The British cinema of the Second World War has typically been characterized in terms of its representation of ‘the people's war’. The films which have attracted most critical attention are those which presented a picture of the British people at war, united despite class differences, and where the stories of individuals, heroic though they may be, were sublimated into the greater story of the whole nation pulling together at a time of national crisis. Commentators have identified, for the first time in British feature films, an authentic, true-to-life representation of ordinary men and women. Roger Manvell considered that films such as Millions Like Us, San Demetrio, London, Nine Men, The Way Ahead, Waterloo Road and The Way to the Stars ‘showed people in whom we could believe and whose experience was as genuine as our own’. The reason for this newfound realism is usually explained through the influence of the documentary movement, the progressive left-wing sector of the British film industry, on the mainstream feature film producers. During the 1930s documentary had been, at best, a marginal mode of film practice which appealed to the intelligentsia and a small critical elite, but which never won the approval of the majority of the cinema-going audience, who preferred the escapist fantasies offered to them by both American and British feature films.