The Weaker Sex

In an English town during the war, Martha Dacre keeps the household standing alone: her daughters, her son, those who come back from the front and those who do not, ration books, queues and billeted guests. The film runs from the last years of the war into the peace. The subject is not the front but management inside a house. Martha performs no heroism; she simply keeps everyone in place, and when the war ends it turns out nobody noticed. The form is episodic, advancing through seasons and news rather than through a defined plot. Humour and sorrow stand side by side in the same scene. The source is a play by Esther McCracken. The film was made only a few years after the war, so the daily life it describes was the audience's own recent past, and rationing was still in force when its ration-book scenes reached cinemas. Roy Ward Baker directs. Ursula Jeans plays Martha and Cecil Parker her neighbour. Who it is for: viewers who like British home front films and quiet family narratives. Who it is not for: anyone waiting for dramatic escalation; the film is deliberately uneventful and its biggest events stay outside the frame.