Glorious 39

Plot synopsis:
In present-day London, Michael Walton (Toby Regbo) visits his cousins, Walter and Oliver Page (Christopher Lee and Corin Redgrave). Michael, interested in family history, asks them about his great aunt, Anne Keyes (Romola Garai), the sister of his grandmother, Celia (Juno Temple). Anne, an actress, was the eldest of the three Keyes children. Desperate for children, her father, Alexander (Bill Nighy), a Member of Parliament, and mother, Maud (Jenny Agutter), had adopted her: however, Maud subsequently gave birth to Ralph (Eddie Redmayne) and Celia. Michael is curious to learn what happened to Anne, which leads Walter to reminisce about the summer of 1939, at the Keyes estate in Norfolk.
On the day of Alexander's birthday, Anne has prepared a table in the garden to celebrate. Anne's friend, the outspoken MP Hector (David Tennant), and lover, the reserved Lawrence (Charlie Cox), are present for the festivities. When Alexander arrives that night he also brings a guest, the quiet government employee Joseph Balcombe (Jeremy Northam). During dinner Hector rants about Britain's lack of action against Nazi Germany, noting that while his view is unpopular, he feels that it needs to be said. It is later revealed that he has been one of those calling out for a new prime minister.
The next day, while looking for a missing cat, Anne finds her in one of the property's sheds, which are off-limits as they are used for storing Alexander's private papers. She finds gramophone records labelled "Foxtrot", which, when played, prove to contain recorded meetings and telephone conversations. Alexander reveals that he has allowed Balcombe to store government documents in the shed.
Two weeks later, Anne is notified that Hector has been found dead, of an apparent suicide. Anne wonders if Balcombe had anything to do with Hector's death. Alexander brushes off the idea, but does offer to ask Balcombe to remove the records from the shed, something he promises to do the next day during a picnic. While there, the picnic-goers take off for a walk, including Aunt Elizabeth (Julie Christie), leaving Anne to watch over baby Oliver. Anne awakens to find Oliver and his pushchair missing. She follows his cries to no avail, and when the family returns, they search, too, until they find him in his pushchair on a lane. Anne vehemently denies moving the baby, but the incident plants roots of doubt about Anne's word.
Balcombe removes the records that night, but Anne has secretly kept two of them. The family then returns to London because Parliament has been recalled. While there Anne listens to the records. One contains a recording of a distressed Hector pleading with Balcombe to cease calling him and also his parents. However, the maid bursts into the room, which causes the gramophone to fall and the record to break into pieces. On 1 September Anne gives a second record to her fellow actor and friend Gilbert (Hugh Bonneville), however he is later found dead from an apparent suicide.
Anne travels back to Norfolk to keep Aunt Elizabeth company, where she listens to the second recording. On it she recognizes Balcombe's voice, along with another, her brother, Ralph. Ralph is heard suggesting the name "Thin Man Dancing" for a covert operation. The name he suggested is a reference to a childhood toy with which the siblings played. This confirms to Anne that Ralph is not to be trusted. At a party in London, Anne attempts to tell Lawrence of Ralph's involvement, but he already knows. Lawrence convinces Anne to bring him the recording at a rendezvous at a suburban veterinary surgery. After Anne finds Lawrence's body in a shed filled with euthanised pets, she is drugged by her father and taken prisoner in Aunt Elizabeth's house, which is close to St Paul's Cathedral. Balcombe pays her a visit and brings with him the second recording, which was intercepted by him. He informs her that the recording had been made for her father, and that was why they were stored at the house in Norfolk. He also informs her that their house in London is being used for series of pro-appeasement meetings which her father is chairing.
Alexander later admits to her that he believes Britain will be completely destroyed unless it secures a peace treaty with Germany, and that nothing should disturb that. Alexander tells her that she is the only member of the family that does not share his beliefs, which is why they are keeping her locked away and sedated. After some time, Maud unlocks the door to release her while the rest of the family is at the park. She goes past them, and when they act as though nothing wrong had happened, Anne runs away.
Back in the present, Walter tells Michael that Anne died in Canada 20 years ago, and that he was just doing what his family and Balcombe had wanted. It is then revealed that Balcombe convinced Walter to move Oliver's pushchair into the lane. Michael asks Oliver and Walter to accompany him to meet his mother. They travel to the same park where Anne had last seen her family. A woman, Michael's mother, wheels an elderly woman towards them. That elderly woman is revealed to be Anne, and Michael tells them that he knew the truth all along but wanted to hear it from them.

Tags: murder, flashback

Review:
Anne Keyes disturbingly uncovers a sinister plot without apparent motive in a story told as a flashback in a way that is helpful to its audience.This is a very British film about guilty pasts, family values and inner strength set around the outbreak of WW2.
But there is tension, intrigue, suspense, and menace in just the right quantities to keep us gripped and interested.Romola Garai gives us a superbly convincing portrayal of Anne with some great support notably from Jeremy Northam (Balcombe), Sam Kubrick-Finney (young Walter), Hugh Bonnevile (Gilbert) and Juno Temple (Celia).
Though there have been books and other films that deal with the dissidence between the aristocrats and the general populace of England around the topic of WW II, this beautifully executed 'historical thriller' brings many aspects of those discrepancies of opinion to light in a manner not unlike the similar thought processes in Germany at the same time: the gentry of Germany turned a blind eye to the events surrounding them (The Final Solution) in order to believe in what they chose to believe as a promise for stabilization and world importance as a genteel country.
The year is 1939 and the aristocratic family of Sir Alexander Keyes (Bill Nighy) and his wife Maud (Jenny Agutter) are living what seems to be an idyllic life with their children Ralph (Eddie Redmayne), Celia (Juno Temple) and the eldest, Anne (Romula Garai) who we soon discover was adopted before the Keyes discovered they could bear children on their own.
From this point the story takes a dark turn: Anne continues filming in London with her close friend, actor Gilbert (Hugh Bonneville), and Anne discovers some phonograph records in the basement of the Keyes home, records that contain not fox trots but instead 'conversations' from meetings.
Few British people would NOT know this, given that their abdicated king Edward and his wife Wallis Simpson openly admired Hitler, and many other high-borns found him quite right to attack democracy in its heart.Romula Garai, one of the world's finest new actresses, carries the movie with her endless shading of emotions, her eyes opening to the horror that her family really is despite its large, warm embrace of her.
Stephen Poliakoff, Britain's own resident television drama genius (both writer and director), has really outdone himself this time with his first feature film in ten years.
I always enjoy watching BBC films, always very well acted and usually an interesting story that makes you think.
This one promised quite a lot: a great cast including Jeremy Northam, Bill Nighy and Romola Garay, a plot in the first year of the second world War, it seemed like a recipe for a great movie.
The plot is incoherent and hackneyed: the good guys all want to fight the Nazis, the nasty people don't; even the use of an adopted child as the lead character seems to be a cheap way of having a cake and eating it, as it allows the director to revel in the aristocratic excess while simultaneously suggesting there was something terrible about it.
'Glorious' relates to both the nature of that year's summer and the affectionate name for Garai's character Anne, the adopted daughter of the aristocratic Keyes family which is headed by an influential Conservative Member of Parliament who is appalled by the notion of the country going to war for the second time in only a couple of decades.Written and directed by Stephen Poliakoff as a kind of Hitchcockian thriller, this is a work replete with well-known British character actors spanning the age range from Christopher Lee & Julie Christie through Bill Nighy & Jeremy Northam to David Tennant & Eddie Redmayne.
His once sharp eye for character dulled, he fails to write dialog which is anything but undiluted exposition, every line.The story structure is little better, the occasional scenes of thriller tension - and, yes, there are some good ones - being lost in a meandering sea of nothing much happening.The cast put a brave face to their unspeakable lines and carry on, in the spirit of the blitz.
Moreover, she is horrified to find that some members of her own family may be in sympathy with the aims of the plot.In form the film is a traditional, old-fashioned thriller; the most unusual thing about it is a rather clumsy framework device involving Anne's great-nephew Michael and his efforts to learn more about his family history.
The main motivation of the pro-appeasement faction was not the craven defeatism depicted here, and certainly not sympathy for Nazism, but the realisation that a Second World War, even if like the First it ended in a nominal British victory, would inevitably result in bloodshed and destruction unparallelled even by the standards of 1914-18.A film like "Glorious 39", with its banal goodies-and-baddies thriller plot, is unable to tackle this tragic dilemma.
I'm sorry, but this movie was a pile.Yes, the acting and filming were well done, but anyone who believes that this was in any way suspenseful or a "taut thriller" is WAY too used to old-school, glacially paced British dramas.Heck, I can't say for certain that there was any true drama to this rare combination of political intrigue AND plodding storytelling.There was neither a single twist nor genuinely suspenseful moment right up to the end, which I imagine was supposed to leave us gob-smacked but only served to make us feel good that we were able to predict it about two hours earlier.If you are wavering between this and something else, pick the something else.
This is too bad, for the stellar cast and skillful crew are very commendable, and the idea at the center of Glorious 39 is worthwhile – This film wants to approach classic excellence, but falls flat on its ass, in the end, because writer-director Poliakoff has failed to trust his own tale, and his own audience's maturity, and the mystique of the era he chose, enough so as to create a story infused with a simple sense of truth; instead, he overburdens his film with at an times bloated acting, and often gratuitous visual dramatic clichés that snap us repeatedly out from the hypnotic potential of this otherwise beautiful nightmare..
An excellent cast delivers a suitably idiosyncratic story of British upper crust treachery leading up to the Second World War. There is genuine intrigue running through this somewhat stagey but highly enjoyable piece, and director Stephen Poliakov ably demonstrates that slow burn is so much more effective than breakneck plotting when it comes to delivering threat.At the heart of the story Romola Garai gives a highly affecting and increasingly fractured performance as the drama unfolds, and Bill Nighy is wonderfully patronising as Sir Alexander.
The superb British cast spans a generation or two of home-grown acting talent from the evergreen Christopher Lee to young Toby Regbo (at the time soon to appear as Jim Hawkins), and taking in Julie Christie; Jenny Agutter; Hugh Bonneville; Jeremy Northam; Eddie Redmayne; and Juno Temple.If your attention span is longer than 10 minutes, you're not averse to the occasional costume drama, and you don't need to see things exploding every ten seconds there's a fair chance you will enjoy this..
Bill Nighy, try as he may, simply isn't the right man to deliver the aristocratic ennui demanded by the part - he's far too warm and animated.The denouement is too long drawn-out and the ending deeply unsatisfying - both because the story isn't properly closed off and because it avoids any sense of the tragedy that events leading up to it demand.The one bright light in an otherwise frustrating movie was the spirited performance of Romola Garai as the heroine..
In his first feature for 10 years, writer-director Stephen Poliakoff deals with some weighty themes - fascism, adoption, familial loyalty - while alighting on fascinating aspects of the readying for war, such as pets being killed and heaped onto pyres.
"Animals going onto a fire in a quiet English summer." Despite its depth, though, Glorious 39 is really an old-fashioned thriller: engrossing and atmospheric, with a gnawing, ever-present sense of menace and some mightily effective set pieces.The film does have its faults, floundering in the final 15 and closing with an atrocious scene that serves no purpose, beyond fulfilling a perceived desire for a happy ending and satiating Poliakoff's need to hammer the audience over the head with poorly-conceived pseudo-irony.
Its Hitchcockian elements - the stomach-tightening tension piquing during a slew of well thought-out suspense scenes - are marvellously handled, and the film is also notable for Garai's expressive, layered turn, which catches the eye in a cast that includes Nighy, Julie Christie, Jeremy Northam, David Tennant and Jenny Agutter.
Two old gentlemen reminisce the year 1939, the time just before World War II.Anne Keyes realizes she can't trust her own family.Glorious 39 (2009) is a conspiracy thriller directed and written by Stephen Poliakoff.The cast is very nice.Romola Garai plays Anne Keyes, also known as Glorious.Bill Nighy portrays her father Sir Alexander.Jenny Agutter is her mother Maud.Julie Christie is Aunt Elizabeth.Eddie Redmayne is brother Ralph.Juno Temple is the younger sister Celia.David Tennant plays Hector.Charlie Cox plays Lawrence, Anne's lover.Jeremy Northam is Joseph Balcombe.It's a real thrill to see Christopher Lee (b.
1922) playing older Walter Page.The late Corin Redgrave plays Oliver Page.Muriel Pavlow is Old Anne.I guess this one goes to the category OK.It doesn't quite live up to expectations.It's only slightly thrilling, but not as much as it should be.But it's not a total waste of time to watch this movie..
Put some political/ national matters, a high-placed family in a British countryside and a few fatal events and you have your mystery case drama.As expected, the protagonists and supporting actor's performances were stunning.
I wouldn't expect less from Bill Nighy, or Romola Garai and -for the love of God- Christopher Lee and David Tennant have a small part in this film!
What an absolute waste of 2 hours.Implausible plot, over laboured and dull – if you plan to make your film 2 hours long please show the viewer some courtesy by making it interesting.I chose to rent this film based on the splendid cast list however in this instance no one really excelled (which is probably due to the clunky script & poor direction) save for David Tennant who was barely used.
However if I had to single someone out it would have to be Eddie Redmayne for his ever so slightly OTT / hammy performance.Steven Poliakoff both wrote & directed this dire piece of cinema - so you would assume that he created his own vision - its not like a Director made a bad adaptation of good book, or vice versa.I have deliberated over whether or not to rate this film as 1 or 2 out of 10.I generously gave it 2..
So I found myself just waiting for the next all-too-brief appearance of Bill Nighy or Julie Christie - who added small but needed infusions of character and/or warmth to the dullness of this film.It was literally 50 minutes before the plot moved away from dinner table and living room upper class blathering and tea-talk to any notable landmark event in the storyline.By then I was clinging to consciousness...I had high hopes for this when I saw the cast, but it didn't really come close.
Tension is really well maintained through out the movie, as soon as the story kicks and the paranoia sets in it just increases and deepens with each frame until the final credit rolls.As the lead Romola Garai gives this gripping piece of work its intensity.
Tension is really well maintained through out the movie, as soon as the story kicks and the paranoia sets in it just increases and deepens with each frame until the final credit rolls.As the lead Romola Garai gives this gripping piece of work its intensity.
She never hits a false note and is the key reason because of which the paranoia and tension are so incredibly palpable.Glorious 39 is period piece and a engaging conspiracy thriller, that is narrated in a old-school manner of film-making were the script complements the visuals and the performances lends in to make the narration even more engaging..
She never hits a false note and is the key reason because of which the paranoia and tension are so incredibly palpable.Glorious 39 is period piece and a engaging conspiracy thriller, that is narrated in a old-school manner of film-making were the script complements the visuals and the performances lends in to make the narration even more engaging..
It does not have the finishing touches and real mystique of Atonement and is only comparable with Brideshead Revisited on grounds of heritage and culture class, nothing more.The 'appeasement' theme was an interesting and Romola as the leading lady was definitely the star, although I think an opportunity was definitely lost to develop a love story between her and Hector played by ex doctor Who David Tennant who was excellent in the limited role given to him.
Yes Bill Nighty and Julie Christie are excellent also but the story is already lost by the time they really feature in the movie.Mr Poliafoff is clearly a talented director and working with talented actors and actresses but this fails on the back of a poor script and I absolutely agree, an appalling manufactured ending.
At times it feels more low-rent psychological thriller than period drama and it has a seriously clunky ending with some really terrible acting, but otherwise there are some good bits.
It's interesting, intriguing and suspenseful although the 'surprise' ending is anything but (assuming you stayed with the previous 1 hour 59 minutes).It's very much like a Famous Five (or Secret Seven) and jolly hockey sticks with an underlying level of mystery and menace and just a smidgen of adult gruesomeness.The acting is excellent, the scenery is superb and the story is really good (if terribly overwritten).
OK acting apart from Bill Nighy who irritated, though to be fair his script was unhelpful and repetitive.In that period a film about Britain, with the appeasement of many of the upper classes prevalent, should have lent itself to a much better effort than this.The scene near the end at the vets out in the sticks was truly bizarre, when poor old Lawrence was found in a bag.A poor man's,(or woman's), 39 steps.Now that was glorious..
The six daughters of the family were known collectively as the Mitford sisters where two of them were well known during the 1930s for being close to Adolf Hitler.The movie is a beautiful portrait of what happens when political views become materialized, a war is started and as a result how a reputed family gets torn apart.Political views on communism and fascism of course never die, but the tone and horrible ending of Glorious 39 is only playing in the hands of communist views and the objectives of "once" the KGB..
Anne begins her journey in the English countryside a member of one of the great aristocratic families right before the events of World War 2.
With the revelation of Anne's ancestry and the showing of their true regard for Anne during the course of the movie Anne begins to realize this fact and at the end makes her escape from the strange, racist and corrupt family.Were they in the right to try to appease Hitler?
Glorious 39, when I first heard of it, ticked all of the boxes for what I would normally like in a film - Romola Garai, David Tennant, Bill Nighy, 1930s setting, war drama, so on and so forth.
This film is much too unpleasant to serve as an "entertainment" (warning: dead pets!), but has too many lapses in credibility to be taken seriously as a political statement, and way too many plot holes to work as an intellectual puzzler.There is atmosphere to spare, and some scenes succeed at producing goosebumps...as long as the viewer doesn't actually think about them.
We are taken by flashback to 1939 where Anne is an actress in the beautiful British countryside, and this is at the time when the World War II was beginning.
Soon after hearing and revealing these, and trying to find the origins of the records, the perfect life of Anne starts slowly falling apart, including the death of a good friend, fleeing to London, and being imprisoned by her own father Sir Alexander Keyes (Bill Nighy) and others.
He just doesn't get anywhere near enough screen time (in a film that has a running time of 2 hours!) and so his death doesn't have any real impact for us.To top things off, the movie concludes with an ending that is an anti-climax, and makes little real sense (the use of a final shot of young Anne even seems to indicate that at least someone involved in this film was concerned that the execution of the plot may leave some viewers confused about who the elderly woman in the chair was, so they had to spell it out as obviously as they possibly could).It's a real shame, because the atmosphere, acting and story concept are all top shelf - it's just a shame that the execution was so flawed..
Unless you know or understand history you might feel the plot exaggerated.But the plot seems close to some family's reality in 1939 and the little details are accurate, such as those wonderful automobiles and that retched identification card proclamation that ended in the 50s.Pity though that the writer and director, Mr. Stephen Poliakoff, didn't step farther away from the ladder and jump into the sea of controversies that swelled around in Great Britain, the United States and elsewhere before the Allies became first one, then three.Several of the symbols are tame, while some of the mystery is riveting as the protagonist, the adopted daughter of the upper middle class Keyes family, Anne (Romola Sadie Garai) struggles to understand whether her family is involved in what seems like an enormous plot, at any cost, to stop war and the elevation of Sir Winston Churchill.
I enjoyed this film and I would rate it as at least a 7 star.The plot is quite intriguing and the acting mostly quite good.