Journey’s End (Gainsborough Pictures, Tiffany Productions, 1930)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I ran Charles a film I’d just been reading a great deal about in James Curtis’s biography of James Whale, subtitled A New World of Gods and Monsters. It was the 1930 film of R. C. Sherriff’s anti-war play Journey’s End, a project Whale had been associated with almost literally from the beginning. He had directed its first performances at a supposedly private theatre “club” – when the Church of England banned theatrical performances and other entertainments on Sundays promoters got around it by organizing “clubs” and staging supposedly private members-only performances – in London in 1928 with Laurence Olivier playing the lead role of Captain Dennis Stanhope, commander of a small unit in the Great War (which is what World War I was usually called before there was a World War II). Whale directed it again when the show moved to the Savoy Theatre on London’s West End (the equivalent of an Off-Broadway show in New York moving to a Broadway theatre) with Colin Clive replacing Olivier (who’d only taken the role because he was hoping to land the lead in a West End production of a play based on Percival Christopher Wren’s Beau Geste, which he did); he directed the American premiere in New York; and he landed the job directing the film as well. Whale had been signed by Paramount to a three-month contract and had only got to do dialogue direction on one film, but when Paramount didn’t pick up his option he got hired by Howard Hughes (yes, that Howard Hughes) to work as so-called “English Dialogue Director” on his massive World War I aviation epic Hell’s Angels. Most of Whale’s biographers (including Curtis himself in an earlier book) had written his contributions off to Hell’s Angels as minor and said the egomaniac Hughes had done most of the direction himself. In his new book, Curtis says that after Hughes finished a silent version of Hell’s Angels he realized it needed sound to make any sort of impact at all on a box office whose customers were only going to see talkies. Hughes had spent a good chunk of his fortune on spectacular scenes of aerial combat, including a Zeppelin bombing raid on London, but Whale soon realized that the script of the non-combat scenes was unusable for a sound film and worked with the writer Joseph Moncure March to create a new one that would provide a context for the action scenes. According to Curtis, Whale directed most of the dialogue scenes in Hell’s Angels himself as well as working with the writer to create them in the first place.

Whale was so impressed with March that he insisted on March as the writer of the film version of Journey’s End – earlier writers had tried to “open up” the play and include flashback scenes of the characters before they went to war, but March was willing to work directly from Sherriff’s script and just make judicious cuts, though the final film (unlike the play, which took place exclusively in three sets representing different rooms within the dugout in which the soldiers lived and spent all their time except when they were actually fighting) has three not-too-well filmed scenes of combat. The original plan was for Michael Balcon’s Gainsborough Pictures (the outfit that had given Alfred Hitchcock his first directorial jobs and then lost him to a larger British studio) and his distributor, Gaumont-British (the branch of a French company whose French original still exists) to produce the movie in Britain with an all-British cast, but no British studio was well equipped enough to make the film. The next plan was to do a co-production deal with the American Tiffany studio (which had had the bad luck to be founded in 1929, right before the Great Depression kicked in and pretty much wiped out the market for entertainment; Tiffany eventually merged with another Depression-era startup, Sono Art-World Wide, and both companies went out of business in 1933), but there wasn’t enough studio space in New York to film it there (nor enough land to stage the battle scenes Whale and March had decided to add to the script), so the production ended up in Los Angeles after all.

Journey’s End is the story of a British company in World War I stationed on the Western front in Amiens, France in April 1918, just before the Germans are scheduled to make a big advance in an attempt to break the four-year stalemate of trench warfare once and for all. British intelligence has learned that the Germans plan an advance that will involve an all-out attack, but they only have a sketchy idea of when or where it will occur – though the company in the story have been told to await it any day or week. The unit is led by Captain Dennis Stanhope (Colin Clive), and a new young officer named Lieutenant Raleigh (David Manners) is sent in to replace one of the many casualties the unit has suffered. In what James Curtis refers to as “the play’s one plot contrivance,” before the war Stanhope had dated Raleigh’s sister and Raleigh had come to a deep admiration for his would-be brother-in-law, regarding Stanhope as the model for the sort of man Raleigh wanted to become. Alas, three years of war have so frazzled Stanhope he has only a thin hold on sanity; he’s become short-tempered, mean-spirited and neurotic. About the last thing he wants to see is Raleigh being assigned to his unit and seeing him in his current mental state – Stanhope gets a lot of almost Casablanca-esque dialogue along the lines of, “Of all the trenches in all the war, he had to be stationed in mine.” He also demands the right to censor the letter Raleigh wants to write home, and when his assistant commander Lt. Osborne (Ian McLaren) tells Stanhope he should let Raleigh’s letter go through because “there’s nothing in it about where we are” (the whole official justification for censoring soldiers’ letters was they might contain information about actual locations or troop movements that could be useful to the enemy if it fell into their hands), and Stanhope first has a fit about his secrets being violated and then decides to let the letter go through after all.

The unit is ordered into the lines for several pointless missions that, like quite a few of the fights in the Great War, accomplish nothing other than getting more men killed. World War I was a classic example of armies that got into trouble “fighting the last war” instead of the current one; the whole concept of trench warfare had been invented in the U.S. Civil War by Ulysses S. Grant, who in his diaries lamented that he was sending men to their deaths at frightening rates but also felt he was the only way to win. A strategy of attrition worked for Grant because he knew the Union had three times as many men of military age as the Confederacy, so he knew that ultimately the other side would simply run out of people to carry out the bloody battles and so his side would win. But the sides in World War I each had about the same number of potential soldiers available and so the pointless slaughter continued, racking up casualties on both sides until the arrival of American troops in substantial numbers in early 1918 gave their side a numerical advantage, repelled the German invasion awaited in this story and ultimately won the war for the Entente powers of Britain and France. Most films about the ground war in World War I emphasize the sheer pointlessness of the slaughter, with massive operations that tried to break the stalemate of the trenches and did nothing but up the body counts. Journey’s End attains whatever power it has as drama (and it’s considerable, even though it’s been diluted by how often war has been depicted and how much the situations of this story have become war-fiction clichés) from the consciousness of the men that no matter how hard they fight and how many personal risks they run, the outcome of the war is way over their heads.

The film itself is a mixed bag, the work of a director who’d already done at least three stage productions of the story and therefore knew the material inside and out (and had served in World War I himself, though he was captured by the Germans and spent the last year and a half of the war as a prisoner; the one amusement the British prisoners had was amateur theatrical entertainments, and Whale took to them with such gusto as director, writer and actor that he decided to make the theatre his career as soon as the war was over and he got home), but he hadn’t actually made a complete movie and he was stuck with the fabled immobility of early sound equipment, with the cameras locked in soundproof booths. You couldn’t move the booths (“it was like moving a house,” early sound director Rouben Mamoulian recalled), and if you wanted more than one camera angle you had to use more than one camera and cut between them in the editing room. Other, more financially solid studios than Tiffany and other directors with more experience than Whale – Mamoulian, Lewis Milestone, William Wyler, King Vidor, Frank Capra – were pushing the envelope of sound moviemaking, and the technical people were improving the sensitivity of the recording and coming up with mike booms and camera blimps that made the talkies more mobile, but Whale was still stuck with earlier equipment and still thought of Journey’s End in stage terms – though, as Charles pointed out, at least his training on stage in general and his experience with this story on stage in particular meant that instead of allowing the … God-awful … pausing between lines, and sometimes even within lines, that make some early talkies virtually unwatchable today, the actors in Journey’s End speak their lines naturalistically and believably.

The situations in the film of Journey's End are powerful and one can readily see why this story bowled over people in the late 1920’s, but at the same time some of the ideas in this film have become clichéd (as Charles once told me about another film we watched together, the anti-war movie has become as clichéd as the pro-war movie) and there’s one performance in the movie that, if not downright bad, certainly becomes irritating. That’s David Manners as Raleigh, making his first film; yes, I know he’s supposed to be playing the callow young officer who shows up at the front with only the faintest hint of what life in the trenches is really like, but Manners way overdoes the chipperness and one wonders why Whale wasn’t able to calm him down (or whether the movie might have been better with the young Maurice Evans, who had played the part in Whale’s stage productions). Manners got better as an actor with more experience; he’s probably best known for two Universal horror films (neither of which Whale directed), Dracula (1931) and The Black Cat (1934), but probably his best performance is as the blind veteran who’s about to commit suicide when he’s redeemed by a radio broadcast from evangelist Barbara Stanwyck in Frank Capra’s The Miracle Woman (which might have been a sequel to his Journey’s End performance if he’d merely been blinded instead of killed). David J. Skal interviewed Manners shortly before his death and found that he hated Dracula so much he had never seen the film start-to-finish and did not wish to.

There’s also one actor who emerges over the rest of the cast; though I suspect Sherriff intended Journey’s End to be more of an ensemble piece than a star vehicle, Colin Clive grabbed hold of the part of Stanhope and gave an absolutely riveting performance. Clive was still acting in the London stage production of Journey’s End when Whale and his producers sent for him to repeat the role on film. Though he throws away one line Laurence Olivier allegedly made unforgettable in the first production – after the company has returned from one of its stupid missions and Osborne has got himself killed, Stanhope upbraids the latest piece of replacement cannon fodder, “Must you sit on Osborne’s bed?” – virtually all of Clive’s performance is brilliant. He so totally brings to life the character, the once-proud and dignified man ruined by the traumas of three years of pointless war, one can readily imagine why a year after making this film Whale fought Universal so hard to be allowed to cast Clive as Henry Frankenstein in the monster classic (especially since Universal’s choice was Leslie Howard, a more popular movie “name” but, on the evidence of the films he did make, totally wrong for the part of an idealistic science student driven mad by the zeal to create an artificial human being and the guilt he feels later when his creature escapes and starts killing people). Watching Colin Clive in Journey’s End is like watching a car wreck – one wants to turn away from the wreckage this man has become and yet you can’t; you watch with sick fascination as the neuroses just pour out of him. There’s a sad coda to this film in that the first thing we hear about Stanhope – even before he actually enters (Sherriff was following the construction rules of old playwriting that you don’t actually show the star until about 20 to 30 minutes in; until then you keep the audience in suspense by having the other characters talk about the star’s role until he or she enters) is how much he’s drinking; according to Curtis’s book, Clive was stiff in his early rehearsals for the play until author R. C. Sherriff suggested he have a drink over lunch to loosen him up … and Clive eventually became an alcoholic for real and this led him to an early death.

Journey’s End was an electrifying success for Whale’s first film as a director – the critic for the New York Evening Post wrote that with just this one film, “James Whale has unquestionably placed himself along with the foremost screen directors” – but it emerges today as a film of quality but one that could have been considerably better with a director who’d known more about film and a less refractory sound process (though the recording system used, RCA Photophone, would ultimately replace both Warner Bros.’ Vitaphone and Fox’s Movietone as the standard for sound-film recording), and it seems like a worthy start to Whale’s film career but not quite a masterpiece. (There have been at least five remakes of Journey’s End, including a German film from 1931 with Conrad Veidt as Stanhope, a 1976 movie called Aces High that kept the World War I setting but moved it to the air war, TV-movies in 1983 and 1988 and a theatrical remake in 2017 with Saul Dibb directing, Simon Reade as writer, Sam Claflin as Stanhope, Asa Butterfield from Ender’s Game as Raleigh and Paul Bettany as Osborne, which might be well worth seeing.