This film has taken me over fifty years to watch. Hating films about war (and they bombarded English cinema as relentlessly as bombs for several decades) I had better things to think about when I was eleven years old - like loving people and not indiscriminately destroying them. Contrary to some gung-ho responses here I see all war as evil and life-destroying.
One, of the characters in this film is Bomber Harris, he who destroyed Dresden and its population quite without mercy, and needlessly. Here he mentions Essen and perhaps he had strategic military reasons for that, but Dresden posed no greater danger than good opera and Rachmaninov's Second Symphony. Who cares if this city was obliterated, including many thousands of refugees escaping from war? Well, some of us do and his presence in this film was as sickening as the war itself. I will leave the inclusion of the name 'Nigger' to those who think everyone found it acceptable in 1955. In my white family it certainly was not, but let's get back to the film.
Todd is his boring self and Redgrave looks as if he would have preferred being in a Rattigan adaptation (this is not in the same class as the glorious life-affirming 'The Browning Version'). The direction is pedestrian and has no cinematic merit. Ursula Jeans added a spark of real humanity by rather quaintly asking the Redgrave character if Harris had been 'fierce'. The word fierce was said with conviction and I wondered what she felt about this period of darkly pompous self-glorifying fifties war films. The French at this time were producing sensitive films like 'Adorables Creatures' and 'La Ronde'. Sensible people, and they really had been invaded by the Germans!!! Oh, and today in the centre of Brighton the good people here were protesting against Israel so please do not suggest the reasons for the war were defending the Jews, or liberating the concentration camps. Pitifully few people cared then and pitifully few people care now. I am not Jewish. I was raised a lapsed Catholic, and War is bad, bad, bad and we give ourselves fine reasons to encourage them and then cry when we watch films like this afterwards.
Musically, Coates was no Elgar either, however much he may have wowed the middle-brow public with his patriotic pastiche.
Final words. 1,6OO civilians were drowned and German industrial output returned to normal capacity within a few months - just in case that may be of interest.
One, of the characters in this film is Bomber Harris, he who destroyed Dresden and its population quite without mercy, and needlessly. Here he mentions Essen and perhaps he had strategic military reasons for that, but Dresden posed no greater danger than good opera and Rachmaninov's Second Symphony. Who cares if this city was obliterated, including many thousands of refugees escaping from war? Well, some of us do and his presence in this film was as sickening as the war itself. I will leave the inclusion of the name 'Nigger' to those who think everyone found it acceptable in 1955. In my white family it certainly was not, but let's get back to the film.
Todd is his boring self and Redgrave looks as if he would have preferred being in a Rattigan adaptation (this is not in the same class as the glorious life-affirming 'The Browning Version'). The direction is pedestrian and has no cinematic merit. Ursula Jeans added a spark of real humanity by rather quaintly asking the Redgrave character if Harris had been 'fierce'. The word fierce was said with conviction and I wondered what she felt about this period of darkly pompous self-glorifying fifties war films. The French at this time were producing sensitive films like 'Adorables Creatures' and 'La Ronde'. Sensible people, and they really had been invaded by the Germans!!! Oh, and today in the centre of Brighton the good people here were protesting against Israel so please do not suggest the reasons for the war were defending the Jews, or liberating the concentration camps. Pitifully few people cared then and pitifully few people care now. I am not Jewish. I was raised a lapsed Catholic, and War is bad, bad, bad and we give ourselves fine reasons to encourage them and then cry when we watch films like this afterwards.
Musically, Coates was no Elgar either, however much he may have wowed the middle-brow public with his patriotic pastiche.
Final words. 1,6OO civilians were drowned and German industrial output returned to normal capacity within a few months - just in case that may be of interest.