Journey's End

Whale's first film, marred by some strangulated performances, is fascinating primarily as a record of his stage production of RC Sherriff's enormously successful play. The passionate sincerity of Sherriff's lament for the death of idealism in the mud of World War I still comes across with intermittent power, but is undercut by textual tampering. Though the structure of the play is respected, with opening-out limited to a prologue and brief punctuating scenes in no man's land, the speeches have all been pruned. As a result, the curiously plangent rhythms of the text (which still make it a masterpiece on stage today) are lost, with the meticulously built-up tension - in which you can almost hear the playing fields of Eton in the background as youthful veterans of the trenches mask their fear so as to live up to the hero worship of even younger schoolfellows - frittered away much of the time into an exchange of banalities.