A real discovery, thanks to recent detective work by Mark Fuller (see www.powell-pressburger.org for details). In the summer of 1939, a charity devoted to helping ex-servicemen enlisted Powell and his current cameraman Bernard Browne (also responsible for The Spy in Black and An Airman’s Letter) to make a promotional film. Two leading English actors who would shortly appear in Korda’s The Lion Has Wings, Ralph Richardson and Flora Robson, were on hand to play ‘John Smith’, sacked by his employer due to hard times, and his wife; while veteran character actor Wally Patch is the friend who advises Smith to seek help from the Embankment Fellowship Centre. Given Powell’s well- known scepticism about the documentary movement of the 30s, this miniature drama-doc is eagerly awaited as evidence of his approach to dramatising a social issue that had dominated the previous decade.

Ian Christie