Major Barbara is not very good. Yes, the film is stagey, not an excessive concern, in my opinion, it can be a pain but it's also common in films of this vintage. The problem is that the plot and motivations and even the politics are inconsistent, incoherent and often incredibly muddled. The film opens on a man, because sexism, who is giving some garbled street performance on greek something or other. Everyone abandons his lunatic ravings to go see the superior street theatre of the Salvation Army. The local cop kindly leads the professor over to listen as well, Major Barbara is giving a speech about saving souls, and the fellow raises his hand.
She takes him away, and he professes he's a greek professor and an agnostic of sorts with no sincere interest in being saved, but he fell in love with her, for some reason she decides to take him home. On the doorstep they finally ask each others' names. She's the daughter of a millionaire and he's Australian.
Cut to some months later, they're engaged and the family is together. Cut to the mother making a rambly speech to her son about the siblings absent father. The son says he is all morally indigant that their father manufactors munitions and is shocked to find out that is the source of the family's mother. The mother reveals that the father has lived apart from them because he is immoral and celebrates his immorality (not sure if that is supposed to mean he's gay or just has a mistress). There are also some bizarre lines about their father being adopted and somesuch I didn't really follow.
So they all get together, the major, the professor, the uptight brother, the righteous mother and also the idiot brother-in-law-to-be and his similarly intellectually weak fiancee, the major's sister. Then the father shows up, he's bearded, befuddled, comical and professes to be slowly losing his memory. The mother is trying to make amends or sort out inheritance and she wants to pray first but the father leaves professing moral objection to praying, and the rest of the family follows. The major invites her father to see their work at the salvation army.
Whew, that is entirely too much plot summary for ten minutes of film. but none of it matters too much until the end because there's a rather excellent flowing middle section all about the salvation army that is funny, sharp, and damned entertaining throughout the entire time the film spends here. it's rather like a religious riff on The Lower Depths at times and is when the film is completely at its best.
Then the film descends into family bickering about inheritence, adoption etc again for the final half hour which is about as comprehensible and thrilling as the deadly dull plot summary mentioned above. But it does end with a lovely montage by David Lean that presages the opening montage of In Which We Serve before launching into an odd propaganda message that I'm not sure what it was other than jobs making bullets is god's work, I think.
One of the oddest things about the film, though, is that the father is clearly established as comicly out of touch, clearly losing his memory, eccentric-verging-on-senile then the whole rest of the film he's sharp as a tack nothing remotely like the first scene.
Not a thrilling start to this set, but it's better than any of the Sabu! films.
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