No More Heroes..? September 2, 2006
Posted by John Hodson in : Film General, War Films , 7 commentsThe news of a remake of The Dam Busters makes me shudder at the possibilities; there are so many obstacles to any potential success, that it defies belief that anyone would attempt such a project.
First, it’s a European and Commonwealth story; in the main, the all-important American audience may simply not care and stay away in droves (unless, that is, 617 Squadron suddenly becomes the 93rd Bomber group). Secondly, are film makers just too far removed from the event to actually recreate it with any semblance of reality? And, lastly, disregarding how the Americans receive the story, is the core modern movie audience itself too far removed to actually give a damn about history that isn’t quite ancient enough?
I watched A Bridge Too Far the other night, directed by a Briton, from a script written by an anglophile American. Viewing it for the first time in many a moon, it comes across as exactly the kind of product designed to make money by the barrow load; as a vehicle for a largely British action, Attenborough’s film was made to ‘play in Peoria.’
The sneering Germans are by turns cynical or cowardly, the tea slurping Brits (they run short of ammo, but tea? Not on your life…), snobby, incredibly stupid or chirpy cannon fodder, the ‘go get ‘em’ Americans - their involvement in actual events bolstered to increase overseas returns (it was ever thus) - totally heroic. That also extends to Gene Hackman’s Polish Maj. Gen. Stanislaw Sosabowski, an American by proxy, and the glorification of the offscreen General George S. Patton at the expense of the equally unseen Montgomery. It’s ever so slightly stomach turning, that amongst the main characters, it’s Dirk Bogarde’s apparently casually uncaring Lt. Gen. ’Boy’ Browning that shoulders the blame for the failure of Operation Market Garden - but then, Browning was conveniently dead at the time the film was made.
In other words, the stereotypes are securely in place, as is box office success - it might work as a piece of cinema (and oddly, despite my vilification, I think it does at times), but as an attempt to accurately portray historical events and the people that took part in them, for the most part, it stinks. But then, this a movie, not a documentary…
British war movies are a bit of a mixed bag. Barged aside by the American war machine, both on film and in reality it seems, there are relatively few pictures made here that attempt a real dissection of men at war, that look at what makes them cowards (or indeed, what exactly is a coward) or gives them courage - what drives them to do what they do? Our home grown efforts take a handful of stereotypes, shake ‘em up and pull them out of a steel helmet - the cool middle class commanders, the cheeky Cock-er-nee chappies, the stoic civvies who endure the bombing but keep the lie alive that ‘Britain Can Take It’ (people booed and threw stones at Churchill as he made his photo opportunisitic tours of blitzed London). During wartime itself, there was an obvious need for producers to keep the spirits up and portray a mythic Britain, where everything would turn out alright in the end, that sacrifice in the name of the nation was needed, that we had to keep those upper lips stiff..and, of course, everyone knew their place.
After the war, in this country, it was films made by the middle classes, written by the middle classes and acted by the middle classes that for the most part kept these myths alive; in fact most successful British war films are told from the perspective of men who know what’s best for the ‘chaps’, or who die quietly without too much fuss, without messing up the nice white bed linen. Colditz, for example, still immensely entertaining, is portrayed as some sort of lunatic extension of an Oxbridge University, complete with footlights revue. Reach For The Sky features the courageous, egotistical, self-obsessed Douglas Bader; ‘gor blimey’ working class characters are reduced to packing bags or cleaning the boots of their flying officers.
There are films, of course, that do break free of this straitjacket. As time moved on, so did the films and so did their attitudes; The Long and The Short and The Tall almost wholly focuses on the poor bloody British infantry, trapped in a war they don’t want to fight, in a country of which they know little. The Hill, another ‘war’ film in which the working stiff is the central to the narrative, an examination of the sheer madness of the military mind. It’s odd (well, not so odd) that another American, Joe Losey, directed the very underrated and very British King & Country, its story of alleged cowardice now part of current events (there are DVDs out in both R1 and R2 I would appreciate opinions of if anyone has them, by the way). I’ve only ever seen Stuart Cooper’s Overlord (apparently on Criterion’s slate) once, but if we are to value films for their accurate portrayal of men at war, placed precisely in a given time, it’s got to come high up the list. Devastating stuff.
I’m moving pretty far from modern warfare, but if I’m discussing the British working man at war I must give a nod to Zulu; James Booth’s Henry Hook is a shirking, thieving, drunken layabout with a proper sense of the value of his own neck. And he wins the Victoria Cross. Go on ‘enry! Let us not forget either Tony Richardson’s The Charge of The Light Brigade…I digress (again).
Right now, the second world war film seems to be moving back into vogue and it’s here, in the 21st century, that the question begs to be asked; are we not too far removed now from actual events to give them any sense of veracity? It’s one thing to portray, say, 19th century warfare and 19th century people inaccurately, but World War Two is within touching distance of most of us, who must know someone, still, of the right vintage.
And it’s here I wonder what they’ll do with The Dam Busters. If I was to, once again, state the bleedin’ obvious, it’s that people have changed in the last 60 odd years; whether it’s to do with diet, exercise or grooming - or central casting - but every time I watch a period piece now, everything seems wrong. Hair styles, teeth, body toning, speech patterns, skin colour (nobody tanned in the ’40s, except the rich and even then…), the actual basic shape of people has changed. Check out the average cast of a war film made in the ’40s or ’50s; look at the faces, particularly the faces of those a little down the cast list, and you’ll see what I mean.
We also seem to insist on slapping modern sensibilities on to people who, even at this short distance, might as well have come from Mars. Basic attitudes, dress, behaviour, moral code - what would have made the young men of seven decades ago blush bright red, even in the tap room of their local, is now the stuff of childrens TV. I think of my own family, my father, my uncles, who went to war, some that didn’t come back, some that came home broken, others who tucked the memories away in a private place, never to be shared. Real, plain, ordinary men, never portayed, in my experience, properly on film.
Just prior to World War Two, my current home town of Bolton was part of a ‘Mass Observation’ project, a snapshot of Britain in the late ’30s. It revealed, among other things, that despite the very recent memory of having been ‘lions led by donkeys’, the average man was eager to go to war. He would defend his home, his country and his loved ones. Many feared their wives and sweethearts would be raped by the invading Hun. I wonder, now, what a similar survey would turn up? I wonder…
Can the new The Dam Busters be sold if we present these men the way they were shown in Michael Anderson’s stirring film? Courageous boys - and they were all very young men - out to ‘do their duty for King and country’? Richard Todd, for intance must have brought his own experience to the table (he was involved in the taking of Pegasus Bridge on D-Day, and played his own commander in the admirable The Longest Day) and thus, brought a truth to his performance that would be difficult to replicate. Or will these more cynical times demand that the raid’s consequences, the killing of German civilians, and the actual failure of the Dam Busters raid to halt the German war machine, be scrutinised more closely? Does the war film now demand an explicit anti-war text (Barnes Wallice did agonise over what his bombs had wrought and what the raid cost in human terms)? Have we no time - has, indeed, the time passed - for heroes, especially British heroes?
Another question that hangs heavy is what will they do with Gibson’s beloved labrador ‘Nigger’, also, famously, the codeword for successfully delivering the bouncing bombs? Do we excise the word with a deference to modern sensibilities (as it has been in some TV showings of the film), do we pretend it was never so. And in so doing, as Spike Lee said, ‘…if we don’t show these things, how is anybody going to know that they really happened?’ I’m not that old (honestly I’m not), but I do remember my grandfather owning a shoe polish that was ’Nigger Brown’; that’s where Gibson’s affectionate name comes from, the name of a colour, a little piece of casual, unknowing racisim from a time when the whole world was fabricated from such. Times have changed; we know better now. I also hope we know better than to cover it up.
We shouldn’t forget. If we intend to portray ‘real’ people (even ‘real’ people in fictionalised events), then we must not shirk from doing so. Real people, in real situations reacting as they would have, behaving in a contemporaneous manner. But I’m possibly asking too much of Peter Jackson and his production team; I certainly hope not. I fear a CGI bombing fest, a ‘cartoon’ film, in all possible meanings of the word. ‘Feel the force, Guy’, a ghostly voice may intone, ‘feel the force…’ At least we’ll get to see an accurate representation of the bomb itself, still on the ‘top secret’ list when the original film was made, and, comically, still on the same list when I made my first ‘Airfix’ scale model of a 617 Squadron Lancaster. The bomb design was accurate on that too, however.
It’s a lasting regret that no film has been made of Len Deighton’s coruscating examination of a British 1000 bomber raid on Germany. In the marvellous novel Bomber, there are no heroes, no villains, no winners, just losers. It is, as Jack Hawkins says in The Cruel Sea, ‘…it’s just the war…this bloody war.’
Indeed. But I return to thoughts (as I often do these days) of the men I know - knew - personally who fought, who saw things that nobody who wants to retain their sanity should. Who came home and, in that, oh, so English way, got on with it. Ordinary men you wouldn’t look twice at, queuing for their pensions, shuffling unsteadily down the streets, numbers dwindling fast.
And they are heroes still; every one.