Category: World War II

Empire of the Sun (1987)

Beautifully shot version of Ballard’s semi-biographical novel with a superb lead performance

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Christian Bale (Jim Graham), John Malkovich (Basie), Miranda Richardson (Mrs Victor), Nigel Havers (Dr Rawlins), Joe Pantoliano (Frank Demarest), Leslie Phillips (Mr Maxton), Masatō Ibu (Sergeant Nagata), Robert Stephens (Mr Lockwood), Takatarō Kataoka (Young pilot), Emily Richard (Mary Graham), Rupert Friend (John Graham), Ben Stiller (Dainty), Paul McGann (Lt Price)

JG Ballard was 12 when he was sent from Shanghai to a Japanese internment camp in 1943 for the remainder of the Second World War. His experiences formed the basis for his novel, Empire of the Sun. The key difference being that, unlike him, young Jim Graham (an incredible Christian Bale) is separated from his parents, falling under the duelling influences of charmingly callous grifter Basie (John Malkovich) and compassionate Dr Rawlins (a very good Nigel Havers), switching between starving trauma and boyish excitement at the explosions of war around him.

Empire of the Sun was originally due to be a David Lean project, before he handed the reins to producer Steven Spielberg. Keen to echo one of his idol’s works – keen to make a film that could sit alongside The Bridge on the River Kwai – and clutching an excellent Tom Stoppard adaptation, Empire of the Sun becomes a grand epic, gorgeously filmed by Allen Daviau. But it also a strangely under-energised affair. It has flashes of powerful emotion, moments where it is profoundly sad and moving. But it’s also an overlong film that struggles to fully commit to a young boy’s emotionally confused reaction to war.

On its release, Empire of the Sun suffered in comparison to Hope and Glory. Unlike Spielberg, John Boorman’s presented a deeply personal, autobiographical view of war through his own memories. Boorman, remembering his own experiences, was not afraid to present war as a child might see it: the grandest game in the world. It’s something Empire of the Sun struggles to process, awkwardly struggling to fuse Jim’s romantic view of the camp as a home full of adventure and its neighbouring airstrip being lined with fighter planes he worships, with his understanding that the guards are dangerous temperamental bullies prone to violence. There is something in this difficult to manage balance between childish wide-eyed excitement and terror at war that Spielberg can’t quite master.

Which isn’t to say there’s not a lot to admire in Empire of the Sun. Visually it’s a wonder, from its early green fields and blue-sky framed shots of the Shanghai British community to the increasingly yellow-filtered bleakness of the punishing, drought packed prison camp and death march that is the eventual fate of the internees. If anything, the film is a little too strong on the desolate beauty of the POW camp, the grand visuals sometimes making an awkward fit with its tale of childhood trauma. John William’s overly grand score – too reminiscent of the adventures of previous Spielberg films – also doesn’t quite work, overpowering moments of the film that should feel more subtle.

This visual and aural grandness would work, if Spielberg could commit to Jim’s frequent view of war as a grand game. After all, separated from his parents in Shanghai he cycles anywhere he wants. In the camp, he cosplays as an American pilot and charges around with the breathless energy of a kid at summer camp. To him, an attack on the airfield becomes a glorious fireworks show. Spielberg is more comfortable with the scenes showcasing Jim unquestionable distress (in particular, a teary breakdown over his inability to remember his parent’s faces). It’s a film that wants to be a survivor’s story amongst suffering, but in which the lead spends a great deal of time enjoying his situation.

Empire of the Sun can’t quite wrap its head around Jim’s psychology, never quite willing to commit to the perspective of a naïve child who can’t quite understand the real horror of the situation he’s in, even while death piles up around him. It’s more comfortable with familiar coming-of-age tropes, such as the early stirring of Jim’s sexuality with Miranda Richardson’s alluringly distant Mrs Victor. (Richardson is very good as this society grand dame, fonder of Jim than she admits).

None of this though is to bring into any question the breathtakingly mature performance by future Oscar-winner Christian Bale (Spielberg’s greatest directorial feat is the unstudied naturalness he helps draw out of Bale). Bale’s performance does a lot to square the circle of Jim’s excitement with the fragile trauma under the surface, almost more than the film does. If there is one thing Spielberg’s film does get, thanks to Bale, it’s a child’s inexhaustible reboundability. Jim is never quite spoiled by his experiences: shaken yes, but still a kind, imaginative child with a relentless optimism. Bale’s performance is highly nuanced, the flashes of pain and panic very effective, the subtle hardening of his survival instinct very well judged.

Bale’s stunningly mature performance powers one of Empire of the Sun’s strongest themes: Jim’s subconscious quest for substitute parents. Barely able to remember his real parents, Jim looks to other adults to fill the gap, while lacking the maturity to judge who is appropriate and who not (he even allows himself to be ‘renamed’ from Jamie to Jim). This brings out a strong Oliver Twist subplot, with Jim fixing himself onto an amoral American Fagin. John Malkovich gives a serpentine menace to the amoral Basie, the grifter who always comes out on top, demonstrating just enough affection for Jim while never leaving you in doubt he’d eat the boy alive if circumstances called for it.

With so many strengths, it makes it more of a shame Empire of the Sun doesn’t quite click. It’s at least twenty minutes too long, dedicating too much time to larger scale moments which, while impressively staged, distance us from the heart of the movie. It works best with smaller personal moments, even within its epic sequences. The Japanese army marching into Shanghai is masterfully staged, but it’s the terror of Jim as he loses his parents in a surging crowd that carries the real impact. Similarly, Jim watching the A-bomb explode, light flowing across the screen, has a silent power. Some moments capture the changing world in microcosm brilliantly: Jim’s discovery that his parent’s staff are looting his home, has the maid respond to his anger by calmly walking across the room and slapping him. This moment captures the fall of everything Jim has known perfectly.

You wish there was more of these smaller, more intimate moments in Empire of the Sun – just as you wish that the film was more slimmed down, more focused and better able to engage with the complex child’s perspective that could simultaneously love and hate the way. Spielberg’s film despite its many strengths and virtues, isn’t quite willing to do that.

To Be or Not To Be (1942)

Hilarious Lubitsch comedy that walks a fine line between the dark horrors and absurdities of Fascism

Director: Ernst Lubitsch

Cast: Carole Lombard (Maria Tura), Jack Benny (Joseph Tura), Robert Stack (Lt Stanislav Sobinski), Felix Bressart (Greenberg), Lionel Atwill (Rawitch), Stanley Ridges (Professor Alexander Siletsky), Sig Rumann (Colonel Erhardt), Tom Dugan (Bronski), Charles Halton (Dobosh), George Lynn (Actor Schultz), Henry Victor (Captain Schultz)

Is there a setting less likely for the famous Lubitsch Touch than war-torn Warsaw? To Be or Not To Be is a farce set at the most serious of times, sharp-paced, smooth and very funny. But it’s also about how the sort of playful, civilised class of eccentric free-spirits that Lubitsch excelled at can win through, even at the most dreadful of times against barely-sane bullies. What To Be or Not To Be does best – as well as make you laugh – is give you hope there is some light at the end of the tunnel.

The Turas – husband and wife Joseph (Jack Benny) and Maria (Carole Lombard) – are the (self-proclaimed) most famous actors in Poland. But the season 1939 is tough: their latest play Gestapo (a piss-take of course) is canned because the government is worried it might upset Hitler. Joseph revives his Hamlet and Maria uses the start of his ‘To Be or Not To Be’ soliloquy as the perfect time to entertain her current lover Lt Sobinski (Robert Stack) in her dressing room. Flirtations like this get left behind after the Germans invade, Sobinski flees to join the RAF and the theatre is shuttered.

For most of that, To Be or Not To Be fits neatly into the Lubitsch Touch. The Tura’s – with their fast-talking wit and casual attitude to sexual fidelity – are not a million miles from Trouble in Paradise’s con artists. Joseph’s principal concern isn’t that his wife might be walking out with someone else, but that someone is walking out of his performance (the worst fate imaginable!). The company are a parade of theatrical hams (Lionel Atwill’s grandiose Rawich can never resist padding his role) or spear-carrying dreamers, like Felix Bressart’s Greenberg (dreaming of Shylock). These are all denizens of Lubitsch Land, and it’s all wonderfully funny, soaked in Lubitsch’s love for actors and theatre.

But the world they are about to step into is entirely different. Lubitsch opens the film with a hilarious misdirection: first it seems Hitler (Tom Dugan) himself is walking around Warsaw, before cutting to Jack Benny in Nazi uniform (a sight so shocking to Benny’s Jewish Polish Dad, he walked out and had to be coaxed by his son back in to finish watching it). But the conversation we hear – with its parade of nervous ‘Heil Hitlers’, ridiculous bribing of a small child with a toy tank – is slightly too absurd and, by the time Dugan’s Hitler enters with a proud ‘Heil myself!’ it becomes clear we’re watching rehearsals for Gestapo (at the end of which Dugan’s Bronski heads out into Warsaw to prove he can pass as Hitler).

It’s a fabulous lead into what we can expect for the rest of the film, which sees the actors swopping identities and character with desperate abandon as they get trapped into an espionage plot. In Britain Sobinski is rightly suspicious of Polish exile Professor Siletsky (Stanley Ridges), largely because he’s never heard of Maria Tura. With Siletsky carrying information to Warsaw that could shatter the resistance, Sobinski smuggles himself back into Poland and loops the actors –especially Joseph – into a complex, improvised deception scheme to get the deadly information back, save the resistance and dodge the real Gestapo under ruthless but desperate Colonel Erhadt (Sig Ruman).

To Be or Not To Be ups its gear into one of the wildest, riskiest and outrageous farces of all time. Jack Benny is front-and-centre as the vain-but-decent Tura, roped into impersonating first Erhardt to Siletsky, then Siletsky to Erhardt, with the help and hindrance of the company (many of whom, especially Rawitch, still instinctively take every chance to expand their roles). Benny’s comic timing throughout is exquisite, using every inch of his gift for comic vanity, brilliantly bouncing from assurance to barely concealed panic (usually when his pre-prepared lines run out). While working overtime to do the right thing, neither he – nor Carole Lombard’s beautifully performed Maria – step to far from the sort of flirtatious, catty banter that wouldn’t be amiss in a Noel Coward comedy.

Lubitsch’s film is in-love with actors, showing them as instinctively decent and brave, while also being squabbling, competitive misfits either pre-occupied with themselves (from Joseph unable to imagine anything worse than a bored audience, to a rehearsing Rawich not even noticing he has walked into a light backstage) or dreaming of glories to come. Sure, he has fun with their reliance on a script – Joseph runs out of lines so quickly as Erhadt he is hilariously reduced to simply saying over and over again “So they call me Concentration Camp Erhadt”, inevitable raising the suspicions of Siletsky – but at the same time in this crazy, dangerous world, the theatre is a bastion of civilisation.

Civilisation is of course in danger from the worst of the worst. Lubitsch is the comic director, par excellence but he is not afraid to dramatically shift tone and style throughout. The war action, as shells rain up towards Sobinski’s plane, would not look out of place in an action film. Sobinski’s attempt to contact the resistance could be dropped in from a Hitchcock thriller. When a Fritz Lang-inspired chase of Siletsky through a dark theatre is called for, Lubitsch goes entirely straight. The subtle threats behind Siletsky’s attempted seduction of Maria are quietly chilling if you stop to listen (Siletsky is the only character neither funny or on some level ridiculous, as if he has walked in from a serious thriller). There are moments in To Be or Not To Be that are surprisingly tense: when guns are pulled, we know having seen them used earlier that lives are at risk.

The most controversial element of To Be or Not To Be is whether Nazi occupied Poland is a suitable topic for comedy – and lines from Edwin Justus Mayer’s exceptional script like “What [Joseph] did to Shakespeare, we are now doing to Poland” feel close to the bone today. Lubitsch was of course not to know that plans were already being formed forthe Holocaust. But he had been the literal face of Hollywood Jewish corruption in the Nazi’s deplorable The Eternal Jew and the vileness of Nazism was familiar to him. He acknowledged it with Siletsky, the dogmatic, obsessed Nazi (who even dies with the word Heil on his lips). Erhardt brags about the powers of life and death he holds and casually talks of torture and executions. To Be or Not To Be couldn’t picture the evils of mechanised death, but Lubitsch knew the people he was dealing with.

He also knew nothing punctures evil like mockery – and, like most bullies, many Nazis were small, pathetic people. Erhadt – superbly played as a wide-eyed, panicked middle-manager and deadly dispenser of punishments by Sig Rumann – might be dangerous, but he’s also a twitchy, clueless idiot, blaming his subordinate for all his mistake (it’s part of the film’s joke that Joseph’s suave Erhardt feels more convincing than the bug-eyed ignoramus himself). The Nazis are small-minded bullies, with their continued parroting of Heil Hitler and kneejerk obedience to orders (up to jumping out of a plane). Lubitsch treats Nazism seriously while showing how ludicrously puffed-up and stupid it is.

It’s a fine tight rope walk, which echoesThe Great Dictator – but without Chaplin’s heartfelt, fourth-wall plea for peace and understanding. To Be or Not To Be manages to make identity switching farce a sort of commentary on how the Nazis are incapable of questioning the reality they are ordered to accept. Lubitsch shows Nazism as a cult diametrically opposite to the more libertine, bickering and free-minded actors. As such, it’s a valuable reminder in war time that we can prick the pomposity of tyrants by hitting them where it hurts them most: in their pride.

Letters From Iwo Jima (2006)

Thoughtful, sensitive, respectful and insightful war-movie – one of Eastwood’s best

Director: Clint Eastwood

Cast: Ken Watanabe (General Tadamichi Kuribayashi), Kazunari Ninomiya Private Saigo), Tsuyoshi Ihara (Lt Colonel Baron Takeichi Nishi), Ryō Kase (Private Shimizu), Shidō Nakamura (Lt Ito), Hiroshi Watanabe (Lt Fujita), Takumi Bando (Captain Tanida), Yuki Matsuzaki (Private Nozaki), Takashi Yamaguchi (Private Kashiwara), Eijiro Ozaki (Lt Okubo)

Eastwood’s original plan for his Iwo Jima epic was to tell the story from both perspectives, like a sort of Tora, Tora, Tora on the beaches. But, as the amount of story expanded and expanded, he decided to make two films (it helps being a Hollywood Legend when you change your mind like this). The American story would be covered in the melancholic-but-traditional Flags of Our Fathers, focusing on the soldiers who rose that famous flag on the peak of Mount Suribachi. For the Japanese story, Eastwood would do something more daring: tell the story in Japanese, entirely from their perspective presenting their military culture not as wicked or misguided but as a legitimate mantra as prone to extremes as the American one.

Letters From Iwo Jima is equally melancholic as its partner film, helped by its elegiac music score from Michael Stevens and Kyle Eastwood. It’s shot in a coldly austere, sepia-toned monochrome – there is barely any colour in it – and large chunks of it play out in gloomy subterranean quietness where the only sound of war is the artillery ground-pounding above the entrenched Japanese soldiers. This is the apogee of Eastwood’s moody, restrained style – perhaps he recognised and admired the reserve and formality in Japanese culture. Letters From Iwo Jima seems at first unfussy and objective so it’s a surprise how affecting and humane it becomes, all while seeing the virtues and deep flaws in a military system where the individual mattered a lot less than the whole.

Iwo Jima was a brutal fight to the death over an island less than 12 mi², a grey rock in the Pacific that’s only value was as an air strip for launching bombing raids on mainland Japan. Over 110,000 American soldiers took on 20,000 Japanese defenders in a campaign expected to last just a few days, but dragged out over a punishing 36. The relentless Japanese defence resulted in over 25,000 American casualties and c. 90% fatalities for the Japanese. Letters From Iwo Jima explores the mentality of an army that almost completely accepted (from commanding officers down to junior privates) their destiny, no their duty, was to not survive the island’s defence.

The defence’s success is due to the skilled command of General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, a remarkable, restrained performance of relentless determination mixed with deep humanity from Ken Watanabe (unfairly snubbed at the Oscars). Kuribayashi over-rules his senior officers desire for a bayonet charge against the overwhelming American landing forces on the beaches. He knows this traditional attack would lead to suicidal instant defeat for the out-numbered, out-gunned Japanese. Instead Kuribayashi orders a tunnel network built across the island, to allow hit-and-run attacks designed to inflict maximum casualties. Rather than committing suicide at their posts on defeat, soldiers were ordered to withdraw from indefensible positions to continue the fight for as long as possible.

This strategic defence-in-depth strategy is denounced by several of his senior officers as either defeatism or American-sympathy. Kuribayashi knows victory is impossible – he arrives on the island writing a letter to his wife stating he will not live to see her again. But he also knows his tactic is the only way to slow down the American juggernaut. In his opinion, protecting Japan from air attack for a few more weeks is worth sacrificing his and all the lives of the 20,000 men under his command.

Kuribayashi respects Americans – flashbacks show his happiness in the 30s as a military liaison in California, his easy friendships with American officers and desire for co-operation with the USA. But in the same scene he unquestioningly (though with a warm smile) says he will serve his country no matter what. He’s a man of principle and honour, and even if he doesn’t agree with the war, he is for Japan right-or-wrong and will not think twice about giving his life in its service. This attitude soaks through the Japanese soldiers, and Letters From Iwo Jima presents it largely without moral judgement. There are shocking moments where defeated soldiers in Suribachi, weep as they looks at photos of their loved ones while clasping live grenades to their chest so that they may die at their post rather than live with the shame of failing their country. But, the film subtly asks, how different is this from the self-sacrifice countless American war films have (rightly) praised in their soldiers?

The difference is cultural. Very few American soldiers would choose suicide in a cave rather than the thought of confronting their families as defeated men. For Japanese soldiers, this is the ultimate strength, a view shared not just by incompetent, trigger-happy bullies like Captain Ito but right up to Kuribayashi himself who never considers for a moment surrender and living, choosing a suicidal night attack with his last soldiers and suicide on the last piece of earth on Iwo Jima that could still be just about considered Japanese. That’s an institutional expectation of total self-sacrifice, even when the sacrifice is completely symbolic, that has no real comparison in Western militaries.

The soldiers – as we hear in their letters, read to us in voiceover – love their families and they relate to a wounded GI from Oklahoma who talks about his mother (a slightly twee moment in another wise subtle film), but they also believe that the whole (Japan) is far more important than the individual (themselves). Trees should always be sacrificed to slow the fire and protect the forest. Letters From Iwo Jima may show the dangerous excesses this produces in the most fanatical, but doesn’t denounce this extreme penchant for sacrifice or give a clumsy moment of realisation that it is inherently ‘wrong’. Neither does it present Western, individual ideals as superior (indeed the few American soldiers seen are a mixed bag, as much prone to vengeful violence as their opponents).

Letters From Iwo Jima follows Private Saigo (very well played with a bewildered sense of fear and growing desire to live by Kazunari Ninomiya), the character closest to acting as a criticism of the Japanese mindset. A baker, who wants to see his wife and new-born child, he doesn’t really want to die on the island, but never questions it is his duty to do so. And his objections to suicidal orders or kamikaze attacks isn’t grounded in their senselessness but that they run contrary to Kuribayashi’s wider orders. Even our most relatable (to Western eyes) character, one who eventually accepts the idea of surrender when all is lost, is still part of the same culture where placing your own needs and desires before the whole is considered deeply shameful.

Perhaps this thoughtful, non-judgemental exploration of Japanese culture is why Letters From Iwo Jima (unusually for American war films) did very strong business in Japan. Unlike the eventual death cult of Nazism (see the exceptional Downfall), where suicide came from bitter pride and fear, here it’s the ultimate, terrible-but-logical outcome for a mentality that turned a small island into a respected world power. It’s not presented as a freakish aberration or some sort of national genetic character flaw: it’s in many ways a sort of perverse nobility which has, like all noble systems, advocates who are broad-minded and empathetic and those who are prejudiced and fanatical. Letters From Iwo Jima’s strength is it never presents it as inherently evil, rather a choice with good and bad outcomes.

Eastwood’s superbly directed film, perhaps one of his finest, is full of such thoughtful, unjudgmental reflections on duty and service and what loyalties to something larger than ourselves drive us to do. Shot with an austere, haunting chill and superbly played by a faultless cast, Letters From Iwo Jima is an earnest, mature piece of work and a quite extraordinarily unique war film.

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.