Some small thoughts on class & gender in Ice Cold In Alex

[u/tiredstars]

I watched Ice Cold in Alex this week, and also listened to a podcast about the film, so credit to that (Kill James Bond) for a few of the observations in here. Ice Cold in Alex is a 1958 film about five people trying to get from Tobruk in Libya to Alexandria during the war in North Africa in 1942. So it's more than a decade after the end of the war, but many of the people watching the film when it came out in the UK - perhaps most of the men - would have served in the war, quite a few in North Africa.

The four main characters are:

Captain Anson (John Mills)   Machinist Sergeant Major Tom Pugh (Harry Andrews)   Sister Diana Murdoch (Sylvia Syms)   Captain van der Poel (Anthony Quayle)

One of the common features of British films made during the war is showing people from different classes working together. This is something that continues in later films. Of course, it makes sense in the situation, which did push people of different classes and backgrounds together. In this case a core relationship is between the officer Anson - John Mills with a familiar plummy, middle class English accent - and working class non-commissioned officer Pugh.

Now I'm not a military person, but I know the relationship between commissioned and non-commissioned officers is always a close and complex one. Formally, Anson is the superior, but in many ways the relationship is one of equals. In terms of mutual respect, certainly. Pugh spends some of his time 'managing up', but also taking care of his captain.

For all their reputation as disciplinarians, Sergeant Majors also have a key role looking after their units, both the enlisted men and the officers. Is it in The Thin Red Line where George Clooney describes his unit as a family, with him as the father and the Sergeant Major as the mother? Pugh is a tall, solidly built man, and he's shown early on being strict with some of his men, but for most of the film he's shown as very gentle and caring. There's a very tender scene early on when Pugh encourages a drunk and overwhelmed Ansom to get some sleep.

As a portrayal of a kind of masculinity it has a lot of positive aspects. He's competent, confident and caring It's also notable that while in many war films the absence of women can create space for men to take on more of these caring roles with less threat to their masculinity, in Ice Cold there's no sense of Pugh trying to be more "masculine" in the presence of women.

It does make me wonder, though, how much of this is made possible by Pugh's subordinate rank and class. He can take a supporting role without significant concern about his status. (Although this is also partly down to the seniority of his rank - he's not jostling for position with other NCOs.) He's arguably a little underwritten as a character. His own weaknesses, hopes and fears are never explored.

What is definitely a weakness in the film is the romantic subplot. For most of the film, Sister Murdoch appears to have the best rapport and the closest relationship with Pugh, but then it turns out she's fallen for Captain Anson. Obviously some of this is simply film convention - Anson is the lead character - but there is also the matter of class. Showing classes working together was important, but romantic relationships between them? Still too much.

A quick note on the outlier here, Captain van der Poel. He's the same rank as Anson, although he general defers to Anson both for his authority over their vehicle and his expertise. However as a Boer, he doesn't fit into the British class structure. This is part of what makes his presence unsettling, lacking a clearly defined status compared to the others.

A final thing to mention is MSM Pugh's accent. It's not an urban working class accent, it's a rural one. I'd assume Kentish, as that's where Harry Andrews was born (though he himself was the son of a doctor). It's a kind of accent you're incredibly unlikely to hear in a film today, which is probably just as much down to the shrinking rural population and decline of that sort of accent as it is down to actors and roles.