This blog was begun the night of March 29, 2021 :
John Mills has just been paroled after 12 years in prison. With no place to go, he heads down to a desolate beach where an old wooden boat is stranded. It's just a hulk, and looks wrecked, as if it's been in a fire, but Mills needs a place to sleep, so he goes below deck, has a look around, and is flooded with the memory of a night long past. You could call it "The Long Memory"(1953), an excellent English film noir that becomes a meditation on revenge.
As Mills prepares to bed down for the night, we go into flashback mode, where a dozen years earlier he was in the same place, in the ship's cabin with his fiancee and her father. The ship was intact then, but the relationships are broken. In a scene with no expository dialogue, we are given fragments of the situation : Mills wants to marry his girlfriend but doesn't approve of her father's hold on on her. He's an abusive alcoholic in debt to a hoodlum, yet she feels protective toward him. The hoodlum then shows up demanding payment, with two henchmen in tow. A fight breaks out, someone grabs an iron poker and starts swinging. An oil lamp is smashed and the ship catches fire. Mills' fiance makes a break for the lifeboat, also dragging her decrepit father to safety. The last we see of Mills, he's jumping off the burning deck, then swimming to shore.
Cut to a courtroom. Mills is now the defendant in a murder trial, accused of killing the hoodlum (described as an "honest businessman" of course), whose charred body was found at the bottom of the bay. The star witness for the prosecution is none other than his fiancee, who testifies that she saw Mills strike the man with the poker. She's also identified the body of the deceased as the hoodlum in question (although because it is badly burned, you'd think a medical examiner's opinion would be required).
No matter : Mills is convicted on his fiancee's testimony, and that of one of the thugs, a scramble-brained ex-boxer. Here the flashback ends, and Mills is back in the boat, lost in thought. We can tell he's pissed off, and the cops know it too. They've been tailing him ever since he left prison, fearing he'd be out for revenge, which leads us to believe they knew all along his fiancee had lied.
But why did she do so? To protect her father, who owed money to the hood and therefore should've been the prime suspect. She chose her dad over John Mills and ended up framing him, which cost him twelve years of his life.
Once Mills gets his bearings, he sets out to find the two perjurers who testified against him. The first is the boxer, whom Mills inquires about at a roadside diner near the beach. The joint is little more than a shack, with a rough & tumble proprietor and a clientele to match, but during his visit Mills attracts the attention of an employee, a beaten down but beautiful young woman of foreign extraction who, like John Mills before her, is in a bad situation and has no one to turn to.
Mills does locate the boxer, who's now so feeble that he's frightened of Mills and volunteers to change his testimony, to tell the truth in other words. He goes to the police station to do just that, and it's at this point that the Plot Conundrum kicks in - the police inspector in charge of the case is now married to Mills' ex-fiance, the woman whose false testimony landed him in prison. The Inspector suspects his wife may have lied all those years ago, which is why he put a tail on Mills the moment he was paroled. He's worried that Mills may try to find and kill her. And, Mills plans to do exactly that. But then two things happen that derail his plan. Firstly, he found he couldn't kill the pleading boxer. His anger dissipated in the face of the man's fear. The second thing is love. In a subplot that changes the arc of the story, the foreign woman from the diner (Eva Bergh) shows up at the boat one day. She begs Mills to let her stay there, saying she's quit her job and has no money. "I had to leave that horrible place", she tells him. "But I knew the moment I saw you that you were kind, I saw it in your eyes".
Mills doesn't want anyone telling him he's kind; not when he's got revenge on his mind. It might cause him to lose his nerve, but then.......that already happened with the boxer. Still, he tells the woman to go away and leave him alone. But she persists, until he finds himself reluctantly in love. Now he's got a choice to make. Forget about the past and start anew with this lady, or continue with his plan, which has been churning in his mind and stomach for twelve long years.
We've seen variations on this story from time to time, it's a familiar noir device - the choice between love and death, or love and hatred, which in this case will lead to Mills' re-imprisonment and thus qualifies as self destruction. But it's well told here, and there's a second subplot that'll kick in.......I'm not sure I should mention it, so I'll give you only a broad hint - it has to do with the dead hoodlum. This turn of events will render Mills' plan moot. Which doesn't mean he's giving up on revenge, not yet anyway, but he'll have to greatly revise the objective.
What can I say but "John Freakin' Mills"? We love the guy and he's great once again in "The Long Memory", which gets Two Big Thumbs Up and has, in addition to a strong plot, some great black and white location photography at the seaside and in an industrial section of Kent, England, looking grim like the end of the world. ////
And the previous night's Mills :
Okay, so we've been on a John Mills kick, during which he's become one of our favorite actors. Now we've got one one more reason to like him : "Forever England"(1935), featuring Mills in his first starring role as a Royal Navy sailor who becomes a hero during World War One.
As "Albert Brown", Mills has sailing in his blood. His father, who he's never known, was a Navy captain and in 1913 Mills is in training at naval cadet school. When his ship is visited by a crew of German sailors, in the spirit of seafaring fraternity, he forms a friendship with one of the Germans, based on their shared skill at boxing. The visit is enjoyed by all, until the German captain receives a message : return to your ship! World War 1 has erupted!
Midway through the film, Mills' ship is sunk by a torpedo, but he and a few other survivors are rescued by none other than their recent German visitors, now unfortunately their enemies. The German ship in turn is blasted by the heavy guns of an English destroyer, leaving a huge hole in it's side. As it limps away in search of a hiding place, I'm getting a sense of deja vu that gets stronger when it reaches the Galapagos Islands. "Wait a minute - I've seen this movie before"! And it was true, in a sense, because just three weeks ago we watched a film entitled "Sailor of the King", that starred Jeffery Hunter as a US Navy sailor who becomes a hero in World War Two. It turns out that "Sailor of the King" is a remake of "Forever England", and both movies are based on a book called "Brown on Resolution", written in 1929 by C.S. Forester. I didn't recognise any similarities until halfway through "Forever" because it does away with a lot of the dramatic preamble featured in "King". At 70 minutes, versus "King"'s 83, it doesn't waste any time in getting to the action and is thus a more efficient film. Also, as good as Jeffery Hunter was in the lead role, John Mills is even better. He's only 27 here (and as mentioned it's his film debut) and looks every bit the action hero.
For a more detailed review of the plot, go back to my "Sailor of the King" review, but one last thing I do wanna mention about "Forever England" are it's battle scenes. The artillery explosions are so realistic that they could pass as stock footage from the actual war. The budget doesn't look otherwise extravagant, but the filmmakers went all out in this respect.
Two Big Thumbs Up for "Forever England", then, and you've got yourself a John Mills Twofer to write home about.
That's all for now. Have a great afternoon, tons of love as always.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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