The Winslow Boy (1999)

"Oh, do you really think so Miss Winslow? How little you know about men..."

‘Elegant, aloof, a cold fish, as hard as nails, ‘a master of the forensic triumph’…’

Here’s my second Christmas weepie, and, as with The Railway Children (1970), it’s a moving saga of English understatement — a serious blubfest. It’s Terence Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy. In many ways, this is a tale of two films (even six, if you include television) as The Winslow Boy has been adapted (from the play of 1946) for the Silver Screen twice: in 1948 by Anthony ‘Puffin’ Asquith (with a screenplay by Rattigan) and in 1999 by David Mamet. There are also four BBC television adaptations: in 1949, 1958 1977 and 1988.

It’s based on a true story. In 1910, George Archer-Shee, the son of an official at the Bank of England, was sacked from Osborne (the Royal Naval College in the Isle of Wight) for the theft of a five-shilling postal order. Sir Edward Carson, the eminent barrister and Irish Unionist, then defended Archer-Shee in court. The case became a cause célèbre in the British press. Archer-Shee was acquitted and paid compensation. In October 1914, he was killed, aged nineteen, at the First Battle of Ypres.

The Winslow Boy (1948).

We have a tendency, I think (and, oh crikey, I’m guilty of this myself), to tidy things away. To pigeonhole. It is, perhaps, an Anglo-American trait. The Top Ten of This. The Top Twenty of That. This film is better than That. That film is better than This. I spent yesterday rewatching The Winslow Boy in its two incarnations, and I like them both — for different reasons. Ultimately, both are products of Rattigan’s genius. I hope you will take the time to watch both films (they’re readily available online) so that you can make up your own mind. The ‘48 version is, perhaps, the stronger of the two: the dramatic scene when Sir Robert Morton KC MP (Robert Donat) cross-examines naval cadet Ronnie Winslow (Neil North) — in many ways what the play and film are all about — is a cracking example of editing and direction, with poor Ronnie reduced to tears under Morton’s barristerial onslaught. The ‘99 version is equally subtle but more nostalgic (it’s set at Christmas), and there’s a decent period feel lacking in the anachronistic ‘48 version, backed by a suitably elegiac soundtrack from Alaric Jans, an impressive and effective pastiche in the manner of Sir Hubert Parry or Ralph Vaughan Williams.

“How little you know about women, Sir Robert…”

Arthur Winslow’s fight to clear his innocent son’s name in the more general cause of individual liberty and freedom — ‘let right be done’— is deeply moving. Both films are set just before the outbreak of The Great War. They’re a nice middle-class family, the Winslows. In the original play, they live (from memory) in a South Kensington house, and in the ‘48 version, they live in a suburban villa in Wimbledon. In the ‘99 version, they’re been upgraded. Everything’s a little bit grander. There’s a shuttered Georgian house in what looks very much like Chiswick Mall, and a Drawing Room like something from a fin-de-siècle Sargent painting: Spanish screens of embossed leather, chocolate brown walls and blue and white Chinese porcelain, and Catherine Winslow (the radical, Suffragette daughter played by Rebecca Pidgeon) is engaged to John Watherstone (Aden Gillet) a cornet (i.e. subaltern or Second Lieutenant) in the Royal Horse Guards, with the Victorian Gothic splendour of Lincoln’s Inn standing in for St James’s Palace.