21 Days, a.k.a. 21 Days Together (London Films, United Artists, 1940)

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

My husband Charles got home from work early last night and so we had the time to watch a movie together that proved to be quite interesting: 21 Days, also known as 21 Days Together, made in Britain in early 1940 (after World War II started but before Winston Churchill became Prime Minister and immediately ordered Britain’s movie studios closed to avoid diverting people and resources from the war effort – later he allowed limited production to resume but concentrated on stories that would boost British morale, including Laurence Olivier’s directorial debut, Henry V) and co-starring Laurence Olivier and his then-fiancée Vivien Leigh in an unusual story for them. It’s unusual because most of their movies together were big-budget historical extravaganzae like Fire Over England and That Hamilton Woman (a 1941 production Churchill allowed to be made because Olivier was playing Admiral Horatio Nelson and that he figured would be a morale booster in and of itself even though the story is about Nelson’s adulterous love affair with Lady Emma Hamilton, Leigh’s character).

This one is quite different, a 72-minute vest-pocket thriller in which Olivier plays Larry Darrent (it seems appropriate that in a movie co-starring his real-life partner he got to play a character with the same first name as his own), the ne’er-do-well brother of defense attorney Keith Wallen (Leslie Banks, usually cast as a villain – he was the hunter of humans General Zaroff in the first and best version of The Most Dangerous Game, though with his penchant for casting against “type” Alfred Hitchcock made him the hero of the 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much). 21 Days has some illustrious talent behind the camera – the story is based on a novel called The First and the Last, and Graham Greene co-wrote the screenplay with director Basil Dean – and at least two actors who worked with Hitchcock, Banks and Esmé Percy (the screaming-queen killer of Hitchcock’s flawed but fascinating 1930 whodunit Murder!).

The plot features Larry having just returned from Rhodesia (then a British colony and now the independent but corruption-ridden country of Zimbabwe) having lost a big chunk of the Darrant family’s money. He hooks up with a woman named Wanda Wallen (Vivien Leigh) and they have a night on the town that ends with them returning to her room – only she notices that someone is in her room. With the script having already established that both leads are broke – they pawned some jewelry to get five pounds to finance their date – my first guess was her landlady had thrown her out and the “intruder” was the new tenant. In fact he’s a blustering heavy-set thickly accented guy named Wallen (Esmé Percy) who claims to be Wanda’s husband. She married him in Europe some years back to get some money she desperately needed, and though they were only together for a few weeks he insists that she give him money or he’ll resume his position as her husband. Larry gets furious and, when Wallen attacks him, grabs him and strangles him in self-defense – so, like the female lead of Hitchcock’s 1929 Blackmail, he’s morally innocent but legally guilty of murder.

Larry moves the body and dumps it in a convenient alleyway but he and Wanda are spotted and accosted by Mander (Francis X. Sullivan), a homeless alcoholic who used to work for the Church of England until his drunkenness cost him that job, and who stole money and a ring from the corpse. When the police arrest him he says, “I did a terrible thing” – he means stealing from a dead man but the cops interpret that as a confession to the murder – and he’s put on trial with Keith Darrant as his defense attorney. Keith’s real concern is that he’s up for a judicial appointment and he’s worried that if it comes out that his brother is the real killer, that will disgrace him, he’ll lose the judgeship and he’ll turn into a national joke. So he sends Larry and Wanda off with a sum of money that will allow them to vacation for three weeks, after which he plans to send them out of the country so they can settle elsewhere, get married and stay out of his hair – only, despite all the fun they’re having, Larry is tormented by guilt that an innocent man may hang for the murder he committed.

After the three weeks Larry and Wanda return and Larry learns that the jury in Mander’s case has just returned a verdict – guilty – and Larry determines to turn himself in. Then [spoiler alert!] a deus ex machina appears in the form of Mander’s general ill health when we hear an announcement that he’s “cheated the hangman” – i.e., he’s died au naturel before he could be executed – only Larry has already set out for a police station to turn himself in and there’s a nice suspense sequence at the end to see if Wanda can reach him in the street and stop him before he does so. She does, their life together and his brother’s judicial appointment are saved, and we’re supposed to believe this is a happy ending even though, like the leads of Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929), they share a guilty secret between them and one can’t help but wonder what this is going to do to their future relationship. The other film 21 Days couldn’t help but remind me of was James Whale’s One More River (1934), also based on a novel by John Galsworthy and also featuring extended scenes in a British courtroom – and despite his rather stuck-up personal character (Hitchcock remembered meeting him for a 1931 film of a Galsworthy play, The Skin Game – yet another story which climaxes in a trial! – and when he was invited to Galsworthy’s home for dinner they asked him who his favorite composer was. Hitchcock said, “Wagner – he’s so melodramatic,” whereupon Mrs. Galsworthy sat straight up in her chair and proclaimed, “We like Bach!”) Galsworthy was known as a liberal on issues of personal morality.

He does rather stack the deck by portraying Wallen as an opportunist who “married” a number of women to get his hands on their money even though he already had a wife – and both we and the characters are stunned when the prosecution calls a “Mrs. Wallen” as a witness and she turns out to be a much older, heavy-set woman who doesn’t look at all like Vivien Leigh and explains to the court just how her slimeball husband made his living. 21 Days is a fine little minor movie, and though Olivier plays his part as if stuck to the camera lens (as if he’s forgotten all the lessons William Wyler had tried to teach him on the set of Wuthering Heights the year before, particularly on how screen acting differs from stage acting and in front of a camera, less very often is more) it works for the rather irresponsible boor he’s supposed to be playing. Basil Dean’s direction, while hardly at the level of Hitchcock’s or Whale’s, is effective and impressive, and the final scene is a suspense sequence of which the Master could have been proud. A very interesting little movie and a surprise coming from early-wartime Britain!