Ealing proving once again that didn’t just deal in black comedies concerned with a brand of pure Britannia that has since been consigned to history with Studio Canal’s release of Scott of the Antarctic. Sometimes Hitchcock editor, Charles Frend directs the now fabled story of Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated South Pole expedition. However, unlike other films concerned with the extremes of nature, Frend spends most of his time setting the scene back in Britain; selecting crew and preparing for potential eventualities, before heading into the unforgiving tundra.
The camaraderie early on, the collective effort to succeed or even be part of this trip is packed with the sort of Ealing dialogue and characterisation that made their golden run feel so effortless. Cheekier and more openly upper class than the traditional Ealing, the playful tone suits the material well. as whimsically British as Walter Meade & Ivor Montagu’s script is, when the sting in the tail arrives it feels earned rather than being a mere eventuality.
Over the first hour, they suggest whether Captain Scott did everything he could to ensure the success of the mission. It is still a strongly made and charming film, championing the spirit of these men and their British pride – yet it does it in such a cleverly subtle way that it also manages to ask questions of their effort, too. Scott of the Antarctic embodies the stiff upper lip of British stoicism just as potently as any other film from the West London studio. Frend is using it alike Ken Russell with his BBC documentary Elgar, he is satirizing that stiff upper lip and asks some real questions of Captain Scott and the processes he did and didn’t do before setting off to Antarctica.
A soundstage can communicate how alien and isolating this world can be in more relatable terms than a thunderingly windy, tundra where everything is lost in the blinding white of snowstorms.
SCOTT OF THE ANTARCTICA
The best part of the Ealing studio film is their brevity, a point of great elegance in Frend’s hands. The expedition doesn’t take up much more than 30 minutes and while that may be a little on the brief side it serves as a great antidote to the brand of hardship cinema inspired by Scott’s failed expedition. Hindsight and history have made Scott of the Antarctic a refreshing film, in an era full of self-important and over-long films like the Revenant – it cannot be understated how fresh it feels for a film to get to the point with little dilly-dallying.
Patently conceived ages before the modernity of computer animation, the only way to bring this story to life as fiction was through sound stages, matte painting and subtle in-camera effects. In the quieter moments, those sound stages are as clear as day, while the suspension of disbelief does have a hard time the aforementioned combination, the unreal quiet unexpectedly contextualises this landscape, presenting it as somewhere that has more in common with the dunes of the moon than anything else of Earth. A soundstage can communicate how alien and isolating this world can be in more relatable terms than a thunderingly windy, tundra where everything is lost in the blinding white of snowstorms. As is often said of low-budget filmmaking, “necessity is the mother of invention”.
While serendipity reigns in the silence, that was not what forced Captain Oates to wander into the stormy abyss uttering the words “I’m just going outside; I may be away some time”. Even though shot on a soundstage, Jim Morahan’s special effects team have done the unimaginable, creating a frighteningly real threat. With films like Everest or the Day after Tomorrow, it’s easy to understand how such films can be presented via CG, but without it – not only is Scott of the Antarctic an incredible exploit, it will still be as fresh as a daisy when the bullet pace of technology has rendered those aforementioned films surplus to requirements. Nothing ages a movie like computer wizardry.
SCOTT OF THE ANTARCTIC IS OUT NOW ON STUDIOCANAL VINTAGE CLASSICS BLU-RAY
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