Category: World War II

Lee (2024)

Kate Winslet plays with passion in an otherwise rather safe and traditional biopic

Director: Ellen Kuras

Cast: Kate Winslet (Lee Miller), Marion Cotillard (Solange d’Ayen), Andrea Riseborough (Audrey Withers), Andy Samberg (David Scherman), Noémie Merlant (Nusch Éluard), Josh O’Connor (Interviewer), Alexander Skarsgård (Roland Penrose), Arinzé Kene (Major Jonesy), Vincent Colombe (Paul Éluard), Patrick Mille (Jean D’Ayen), Samuel Barnett (Cecil Beaton), Zita Hanrot (Ady Fidelin)

“War? That’s no place for a woman!” That’s the message photographer Lee Miller (Kate Winslet) received when she applied to head to the Western Front for Vogue in World War Two. An experienced artist and photographer, with a strongly independent mindset, Miller wasn’t taking no for an answer: her stunning images of the horrors of war and the Holocaust would become a vital historical record.

That’s the key message of this well-meaning, rather earnest, slightly old-fashioned film, a callback to hagiographic biopics of yesteryear. It’s told through a framing device of an older Lee being interviewed in the 70s. The interviewer is played, in a thankless role, by Josh O’Connor (the character’s identity is a late act reveal that most viewers will probably guess early) and his dialogue is awash with either the sort of “and then you married and left France and moved back to London where you became the first woman photographer hired by Vogue” narration that links time-jumped scenes together, or blunt statements about Lee’s emotional state (“you must have been very frustrated”) that Winslet is definitely skilled enough to do with her face alone.

This was a passion project for Winslet, who spent a decade bringing it to the screen and which she bailed it out during a funding wobble, and she is the main reason to watch Lee. This strong-willed, take-no-nonsense bohemian turned hardened professional is a gift for Winslet, but she also gives Miller a strong streak of inner doubt and fear. Under her force-of-nature exterior, there is a strong streak of vulnerability in Miller, her life marked by past trauma. Winslet lets this rawness out at key moments, bringing great depth and shade to a character who could otherwise be blunt and difficult, and the film works best when it gives her free reign.

It’s unflinching but also tasteful in its depiction of war. Experienced cinematographer and first-time film director Ellen Kuras shoots its grimy, hand-held immediacy with an intensity that makes a lot of the film’s limited budget. Lee’s dirt and dust-sprayed combat scenes – with Miller dodging explosions and bullets to get into position to get the perfect shot – are tensely assembled and make a punchy impact. But Lee also knows when not to show us things, and its visual restraint when Miller and colleague David Scherman (Andy Samberg) photograph the horrific aftermath of Buchenwald and Dachau is admirable, the camera focusing on the characters’ stunned faces as they capture the terrible moments, with the horrific reality just out of focus.

There are some fine moments in Lee, which makes it more of a shame that so much of it feels safe, predictable and unchallenging. Lee focuses on Lee Miller as an artist and downplays her daring, unconventional life. Tellingly it’s adapted from a biographer by her son, titled The Lives of Lee Miller, which chronicles her life of constant reinvention. This is after all a woman who maintained a relationship with her Egyptian husband in the 30s, after meeting her second husband Roland who himself remained married for several years (they only married in 1947). She was a model, a surrealist artist, photographic pioneer, ahead of her time. That’s rinsed out to make her more conventional.

In the film, she and husband Penrose (a generously low-key performance from Alexander Skarsgård) have an uncomplicated meet-cute in a French villa owned by a friend (an extended cameo by Marion Cottillard) – admittedly it as at an outdoor picnic where Lee and others sunbathe topless – before settling into a life of middle-class suburbia (right down to Lee cooking meals for Roland when he returns from work). Hints that she has a consensual affair with Scherman linger, but the film seems prissily determined to reposition Lee as a far more conventional person than she really was. It’s a conservative attitude that comes from a good place – focusing on the work not the gossip – but it also makes her feel less unique or challenging than she was.

With the work as its focus, it’s surprising Lee doesn’t make more of the extensive collection of masterpiece photos Miller took. Although an inevitable credits montage shows how some of these were re-created for the film, actually including the images in the film itself might have carried more power and placed Miller’s work more prominently at its heart.

Lee also fumbles slightly with its final revelation of Miller’s past trauma. Shocking as this is, attempting to suggest what happened to Lee in her teens is on the same scale as the Holocaust or that she has a unique understanding of an act of ethnic genocide because she suffered in the past stinks. It’s especially notable since Lee does an excellent job of showing the quiet distress the Jewish Scherman feels as he realises only an accident of geography saved his life. Andy Samberg, in his first dramatic role, is extremely good in a role that clearly carries a very personal feeling for him.

Lee has things going for it, not least Winslet’s barn-stormingly committed and passionate performance. But in the end, it turns its lead character into someone who feels less provocative and revolutionary than she was. Its safely traditional structure and narrative approach turn her into a “role model” and make Lee the sort of middle-brow biopics Hollywood churned out in the 80s. It’s solid, interesting but essentially safe and forgettable.

Das Boot (1982)

Perhaps the definitive submarine film, a terrifying masterpiece of claustrophobia and suspense

Director: Wolfgang Petersen

Cast: Jürgen Prochnow (Kapitänleutnant), Herbert Grönemeyer (Leutnant Werner), Klaus Wennemann (Chief engineer), Hubertus Bengsch (First watch officer), Martin Semmelrogge (Second watch officer), Bernd Tauber (Chief HelmsmanKriechbaum), Erwin Leder (Chief Mechanic Johann), Martin May (Ullmann), Heinz Hoenig (Hinrich), Uwe Ochsenknecht (Boatswain Lamprecht), Claude-Oliver Rudolph (Ario), Jan Fedder (Pilgrim), Ralf Richter (Frenssen)

In the annals of submarine movies, few have taken such a hold of the imagination than Das Boot. This is particularly remarkable since it follows the struggles not of Allied sailors but members of the German Kriegsmarine, the U-Boats who patrolled the Atlantic to sink as many merchant ships as they could, all in the service of aiding the Nazi war effort. But the sea knows no flags and holds no allegiances: to the watery deep, men are just men, and a small, rusty metal box is fragile at 280 metres no matter who sails in it. And the men sailing U-96 are just ordinary, regular men, with wives, girlfriends and regrets back home who above all just want to survive to see them again.

Wolfgang Petersen’s is a masterclass in immersing us in a claustrophobic world. The crew of U-96 are led by the captain (Jürgen Prochnow), a hardened, cynical veteran is out here to do a job, not fight for radical cause he has little time for. Instead, his concern is to preserve the lives of his men, all younger (in most cases almost twenty years so) than him, during their time at sea where days (and even weeks) of bored inaction are interspersed with interludes of sheer terror as the submarine desperately runs from depth charges and dodges Allied destroyers.

Das Boot was filmed over almost a year, in chronological order. The actors practically lived in their confined set (deafened by the sound of its mechanics), their hair growing out to match their characters and their skin taking on a pallor from not enough time in the sun. For hours at a time we never leave the confines of the submarine – if you don’t count the odd trip to the ship’s bridge, where those lucky enough to venture up-top are lashed with salty sea water from near constant Atlantic storms. Aside from that, they are in what is effectively a 60m metal corridor, a specially designed camera operated by cinematographer Jost Vacano, tracking swiftly behind the frenetic pace of the sailors as they dive through hatches and pound along dripping quarters.

It’s a film where you cannot escape the tight confines of this boat, the sound track filled with groans and shudders as the boat cracks under the weight of water or buckles from high-pressure depth charges. When under attack, bolts burst out of pipes like machine gun bullets and water (which is obviously freezing) gushes through opened valves. It mixes with the sweat in the characters tension-filled faces. There is no comfort and no privacy under the water, bunks positioned on the edges of the ship’s corridor. The only food is whatever was taken aboard last time the ship was at shore – and if that means cutting layers of green mould off weeks-old bread, so be it.

Petersen’s capturing of this sense of a tiny, pressure-filled world is superb and he succeeds masterfully in getting the audience to feel the character’ stress and fear. When the film opened in America, crowds cheered an opening caption which details the losses the Kriegsmarine suffered during the war: at the end, the same audiences were reported stunned into sympathetic silence. None of these men are detestable Nazis. One man writes never-ending letters to his French fiancée. Another is a devout Christian. The Chief Engineer clasps tight photos of a skiing holiday with the wife he has not seen in months. Another is frustrated at radio reports of his football team losing a key match. All of them are haggard, unshaven and scruffy. None of them feel safe for a moment.

Only the first watch officer utters anything approaching true believe in the Nazi regime (he is also the only man to try and maintain some semblance of military smartness – at an encounter with a German merchant ship, he is inevitably mistaken for the captain). But his belief comes from naïve optimism: he has no wider idea of the world around him and his statements of trust in the regime noticeably dry up over time. For the rest: who has the time for ideology when you could be crushed by a mountain of water at any time? Captain Thomson (Otto Sander) opens the film by making a drunken speech at the launch of U-96, lambasting Hitler – a speech that is met with shocked silence because its being said rather than because of the content.

The sea also builds subconscious bonds for those who share its dangers, even with enemies. After returning later at night to the scene of a sinking ship (their only successful operation throughout the whole film), the Captain and his officers are horrified to find the Allied ship has not had its crew evacuated – a fact they notice too late, having already sent two more torpedoes into the water to finish the ship off. Haunted, the Captain orders U-96 to back off: after all, he knows (as we do) it will be impossible to take any survivors aboard his tiny boat. Even this successful mission is tinged with horror: the rest of their encounters mostly feature desperate attempts to dodge British destroyers.

It’s relentless. Life under water is dull, but inescapable but could be broken at any moment by life-threatening terror, perhaps hours of shaking and leaking under depth charges explode around them. Even the most experienced can crack – Johann, the ship’s chief mechanic, at one-point breaking under the pressure, his wide-eyes desperately searching for some escape as he ignores orders. War correspondent Lt Werner (Herbert Grönemeyer) goes through the same experiences we do: his assumptions about brave soldiers and ice-cold professionals, breaking down as he and we realise these are ordinary people just trying to stay alive.

Their lives are the principle concern of the Captain, superbly played by a stoic Jürgen Prochnow, as a man who keeps his emotions on a tight leash because letting them slip may see them never getting under his control again. The Captain is a default father to his men, concerned above all with preserving their lives, over and above the war he is bitter and cynical about. Now of course, you can argue Petersen is stacking the deck by presenting a German crew with not a (determined) advocate for Nazism among them: but so superbly does the film bring-to-life the pressures, risks and terror of U-96, you fail to be surprised that they would come to focus overwhelmingly on their own survival rather than the gnomic ideology of the murderous dictator who started the whole thing.

By the time the film has send U-96 to the near bottom of the ocean, forcing the crew to battle against the odds to restore power and save it from sinking (it’s the golden rule of all submarine films, that the recommended depth should be exceeded and for the ship to sink like a stone), you will be rooting for these pressured-but-capable professionals to save themselves. The overall feeling you take from Das Boot is the futile, pointlessness of it all: months at sea almost for nothing, acts of extreme bravery rendered moot by flashes of ill luck and chance, the utter lack of having any to show for it when the boat returns to port. Das Boot understands the futile horror, the grim pressure and punishing impact of war, placing people into terrible situations for no real purpose. It’s that which helps make it one of the defining war films – and the great submarine film.

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Superb fantasy film, full of heart, visual imagination and beautiful story-telling, truly one from the heart

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Cast: Ivana Baquero (Ofelia), Sergi López (Captain Vidal), Maribel Verdú (Mercedes), Doug Jones (The Faun/The Pale Man), Ariadna Gil (Carmen), Álex Angulo (Doctor Ferreiro), Manolo Solo (Garcés), César Vea (Serrano), Roger Casamajor (Pedro), Pablo Adán (Narrator/Voice of the Faun)

What do you do when your world is terrible? Sometimes the only way to survive is to embrace your own world, even if that world has its own darkness and terrors. Guillermo del Toro’s masterful Gothic fairy tale mixes the terrors of Francoist Spain with one of untrustworthy magic and monstrous spirits and compellingly balances bleak horrors with the chance of hope. Visually stunning, thematically rich and heartbreakingly emotional, Pan’s Labyrinth is a Grimm’s fairy tale bought shockingly up-to-date, a uniquely heartfelt film from a distinctive director.

It’s 1944 in the woods of Spain and the Reds are still fighting their lonely crusade against Franco’s fascists. Captain Vidal (Sergi López) is here to stamp out these rebels and has summoned his heavily pregnant wife Carmen (Ariadna Gil) and twelve-year old step-daughter Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) to his distant command post so that he can be present at the imminent birth of his son. Ofelia hates the punctilious and coldly obsessive Vidal (rightly so – he’s capable of coldy indifferent but shocking acts of violence) and escapes more-and-more into her fairytale books. One night, she wanders into an old maze and encounters a Faun (Doug Jones), who tells her she is the long-lost princess of the fairy kingdom and must perform three tasks to return home. Ofelia now exists in two worlds: an increasingly Gothic fairy one of and a real one of violence, ruled by her monstrous father-in-law.

Pan’s Labyrinth is a beautifully balanced film of multiple interpretations. It’s never clearly stated whether Ofelia’s fairytale world is ‘real’ of a product of her imagination. It’s clearly a way a scared girl could process real world traumas – the death of her father, the appalling Vidal, the horrors of war around her – with many elements of the fairy world reflecting things happening around her. But on the other hand, the mandrake root the Faun gives her to help heal her sick mother by placing it under her bed has an immediate impact and Ofelia’s magic chalk and the labyrinth itself offer secret doorways that allow her to escape Vidal in the film’s final act (or perhaps a by then disoriented and drugged Vidal is just mistaken). Essentially, you are left to embrace the idea you prefer – much as it is implied Ofelia herself chooses the version of her life she wishes to embrace.

Choosing for yourself and not blindly following orders is one of the key lessons of Pan’s Labyrinth. The ‘real’ world of Franco’s Spain is full of regimented orders to be blindly obeyed without question. In this it has the collaboration of the Church – at Vidal’s dinner-party, a subservient priest self-satisfyingly fills his plate with food while shrugging off concerns of the starving poor – and Fascism echoes Church mantras (one of Vidal’s lieutenants repeats the same propaganda ‘prayer’ to Franco over-and-over again while he hands out the bread ration to the cowed villagers). Franco’s Spain is one of order and regimen, where individuality and choice is stamped out.

And there are echoes of this in Ofelia’s fantasy world. Played with a gentleness, vulnerability and strikingly earnest decency by Ivana Baquero, Ofelia refuses to accept the world must be the way it is (unlike her mother who has sadly accepted it must). But her fairy world, the Faun – expertly portrayed by Doug Jones’ lithe physicality – is a far from gentle guide. Creaking from the wood he is formed from, he’s sinister, mixes vague statements with subtly presented orders and constantly holds information back while presenting Ofelia with tight rules for her tasks. Just as Fascism takes choice away real world, the Faun presents Ofelia with a book that reveals the future (but only one page at a time) and her tasks increasingly demand complete obedience, under the threat of punishment.

This is not a comforting world. Ofelia – who at one-point wears costumes reminiscent of those other famous children in dark, surreal and dangerous fantasy-worlds Alice and Dorothy – confronts a vile toad and, most chillingly, an albino child-eater with eyes in his stigmata hands who lives in a room decorated with nightmare reflections of the real horrors of the 40s (most strikingly a Holocaust-reminiscent pile of children’s shoes). For all its fantastical, it’s also very much a nightmare version of a real-world that could have been dreamed up by a child processing horrors.

Pan’s Labyrinth celebrates individuality and choosing for yourself. Ofelia’s story is one of increasingly taking her own choices: from refusing to accept her mother’s new husband, to escaping into her fantasy world (twisted as it is), to finally outright refusing the increasingly dark instructions of the Faun. It’s in doing this that she can eventually prove herself a true hero, someone who does not accept the established order but can make her own decisions.

This makes her a contrast to Vidal. Truly he is one of cinema’s most loathsome monsters. In a superbly controlled performance by Sergi López, Vidal isn’t repulsive because he is a larger-than-life, sadistic monster but because he is a small, inadequate bully who has controls his small world in order to make himself feel important. Vidal is obsessed with order and detail – introduced tutting at the 15-minute-late arrival of his wife, his office is filled with the gears of the mill and he fetishistically cleans his pristine uniform, shaves himself and repairs his father’s watch. This watch – the only memoir he has of his hero father, who died when he was a baby – is the root of his obsessions, Vidal desperate to become his father and pass on his own toxic legacy of ancestor worship to his son. It’s striking that, as Vidal’s world collapses around him, his clothing and body becomes more and more scarred, bloody and disordered – his external appearance resembling the monster within.

In Vidal’s world everything fits neatly into place, governed by his Fascist ideology. Carmen – a fragile Ariadna Gil, struggling to accommodate to a world of harsh choices – is of interest to him only because of the baby she carries. He operates the mill as a tightly organised regime, in which the rebels are unwanted ghosts in the machine. He uses violence ruthlessly but as a tool, not with sadistic relish. He brutally beats a suspected rebel to death with a bottle with robotic indifference and tortures suspects with a practised patter. To him, everything is justified if it is obeying an order. So much so, that he literally cannot understand the refusal of Dr Ferreiro (in one of the film’s most moving moments) to blindly follow orders, no matter the consequences.

Dr Ferreiro (a beautifully judged performance by Álex Angulo) is one of two figures whose independent thought Vidal is unable to recognise, even when they are under his nose. His maid Mercedes (Maribel Verdú, one of the passionate hearts of the film) is fiercely independent, the sister of the rebel leader and working subtly against Vidal. She forms a bond with the gentle Ofelia while showing that refusing to be part of a blind system is a crucial part of humanity. She also provides possibly one of the most satisfying moments in cinema during a confrontation with Vidal.

Del Toro’s film beautifully balances these fascinating ideas of choice and independence within its brilliantly evocative design. It’s a beautifully shot film, in a gorgeous array of Velazquez-inspired tones, its moody darks and blues gorgeously captured by Guillermo Navarro while its design work is extraordinary in its texture and detail. But it’s a classic because del Toro’s superb creativity and quietly emotional direction. Pan’s Labyrinth makes us really care for this child just as it makes us despise the cruelty of her step-father. Combined with gorgeous design, del Toro’s film truly comes from the heart, a loving, very personal tribute to the power of stories and individual choices. The film is so powerful, you even forget that it opens as it ends, and that we know in our heart-of-hearts how this journey will finish. Nevertheless, Pan’s Labyrinth ends on a note of joy and acceptance so pure, it could only be from the fantasy world not the real one.

Five Graves to Cairo (1943)

Exciting and witty war-time spy thriller, an overlooked work from a master director

Director: Billy Wilder

Cast: Franchot Tone (Corporal John Bramble), Anne Baxter (Mouche), Akim Tamiroff (Farid), Erich von Stroheim (Field Marshall Erwin Rommel), Peter van Eyck (Lieutenant Schwegler), Fortunio Bonanova (General Sebastiano), Miles Mander (Colonel Fitzhume)

It’s 1942 and the war is not going well for the British. The Germans are on the move in Africa under their ace commander Field Marshal Rommel. A tank drifts through the desert, bumping up and down sand dunes. Inside its crew slump, one dangling from his gun turret, another thrown on-and-off the gearsticks with each dune. It’s hauntingly Wilderish – a ghost tank charging through a never-ending desert – that Corporal John Bramble (Franchot Tone) wakes into, escaping across into the bombed-out Empress of Britain hotel run by panicked Farid (Akim Tamiroff), assisted by British-loathing Frenchwoman Mouche (Anne Baxter). Bramble’s hopes that he might lay low for a few days are thrown into danger when the hotel is requisitioned moments after his arrival by the German army with Rommel (Erich von Stroheim) himself setting up command there. Bramble passes himself off as recently deceased club-footed waiter Davos – only to discover Davos was a German spy and Rommel expects him to help delivery on his masterplan to crush the British.

Five Graves to Cairo is a magisterial juggling game of move and counter-move in which everyone holds tightly their own very specific parts of a greater mystery while trying to learn everyone else’s. Wilder does all this with wit and more than a little tension. Can Bramble keep up his pretence about being Davos while hiding his complete ignorance of Rommel’s masterplan? Will Rommel’s constantly alert, note-taking aide Lt Schwegler (Peter van Eyck) rumble him? The whole film is captured in one of its earliest sequences, as Farid carefully shepherds and blocks the view of Schwegler’s inspection of the foyer of his hotel, to prevent him seeing Bramble hiding behind the desk.

The whole film builds from there as Bramble constantly thinks on his feet, crafting obscure but convincing answers as he improvises wildly. All while limping around in a club-foot shoe and providing the sort of night-and-day waiting service the Germans expect. His improvisation is endless, from distracting a blowhard Italian general to steal his gun, to identifying himself quietly to a captured British officer being wined and dined by the smug Rommel by switching a whisky name chain on a bottle with his dog-tag (then smoothly passing off ‘Bramble’ as a rare spirit to the Italian general). His plans switch fast too, from a vague assassination attempt to being instructed by Miles Mander’s Montgomery-ish officer to uncover the Field Marshal’s schemes.

The Field Marshal himself is the epitome of Prussian arrogance. Played with a preening, puffed-up, Teutonic self-importance by an excellent Erich von Stroheim, Rommel never moves without his feathered swagger stick, pompously cavorting around the hotel, prissily demanding the finest sheets and best room. Far from the later ‘Good German’ image of the General, this Rommel is as snobbishly self-satisfied as a Bond villain, overwhelmingly pleased with his elaborate scheme (which he shrewdly set-up years earlier) and teasingly playing twenty questions with his British prisoners to see if they can work-out his intentions, while manipulating the game so his opponents can’t win. He’s an arrogant, hissable villain we are desperate to see taken down a peg or two.

Equally dislikeable is his whipper-smart aide, played with a thin-politeness by Peter van Eyck that hides his comfort with deception. With these villains as the face of the relentless German military machine, Wilder builds real tension around the importance of Bramble foiling Rommel’s scheme – and makes very clear to us that these ruthless sticklers for rules, certain of their own genius and superiority, will definitely not treat this accidental spy kindly if they catch him.

As Bramble, Franchot Tone does a decent job – although his Transatlantic vowels sound particularly odd when the similarly American Anne Baxter immerses herself in a French accent – even if Bramble himself is less interesting than his situation. A more charismatic actor might perhaps have helped lift Five Graves to Cairo to a higher level – after all it shares more than a few stands of DNA with Casablanca but Tone and Baxter aren’t quite Bogie and Bergman. What Tone does do well is morph swiftly from persona-to-persona, switching from heat-stroke confused soldier to would-be-assassin, to fast-thinking spy with a surprisingly natural ease.

He also builds a rapport with Mouche – Edith Head’s costumes for these two, with their contrasting blacks and stripes, quickly visually link them together – who discovers she hates the German more than she resents the British for abandoning her brother at Dunkirk. Baxter is very good as the real emotional heart of this film, a harsh woman hardened by loss, desperate to do what she can to save her POW brother but who finds a new cause to believe in. Baxter carefully lets her character build in statue from obstacle to reluctant aide to true believer, with real naturalness.

Her development reflects a whole film that uses its single claustrophobic location – nearly the whole film takes place over little more than a day or two in the hotel – to excellent effect, with potentially dangerous reveals lurking around every corner. Not least that the real Davos lies buried under rubble in the basement – not quite fully buried, Wilder’s focus early on Bramble’s orthopaedic show hinting at the vital ‘tell’ later on. Everyone – except perhaps the supremely self-satisfied Rommel – suspects there is more going on than they realise, and Wilder expertly ratchets up the tension through Hitchcockian time-bombs and carefully structured dialogue sequences to keep the audience firmly on the edge of their seats.

It’s makes for a fine caper, a careful riff on then current history that suggests Bramble might just have provided the vital clues to prevent the nefarious Rommel from claiming victory at El Alamein. While Five Graves to Cairo has a high entertainment factor, it’s not quite in the first league of war spy stories. But with entertaining performances – Tamiroff’s sweaty, stammering Farid and Fortunio Bonanova’s hyper-Italian Opera-singing general are also treats – and a real wit balanced with a well-developed tension, it’s a strong early film from a director who would go from strength-to-strength.

The Wooden Horse (1950)

One of the first POW films, setting a template for stiff-upper-lip derring-do

Director: Jack Lee

Cast: Leo Genn (Peter Howard), David Tomlinson (Philip Rowe), Anthony Steel (John Clinton), David Greene (Bennett), Peter Burton (Nigel), Patrick Waddington (Senior British Officer), Michael Goodliffe (Robbie), Anthony Dawson (Pomfret), Bryan Forbes (Paul), Dan Cunningham (David)

One of the most popular of WW2 movies sub-genres is the POW escape movie. The Wooden Horse was one of the first of these, showcasing the sort of barmy, off-the-wall scheme that British POWs spent their tedious years dreaming up. Based on an autobiographical novel by former POW Eric Williams – here fictionalised as Peter Howard (Leo Genn) – inmates of Stalag Luft III built a pommel horse to aid their escape. The scheme? Hide a man underneath the horse to dig a tunnel, while the guards are distracted by a never-ending stream of men jumping over it for hours and hours on end.

The Wooden Horse dramatizes this with a stiff-upper-lip ‘well done Old Chap’ Britishness, shot with a low-key documentary realism (the film blew a huge portion of its budget on location shooting). It’s almost defiantly low-key, about a world away from Steve McQueen jumping over a fence on a motorbike or the sort of emotive struggles with war pressure in The Cruel Sea. Even the escape itself is a grinding, repetitive task taking place over months moving an infinitesimal distance every day as the parade ground tunnel edges closer and closer to the fence. This low-key attitude extends to the cast, led by Leo Genn, who eschew dynamics for calm, quiet unflappability. (Ironically, despite its documentary realism, Peter Butterworth – one of the original members of the escape attempt – was told on auditioning he wasn’t believable as a POW.)

The film is split neatly into two halves. The first covers the escape plan itself and lays out a structure that became familiar from countless POW films that followed: the plan is carefully detailed, senior officers humph and finally flick the thumbs up, a parade of fellow inmates chip in expertise (from forgery to ingenious distractions), a staged accident of flipping the horse over tricks the Germans into thinking nothing is going on, the tunnel caves in, a man is left stranded in the tunnel longer than is safe… It’s all in here, while our heroes bluffly and bravely work out the logistics of smuggling soil away and mastering various French identities to make their escape.

The second half follows two of our heroes – Leo Genn’s stoic Howard and Anthony Steele’s matinee idol Clinton – as they shred their nerves moving through Europe aiming for the port of Lübeck and a ship to Norway. This is the marginally less interesting part of the film, although it conversely does feature the film’s most interesting moment as a visibly sickened Clinton is forced to kill an ordinary German guard, very different from the usual boys-own adventure attitudes you expect.

However, most of the rest of the second half is just a little too dry and documentary, despite the best efforts to play up the paranoia and tension of a life on the run in occupied territory. Lee directs with a methodical, unflashy style, while ongoing clashes with producers on the budget, which eventually saw the film completed months later by the producer and a hurriedly put-together rather abrupt (and incongruous) ending in a Swedish restaurant, which seems to lean into the beginnings of an anti-Soviet Cold-War era consensus. Some of the dramatic tension drains out of a film which actually might have benefited from a little more melodrama, among the muttered, patient conversations in alleyways and the almost-agitated debates about which resistance groups to trust.

The camp-escape half works best, probably because the ingenuity of seeing the prisoners work out the logistics of converting their pommel horse into the perfect escape weapon and overcoming the minutia of camp life remains very entertaining. There is even a certain amount of wit in the bonhomie and cheek of the escape, which the film doesn’t shy away from, from the plan depending on the willingness of hungry POWs hurling themselves over a wooden horse for hours at a time to the boarding school air of bored over-familiarity that permeates the sleeping quarters. Lee also mines some tension out of a late-night inspection of the sleeping quarters, which only just misses discovering the mountains of soil that has been hidden precariously in the ceiling.

The Germans themselves are presented fairly sportingly – The Wooden Horse doesn’t give us an obvious villain and, as noted, presents its only slain German as a tragic figure. The Germans are even fairly sporting, solemnly carrying away the offending horse with a hurt dignity after the escape – presumably the poor War Horse is to be confined to solitary – while the POWs give this hero a rousing cheer. The Wooden Horse avoids the set-up of many similar films, which often presents both a token ‘Worthy Opponent’ and a token ‘Unrepentant Nazi’ among the Germans. Instead, they are exclusively presented as straight-forward professionals – again perhaps with an eye on the emerging 1950s anti-Soviet consensus that was starting to form in Europe.

The mood of sporting endeavour around the whole film – as well as the stiff-upper-lip pluck of the imprisoned Brits – helped guide the POW film towards its natural development as a Boy’s-Own adventure story with a sense escape as the ultimate sporting adventure (though even The Great Escape throws in more than enough tragedy). The Wooden Horse sometimes lacks in drama, so swept up is it in a sort of documentary realism (it’s hard not to argue with the producers that the put-upon forbearance of John Mills might have been a better choice for the lead than the rather too smooth Leo Genn), but as an early example of a much-loved genre it offers more than enough entertainment.

Ashes and Diamonds (1958)

Wajda’s masterpiece of subtle but stinging Soviet criticism and one of the great European films

Director: Andrjez Wajda

Cast: Zbigniew Cybulski (Maciek Chełmicki), Ewa Krzyżewska (Krystyna), Wacław Zastrzeżyński (Szczuka), Adam Pawlikowski (Andrzej), Bogumił Kobiela (Drewnowski), Stanisław Milski (Pieniążek). Ignacy Machowski (Waga)

When the dust settles from the chaos of uncertain, terrible times what will we it leave behind: ashes or a diamond? It’s a question Poland is asking on the final day of the war, 8^th May 1945 –what fate will come under Soviet rule? Wajda’s War Trilogy comes to its end and, even considering the quality of the first two films in the series, Ashes and Diamonds is a quantum leap in filmmaking, an extraordinary mix of realism and poetic ambiguity. Wajda captures this turning point in Polish history with a series of encounters between a group of characters in a single location on one night. Ashes and Diamonds can lay claim to being one of the greatest films from Eastern Europe in the twentieth century, a breathtakingly rewarding mix of subtle messaging and tragedy.

Home Army fighters – those paying attention to Wajda’s earlier work will be well aware the Polish government strongly disapproved of these forces loyal to a democratic Polish government – Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski) and Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski) attempt to assassinate communist leader Szczuka (Wacław Zastrzeżyński). Instead, they accidentally murder two regular workers. They are ordered to take a second attempt on their target after he attends a celebration with a host of Polish and Soviet dignitaries at a local hotel. But triggerman Maciek is torn, trapped in a cycle of war that has killed his friends, uncertain about whether to continue in the crusade that has consumed his youth or explore a life he glances at with barmaid Krystna (Ewa Krzyżewska). Will Maciek complete his mission or accept Poland’s future lies not with the ‘liberating’ Soviets?

Wajda’s restructuring of Jerzy Andrzejewski’s novel is the culmination of the entire War Trilogy’s style: a careful criticism of Stalinism, buried behind ambiguous characters and images that provide enough of an interpretative fig-leaf that the Polish authorities could convince themselves his work was politically acceptable. Nearly everything in Ashes and Diamonds is subtly open to interpretation, carefully hiding its message in plain sight: the war is bringing ashes to Poland, not diamonds. Certainly, today, that’s the only interpretation you could take from Wajda’s extraordinary ending: our assassin writhing in painful, fearful death-throws on a rubbish heap while the hotel guests dance slowly and hypnotically into a doorway bathed in light. The beautiful ambiguity though is clear: look, Wajda could say to his political masters, they’re heading into the light while the Home Army soldier literally dies in a pile of rubbish. How more pro-Soviet can you get?

The entire film is a sad poem to a lost Poland with Wajda carefully guiding our sympathy towards Maciek. On paper, there’s plenty to admire in Szczuka, clearly an honest, competent politician – but he’s also uncharismatic and dull, who we may respect but never love. All our sympathies are captured by Zbigniew Cybulski’s extraordinary performance as Maciek. Inspired by James Dean and Marlon Brando (having binged their films while studying in Paris), Cybulski effectively wears his own clothes and gives Maciek the sort of anti-authority cool Dean made his own. Our sympathies lie immediately with this young man turned reluctant warrior, angry and scared.

Cybulski’s performance isn’t just attitude. He makes clear Maciek is deeply traumatised by the things he’s seen and done. Those dark glasses he wears – which make him look both older, cooler and more cocksure (he looks noticeably younger and more vulnerable without them) – are a legacy of damage to his eyesight from the sewers of the Warsaw Uprising. There’s an odd childish vulnerability to him – he’s spooked by ants crawling across his machine gun during their opening botched assassination – along with a surly resentment at the never-ending demands of this war. But he’s also iconoclastic and passionate about the vision he’s been fighting for. All of this is beautifully captured by Cybulski.

Maciek is at the centre of this pained reflection on all that has been lost in the war. Wajda presents this lingering sense with a series of strikingly unforgettable images. Maciek and Andrzej toast their fallen comrades with burning shots of vodka, each lit like a candle as they remember another name. Flames mark death and loss throughout: the innocent man accidentally machine-gunned by Maciek falls with his jacket burning from point-blank gunfire, fireworks fill the sky when Maciek carries out his assassination.

And where is the Church in all this? Ashes and Diamonds come back time and again to the great spiritual guide in Polish lives (before Socialism). The early assassination takes place outside a countryside Church, its locked door failing to save the victims. It’s an ominous sign for a world where God may have fallen silent, or perhaps never spoke at all. In another brilliant touch of Wajda ambiguity, Maciek and Krystyna walk through a bombed-out church, encountering a giant crucifix hanging upside down. This is not only an extraordinary image – the thorns from Jesus’ head either seeming to visually skewer the lovers or pull them in – but also a confirmation or lament for how little God can help Poland. Maciek clearly doesn’t care, since he happily uses altar decorations to fix Krystyna’s shoe. Faith doesn’t matter in this world.

All people have to belief in is what they can muster in themselves. Perhaps that’s why Maciek has filled his life with the longing to keep the good old cause going. He’s lost so much, he can’t actually believe there is anything else he could really do. For all his flirting at the bar, brimming with cocksure cool, does he ever really believe he has any choice but to continue with what he has committed to do? Wajda frames Maciek in his final moments of choice, huddling under stairs, shadows seeming to box and cage him in.

He’s as trapped as the rest of Poland is. Szczuka is a decent man, but he’s also a Socialist fanatic horrified to hear his son fought for the ‘reactionary’ Home Army. Meanwhile, his Soviet paymasters carefully nuzzle themselves into control over the Polish authorities, Wajda presenting them always with a careful political neutrality. Cunningly, all criticism of them is placed in the mouth of a journalist who speaks nothing but the truth about the freedom-crushing Soviets – but he’s made a drunkard sleazeball (more than enough for the censors to dismiss his words).

Ashes and Diamonds is also a beautiful piece of filmmaking, crammed with Wellesian light and shadow. Despite mostly being a film about waiting and decision making, it’s also full of pace, energy and a sense of a world steamrolled out of existence. It has one of the legendary endings, not only the long, lonely death of our hero but also the hypnotic, slow dance of the Polish authorities, disappearing into the sunlight, unknowingly marching into a future that will extinguish them.

Wajda manages to communicate all this in a film which, thanks to its need to slip everything past the censors, is extraordinarily supple and subtle, never over-playing its hand and spreading its humanity. There are no real villains here, only a series of people at a turning point of history, presented with careful even-handedness, but in way that never intrudes on the obvious sympathies of the film. With extraordinary direction and a superb, era-defining performance from Cybulski, it’s a masterpiece of World Cinema.

Kanał (1957)

Wajda’s war-epic is a brilliantly filmed, unsettling critique of the truth behind national myths

Director: Andrzej Wajda

Cast: Teresa Iżewska (Daisy), Tadeusz Janczar (Jacek “Korab”), Wieńczysław Gliński (Lt. Zadra), Tadeusz Gwiazdowski (Sgt. Kula), Stanisław Mikulski (Smukły), Emil Karewicz (Lt. Mądry), Maciej Maciejewski (Gustaw), Vladek Sheybal (Michał, the composer), Teresa Berezowska (Halinka)

By 1957, Wajda was working under a very different Polish government from the one in place for his debut feature A Generation. With the fall of Stalinism came an easing on restrictions and controls. Wajda could address themes he couldn’t touch before, helping make Kanał perhaps even more controversial than A Generation, as it explored Polish sacrifices during the Second World War and, by implication, asked what the point might have been. Focusing on the final days of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising – a revolt against the German occupiers which the Soviets effectively stood by and watched the Wehrmacht crush – Kanał gives a Polish National myth a tragic human face of futile effort.

Not quite what Wajda’s bosses in the Polish Film Industry expected. Perhaps the title should have tipped them off: Kanał translates as Sewer, hardly suggesting a heroic tribute to national sacrifice. Starting on the 54^th day of the Warsaw Uprising, the Home Army forces are beaten, clinging to a few streets. Introducing a unit commanded by Lt Zadra (Wieńczysław Gliński) in a long tracking shot through a devastated city, an unseen narrator bluntly tells us in the opening moments everyone we see is about to die. But not in a last charge against the Germans: instead it will be in the sewers, while attempting to escape, waist deep in shit, lost in the dark and stumbling into dead ends, madness, exhaustion and booby traps.

For many Poles this didn’t fit with the idea of the Warsaw Uprising being a heroic, necessary battle for the nation. It’s rather like in the 1950s, a British film studio had made a film about the Battle of Britain in which the pilots got tanked up on booze then took to the skies to be pointlessly shot down by the Luftwaffe over the channel. At least Wajda this time could present the Home Army – who, following the government line, A Generation had condemned as bourgeoise, fusspot cowards – as heroes. And Kanał is mercifully free of blunt political messaging: no one has time for any of that when they are simply desperate to survive.

What it’s also free of though is any tangible achievements from the Polish Resistance forces. Zadra’s unit holds onto a trashed district, under heavy fire, taking more and more casualties for about a day before being ordered to withdraw through a city pounded by shells through desperate civilians. During the entire course of Kanał the Poles inflict three casualties on the Germans: one tank is hit (but not destroyed), one unmanned motorised mine is stopped and one German soldier who falls into a defensive trench is beaten to death with a stone. Other than that, this is a one-sided curb-stomp where the Germans are hardly even seen and the Poles take huge casualties without even the most basic, morale boosting minor victory.

Kanał’s first half, which covers the war up-top is gritty, immediate and a truly scintillating piece of brutal combat. Wajda’s cinematic confidence is clear from the start with that long Wellesian tracking shot introducing all the characters as they move from one ruined district to another. His combat scenes take place on a wasteland of smashed buildings and have a panicked pointlessness to them – confused and desperate soldiers responding rather than planning anything proactive. The one undeniably heroic act we see – Jacek’s (Tadeusz Janczar, once again Wajda’s complex sacrificial lamb) taking down of the motorized mine – sees him near-fatally wounded, reducing him to a limping, slowly dying passenger for the rest of the film.

The atmosphere behind the lines is already tipping into desperation: number two soldier Mądry (a swaggering Emil Karewicz) is bedding young fighter Halinka (a fragile Teresa Berezowska) openly, while composer Michal (Vladek Sheybal, excellent as a haunted outsider) attempts to call through to his wife and children on the other side of the city, only to listen in on their deaths over a phone line. Any sense of chain of command is crumbling, and the soldiers are already hardened to death and destruction: retreating through the city, none of them can muster even a flicker of interest in a desperate mother begging for news of her lost child.

That’s nothing though compared to the bleakness of the film’s second half as the unit piles into the sewer. Here, time and space start to lose all meaning. The film’s timeline becomes as unclear for us as it does for the characters as they trudge through this Dantean sludge (Wajda makes sure we don’t miss the point, in a slightly clumsy touch, by having Michal quote the poet at length). With limited light, no real idea where they are going, low motivation and toxic gases being stirred up from the excrement they are crushing under their feet, slowly sanity slips, people revert to their worst instincts and selfish, unheroic decisions are made.

There is little to build a national myth on here. An incoherent colonel is left to die in the mire. Mądry and record keeper Sgt. Kula (a comradely Tadeusz Gwiazdowski) decide their own lives are more important than those of the company. Zadra clings to his duty, but lost and confused utterly fails to maintain any duty of care to his men. Michal, teetering already with the loss of his family, disappears into his own world. Their guide Daisy (a brilliantly humane Teresa Iżewska) abandons her duty in what we already know is going to be a futile attempt to keep Jacek alive. There is no dignity or final heroic act of death, with people meeting the end with stunned silence, clumsy tiredness or panic.

And over it all is the statement Wajda implies: since the Uprising achieved nothing but the massacre of its fighters, to a Wehrmacht driven out months later with ease by the Soviet forces, what was the point? That, however much the Communist state chose to praise the bravery of the soldiers, was it brave or foolhardy to single themselves out as targets in a one-sided battle that achieved nothing? Watching the fighters of the Uprising wade through excrement towards a lonely, uncelebrated death with nothing to show for it, makes you consider the complex feelings that lie behind National myths of sacrifice. And it’s a powerful and haunting message for this mesmerising sophomore effort.

A Generation (1955)

Wajda’s striking debut is full of politically-enforced lies but is masterful film-making

Director: Andrzej Wajda

Cast: Tadeusz Łomnicki (Stach Mazur), Urszula Modrzyńska (Dorota), Tadeusz Janczar (Jasio Krone), Janusz Paluszkiewicz (Sekuła), Ryszard Kotys (Jacek), Roman Polanski (Mundek)

Few European countries felt the brunt of the Second World War more than Poland. Invaded by the Nazis and the USSR (it’s often forgot Britain and France went to war in 1939 to defend Polish, something even we seem to have forgotten by 1945 when we allowed the country to be smothered in the Soviet embrace), it faced atrocities from both dictatorships which left lasting scars on the nation. It’s events (and legacy) was the subject of the first three films by legendary Polish director Andrzej Wajda, the title A Generation capturing the impact it had on the entire country.

A Generation follows a group of young men drawn into the resistance movement against the German occupying forces. They include the increasingly political Stach (Tadeusz Łomnicki) and the hesitant, anxious Jasio (Tadeusz Janczar), both of whom are inducted into a resistance cell by the impassioned Dorota (Urszula Modrzyńska). As Warsaw burns during the Jewish Ghetto Uprising of 1943, the newly minted fighters take to the streets in solidarity – and at cost.

It’s a simple summary, but that only tells half the story. There are subtleties to A Generation that can be hard to pick-up on for those not born Polish. When Wajda made A Generation, Poland was in the grip of Stalinism. It’s a film not made under artistic freedom, but by an artist pushing against the boundaries of what censorship would allow him to say. Among a great deal of truth in A Generation there are also thumping great lies. Lies that surely must have hurt Wajda, whose father was murdered (along with thousands others) by the Soviets at Katyn (a war crime A Generation, by necessity, pins on the Germans).

Stalinist thinking dictated very clear lines. The resistance heroes in the film are The People’s Guard. This was a pro-Soviet force, that believed only the Soviet Union could save Poland from the Germans. The Home Army (the largest resistance group, loyal to the Polish government-in-exile in Britain) are portrayed as bourgeoisie, reactionary, scared to fight and only marginally better than collaborators. (In real life, Stalin allowed the Home Army to be massacred by the Germans in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 – Soviet tanks effectively sat outside the city and watched – then shipped thousands of survivors to death in the gulags).

Stalinist thinking also permeates the films characterisation and opinions. Many of the characters frequently feel functional and under-developed, quietly placing the movement ahead of themselves – classic Stalinist thinking, where the individual only serves as a cog in a greater machine. Stach’s work-place mentor waxes lyrical about a wise, kind old man with a beard – Karl Marx of course – while outlining how their Home Army supporting factory boss is ruthlessly exploiting the working classes for profit. Comments about the holocaust are kept to a minimum – Stalin hardly being known for his tolerance either – with Wajda going as far as he can by praising the Jews bravery as fighters. Arguably the most developed character in the film – Tadeusz Janczar’s twitchy Jasio – is only allowed to be a more complex hero because, all his doubts, fears, bravado and individual pride, eventually lead him to the ultimate sacrifice (in the film’s most iconic moment).

If A Generation is so politically compromised, why watch it today? Because it is also a superbly striking debut from a master film-maker – and it’s important to remember, that even with its lies and political obfuscations, the Polish authorities were hardly happy with it at the time anyway. Inspired by Italian neo-realism, Wajda gives the film a lived-in, on-the-streets quality that helped revolutionise Polish cinema. Quite simply, no Polish film had ever looked like this before – it was the first to break free from its hermetically sealed studio bubble. From its opening tracking shot through the poverty-stricken streets of Warsaw’s Wola district, to its extensive location shooting in run-down factories and cobble-lined streets, A Generation embraces realism, employing several non-actors.

Mud, rain and ill-lit locations fill out the frame in a grim, sharply realist view of war. Wajda frequently shows bodies hanging from lamp-posts, while gun battles between Germans and partisans have a frighteningly random intensity to them (perhaps helped by the fact that budgetary issues meant it was cheaper to fire real ammunition on set). The film pioneered the use of squibs for gunshots (condoms filled with fake blood, then burst). Warsaw burns in the background of shots that foreground everyday life, such as fun-fares and solidly proletarian workers working happily.

The partisans huddle in sewers, drink in shanty late-night bars and work in dirty, noisy factories. Wajda’s film fully embraces the style de Sica and others introduced (and fascinatingly was doing this in parallel with Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali and Aparajito thousands of miles away). A Generation might keep many of its characters lightly sketched – Stach and Dorota are invested with youthful fire by Tadeusz Łomnicki and Urszula Modrzyńska which goes a long way to round-out their essentially blandly communist personalities, Donata in particular fervent and stoic in her socialism – but it makes the stakes for their struggle with Fascism grippingly real and dangerously immediate.

Wajda also, successfully, gambled that if he made the two leads reasonably acceptable symbols of Stalinist thinking he would be allowed greater scope with the third. Tadeusz Janczar’s performance as Jasio is fabulous – a fighter disgusted by killing, who kills a German with a panicked firing of an entire clip then brags how much he let him have it, whose escape from the Germans during the Uprising could be interpreted either as a noble distraction to allow others to escape or a blind panic that ends fatally. Either way, Jasio is a fascinatingly rich, contradictory character.

Wajda’s film is a powerful mission statement of his dynamism with the camera and his ability to walk a fine-line between political demands and genuine drama (though his later films would be made under a marginally more liberal government). While it must never be forgotten while watching it that it presents a slanted, false version of history, it still captures an essential truth of its haphazard chaos and savage violence. When Stach weeps when seeing teenagers not much younger than him preparing to join the People’s Guard, it hits a deeper truth about the horrors of the twentieth century on Poland that blasts through any political compromise Wajda was forced to make.

The Zone of Interest (2023)

Chilling Holocaust film, its unseen horrors only overheard give it supreme power

Director: Jonathan Glazer

Cast: Christian Friedel (Rudolf Höss), Sandra Hüller (Hedwig Höss), Ralph Herforth (Oswald Pohl), Daniel Holzberg (Gerard Maurer), Sascha Maaz (Arthur Liebehenschel), Freya Kreutzkam (Elenore Pohl), Imogen Kogge (Linna Hensel), Johann Karthaus (Klaus Höss), Lilli Falk (Heidetraut Höss), Louis Noah Wite (Hans-Jurgen Höss)

A family enjoys the delights of a summer day beside the river. They laugh, splash each other with water and amble home to their villa, next to where father works. They tune out the all-too-familiar sounds of that workplace to enjoy a family dinner. They are living the dream, out of the city, with a home and beautiful, landscaped garden. The family is Rudolf Höss’. The workplace is Auschwitz. The sounds are of the unimaginable horrors that make their life possible.

Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust movie is unlike any other ever made. Taking a Martin Amis novel as inspiration, Glazer creates a hauntingly observant film where the plot is simple (Höss works at Auschwitz, the family enjoys a series of everyday events, Höss gets re-posted, his wife remains in their home, Höss later returns to continue his work) but every single frame implies never-seen horrifying events. While the family are indifferent to the distant sounds of trains arriving, industrial churn, gunshots and screams, we can’t be. The only thing that separates the Höss’ heaven of their intricate garden and charming home from the hell of Auschwitz is a single wall.

Glazer’s film never leaves the house for the camp, meaning what we hear is our only clue to what is happening. The Zone of Interest uses sound like almost no other film I’ve seen. Sound designer Johnnie Burns creates an overwhelming soundscape that suggests horrors. The low rumble of industrial sound, the background hum of screams and cracks of gunshot, ignored by the family as white noise. It’s brilliant and sickeningly immersive that never for an instant lets you forget where we are. Glazer complements this with half-seen sights, the most striking the steam of a train arriving visible over the wall of the house, that add to our grim knowledge of what’s happening out of shot.

Glazer lets events play out with a chilling naturalism. Shot on concealed digital cameras with no artificial lighting, there is very little studied here at all. Instead, everything plays out with a terrifyingly low-key sense of reality. Conversations are at times mumbled, movements have a mix of casual and procedural and everything is kept determinedly undramatic. What emerges is the mundane, character-less nature of the Hösses. These people are evil in the sense that the wickedness of their deeds hasn’t even crossed their minds. Two sociopaths who pride themselves on their respectability, presiding over an industrial killing machine.

The film brilliantly balances a lack of overt events with acres of horrific implication. Fishing with his children, Höss steps on a half-seen jaw-bone and suddenly plucks them from the lake, running home with them to practically bleach them clean with the servants left to scrub the bathroom – it’s never stated that human remains are being washed from them, but the look on the face of these servants speaks volumes. (Höss later records a coded memo chastising his team for their lack of care, like a middle manager furious at an untidy storage room.) Hedwig’s mother wakes at night with her room flooded with red light. Opening a curtain to investigate, the camera sees her look of horror, a handkerchief covering her nose, while we only see the faint reflection of flames on the window. Moments like this fill the film, the implications of horrors out of shot.

At its heart, Zone of Interest brings startlingly to life Rudolf Höss, a man who admitted to murdering millions but wanted it known he did not tolerate overt cruelty to his victims. Played with a precise blankness by Christian Friedel, you realise if Hitler had charged him with organising the Reich’s stationary he would have gone about it with the same commitment and passion-free precision as he does mass murder. Does Höss have any idea, deep down, of his vileness? As he carefully, obsessively marches around the house every night shutting off lights and closing doors, is he subconsciously trying to defend his family and shut out reality, bury his knowledge of his evil in household procedure, or is he just as obsessive about this as he is in everything else?

His wife, played with a middle-class, aspirational coldness by Sandra Hüller, seems to have convinced herself she can enjoy all the benefits of the life of an Auschwitz camp commandant, without needing to think seriously about where it comes from. She tries on luscious clothing, brought to her from the camp, and obsessively tends and cares for her garden. Not that it stops her from lashing out at her servants like a petty tyrant. So devoted to her home is she, she refuses to leave it on Höss’ transfer back to Berlin, believing it to be the perfect place to raise her children.

It’s the children that subtly bear the brunt. As the film progresses, the damage to them becomes more and more clear, especially after Höss is reassigned and his attempts to control the environment are ignored by his successor. The daughter who cannot sleep at night, constantly walking the house. The younger son who overhears the forced drowning of a victim and mimics the guard’s cruel authoritarian “humour”. The older son who locks his brother in the greenhouse and mimics the hissing noise of gas. The Höss family are laying the roots to destroy their family in their obsessive desire to build a blinkered perfect home for them.

There is only one note of true kindness in The Zone of Interest. During his research, Glazer discovered a young Polish girl made it her mission to leave fruit at night for the inmates, hidden throughout the camp. Glazer captures this with thermal imaging cameras (eager to maintain his “rule” of no artificial light), giving this girl a sort of mystical, fairy-tale quality (we once even see her while hearing Höss read to his children at night). However, even this act of kindness is corrupted – the forced drowning is caused by a fight over an apple, presumably left by this child.

The Zone of Interest does lose some of its impact when it follows Höss to Berlin – it’s a film that flourishes best as a claustrophobic piece, focused on the house and its grounds. You could argue that The Zone of Interest is effectively a short film, expanded into feature length, making the same point over again. But, on reflection, part of the point is the power of the thudding repetition of that message, the overwhelming impact of people indifferently carrying on in the face of pure evil.

Does Höss realise this on some level? The Zone of Interest concludes with Höss dry-retching on the stairs – he’s such a shell he doesn’t even have enough in him to vomit up – before seeming to stare right out at us into the darkness. Glazer then finally takes us into the camp – to see the museum it is today, quiet, still, tended to with care by the staff. Höss’ life’s work is to create a memorial to his barbarity, where dedicated staff will make sure the picture of evil remains unblemished by dirt. It’s the first-time sound really drains out of the film and it makes for a powerful moment.

The Zone of Interest really lingers with the viewer. Glazer’s subtle and unflashy work builds the film into a powerful experience piece that leaves a lasting impact. It’s a film that grows even more powerful as you unpack the subtleties of its exploration of the banal nature of cruelty and the lasting impact of inhumanity on ourselves and others. A truly unique and important film.

Murphy’s War (1971)

This heavy-handed anti-war Don Quixote story is far from a success

Director: Peter Yates

Cast: Peter O’Toole (Murphy), Siân Phillips (Dr Hayden), Phillipe Noiret (Louis Brezan), Horst Janson (Captain Lauchs), John Hallam (Lt Ellis)

In the dying days of World War Two, the merchant ship Mount Kyle is sunk in the Venezuelan Orinoco by a German U-Boat. Surviving the machine-gunning murder of the crew is Irish engineer Murphy (Peter O’Toole), who is treated at a Quaker mission by Dr Hayden (Siân Phillips). Murphy at first seems happy to be out of the war: but that changes, after the murder of fellow survivor Lt Ellis (John Hallam) by u-Boat captain Lauchs (Horst Janson), hunting the survivors. Murphy, assisted by Frenchman Louis (Phillipe Noiret), decides to take revenge, kitting out a crashed bi-plane to launch a series of increasingly obsessive attacks on the u-Boat with Murphy succumbing to a vendetta.

Peter Yates takes an action-adventure novel and adjusts into an anti-war epic that becomes increasingly shrill as it reaches its nihilistic ending. This shift led to several clashes between Yates and the film’s producer Michael Deeley, who was looking for a box-office hit with a charismatic star. While Yates’ film is complex in its eventual structure, the overall impact of the film is confused and blunted, its sympathies mixed and logic often flawed. It has its moments but doesn’t quite work.

As part of its anti-war set-up, Yates believed it was essential to humanise the German sailors (after all, he wanted the viewer to feel unease at Murphy’s destructive crusade). Unfortunately, creates a dissonance in the film. The first thing the German sailors do is ruthlessly machine-gun the Mount Kyle’s sailors as they tumble into burning waters. Graphically shown is every beat of the fear, as charred machine-gunned bodies fill the frame while the Germans show not a moment of regret (indeed we next see them celebrating the Captain’s award of an iron cross). The captain murders Lt Ellis with a face filled with regret, but his execution involves bullets causing Ellis’ body to jerk in its graphic death throws. How are we supposed to sympathise with them after that?

The focusing on such brutality fits the anti-war hell the film wants to lay out. But it fatally undermines the film’s aim to sure Murphy’s campaign to destroy the u-Boat as an obsessive and destructive campaign. With no reason given for the brutal war crimes committed by the u-Boat (for good measure they also machine gun the Quaker settlement, killing many of the villagers), its hard not to feel that actually Murphy has a point and that these guys deserve punishment. Would a throwaway line about a secret German mission or a need to hide have hurt the film?

The film can’t have it both ways. It can’t luxuriate in the destruction and murder war soldiers commit and then ask us to sympathise with these same soldiers when their death is threatened by another obsessive soldier on a quest for revenge. In a better developed film this sort of clash of sympathies might feel more natural. Instead, the Germans are either monstrous or sympathetic depending on the needs of the scene while Murphy himself makes an awkward shift late on from a guy with righteous anger into a destructive figure we are invited to condemn.

This is a particular shame as there is a lot in Murphy’s War to admire. Yates directs with an assurance and sense of epic scale. The Venezuelan scenery is shot with a real beauty by Douglas Slocombe and the film is edited with a professional excellence by future-Bond-director John Glen. The film’s first half hits a “boy’s own adventure” tone very effectively – making the later shift into 70’s anti-establishment nihilism more awkward – with inventive sequences as Murphy, McGiver-like, reassembles the downed biplane and jerry-rigs some home-made bombs.

A big part of any success is the charismatic performance of Peter O’Toole, who tears into the role of this Irish rebel with relish. Mixing insouciant wit with a bitter irony that slowly gives away to a sociopathic gleam as obsession takes hold, this is an excellent performance. O’Toole manages to make a character who is, in many ways, slightly incoherent work effectively. After all this rebel we hear condemning war with counter-culture cool, who fights to the bitter end; a guy who expresses indifference for his colleagues but goes to unimaginable lengths to avenge them. These contradictions don’t feel naturally developed, but ideas that are put in place to ease the plot.

Saying that, the film has some interesting beats as Murphy collapses more and more into Don Quixote like obsession, tilting at his underwater windmill. (Yates clearly had a passion for this angle as he would make two attempts to make a film of Don Quixote before finally making a TV version in 2000). O’Toole is perfect for this increasing severing from reality and as his Sancho Panza, Phillipe Noiret contributes a warm, humane performance as reluctant Louis, who silently acquiesces in a campaign he clearly feels is misguided and delusional. Equally good is Siân Phillips, balancing exasperation and affection for Murphy, finally unable to brake through his walls of aggression.

There are good ideas and moments in Murphy’s War but its poor-plotting (its story is also strikingly slight, with the preparation of the biplane and its test flight filling an elongated stretch of the film) and jumbled mix of adventure and anti-war sentiments eventually fatally undermine its effectiveness. Despite fine work from Yates and a charismatic and highly watchable performance from O’Toole it’s, at-best, an interesting failure.