Reconstructing Boundaries: Gender, war and empire in British cinema, 1945-1950

Abstract

In Against the Wind (1947), a British film released soon after the Second World War, the fate of Max --who is shown working for the British-led resistance in Belgium --is sealed by two women.1 The film is careful to establish that Max (Jack Warner) does not identify as British before he is revealed as a traitor. He is shown telling his fellow resistance workers that 'My mother was Belgian, my old man was a Yank and his father was German'. Both his own non-Britishness, and that of the Irish woman, Bridie (Sheila Carty), to whom he sells his secrets, are emphasised during their clandestine meeting. He calls her 'Shamrock' while she tells him that: 'A man without some sort of country is a poor sort of mongrel'. It is through his association with Bridie, who is passing his information to the Nazis, that Max's treachery is discovered by the British authorities. The discovery comes too late to stop him being dropped by parachute in Belgium, and the information about his treachery has to be passed on from Britain to the wireless operator in Belgium. As soon as she decodes the message, this wireless operator --Michele (Simone Signoret) --shoots him.The two women who seal Max's fate might be taken as emblematic of the way in which women's active involvement in the Second World War began to be portrayed in its immediate aftermath. Bridie in Against the Wind, the Irish woman from a neutral country who spies against Britain, is a figure who is much more extensively Dark Stranger (1946), embodying the active woman as a threat to the British nation. 2 Michele, the continental woman whose country is occupied by the Nazis, and who works loyally for the resistance under British leadership, is a figure much more extensively developed in Odette (1950), embodying female heroism. 3 None of these films feature active British women, and Against the Wind

“Europe against the Germans”: The British Resistance Narrative, 1940–1950

“…108 At a time when women were increasingly expelled from British film imagery of the Second World War, and especially from active involvement in it, the continued portrayal of continental European women is notable. 109 The portrayal of female resisters may have contributed to the possibility of claiming continental European heroism for the British; the idea of transnational white femininity could subsume differences of nationality. However, resistance films also developed a distinctive image of European femininity-in a narrative that told of their suffering as well as their strength and courage.…”