Journey’s End **** (1930, Colin Clive, Ian Maclaren, David Manners) – Classic Movie Review 3043

Journey’s End (1930) was a huge success and launched the film careers of James Whale and Colin Clive, who stayed on in America to make Frankenstein (1931) together.

Debut film director James Whale’s 1930 early sound movie Journey’s End is British but was made in Hollywood to take advantage of the new sound stages. It is also Frankenstein star Colin Clive’s first screen work.

Whale’s cinema version of R C Sherriff’s classic 1929 anti-war play about the terrible troubles in the trenches in World War One France in 1917 is alas wildly dated and allowances have to be made for the film’s era of film-making and venerable age. The camera doesn’t move and the actors move too much! But nevertheless this creaky vintage film is still fascinating and moving, and the play retains its power to sway audiences.

The acting requires audiences to adjust to conventions of another era. But there are impressive British theatre-style performances from Colin Clive as the tormented alcoholic leader Captain Denis Stanhope and David Manners as the young second lieutenant James Raleigh, who looks up to him as a hero, with now obvious homoerotic emotional content. The alcoholic captain fears his newly arrived replacement Raleigh, his sweetheart’s brother, will betray his downfall.

Joseph Moncure March and V Gareth Gundrey adapt the play, Benjamin Kline is the cinematographer, Harvey Libbert is set designer and George Pearson the producer. Also in the cast are Ian Maclaren, Billy Bevan, Anthony Bushell, Robert Adair, Charles K Gerrard, Tom Whiteley, Jack Pitcairn, Werner Klingler, Gil Perkins and Leslie Sketchley.

In 1931 there was a German film version Die andere Seite directed by Heinz Paul with Conrad Veidt as Stanhope and Wolfgang Liebeneiner as Raleigh. It was banned weeks after the Nazis took power in 1933. It was remade again as Aces High in 1976 with Malcolm McDowell and swapped to the British Royal Flying Corps, and again as a TV movie in 1988 with George Baker, Gary Cady, Jeremy Northam as Captain Denis Stanhope and Timothy Spall.

It is remade for the cinema in 2017 as Journey’s End.

Journey’s End was a huge success and launched the film careers of Whale, Clive and several of its stars. Gay director Whale and gay star Clive (married to actress Jeanne de Casalis in June 1929) stayed on in America to make Frankenstein together (‘It’s Alive! It’s Alive!’). Ironically, and tragically, Clive suffered from severe chronic alcoholism and died from complications of tuberculosis in 1937 aged 37.

Whale’s story is told in the 1998 biopic Gods and Monsters.

Films directed by James Whale: Journey’s End (1930), Hell’s Angels (1930) [director of dialogue], Waterloo Bridge (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Impatient Maiden (1932), The Old Dark House (1932), The Kiss Before the Mirror (1933), The Invisible Man (1933), By Candlelight (1933), One More River (1934), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Remember Last Night? (1935), Show Boat (1936), The Road Back (1937), The Great Garrick (1937), Sinners in Paradise (1938), Wives Under Suspicion (1938), Port of Seven Seas (1938), The Man in the Iron Mask (1939), Green Hell (1940), and They Dare Not Love (1941).

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 3043

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James Whale poses with a model of Frankenstein’s monster on the set of Bride of Frankenstein in 1935.