Wartime working conditions in industry is the principal theme. The film also aims to boost morale in the wake of Germany’s invasions across the English Channel and the British retreat in early summer 1940 from the beaches at Dunkirk. None of this material set Jennings on fire, but this modest film vividly reflects its time and place, and shows him building a visual vocabulary to be explored more powerfully later. Will Fyffe, seen entertaining in the workers’ canteen, was a Scottish comedian, though he’d prompt some of us to eat our lunch elsewhere.

Geoff Brown