The Lost People: how an immersive play became a 1940s British film about wartime displacement
Based on an avant-garde wartime play, The Lost People was scripted by the pioneering filmmaker Muriel Box (who also directed some sequences) and presents an unusual depiction of the turmoil of post-war displacement.
When World War II ended, thousands of people were stranded far from home, having fled the fighting or been liberated from camps. The 1949 British film The Lost People takes place in a disused German theatre repurposed as a holding site for these displaced persons, or DPs, as they await relocation. With the common enemy defeated, old tensions and rivalries surface among the many nationalities confined within its walls.
Directed by Bernard Knowles, the film is based on the avant-garde play Cockpit by Bridget Boland. She had been sent out to Germany in May 1945 to research subjects that could be made into plays to perform to British troops to prepare them for what they would find once deployed on the continent. Boland reflected on the experience in the film’s pressbook: “I watched the displaced people on the roads. There was a weird surrealistic, dream-like quality about their movements… Instead of swinging back in triumph with victorious armies, they were crawling footsore miles, lost without maps.” After being demobbed, she was haunted by her memories and felt compelled to write her own play.
Opening at The Playhouse in London in February 1948, Boland’s play was an example of immersive theatre before the phrase had been coined, with the action taking place all around the theatre itself. Characters screamed down from the gallery and came rushing through the stalls, while a case of bubonic plague was housed in one of the boxes; the multilingual cast performed in their own languages. Despite its inventive staging, the play closed after just 58 performances, one critic opining: “London isn’t half intelligent enough for it.” Given this failure and the complexity of translating it to the screen, its addition to Gainsborough’s production roster is surprising.
Muriel Box worked with Boland to adapt her play for the screen, but its site-specific nature made the transition tricky, and The Lost People is a rare example of a film that’s actually more flatly theatrical than the stage production. The multilingual element was, of course, also jettisoned, a title card at the start noting: “for clarity’s sake the dialogue in the film has been interpreted entirely in English.”
On 1 July 1948, a reporter from Film Industry visited the tiny Gate Studio at Elstree where they found 15 principals and 150 crowd artists waiting to shoot the wedding of Richard Attenborough and Mai Zetterling’s characters. He chatted to designer John Elphick (who worked on 1945’s Caesar and Cleopatra and the 1946 Great Expectations), part of the team who managed to get the impressive set erected in just 14 days. The look of the film is certainly one of its strengths; C.A. Lejeune found “the drifting masses of humanity in the huge, faded theatre… exciting to look at”.
The production hit a major setback when French actor Mila Parély (star of Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu, 1939) was sacked, apparently due to her English being incomprehensible. According to actor Peter Bull, Parély later complained, not about the sacking but because some long shots of her remained in the film, making it look as though she was merely an extra.
Bull, undoubtedly the most witty and self-effacing chronicler of the vagaries of British cinema, had his own enunciation problems in the film. Cast as ‘Wölf’, a lascivious seaman, Bull was delighted when he read the script: “It was my favourite type of part, as there were only two words to say, which were ‘rats, rats’… The day on which I had to say ‘rats, rats’ I got very excited, and did it. I thought, superbly… Two days later I was asked to post-synchronise them as they were totally incoherent.” Other dialogue issues emerged on the film’s release. One Polish journalist was incensed by the marked German accent of a supposedly Polish professor, not to mention the Polish Christmas carols played at the wedding.
Peter Bull wryly observed that the title play’s retitling as The Lost People “was a fairly accurate description of the actors recruited”. The replacement of Parély by Irish actor Siobhan McKenna, of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, necessitated the cast returning to their roles for reshoots in March 1949 at Denham, directed by Muriel Box. By then, Mai Zetterling was in a stage play and the long locks she’d grown for it had to be hidden under a curly wig that invited comparisons with Harpo Marx. As Captain Ridley, the constipated British officer trying to impose order on the international chaos, Dennis Price has the thankless task of trying to deliver some fairly terrible lines with conviction.
McKenna fares better as the French resistance fighter who stirs up discontent among the refugees, and William Hartnell is compelling as Ridley’s second-in-command, his cynical view of the DPs proving more realistic than his superior’s naive optimism. Other talented European actors manage to lend some authenticity. Herbert Lom does his best with the role of the stage manager, flitting around the set brandishing a feather duster, while Tutte Lemkow and Marcel Poncin imbue their performances with emotion.
The Lost People was one of many films of the period that reflected on or looked towards a post-war world. Ealing Studio’s fantasy They Came to a City (1944, available on BFI Blu-ray), adapted from J. B. Priestley’s play, imagined a classless society, while Traveller’s Joy (1950) created comedy from the European currency restrictions. But when The Lost People finally reached British cinemas in August 1949, it was greeted with little enthusiasm, with Monthly Film Bulletin commenting that the subject had “lost its topicality”, and Kine Weekly gloomily pondering “Who said there is hope for Europe?”
Audiences too were weary of films that presented them with the turmoil, politics and austerity that they went to the pictures to escape. Filmmakers wisely began looking to the future, and with the dawn of a new decade, preparations underway for the Festival of Britain, and a young queen coming to the throne, the aftermath of war receded as cinematic fodder. Today, the film’s interest lies in its portrayal of a little documented moment in 20th-century history, and some genuinely poignant moments from a talented European cast.
The BFI National Archive’s comprehensive holdings on The Lost People came to us from Rank at various different times, starting with a duplicating positive in 1955. From this we made a duplicate negative and a viewing print in 1980. The original nitrate negatives eventually came to us in 1993. Never released on DVD or shown on UK television, it can be requested via the BFI’s viewing service.
Peter Bull’s memoir I Know the Face, but… is available to request at the BFI Reuben Library.