15 October 2009
Ice Cold in Alex
This great film was shown during the week by Channel 4. It is something of an icon to cinema goers everywhere but British cinema goers in particular. It is even an icon to the advertising business as it was used marvellously and effectively in an award winning commercial for beer the other year.
But it is good to wallow in a nostalgic look at some of these films. In the fifties television sets were sparse, so our real and perhaps only entertainment was a trip to the cinema. They used to pack us in like sardines and with almost everyone fagging it away to their hearts content on Woodbines and Players Navy Cut, those cinemas were fog filled dens of putrifaction..if thats the right word... and if it isnt it oughta be! How some of us are still here having escaped lung contamination is truly a miracle of biblical magnificence, and all endured in the harmless....
pursuit of visual onscreen joy. But back to the film itself. It harks back to those days in the cinema when we all existed, no matter where we came from, on a staple diet of black and white but iconic British war films. They all featured those ordinary chaps..you know the type, wheeled in from Bradford and Brum and all points east, to present you and me with a staunch body of bedraggled heroes, sweating through endless desert scenes, fighting the unspeakable and better equipped foe, and against all the odds too.. and of course against a foe who didnt quite play cricket!
The film featured is a solid example of the aforementioned, where a sturdy group of old cinematic stalwarts, helped us to leave the cinema in good and buoyant spirits, knowing in our hearts thereafter, that we can each of us win against overwhelming adversity.
They were morale boosters. One feels sure now.. looking back with a cynical eye, that it was all part of some government post war morale boosting plot, hatched by our public school betters in the wooden panelled corridors of Whitehall. But then maybe it worked...
The film itself is now regarded as a classic. It featured the ever popular John Mills as a flawed officer, not something very often seen in those days..a flawed officer, drinking his way through errors of judgement, but backed up by the ever deferential Sergeant Major Harry Andrews, who believed in the officers right to rule, and backed him up to the hilt but in fine solid heartwarming and good natured British tradition. The class system was society's benchmark then and we all knew our place. Maybe it was a better system...but who knows!?
Also great performances in the film from Anthony Quale and Sylvia Syms but I wont give the general story away. How lovely Sylvia Syms was then. Catch it soon.
By the way, almost forgot, the ice cold in Alexandria refers to the beer John Mills would treat himself and the team too if they ever made it through the burning North African desert.
Paul Boland
