British popular cinema in the 1940s was a key site of struggle over images of national identity and national unity. This paper discusses the representation of sociolectal variation in one British film, the 1942 In Which We Serve, and argues that the distribution of sociolinguistic variants in the film makes a significant contribution to the film's construction of a hierarchical model of social organisation. The simultaneous privileging of a standard variety and emphasis on sociolectal diversity is discussed in terms of an underlying Churchillian paternalistic rhetoric, and it is argued that there is a correlation between particular representations of sociolectal variation in films of this period and particular kinds of hegemonic effect.