Scott of the Antarctic

Respectable account of Scott's doomed expedition to the South Pole. With so many frozen upper lips, the performances are rather buried behind balaclavas (at the end it's hard to tell who's who), and the studio colour backdrops are sometimes intrusive. However, Vaughan Williams' score effectively upstages the dialogue; and the early scenes, when Mills scratches around for financing and assembles his crew, are a fair evocation of Edwardian England, even if the failure of the mission, and the reverberations that failure had for Imperial Britain, are beyond the scope of the movie. The movie says, with characteristic aplomb, well done chaps, at least you tried.