Obscure Miner Inspires Making Of Film

Dominion, Volume 33, Issue 186, 3 May 1940, Page 5

Obscure Miner Inspires Making Of Film

T'OUR men, four separate branches of the film industry, sat in a compartment of an express train thundering down from the north of England to London on the coldest night of last winter. They were Michael Balcon, production bead of the Ealing Studios and producer of oyer three hundred 1 British films; Clive Brook, the actor; Robert Stevenson, the director; and Ben Henry, the general manager of Associated British Film Distributors, the distributing company .selling Ealing production -to the theatres. They had been to Bradford to attend the opening of a new picture theatre. It had been a lightning trip and a tight schedule had made them forgo lunch and dinner, so that it was with some enthusiasm that they had begun to unwrap a parcel of food and drink. A thin, rather pale young man,

soberly dressed in black, responded gratefully to the invitation to share the refreshments. The five men sat there munching sandwiches, talking of this and that. “What business are you in.' asked Balcon. . a “I work down the pits,” said the young man. The four men looked astonished. “You don’t mind my saying so,” sail Clive Brook, "but you don’t look like a miner.” “Maybe, 1 don’t in my best clothes, he said, smiling. “But there’s one thing that gives me away.” He turned up the palms of his hands. S-lneradicably his profession was stamped /on them. “Can’t get that off, no matter how hard I wash ’em.” They talked together for half arthour till the young men reached his destination. Balcon plied him with quest ion after quest ion. How did he work? Where did he live? What did he do with his spare time? Had he a girl friend? (“She’s what you’d call skivvy,” said the young man rather wryly.”) How old was be? How much did" he earn? For the rest of the journey Michael Balcon could not get the miner out of his mind.

“It just shows you,” he told the others, "how a film producer cun get out of touch with reality if he is not careful. We have our own preconceived notions of what a miner looks like. We imagine hirn with a blackened face, clothes permeated with coal dust. And here is this boy, looking for all the world like a city clerk, independent in outlook, easy in conversation —look how perfectly at ease lie lias been with us. four completely strange people to him. This is the modern miner. What an idea for a film." Michael Baleen’s mind set about looking for a film story which would give the public the same interest that he had experienced in meeting that sturdy, independent young representative of a line, patient, longsuffering body of men, whose plight has been kept as much underground as the men have been themselves.

Ealing Studios will produce it, and 2G-year-old Pen Tennyson, who has just finished his first film as a director, “There Ain’t No Justice,” directed it. Paul Robeson, who said he would not return to the commercial screen till he found a story that he considered really worth while, is the slar. The Utle is "’rhe Proud Valley,” mid for (he background Balcon selected that desolate yet colourful corner of Britain, the Rhondda Valley.