The best A.E. Matthews’s war movies

General Candy, who's overseeing an English squad in 1943, is a veteran leader who doesn't have the respect of the men he's training and is considered out-of-touch with what's needed to win the war. But it wasn't always this way. Flashing back to his early career in the Boer War and World War I, we see a dashing young officer whose life has been shaped by three different women, and by a lasting friendship with a German soldier.

A mismatched collection of conscripted civilians find training tough under Lieutenant Jim Perry and Sergeant Ned Fletcher when they are called up to replace an infantry battalion that had suffered casualties at Dunkirk.

A British coastal command pilot is charged with neglect when it is thought that he has sunk a British submarine rather than a German U-boat. Unable to live with his actions, he volunteers for a deadly mission. His girlfriend meanwhile tries to prove that he is innocent.

A newly married WREN, presumed drowned when her ship is torpedoed, spends three years on a tropical island before returning to England to find her husband remarried with a baby son.

David Charleston, once a world renowned journalist, now lives alone maintaining the Thunder Rock lighthouse in Lake Michigan. He doesn't cash his paychecks and has no contact other than the monthly inspector's visit. When alone, he imagines conversations with those who died when a 19th century packet ship with some 60 passengers sank. He imagines their lives, their problems, their fears and their hopes. In one of these conversations, he recalls his own efforts in the 1930s when he desperately tried to convince first his editors, and later the public, of the dangers of fascism and the inevitability of war. Few would listen. One of the passengers, a spinster, tells her story of seeking independence from a world dominated by men. There's also the case of a doctor who is banished for using unacceptable methods. David has given up on life, but the imaginary passengers give him hope for the future.