The Windjammer

This account of the five month voyage of the 'Grace Harwar' from Wallaroo in Australia to London in 1929 is an extraordinary combination of documentary and low-life drama. Working class hero Bert is as bloody-minded as Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and leads a chorus of eccentrically seedy sailors in grousing about the patched and battered old sailing ship. AP Herbert's phlegmatically salty dialogue, and the stunning photography of angry seas and men swinging through the rigging like gibbons (which the young cameraman paid for with his life), give the film an almost hallucinatory resonance. An authentic glimpse into a lost world.