Reviews

Some reviewer questions the "private arrangement" - coffee for tobacco - between Union and Southern soldiers on opposite sides of a river in a quiet sector. From my readings, this occurred frequently.

And Mosby was very much a thorn in the Union's side. His mounted commando raids could be devastating ... and devastatingly disruptive.

And the child soldier might rightly concern us. There were of course drummer boys in the war, but for a young kid to kill others ... maybe creating orphans ... seems obscene.

The equipment seems very authentic. Mosby's kidnapping of General Stoughton is an historical fact. And regular army officers did not like Mosby's unconventional warfare tactics, as the film shows. The mockery of West Point professionals seems unjust..

And the film leaves us with the open question of whether or not James MacArthur's Union soldier would survive ... although it was a Disney movie, so ....

This is actually an excellent Civil War film, showing the human as well as structural destruction of the South.

It revolves around a plantation called Monrovia and its owning family. The current owner invites his West Point graduate friends down just as war is about to break out. One of his classmates was the very intense lover 6 years before of his beautiful, desire-driven blonde wife played by early 1950s Hollywood peroxide blonde sex bomb and scandalizer Barbara Payton, very appropriately.

Their reunion is only brief, with the attack on Ft. Sumpter, but long enough for the pre-marriage romance to be reignited, if not physically.

The men go off to fight, and then the lover is assigned to get 4 guns up to the top of an impregnable Devil's Tower like local mountain to destroy trains going by it resupplying Sherman's march on Atlanta.

To his shock, his friend's wife and uncle are still in the house, and he manages some time with her while engineering his guns up to the top of the mountain.

(There is an incident like this in my mother's family. My GGG Granduncle Brigadier Alexander Jack had elephants carry up into overlooking mountains the guns that subdued Kangra Fort to end the 2nd Sikh War. He and youngest brother Andrew just visiting from Australia would then die in the 1857 Cawnpore Massacre.)

The guns successfully destroy 2 locomotives and their freight cars, and a Union officer - coincidentally the 3rd West Point friend who also knows about the mountain - played by Guy Madison of TV Wild Bill Hickok fame - who was a real-life lover of Barbara Payton about the time the film was made! - is tasked to destroy the Rebels and their position. And he too is pleasantly shocked to find his other friend's beautiful wife still in the house and always charmed by her, lets her stay.

He has an extremely powerful naval Dahlgren gun brought up to destroy the mountaintop Rebel position, but the Rebs figure out a way to destroy *it*.

Meanwhile, our flawed heroine has managed to (unintentionally) get a Union sergeant and her uncle to shoot each other, when the sergeant discovers her signaling to the mountaintop, after deceitfully - and unthinkingly - sending him to proudly get his photo of his little boys, to give herself the chance to signal.

Seeing the photo, she then tries to treat him to save his life but he dies.

(MANY orphans from that war - I believe including my great grandfather and his 5 surviving siblings, nonetheless raised by Great Grandma Eliza.) Our Union officer then decides to blow up the mountain and has enough black powder put in its caves to destroy the (later) mountain housing the Guns of Navarone.

The wife is then mistakenly fatally shot by a Rebel sentry, and her Rebel officer lover decides to die with her on the mountain.

The villain of the film, on reflection, turns out to be our Union officer who let her get him to let her stay - presumably he had intentions toward her of his own, subconsciously - leading to her and her uncle's deaths.

But at the very first, her husband never should have invited her former lover to visit - to test her loyalty of which she was humanly incapable, obviously - so he gets failing marks too.

4 of the 5 principal characters thus die in the film.

An underaged kid befriends a beautiful young military wife who then turns to him for (sexual) consolation when her husband is killed. How many women teachers have developed crushes on their male students ... who are underaged?

I can remember my tall, slim, and pretty first French teacher in high school leaning over her lectern to our moans, but as far as I know she didn't get involved with students. She *was* arrested trying to exit a wild New Year's party nude through a bathroom window and to our acute disappointment her contract was not renewed for the next school year.

However, I can remember another, unmarried teacher of mine - brown-eyed brunette who went to my church - about 30 years old who seemed to take an intense interest in me. She gave me these (what I much later realized were) TORRID looks, even in the hall. When a classmate disagreed with me in a debate, I had to save him from her revenge, explaining we always disagreed on issues but were good friends.

She got pregnant - I believe by another young teacher who was married and seemed rather stupid - but someone else then married her, and I hope and trust she has been a wonderful and happy wife and mom.

Anyway, just being a girl or woman's friend can lead to something beautiful.

As for myself, I was my first love's first love and we were like 2 kids in the Garden of Eden. Absolutely beautiful, and then I stupidly lost her, as I've mentioned in one of my other reviews.

There should have been a sequel to this. 8 years later, he brings his own new bride back to the island for a vacation if not honeymoon, and Dorothy is back in the cabin ... with a little boy who looks *exactly* like him.

BEAUTIFUL film, if illegal. :-)

I understand an American film distributor has picked it up. I took my children over here - son 15 daughter 13 - to see it yesterday, and we all liked it. Afterwards, over pizza, I filled them in on the background of Convoy PQ 17 and - not in the film - how the massacre led to bitter recriminations between our American and the British naval high commands.

I believe Admiral Pound was just mentally exhausted - I understand he died of brain cancer a year or so later - and fearful of exactly that kind of inter-Allied blowup ... and so, ironically, caused it.

For those who don't know, as the film described the convoy was ordered to scatter ... to fall easy victims to u-boats and bombers ... because the heavy German ships superbattleship Tirpitz, pocket battleships Luetzow (which ran onto a Norwegian rock and had to return - those sneaky Norwegian trolls! -) and Scheer, heavy cruiser Hipper, and some fleet destroyers were putting to sea, and they would have been more than a match (as we have verified in more than one naval miniatures wargame) for our heavy cruiser covering force: USSs Tuscaloosa and Wichita and HMSs London and Norfolk and a few destroyers.

However, there was also our battleship force with Duke of York and our own Washington with its crushing 16"/400mm guns firing 1-ton shells which would have sunk Tirpitz forthwith.

The Admiralty suddenly decided the battleships were too far back and recalled all the warships, leaving the merchant ships to their fate, well-described in the film.

Our - anti-British anyway, thanks to unpleasant relations during World War 1 - Chief of Naval Operations Adm King just BLEW UP and pulled Washington out and into the Pacific, where it then saved our Marines on Guadalcanal, easily pounding Japanese battle cruiser Kirishima under the waves in Nov42.

There was a lot of crew melodrama in the film, but merchant vessels were not under military discipline, and crew members could be very diverse. The film does get across that it was a very human, personal struggle/war.

And the film did bring out well the captain's dedication to getting the war supplies through to the "Soviets," because they were fighting for Norway's liberation as well as their own survival.

In contrast, the first mate - traumatized by the loss of his own ship and friends previously with many dying before rescue - is looking for reasons to cancel out.

Someone else has talked about the floating mines scene, and my son and I both wondered who had tied Isaksen's knot? This does get across how much ship crew members depend on each other for their lives.

I would have had 1 of the 2 German JU88 bombers leaving damaged. As someone else described, an apparently undamaged u-boat surfacing in the middle of the convoy before it was scattered made no sense. Our Liberty ships had 4"/105mm surface guns on their fantails which could have made short work of it.

And the ship's escape&evasion stratagem was in fact innovatively used by Royal Navy Lieutenant Leo Gradwell for his anti-sub trawler Ayrshire and the 3 freighters they took under their care ... and worked too.

Finally, if you look on Wiki's Convoy PQ 17 Order of Battle, you'll see there was no Norwegian warship *or freighter* involved in it.

But the film's artistic license is OK, helping Norwegian viewers identify with the struggle, and other convoys out on the Atlantic ordered to scatter would have inevitably had Norwegian ships.

(In my game design research, I've found Norwegian Noreg and Mirio *were* on Arctic convoys.)

And the statement that of 30,000 Norwegian merchant sailors in the war 4,000 died was important to get across.

This is a kind of "Das Boot" for the other side, and it should be seen.

Lou Coatney, and I have many free/educational print-and-play boardgames on my webpage, including Murmansk Run, and I'm working up a simpler little Postcard Murmansk.

A review of The Government Inspector film (2005) about British Iraq weapons instructor Dr. David Kelly's death in July 2003.

Film writer/director Peter Kosminsky's docudrama begins with scenes to confirm the Blair (and subsequent) governments' claim Kelly's death was suicide, despite there being no historically required coroner's inquest and despite basic, compelling questions remaining which indicate that it wasn't suicide.

That is, it seems to have been a film made to back the highly questionable and questioned official narrative, deflecting attention from questions about his actual death to Kelly's personal life as well as conflicting accounts of Kelly, BBC reporter Gilligan, and Prime Minister Tony Blair's spinmeister Alastair Campbell about the "dodgy dossier" which Blair used to try to persuade both the American and British peoples to support us attacking Iraq ... claiming most sensationally and falsely that Saddam Hussein could launch weapons of mass destruction "in 45-minutes."

The government claimed Kelly both used pills and his garden knife to slash his wrists, but there was an insufficient amount of the drug in his system to kill him, according to the autopsy, and only a small piece of one tablet was in his stomach. Moreover, according to both his U. S. Army inspector colleague Mai Pedersen and his wife, Kelly had an intense aversion to trying to take pills.

As well, doctors claim that cutting the ulnar artery - wrists - is not fatal and there was little blood found on/around his body, in any case.

Guardian, 27Jan04, Letters: "Our doubts about Dr. Kelly's suicide," by David Halpin and Drs. Stephen Frost, Searle Sennett, and Rowena Thursby.

Guardian, 28May18, Book Review, "An inconvenient death - by Miles Goslett"

Daily Mail, 13Nov10, Miles Goslett, "Drug expert claims Dr. David Kelly was murdered, as he could not have taken overdose."

There was no suicide note, and he had seemed upbeat, planning a get-together with a friend.

Guardian, 12Dec04, "Kelly death paramedics query verdict:

The Hutton inquiry found that the scientist caught in the storm over the 'sexed up' Iraq dossier committed suicide. Now, for the first time, the experienced ambulance crew who were among the first on the scene tell of their doubts about the decision. Special report by Antony Barnett."

A suspicious omission from the film is Kelly's last-day e-mail to Judith Miller, a New York Times reporter and principal media proponent of the (never found) Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction lie, used as the official motive for attacking/invading Iraq. In his e-mail to her, of all people, he referred to "dark players," and the film depicts Kelly as being idealistic, self-righteously blind if not delusional, and (fatally) naive.

And the film was incriminated by Peter Kosminsky himself, who being criticized for taking the official line attempted to claim that docudrams are not necessarily based on fact ... and neither are documentaries themselves!

Guardian, 17Oct05, "Kosminsky defends docudrama, by Jason Deans.

"Award-winning director Peter Kosminsky has expressed his frustration with critics who question the authenticity of his fact based dramas such as The Government Inspector, saying conventional documentaries are just as subjective.

Mr Kosminsky said people regarded documentaries as objective because they looked real, but his docudramas were just as subjective because they had actors and a script."

There are other questions, but the biggest and most self-incriminating one is why the Blair and subsequent British governments have blocked a geniune, thorough, historically legally required under-oath inquest into his death.

Kelly's death did succeed in diverting public attention away from the consequences and thus crime of the fraudulent runup to the Iraq war, which was then repeated in Iraq and Syria.

The film is well-acted and certainly is absorbing and emotionally compelling - the idyllic/bucolic horse pasture scenes first in the company of his daughter and then finally alone by himself, for example - regardless of its dismissal of facts ... if not its dismissal of a high state crime incidentally murdering once great Britain's justice and democracy.

The Wikipedia entry about David Kelly's death dismisses all the unanswered questions as well.

For many years now I've tried to get the film to view, and just discovered it is now available on YouTube.

Another film about Iraq War fraud is Official Secrets, starring Keira Knightley as pre-war whistle-blower Katharine Gun.

Katherine Gun is reminiscent of Sigourney Weaver's Jilly, the British Djakarta Indonesia embassy clerk who sees a telegram indicating impending civil war and confides that to reporter Mel Gibson in The Year of Living Dangerously.

The James Bond film afficionados who have cut this film down are numbly insensitive to its genius.

A post-WW2 Nazi cult in Berlin has murdered 2 British agents. (Why? Were these unreconstructed Nazis any real threat?) An American working for British intelligence in the Mideast - think White Helmets more recently - is pulled out of there to try to find the Nazis for the new German government to arrest and prosecute ... and British intelligence to get revenge and anti-Nazi reassurance.

Quiller, played by George Segal, meets his affected if not effeminate handler Pol (Alec Guinness) in the Nazis' Nuremberg stadium and agrees to take the case, after hearing one of his friends is one of the victims.

He is criticized for being too independent and is warned to accept backup/support.

He is immediately tailed, but by a friendly whom he confronts in a friendly manner and then loses/evades.

Apparently given a list of suspects, he goes to the bowling alley of one, lying about wanting to establish a bowling franchise but otherwise sufficiently raising the suspicion of the Nazi owner.

Then he goes to a German late elementary (or middle) school to question the colleagues of an former Nazi war criminal who had been a teacher there and then was outed and committed suicide.

The tall, blonde statuesque headmistress is played by German actress Edith Schneider, and she leads him - lying that he is a magazine reporter/writer - to another, younger teacher who apparently was a personal friend of the deceased Nazi, Inge Lindt (Senta Berger), literally (and eye-poppingly) decked/popping out in a cling(y) light blue presumably cashmere sweater.

I'll observe that this is infinitely more erotic than seeing Senta nude would have been. It leaves her obvious beauties - Quiller conspicuously looks down at them which seems to titillate Inge - to our limitless imaginations. GREAT fashion era! }:-) She feigns unawareness, but accepts his offer to drive her home. Once there, they say good-bye but then a few moments later he tells her to wait - a yo-yo move to catch her then regretting telling him good-bye.

In her apartment they talk, and he gently interrogates her, and she finally warns him that these people - if they exist? - are dangerous. She is clearly lonely and he easily has her feeling attracted to him.

Here I'll interject is an important factor which is either being overlooked or deliberately omitted: George Segal's Quiller is VERY Jewish in his gently insistent, seductive demeanor ... remembering that this is not long at all after WW2 and that he is trying to help apprehend very anti-Semitic Nazis who would viscerally detest him!

Now known to them, he is covertly injected by a passerby to drug and then capture him and wakes up in the Nazi lair to be confronted by tall, blonde, severely Aryan ringleader Oktober (diabolically played by Swede Max von Sydow). They try to get him to identify his handler which he avoids only by giving them a recent name in his head: Inge Lindt!

Somehow resisting otherwise, Oktober - irritated about him having the affection of a beautiful German girl - orders him killed.

He then regains consciousness inexplicably on a concrete pier on the river front and then escapes his captors still in the area.

He meets Pol again, and then returns to Inge to interrogate and consummate their relationship then to again try to find the bad guys with the help of the headmistress and Inge.

The headmistress leaves him at the site, but Inge wants to continue to accompany him ... for his safety?

He ventures into the old bomb-damaged building, is captured, and then taken down to the dungeon where Inge has already been confined in a chair.

He is told that if he doesn't reveal his own headquarters she will be killed and is allowed to go outside to think it over, under close guard. Even the hotel he has stayed at is now in on this, but he escapes anyway and reports the hideout to Pol back at his own headquarters.

The German police are told the location, the bad guys are still there for some reason, and they are all rounded up ... but no girl. Was she murdered after all, after he escaped?

So the final scene is fascinating. He goes to the school that next morning to her classroom and she is there! ... still alive and obviously very surprised but not alarmed to see him again ... alive. He is both relieved and disturbed/suspicious she is safe.

He says something suggesting she leave Berlin and join him, but she says she has her work to do. (WHAT work? Why not *teaching*?) As he then departs - she is safe, and he is obviously not going to have her prosecuted, being in love with her - he is icily passed by the headmistress.

Inge is extremely submissive, lonely, and sexual. Is the headmistress lesbian? Had Inge been intimate with the Nazi who had committed suicide? ... or Quiller's murdered friend? ... or Oktober?

Intriguing film, albeit flawed by gaps in plot and narrative.

***** Further thoughts:

It's not just Senta's sweater: she gave a truly great performance. Watch her face at least as much as what she says - the wave of superseding, sensitive expressions of a lonely, conflicted, beautiful girl.

I can't think of any other actress who could do that so well!

And upon reflecting, I think this would have been a far better and possibly more realistic ending:

Previous to it, in bed he asks if she and the headmistress have been close friends, and she looks away and shyly says "Sometimes." (During the film his midnight phone call to her and asking if she is alone is classic. :-) )

In the film as it is, at the end he comes to her classroom and happily finds her alive, she makes some excuse about having been released by the Nazis, and then declines his further interest saying she has work to do, there.

But he was in the commanding position, not telling the authorities how she had been there apparently letting herself be used to try to get him to reveal *his* side's base - so this was all just a game of Banner Catch? :-) - but still able to do so.

So instead when she makes her excuse about finally telephoning he ignores that and says he'll carry her bag home for her again, and firmly if not threateningly "Agreed?"

She concedes but says they have to take precautions because of the time of the/her month. He instead says "No. Beautiful baby. Agreed?"

Shock, then resignation/concession, then excited arousal crosses her face, and she nods her head with a resigned smile.

As they leave the school on the sidewalk - him carrying her bag on one shoulder while them holding hands on the other side, here comes the stern headmistress, and with a wolfish smile - and Inge then looking down amazed and smiling at his nerve - he says, "Headmistress. Good to see you too."

And the headmistress walks on past a few steps and then stops in scared horror: She is under his control and on his menu too!

This was a very if not that explicitly sexual film, and my proposed ending would be far more appropriate.

Strange opening. By this time of the war, the Germans well knew not to go anywhere in a vehicle in broad daylight. I was expecting an aerial massacre of those civilians in the truck.

And I cannot imagine the USAAF wasting ammo on a young couple on a country road.

Someone pointed out how pretty the little young girl was/is. Actress Paul Schramm is 5-1 !. Hopefully, she's a mother of equally beautiful little children by now.

The original was discreet about - didn't waste time on - sex. It did show better how vicious "authorities" become with their impending defeat.

The film was sympathetic to the GIs who with one exception were just the enemy in the original. And I was astonished to see an original American M4 Sherman tank in this one, although the cardboard version did have the essence of the tank.

But I strongly doubt veteran GIs would have bunched up like that. Amazing, most all of them weren't mowed down by the MG42 in the first 700rpm burst. And they would have immediately moved to flank the position, and they would have thrown a blizzard of grenades.

The "battle" would have been over in 5 minutes.

In comparison to the original, in this one the corporal was deserting, and the German MPs aren't so vilified for killing him. The boy-and-girl-happy-ever-after was different from the original, which is best viewed in its black and white.

More Westerners should see this, and then maybe we would be more for ending the Ukraine War ... unconditionally and stopping tragedy like this.

It did hold my interest.

I had seen this film before, and thought it was a good anti-war film, but having a 15 year old son over here in 2023, makes its impact that much harder.

I hadn't remembered so many of the kids being killed.

The portrayals of some of the parents/families was good, showing how some of those relationships triggered these kids in different ways.

This rural German community had not been directly touched by the war, with the exception of lost fathers, brothers, and sons off at the front. Interesting, that one of the boys had been sent out of a major target city like British kids were during the war.

I have studied World War 2 all my life and have designed many print-and-play boardgames and cardstock paper model WW2 ships, but a major theme of my webpage is that War must be CONFINED to history books, games, and museums.

I cannot believe the war-eagerness over here in Western Europe, and I fear for my children and grandchildren.

I would want to show this to my 15 year old Norwegian-American son here in Norway, but he has already made it clear he wants no part of war ... or my wargames.

When he was about 3 and playing in the living room I had the Victory at Sea Two if by Sea chapter on the DVD player. I grew up with the series and first saw it when I was about 8. In that program there is a scene of a Japanese soldier coming up out of a bunker and trying to run away and our Marines (of course) cutting him down, to prevent his escape (and coming back some night in a banzai charge).

My 3 year old saw that, his eyes got big with fear, and he fled the room, and I was afterwards FAR more careful what I watched when he was around.

He's studying piano, and I'm glad he doesn't like war.

In general terms, the film does give the overall sense of the battle. The book Battle: Story of the Bulge, by John Toland, is still an excellent read which gives you a sense of the GIs' shock and horror from this Nazi strategic surprise attack.

Panzers overrunning unsupported infantry. Ruthless, merciless application of force.

But there is something else here: a comparison of life goals and values between panzer leader Robert Shaw's vividly played Hessler and his aide Conrad, played by real-life German Wehrmacht Russian Front survivor, Hans-Christian Blech. Hessler lives for his career and the war. Conrad fears for his children - sons - being dragged into it, when they become old enough (although the Nazis were putting young boys in uniforms to fight ... and hanging those who tried to get away). Conrad finally realizes that this honorable, professional German officer he had so admired was a lethal threat to his sons.

And a precipitating incident is a Belgian kid taking a shot at Hessler from and upstairs window. The kid is apprehended by German soldiers and dragged before Hessler who has to decide whether or not to shoot him. Nuns present beg for the boy's life saying he is his father's only child, so Hessler does spare the kid while ordering the father - who should have had better control over his son, I suppose - executed! Fascinating.

Regarding the Germans being stopped before/by the fuel dump, Henry Fonda's character Lt. Col. Kiley was actually a Major Paul Solis whose *towed* tank destroyer detachment had (typically) been overrun, and it was Solis who ordered the flaming barrels rolled down the hill/road ... sort of like the Romans' flaming pigs putting the Carthagians' elephants to flight in their own Battle of Zama.

Charles Bronson made an unforgettable Captain Wolenski, and his rant about exterminating Germany and the Germans would have been consistent with a Polish-American officer who had just seen so many of his men killed.

Young lieutenant James MacArthur and professional if not psychopathic soldier George Montgomery were a fascinating and instructive combination, and I thought the Malmedy Massacre was done well enough, although there was no mention of the 100s of other GIs and innocent Belgian men, women, and children the Waffen-SS murdered.

It is amazing to read that the lead German character was initially intended to be Waffen SS schwerpunkt leader Joachim Peiper, who should have been hanged after the war.

On Quora, historian James M. Volo describes Southern cadets leaving the Academy not confrontationally - on the other hand not the cermonious parting of They Died with Their Boots On.

Not bad. I assume the spoilers - fates of the cadets - at the end of the film came after the series was turned down. Blue and Gray remains excellent.

Interesting detail/depiction of uniform confusion.

I doubt an artillery officer would have ceased fire simply because he saw former classmates.

Pretty ladies.

The film should have spent at least a couple minutes describing/mapping the battle more. This is where aggressive Confederate Stonewall Jackson became a giant, already.

It certainly does handle the social side of the early conflict.

Just yesterday, my younger, Norwegian-American children and I went to see this in Kilden Kino on Tønsberg (- Norway's oldest community, thanks to the cylindrical plateau alongside the town which was a natural ancient fortress).

The volume was too loud, but then I am hard of hearing, so .... I had only gotten a couple of hours of sleep the night before and was concerned Dad would fall asleep during the movie.

NO WAY.

I'm becoming repulsed by James Bond but have enjoyed the Jack Ryan and Jason Bourne series. I haven't kept up with MI, but since there was much filming in Norway, we had to see it, and the train scenes certainly were in beautiful Norway. (LOTS of lightly or un-settled dramatic terrain like that here.) I've seen car chase and train scenes before and that gets a bit old, even if these were spectacular. (My favorite is the Moscow scene in The Bourne Supremacy.) Why not a kayak or sail board ... or hang glider ... chase scene?

The characters were interesting, and I thought Elias Morales was excellent as Gabriel. Sorry to see brainy Elsa eliminated for the transition to light-fingered Grace. Henry Czerny is as excellent as he was in Clear and Present Danger.

Tom honestly looked his age, and that doesn't disfavor him. My kids both knew he does his own stunts - and of his scientology quirk - and I'm coming to think of him as a real-life Indiana Jones ... or Ethan Hunt. But 57 now 61 *is* pushing it, and we don't want to lose him.

I wonder how the sub-marine/sous-marin sequel will face off with the submarine scene in Pierce Brosnan's The World Is Not Enough - real turn-off, though: Bond should never have killed a woman.

My kids said they liked the film. None of us fell asleep. :-)

The Supermarine Spitfire was and still is one of the most beautiful aeroplanes and warplanes, and everyone should see the film. The First of the Few (released as Spitfire in America) on YouTube.

Others have noted the Spits in this film were not the Battle of Britain Mark Is. Depending on costs, the film might have at least had mock-ups on the ground - once a prop is spinning you can't tell how many blades it has, of course.

But the major grievance with the film is its depiction of such a dysfunctional/ineffective organization wasting lives and planes. The initial Green Hornet Squadron commander is baby-faced Barton who on the first day of war leads some of his pilots to attack bombers later to find out they were British Blenheims, and he has caused a friendly fire tragedy.

Then wealthy Retts/Rex? Takes over with his irritating dog but personally bankrolled excellent cuisine. He resents later arrival Hurt, an American who turns out to have been a Republican fighter pilot in Spain and to have already shot down a Bf109 (Messerschmidt) ... and to be rich as well. (There is later resentment at Hurt often referencing his combat experience, which would have been against Italians as well as Germans, which I the viewer would like to have heard!) In the air, Rex is a by-the-book martinet, concentrating on keeping a tight formation, apparently instead of a sharp eye out for German fighters which regularly catch them - especially the designated/doomed Tail-end-Charlie of the formation.

It is interesting that in the other reviews, the colorful and indeed evilly mischievous "Moggy" character well played by Neil Dudgeon gets praise. His constant, cynical needling and bullying is socially and professionally disruptive and demoralizing. He gets a younger pilot wanting to be his friend killed with a flying dare and gets away even with that.

Intriguing is the non-flying squadron intelligence officer, Skull, who tries to keep count of the unit's effectiveness while appearing to be a highly educated Cambridge commie. He is redeemed, privately counseling a pilot to help him get over his sexual disfunctioning with the beautiful Mary, a war-widow teacher living near their base in France. And while the pilot is on leave to visit his parents and she is lonely, Moggy cynically seduces her.

During this, supposedly anti-British local residents hurl a rock through her window, but at the time Stalin was urging French Communists to sabotage French war industry to help his ally at the time Hitler, so the rock thrower could have been a commie but the film only attributes it to anglophbia.

The pilot returns from leave, consummates his relationship with Mary whom he marries in a double ceremony with another pilot and his own French teacher who soon gets pregnant.

With France starting to fall in May 1940, the 2 young wives head for the Channel to go over to Britain, but the pregnant French girl is killed by a German strafing attack, psychologically maiming her grief-stricken husband pilot "Flash" Gordon to become psychotic.

Squadron leader Rex is heavily wounded by shrapnel but insists on flying even though tormented by pain and quickly killed. Baby faced Barton meanwhile returns to the squadron and kills the dog wrecking everyone's vitally needed sleep by mournfully howling for its dead master. (Did Britain's animal league protest this in the film?) The American Hurt tries to compile and (to new arrivals) teach combat experience, but both Moggy and now Flash ridicule and mock his efforts, drawing the new pilots away from the very lessons they need to survive. When Hurt argues with Flash about this, Barton takes Flash's side who then takes some young pilots off on a Battle of Britain mission getting both him and them killed.

So Barton shows himself again to have poor judgment and be as bottom-line incompetent as Rex was.

The final air battle in the film is what it claims to be the decisive one of The Battle of Britain, and ... EVERYBODY DIES ... including American Hurt and even evil Moggy - only Barton and one of Moggy's past friends surviving.

Another reviewer quotes the outrage of an actual former Battle of Britain fighter pilot about the film defaming the pilots and the RAF and claims the above dysfunctioning never would have been permitted by command, but - bottom-line - just how efficient/effective *were* the British fighter squadrons, until they gave up (or had had killed off) stupidity like flying in tight 3-plane-element Vic formations?

And look how effective the Polish pilots were by comparison, when finally allowed to fight.

The flying scenes were good, but the combat scenes were taken from the excellent, original film, Battle of Britain, leaving it to be something of a dysfunctional melodrama ... leading me to wonder if the book author and/or screenwriters were themselves Cambridge commies!

But today, look at all the personal (including sexual) antagonism and rivalry and now us putting females and homosexuals into our military and naval units and crews ... and the possibly fatal dysfunctioning consequences.

For example, there was the childless female US Air Force pilot who tried to murder the wife of a fellow male pilot to get him for herself, and then the sensational (but challenged) claim about the cause of/motive for the turret explosion/accident on the USS Iowa 30 years or so ago.

My Western Illinois Univ. History masters thesis about the 1940 Katyn Massacre as a - the - Cold War (ending) issue is free for anyone to read up on ibiblio.

(It was Truth which brought down the Soviet regime, not mere economics. Stalin never let those get in his way. Ask any kulak. Oh. Wait.) In 1989 under Polish communist general Jaruzelski, the Polish Army was ready to fight the Red Army, and the Russians - tired of being the bad guys and considering the Eastern Europeans to be just trouble - did not invade, the credibility of external Soviet terror collapsed, the Warsaw Pact members freed themselves, and the Soviet regime fell.

(In 1986 after her talk at our Juneau Alaska World Affairs Conference, I got President Bush1's go-to kremlinologist Martha Mautner to admit that the truth about Katyn *could* bring the Soviet regime down, and then she asked me ... concerned about what would happen to the Russian people, I believe ... "What then?" And as we can see after all our broken post-Soviet promises to the Russians, she was right.)

This film portrays the anti-communist and anti-Russian Poles fighting for their postwar independence by trying stage an anti-Nazi insurrection - the Warsaw Uprising - to create the Free Polish government in Warsaw, not just over in London, before the Red Army can get there.

The film seems to claim that Churchill had already conceded Poland to Stalin and did not want the uprising. And realistically the British had far less of a chance to help the Poles in August 1944 than they did in September 1939 (by with the French attacking Germany in the west), but the Poles were desperate, justifiably fearing Soviet occupation after the Katyn and other NKVD massacres.

(When the Uprising started, the British did to their credit try to get some supplies into Warsaw by air, but it was hopeless. If Hitler had had any sense by this point in the war, he would have made a big show of suppressing the Uprising but *not* doing so, to enable an independent Polish government to be created.)

So this film depicts the machinations of a charismatic if air-headed young Don Quixote to get a doomed Uprising started ... with hindsight quite stubbornly and stupidly.

And Europeans *can* be quite stubbornly stupid as we are seeing right now with the tragedy in Ukraine right now. They are prisoners of the past ... which they glorify with films exactly like this.

The actors in the film did an excellent job, portraying their characters, by the way, and if you don't realize the overall absurdity and tragedy of what is happening, the film can be very entertaining and absorbing.

The final moment where the - cold-bloodedly ruthless - dying SS officer recognizes the "Christmas tree" girl ... he obviously had fallen in love with ... was poignant.