Glorious 39 (2009)

I enjoyed this movie because it took a turn I wasn't expecting when the family started acting strangely. I didn't start to think about the plot holes till it was over--I kept thinking it would all come clear. But I gotta admit it didn't make sense.

(1) Anne was adopted. Then we learn she was a gypsy. The English have always been so class conscious that an upper class person hardly speaks to anyone except those in their circle, so I find it impossible to believe they would take a Roma child into their family as a full member.

(2) Before the war started, England was divided on their opinion of going to war. This is easily documented in any history book about WW 11. Some people wanted the war, some people didn't, some were sympathetic to Hitler (The Duke and Duchess of Windsor), and some just wanted him to go away.

(3) At that time, (like now) the opinions of young women were regarded lightly. What they had to say did not account for much. Especially in politics, they were ignored.

In view of (1) (2)and (3), please someone tell me why the Keyes family went to so much trouble, murder, lies, deception, cruelty to animals, and darn near killing Anne, just because she might hold a different opinion on the war. When her father was explaining it all to her, all he could come up with was she was a Roma (gypsy) and didn't fall in with the families' opinion of the war. It's pretty darn strange and puzzling to me. What did I miss? She wasn't political at all till they started their odd behavior.

Fmovies: 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. This film bears all the traditional hallmarks of Poliakoff obsessions: the evocative power of the past, the magic of memory, the mystical bonds of extended family connections, the hidden energies of secrets kept buried for too long, and the shattering consequences of the revelation of truth which has been suppressed. This film is set in 1939 in Britain, and what it reveals is one of the most terrifying of all the untold stories in which the true and secret history of Britain abounds. The British are remarkable for their ostrich qualities, and they have always been experts at not knowing what they do not want to know, and also at thinking the unsustainable. Here Poliakoff partially strips the veneer from the genteel surface, but I wish he had gone further and been more explicit even than this. His subject is the aristocratic Nazi sympathizers of the Neville Chamberlain clique who tried to prevent Britain entering the War, and wished not only to appease Hitler but to submit to him in the fashion of the Vichy Regime. We must never forget that Chamberlain had been a member of the Eugenics Society, and just imagine the fate of the British Jews if these people had succeeded in their aim. What Poliakoff does not state, and perhaps does not even know, is that the more fanatical of the pro-Nazis in Britain were members of the secret society known in Germany as the Vehme (pronounced 'fame-uh'), which carried out ruthless campaigns of assassination of political enemies, such as are shown in this film. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Vehme assassinated more than 6,000 leading members of the political opposition inside Germany, thereby so enfeebling the opposition parties that they had no effective leadership left even before the Reichstag fire which Hitler arranged as his pretext for the Enabling Act which gave him the supra-legal powers to establish his absolute dictatorship and dispense with the opposition altogether by arresting and executing their leaders with the official sanction of the state. A typical Vehme-style execution on the continent was carried out by hanging, and an example of one of those which occurred in London in our own time was the assassination by hanging of Roberto Calvi in 1982 ordered by the P-2 Masons of Italy, who are linked to the Vehme. (It was no accident that Blackfriars Bridge was chosen for the hanging, as the Black Friars are the Dominicans, who were the order who presided over the Inquisition, and Calvi was 'banker to the Vatican' as the newspapers have often called him.) It is interesting that one of the victims of the British Vehme shown in the film is someone we see hanging upside down in a sack. The leading members of the Vehme call themselves the 'Wissende' ('knowing ones'). One of their secret signs of recognition is to turn their knives round at the dinner table so that the points are towards themselves. This harrowing and extremely nail-biting film shows the slow and painful discovery of the British Vehme at work, as perceived by the adopted daughter of one of them, who is a British MP played by Bill Nighy with his usual brilliance and effectiveness. The terrified and totally apolitical adopted daughter who discovers the truth is played with rising levels of hysteria and terror by the amazingly talented Romola Garai. Her eyes get wider and wider with each passing minute of screen time as her fear m

After finding secret pro-appeasement (for the Nazis) recordings Anne (Garai) becomes involved in a secret, violent conspiracy, set in England in 1939. After one of her friends who speaks out against Hitler is found dead, Anne begins to dig deeper into the reasons for his death. This is a very interesting movie. It is both compelling and slow moving. It is tense but it drags in spots. It kept me watching but my mind did wander a bit. This is overall a good movie but you need to be in the mood for it. You really feel for Anne and the way her life begins to fall apart. I am a fan of historical movies so I really liked that aspect of it. This movie had the feel of a made-for-TV movie, although it would have been an HBO movie with the quality of it. I recommend this but again, it's not for everyone, and you need to be in the mood to watch a movie like this one. I give it a B-.

Would I watch again? - Probably not

Glorious 39 fmovies. I had the privilege of attending the world premiere of this film at the Toronto International Film Festival last night. It tells the story of the aristocratic Keyes family in the days leading up to the outbreak of WWII. The father played superbly by Bill Nighy is an influential MP and an all round "good egg" of a dad to his three children. The oldest daughter Ann, played by Romola Garai is an adopted child but seems to fit in perfectly with her younger siblings and is the life and soul of the family. The film starts as a classic English period piece with lavish settings in Norfolk and London involving picnics and parties. However, as war gets closer, dramatic and strange events involving the family and friends slowly change the mood of the film. Other reviewers have made comparisons to Hitchcock's films and I have to agree with them. I enjoyed the film but there were definitely a few situations that did not ring true. The ending was particularly clumsy and there were some strange scenes that just didn't seem to fit. At 130 minutes it was probably 20 minutes too long. There were good performances by Julie Christie as a batty aunt and Jeremy Northam as a sinister government official. A good watch if you like British mysteries

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. Writer/Director Stephen Poliakoff has based his examination of this problem on focusing on the life of one particular character whose fate was the standard of the dispossessed.

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. Anne is a beautiful creative actress who seems to make the family proud. The family is visited by an old friend Hector (David Tennant) who at dinner is very vocal about the fact that Hitler is a threat to England and that England must stop Hitler before he destroys them instead of pursuing a course of appeasement of Hitler that would prevent disturbance of their elegant way of life on the island of England. It is obvious that Sir Alexander is more concerned with his duties as a member of parliament and his maintenance of his family history and wealth, and his responses to Hector as well as to the mysterious Balcombe (Jeremy Northam) from the Foreign Office and the young Lawrence (Charlie Cox), a new member of the Foreign Office who is courting Anne, suggest subterfuge.

The family is visited by the very proper Aunt Elizabeth (Julie Christie) and while the entire family is on picnic, an infant transiently disappears while under Anne's care. 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. Suspicions about evil derring-do arise when the family learns that Hector has committed suicide soon followed by the suicide of Gilbert and eventually the bizarre discovery of Lawrence's body among the pet animals ordered to be put to death to make the people of England more ready for abrupt changes. War with Germany begins and changes the atmosphere and results in changes in the Keyes family: Anne is imprisoned by the family because 'she is really not one of us' and unravels the harrowing mystery of the Keyes' family involvement in the dark events of the present and the past.

The mood of England of 1939 is beautifully captured by cinematographer Danny Cohen and the musical score by Adrian Johnston illustrates the dichotomy of the free-spirited Anne and the dark underpinnings of the Keyes family. Romola Garai is excellent in her treacherous role as are the other stars. Small roles by Toby Regbo, Christopher Lee, Corin Redgrave and others make this a cast rich in some of the finest British actors of the day. GLORIOUS 39 ('Glorious' is the nickname given Anne) is an enlightening film that addresses many significant issues too infrequently addressed by works o

Reviewers simply don't "get" the underlying tension of the film, which probably relies too much on viewers' understanding that many, many aristocrats/Tories were trying to avoid war with Hitler and often sympathized with him. If you don't know that, then you don't grasp the stakes of the film. 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. And Bill NIghy is absolutely transcendent as her loving father and Tory MP who is supposed to negotiate American aid to Britain and who lets us know he is fiercely anti-war because of the destruction and death it deals. Is he what he seems, though?

I found this one of the few grounded portrayals of the British upper class attitudes pre-war than anything else I've yet seen.