In Which We Serve

Noel Coward - Captain Kinross
John Mills - Ordinary Seaman Shorty Blake
Bernard Miles - Chief Petty Officer Walter Hardy
Celia Johnson - Alix Kinross
Kay Walsh - Freda Lewis
Michael Wilding - "Flags"
Mrs. Hardy Mrs. Hardy
Derek Elphinstone - Number One
Robert Sansom - Guns
Philip Friend - Torps
Hubert Gregg - Pilot
James Donald - Doctor
Ballard Berkeley - Engineer Commander
Kenneth Carten - Sub Lieutenant R.N.V.R
Walter Fitzgerald - Colonel Lumsden
Gerald Case - Jasper
Ann Stephens - Lavinia Kinross
Kathleen Harrison - Mrs. Blake
George Carney - Mr. Blake
Richard Attenborough - Young Sailor
Wally Patch - Uncle Fred
Frederick Piper - Edgecombe
Leslie Howard - Narrator

In Which We Serve is only one in a long list of propaganda films turned out by England and the United States during World War II. Based on the actual service record of a British destroyer recounted to Noel Coward by Lord Mountbatten, it advances the standard line of support for the war effort and follows a familiar pattern by combining the story of H.M.S. Torrin, from shipyard to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, with the personal lives of its captain and crew. Within this context, the film has its reputation. If it seems, at times, cloying or overeager on its way to the message of the closing title ("God bless our ships and all who sail on them."), it remains significant not just as Lean's first attempt at directing an entire feature, but as a picture singled out for admiration by its contemporaries from among scores of similar efforts.