Their Finest Hour and a Half by Lissa Evans Page B

see?’ For a few seconds the wall of shoulders seemed deliberately to exclude her, and then there was a grudging shift, and a narrow gap opened up.
    â€˜It’s just a memo,’ said one of the sets of shoulders, tetchily.
    12 November 1940
    I wish to pass on the results of several recent meetings with representatives of American distribution companies. These representatives are somewhat disturbed by what they invariably describe as the ‘lack of oomph’ in the films with overseas potential produced under the aegis, or with the guidance, of this department. This is, in part, a reflection of the difficulties the American public have with the British tradition of understatement, and the laconic way in which much bravery is habitually reported and portrayed. There is also the perennial American problem with the British accent, usually defined as ‘plummy and muffled’, but underlying everything is the key question of how entertaining these films are – and by ‘films’ I refer to both documentary shorts and theatrical productions. The need to maintain and accentuate pro-British feeling in the USA cannot be overstated, and it is imperative to remind ourselves – every day, if necessary – that for a film to be good propaganda it must also be good entertainment.
    While the following list of suggestions by a prominent American distributor may not be seen as possible, practical, or even desirable, I would ask you to read and absorb it without derision, as a useful reflection of the minds of our American cousins, whose continued goodwill towards us is vital. Remember that the Nazis have never underestimated the propaganda power of the moving image; it would be stupidity itself for us to do so.
    S Bernstein
    Special Advisor, film division .
    Mr Goldfarb’s suggestions:
    i) Plenty of oomph factory girls at work and play.
    ii) Plenty of oomph army/navy/flyer girls at work and play.
    iii) A reel with commentary by the Queen, dealing with a non-military subject: women and children, brides in wartime etc.
    iv) Bangs, crashes, walls falling over, men shouting, ambulances careening (skidding) round corners are all good, but can you make the bangs really loud . American viewers want to be knocked off their feet.
    v) Something with George Bernard Shaw in it. Just a reel, though, I don’t think our audience could take anything longer .
    By the time that Catrin had finished reading the memo, she was standing entirely on her own, the others having reassembled at the far end of the office, where the tea-trolley had made an appearance. She would have liked to ask someone why it was that cinematic bangs and crashes were, indeed, never as loud as the real thing. She would have liked to speculate on what the desired ‘something with George Bernard Shaw in it’ might be. (A best beard contest? A display of Irish dancing?) She would have liked to discuss the air of strained urgency that the memo seemed to exude, and the intense seriousness of what was, at least nominally, a note about entertainment. Instead, she was left doing her usual impression of The Last Kipper in the Shop.
    It had been like this since she had first started at the Ministry. Once it had been established that she was not the extra stenographer that scenarios had been hoping for (and some of the boys had asked her several times, as if she might have banged her head on the way in and be suffering from temporary amnesia), then the welcoming smiles, the appreciatively raised eyebrows, the race to take her coat and to find her a chair had all stopped. It was universally viewed as unfair, as insulting , she gathered, that a woman had been brought in especially to write women’s dialogue. ‘If there’s a dog in the script then we don’t employ a Jack Russell to come up with “woof woof”, do we?’, as one of her colleagues had put it, and she’d been allocated an office two hundred yards from