Original subtitles

(FILM SOUNDTRACK, EXUBERANT MUSIC)

(JOHN MILLS' VOICEOVER) Nine thousand feet up.

The barrier and the glacier behind us.

It should be level going now.

All the way to our goal.

As everyone surely knows,

Robert Falcon Scott failed in his attempt

to be first to the South Pole.

In 1912, he was beaten by the Norwegian explorer

Roald Amundsen, and would perish algside his men

only 11 miles from safety.

He is a complex figure

whose expedition was beset by miscalculation and bad luck.

Yet he is also a natial icon

who embodies a spirit of adventure, who inspired a remarkable film.

Directed by Charles Frend in 1948, and starring John Mills,

'Scott of the Antarctic' stands out

because it grapples with this very complexity.

Can we keep up these marches?

It's a critical time,

but we ought to do the trick.

In many ways, this film is a greater success

than the Terra Nova expedition and should be celebrated

more than the expedition itself. It's an enormous achievement.

This is a group of British people pulling together

to break the bounds of technology, to do things

that had never been done before, to go places

that had never been shot before and make footage from them,

to explore the limits of filmmaking,

to explore the limits of story-telling,

to push actors to extremes of performance,

and all work together in harmony

to produce something beautiful and wonderful

that would inspire the world and inspire filmmakers for generatis to come.

And that is something to be genuinely celebrated.

(SOUNDTRACK, SOMBRE MUSIC)

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

September the 9th, 1904.

On board the Discovery, homeward bound from the Antarctic.

I've added a little, I hope,

to the knowledge gleaned by Captain Cook, Sir James Ross

and other explorers before me,

but I have only touched the fringe of things.

I leave behind a whole continent, vast, mysterious,

inhospitable, and still to all intents and purposes,

unknown.

It is a detailed depiction of the extraordinary physical toil

required to cross 1,766 miles

of formidable ice and snow,

there and so very nearly back again.

It is also a film about the draw of this remote, almost alien world,

a place portrayed as viscerally real.

Never had audiences felt such cold in their seats,

and also, dream-like.

What was it that brought Scott and his comrades

to these fatal icy wastes?

Science? Hubris? Honour?

Or something deeper, a need to pursue the limits of what was possible?

Robert Falcon Scott was a naval officer

who in the early 20th century became renowned

for his attempts to be the first to reach the South Pole.

This was an arduous task in the 1910s,

and gained a lot of public attention.

It was a deeply courageous act to traverse the terrain of Antarctica.

He rose fairly slowly through the ranks

from able seaman up to sub-lieutenant

over a period of about 20 years.

In the course of that, he came across,

I think he was the age of 18, he came across someone from the Royal Geographical Society

who rather liked his enthusiasm, and his sort of enterprise.

Clearly, Scott wanted to be more than a lowish-ranking officer,

he had other ambitions.

And eventually, he came across this man again,

who invited him to join, in fact,

to join and captain the ship,

the Discovery,

with Shackleton, in a polar expedition

to the Antarctic. He jumped at the chance,

partly because there was very little way he could get promoted

further in the Navy, and it gave him a chance to actually be a captain,

but also because he liked the idea of an adventure.

He was an adventurous soul.

I think he had huge ambitions, not just for himself,

but also for the nation.

Was it a kind of British obsession to be first to the South Pole at the time?

This is 1908, 1910, 1912, isn't it?

This is pretty much the peak of the British Empire.

This is the idea that the British Empire ought to be doing these things.

It's a light unto other nations, you know, that the British should be

the first to do all of these amazing pieces of exploration,

be the first to put that flag, the Union Jack,

in all these impossible places,

places that are relatively pointless to put your flag, really.

So Scott was wise enough to not quite dress up,

but he was very aware of the value of portraying all of his interests

as scientific. So he ensured there were scientific officers

on his expeditions, he ensured that he was going to be trying to make discoveries

about the area, rather than simply place his flag.

But really, as an individual, he wanted to place the flag.

(ARCHIVE NARRATOR) This was the science that Scott hoped would survive

if he and his team did not. More than 40,000 specimens,

each one collected and carefully labelled.

Their meticulous research unearthed 400 completely new species.

In the years since then, Scott has been hailed as a hero,

and criticised for poor planning.

But the scientists who continue to use the data he gathered

see his expedition not as glorious failure,

but stunning achievement.

The title is important.

The film is called 'Scott of the Antarctic,'

the tragic hero who remains there forever,

more synymous with the South Pole than even Amundsen.

This is a film not about gallant failure

so much as nobility, struggle and the mystery of the human spirit.

Shackleton had gone under Scott's leadership on the first expedition,

Discovery, they hadn't reached the South Pole,

but they brought back some fascinating zoological specimens

and all sorts of things that were useful.

It was a scientific expedition as much as anything else.

But by then, when they came back,

Scott had got the bug for polar expedition.

He really, really wanted to reach the South Pole himself.

I think he saw it as his sort of route to glory, in a way.

And so he spent an... with the help of

the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Society,

he proposed to them that he do another expedition.

Know anything about the Antarctic?

Only what I've read.

When I saw you were taking Pernice, I thought perhaps I'd come in handy. - Fit? - As a fiddle.

Age? 29.

Married? No.

It'll be tough. - - I know. - As Hades. - But not so warm,

eh?

But I think we can manage it. We?

That's what I said.

You mean you'll take me? Glad to.

You're on the strings. I say.

The quest to be first to the South Pole

stemmed from an era of empire and exploration,

the British obsession to see over the horizon.

Scott's Terra Nova expedition of 1910 to 1913

set out with the intention of securing the honour of this achievement.

There's this strange sort of way of interpreting what happened

in 1912 with the Terra Nova expedition,

the famous Scott expedition, some would say it was a great failure,

because he was second to the Pole, and he died,

but in other ways, it has been written and thought of

as something of a triumph in a way. How do you interpret that?

I think this is thought of as a triumph

very much because of the historical context that surrounds it.

It was an expedition that took place at the peak of the British Empire,

at a moment of great hubris for a number of reasons.

I mean, his expedition failed two weeks before the Titanic sank.

This was the moment when all of these great projects

of the British Empire were beginning to come apart.

It was shortly before the First World War,

and these ideas of what the Empire had been and what it was to be British

were beginning to fall apart.

The First World War, we saw certain dreams of the,

you know, British society fall apart, and really,

the end of the 19th century and the dawning of the 20th century,

saw a lot of these legends become almost pointless.

So that's partly this time that he encapsulates.

And he encapsulates this time when it was possible for a man

who was, you know, frankly an amateur. I mean, this was not a man

who had... no-one on that expedition was a highly trained polar explorer.

These were people who didn't take advice from highly trained polar explorers,

but this idea that it was still possible for a bunch of chaps

to get to the Pole in the name of Their Majesties

and be the first to put the flag down.

I think that the timing of those tragic events

which happened to Scott and his crew

ultimately served as something that was oddly galvanising

for First World War soldiers.

It was the idea of facing impossible odds, the idea of facing,

in Scott's case, unfortunately, certain death,

and this incredible stoicism and bravery

that he showed in his letters, and his care for others,

his self-sacrifice.

So I think that soldiers took something from that,

and in fact some of the images and some of the film that was taken

on that expedition by Herbert Ponting

was shown to soldiers at the front at the time.

(PLAINTIVE MUSIC)

(MEN CHEERING/JAUNTY MUSIC)

Mr Ponting, without a sight.

There was a cinematic heritage within the real expedition.

Photographer and early cinematographer Herbert Ponting

was among Scott's party and is played in the film

by Clive Morton. Ponting's footage was used

in two famous documentaries,

'The Great White Silence,' and '90 Degrees South,'

which helped stir the public imagination.

It's interesting, because there was a cinematographer

as part of Scott's party. Herbert Ponting had gone down there

and his material is the basis for two very famous documentaries,

'The Great White Silence' and '90 Degrees South.'

So in a sense, there was a visual cinematic heritage of Scott's story.

Yes, I mean Ponting,

there's two very strong points about Ponting.

One is it's notable that Scott chose to take a cinematographer

to the Pole to record his expedition,

because there's a certain arrogance, I think, to that.

No-one has ever done that before. None of the other expeditions

thought it was important to be filmed. Scott did. So that's notable.

The films themselves are hugely important

for a number of reasons. One, in terms of the documentary form itself.

But the first film was shown in unedited form.

At the front, First World War soldiers,

part of this idea of what it is to be part of a heroic noble expedition

and, you know, British sacrifice.

So it's part of a myth-making about what is heroism

and what is noble sacrifice and what is a bold expedition.

So these films are, by the time we get to the making of 'Scott of the Antarctic,'

they've become quite totemic. And they are very influential

in the making of 'Scott of the Antarctic.'

Charles Frend had risen to prominence at Ealing Studios,

directing the World War II docu-dramas 'The Big Blockade'

and 'San Demetrio London.'

He pushed chief executive Michael Balcon

to attempt something epic, while staying faithful to realism.

Surviving members of the expedition were interviewed,

and Scott's widow Kathleen was persuaded to give her approval,

even providing Mills with her husband's watch,

which had been recovered from his body.

Charles Frend was a director who had always shown an interest

in stories of British courage and bravery.

He started out as a film editor, and he edited several of Hitchcock's films in the '30s.

As the war had started, he started to direct his first films.

So I think in his mind, his filmmaking career

and his set of interests were very tied in

to a particular kind of Britishness, and he,

without having any kind of jingoism

about him, was a very patriotic man.

So Scott of the Antarctic comes around

at a time where I think Ealing Studios, and I guess the British public

as well, are, you know, limping out of the end of the Second World War.

It's been a victory, but a very, hard won victory.

There's been a lot of suffering, a lot of privation,

and rather than map that directly onto a story about the Second World War,

I think there is something to the idea

that Frend was interested in telling a story that was more allegorical

and more looking back at the past

as something about the British national character

as one that strives, even if it doesn't succeed.

There's a tremendous amount of planning in this film.

I mean, it took three years of additional filming, really,

because Balcon sent out two different cinematographers,

one into the Antarctic, to simply take great location work

of the glaciers and the wildlife, the seals, and things like that,

anything that actually gave the sense of, you know,

the vastness of the icescape,

and then also Geoffrey Unsworth was sent to Switzerland and Norway

to create again a slightly more sort of domestic side of things.

He could actually do location work with extras,

so that for very long shots, when you see the team

sort of trudging through the snow along a glacier,

that's not the actual actors, they are just people who are there

to sort of show the... at a great distance,

the kind of landscape that these people had to negotiate.

Finally, all this material had to be assembled

as well as the film itself to be made

with the personalities and the characters by Jack Cardiff,

the great cinematographer, back in Ealing Studios.

And he had to somehow not only film the story of the men

against some, of course, created backdrops,

but somehow weld together these two sets of location films

into a whole that worked.

The script by Walter Meade, Ivor Montagu, and Mary Hayley Bell,

Mills' wife, tells the story

almost entirely from Scott's perspective.

The yearning to return to Antarctica,

the quiet emergence of the obsession to be first.

Indeed, he is introduced being sculpted,

the man sat beside his legend.

The film moves chronologically through the fundraising,

team-building, and planning, before the journey itself.

One of its greatest achievements is to find dramatic variety

and humour in the monotony of reaching the Pole.

Because that essentially was his pitch to Michael Balcon,

was that, I want to do an epic, but I want to do it realistically.

I want to do it with the documentary background that I have.

Yes. And the documentary element of this is crucial,

because the film itself relies, I think to an extent, on us

knowing the ending. The film's structure is very unconventional.

The actual expedition itself is a very small part of the film.

I mean, the part of the film that shows us

the gradual defeat of Scott is half an hour,

it's the final half an hour of the film.

So he takes us with him, based on the fact that we're waiting

to see what we know will happen.

And therefore he can take his time to explore everything

that goes on around this expedition on the understanding

that we know this is real.

If you were to make this purely as a fictional film,

it wouldn't really work. Structurally, it relies on its documentary form.

Wait a minute, I've got another one here somewhere.

"Am going south. Amundsen."

South? But I thought it was understood - Everyone thought it was understood.

I can't believe it. Perfectly true, read it yourself.

From Madeira. That means

he's started. Why didn't he tell anyone? Not very sporting.(BABBLE)

Changed his mind. Anyone is allowed to change his mind.

He was going north, now he's going south. That's all.

It becomes, in his mind, a race for the first person

to plant a flag, the first nation to plant a flag on the South Pole.

Wonderfully, in the film, it's Oates who, when he hears this news,

he says "That's not very sporting, is it?,"

which is such a classical British understatement

that it kind of sets the tone for almost the entire movie,

the way that these men went through an incredible ordeal, I mean,

almost impossible to actually imagine,

the fact is that you've got Scott's own journal

and various other journals as well, to tell you

just exactly the kind of deprivations they went through.

John Mills was perfect for Scott. He had risen to stardom

with a brand of eloquent restraint in films

such as 'In Which We Serve,' 'This Happy Breed,'

and 'Great Expectations.'

He was always carrying the weight of the world.

And this film doesn't go easy on its hero.

The script underlines his ill-fated choices,

and the snatches of Scott's actual diary

we hear in solemn voiceover become deeply moving.

It's interesting, because a film

which is on the face of it very sort of patriotic

and is very much a celebration of this kind of triumph

in the face of adversity and tragedy, it is also

not totally uncritical of Scott.

And I think some of that comes through in John Mills' performance as well,

which is to say that even though he has a kind of chummy camaraderie with the other men,

and he is likeable, he looks out for them,

there is a sense that he's slightly a man apart.

There is a sense that he does impose his sort of superiority

on them and, you know, there's a scene of them

kind of all laughing and joking around a table, and it cuts to his face,

and his face is like... he's kind of thinking about something else. He is so caught up in his own goals

and his own obsessive quest

and sort of proving himself, and this is a very famous thing

at the time, you know, everyone back home was very invested,

the newspapers were covering it. So it was, you know, there's a lot of fame around this adventure.

And so it was very important to him.

January 18th. All the daydreams must go.

Now for the run home and a desperate struggle.

I wonder if we can do it.

(HOPEFUL MUSIC)

Well, they did it. I congratulate you, Titus.

And I thank you, Titus.

The glacier tomorrow, Bill.

One of the most powerful themes is team spirit,

borne of military training. Scott and his men

are devoted to one another and their mission.

Harold Warrender as Wilson, Derek Bond as Oates,

Reginald Beckwith as the sturdy Bowers,

and an unforgettable James Robertson Justice

as Taff Evans, transform the cliche of stiff upper lip Brits

into paradigms of duty and resilience.

We also meet two of the anxious wives left behind

in Diana Churchill's Kathleen Scott, and Anne Firth as Oriana Wilson.

And Charles Frend as the director understood

exactly how to create... the forward momentum of the film

was to cut very, very carefully

between huge distant landscapes, extraordinary vistas,

and then immediately back to the men's faces

and very, very tight close-ups,

so that you got the sense of figures in a landscape,

figures in an incredibly hostile alien landscape,

who could hardly be... I mean,

they were like ants crawling through, you know, sort of snow.

And also, they intercut that with their own camaraderie

in the tents at night, or when they can't go any further.

There is an interesting contrast on the home front,

and the home front is represented by two of the wives of the officers.

One is Kathleen Scott, played by Diana Churchill

as the wife, of course, of the head of the expedition.

She, in real life, was a very interesting woman,

she was a sculptor, and she has a real kind of independence to her,

and she's shown as somebody who is kind of ahead of her time, kind of modern.

She is speaking a little bit more to the 1940s female audience,

I think. But she is very supportive of her husband's aims.

She understands the importance of his need to do this

and she is with him all the way.

This idea of having, you know, being the first Englishman

to step foot on the South Pole, she sees that as a worthy and heroic goal.

On the other hand, we get Oriana Wilson,

who is, you know, I think more, I guess perhaps stereotypical

in that she's representing home and hearth,

she's worried for her husband's safety,

which seems pretty reasonable to me, to be fair,

but she is not really portrayed in as positive of a light

in some respects. You know, they're talking

about the failed expedition with Ernest Shackleton

and they say, oh, he's got within 90 miles of the South Pole,

and she says, isn't 90 miles close enough?

And the response to that is no, of course it's not enough. You don't understand.

The best four men.

The best... who are the best four?

Teddy, Bernie, Lesley, Green?

What is so intriguing is that we glimpse something

beyond the dutiful surface of these men.

To turn back was unthinkable.

The wounded expression of Kenneth Moore's Teddy Evans,

when he is not chosen for the final push to the Pole,

speaks volumes.

By the final stretch,

the remaining men are confonting death,

most famously, a frost-bitten Oates leaving the tent.

It's about camaraderie, isn't it, and team spirit,

but something more than that?

Yes, I think the film begins as almost as a heist movie,

or a classic Ealing, putting the team together.

I mean there are some... the recruitment of that inner core

is done very lightly.

I mean, for instance, when Oates comes in, he's hired

pretty much on the basis of him being bored with his life in India,

and when Bowers comes in, he's hired on the strength of his biceps.

So there's a certain comedy and a real lightness of tone

to the putting together of that team.

But as they're spending the time in the tents together,

again they are dealing with silence and they're dealing with the unsaid.

They're dealing with the jokes and conveying despair.

So as the men begin to die, and they're talking just lightly about brandy,

who is allowed to have the brandy, it's only for medicinal purposes,

to some extent, the moment that you get the brandy

is not quite the bullet in the Russian roulette chamber,

but it is a sign, it's a symbol that things are going badly for you.

And they are able to do this very lightly, very gently.

In a strange way, it's almost an anti-Ealing film, because when you put the team together

in an Ealing film, you would expect their idiosyncrasies

to all come into play as they solve the problem at the end

and the triumph is achieved. What remains so effective about 'Scott of the Antarctic'

is that it puts the audience into the polar extremes.

It is an almost physical experience. Yet none of the actors

nor the director ever left Ealing Studios.

The cinematic trick was achieved through extensive second-unit photography

from Hope Bay in Antarctica, Jungfrau Mountain in Switzerland,

and nine weeks of shooting near Finse in Norway,

all of which was done before the main production

with stand-ins for characters who hadn't even been cast.

In terms of this being a British epic,

it very much feels like it's laying the foundation for future British epics

that would be in Technicolor, set in quite exotic locations,

because we've got to remember that in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War,

the majority of British domestic films were in black and white,

they were not shot in expensive, far-flung locations,

so this was, you know, something which stood apart.

And the fact that it was chosen to be made in Technicolor

shows, first of all, how invested Balcon and Ealing and Arthur Rank,

who wanted more lavish pictures and bigger epics as well,

were, you know, they were very invested in making this

something which was a real cinema spectacle to rival, say,

spectacles of Hollywood and so forth.

It's not naturally a story that feels like it would, you know,

be in colour at this time. Mostly colour films were reserved

for the light-hearted stuff, or fantasies, or comedies,

or romances.

It's a really interesting choice, but it really shows

that Technicolor was so much more expensive to process,

that this was something that needed to be big.

This is a London-based studio of, you know, good success

but not the greatest means.

How do they go about depicting events

in the remotest place in the world?

What was the procedure they went at to create the film?

This film, I think, it's important to state

is an enormously technologically advanced piece of filmmaking.

It's at... it is a cutting edge movie.

So for a start, they use footage of Antarctica.

And this is shot by, I suppose, the third unit, arguably, Ormond Borradaile.

He goes out with a Technicolor camera,

because they want to make the film in colour.

Technicolor aren't certain if their cameras will work

in that temperature, and they certainly know

that their big three-lens cameras aren't going to work.

So they give him an experimental single-lens Technicolor camera,

but they sort of say, well, we don't know if that'll work.

And Michael Balcon knew that if it didn't work,

then they'd have to make the film in black and white.

So he gave him two cameras, the single-lens Technicolor

and the black and white, and said, see what you can get.

But what he got was superb footage of Antarctica.

It's amazing when you see this film.

This is the kind of footage that in fact you will see

in a wildlife documentary today. The quality of that work

is unbelievable. Very risky for Ealing.

They were sending that out, they were investing in this new technology.

Because Technicolor was insisting all the editing taking place in Hollywood,

they weren't even seeing the rushes, they just had to trust

that this three-month shoot would work out,

and that they would be able to then go to the next stage of the film. The next stage of the film,

the second unit went to first of all Switzerland, then Norway,

and with a series of experienced mountaineers,

shot footage of an expedition, you know,

some very thrilling sequences.

The visual rapture of the film

is down to the genius of cinematographer Jack Cardiff.

He had the unenviable task of matching the different film stock

with the Technicolor work he was doing on the sound stages of Ealing Studios.

Obsessive about the strange property of light at the Pole,

this veteran of Powell and Pressburger

brings a surreal edge to a bitter reality.

As if these men were explorers on an alien planet.

The film itself is a testament to the dedication

not only of capturing the reality of these experiences,

but to making something artistically enduring out of it.

The visuals of this film are sometimes quite breathtaking.

The use of colour in this film by Jack Cardiff

is really a feat for its time.

And some of the kind of ways that light is used

in that incredible final scene where it's very dark inside the tent

and there's just one little bit of light, a little candle, a lamp,

and you see John Mills in the corner, his face is filthy,

he's starving, he's got scruff all over, you know, he's unshaven.

It's quite dark, and he's writing his final missive,

his final letter that was famous, to the British public.

And you can just see the light gleaming in his eyes

when he looks up. It's the one sort of thing, I think, you latch to as a viewer,

is that light in his eyes.

There's something very moving - about that. - These are not just close-ups of faces,

Cardiff goes right into their eyes,

much in the same way as, much later, Sergio Leone did.

He goes right into the eyes, because if you can see into your eyes,

then you can see the pain.

You can see the suffering.

You can see whatever emotions are there with the right actor.

And he's got a set of actors who can actually convey it.

The other thing is of course that eyes do have colour,

and that kind of jumps out of the sort of brown, tanned,

horribly sort of wizened skin, so that you see in their eyes

the last vestiges of their life, of their living soul.

Cardiff is the finest capturer of eyes in film history.

A great aura of melancholy is evoked in miraculous close-ups.

Credit should also go to the extraordinary make-up

by Harry Frampton.

These men convincingly deteriorate before us.

We feel the savagery of Taff Evans' frostbite,

and the monumental exhaustion as they huddle together in the tent

in Cardiff's beautiful Renaissance-like tableaus.

(WIND HOWLING)

I hope I don't wake tomorrow, Bill.

I'm just going outside. I may be away some time.

While Vaughan Williams' score is justly celebrated,

Frend's use of silence is in many ways even more evocative.

In a shot of Scott's team fatefully disappearing over the horiz,

and the crushing discovery that Amundsen,

that unseen presence, has beaten them,

are veiled in an icy nothingness.

In a sense, it is a ghost story,

as we already know their fate.

Vaughan Williams at the time was one of the most respected living British composers,

and he was a very prolific composer, to the extent that when he was approached

to conduct the music for this film, he made so much of it

that they actually extended some of the sequences

in order to include more of it, and they still couldn't include everything that he wrote,

and that was later released and was very popular on its own.

But he really gives a kind of dissonance and sadness

and depth to this film.

And it's used really beautifully in concert with silence

in the film, because what do you think of

when there's a blizzard or a very heavy snow?

For me, it's the muffled silence, it's the incredible quiet.

Snow does funny things to the sonics of the environment around you,

and suddenly just the sound of the wind or the flapping of a tent in the wind,

or the sound of a sledge moving through the snow

seems to be magnified.

So there's a real haunting quality to the silences in the film

as much as it also uses the score so beautifully.

What always strikes me about 'Scott of the Antarctic'

is Charles Frend's astonishing use of silence,

which is the sort of non-sound of the Antarctic.

Yes, there's enormous amounts of time

when these men are just pushing their way through the environment around them,

and he holds back the music.

He'll use, as you say, the vastness of silence,

he'll use wind a lot.

He'll use the flapping of the tent, I think, in an almost ominous way.

The sounds, as soon as you hear human sounds,

particularly in the last half an hour, they always come with an ominous quality to them.

So he's very cunning in the way that he uses everything.

I mean, he's a filmmaker operating at the extremities of his art,

I think, at this particular point. 'Scott of the Antarctic' continues to touch audiences

even as it did on its release.

It examines the powerful idealism

that took Scott to the remotest corner of the world.

In 1912, his courage was amplified by the sacrifices

that would come with World War I,

a fortitude echoed by World War II,

which had ended only three years before the film was released.

It is the endeavour that counts,

the daring, even the obsession,

far more than who came first to the South Pole.

Can you see alright at the back there?

Yes, thank you, sir. - Yes, sir. - Now we're here,

just above the sea ice.

The first stage is the great ice barrier,

about 400 miles to cross.

Then come mountains, 9,000 feet high.

We get up them by the Beardmore Glacier.

There is over 100 miles of that. Lastly, the plateau.

Another 350 miles along that to the Pole.

It's a very good film, I think, in terms of communicating

to an audience the nature of the journey.

And it does it in such a beautifully simple way.

Scott draws maps on pieces of paper beneath the camera

and we see the distance he has to go to the plateau, the distance then

on to the Pole. And this is gloriously simple.

I totally understand where they are at any point. Yes.

This is, I mean, this is again, it's an incredibly visual film,

because very little is said in this film

apart from, everything's OK, off we go. So all of the work is done

with the camera and with visual clues,

with visual hints.

There is, at one point for instance, the ship,

the Terra Nova was not suitable for that journey.

And the way they show that is by showing it

failing to break through the pack ice and then having to reverse and go forward.

It's subtle, it doesn't play directly into the end of it,

but it shows you that there is a problem very early on,

as they arrive in Antarctica. They are not equipped for this expedition. But no-one

at any point ever says to anyone, we are not going to succeed,

we are not equipped for this, we have made a mistake.

Everything is done with the visuals.

You know, the thing about Scott is that his reputation has been revised twice.

In the '70s it was discovered that, or thought

and written about that actually he, you know,

had made too many mistakes, he wasn't prepared enough,

he hadn't listened to advice, and that hew as solely responsible

for the deaths of all the men that died, including himself,

and that he was to blame through his sheer arrogance.

Subsequent to that, in the early part of this century,

a few other studies came out, and books,

one by Ranulph Fiennes, some others,

that looked at the facts,

looked at the facts of the weather, looked at the facts of the things

that he had done and the things that he could not possibly do or predict,

and revised their opinion of him partially.

So he's been partially redeemed

as a man who certainly had a huge ego,

certainly was driven,

really at the expense of many of the people around him,

to actually try and complete this mission.

'Scott' marks the beginning of the British epic,

paving the way for David Lean's widescreen visions

centred on complex heroes.

Frend would apply many of the same themes

in his later war epic, 'The Cruel Sea.'

Mills would channel Scott's British grit

in such classics as 'Dunkirk' and 'Ice Cold in Alex.'

In truth, Scott remains such a vivid part of the British psyche

largely because of this film.

I do think 'Scott of the Antarctic' endures

because it is about resilience of the human spirit, and because it honours something

which maybe in today's world, which is a little more individualistic

and a little bit more cynical, would say, oh, why would they do this,

go to this kind of cursed, frozen landscape

just to say that they were the first to get there? But so many of their discoveries were used

by the Royal Geographic Society, were used by naturalists

and biologists, who learned about the envirment and about the weather of Antarctica.

So ultimately, their bravado and their resilience did, you know,

benefit society and did benefit science.

And so ultimately, there is something to take away from that

no matter what your view is of their motivation.

What are the shots in 'Scott of the Antarctic'

that really stand out for you? I mean, there are so many.

I think the part at the beginning where they're recreating Ponting's footage,

they do certain shot for shot recreations, for instance,

of the ship breaking through the pack ice,

which they do beautifully and very skilfully.

I think even now, the shots of Antarctica where, you know,

we had never seen that before, even now it fills you with wonder,

they did it so well that it's remarkable.

I think the work in the Swiss mountains

where you see the mountain climber

fall through the ice and be rescued with a great derring-do,

I think that's... it's really well done.

You're waiting for that to happen to some degree. But then I think

the close-ups, the tent sequences, where nothing is said and done,

where they cook the food, they look at each other,

but they don't say anything apart from do their absolute best to say everything's fine,

and you feel death creeping up around them.

That is the remarkable part where by telling... with the actors

performing the opposite of the real story,

the two things heading in the opposite direction, the camera showing you

the real story, the actors performing a fake story, I think those are remarkable.

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