Piccadilly Incident (1946)
Synopsis and review from "Monthly Film Bulletin", Vol.13 (No.153) 1946, p. 122. Taken from the British Film Insitute website.

Excerpt from the Roger Moore biography by Roy Moseley: On the first leave from the army while at Officers' Training School Roger was fortunate enough to secure a bit part in Herbert Wilcox's Piccadilly Incident, the first film to team Anna Neagle with Michael Wilding, who were to become one of the most popular romantic screen couples ever in British films. Roger's part in the film entailed sitting at a table with Michael Wilding, and earned him five shillings a day, which was a useful addition to his army pay. More important was that the great British film-maker, Herbert Wilcox, impressed by a young soldier, told Roger to look him up when he came out of the army. Roger says: Anna Neagle had seen me and I looked up and saw her talking to her husband, Herbert Wilcox. He came over to me and said they had been discussing me. He asked if I was an actor or a real soldier earning a few bob on the side. I said I was both and he told me to come and see him when I was eventually demobbed.

Synopsis: Drama. Wren Diana Fraser meets Captain Alan Pearson by chance during an air-raid in London. They marry and spend her short embarkation leave together, but their hopes are tragically destroyed when, after the fall of Singapore, she is reported missing at sea. Alan, cruelly hurt and lonely, some three years later marries for a second time. Meanwhile Diana, cast up on a desert island with five other survivors, is clinging to life despite the boredom, frustration and hardships, sustained by her hope of eventually returning to her husband. When she finally is taken home, she is stunned to find him happily married to another woman, with a little son. Loving Alan and realising that her return is a disaster for all of them, she tries to pretend that she no longer loves him and wants a divorce. The problem is solved by her death in another air-raid, and Alan is able to legalise his second marriage. The picture ends on the bitter thought that according to English law nothing can legalise the position of the baby, who will always be subject to the penalties, both legal and social, of illegitimacy

Review: The serious intention of the film is confined to the prologue and epilogue, in which a weighty legal view is ponderously delivered of the injustice suffered by illegitimate children. In between, it is a normal human drama, with a beginning which is unquestionably more convincing than the end. The opening scenes which take place in blitzed London are authentic, and dialogue, direction and acting all combine to make the characterisations by Michael Wilding and Anna Neagle unusually true to life. Up to the depressing parting in early morning Waterloo Station, all goes quietly but well. But with Diana's departure for Singapore the story becomes more fanciful. Scenes at home remain credible, but the desert island existence of Diana and her colleagues, though done with a commendable lack of glamour, is a little harder to believe. With her return to England both Diana and Alan cease to behave like real people at all, and the happy coincidence by which the falling wall kills her rather than him is altogether too much like a trick ending. It remains quite an entertaining film, and the social problem involved will probably interest people without scaring them by being driven home too deliberately, but it certainly seems a pity that so promising a beginning should have tailed off to such an unsatisfactory ending.

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