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633 Squadron (1964)
633 Squadron has not aged well
633 Squadron is quite possibly one of the first war films I watched on television, and I had dim memories of Mosquitos flying low over water and through rocky fjords, and of course the wonderful theme music by Ron Goodwin. Watching it again after many years, 633 Squadron is a massive disappointment.
First is the storyline. 633 Squadron is not based on any specific incident, but the story - an audacious attack on a Norwegian weapons factory using specially made bombs - rehashes bits of The Dam Busters and Above Us The Waves, possibly The Guns of Navarone (which came out two years earlier) and the real-life attack on the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen.
The titles state the film is 'inspired by the exploits of the British and Commonwealth Mosquito Air Crews', which is fair enough, but it's one thing to make up a story, another to just completely depart from any realistic semblance of action, as this film does throughout. While there appear to be four working Mosquito aircraft in the film, you only ever see three flying together, even when there are supposed to be 12 of them. The aircraft have the uncanny ability of machine-gunning anti-aircraft crews from height, but don't appear to have any advantage over German fighters, while Mosquitos are well known to have been faster.
The crew characters are also wafer-thin - the jokey and irreverent Aussie, a possibly Welsh navigator, a pilot with a comically unconvincing artificial hand ever seen outside panto, and the obligatory American, the lead character Wing Commander Grant (Cliff Robertson). As a film made in the UK by a US studio, MGM, you can see why he is there, but in a dramatic context, it's hard to see what he brings to the story. His thin backstory is that he was a stunt pilot before the war who joined an Eagle Squadron in the RAF. He is kind of an irreverent sixties anti-authority figure (especially up against Harry Andrews' Air Vice Marshal), but it's not really developed. This is largely due to the wooden quality of Robertson's performance.
As if no-one would want to see a film which features a load of British and Commonwealth airmen (even with an obligatory American), a band of Norwegian resistance fighters are working with 633 Squadron, and one of them, Erik Bergman (George Chakiris), is flown to the UK to help them prepare the raid. With his astonishingly anachronistic hairdo, Bergman serves little purpose, though he does have a glamorous blonde sister (Maria Perschy) who falls for Grant, adding a bit of love interest into the mix.
Possibly the worst thing about the film is its dramatic climax. The Norwegian fighters are supposed to be attacking and disabling the anti-aircraft batteries on the fjord before the raid but they all get wiped out. There is no explanation as to how the Germans seem to know where and when they are attacking. It can't be that Erik (who is parachuted back into Norway but promptly captured) has given up the secret to the Gestapo, because before the raid Grant goes and bombs the building he is in to stop him talking.
By the way, the scene where Erik is tortured is particularly weird. The Gestapo seem to be doing something beastly out of shot below the waist, with a female SS woman appearing to be enjoying it rather too much.
Shetlandsgjengen (1954)
The Germans take a hell of a beating
This post-war, low-budget film portrays the 'Shetland Bus' service which transported agents and weapons from the Shetland Islands off the coast of Scotland to Norway, the other side of a stormy and hazardous sea. Initially, trawlers were used, crewed by Norwegians (the film simply refers to them as 'Vikings').
Leif Larsen, who was involved in the actual service, plays himself, and the events of the film appear to be fairly closely based on fact. While Michael Aldridge, playing the RNVR officer commanding the base, is a familiar face, most of the actors are amateurs, like Larsen.
For me, the amateur cast is less of a problem than the script: Larsen is actually really good, the commanding presence that he was (by all accounts) in real life, and the other Vikings are also excellent - especially the cheerful crewman whose unconventional headgear raises the eyebrows of a visiting Admiral. The dialogue is poor, a mix of exposition of Downton Abbey proportions and tepid banter.
The film's US title was 'Suicide Mission', but the film makers (the director was the little-known Michael Forlong, who wrote the screenplay with Sidney Cole from a novel by David Howarth) opted for a lighthearted tone. The dangers the Vikings faced were considerable: attack from the air German planes, betrayal by Quislings in Norway, and the North Sea itself.
All of these threats are played out in the storyline, and the action sequences of the film - and the shots of trawlers contending with massive waves - are the best part. Larsen completed more than 40 missions and was decorated more times than any other non-British person and any other merchant seaman.
Neutral Port (1940)
Light comedy of Esperanto is lost in translation
It's 3 September 1939 in the Mediterranean port of Esperanto. Anxious civilians besiege the British consulate trying to get on a boat, but the consul (Leslie Banks) is busy playing a game of chess against his German counterpart (Sigurd Lohde) at the club. When war is declared, his assistant Jim (Hugh McDermott, for once not playing an American) brings him the news and the game is put to one side. Esperanto declares its neutrality, and the Hotel Adolf hedges its bets - displaying a portrait of the Fuhrer beneath a Union flag.
It's a nice opening scene, and Esperanto, where the police strut about in comic opera uniforms, is a little bit Wes Anderson. For a film released in 1940, the propaganda message is light touch and the Germans are not demonised. A developing storyline surrounds the Scharndorf, a German merchant ship that the British believe (correctly) is actually a covert supply ship for German U Boats. The consul is told to put someone with a radio transmitter on the ship to send its position to the Royal Navy so it can be sunk, and appoints Jim for the highly dangerous job, much to the horror of his daughter Helen (Phyllis Calvert), who is in love with Jim.
Unfortunately, the film does goes downhill from its opening scenes. Yvonne Arnaud's turn as bar owner Rosa Pirenti is a histrionic performance that simply overbears everything else. It's maybe not her fault (Arnaud is fine as Madame Lebouche in Tomorrow We Live). The director, Marcel Varnel, should just have told her to turn herself down from 11.
Things are not much improved by Will Fyffe as Ferguson, the skipper of a ship called the Annie Louise which is sunk offshore almost as soon as war breaks out and who Rosa is determined to marry. His turn as an amusingly cantankerous old sea salt falls just as flat as Arnaud's.
Resistance (2011)
Not flawless, but an intense and humane film about the pity of war
I'm posting this here largely because of the low imdb rating, which is plain wrong.
Resistance is a counterfactual tale set in a Welsh mountain valley which posits a successful Nazi invasion of Britain in 1944. There are a host of reasons why that scenario is difficult to square with the historical facts (what happened to the RAF, the Americans and the Russians?), but let's leave that to one side.
This is a powerful small-scale film focusing on the complex relationship between the occupier and the occupied. Only minimal hints about what is going on in the wider world are dropped (London falls, but Manchester and Birmingham are not subdued), and even at the end of the film you are left with several possible conclusions.
Because of its determinedly slow rhythm and elliptical style (lots of long Pinteresque pauses and staring into the middle distance), this film is not for thrill-seekers. To be honest, it would be a better film with a bit more happening. But there are more than enough (or far too many) movies full of explosions, machine guns and dumb revenge killings. Resistance has a different agenda.
As the enemy approaches, all the men leave the village, in the dead of night, without telling the women where they are going. The women suspect (rightly) they have gone to join the resistance. Soon afterwards a squad of Germans led by Hauptmann Wolfram (Tom Wlaschiha) arrives in the valley.
They appear to be searching for the men, but it turns out that Wolfram at least is more concerned with finding artworks that have been hidden in the area (specifically the medieval Mappa Mundi). Then the men just stay, through the winter to the following spring. They are kind to the women and help out with the sheep and the ploughing, and they even borrow civilian clothes when their uniforms start to wear out. They almost become protectors rather than enemies (not telling the Gestapo about the missing men, for example).
But they are met with a Silence du Mer treatment (the resistance of the title is that of the women). Wolfram tries hard to befriend one of the wives, Sarah (Andrea Risborough) and gives her a record player for her birthday, but he is rejected. He may be a decent person, and is clearly weary of the war, but he remains the enemy.
Resistance may be lacking in thrills, but it's also a salutary reminder of the pity of war which, maybe significantly, was made in the aftermath of the Iraq war and while British soldiers were fighting and dying in Afghanistan.
Where Eagles Dare (1968)
Mission implausible
Where Eagles Dare was created by Alastair Maclean as a vehicle for Richard Burton, who asked producer Elliott Kastner to find him 'some super-hero stuff for me where I don't get killed in the end'.
Maclean came up with a plot which, though having nothing to do with real life, is at least clever, taking unexpected twists and turns. But it has to be said he didn't depart too far from his first major war movie success, The Guns of Navarone. The scenery and the mission impossible by a motley group of commandos are different, but as in Guns there be a traitor in their midst... Admiral Rolland (Michael Hordern), one of the two senior officers putting the operation together, mutters that it can't possibly succeed, just like his counterpart James Robertson Justice in the earlier film.
Burton, who was aged 45 when the film came out, is obviously too old for the part, but can you be miscast in a film which is your vehicle? His lines are almost entirely made up of exposition or words of command barked grumpily at Eastwood. The heroes mow down scores of German soldiers without aiming their machine guns or being hit themselves (to be fair, Burton cuts his hand closing a door). They seem to know exactly where and when to be at any time as if connected by telepathy. The haircuts and make-up are 1960s, just like the helicopter which lands in the Schloss at one point.
At least the stuntmen did a good job: the famous cable car scene is definitely the highlight of the film (weighing in at an interminable two and a half hours), though that's not saying much.
Where Eagles Dare has aged badly. I can accept it can be enjoyed as undemanding entertainment: but only if you turn a blind eye to the improbability of the action, the one dimensional characters, the mostly wooden acting and the complete absence of any wit or interest in the dialogue.
Against the Wind (1948)
Blowing stuff up in Belgium
Two years before Odette and a decade before Carve her Name with Pride, this film imagines a Special Operations Executive mission in Belgium. The SOE is not identified by name, and seems to be operating from a room inside the Natural History Museum instead of an office building on Baker Street, but many of the other elements are there - training in a country house, techniques of maintaining cover while on mission, and parachute jumps.
There is even a workshop devising clever ways of concealing explosives - including dead rats and horse manure. Interesting to see so soon after the war what aspects of SOE, still now cloaked in secrecy more than half a century later, were seemingly well known. The workshop is also clearly a cinematic ancestor of Q's gadget factory in the Bond movies.
One of the true to life aspects of this well scripted and directed (by Charles Crichton, better known for comedies The Lavender Hill Mob and The Titchfield Thunderbolt) film is the danger of being an agent in occupied Europe. Networks are vulnerable to betrayal (and one of the group we are introduced to in training turns out to be passing secrets to the Germans via an Irish contact) and the Gestapo are everywhere. People die, quite a lot of them, and suddenly. There is some dubious licence (Simone Signoret as Michèle operates a radio hidden in a sewing machine, which surely would have been vulnerable to detection, while John Slater as Emile has plastic surgery so effective his wife does not recognise him), but the story, while the characters and their mission are fictitious, seems to be informed by recent experience of the secret world.
It is also ironic and poignant, in times of Brexit, to see again the common purpose of a bunch of foreigners in wartime England and the mortal risks they are prepared to take to liberate Europe from the Nazis. The women take roles equally as important as the men; which Gordon Jackson's character, who is drafted in from the explosive factory, is a bit stuffy about. Robert Beatty plays Father Elliot, a French-Canadian Catholic priest who is sent in to Belgium liberate an agent called Andrew (played by the Austrian actor Peter Illing) who has been caught after blowing up an archive office. James Robertson Justice, who would later play a similar role in The Guns of Navarone, is the mastermind in the museum back in London.
His description of what his group does is as good a description of SOE as you get in movies portraying its activities: 'We collect all kinds of queer fish in this organisation, people who would never be taken for saboteurs. We send them back to school to learn all the things they were thrashed for - cheating and deceiving, pretending to be everything they are not. Playing rough games and dirty tricks.' Maurice Buckmaster, head of SOE in France who appears at the beginning of Odette, could hardly have put it better.
The dramatic licence of the conclusion stretches credibility a bit far, and the constant background music gets a bit overpowering at times. But the strong cast of actors get well developed and believable characters to work with and Against the Wind is one of the better examples of its genre, even though it is one of the first.
The Guns of Navarone (1961)
Fine cast and plot, but surely over-rated
One of those films that often features in lists of the great war films, The Guns of Navarone has certain things going for it: a fine cast, a good plot (albeit one with some fairly serious holes), and an approach to characterisation which means the Germans are not all evil fanatics or dolts (pretty much all wartime films) and the Greeks are not mad or stupid (Ill Met by Moonlight). It's also in colour, which British films rarely seem to have been in in this era: thanks no doubt to the backing of US movie studio Columbia.
British troops are stranded on an island near the coast of Turkey, but in order to rescue them a flotilla of Navy ships have to pass two enormous guns carved into a mountain on the island of Navarone. How the British managed to get past the guns on the way over, or why the ships can't simply sail around the other side of Navarone, is not explained.
Bombing from the air has failed, and the latest RAF mission, led by Richard Harris failing to do an Australian accent, has just lost several men trying again. Jensen, a secret service type played by James Robertson Justice recruits a crack team to land on the island undercover and try to blow up the guns. It's the idea of Major Franklin (Anthony Quayle) whose idea is for the team to scale a 400-foot cliff on one side of the island which is lightly guarded. He calls in Captain Mallory (Gregory Peck), a brilliant mountaineer before the war, who has been undercover in Crete and speaks fluent Greek and German. Mallory believes it's impossible and Jensen is certain the mission will fail.
Mallory nevertheless goes ahead, and achieves the task despite climbing in a terrible storm through lashings of rain. There's not much of an explanation for his change of heart other that it keeps the suspense ticking over. There is also a bit of tension added to the team because one, Colonel Stavros (Anthony Quinn), has pledged to kill Mallory when the war is over (he blames him for the death of his wife and children), while 'Butcher' Brown (Stanley Baker) is, it turns out, fed up with killing people. David Niven, playing the posh but rebellious Corporal Miller, is also unhappy with Mallory's leadership. Perhaps it's because Peck does not even try to do a British accent and his character is not made into a Canadian as he is in The Purple Plain.
The film is well enough plotted and it's a gripping yarn with a sprinkling of anti-war sentiment thrown in (not quite as starkly as Yesterday's Enemy). The screenplay is the handiwork of a blacklisted Hollywood writer, Carl Foreman, so it's well-polished, though for me the dialogue is often somewhat wooden. There aren't really any lines you could quote, and it feels like the first of those war films of the sixties and seventies where the reality of the war starts to become submerged in escapist adventure.