The Faithful Heart

Edna Best - Blackie Anderway/Blackie's Daughter
Anne Grey - Diana
Laurence Hanray - Major Ango
Herbert Marshall - Waverly Ango
Mignon O'Doherty - Miss Gattiscombe
Athole Stewart - Sir Gilbert Oughterson

The Faithful Heart is the most fully realised of early Gainsborough films (Journey’s End, Women to Women, Michael and Mary) which points forward most clearly to the future. By the time of The Faithful Heart, there were two significant new developments: sound technology was becoming much more flexible, and Gainsborough was building up a form of group production that seems to anticipate what Balcon would establish a few years later at Ealing.

Set in around 1900, the film leads up to the departure from Southampton of Waverly Ango (Herbert Marshall), a young merchant seaman whose shore leave has been spent in a brief and intense romance with a Southampton barmaid, Blacky (Edna Best). The other characters in the inn scenes are Ginger, who is Blacky's sister and fellow barmaid; their aunt, owner of the Inn; and the Major, a permanent resident. Waverly plans to make his fortune abroad, but promises to keep in touch; Blacky is less sanguine. Late at night, she looks out from the bay window of the Inn parlour as he rejoins his ship. A tinkly tune plays on the inn's old music box. The sequence cuts back and forth between inside (parlour) and outside (sea and boats) with an accompanying soundtrack of a music box and the ship's hooter.

After the fade-out, twenty years have passed. We learn that Waverly has prospered and distinguished himself in the war: he has been promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel, has won the Victoria Cross, and is about to make an upper class marriage. Blacky is long forgotten. Suddenly, with an electrifying effect, she reappears looking not a day older. She is, of course, the child of the liaison, the mother having died in childbirth - the publicity given to the VC ceremony has helped the daughter (also named Blacky) to find her lost father. Waverly gradually remembers, acknowledges her, and wants to help. Before long, however, the fiancées hostility persuades her to emigrate to Canada to join her Aunt Ginger. Waverly finds out and intercepts her at Southampton. They go to the Inn. The fiancee has foreseen this, meets them there, and gives him an ultimatum: it's Blacky or me. He chooses Blacky.