ThinkofEngland

For who knows how long this war still has to run - and maintaining a good fighting morale - as we learned only too well in the last war - is everything.

So here we find, a very war-damaged former movie star; a celebrated German film director fresh from internment; a munitions-machinist-come-aspiring-actress; a disgraced captain from the Ministry of Information; an ageing, morally ambiguous hair-and-makeup artist, and a young sound trainee… All of them bring their particular skillsets - not to mention their very colourful pasts - to this most un-English of endeavours.

But then total war, as we learned so well barely 20 years earlier, challenges just about every moral code that civilised societies are built upon. So why then shouldn’t it also challenge the Hays Code, that founding document of cinema censorship? I mean, with so many others suddenly being asked to find within themselves their own very worst version, and to do things they could never even have contemplated in normal times, well it’s hardly the moment to get all prudish about a little nudity and sex.

Corporal Harry Evans, née Tyrone Higgs, the famous tough-guy of British screen, answered the nation’s call and method-acted his way across Crete, North Africa and Sicily, twice decorated for bravery along the way … and here we now find him, in handcuffs, reprieved from the hanging that awaited him for the brutal murder of two of his own company. Can he now save his bacon simply by reverting to the actor he once was? Hit that mark and say these stupid lines?

If only it were that easy; if only everything that has happened to him, everything he’s been party to these last three years, would stop burning itself onto his retina; if only it could all be undone simply by someone saying, ‘And cut!’ But then again, if what you’re after is an utterly convincing portrayal of an actual veteran returning home from the true horror of war - well, this is decades before its time.

Which is a serious challenge for Holly Spurring - 20 screen tests without a single call-back, only to now suddenly find herself playing opposite a near-psychopathic monster. Is this really the acting process at work? Is she even safe?

At least there’s no denying it is the actual Tyrone Higgs stood across from her, someone she’s watched so often up there on the silver screen! Because if he’s willing to do this, then it can’t be that bad a thing to do, surely. Or that wrong. Or else she would have never agreed. Because she’s really not that kind of an actress.

And Max Meyer has known every kind, worked with them all, back in Germany - from Marlene Dietrich to Lilian Harvey. As his Jewish contemporaries progressively fled the Third Reich for the safety of Hollywood, so Max profited from Goebbels’ favour. Which lasted all the way until he too was finally outed as a Jew himself. And now he carries with him an unopened envelope with the last known whereabouts of his estranged family concealed within, and the hideous guilt of his complicity in their fate.

As far as Agnes is concerned, there is nothing good that comes of war, and over her dead body will her gorgeous, innocent Clifford ever be allowed to fall into its barbarous clutches. There is literally nothing she would stop at to keep him safe, not even accepting of his own wish to join up.

And this is the rabble that Captain Anthony Clune must now coax into making three short films - one for the Army, one for the Navy, and one for the Air Force. This most stiff-upper-lipped of Old Etonian’s presiding over the making of actual hard-core pornography! He cannot even bring himself to watch. All because he was caught cottaging in Chiswick Park public lavatories, and in a time when the most debased of human conduct is almost celebrated whilst homosexuality remains utterly unconscionable.

You can only wonder what the half-starved and very ragged Luftwaffe pilot, watching on from afar, is making of it all …