Convoy

Clive Brook - Captain Armitage
John Clements - Lt. Clanford
Judy Campbell - Lucy Armitage
Penelope Dudley - Ward Mabel
Allan Jeaves - Cdr. Blount
Stewart Granger - Sutton
Michael Wilding - Dot
Mervyn Johns - Mate

After finishing The Proud Valley, Pen Tennyson married Nova Pilbeam, and then embarked on preparations for a film showing life in the Royal Navy during wartime. He was a member of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, called the 'wavy navy' on account of the zig-zag stripes worn as officers insignia of rank, but had been granted an exemption so that he could move ahead with the film, which was called Convoy. Clive Brook, in his last Ealing work, played the captain of a cruiser whose job was to protect a convoy of merchant ships sailing towards England across the North Sea. In order to experience such an assignment, Tennyson made a voyage on HMS Valorous on convoy duty in waters off the east Scottish coast, with deadly minefields and marauding U-boats a constant menace.

Convoy is the first of many distinguished films about the war made at Ealing. It attempted to show how war is conducted, but also that the men involved are human beings. There is a somewhat banal subplot which has John Clements as a sporty young lieutenant who seems to have run off with the captain's wife. By the end, as he dies heroically for his ship and his country, he is revealed to be not such a cad after all. But the main issue is the plight of the convoy when it is attacked by a supposedly invincible German pocket battleship. The British cruiser fights a delaying action to enable the destroyers to get the merchantmen to safety and, although heavily outgunned and almost sunk, holds on long enough for help to arrive.

Although there was a great deal of work with miniatures, the battle scenes were impressively shot. Apart from Judy Campbell in the superfluous and thankless role of the captain's wife, the acting style was one of calm, earnest underplaying that was to be the standard for this kind of film (ridiculed mercilessly in 1961 by the satirists of Beyond the Fringe). Not all the dialogue took place on the bridge and in the ward room. There was even an affecting view of life below decks, with Edward Chapman as the gruff, sly master of a tramp steamer in the convoy and Edward Rigby as his cockney mate. They too have their moment of heroism and glory. Convoy was not only highly regarded by the critics; the most exciting, lifelike and rational account of the Navy's work in wartime yet seen on the screen, wrote one - but was also a huge box-office success, and received an American release with good returns, the holy grail of the British film industry. Balcon urged Tennyson to make another war picture, but he had decided that his deferment from the Navy could no longer be continued. He was posted to an antisubmarine trawler, and later worked on Admiralty training films. Returning from Scapa Flow to Rosyth in a Fleet Air Arm aircraft, after shooting footage, he died as the plane crashed, and a career of great promise came to a premature end.

Pen Tennyson's last film was also the most significant, for it marked the beginning of an official awareness of the importance of the cinema in creating useful propaganda to help the war effort. At the start of the war the attitude of the authorities was wholly negative. Cinema screens were blacked-out along with the streetlights.
Extract© George Perry: Forever Ealing.