Film Reviews

Glorious 39

• Rating:
• Director:
• Starring: Bill Nighy
• Details: UK / 129mins (15A).

More laborious than glorious, this pre-WWII thriller had the bones of a decent movie but there are too many clangers, most of which coming in the final third, to render it believable.
After a brief present day intro that sees a young man track down two elderly gentleman, one of them Christopher Lee, to find out what happened to Anne Keyes (Garai) - the adopted daughter of a well-to-do English family headed up by the charming patriarch Alexander (Nighy) - Glorious 39 then flashbacks to 1939, just weeks before the outbreak of WWII. Here Anne has everything going for her - she's a budding actress who has just landed a role in a film, she and her siblings Celia (Juno Temple) and Ralph (Eddie Redmayne) couldn't be closer, and she's to be married to Lawrence (Charlie Cox). All this comes crashing down at a party where ambitious MP Hector (David Tennant) admits that Chamberlain is too soft on Hitler and hints that there are some in England who are willing to give Germany a massive payout in appeasement.
Anne doesn't think much of it until she hears Hector's voice on a record she found in her father's shed: he's in distress, pleading with whoever is in the room to leave his family alone, that they've gone too far. Before she can get her head around that, news arrives that Hector is dead. Then her fiancee disappears. When she seeks the help of her co-star, he is found with a bullet in his head. What is going on? Who is behind it? She tries to talk to her family about it but because she's an actress and, as they see it, prone to flights of fancy, they dismiss her wacky conspiracy theories. Are they in on it too?
Glorious 39 is a pretty decent Hitchcockian thriller for the most part, twisting and turning and delighting in tying itself up in knots. In Anne Keyes, writer-director Stephen Poliakoff has crafted a superb character as a foil in a paranoid thriller; making her an adopted child, he slowly isolates Anne and creates doubt in the mind of the audience - is she really imagining all this? Glorious 39 doesn't begin to fall apart until the final third. Maybe it's a genius move on the director's part because - for spoiler reasons - I can't go into in detail how bad it gets. Suffice to say that increasingly convenient happenings and bland plot developments drag the film under. Before that terrible final third, there are hints that the film will succumb to nonsense: Why would the Secret Service record their conversations? Even Inspector Gadget's mission statements would self-destruct.
He also wastes the talents of David Tennant, Jenny Agutter and Julie Christie who are barely in the film. Gorai does what she can with Anne, but Bill Nighy would want to rethink what he's doing - there's only so long he can get away with playing Bill Nighy.

Review by Gavin Burke