Category: World War II

Darkest Hour (2017)

Gary Oldman, rather surprisingly, rather is Churchill during his Darkest Hour

Director: Joe Wright

Cast: Gary Oldman (Winston Churchill), Kristin Scott Thomas (Clementine Churchill), Lily James (Elizabeth Layton), Ben Mendelsohn (George VI), Stephen Dillane (Lord Halifax), Ronald Pickup (Neville Chamberlain), Samuel West (Anthony Eden), David Schofield (Clement Atlee), Malcolm Storry (General Ironside), Richard Lumsden (General Ismay), Joe Armstrong (John Evans), Adrian Rawlins (Air Chief Marshall Dowding), David Bamber (Vice-Admiral Ramsay)

One of my favourite ever TV series is Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years, a chronicle of Churchill’s time out of government (basically 1929-1939). It covers the political clashes between Churchill and his rivals brilliantly, as well as giving us a real feeling for Churchill’s own personality and flaws and featured a brilliant performance from Robert Hardy. Darkest Hour takes off almost where that series ends – and I think it might just be a spiritual sequel. And, for all its flaws, I might even grow too really like it.

Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour is a beautifully filmed, imaginatively shot retelling of the crucial first month of Churchill’s premiership. Wright uses a great device of flashing the date up (in an imposing screen-filling font) as each day progresses. Apart from brief moments, the action rarely leaves Whitehall, with the focus kept tightly on the politics at home. Will Churchill win over the war cabinet to continue the war, or not? It revolves around dialogue shot with tension and excitement, and is structured key Churchill speeches: each carrying all the emotional impact you could expect and beautifully performed, with goose-bump effect by Gary Oldman.

Because yes, this film’s one piece of genuine excellence, and what it is really going to be remembered for, is the brilliance of Oldman’s performance. This is one of those transformative performances where the actor disappears. Of course it’s helped by the make-up, but there is more to it than that. The voice, the mannerisms, movement, emotion – as a complete recreation of the man it’s just about perfect. Whatever the film’s flaws, Oldman nails it. Sure it’s larger than life – but so was Churchill.

Oldman’s Churchill is irascible, demanding and temperamental – but he’s also warm and humane. In one beautiful moment he conducts a conversation with an un-encouraging Roosevelt, where his features seems to shrivel and shrink with despair, while his voice keeps up the optimism. Moments of gloom hit home, but there is also humour (and Oldman is actually rather funny in the lead role). There’s moments of pain, guilt and depression – it’s terrific.

However it does mean some of the other actors scarcely get a look in. Kristin Scott Thomas in particular gets a truly thankless part, no less than four times having to counsel a depressed Churchill with variations on “You’re a difficult but great man and your whole life has been leading to this moment” speeches. Lily James actually gets a more interesting part as Churchill’s admiring secretary, getting the chance to be frightened, awed, amused and frustrated with the Prime Minister – and she does it very well, even if her part is a standard audience surrogate figure.

The characters are neatly divided in the film: they are either pro- or anti-Churchill. The “pro” characters largely get saddled with standing around admiringly around the great man (Samuel West gets particularly short-changed as Eden becomes Churchill’s yes man). The “anti” characters mutter in corridors about how unpredictable and dangerous he is, how he could wreck the country etc. etc.

To be fair to the film, it does at least treat the doubts of Halifax (Stephen Dillane – all clipped repression, he’s excellent) and Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup – serpentine and tactical, although Chamberlain’s hold over the Tory party was nowhere near as great as this film suggests) as legitimate concerns. It does weight the dice in favour of Churchill, and we don’t get enough time to fully understand the reasons why peace with Hitler might have seemed reasonable in 1940 (tricky to get across to a modern audience so aware of Hitler’s status as evil incarnate). But Halifax’s stance that it was better to cut your losses than fight on to destruction is at least treated sympathetically, rather than making him a spineless weasel (as others have done).

The film really comes to life with the conflict between the Halifax-Chamberlain alliance and a (largely alone) Churchill. The cabinet war room clashes have a fire, energy and sense of drama to them that a lot of the rest of the film doesn’t always have. It sometimes drags and gets lost in filling the time with “quirky” moments with Churchill. There is a bit too much domesticity that feels irrelevant when we know the fate of the nation is at stake.

But then this is a sentimental film. Not only is it in love with Churchill (we see some blemishes, but his air of perfection goes unpunctured), but it uses devices that feelas you are watching them like sentimental film devices. None more so than Churchill bunking down on a tube train to exchange encouraging words with regular people and for them to tearfully recite poetry at each other. In fact it’s a testament to Oldman that he largely gets this hopelessly fake-feeling scene working at all.

Wright’s film makes a point later of demonstrating that – reporting back to the Tory party the results of this conversation – Churchill uses the names of the people he met, but completely replaces their words with his own. But it still gets itself bogged down in this sentimentality – including a teary end caption on Churchill being voted out of office. Every scene with Churchill and Clementine has a similar chocolate box feel, as does a late scene with George VI (who seems to flip on a sixpence between pro and anti-Churchill – although Ben Mendholsen is very good in the role).

Darkest Hour is an extremely well-made film. It’s told with a lot of energy – and it has a simply brilliant lead performance. Joe Wright finds new and interesting ways to shoot things: there are some great shots which frame Churchill in strips of light surrounded by imposing darkness. But its not brilliant. It will move you – but that is largely because it recreates actual real-life, moving events (who can listen to Churchill without goosebumps?). But it’s given us one of the greatest Churchill performances and it’s worth it for that if nothing else. And, for all its flaws, and the safeness of its storytelling, I actually quite liked it – and I think I could like it more and more as I re-watch it.

Enemy at the Gates (2001)

Jude Law takes aim in wonky Stalingrad drama Enemy at the Gates

Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud

Cast: Jude Law (Vasily Zaytsev), Joseph Fiennes (Commisar Danilov), Rachel Weisz (Tania Chernova), Bob Hoskins (Nikita Khrushchev), Ed Harris (Major Erwin König), Ron Perlman (Koulikov), Eva Mattes (Mother Filipovva), Gabriel Marshall-Thomson (Sasha Filippov), Matthias Habich (General Friedrich Paulus)

The Second World War in film almost always focuses on the heroics of the Western Front, where the rights and wrongs are usually pretty clear (the Western powers are noble, the Nazis savage). So it’s different to set a film on the Eastern front – where the Second World War was arguably really won and lost, and where morality is much more complex. The Nazis are terrible, but Stalin’s Russia was no picnic either.

Stalingrad in 1942: Soviet tactics involve giving every other man a gun, and ordering the second man to follow his partner and take his gun when he is killed. Witnessing the sharpshooting skills of young soldier Vasily Zaytsev (Jude Law), political Commissar Danilov (Joseph Fiennes) decides to turn him into the romantic hero the Soviets need to help inspire them. He’s so successful in doing so that the Germans send their own expert sniper, Major König (Ed Harris), to find and kill Zaytsev. Meanwhile, the friendship between Danilov and Zaytsev becomes complicated when they both fall in love for the same woman, sharpshooter and German translator Tania Chernova (Rachel Weisz).

It’s quite something for a film to be denounced by both sides of the war it’s depicting: this probably means it’s doing something right, as it doesn’t deny the hellish atrocities carried out on both sides (even if many of these are implied). The real reason to be outraged is probably more to do with its general flatness and shoving of the great battle into the standard war-movie clichés. There are some attempts to suggest what we are seeing is a true story, but other than a man called Zaytsev existing, there is very little of truth on show. Instead we get a Hollywood view of Soviet Russia: where the characters we like are regular joes, while the ones we don’t are full-on Commie zealots.

The film starts well, with an extended sequence that follows Zaytsev and several other soldiers boarding boats, crossing the river, arriving in Stalingrad and being marched immediately into the front line. Half the men are killed – the fleeing remainder are swiftly machine gunned by their officers for cowardice. It brings back memories of Saving Private Ryan and, while not as good, gives the impression we are going to see a “horrors of war” film – which the film doesn’t turn into.

Instead we get an increasingly melodramatic plotline around love triangles and sniper duels that never really feels like Russian lives at the time. In fact, the film fails to capture any real sense of Soviet Russia, other than its dirt and ruthlessness. Danilov and Zaytsev celebrate their newfound fame with a sort of giddy laddishness that just doesn’t fit any Russian’s understanding of what being noticed in Soviet Russia would surely mean. When the film does try to sound Soviet it stumbles: there is a painful (unintentionally) funny moment when Zaytsev talks about his dream job to be working in a factory, because factory work seems so noble.

The love triangle also seems ripped from Mills and Boon. Not a lot of it rings true, with Danilov turning into some sort of jealous head-boy. The romance blossoming between Zaytsev and Tania can’t decide whether it’s two souls coming together, or whether it has the air of a “last romance” with death around the corner. So it’s either overblown and overplayed, or not given enough room to build. It doesn’t help that there are a number of strange choices – not least a sex scene where Rachel Weisz seems more uncomfortable and in pain than in the throes of passion.

Maybe it’s that none of the performances of the lead actors feels either particularly Russian or soldierly. Jude Law fails to convince as a man from peasant hardship. He’s also saddled himself with a wooden “peasant” accent that not only makes Zaytsev sound like a mockney chancer, but also sound like a worse actor than he is. Joseph Fiennes is more school prefect than Soviet Commissar. Rachel Weisz is the most natural of the three, but her character makes little real sense: sometimes she’s gung-ho, others she talks about wanting this war to end. None of these actors really brings the right charisma needed – in particular Law looks as overwhelmed by the events around him as Zaytsev claims to feel.

The film belongs to the sniper sequences, and the duel of wits that develops between Zaytsev and König. Ed Harris’ part is as limply written as the rest, but Harris has a movie star charisma the others lack, and suggests a great deal of reserved arrogance and professional coldness. He’s the best thing about the movie. Annaud shoots the slow-burn waiting of sniping with a tension – and the film rather bravely stresses König’s superiority time and time again. As the film zeroes in on these two men trying to outmatch each other, it feels like it’s about something – and also that it’s relieved to leave the war at large behind.

Because for a film set in the Eastern Front, this feels unnerved by there being right and wrong on both sides. It even feels squeamish about sniper shooting. After his initial display of skill, we literally don’t see any sniper work from Zaytsev again – the “cowardly” killing from a distance of regular German soldiers is handed out to other characters. Russians are sorted into good and bad, with the good showing they are “just like us” by quietly denouncing their government. König can’t just be a professional, but the film has to try and nudge him into being a cold-hearted killer. It’s a film about the complex morality of war, that wants to make it as simple as possible.

It’s still well-made, but you wish that more time had been directed towards the script, to give us a story that was slightly better and characters that felt a bit more real. James Horner supplies a decent score (interestingly it also shows how much of film music is re-used, as key refrains in this film are strongly reminiscent of Willowand Troy). But the lead actors are all miscast (Bob Hoskins isn’t much more convincing as a bulldog Khrushchev) and it feels like a film that’s running away from a complex series of issues to try and present something as close as possible to goodies vs. baddies. The War on the Eastern Front was a hugely complex thing: this film hardly scratches the surface.

Stalag 17 (1953)

William Holden is the untrusted fixer in Billy Wilder’s prison camp drama Stalag 17

Director: Billy Wilder

Cast: William Holden (JJ Sefton), Don Taylor (Lieutenant Dunbar), Otto Preminger (Colonel von Scherbach), Robert Strauss (Stanislas ‘Animal’ Kuzara), Harvey Lembeck (Harry Shapiro), Peter Graves (Price), Sig Rumann (Sgt Johann Sebastian Schulz), Neville Brand (Duke), Richard Erdman (Hoffy)

A sort of cross between The Great Escape and Colditz (but not as good as either), Stalag 17 is a relatively minor entry into Billy Wilder’s illustrious cannon: but that makes it more than good enough to be a stand-out movie in anybody else’s. Set in a German prisoner of war camp for captured American NCOs, it follows the hunt for a traitor leaking escape plans to the Germans. The suspicions of the other inmates quickly turn to camp fixer JJ Sefton (William Holden), a self-serving, cynical outsider, despite his protestations of innocence. When a saboteur and POW is betrayed to the Germans, Sefton decides he needs to locate the stool pigeon himself.

The main historical interest in Stalag 17 is William Holden’s Oscar-winning performance. Holden apparently walked out of the original Broadway production of the play, but such was his trust in Wilder’s judgement he agreed to play the substantially rewritten role. Just as well he did, as Holden’s drawling cynicism, air of bitterness and the marvellous impression he is able to give of a man of commitment and principle under the veneer of a self-serving egotist are perfect for it. Holden won the Oscar (he believed it was a consolation for his failure to win for Sunset Boulevard) – and co-incidentally gave the shortest acceptance speech ever (due to TV coverage rules), a simple “thank you.”

Holden’s character slowly dominates the narrative more and more, but is often shot on the margins of the film. Wilder shoots a film where the lead character is on the periphery of the action, with Holden on the edge of frames, or just being caught by the camera as it drifts towards him. He feels like a supporting character for a large chunk of the first half of the film, while Wilder focuses on the daily life and bonhomie of the camp: two things Sefton deliberately exiles himself from. But you keep coming back to him, and are always aware of what he is thinking and planning.

The focus on the atmosphere of the camp allows a number of fun scenes around the isolation of the men. There are joyful celebrations for Christmas (including tree decorations and a full dance in the barracks, with men eagerly grabbing each other for a whirl in a way you can’t imagine them doing back home). We get the games and in-jokes that keep them sane, the cheeking of the guards, and the obsessive interest in the women held in the Russian camp next door.

This also allows a number of colourful performances from a solid group of character actors. Robert Strauss was Oscar-nominated as the scruffy, Betty-Grable-obsessed “Animal”, and his comic antics provide much of the film’s humour. There are fine performances from Harvey Lembeck as his confidante (Lembeck and Strauss had both played the same roles in the stage production), while Peter Graves, Neville Brand and Richard Erdman contribute performances as very different POWs.

The film also deals with mob dynamics: the group turns on Sefton, it seems, because he dares to bet against an escape and, as a fixer, he has access to luxuries the rest of the group don’t have (and charges them to access). Throw in his distance and his happiness not to make friends and it’s clear why they suspect him. But that doesn’t make their brutal punishment of him (on no evidence) and their cruel ostracism any easier to watch. You can’t help suspecting that Wilder had more than half his mind on the McCarthy trials taking place at the time when he was filming this mob-justice film.

The film is also notable for making the Germans reasonably fully-formed characters. Sure, our two main characters are, to varying degrees, ruthless buffoons, but they are not vicious or cruel. Otto Preminger’s camp commandant is a puffed-up martinet who puts his boots on when calling a General merely so he can click the heels together (and immediately removes them when the call is complete). Sig Rumann’s barracks guard is a decent cove and bluff braggart, who actually runs a fairly efficient spy system with the traitor.

The film is partly a study of men under pressure and partly a mystery – obviously Sefton isn’t the traitor, and the film slowly reveals who is before an impressive sequence where we see the traitor in action planting a message. There is a noir-ish quality to this mystery element, and the film holds a balance fairly well between a war comedy and an adventure where lives really are at stake (it’s book-ended by characters being machine gunned by the Germans after all). It’s not the greatest war film ever, but it has more than enough going for it.

The Guns of Navarone (1961)

Gregory Peck leads one of the first men-on-a-mission films in The Guns of Nararone

Director: J. Lee Thompson

Cast: Gregory Peck (Captain Keith Mallory), David Niven (Corporal Miller), Anthony Quinn (Colonel Andrea Stavrou), Stanley Baker (Private “Butcher” Brown), Anthony Quayle (Major Roy Franklin), Irene Papas (Maria Pappadimos), Gia Scala (Anna), James Darren (Private Spyro Pappadimos), James Robertson Justice (Commodore Jensen), Richard Harris (Squadron Leader Barnsby), Bryan Forbes (Cohn), Allan Cuthbertson (Major Baker), Walter Gotell (Oberleutnant Meusel), George Mikell (Hauptstaumführer Sessler)

The Guns of Navarone is the archetypical “men on a mission” classic – it was the first major film to feature a team of specialists, all played by famous actors, going behind the lines to carry out some impossible task, leaving a trail of explosions and dead Nazis in their wake. Guns of Navarone was lavished with box-office success – and Oscar nominations, surprisingly – and although it’s a little too long, and a little weakly paced at times (as Thompson himself has admitted) it’s still got a cracking, bank holiday afternoon enjoyability about it. It’s not perfect, but honestly who could resist it?

In 1943, 2,000 British soldiers are stranded on the Greek island of Kheros. The Royal Navy plans to rescue them – but the way is blocked by two massive, radar controlled guns, in an impenetrable mountain base. The air force can’t take it out: so it’s up to Commando leader Major Roy Franklin (Anthony Quayle) to put together a team to do it. Recruiting mountaineer-turned-intelligence-agent Keith Mallory (Gregory Peck), explosives expert Miller (David Niven) and Greek-resistance leader Andrea Stavrou (who else but Anthony Quinn?), Franklin leads the team in. But when he is injured, the ruthless Mallory takes command – and leads the team in a perilous behind-the-lines raid.

I’d not seen Guns of the Navarone for a few years, and I’d forgotten what a brilliantly fun, boys-own-adventure thriller it is. I’d also forgotten what a lot of time is given early on into establishing what a team of bad-asses this group are. There seems to be no limit to their ruthless, knife wielding, gun running, cold-eyed killer bravery. And they hired a hell of a cast to play it as well – so damn good that you completely forget Peck, Niven, Quayle and Quinn are all just a little bit too over-the-hill for the derring-do they are called on to carry out.

Guns of Navarone brilliantly explains the mission aims, all the stakes and introduces each of the characters and their basic backstory, before the film basically gives us a series of action set-pieces – on a boat, at the coast, on a cliff, in a village, in a German cell, in Greek ruins, in a German base. It covers everything, and each scene is directed with real verve and increasing tension, with a simplicity to camera-work and editing that really lets the action breathe. The final sequence, waiting for the booby trap to explode among the guns, is a brilliantly done “rule of three” waiting game, with the tension building up each time.

The film is also rattling good fun, and gives each of its actors’ set-piece moments. Gregory Peck grounds the film perfectly as the increasingly ruthless Mallory, willing to sacrifice a number of pawns to achieve the target, but has a war weariness that still makes him sympathetic (as a side note, Peck’s German accent was so woeful all his German was dubbed). Niven plays Miller as a mixture of louche whiner, chippy middle-class man and natural-born troublemaker – and gets some knock-out speeches on the morality of war (Niven by the way nearly died after catching pneumonia during the boat wreck sequence).

Anthony Quinn had a monopoly on playing exotic roles at the time – from Mexicans to Arabs, from Gaugain to Zorba the Greek – so no great surprise he plays the Greek colonel here. He’s terrific though, a cold-eyed ruthless killer – and the sequence where he pretends to be a cowardly awkward fisherman is wonderful (not least for Stavrou’s reaction to Miller’s praise for his performance – a half shrug and a “so-so” hand gesture, one of my favourite ever “character” touches in the movies). Irene Papas is perfect as his female equivalent, while Anthony Quayle puts together another of his “decent army officer chaps” as boys-own adventurer Franklin. Baker and Darren don’t get huge amounts to do, but Baker does well with a “lost my taste for this killing malarkey” sub-plot.

Many of the character beats were so well-done they basically became archetypes for every “group on a mission” film since (the austere leader, the difficult whiner, the old-school traditionalist, the ruthless warrior, the maverick, the one who’s lost his nerve – and, uh, I guess James Darren is the “sexy” one). The actors play off each other superbly. There are also some great cameos – Robertson Justice is great as “the man in charge”, Walter Gotell very good as an archetypical “worthy adversary” German – there is even a slightly bizarre cameo from Richard Harris as an Aussie pilot (yup you read that right).

Navarone’s pace doesn’t always quite work – the gaps between the action sequences do lag. It takes nearly 45 minutes for our heroes to even get to Navarone. The film also can’t quite decide its stance on warfare. We get Miller’s passionate speeches on the pointlessness of missions when wars are always going to happen anyway. The unmasking of a traitor leads to a long debate on the morality of killing them or not. Several of the characters question the point and morality of war. But then, the film spends plenty of time on Alistair MacLean thriller beats: there is killing-a-plenty of German soldiers, gunned down with ruthless efficiency (not quite as many as Where Eagles Dare but pretty close!). There are small references to Greek villages paying a heavy price in retribution for the gang’s action – but these considerations never even slow them down, or make them stop to think.

Not that it really matters – this is a boy’s own action film, full of hard-as-nails actors grimly “doing what a man’s gotta do” throughout. And, despite being a little too long and aiming for a depth it doesn’t always follow through on, it’s brilliantly assembled, the action sequences are tightly directed, and the acting has a square-jawed confidence to it. Niven is pretty much perfect as the slightly dishevelled Miller, and the clashing relationship between him and Peck growing into respect, has fine bromance to it. Navarone is the first of its kind, and it’s still (and always will be) one of the best – really exciting, really thrilling, really damn good fun.

The Heroes of Telemark (1965)

Kirk Douglas runs rings around the Germans in The Heroes of Telemark

Director: Anthony Mann

Cast: Kirk Douglas (Dr Rolf Pedersen), Richard Harris (Knut Straud), Ulla Jacobsson (Anna Pedersen), Michael Redgrave (Uncle), David Weston (Arne), Roy Dotrice (Jensen), Anton Diffring (Major Frick), Ralph Michael (Nilssen), Eric Porter (Josef Terboven), Sebastian Breaks (Gunnar), John Golightly (Freddy), Alan Howard (Oli), Patrick Jordan (Henrik), William Marlowe (Claus), Brook Williams (Einar)

During the Second World War, Telemark in Norway was the main production factory for Heavy Water, a key component for the German nuclear programme. Norwegian commandoes were ordered to destroy the factory, which they did with a cunning plan. This film dramatizes the story – adding more guns and violence – but does at least make the lead characters Norwegian. Knut Straud (Richard Harris) is the leader of the resistance, Rolf Pedersen (Kirk Douglas) the professor who identifies what the factory is churning out. Parachuted back into Norway after secretly travelling to Britain to discuss issues with the allies, they start to plan a raid.

The Heroes of Telemark is sub-par boys-own action stuff, a sort of cross between Where Eagles Dare and The Guns of Navarone but nowhere near as good as either. Despite being crammed with derring-do, it’s strangely unmemorable, and although the stakes are really high, you never feel like you care. Everything in the film, bizarrely, feels a little bit easy. Our heroes are not particularly challenged (Nazi bigwig Terboven even berates his guards at the base for letting our heroes walk in and blow up the factory all while wearing British uniforms) but there isn’t any real price paid. The only heroes who bite the bullet are so heavily signposted for death, you actually spend most the film waiting for them to cop it.

Part of the problem is both Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris feel miscast in the lead roles. It’s also pretty clear (alleged) on-set tensions carried across into shooting – not only do the two characters not really seem to like each other, you don’t get any feeling of a growing bond between them as the film goes on. You end up not really caring about either of them – and since virtually everyone else on the team is hardly defined at all as a human being, that’s quite a big loss.

Douglas plays a bizarre professor of physics whose character varies wildly from scene to scene depending on the plot. Introduced making out with a student in a dark room, Pedersen initially denounces the boys-own heroics of the resistance. No sooner is a gun placed in his hand though, than he starts turning into a regular “ends justify the means” superman. Marry his new-found ruthlessness with his regular horn-dog attitude to women, and he’s a hard guy to like. I’m not sure a hero today would climb into bed with his estranged wife (a glamourous and pretty good Ulla Jaconssen) and then get shirty when she fails to put out. The part feels like an anti-hero role, reworked to give the Hollywood mega-star some action.

Richard Harris is similarly out-of-place as Knut Straud (a character based on the real commando who carried out the raid). He spends the whole film looking sullen and furious – he’s going for intense devotion to duty, but instead he looks like the whole thing is a tedious chore. Harris isn’t really anyone’s idea of an action star, and he’s an odd choice for the film altogether. For different reasons, just like Douglas, his stubborn touchiness makes him hard to like.

Following these rather disengaging figures means the derring-do constantly falls flat. It doesn’t help that Anthony Mann’s direction lacks thrust, drive and energy and never really gets the pulse going. Even during the most daring commando sequences, it never feels particularly thrilling. It’s a very easy film to drift away from, never managing to be as taut or tight as it should. The world-shattering stakes of the German nuclear programme are never clearly explained, or kept at the forefront. Chuck in some rather obvious doubles work (no way is Douglas that good a skier) and a few wonky model shots (the boulder Harris and co roll down the hill to try and take out Terboven’s car is all too clearly made of papier mache) and you’ve got a film that never gets going.

It also lacks an antagonist. Eric Porter has a couple of decent scenes here and there as Reichskommisar for Norway Josef Terboven, but he disappears from the film for ages. The Nazis end up as a faceless bunch of German soldiers, and are so easily overcome or fooled that they hardly count as challenges. As such, the clashes and arguments really come within the commando organisation itself, but since Harris and Douglas so clearly don’t like each other, even their brief reconciliation doesn’t ring that true.

The Heroes of Telemark will pass the time on a bank holiday afternoon. You get some decent performances – Roy Dotrice is very good as a possible quisling – and the odd good scene (Redgrave gets a good death scene) but it never really comes to life like it should. Mann’s direction is too plodding, and the pacing of the film so slack that it never becomes exciting or engaging. There are so many better movies on a similar theme you could be watching.

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

Misguided principles are brilliantly mixed with an epic scale in this stunning prison camp film

Director: David Lean

Cast: William Holden (Commander Shears), Alec Guinness (Lt Colonel Nicholson), Jack Hawkins (Major Warden), Sessue Hayakawa (Colonel Saito), James Donald (Major Clipton), Geoffrey Horne (Lt Joyce), André Morell (Colonel Green), Peter Williams (Captain Reeves), John Boxer (Major Hughes)

“Madness! Madness!”Are there many better final lines of films – or any delivered with more emphatic, meaningful gusto than James Donald manages at the close of this David Lean classic? The Bridge on the River Kwai is a constantly reliable, wonderfully assembled classic film, and a never-ending joy to watch. It’s not only a gripping epic, it’s also a wonderful psychological study of a series of men and the impact war has on their psyches. It’s all madness after all.

In 1943, Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) and his men arrive in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Burma. Camp Commander Colonel Saito (Sesse Hayakawa) has been tasked with building a bridge over the river Kwai, and demands officers and men go to work. When Nicholson adamantly refuses to allow officers to do manual labour (as per the Geneva Convention), he and Saito are set for a clash of wills, in which the iron-willed, rigid certainty of Nicholson eventually triumphs. However, once Nicholson is released from solitary confinement, he is so horrified by the decline in discipline of his men, he decides building the bridge is the perfect opportunity to rebuild morale and demonstrate British character=. So he sets upon building a better, stronger bridge than the Japanese had designed. Meanwhile, fellow prisoner American Commander Shears (William Holden) escapes from the camp back to Allied headquarters – only to be forced to return to the jungle on a commando raid to destroy the bridge, led by Major Warden (Jack Hawkins).

Wow this is one hell of a film. It was garlanded with seven Oscars, and totally deserves each and every one of them. Kwai is a deeply engaging, wonderfully structured epic that balances perfectly the sweep of Hollywood cinema with a keen understanding of the complexities of psychologies under pressure. Because like Clipton says, this is a film about madness. Virtually everyone in this is mad in some way. Lean brilliantly positions these psyches in a series of conflicts and clashes: we have Nicholson vs. Saito, Nicholson vs. Shears, Shears vs. Warden – in every relationship in the film there is conflict and disagreement. It makes for extraordinary drama.

Pile on top of that the fact that David Lean is a consummate film maker. Every moment of Kwai is a display of wondrous visual storytelling, from the arrival of the British in the prison camp – a triumph of defiance, pride and hubris – to the final attack on the bridge. The final sequence around the bridge is exquisitely assembled. The editing is flawless, the tension build-up (nearly 20 minutes!) never flags, but carefully establishes the who, what, why and where. The sequence itself builds up both events and problems with daunting skill. In between, every sequence of the film has some masterful work in it.

The heartbeat is Alec Guinness, simply marvellous as Nicholson. It’s hard to believe watching it that he was not the first choice – in a parallel universe Charles Laughton starred opposite Cary Grant’s Commander Shears! – because he is superb in this Oscar-winning role. Guinness’s Nicholson is mad. Not in the cuckoo way or a cruel or arrogant way. He’s blinded by the rule book, by the middle-class values of duty, order and dignity that govern his life. Mad because he takes a task from his Japanese enemies and does it better than they ever could have: “Must we work so well? Must we build them a better bridge than they could have built themselves?” Clipton asks of him. Too true. Nicholson’s response? That one day people will remember the bridge was built not by “a gang of slaves, but soldiers, British soldiers…even in captivity”.

So Nicholson doesn’t see it that way. It doesn’t match his narrow world view of a place for everything and everything in its place. Because he has no vision beyond his own immediate circumstances. The important thing for him is to build the bridge, because it’s his duty to keep his men together, and demonstrate British resolve. So it’s Nicholson who visits Clipton’s sick bay and gently questions the wounded men, encouraging them to go back to work on the bridge so it can be finished on time (they ironically march through the graveyard of the camp on the way). For Nicholson the bridge is everything – and Guinness’ eyes are full of rigid monomania (needless to say, by the end of the film Nicholson himself off-handedly informs Clipton with pride that the officers have volunteered to work on the bridge to make sure it will be finished before the deadline).

His manner contrasts fascinatingly with Sesse Hawakaya’s Colonel Saito. Saito, a bank manager type if ever you saw one, clearly struggles with holding his command together and to deliver the bridge as planned. He has the strength of office, but not the strength of character of Nicholson. Hawakaya plays a weak man – and it’s fascinating how Lean charts the shift in power from Saito to Nicholson. Nicholson stands for principle and simply cannot imagine backing down – and then, with a sense of certainty and natural authority that governs his life, swiftly takes over the entire planning of the bridge from Saito. Poor Saito is a broken, weakened man: and in his own form of madness, is left with Nicholson alone as a confidant (the two of them talk more to each other about their loneliness and uncertainties than they do anyone else – Nicholson in particular gets a marvellous speech about the sad transience of the soldier’s life – “it’s a good life, but still there are times…”).

The madness doesn’t stop there. Jack Hawkins’ Major Warden is as fanatical as Nicholson: the mission is everything. Hawkins is excellent, turning Warden into a sort of over-grown schoolboy, playing at soldiers but with an adolescent aggressive willingness to sacrifice the pieces for the greater good. For Warden, no life in the team is sacred (including his own), and everything must be about the target. Warden’s gung-ho, take-no-prisoners attitude, his lack of empathy for the lives of those around him, makes him as much of an insane danger as Nicholson, perhaps more so.

Holden’s more humane Shears is the counterbalance with these three lunatics. Of course, Shears is sucked even more into the madness than anyone else – who else would escape from a prison camp, only to be forced to head back into the jungle on a fool’s errand? Holden is damned impressive as the naturally anti-authoritarian Shears, a man who never seems to have seen a boss without questioning him, who recognises the insanity of the war around him but when push comes to shove throws himself into the mission he has been given.

He’s the big addition to the original source material – but it’s an idea so good that Pierre Boullé said he wished he had thought of it himself. Boullé won the screenplay Oscar, but the writers of the script were really the black-listed Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman. These two put together a superb script, and the structure contrasting Shears with Nicholson works perfectly. These two are mirror images, but never really antagonists. Their final meeting towards the end of the film has a poetic sadness about it. It adds a whole extra dimension to the film – while one storyline sees the bridge being built, a parallel one prepares for its destruction.

All these threads come together beautifully on the morning of the bridge’s opening, after a triumphant celebration by the prisoners on the completion of the bridge – a moment Nicholson describes to them as “turn[ing] defeat into victory”. He is of course both right and wrong – and the triumph of the film is that you can’t help but share Nicholson’s desire to save this bridge that we have seen so much work, effort and love go into constructing.

“Madness”. That’s how Clipton sees it – James Donald is by the way wonderful as the one sane man – and yes of course he’s right. It’s all part of what is a masterful film made by a master storyteller, beautifully filmed and edited. Alec Guinness gives a performance for the ages as stubborn, small-minded man whom we somehow still end up strangely admiring and respecting. Holden, Hawkins and Hayakara offer intelligent, engaging portrayals. The Bridge on the River Kwaiis a film that you can watch again and again. In fact you should, because Lean here marries an epic scale with a story that feels small, personal and deeply felt – that places the psychology of real people at the centre of an epic stage. It’s simply a classic.

A Bridge Too Far (1977)

Dirk Bogarde, Sean Connery, Ryan O’Neal and Gene Hackman are among the Generals aiming to go A Bridge Too Far

Director: Richard Attenborough

Cast: Dirk Bogarde (Lt-Gen Frederick “Boy” Browning), James Caan (Staff Sgt Eddie Dohun), Michael Caine (Lt-Col J.O.E. Vandeleur), Sean Connery (Maj Gen Roy Urguhart), Edward Fox (Lt Gen Brian Horrocks), Elliot Gould (Col Robert Stout), Gene Hackman (Maj Gen Stanislaw Sosabowski), Anthony Hopkins (Lt Col John Frost), Hardy Krüger (SS Maj Gen Karl Ludwig), Laurence Olivier (Dr. Jan Spaander), Ryan O’Neal (Brig Gen James Gavin), Robert Redford (Major Julian Cook), Maximilian Schell (SS Gen Wilhelm Bittrich), Liv Ullman (Kate ter Horst), Michael Byrne (Lt Col Giles Vandeleur), Denholm Elliott (RAF Officer), Jeremy Kemp (Briefing Officer), Wolfgang Preiss (Feldmarchall Gerd von Rundstedt), Stephen Moore (Maj Robert Steele)

You’ve got to love a good war film. In fact, there are few things more cinematic than the old-school, star laden Hollywood war film. A Bridge Too Far is for me one of the finest examples of this genre, and it’s a film I come back to time and time again. Is it perfect? No of course it isn’t – in fact I probably love this film more than some of the people actually in it do. But it’s a damn fine piece of big-screen, big-budget film-making, and it’s got a cast of stars. And more than perhaps any other film of this genre, it’s a film about how overwhelmingly awful and gut-wrenching war is. This is a film about a defeat – and not the sort of triumphant defeat that Dunkirk feels like. It’s just a gut-punch. The Allies threw the dice big time, and they lost.

The Battle of Arnhem was one of those “end the war by Christmas” plans. The brainchild of British war-hero Field Marshall Montgomery (noticeably absent from the film), Operation Market Garden was a lightning strike into the heart of the Ruhr to capture Germany’s industrial capability. This involved a series of paratrooper drops into towns in the Netherlands, culminating in Arnhem, to cross the Rhine. While the paratroopers seized key bridges, British Tank Division XXX Corp would power through, cross the bridges and into Germany. It was bold, daring and radical. It was a disaster. Arnhem, far from being undefended, was being used as a rest place for a Waffen-SS Panzer division. The British paratroopers found themselves not seizing a lightly defended bridge, but fighting a tank division with machine guns and limited supplies. Meanwhile XXX Corp’s progress became bogged down in traffic jams and higher than expected German resistance.

It’s quite something to make a war film about possibly the biggest military disaster on the Western Front during the Second World War. The entire plan is a misconceived tactical blunder, and the film never shies away from this, demonstrating time and again the numerous errors that led to it: from Generals ignoring reconnaissance that suggests this won’t be a cake walk, to paratroopers failing to seize bridges quickly, to tanks crawling down crowded roads, fighting every step of the way. Alongside all this, the film never loses track of the horrifying impact of war on both soldiers and civilians caught in the crossfire. It’s a huge budget, all-action, anti-war film.

Richard Attenborough is the perfect marshal for this film. He has the experience and understanding of scope to handle the action scenes. At the time, this film was possibly the most expensive film ever made. Not only that, it was independently funded – producer Joseph E. Levine thought the film was so important he pumped millions of pounds of his own money into it. The attention to detail is extraordinary – the film consulted nearly every single surviving commander from the battle on the script – and all the stops were pulled out creating the military features of the film.

This is of course particularly striking now as we know everything in the film is real – no special effects in those days. If you see it in the film, then you know that it was really there. In the sequence showing the planes taking off to deliver the paratroopers to their destinations, there were so many planes in the air that Attenborough could literally claim to command the world’s seventh largest air force. Every military blow of the battle is carefully reconstructed. The tactics are carefully explained and followed. Attenborough can shoot compelling action.

But what makes the film so good (for me anyway) is the way the heart-breaking horror of war never gets lost. In all this action, we are always shown the cost. Attenborough will frequently cut back to the after-effects – several times we hear wounded soldiers whimpering on smoke-filled, body-littered battlefields. Many acts of courage (on both sides) by individual soldiers result only in pointless, gut-wrenching deaths. Arnhem isn’t just damaged by the battle, it’s flattened. The impact on the civilian population is terrible – in a powerful sequence, we see characters we were introduced to earlier mercilessly caught in the crossfire of the German tanks. We return continually to locations increasingly shredded by weapons fire. More and more soldiers are wounded – some horrifically. Near the end, the remaining British paratroopers, encircled and surrendering, sing a deeply moving quiet rendition of Abide With Me. No one could come out of this wanting to go to war.

Attenborough’s humanity is key to the film’s success. It helps as well that he is a brilliant actor’s director. Want to dispel any doubt on the horrors of Arnhem –then train the camera on the Laurence Olivier’s tear-stained face as he drives through the destroyed streets. Want to understand the sacrifices and the courage? Well just let Anthony Hopkins – simply excellent as the commander of the only forces to reach the bridge at Arnhem – with calm, restrained Britishness request support and supplies late in the film as his men are butchered around him. It’s a film full of brilliant moments of acting like that, where Attenborough points the camera at them and lets them act.

The sequences around Arnhem and the British paratroopers there are the heart of the film. Sean Connery is terrific as Major General Roy Urquhart, commander of the British paratroopers. His growing frustration as events spiral far out of his control is a great contrast with his initial professional confidence. Gene Hackman, as commander of the Polish forces (slightly odd casting but good once you tune up to it), gets the role of the “one man talking sense” who can smell disaster early on, but works harder than anyone to get the plan to work. A number of the regular soldiers in Arnhem are faces the film returns to again and again – giving us people to relate to as their numbers are increasingly decimated by the savage, desperate combat. John Addison’s score also helps a huge amount with building the emotion in these scenes.

The Arnhem sequences are so good that the other sequences around the American paratroopers feel like they come from a slightly different movie. It doesn’t help that the likes of Elliot Gould are playing slightly clichéd “Brooklyn Yankee” types, chomping cigars and ribbing the stiff-upper-lip Brits. Ryan O’Neal as General Gavin is slightly dull. The XXX Corp material is a little dry (essentially driving up a road or waiting), although Edward Fox is superb (and BAFTA-winning) as their charismatic commander Lt Gen Brian Horrocks. Attenborough puts together at least one terrific set-piece tank battle on the road – but it’s not quite enough.

The two biggest American stars are also given the feel-good, up-beat material. James Caan gets the best part in what is effectively a stand-alone story of a Staff Sergeant going to impossible lengths to save the life of his Captain (Caan had his choice of part and chose well). Robert Redford is a little too starry (bizarrely in a film full of stars!) as a Major tasked to seize the vital bridge at Nijmagen via a daylight river-crossing. This sequence feels like it’s been put in the film to (a) give us something to cheer and (b) to allow an American victory for the box office. Of course, we need the biggest star in the world at the time to play the most straight-forward heroic part!

The film does have a tendency to shuffle its characters into “good” and “bad”. So after Redford seizes the bridge, the character sent to tell him that XXX Corp won’t be rushing across to Arnhem after all isn’t Caine’s Vandeleur, but a nameless Colonel played by Polanski’s villainous Ross from Macbeth himself, John Stride. The most sympathetic generals and commanders are all (coincidentally) the people who served as military advisors on the film.

On the other hand, the film ends up laying most of the “blame” on Dirk Bogarde’s Lt Gen Browning. Browning’s widow, Daphne du Maurier, threatened to sue the film-makers for the portrayal of Browning here (she got an apology). Browning is portrayed as the ultimate “non-boat rocker” – over-confident and arrogant, he disregards intelligence suggesting the Arnhem plan is dangerous, seems shocked and clueless once the scale of the disaster is revealed, and by the end of the film seems to be most interested in positioning himself as always opposed to the plan in the first place. Bogarde (the only actor in the film who actually served in Market Garden) was similarly angry when he saw the film – and he has a point. It’s grossly unfair.

It’s a problem with this film and it does annoy me. The parts not set in Arnhem are not as memorable or compelling as the rest. But huge chunks of the film are brilliant, and never fail to move or (sometimes) excite me. Its anti-war stance is striking. The acting from the cast is very good across the board – say what you like, cast every part with a star and you never get confused about who is who. Attenborough also draws great performances from the non-stars – Stephen Moore is a particular stand-out as a signals man unwilling to voice his doubts about the equipment (and who pays a heavy price).

I can watch A Bridge Too Far at any time. I always love it. It’s a film of great moments and performances. It carries real emotional weight. Attenborough is a very good director of actors, but also a skilled commander of scale. It’s a film that gets emotion in there. It’s a film that isn’t afraid to present a military disaster. It doesn’t demonise the Germans. Sure it plays goodies and baddies with the Allies, and parts of it to drag on a bit too much or deal with cliché. But at its best is the core of a great film. I love it. It’s a favourite. And always will be.

Their Finest (2016)

Gemma Arterton and Bill Nighy do their bit for the war effort by making movies in Their Finest

Director: Lone Scherfig

Cast: Gemma Arterton (Catrin Cole), Sam Claflin (Tom Buckley), Bill Nighy (Ambrose Hilliard), Jack Huston (Ellis Cole), Helen McCrory (Sophie Smith), Eddie Marsan (Sammy Smith), Jack Lacy (Carl Lundbeck), Rachael Stirling (Phyl Moore), Richard E Grant (Roger Swain), Paul Ritter (Raymond Parfitt), Henry Goodman (Gabriel Baker), Jeremy Irons (Secretary of War)

During World War Two, Catrin Cole (Gemma Arterton) is hired by the Ministry of Information to write dialogue for propaganda films – to be specific “the slop” (the women’s dialogue). She pitches the semi-true story of two young women who take a boat to Dunkirk to rescue soldiers, and is hired to work with Tom Buckley (Sam Claflin) to write a screenplay. Among the cast of this film is Ambrose Hillaird (Bill Nighy), an ageing matinee idol having trouble accepting his days of playing young heroes are behind him. Together they overcome initial difficulties to create a film that moves the nation.

Their Finest is a gently amiable piece of film-making, totally predictable but still rather entertaining for all that. You won’t exactly be gripped or compelled by it, but you certainly won’t feel cheated out of your time watching it. It doesn’t have much in the way of originality about it – and you can see most of its jokes and events coming a mile off – but it’s still got a certain charm and warmth about it. And it’s crammed full of some very fun “film-within-a-film” scenes, both seeing the film the team create and the work (and backstage politics) that go into making it. There are also some neat gags (and wry comments) about the casual sexism of the day – and the film (without dwelling on the issue) makes a number of heartwarming moments out of its lead character succeeding against the odds on her own merits.

It also has a couple of fine performances, not least from an engaging and bright Gemma Arterton, who brings a great deal of quiet depth and dignity to Catrin. Catrin has a sweet lack of self-confidence about her – a gentle doubt, that she must learn to overcome over the film. She makes an affecting and empathetic lead. It also helps that she has a great screwball comedy chemistry with Sam Claflin. Claflin’s part is far more conventional – the gruff man with the heart of gold – but he nails the part’s humanity and its comic grumpiness.

The film’s main weapon of entertainment is Bill Nighy, in a part almost certainly written for him so well does it match his strengths. Hilliard is just the sort of vain, pompous, arrogant preener that Nighy can play in his sleep – a man who needs to be flattered and praised into doing anything, who assumes when he first reads the script he’s being offered the role of the young hero not the drunk uncle. What Nighy does so well with parts like this, though, is bring them depth and pathos. Hilliard may be an egotist, but he’s gently comforting in tragedy and has a profound sadness and insecurity behind him about where his career and life is going. So, while he brings a lot of the film’s comedy, he’s also a large part of its heart, elements that emerge increasingly as the film progresses.

The sequences that follow the making of the film are very funny. Jack Lacy is wonderfully sweet and genuine as an actual war-hero, an American serving in the RAF, parachuted in by the Ministry of War to send a propaganda message to the USA. Lacy’s Carl is well-meaning and loves films (not least his hero worship of Hilliard) but a hopeless actor, who can’t help smiling at the camera after every line. It’s a neat indication of the film’s well-judged tone that he is never a butt: the crew work hard to improve him, he’s eager to learn, he’s completely lovely – and when a character does complain about the extra work he is causing, Henry Goodman’s Alexander Korda-ish producer simply states “he has done things none of us would be brave enough to do”.

Because there is a harder realism about this film. It doesn’t shy away from the dangers and brutality of war – there are bombings and people die. Some deaths are characters we know, others are on the edges of the story. “I’m a bit emotional today. My landlady was killed last night” one character states. Each of our lead characters encounters a dead body, or knows someone who has been killed. There is a genuine danger of obliteration or invasion just on the edges of the comedy. It’s a neat balance that the film keeps, between pathos and light comedy.

The film-within-a-film, The Nancy Starling, is a brilliant pastiche of 1940s British war films, instantly recognisable and affectionately amusing. But it’s also, when we finally see parts of the film, rather moving. It has a real emotional force to it – the film-makers achieve the difficult balance of giving us a pastiche we can chuckle at it, but also a pastiche that feels like it would genuinely move the people watching it in the film.

Their Finest’s main problem might be that partly because it’s so quietly unassuming and gentle, it is almost completely bogged down in predictability. Most of the character arcs can be seen coming a pile off – my wife and I were able to practically write the scenes ourselves as they happened. There is very little original here. Even the stories of actors’ pretensions and film-making disasters have a breezy air of familiarity about them – the sort of stuff we’ve seen in films about film-making hundreds of times before. In fact, what’s striking is that a film so predictable and familiar remains entertaining and endearing – which is surely some sort of testament to the acting and direction.

Their Finest is perfect for what it is: an entertaining, weekend-afternoon film that will pop a gentle smile on your face. There is nothing particularly deep or memorable about it beyond that. It has some fine performances, some good jokes and it will make you laugh. But will you remember much about it within a few hours? Probably not. Is it a film that you can imagine revisiting to discover new gems in it? Again probably not. Is it a film that will entertain you on a Sunday afternoon? Absolutely.

Churchill (2017)

Brian Cox does his very best Greatest Britain as Churchill

Director: Jonathan Teplitzky

Cast: Brian Cox (Winston Churchill), Miranda Richardson (Clementine Churchill), John Slattery (General Dwight D. Eisenhower), James Purefoy (King George VI), Ella Purnell (Helen Garrett), Richard Durden (Jan Smuts), Julian Wadham (Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery), Danny Webb (Field Marshall Alan Brooke), Jonathan Aris (Air Field Marshall Trafford Leigh-Mallory)

Someone should open a club: The Churchill Club. Every actor who’s played the Great Man gets instant membership. President the late Robert Hardy (seven times!). Other members? You name it: Finney, Gambon, Burton, Spall, Gleeson, Russell Beale, West, Hoskins… Think of a shorter, slightly rotund British character actor and inevitably they’ve had a go. Even the decidedly non-rotund, non-short, non-British John Lithgow aced the role in Netflix’s The Crown. With Gary Oldman also making his pitch this year in Darkest Hour, this film sees renowned character actor Brian Cox join the club.

1944. Its three days before D-Day and Winston Churchill (Brian Cox) is getting cold feet. Haunted by memories of Gallipoli, he fears that the attack on Northern France will lead to disaster and oceans of blood. Against the advice of his Generals Montgomery (Julian Wadham) and Brooke (Danny Webb), he attempts to push General Eisenhower (John Slattery) to change the plans. As depression takes its grip on him, only his wife Clementine (Miranda Richardson) can get through to him.

Churchill is a bit of a mess. It’s pretty well acted but highly televisual, shot with a self-conscious flourish that only emphasises its micro-budget. Teplitzky is in love with the cross-fade (or even worse the half fade) – constantly cutting from place to place for brief moments in the middle of scenes, often for lingering shots of actors staring out to sea or walking through fields. The action is often framed oddly, in long shot with full bodies in shot framed between ground and sky. Other scenes are filmed flatly – when Montgomery addresses his army, no amount of slow pans can hide that it consists of about 20 men.

On top of that, every single scene is scored within an inch of its bloody life. Now I love the power of film music, but this goes too far. The score is bland, predictable and unimaginative and just not that interesting to listen to. When it’s dropped heavy-handedly on top of every single scene it makes you want to scream. It’s also often completely misjudged or inappropriate – as gentle romantic piano swells during a key discussion between Churchill and the King, you almost expect them to kiss.

That’s before we get started on the script, which is instantly forgettable. Alex von Tunkleman wrote a long running column in the Guardian on historical accuracy (or not) in films. Talk about a hostage to fortune, when you try to write your own film… I’ll go into historical issues in a bit, but there are lots of little things that feel wrong from Smuts (Deputy PM Of South Africa!) following Churchill around like some sort of valet too Montgomery addressing the Prime Minister to his face as “Churchill”. Stuff that just doesn’t feel quite right. The script also relies on a fictional “young secretary” who eventually speaks truth to the great man and wins his respect. Von Tunkleman is no writer of snappy dialogue, the film too often feeling like a wonky history lesson than a drama.

Historically the film does explore a different side of Churchill – enough to ruffle the feathers of the millions of Churchill fans out there. It focuses on his depression and self-doubt, within the framework of a period when he was starting to become sidelined by America. It also focuses on his little known opposition (certainly initially) to D-Day (he favoured a second front opened in Europe’s “soft underbelly” of Italy) – although it certainly expands this last-minute opposition for dramatic effect. I’m pretty sure he was on board by this point (however initially reluctant)!

What the film looks like it might do (but never quite does) is really explore some of Churchill’s laws and vulnerabilities – to look at the negatives and see how overcoming (or dealing with these) made him a great man. It touches heavily on Churchill’s depression – the “black dog” – with a desperately worried Churchill retiring to his bed to despair, praying for bad weather to prevent the landing and bawling out his secretary. Churchill is frequently wrong or mistaken, and the film captures much of the frustration his generals had with this talented amateur. It also isn’t afraid to show that, with American muscle driving the war, Churchill was becoming more of a mascot than a major orchestrator of allied strategy.

It’s a shaded portrait, but the film is eventually seduced by Churchill’s magnestism – a King’s Speech style final radio broadcast is all swelling regard, and a coda of Churchill waving his hat on a beach towards France hammers home his legendary status – miles away from its careful look at his growing irrelevance (and his concerns about this) early in the film. For all we have characters constantly stressing to Churchill his time is passing, the film can’t help finishing with a flourish that hammers home his centrality.

Churchill is flat and unimaginative but it does have an energetic, engaging performance from Brian Cox. While not in the first rank of Churchills, he captures the charisma, without slavishly imitating the famous voice. His Churchill, with his depression and doubt, also feels different: a slightly counter-establishment actor like Cox fits nicely with this. It’s an assured, charismatic performance hampered by the material. The rest of the cast feed off scraps though Miranda Richardson is assured as a twinkly level-headed Clementine. Richard Durden also deserves mention as gruffly supportive Smuts, as does James Purefoy as a gentle George VI.

Churchill means well – but fails. It’s aiming to question some of the reverence we have for the past, but ends up falling between stools, in the end too in love with the myth, but too critical to please the die hards. Flatly filmed and woodenly written, too many scenes fade from memory too quickly. Brian Cox (and Winston) deserved better.

Dunkirk (2017)

Harry Styles, Aneurin Barnard and Fionn Whitehead are three ordinary soldiers trying to get home in Christopher Nolan’s epic Dunkirk

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Fionn Whitehead (Tommy), Tom Glynn-Carney (Peter Dawson), Jack Lowden (Collins), Harry Styles (Alex), Aneurin Barnard (Gibson), James D’Arcy (Colonel Winnant), Barry Keoghan (George Mills), Kenneth Branagh (Commander Bolton), Cillian Murphy (Shivering Soldier), Mark Rylance (Mr Dawson), Tom Hardy (Farrier)

“We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations. But there was a victory inside this deliverance, which should be noted.” – Winston Churchill

The evacuation of Dunkirk is a very British triumph. Beaten and encircled by the Germans, British forces were stranded in a small pocket around Dunkirk. The country looked certain to lose almost 400,000 men to death or imprisonment – the core of its professional army. The fact that almost 340,000 soldiers were evacuated was more than a triumph: it was almost a miracle. Christopher Nolan’s epic new film brings the triumph and adversity of this campaign to the big screen.

The action unfolds over a week around the evacuation of Dunkirk. On the beach Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), Gibson (Aneurin Barnard) and Alex (Harry Styles) are desperate to escape the chaos on the beach, where the evacuation is being managed from the one standing pier by Commander Bolton (Kenneth Branagh). On the sea, Mr Dawson (Mark Rylance) and his son Tom (Peter Dawson) head to Dunkirk in their small pleasure boat to help with the evacuation, picking up a traumatised soldier on the way (Cillian Murphy). In the air, Farrier (Tom Hardy) and Collins (Jack Lowden) fly a one-hour mission over Dunkirk to provide air support to the stranded soldiers.

As a director, Nolan’s calling cards are playing with narrative forms and timelines, while allowing personal stories play out on extremely grand canvases. Dunkirk feels like a summation of some kind of his career: its multi-layered timelines are gracefully and intelligently threaded together, and while the canvas is enormous, the human stories don’t get lost. The human interest running through the film is particularly impressive, as there is so little dialogue. It’s pretty close to “experience cinema” – it throws the audience into an immersive explosion of events, giving as much of an impression as it’s possible to give of the claustrophobia, tension and terror of being trapped on that beach.

The film-making is impeccable in creating this overbearing feeling. Hans Zimmer’s score thunders over the film, bearing down with a constant pressure and making excellent use of metronome ticking to keep hammering home the time pressure. Nolan brilliantly inverts scale in his filming to create a sense of claustrophobia – we constantly see sweeping shots of but the scale of our surroundings only forces home the seeming impossibility of what the British are trying to do. Individual soldiers seem tiny – how can one man possibly have a chance of escaping? It’s a brilliant mixture of sound and imagery to make the large seem small, the epic seem entrapping.

What Nolan does really well in this grand scale is to create a series of “ordinary soldier” characters. Despite the fact that we learn virtually nothing about them, these characters feel human and desperate. Again, they are such small, ordinary Everyman cogs in the giant machine of the army, that they become hugely relatable. It’s a hugely neat trick by Nolan, another brilliant inversion – just as he turns epic to claustrophobic, he turns ciphers into characters.

Recognising the need for balance between the overbearing impact of the Dunkirk beach sequences, the film allows a mix of story-telling and character types in its other two plotlines. So Mark Rylance’s boat captain voices much of the film’s humanitarianism, in a sequence that plays like a chamber piece – four people discussing duty and the impact of war in a confined space. Meanwhile Tom Hardy’s Spitfire pilot carries more of the traditional “war film” man-on-a-mission dynamics, engaging in a series of dog fights in the sky. Interweaving these stories offers not only relief to the audience, but also narrative contrast.

The interwoven storylines are also brilliantly done since they all take place in very different timespans. The plot at “the Mole” takes place over a week, “the sea” in one day, and “the sky” in one hour. Each of these timelines interlocks and unfolds in the film simultaneously, and characters move at points from one timeline to another.

Okay, writing it down, it sounds impossibly confusing and difficult to follow right? Who could keep track of all that? But the film is so brilliantly assembled that it always make perfect sense. Nolan uses several key markers – a boat, the fate of certain characters – to constantly allow us to see where we are in the story’s timeline. So we understand when we have moved from one timeline to another when we see a ship still on the beach that we’ve seen sinking elsewhere. This also increases the tension – we know at points what will happen before the characters do, because we’ve already seen the after-effects. Again, put it into words it sounds wanky and difficult to follow, but it really isn’t – and the film is put together with such confidence that it never feels the need to show off its narrative gymnastics. Nolan is confident enough to be clever without drawing our attention to it – a very difficult trick to pull off.

All this forceful story telling never prevents the story from also being at many points immensely moving and stirring. The arrival of the boats at Dunkirk is a genuine “lump in the throat” moment. The simple decency of Rylance’s boat captain gives a low-key impression of a very British sort of heroism, of quietly doing one’s duty while valuing every life and wearing your own grief lightly.

The film’s more action-based sequences are equally stirring and moving, because Nolan brilliantly establishes character with only a few brief notes. It’s made clear early on that Hardy’s pilot has only a limited fuel supply: every second he stays above Dunkirk protecting the men and ships below, he reduces his chances of getting home. It’s another sort of heroic self-sacrifice, and in a film that generally doesn’t shy away from showing the deadly consequences of war, Nolan is happy to give us some more traditional, fist-pumping heroics.

Nolan gets the maximum emotion from the more dialogue-heavy parts by hiring some terrific actors: Rylance, as mentioned is superb, and Cillian Murphy is very good as a shell shocked captain. Kenneth Branagh is perfect for conveying the weight of responsibility on the shoulders of the naval commander in charge of the evacuation. And elsewhere, Whitehead, Bernard and Styles all invest their ordinary Tommies with a great deal of emotion and empathy.

Dunkirk is a marvel of cinematic technique and accomplishment, which brings enough moral and emotional force to the drama to keep you engaged in the plights of its characters. You can marvel at the film making tour-de-force of its executions, but you never feel disengaged from it. It’s a marvellous film.