ultimately robs the film of its credibility and undermines its impact.

Where The Stars Look Down redeems itself is in its spectacular final act which depicts the all too predictable pit disaster, an outcome that was too visibly signposted from the very start of the film.  From the expressionistic camera set-ups and high contrast lighting it is tempting to think that Reed drew some inspiration from Georg Wilhelm Pabst's Kameradschaft (1931), which contains a similarly horrific account of an avoidable mining calamity.  Whilst the disaster in Reed's films doesn't quite have the terrifying visual impact of the subterranean nightmare conjured up by Pabst in his film, it is a notable achievement for a British film of this time, its emotional power heightened by the incredibly moving performances by the actors playing the entombed miners.

The Stars Look Down may have been a box office success that caught the British Zeitgeist for social change in the early 1940s but it drew criticism in some quarters for its relentlessly grim tone.  The film was deemed so bleak that its American release was delayed by eighteen months.  When it was finally released in the United States, the opening and closing sequences were removed and replaced with a tacky narration piece voiced by Lionel Barrymore.  Even with these attempts to soften its pessimistic mood, the film still has an apocalyptic gloom about it, one of cinema's grimmer onslaughts against the sin of human greed and the excesses of capitalism.

Film Synopsis

Miners at Neptune Colliery in Sleescale, a small town in the northeast of England, refuse to work on a seam which threatens to flood the mine.  The stoppage is led by Bob Fenwick, an old miner whose son David has recently won a scholarship to university and who hopes to use his qualifications to improve the lot of ordinary miners.  After weeks without pay, near-starvation drives the miners to ransack a butcher's shop.  Some time later, David is assiduously pursuing his studies at college when he runs into a former miner Joe Gowlan, now a thriving bookmaker.   It is through Joe that David meets Jenny Sunley, a selfish opportunist who, when Joe dumps her, feigns an interest in David.  In love with Jenny, David marries her in haste and gives up his studies.  He manages to find a low-paid teaching post at a school in his home town but loses this when his superiors disapprove of his modern teaching methods.  David ends up giving private lessons to the son of the colliery's owner, Richard Barras.  Meanwhile, Jenny has become a social pariah, shunned by the miners and their wives whom she obviously considers an inferior class.  Bored with her husband, she resumes her former relationship with Joe, who is getting rich as a speculator. Through Barras' son, David discovers that the pit owner is planning to re-open the seam which had previously been abandoned because of the risk of flooding.  When David's attempts to oppose these reckless plans fail, a tragedy appears unavoidable...