I saw this as part of a recent John Mills double bill with 'We Dive at Dawn'; the two pictures are on the face of it remarkably similar, both attempting to show the human face of war as well as mindless explosions and heroics, and it is absorbing to try to pinpoint just why this one is so very much better than the other! For all its literacy and restraint, 'We Dive at Dawn' is ultimately little more than a standard case of Our Boys Win Through Again (aided, naturally, by the grateful oppressed peoples of Europe); it is of course flattering that at least our propaganda films aimed beyond mere gung-ho status, but the submarine movie clichés have been done better and to more stirring effect elsewhere. 'In Which We Serve' seems to be on an altogether higher level.

Music and dialogue by Noel Coward, naturally, can't hurt, and no more can co-direction by David Lean. The opening montage would befit a silent movie in its all-but-wordless narrative sweep, and the film refers back to it in a complex flashback structure, filling in moments around scenes that we recognise, and then taking the story on... to the pre-ordained ending that hangs over everything, adding tension to every successive scene. We know almost from the start *how* the 'Torrin' meets her fate, but not *when*.

In retrospect, the first combat scenes are an incredibly bold stroke, first showing the destroyer shelling unarmed troop transports rather than engaging in an exchange of fire, and then turning the tables the next day as she is caught helpless and sunk by flight after flight of dive-bombers. This is not the stuff of which morale-raising pictures are generally made, and it gives an additional edge to every flashback scene as the doomed ship prepares to go to war.

For ironically this is, and remains, a morale-raiser, celebrating the quiet virtues of endurance, humanity and loyalty in a time of senseless destruction. It is no coincidence that as part of her short history the 'Torrin' carries and salutes soldiers from Dunkirk. Her crew are drawn together from many different vessels, and then the few survivors dispersed; but in one of the most famous sequences -- the three parallel Christmas parties -- we are shown the bond that every one of them, from the captain to the petty officers to the ordinary seamen, feels for his ship.

The film deliberately sets out to depict its characters as a microcosm of English society, from the smoke-filled third class compartment to the Great Western dining car with its dubious "railway fish" (some things never change!), and as a result it is a fascinating social document. But the handful of half-drowned men soaked in fuel oil and filthy, clinging to their float as the aircraft come back for the kill, make no class distinctions. The script eschews both Hollywood schmaltz and confessional TV's bare-all emotionality, and the love and pain in the spaces between the words still ring true sixty years later.

The chronological structure is ambitious, but it works; we are never in any doubt as to where the current scene in the jigsaw fits in. The detail is apt and acutely observed, from the banter between-decks and the blacked-out ship's name on the wartime sailors' caps (National Security) to the prosaic nectar of Bovril-and-sherry on the destroyer's bridge after the hell of Dunkirk. The style ranges from the almost newsreel staccato through the wavering vision of a drowning or semi-conscious man to the simplicity of a kitchen-sink romance, and the music, while unobtrusive, has a notable sophistication beyond most work of this genre. Like its companion piece, 'This Happy Breed', 'In Which We Serve' demonstrates the hidden depths of Noel Coward's "talent to amuse" -- and the versatility of John Mills. As wartime films go, it's a high-class classic.