Tag: World War Two

Reach for the Sky (1956)

Kenneth More fights disabilities and the Gerries in Reach for the Sky

Director: Lewis Gilbert

Cast: Kenneth More (Douglas Bader), Muriel Pavlow (Thelma Bader), Lyndon Brook (Johnny Sanderson), Lee Patterson (Stan Turner), Alexander Knox (Dr Leonard Joyce), Dorothy Alison (Nurse Brace), Michael Warre (Harry Day), Sydney Tafler (Robert Desoutter)

There are few stories of the Battle of Britain that captured the public imagination than Douglas Bader, fighter pilot ace whose exploits in the battle – and later in Nazi captivity – were all the more extraordinary because he had no legs. It’s one of the best examples around of good old fashioned British pluck helping overcome something – and Bader is without doubt a stirring hero, whose inspiration was so great he still frequently pops up in longlists of Greatest Ever Brits.

At least part of that continued inspiration is probably connected to this film. In fact Bader himself said his own public persona had been almost completely consumed in the public perception by Kenneth More’s performance of him. Needless to say Bader’s foul mouthed real personality (which left the briefing room littered with f-bombs) and abrasive difficultness (he refused to watch the film for almost ten years after a trivial dispute during its making about whether he would be allowed to double for More in long shots) was largely forgotten.

Indeed, the real Bader is washed away in Reach for the Sky by Kenneth More at his most charming, rogeuish and light. More (by his own admission) was not the actor with the greatest range in the world, but he was perfect for the sort of maverick, plucky, never-say-die Brit Bader was presented as in the film. Reach for the Sky ticks all the boxes of the events in Bader’s life as you might expect. From initial accident, to learning to walk again, to getting back in the sky, More plays it all with a brash bonhomie and British character that makes Bader charming and engaging – rather than the difficult egotist he reportedly was in real life. So much so that you kind of forget that Bader’s initial accident is largely caused by his own arrogance and stupidity attempting a dangerous manoeuvre to show off to a range of new pilots.

But then that’s because Bader’s ruthless determination to get back in the sky is inspiring. Reach for the Sky isn’t the film that’s going to make you question anything to do with the war or the dangers or costs of the work we do. Putting it simply, this is practically an advert for the British war effort made ten years after the war finished. It actually feels a bit odd that this film hit the cinemas and because a smash hit in the same year as Suez showed Brits that all the Empire-first, Britannia rules the wavesness the film celebrates was a pile of outdated guff.

But that isn’t to say that what that this film tries to do, it does badly. It lacks the sense of narrative adventure as stuff like, say, The Dam Busters or the importance of working together like Ice Cold in Alex or the bitter cost of war like The Cruel Sea. But as a portrait of a maverick doing his own thing and keeping the British end up its pretty much bang on. There isn’t really room for any other characters in the film’s narrative. It’s nominally narrated by a training colleague of Bader, but he’s barely a presence – the film zeroes in on Bader alone.

It makes for some decent scenes and there is a fair bit of inspirational feeling from watching Bader persevere – while never losing his temper – with walking again or taking up golf with a bullish determination. More’s Bader never shows a flash of anger or bitterness at things that have happened to him, instead carrying on with a jolly “Britain can take it” matey-ness. It makes him an entertaining person to follow around, even if the film itself isn’t particularly dramatic and offers a fairly safe version of an age-old “overcoming all odds” plot. Certainly enough to explain the films continued popularity and lifespan on Sunday afternoon TV.

And it touches a nerve because, even if he was a fully paid up member of the awkward squad in real-life, what Bader did – and the force of personality required to do it – were extraordinary, the sort of thing only 1 in a hundred could even consider doing. To not only walk again having lost both legs, but to fly – and to become a decorated war hero – is way beyond (thankfully!) the imagining of almost everyone watching the film. And, for all the weaknesses of the film, you can’t ignore or disregard the fact that Bader is an inspiration. More is excellent in a lead role tailored completely to his strengths, and the film has a charming boys-own adventure feel to it. It’s not a smart film, but it’s a crowd pleaser and nothing wrong with that.

The Imitation Game (2014)

Benedict Cumberbatch saves the world in smug, empty mess The Imitation Game

Director: Morten Tyldum

Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch (Alan Turing), Keira Knightley (Joan Clarke), Matthew Goode (Hugh Alexander), Rory Kinnear (Detective Nock), Allen Leech (John Cairncross), Matthew Beard (Peter Hilton), Charles Dance (Commander Alastair Dennison), Mark Strong (Maj General Stewart Menzies)

“Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine”. If there is anything that captures the smug self-satisfaction of this ludicrously pleased-with-itself film, it’s that convoluted phrase, with which the film is so pleased that it is repeated no fewer than four times. What does it mean really? Nothing of course, it carries all the meaning of a fortune cookie. Turing is certainly someone whom you could expect something of, since the film is at pains from the start to demonstrate he is a maths prodigy and a genius. But then that would spoil the romance of the film suggesting that because Turing is socially maladjusted, he is somehow unlikely to achieve something – or that achieving something would be even more special having overcome the “disability” of his personality.

Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) is under police suspicion in 1951 after a mysterious break-in at his Manchester home. A keen detective (Rory Kinnear) suspects he may be a Russian agent – why else does he have no military record? But we know different, as flashbacks show Turing working at Bletchley Park on the cracking of the German cipher machine Enigma. Working with the support of an MI6 officer (Mark Strong), Turing has to win the trust of his team – with the support of best friend and maths genius Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) – to build a ground-breaking computer that could crack the impossible code. But back in 1951, Turing is in trouble: he’s gay and that’s a crime in post-war Britain.

Now, Turing’s personality in this film. In real life, Turing was an eccentric, but perfectly capable of functioning perfectly normally in society. That’s not dramatic enough for the film, so Turing is reimagined as someone practically afflicted by Aspergers syndrome, incapable of understanding or relating to people without severe effort and prompting. Of course this is really there to introduce conflict – first with his team (who need to be won round to loving the old eccentric genius), secondly with his boss (who can’t stand his inability to fit in) and thirdly with the police (who can use it to write him off). It’s a film-disability for a character to overcome, another puffed up triumph that we can celebrate, while at the same time pat ourselves on the back because this is a victory for those “not normal”. But it’s probably bollocks.

But then that fits in rather nicely with the whole film, which is more or less probably bollocks from start to finish. The film of course can’t dramatise maths or computing very well, so it throws us all sorts of feeble clichés from tired old film genres instead. Charles Dance plays a reimagined Denniston (in real life a cryptographer) as a standard obstructive boss who all but shrieks “you’re off the case Turing!” at the one-hour mark. The key moment of inspiration of course comes from flirty pub conversation with a charming secretary. Running around and frantic throwing of papers takes the place of all that boring maths.

The film can’t resist any level of dramatic cliché. When a member of the code-breaking team mentions in passing “I have a brother in the navy you know”, as sure as eggs is eggs you can bet the team will decipher a message that could save his life but will be forced to make A Terrible Choice. Of course even this picture of a small code-breaking team making the calls themselves over which messages to act on is nonsense – it’s a decision that would be so far above their pay grade, they should be taking oxygen just thinking about it. But in this bonkers version of the universe, Turing himself makes the call to keep the initial breaking of the code a secret, and the government happily allows him alone to make the call about which codes to act on. Oh for goodness sake, spare me.

But then this is a film that wants to turn Turing into the man who won the war single-handed. While Turing was one of the key figures who made the breakthrough, this was a massive team effort, not one man’s inspiration, and reducing the victory of the war down to one (film cliché) difficult genius is the same old ripe nonsense we’ve seen many, many times before. The film tries to pretend that Bletchley Park and the breaking of Enigma, and Turing himself, is an unknown story – when it’s been pretty well-known since it was announced by the Government in the 1980s.

The film is rubbish, but it’s also gutless. Of course “fifth man” John Cairncross is part of the team – and of course Turing discovers he is a spy. (The reveal of course is due to the same old tedious movie cliché of “I found a book on his desk that was the key book he used for the code”.) And then in a moment of stunning tastelessness, Cairncross blackmails Turing into keeping his mouth shut which he agrees to do – an action that, if it had ever happened in real life, would have been an appalling moment of treachery from Turing, and reinforces all the suspicions of the time that homosexuals couldn’t be trusted.

Ah yes, homosexuality. This film is very, very, very proud of its crusading actions to expose the cruel treatment of Turing for his homosexuality. At the same time, the film is of course way too gutless to even begin to show Turing doing anything actually gay (he doesn’t even so much as hold another man’s hand) during the film. The one genuine moment of love the character is allowed to express, is in the form of a crush on a schoolfriend. (The film substitutes renaming Turing’s machine “Victory” after this school friend “Christopher”, the film keen to try and plug the gap of this film featuring virtually no LGBTQ content at all). But the film preaches intensly and proudly about the equal rights of homosexuality, while veering away with squeamishness from putting anything remotely homosexual on the screen.

The shoddy writing, over-written and self-important, is matched up with Morten Tyldum’s flat, “prestige” film-making that reduces everything to a chocolate box. The film does have some acting beyond what it deserves. Benedict Cumberbatch is good as Turing, although his performance is a remix of some of his greatest hits from past projects, from Hawking to Sherlock, and you feel hardly it’s a stretch for him – even if he plays with it real, and genuine, emotional commitment. Keira Knightley’s cut-glass accent is practically a cliché, but this is one of her best performances with real warmth and empathy. Most of the rest of the cast though are serviceable at best.

“Serviceable”, however, is still better than the film itself, which is a cliché-ridden, gutless, plodding and highly average pile of nothing at all – a totally over-hyped, over-promoted and completely empty film that is about a zillion times less interesting, brave or revealing than Hugh Whitemore’s 1980s play Breaking the Code. Not worth your time.

The Book Thief (2013)

Sophie Nelisse is The Book Thief in this worthy, dull adaptation

Director: Brian Percival

Cast: Geoffrey Rush (Hans Hubermann), Sophie Nélisse (Liesel Meminger), Emily Watson (Rosa Hubermann), Nico Liersch (Rudy Steiner), Ben Schnetzer (Max Vanderberg), Heike Makatsch (Liesel’s mother), Barbara Auer (Ilsa Hermann), Roger Allam (Death)

Every year you get prestigious film versions of novels that have soared up the bestseller lists. Some of these are good or even great films. Other are so lifeless, listless and lacking in spirit they leave you wondering what on earth people got so fussed about the original for. That’s the case here with The Book Thief.

In late 1930s Munich, young Liesel (Sophie Nélisse) is fostered with a local decorator Hans (Geoffrey Rush) and his wife Rosa (Emily Watson). Liesel has a fascination with books – despite not being able to read and write – and soon Hans is teaching her literacy. Liesel has a compulsion to “borrow” books – first from a burning pile of Nazi forbidden tomes, then from the library of the wife of the local mayor. But it’s dangerous to draw too much attention to the family, particularly when they are hiding a young Jewish man, Max (Ben Schnetzer).

I’ve not read The Book Thief. I can’t say that I feel the need to dash out and do so after this bland, middle of the road picture that makes Fascist Germany seem very picturesque. The film largely fails, like so many films before it, to translate the joy of reading into a visual language so the whole “book thief” concept of the title quickly gets pushed to the margins in favour of a series of episodic events based around Nazi Germany and Second World War tropes that already feel a bit tired.

Percival’s award-baiting film doesn’t seem like it wants to bring (or is capable of bringing) something unique or interesting to the setting, instead going through the motions as prettily as possible. And the film does look great, I will give it that. It also sounds pretty damn good, not least through a playful and rich score from John Williams (his first original score for a non-Spielberg film for decades). But it never really gets anything special from the content. In fact, that very chocolate-box beauty of the film seems to run contrary to the setting of Nazi Germany. The awards-friendly beauty envelops the film like treacle.

The book was written from the prospective of Death, but, the film seems to drop this unique aspect as soon as it possibly can. Again, it’s a sign that the film cannot reproduce what worked in the book – by stripping out its most unique and interesting point, it makes the film feel as generic as it possibly can. Roger Allam is a wonderful choice as the richly voiced narrator – but he’s so rarely used in the film that when Death talks about how fascinating he found Liesel you are simply left wondering why.

In fact that why is a real problem with the film – it’s what you’ll be asking all the way through. Why? Why is anything really happening? Why is Death telling us how different and striking this story is when everything we see in the film feels pretty familiar? What is the point of this film or the message it is trying to give us? For a film that tackles war, fascism, persecution of the Jews, and childhood innocence, it seems empty all the time.

And that’s the problem with the film. It’s all about the pretty presentation. The characters speak with forced German accents that make it feel even more like a pretty Hollywood Golden Age film. (By the way the bad Germans, like the Nazis, they speak only in German. Make of that what you will.) The acting is pretty good, Sophie Nélisse is a great find as the heroine. But there is nothing special about it at all. It’s seemingly made entirely as a prestige product for potentially winning Oscars. Any of the depths of uniqueness of the book seems to have been shaved off in service of that, and we’ve been left with a chocolate box that feels like it’s lacking the sweet richness you’d expect to find in it.

Patton (1970)

George C Scott triumphs as Patton in this excellent World War Two biopic

Director: Franklin J Schaffner

Cast: George C Scott (General George S Patton), Karl Malden (General Omar Bradley), Michael Bates (General Bernard Montgomery), Edward Binns (Lt General Walter Bedell Smith), Lawrence Dobkin (Colonel Gaston Bell), John Doucette (General Lucian Truscott), James Edwards (Sgt William Meeks), Frank Latimore (Lt Colonel Henry Davenport), Richard Münch (General Alfred Jodl), Morgan Paull (Captain Richard Jenson), Siegfriend Rauch (Captain Oskar Steiger), Paul Stevens (Lt Colonel Charles Codman), Karl Michael Vogler (Field Marshall Erwin Rommel), Peter Barkworth (Colonel John Welkin)

Patton was garlanded with eight Academy Awards in 1970, but rarely seems to get a mention when people list landmark best pictures. This is unfair, as Patton is a marvellous, intelligent, professional piece of film-making that rewards re-viewing: not least because, in George C Scott, it has one of those performances you simply must see, an extraordinary melding of actor and real man to such a great extent many people can’t believe they are seeing the real thing when watching newsreel footage of the actual Patton.

Patton is nominally a war film, but it’s actually an intriguing character piece. It follows the career of General George S Patton (George C Scott) during the course of the Second World War. Patton was a soldier’s soldier, a dyed-in-the-wool military man with a warrior’s instinct and a poet’s soul. The sort of man who berated men for not wearing proper uniform, then astounded them with thoughtful reflections on classical history. The film charts his command in Africa against Rommel, the invasion with Sicily (and feud with British counterpart Bernard Montgomery), his benching after striking a soldier suffering from shellshock in a military hospital, and his command of the Third Army during the Normandy invasion, including his pivotal role in the Battle of the Bulge.

With a script co-written by Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund North (later president of the Screenwriter’s Guild), Patton was a warts-and-all portrait of one of America’s most famous generals that came out amidst the country’s growing disillusionment with Vietnam. It was embraced by both sides of the argument because it very skilfully walks a tight-rope: for the hawks, there is enough of the “if we had more like him …” stance. For the doves, the film doesn’t shy away from Patton’s egomania, lack of tact and love of war (he even strongly advocates immediately turning on Russia – ‘cos they’ve already got all the men in Europe anyway – which you can interpret as visionary or insane depending on which side of the fence you are on).

At the centre of everything, George C Scott is quite simply a force of nature as Patton – I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this is surely one of the greatest Best Actor winning performances ever. Patton is in nearly every scene, and even the one’s he’s not in he’s the subject of every conversation, and Scott totally dominates the movie. You can’t put your finger on it, but he quite simply becomes Patton. It’s extraordinary, but the actor totally disappears and you feel you are watching some remarkable act of resurrection (fitting since Patton had a profound belief in reincarnation).

Scott’s Patton rages, he shouts, he goes into fits of childish egomania – but he’s also sensitive, intelligent and poetic. He can write a touching letter to the bereaved mother of his adjutant, expressing his sorrow, but also write how tragic it is that he will miss the wars to come. Scott is ramrod in his posture, and more than embraces the theatricality of Patton himself – when an adjutant tells the General sometimes his soldiers don’t know if he’s joking or not, the General softly replies “It’s not important for them to know. It’s important for me to know”.

It’s easy to eulogise over Scott at the expense of all else – but the film is so focused on Patton that he is intrinsically linked with the film’s success. The film is episodic, but every scene tells us something different about the man. Although since the film starts with one of the greatest opening scenes in movie history, we feel like we pretty much know him from the start.

It opens with an enormous American flag, in front of which Patton emerges in full dress uniform to encourage new soldiers to do their duty and, most of all, to “remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” Scott famously refused to do this scene when told it would open the picture, as he felt nothing else in his performance could emerge from its shadow (they eventually told him it would go later in the film – no word on how he responded when he first saw the film!).

In a nut shell you get the whole movie. Is the giant American flag ironic or does the film really mean it? Patton is both strangely terrifying and also awe-inspiring, charisma, determination and force seeping from every pore of his body. Scott nails every detail of this speech, just as he nails every other part of the performance, while the camera work reinforces his mythic status (or his hubris depending on where you stand) as a symbol of Americana.

Schaffner’s direction of the film is easy to overlook, largely because it is refreshingly unflashy. It’s superbly professional –not a single scene falls flat. He marshals each scene with extraordinary effect, and manages the film’s difficult balancing act of sly satire and hagiography brilliantly. He also, within an epic canvas, works very well with actors – there are a host of great cameos in here, not least from Michael Bates as a preening Montgomery and Edward Binns as an exasperated Bedell Smith. Karl Malden is the only other really major character as Patton’s junior (later commanding) officer and he is perfect as the honest professionalism in contrast to Patton’s flash.

And the film gives us plenty of Patton’s flash. The man who loved war and combat, also loved performing – and does so with abundant skill. But the film isn’t afraid to show his warts: in Sicily he threatens to sack a general who refuses to risk his men’s lives on a risky operation, primarily motivated by Patton wanting to reach Messina before Montgomery. Later, when striking the scared soldier, his actions are tough to watch even as part of you sees his point about other men having been wounded in the line of duty (the playing of the soldier as a teary whiner probably doesn’t help). The film never fails to show that Patton’s worst enemy is his own arrogant lack of thought – he constantly shoots his mouth off with no thought for the impact.

The film is brilliantly constructed. The photography is excellent, the editing superbly marshals a long film of many individual scenes into a story that seems a lot tighter and forward moving than it probably is. Schaffner makes us feel we go on a clear journey with this character – helped as well by Jerry Goldsmith’s excellent score that conveys a great deal with ancient mythic weight, playing off Patton’s own belief in resurrection.

Patton is often forgotten a bit – but it is a great film, well made, brilliantly balanced, wonderfully written and directed. And at its centre: what a performance. George C Scott is simply astoundingly brilliant, completely transformed into the old general. His Oscar (which Scott declined, thinking awards phony) was as well-deserved as these things get. A wonderful film, a true epic, and a marvellous character study of an enigma – it deserves to sit near Lawrence of Arabia in the personal epic stakes (to which it has more than a few similarities).

Suite Française (2015)

Matthias Schoenaerts and Michelle Williams love across the divide in this disappointing French Occupation epic

Director: Saul Dibb

Cast: Michelle Williams (Lucile Angellier), Kristin Scott Thomas (Madame Angellier), Matthias Schoenaerts (Oberleutnant Bruno van Falk), Sam Riley (Benoit), Ruth Wilson (Madeleine), Margot Robbie (Celine), Lambert Wilson (Viscount de Montmort), Harriet Walter (Viscountess de Montmort), Clare Holman (Marthe), Alexandra Maria Lara (Leah), Tom Schilling (Oberleutnant Kurt Bonnet), Eric Godon (Monsieur Joseph), Deborah Findlay (Madame Joseph)

The story behind the writing of Suite Française is compelling. Living in Nazi-occupied France, Irène Némirovsky began work on a five-novel series, Suite Française, which she intended to depict life in her homeland under German rule. She had only written two of the five books when she was arrested by the Gestapo as a Jew, and tragically died in Auschwitz. The books were written in a small notebook and kept by Némirovsky’s daughter while she moved from hiding place to hiding place evading the Nazis. Sixty years later, donating her mother’s papers to an archive, she deciphered the notebook and discovered the novels. They were published as a single volume to great success in 2004, regarded as an accomplished piece of literary fiction and a remarkable work of contemporary witness.

The short summary of the novel’s richness and complexity provided by this film can’t really compete. Based on the second of the two novels, the story takes place in a small French village in 1940. Following the arrival of the Germans, officers are billeted in people’s homes: Lucile Angellier (Michelle Williams) and her mother-in-law (Kristin Scott-Thomas) are assigned sensitive musician Bruno van Falk (Matthias Schoenaerts), while their neighbours, farmers Benoit and Madeleine (Sam Riley and Ruth Wilson), are forced to accommodate bullying officer Kurt Bonnet (Tom Schilling). As hostilities between the French residents and the German occupiers grow, so does the attraction between Lucile and Bruno, but Bonnet’s pursuit of Madeleine threatens to ignite the simmering tensions in the community.

Suite Française manages to turn its promising material into a conventional, chocolate box wartime romance – you can’t help but think that it does a great deal of disservice to the original novel. It’s filmed in an unremarkable style (there are at best 1-2 imaginatively done shots and sequences) and poorly paced. With its short runtime (barely more than an hour and a half), it constantly feels rushed. Quite simply it’s a story about simmering tensions in a confined environment – it needed more time for us to get a sense of the drama building, of the resentments between the Germans and the French growing. Because the film is so short we don’t get that at all.

Most notably, in a film about a romance between a French woman and a German officer, there is no sense at all of the risks that French women who started relationships with German officers were running. Besides a few small throw away lines, there is no sense of the physical danger and the social stigma that would be applied to these women. Instead, the tension of Lucile falling for Bruno seems to be based more on whether her mother-in-law will discover that she’s considering cheating on her (absent, unfaithful) husband. Even Celine the promiscuous farmgirl (a wasted Margot Robbie in a terrible wig) doesn’t seem to be running any risks of reprisals from the villagers when she’s banging a German officer in the woods.

This, however, is where the film’s rushing undermines it. If it had allowed us to develop a sense of the resentment, shame and loathing the occupied French felt for their German oppressors, a feeling of the whole town being willing to close doors on anyone they perceive as being too close to the Germans, we could have felt a real danger for Lucile in flirting with a dalliance with Bruno. As well as giving the situation a bit of stakes, it would have made it a lot more emotionally engaging too. We could have witnessed her inner conflict at considering a romance with the enemy, and the emerging feelings between them would have had the conflict of a forbidden love. Instead the film rushes us as quickly as it can towards getting Bruno and Lucile into a passionate clinch, at times taking giant unsupported leaps forward in their relationship, so when it arrives it packs no punch.

This passionate clinch undermines the film. If it wasn’t going to take the time to really build the relationship through lingering glances and brief moments, convincingly charting the journey from hostility and suspicion to a forbidden attraction, it should have cut the relationship down to being something that tempts them both but which they cannot express. Have these two recognise a deep bond between them, a bond that in another time would have brought them together but cannot in the time of war. It’s a film where the only physical contact between them should feel like a window on what might have been – not a passionate locking of lips and sexy fondle or two. Think how much more affecting that might have been.

It would also have fit the structure of the film far better. As Lucile finally finds herself having to choose a side – deciding whether to help a renegade hunted by the Germans or not – her decision to sacrifice her chance of love with Bruno might have worked much better. Similarly, Bruno having to revert to the soldier taking responsibility for the growing persecution of the villagers would have been more affecting. (It further doesn’t help that the film doesn’t give time for Williams and Schoenaerts to build up an effective chemistry.) By chucking them into a clinch as soon as it can, the film undermines its message and also manages to make itself feel more like “Mills and Boon in Occupied France” than the serious tragedy it could have been.

When the film finally focuses on the battles between the French and Germans in its final third, it’s much more interesting than the slightly tired romance. Here we get tensions, stakes, drama – and finally a sense of the danger that being in this situation could have. After the rather soft focus romance that comes before, it really seizes the attention.

Williams does a decent job as Lucile, Scott Thomas could play her austere mother-in-law with hidden depths standing on her head (the film fumbles the unexpected alliance between these characters late on). Schoenaerts is a bit wasted in an underwritten role but does good work. The best performances largely come from the second tier: Lambert Wilson is excellent as the local Viscount who wants to try and work with the Germans but quickly finds himself out of his depth. Harriet Walter is similarly strong as his wife, as is Ruth Wilson.

But Suite Française could have been so much better than the movie that it actually becomes. A film that focused on the dangers of occupation and the tensions of a small community would have been great. A film that rushes through a Romeo and Juliet style romance, without building the sense of forbidden love, is a film that just doesn’t work.

Plenty (1985)

Charles Dance and Meryl Streep endure marital misery in the bleak, oblique and uninvolving David Hare drama Plenty

Director: Fred Schepisi

Cast: Meryl Streep (Susan Traherne), Charles Dance (Raymond Brock), Tracey Ullman (Alice Park), John Gielgud (Sir Leonard Darwin), Sting (Mick), Ian McKellen (Sir Andrew Charleson), Sam Neill (Lazar)

David Hare’s 1970s play Plenty looked at the impact of peace on the war generation. A “state of the nation” story on the growth of prosperity in the post-war era, and the return of many to the humdrum reality of life with Britain’s importance as a world power in rapid decline, led to isolation, anger and depression. It’s a shame that much of that really doesn’t come across in this buttoned-up, murky and unclear social drama, with a hard-to-follow plot and a hard-to-like central character.

Susan Traherne (Meryl Streep) is an SOE courier in France during the Second World War, who has a one-night stand with fellow SOE operative Lazar (Sam Neill) which has a profound effect on her. After the war, she marries Foreign Office civil servant Raymond Brock (Charles Dance), but is unable to find a purpose and contentment in regular civilian life. As the years tick by, and their surroundings grow ever more plentiful, Susan becomes more and more unhappy, difficult and demanding.

The central issue with Plenty (I can’t comment on the play, having never seen it) is that Meryl Streep creates possibly one of the least likeable leading performance you are going to see. Perhaps mistaking Britishness for cut-glass chill – or perhaps it’s the character – Streep’s Susan is brittle, bitter, angry, annoying and infuriating. She complains about everything around her, she lashes out at people, she sulks and whines with no self-insight, she constantly makes life difficult for those around her (most of whom are unbelievably patient) and she is almost impossible to work out.

While the film perhaps intends her to be as sort-of PTSD sufferer, with undiagnosed personality disorders, who cannot reconcile the shallowness of her life with the excitement of war service, I’m not sure this comes across. All we really see is her deeply irritating self. We don’t get a sense of her war service – we see her breakdown early in the film in France – and her relationship with Lazar remains so ill-defined we are unclear what impact it had on her, other than part of a halcyon memory. The film’s final scene is a flashback to the end of the war: Susan watching a sunrise on a French hill dreaming of her life being full of days like this. That scene would have been helpful earlier – it’s the only time we see her optimistic or likeable in the film, and it gets lost by placing it at the end. With it in order we could have warmed to her more.

Instead she remains a shrill presence, in a hard to relate to film that never really makes clear whether we are meant to empathise with Susan, or find her as frustrating as some of the characters do. The film also fails to make this enigma part of its viewing design – I don’t feel like having the lines blurred made the film a richer experience, just one it was harder to engage in. Schepisi’s directing style is very cold and distant – from the slow camera moves, to the tight close ups on Susan at key moments, to the deliberate lack of clear time line (each scene moves on weeks, months or years from the previous one with only a few design and dialogue hints to suggest the change).

Combined with Hare’s indefinable script – crammed with elliptical conversations, unclear emotional and dramatic points, and political points delivered with a querying shrug – it makes for a film that is very hard work to engage with – and doesn’t offer much to reward the viewer if they do.

What pleasures there are come from the performers. Charles Dance is good as Susan’s long-suffering husband – far from a domineering patriarch, his only real crime seems to be that he is a bit boring. Ian McKellen makes a great cameo as a senior civil servant, coolly and calmly telling Susan the errors of her thinking. Sting is an odd choice (I suspect his presence helped the film get backing) and Tracey Ullman does tend to go too far as Susan’s bohemian but more emotionally restrained friend.

John Gielgud steals the show. He is simply superb as Brock’s boss, an old-school diplomat who is, at first, a figure of fun with his Edwardian values but whom events (in particular Suez) reveal to have firm principles. Gielgud also gets most of the film’s best lines, while his quiet air of polite dignity is both endearing and admirable. His delivery of the following line to a tedious bore of a party guest basically is the high point of the movie: “But perhaps before I go, I may nevertheless set you right on a point of fact. Ingmar Bergman is not a bloody Norwegian, he is a bloody Swede.”

But there aren’t enough pleasures like this in this overbearing, rather trying film that never really decides what point it’s trying to make. I think it’s something about wealth and discontent and the more selfish and scrambling build of the post-war generation towards Thatcherism. But I’m really not sure. And to be honest I’m not sure I care.

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.