Their Finest is the second movie in the Kootenay Gallery’s Monday Night at the Movies series, to be shown on Monday, Oct. 30, at 7 p.m. at the Old Theatre Castlegar
Starring Bill Nighy and Gemma Arterton, it’s a British wartime comedy all about the love that flowers in the ruins of the Blitz and the dusty offices of the Ministry of Information film unit. Here, movies of plucky civilian defiance are being made to keep up British morale and inspire the population to greater heights of resistance.
Nighy, playing Ambrose Hilliard, a fading actor. is furious that he could be cast as a drunken uncle instead of the romantic lead in a film about Dunkirk. Gemma Arterton plays the clever and industrious Catrin Cole, a screenwriter employed to turn out “slop,” plausible dialogue for female characters.
She is dispatched to the coast by head writer Tom ( Sam Claflin) to interview a pair of twin sisters who pinched their drunken father’s boat to join in the heroic Dunkirk rescue. Finding their story less than heroic, Catrin still manages to spin the story into schmaltzy adventure and finds that Tom is falling in love with her, adding to the complications of her life.
This scenario gives the actors, and especially the scene-stealing Bill Nighy, plenty of scope for gentle humour and the director a great opportunity to show the conjuring tricks and artifice of cinema.
Single tickets for this fundraiser are $9 at the Gallery or at the door.; series tickets (for seven movies) are $56.