Wordless Wednesday: D Day

Sink the Bismarck! (1960)

"...The British film industry of the 1950s repeatedly mined the war years for suitable material to turn into thrilling and entertaining movies – a sort of ‘Now the truth can be told’ account of the hours that were both Britain’s darkest and finest. It was the perfect marriage of a healthy British film industry and quintessential British stories of pluck and heroism and Sink the Bismarck! is a great example. It was highly praised at the time for its accurate account of the dangers and complexities of battle and the procedural portrayal of More’s Captain Shepard and his unsung backroom boys, it is not the ‘Now the truth can be told’ account that audiences initially believed it to be. There was the small matter of the Official Secrets Act standing in the way of Gilbert’s film. It would be another fifteen years before the work of Bletchley Park’s code-breakers would be declassified, so the interception and decoding of the Bismarck movements from from Luftwaffe Enigma transmissions are shown instead to be little more than hunches on the part of Shepard as he plays a kind of psychological game of chess with his nemesis, Admiral Lütjens (Štěpánek), the German officer responsible for the sinking of his last ship...."

Read my full review at The Geek Show

Yesterday's Enemy (1959)

Perhaps the most intriguing tidbit of information I have regarding Yesterday's Enemy, Hammer's tough and uncompromising WWII tale set in the Burmese jungle, is the fact that, at the premiere, the guest of honour, Lord Mountbatten, was said to have expressed surprise that the film wasn't actually shot in Burma. Given that, anyone watching it ought to realise that it's seemingly shot in the same garden centre that the BBC used for It Ain't Half Hot Mum, this makes for an incredulous and amusing bit of trivia.  

Its studio-bound nature aside, Yesterday's Enemy is a gripping, hard as nails affair concerning a small troop of British soldiers who stumble upon the plans for an imminent Japanese attack immediately before being captured. It was adapted from an earlier TV play from Peter R. Newman, a former RAF pilot. Much like Hammer's other equally hardboiled war film, Camp on Blood Island, Newman took his inspiration from a true story he'd heard recounted by an officer who had been stationed in Burma during the war. It was a story that instantly appealed to Newman; "The major point of the play is this," he said. "Can certain injustices, known for want of a better name as war crimes, be defensible if the means justify the end?". The TV play, which explores this moral maze, was met with mixed reviews; some congratulated Newman, whilst others criticised him, believing his story to be unpatriotic and anti-army. Needless to say, Hammer (who often seemed to take Wilde's bon mot of 'There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about' as their mantra) weren't about to be put off by the critics and they quickly staged a cinematic adaptation starring Stanley Baker as Captain Langford and directed by Val Guest.

It ought to go without saying that Baker is fiercely impressive as the officer for whom the lines between code of conduct and brutality have become blurred - and perhaps, it is argued, necessarily so. Baker shines in every scene, but not for him the ripsnorting grandstanding approach that other actors may take when seizing upon such a prize of a role; Baker is never less than subtle and assured, making the dilemma he faces and the actions he takes all the more intelligently drawn for audiences. He's ably supported by a fine band of brothers, including the striking, distinguished figure of Guy Rolfe, whose padre provides the opposing argument, Leo McKern as a war correspondent attached to the unit, Percy Herbert who himself had been a Japanese POW having been captured in Singapore, a particularly impressive Gordon Jackson, David Lodge, Richard Pasco and a young Bryan Forbes. Of course, this being a Hammer film and of the 1950s, there's a now ill-advised opportunity for a Caucasian actor to pretend to be of East Asian ethnicity and this is the case with Wolfe Morris, however the film evens this out with the casting of the Korean actor, Philip Ahn (indeed, the first Korean American film actor to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame), as the principal antagonist, Yamazuki.

Bloody, brutal and unflinching but always thought provoking and intelligent, Newman may have taken great pains to defend his work by arguing that war was not a Boys' Own story, but I'm of an age that can clearly see how much a film like Yesterday's Enemy influenced dozens of Commando comic strip adventures from the '70s onwards. The poster's tagline sums it up best - War is hell.

The Stranger (1946)

I saw this earlier this month on Netflix and surprisingly it was my first watch of this perhaps overlooked entry in Welles' directorial canon. The Stranger was his third film in the director's chair, made four years after The Magnificent Ambersons. Determined to prove that he could be relied upon to turn in a picture that was both under budget and on time, Welles accepted a rather unfavourable contract from International Pictures that stipulated that he would not only defer to the studio at all times but that he would owe them any wages he may incur above $50,000 per year should he renege on the deal. He was paid $2,000 per week to both act and helm the picture.

The Stranger is a noirish melodrama that sees Welles star as Franz Kindler, a Nazi-in-hiding in the sleepy, autumnal New England town of Harper. Determined to appear as a pillar of the community, Kindler adopts the guise of Charles Rankin, a prep school teacher engaged to marry Mary Longstreet (Loretta Young) the daughter of a supreme court justice official played by Philip Merivale. Arriving in Harper is Nazi hunter Mr Wilson, Edward G. Robinson, who has his suspicions about the seemingly innocuous Rankin.

Ostensibly a genre picture, The Stranger does nevertheless have many Wellesian touches that mark it out as something subtly special. Welles insisted on long takes to blindside editor Ernest J. Nims. This approach allowed him to sneak through a four minute-long take between Kindler and his hapless fellow Nazi fugitive Meinike (Konstantin Shayne) in the woods. It passes by almost unnoticed - and it clearly did for 'supercutter' Nims too - which is surprising when you consider that it's longer than A Touch Of Evil's much vaunted opening sequence. Welles also deploys his usual flourishes of shadows and angles, whilst the decision to include genuine documentary footage of the Holocaust marked it out not only as a distinctive first for Hollywood, but also yet another of Welles' preoccupations; the notion of a film within a film. Welles personally fought to keep this footage in, arguing that it was their duty to inform the world what had truly happened in Nazi Germany.

One other thing marks The Stranger out as a Welles production and that's his decision to use Citizen Kane's production designer, Perry Ferguson. The sets he created are nothing short of brilliant, including a complete town square that can be overlooked from the drug store owned by the checkers enthusiast - and the film's comic relief - Mr Potter (Billy House). At a time when genre pictures looked studiobound and cheap, Ferguson's work gives an authenticity and depth that sets it apart from its contemporaries and again, Welles' use of long takes, ensures that he gets the most from what Ferguson created.

Of course that's not to say Welles got everything his own way. A whole sequence from the front of the film, set in Latin America and focusing on Meinike's flight, was excised, along with the meeting between Kindler/Rankin and Mary, damaging the sense of foreboding Welles had hoped to infuse the film with. He also didn't get his first choice for the role of the protagonist Wilson, who was eventually played by Edward G. Robinson. Tantalisingly, Welles actually wanted the character to be a spinster woman and had hoped Agnes Moorehead would play the role! Don't get me wrong, Robinson is great in the role but I kind of wish Welles had got his way because then The Stranger would have been quite progressive and wryly humourous too. That humour does remain though, in both the aforementioned character of Potter and in one scene that sees Welles absently doodling a swastika whilst on the phone - hardly hiding your real identity there mate!

On the whole The Stranger is a satisfying mix of genre and auteur that is reminiscent of Hitchcock, and I'm glad I finally got around to seeing it.

Feminise The Fifty!

The Bank of England are redesigning the fifty pound note and debate is raging as to who should the new face of the bank note. 

Because only three women have featured on bank notes, the feeling is it should be a woman. Unfortunately this means some right wing idiots are campaigning for Margaret Thatcher to be the face of the fifty (shudder) but I think it's high time that we not just a remarkable woman on the next new bank note, but also one of colour.

With that in mind, I would ask that you all please sign the petition to get WWII SOE heroine Noor Inayat Khan to become the new face of the redesigned fifty pound note.

I can only echo what petition starter Zehra Zaidi has said; the first radio operator to infiltrate Nazi occupied France, Noor Inayat Khan was a truly remarkable woman that generations owe a huge debt to. Her work during WWII rightly saw her awarded a posthumous George Cross, alongside fellow agents Violette Szabo and Odette Hallowes, who Zaidi would also like to see represented on the fifty pound note, should the Bank of England consider more than one person. 

The petition explains at length how Noor's story is relevant to this day. We need to honour her memory and take the opportunity to depict her as a positive Muslim role model. 

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018)

I haven’t read the original novel but I’m told that the screenplay (which is the work of three scriptwriters; two Americans, Don Roos and Tom Bezucha, and an Englishman, Kevin Hood) dispenses with both its epistolary conceit and some of its characters, presumably to convey the story in a more filmic and accessible manner. As such, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, or TGLAPPPS, as no one is calling it but which I will do henceforth for convenience’s sake, is a highly polished ‘heritage’ production from Four Weddings and a Funeral director Mike Newell. It is a film that feels both cosily familiar - calling to mind the recent WWII period films Their Finest and Another Mother’s Son, along with a suitable dash of 1987’s 84 Charing Cross Road for good measure – and perfect for Sunday evening viewing. This last factor is no doubt helped by the casting of several alumni from ITV’s internationally successful period drama Downton Abbey.

Read my full review at The Geek Show

A History Lesson For Boris Johnson

He's spent the week comparing Russia's hosting of the World Cup to Nazi Germany's 1938 Olympics, so it's time to remind him of a couple of things:

1) 20 million Russians were killed fighting the Nazis during World War II, so to liken them to Hitler's Nazis is both ignorant and disgusting.

2) Here's a photograph...

It shows the England football team ahead of a game in Berlin in the '38 Olympics, giving the Nazi salute.

They were instructed to perform the salute by the then British government...which was, of course, the Conservative party.

But what about the Russians, you might ask, did they give the Nazi salute to appeal to their hosts too?

Um no, Russia opted to boycott the '38 Olympics, seeing Nazism for exactly what it was.

Churchill Overkill

With Gary Oldman tipped for the Oscar this year for his performance in Darkest Hour, many have proclaimed him to be the definitive Churchill. But, well I don't know about you, but don't you think we've had enough biopics about Winston Churchill now?

We've had Albert Finney in 2002's The Gathering Storm, and Brendan Gleeson in 2009's Into The Storm. We've had Michael Gambon in 2016's Churchill's Secret and Brian Cox in last year's Churchill. We've had Timothy Spall appear as Churchill in The King's Speech from 2010 and John Lithgow as Churchill in Netflix's acclaimed drama series The Crown. We've even had both Andy Nyman and Richard McCabe play him in Peaky Blinders. And all of these are just those of note made in the last 15 years or so, there's plenty more, and (perhaps asides from Peaky Blinders which shows him to be a ruthless horse trader) all of them say the same thing: that Churchill was The Greatest Briton Who Ever Lived™.

Now far be it from me to say that Churchill wasn't a remarkable man who helped obliterate Hitler's dream of a thousand year Reich, but I've always believed that this canonisation of Churchill to be deeply worrying. To my mind, Churchill was simply the right man for the job at the time. In short; he was a wartime prime minister, terrible in peace time. None of these biopics ever explore any other aspect of Churchill's life, character or political career and it's immensely frustrating because they're choosing to ignore a lot of things that need addressing about the man.

Churchill was not a saint and many would struggle to view him heroically. This is a man who said "I hate Indians. They are beastly people with a beastly religion". In 1943 4 millions Bengalis died from a famine he later claimed was their own fault because they "bred like rabbits". 

A year later in 1944 he ordered the British army to open fire on protesters on the streets of Athens, killing 28 civilians and injuring 120. These Greeks were partisans who fought with the British against the Nazis and the reason Churchill turned on them was because he feared their communist tendencies. He supported the right wing Greek government and wanted to see the monarchy restored. He employed former RUC commander Charles Wickham to train Greece's security forces. His actions helped shape the far right movement that continues in Greece to this day. 

His actions in India and Greece were not uncharacteristic either, there's several countries blighted by Churchill's less than saintly character: Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Kenya, and South Africa, the latter with its disgusting British run concentration camps and which Churchill argued that black people should be exempted from voting. He was a keen proponent of chemical warfare against Kurds and Afghans, believed in the superiority of white people, and also advocated sterilisation and labour camps for 'degenerate Britons'. Perhaps he considered the striking miners of Tonypandy as degenerates when he sent the troops in to the area  to maintain order in 1910? A decision he made again in Liverpool just a year later - this time the soldiers opened fire, killing two people. Also that year Churchill dabbled in the Sidney Street siege between some 200 police and Latvian anarchists, ordering the police to let the house the gang were hiding in burn down.

You can read more about this less than glorious side to Winston Churchill both here and here.

All I'm saying is if these countless biopics don't address all sides of the man then aren't we just whitewashing his legend? And isn't it time we started bringing the lives of other notable politicians to the screen - where, for example, are the biopics of Clem Attlee or Nye Bevan?

The Man With The Iron Heart (2017)

The story of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of The Final Solution, by Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, two British trained Czech paratroopers in Prague in 1942, is one that is absolutely right for the cinema, as has been proven by some ten films that have been produced since the event (including Anthropoid which, rather damagingly, beat this version to the screen in 2016). 

Laurent Binet's book entitled HHhH recounts these very same events but, it is a novel that is most emphatically not right for the cinema, as this film adaptation from Cédric Jimenez proves.

Having long since been interested in the assassination, I read Binet's book a couple of years ago and was blown away by its refusal to comply to standard literary conventions. HHhH (the title stems from a joke said to have been circulated through Nazi Germany during the war: Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich, or in English "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich") was part historical account, part novel and part journal of an author's experience of researching and writing a story. The book was essentially split into three points of view: the life of Heydrich and his rise to prominence in Hitler's Third Reich, the lives of Gabčík and Kubiš and their accomplices in the Czech resistance movement, and lastly the life of the author himself, Binet. It is, as I have said and as you may imagine, pretty unfilmable, and The Man With The Iron Heart utterly proves that. 

Jimenez realises how unfilmable Binet's POV - the journal of the perils and pitfalls of researching and writing up the events of 1942 - would be and excises it completely, to focus instead firstly on Heydrich and his rise to power, and on Kubiš and Gabčík's mission to assassinate him and, in doing so, he essentially removes the very thing that would make this stand out from all other tellings of the story. The Man With The Iron Heart effectively approaches the history it details in two parts: the first is essentially a biopic of Heydrich as played by Australian actor Jason Clarke, focusing on both his professional and personal life, the latter including his marriage to Lina, played by Rosamund Pike, whilst the latter half is given over to Jack O'Connell and Jack Reynor as Kubiš and Gabčík. 

Unfortunately, neither focus is wholly successful. Heydrich's POV may feel original in terms of previous adaptations of this story, but it stinks of the usual preoccupation that many other films have when focusing on the Nazis, namely the depiction of ruthless violence and tyranny shown immediately alongside scenes of sexual intercourse and titillation. As such, it reminded me of the 2007 film Eichmann which also left an unsavoury taste in the mouth. The subsequent focus on the Czech resistance and the mission itself is less original; essentially a retread of previous adaptations, including Anthropoid and Operation Daybreak (this film borrows the poetic licence of the latter when handling the fates of the courageous assassins), but lacking the depth of character those films enjoyed. 

Indeed, characterisation (or the lack of it) is a frustrating issue in the film overall: it's hard to understand what made Heydrich tick - to be honest there's an argument for whether we really want to see such a monster depicted in human terms anyway, but the way the film basically depicts him as a weird, humourless and lonely man (and borderline sexual deviant: almost the first thing we see of the character is him fucking a girl whilst facing a mirror) who meets Lina, a Nazi party member, who aids his rise to power, is sketchy at best - and Gabčík and Kubiš, along with the former's romance of Anna Novak (played by Mia Wasikowska), is something that leaves us feeling particularly shortchanged too, with no attempt made to convey the devil-may-care attitude these two courageous British-trained, Czech soldiers possessed when knowing full well that what they were undertaking was almost certainly a suicide mission - which was not a complaint that you could level at Binet's book. This flaw is especially galling when you consider the talents of the actors assembled for the film, who are all completely wasted I'm sorry to say. Still, Stephen Graham's depiction of Himmler is up there with Donald Pleasance's chilling recreation for The Eagle Has Landed. 

Overall, I'm aware that familiarity may well have marred my appreciation of this overall, but I cannot shake the sense that this would be a disappointment even to someone who has no prior knowledge of the events it depicts. I'd recommend you watch Anthropoid instead, and that you read HHhH. Yes, definitely read that I'd say.

Escape to Athena (1979)

Escape to Athena sounds less like a war movie and more like a travelogue, which is in itself quite apt given that the stars of this were clearly having a lovely holiday in Rhodes! And what a star studded cast Lew Grade assembled for this picture; Roger Moore, Telly Savalas, David Niven, Elliot Gould, Stefanie Powers, Richard Roundtree, Sonny Bono and Claudia Cardinale. As Powers herself said:

"The names had been needed to raise the money. Think about it. I was there to catch the TV audiences and younger men; Richard Roundtree to bring in the black movie-goers; Niv for the older generation; Rog 'cos he's handsome, and a very, very big star; Claudia was there to catch the older roving eyes; Elliot because, as he said, he was under contract; Sonny already owned most of Las Vegas but still desperately wanted to be an actor; and Telly - well, nobody quite knew why he was there except that the film was set in Greece"

So there you have it! As well as those names, there's also Anthony Valentine somewhat resurrecting his role of the ruthless Nazi from TV's Colditz, and Michael Sheard, who was already carving out a name for himself playing Nazis, this time portraying a comically randy sergeant! There's even some choreography from Hot Gossip and Strictly Come Dancing star Arlene Phillips and a closing disco track 'Keep Tomorrow For Me' from Heatwave, which accompanies the modern day (well, 1979) touristy conclusion!

Don't expect much of a balanced review for this one from me, I've loved it since I was a kid when it seemed to routinely crop up on TV at Christmas. It cropped up again on BBC2 on Saturday evening just after a lovely tribute to Roger Moore in Talking Pictures, making it feel like a traditional Christmas. And yes, I can see it's not really a good film, but it is a lot of fun, and sometimes that's all you really want for a couple of hours. I'd probably go so far as to say that this ranks as one of the best, if not the best, effort to break into cinema from Grade as well as one of the most fun pictures from journeyman director George Pan Cosmatos. Perhaps he should have made movies in and about his native Greece more often?

The plot concerns a POW camp on the fictional Greek island of Athena. The prisoners held within are a rag-tag bunch of people hand picked by the Austrian camp commandant Otto Hecht (Roger Moore) for their skills and talents. It is Hecht's duty to unearth and loot the treasures of occupied countries such as Greece for the Reich. So we have David Niven's previously interned archaeology professor, which makes a lot of sense, along with Richard Roundtree's circus performer (which doesn't) and Sonny Bono's Italian cook. But, as he's quick to point out; "I'm not really a cook. I'm actually a racing car driver. And sometimes I sing..." Whatever the reasoning, it seems to work out pretty well; Niven's wily Professor Blake keeps the dig going by reburying the treasures found on previous days, whilst Moore's Hecht squirrels away the most valuable finds for his own private pension.

Joining the camp are two USO performers who were shot down over the Aegean on their way to a show; Elliot Gould's vaudevillian Charlie and Stefanie Powers' Busby Berkeley-style showgirl Dottie Del Mar, who immediately catches the eye of Roger Moore. Meanwhile, the local Greek resistance, led by Telly Savalas' Zeno and his brothel madam squeeze Eleana (Cardinale) are incensed by SS Major Volkman (Valentine) whose sadism is seeing many innocent villagers shot for the slightest of reasons. They're also eagerly preparing for the Allied invasion and know that they must take over the U-boat fuel dump and liberate the incarcerated monks from the mountain top monastery which is said to hold great wealth. To do this, they decide to join forces with the camp mates and pave the way for victory. Needless to say, many of the camp's occupants - including the by now sympathetic Hecht - are eager to get their hands on these riches.

What - you didn't really expect Moore to play a Nazi did you?

Of course there's more going on at the monastery than Savalas' resistance leader has told them; the site is actually the nerve centre and launch pad for a terrifying looking, vast chemical missile which is wheeled out by troops dressed in black and wearing mirrored-glass helmets - the kind of figures that could only have come from Hitler's wet dream fantasies! - and must be stopped to ensure the invasion is a success. 

There's lots of really good things in Escape to Athena; for a start there's the wonderful cinematography of Gil Taylor, whose opening aerial sequence easily captures our attention and who provides a well-shot motorcycle chase between Anthony Valentine's SS officer and, weirdly, Elliot Gould, that places the camera beside the wheel and upon the handlebars. There's also Lalo Schifrin's beautiful toe-tapping Greek infused score and some thumpingly good recreations of hits from the bygone age such as 'When the Saints Go Marching In', and Stefanie Powers' striptease - which ensures the camp is taken over by the goodies and sees Michael Sheard's sergeant positively fit to burst! - is a particularly memorable moment too. Indeed Powers is really good here, and very eye-catching too, with her Betty Grable hairstyle, the tied off shirt and those teeny tiny shorts. 

Of the rest of the cast, Gould does his usual brash and eternally quipping shtick, before tapping into his latent heroism with the aforementioned motorbike chase (though why Savalas instructs a previously unproven Bob Hope style comic to chase and assassinate a cold blooded murderer rather than just do it himself is anyone's guess!) and a moment of Treasure of Sierra Madre style greed at the film's critical climax. Meanwhile David Niven, Roger Moore and Telly Savalas are...well, playing David Niven, Roger Moore and Telly Savalas, and there's nothing wrong with that! Moore gets to remind us that he's still James Bond by having a good fist fight with some Nazi frogmen before rescuing Powers who has sued her underwater skills to neutralise the U-boat fuel dump, whilst Niven is charm personified and his presence in the proceedings helps to remind the audience of the equally Greek-based The Guns of Navarone. It's also the better of the two films Niv and Moore appeared in together: The Sea Wolves has a better pedigree on paper, but it's ultimately an uneven and disappointing affair. Savalas gets to play the action man, of course, but he also gets to do a Greek folk dance (choreographed by the aforementioned Phillips) with Cardinale at the end which is rather sweet. His macho demeanour throughout the picture is also less heavy and imposing than some of his other films from this era, which makes for a more likeable presence. Sadly, Richard Roundtree and Sonny Bono get less to do, their appearance feeling at times like little more than extended cameos, which does little to remove the smell of stunt casting around Bono. The poor guy doesn't even get to sing at the camp show - he mimes to a record being all too noticeably played by Gould off stage. Which I guess pulls the rug from under the audience and is quite funny, but even so.

Speaking of cameos and funnies - look out for the in-joke when Gould spots none other than William Holden smoking a cigar and mooching round the camp; "Are you still here?" an astonished Gould asks, conjuring to mind Holden's performance in POW film Stalag 17. "Why not? It's not a bad life" he shrugs. This uncredited appearance was made possible when Holden decided to visit his lover Stefanie Powers on set and it's a lovely tongue-in-cheek film reference that sets the film's comedic, light-hearted stall out early. Because this really is a comic action adventure - granted, the film may show the assassinations of Greek villagers and partisans at the hands of a brutal SS, it may even ever so briefly allude in a rather unsettling manner to the Nazis intolerance of Gould's Jewishness, but this is far from some hardbitten WWII men on a mission adventure - it's a film where the good guys topple their Nazi captors with the aid of Stefanie Powers' tacky and ramshackle striptease and a dose of herbal laxatives! That said, some of the gags are a little overbearing; I could have done without Gould's remark about how "Twenty years from now, when the Germans are selling Volkswagens to the world..." because it just lifts us completely out of the film in a way that the Holden cameo risked doing but had enough goodwill behind it to be a funny passing delight. Of the negatives I'd say that the film is a little too flabby and overlong and that it's sometimes hard to get a true handle on the plot, but when you're in such good company it's sometimes easy to overlook these vagaries and the chance of it outstaying its welcome too much.

Escape to Athena is a film very much of its time, both in terms of tone and casting as well as production. It's endemic of how the experiences of war had, by that stage in cinema, become so filtered through to entertainment at its purest that it starts to resemble a starry, action packed pantomime - the end point of which would become 1981's Escape to Victory. It's the kind of film where Nazis are routinely shot from their positions atop rooftops, bell towers and sentry towers just to allow the stuntman to perform a swan dive and give the action sequences a bit of frisson. And a film where kids learn that not all German soldiers were Nazis, because even James Bond could be a German officer as long as he helps Kojak save the day and wins the affections of The Girl From UNCLE. In short, it's a lot of fun for those of us of a certain age.

POW Double Bill: The Camp on Blood Island (1958) The Secret of Blood Island (1964)

Mention Hammer Films to anyone and the first thing that comes to mind is horror. But Hammer were actually responsible for a variety of film genres and styles and in the late '50s and early '60s they produced two war movies that proved to be as  spine chilling and unflinching as anything they produced featuring Dracula or Frankenstein's Monster. These films were 1958's The Camp On Blood Island, and its 1964 sequel, The Secret of Blood Island.

"Never before  has any film portrayed with such honesty and accuracy, the tormented sufferings, brutality, heroism, and degradation that were the lot of the POW under his demonic slave masters, the Japanese. I believe everyone in the so-called civilised world should see this magnificent picture, absorb and digest it, and realise that this could happen again. For the animal minds of our former captors will never change and all ex-POWs know this"

So wrote the journalist Leo Rawlings on the release of Hammer's hit 1958 movie, The Camp on Blood Island. Strong words, but perhaps understandably so given his own experiences as a POW in Singapore.

Unfortunately there hasn't been any mainstream or widespread ability to take Rawlings' advice and see, absorb and digest the film for thirty-eight years now. Despite The Camp On Blood Island being televised in Britain on a handful of occasions throughout the 1970s, the film that was one of the most popular hits in British cinema in 1958, has effectively been banned from our screens since 1979, presumably (and at the risk of sounding like an uber twunt Farage-a-like here) on the grounds of political correctness. Granted, it's trying and deeply regrettable to see so many white British actors (Ronald Radd, Lee Montague and, perhaps least convincing of all, Michael Ripper!) don offensive make-up and accents to play Japanese soldiers but, given that so many of the films of this era indulged in such dubious casting and still manage to get broadcast today, one is left to wonder if the real bone of contention is in fact the light in which the Japanese are portrayed in the film. Hammer certainly live up to their reputation for X rated filmmaking here, depicting the cold blooded executions and brutal torture of British POWs at the hands of their captors in an unflinching manner (along with the same lashings of 'Kensington gore' they indulged in for their horror output), but the film's truth - it's wholly unempathetic and hardline depiction of the Japanese forces - isn't in any way different from any number of Japanese POW films, from the recent Unbroken and The Railway Man right the way back to this film's more contemporary stablemate, David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai, which is rightly regarded as a classic. Perhaps there's another reason then why this rattlingly good film, an ostensible Hammer 'B movie', hasn't seen the light of day for almost forty years - snobbery?

The film was said to have been based on a true story that Hammer's Anthony Nelson Keys had heard from someone who had been a Japanese POW. Seeing the potential for a movie, Keys took the story to Michael Carreras who commissioned a script from John Manchip White. The film went into production in the summer of 1957 with Val Guest as director and boasts an impressive cast, including André Morell (who also starred in Lean's POW epic) as the senior British officer, Carl Möhner, Barbara Shelley and the perpetually pained looking Richard Wordsworth, the star of Hammer's The Quatermass Xperiment, as a deeply convincing near-starved and heroic prisoner.

Unfortunately, whilst The Camp on Blood Island proved to be a neglected gem, its sequel, The Secret of Blood Island, most emphatically isn't.

This belated offering from Hammer came some six years after the success of their first foray to Blood Island and has proved to be equally little seen since its release; indeed, I can't find any transmission details for this one at all on BBC Genome (though it may have appeared on ITV as some reviewers on IMDB recall watching it on TV at least once in the '70s) Unlike its predecessor, it has not been released to DVD, making it all the more scarce, but it is available to watch online. Rather than a sequel, which would have been difficult given The Camp on Blood Island is set as the war ends, The Secret of Blood Island is, in fact, a prequel set around a year earlier. Filmed in colour, it stars a handful of actors from the original film but, confusingly, they are playing completely different characters. Those returning included Barbara Shelley, Edwin Richfield, Lee Montague and Michael Ripper.

Unfortunately, the whole film is simply ill advised. The original film was said to have been based on a true story related to the production team at Hammer by a former POW and, whilst the veracity of such a claim could be doubted, what wasn't in any doubt was the intentions behind such a film; The Camp On Blood Island may have been, to quote one critic, the examination of an open wound in Post War Britain,  but it was one that was perhaps required. This film may have toned the brutality down a little, but there's no denying its exploitative credentials as it is clearly a cash-in with so little to say as evinced by the unconvincing and dumb narrative from screenwriter John Gilling.

Barbara Shelley takes centre stage as an SOE agent shot down over Malaya and discovered by a work party of British POWs who agree to hide her in the camp until she's able to continue on with her mission. Quite how Shelley is meant to evade recognition by their Japanese captors with the sole disguise of an elfin cut and side-parting care of the camp barber is beyond me! Nevertheless, it's up to the likes of Jack Hedley, Charles Tingwell and Bill 'Compo' Owen, along with the aforementioned returnees Richfield and Montague, to ensure the game isn't up. Presiding over them is the camp commandant played  by Patrick Wymark - and if you thought Ronald Radd's heavily made up turn in the previous film was offensive and unbelievable, just wait until you see Wymark - and Michael Ripper as his sadistic lieutenant. Quite why Ripper was 'promoted' when his turn as a Japanese soldier was so laughably unconvincing in the first film is beyond me, but to his credit he has improved a little with this more central role and is leaps ahead of Wymark.

The film was directed by Quentin Lawrence, who has none of the skill of The Camp On Blood Island's helmer, Val Guest in the same way that Gilling has none of that earlier film's author Jon Manchip White's flair for telling such a story. I'd also quibble over the decision to place the end of the film at the front in the form of a pre-credit sequence, which adds nothing and effectively gives away everything. Unlike it's predecessor, this film failed to make much of an impact with audiences and so its retreat into relative obscurity is no real loss.

Eichmann (2007)

Known as 'the architect of the Holocaust,' Adolf Eichmann, upon being presented to the world during his trial for war crimes in 1960, appeared a figure of calculating and fastidious grey efficiency. Hannah Arendt, one of the journalists covering the trial, became famous for coining the phrase 'the banality of evil' when witnessing these last days of the facilitator of the Reich's Final Solution. Unfortunately it could be argued that the 2007 film Eichmann, Robert Young's admittedly sincere but occasionally tonally off account of Eichmann's confessions to Captain Avner Less of the Israeli Police Force, is rather guilty of banality itself.

The film takes the form of a legal procedural; placing the young, idealistic Less played by Troy Garity against the weary, duplicitous captive played by Thomas Kretschmann. The main meat of the film is how Less must dig deep to not only confront the physical embodiment of pure evil on a daily basis but also to wring a confession from him. There's also a race against time too, as the press have got wind of a conflict of interest - Less' father was personally sent to his death in Auschwitz by Eichmann.

However, perhaps realising that a film consisting of two men sat opposite one another across a table may be considered boring - even when based on official Israeli documentation about the greatest horror in living memory, director Young and his scriptwriter Snoo Wilson make the fatally offensive mistake of 'sexing' their production up by exploring the rumours that surround Eichmann that are perhaps less than substantiated. The film takes great pains to depict Eichmann as a sexual deviant; his eye lingers on the rear end of an Israeli policewoman and her prominent nipples against the thin fabric of her uniform as he sits in his cell. In the flashbacks, we witness an Eichmann furiously making love to his wife on their first night together in Argentina. Later in the film, when we are shown Eichmann's activities in the war years, we are witness to his liaisons with two mistresses; the first an Austrian Jewish woman and the second a Hungarian Countess who is perversely sexually gratified to hear the details of the Final Solution in some of the film's most unsettling, unsavoury scenes. This opportunity to show tits and arse in such a film is rather tasteless, but it is nothing compared to the unbearably fraught, sickening scene in which the Countess arrives in Eichmann's office with a Jewish baby who she instructs him to kill for her. It's a deeply distressing moment and Eichmann does indeed pull the trigger, but is it true? I can't find anything that truly corroborates it. Perhaps it is the film-maker's intentions to inform us in the clearest possible terms that Eichmann is responsible for the deaths of many babies, children, men and women, young and old. But do we really need informing of that fact? Is it a case of taking a sledgehammer to crack a walnut?

The film also suffers from some one dimensional characterisation. This is most noticeable in Less, who is little more than a blank sheet which the film paints with idealism, torture, indignation and a crusading spirit at various stages across the 90 or so minutes. Garity's performance doesn't help lift the character from the plot mechanics he is there to serve either. It's a real shame, as the real Avner Less deserves better. Understandably in its reverence towards the subject the film actually reduces and condescends the Jewish people even further, with each character standing in as examples of the suffering of their people as a whole. 

Thomas Kretschmann however is chillingly convincing in his attempt to bring the familiar film footage and photographs of Eichmann to life. It's a deeply uncomfortable skin crawling performance of ruthless, quiet self entitlement and barely suppressed notions of superiority that actually grow in their appalling captivating manner because Garity opposite him is so empty. Here at least the film does what it sets out to do and details the horror of the man and of what he was responsible for.

Rounding out the cast are Franka Potente as Less' wife and curiously Stephen Fry as the Israeli Justice Minister who places Less in the role of inquisitor. Whilst Eichmann doesn't escape its minimal budget trappings it  is a solid, well made piece as one perhaps would expect from Young, a veteran of TV and similar small budget features. Overall though I'd recommend The Eichmann Show or, most especially, the excellent Conspiracy over this.

Out On Blue Six: Until The Ribbon Breaks

For the past four weeks or so now, I've been watching a show called X Company on the History Channel.

The series follows the adventures of five OSS agents who have completed their training at the titular Canadian based Camp X and are now working behind enemy lines in Occupied France during WWII. It's a Canadian show which made its debut in 2015 but has only just reached these shores. It stars a range of Canadian/British/French actors including Évelyne Brochu, Jack Laskey, Connor Price, Dustin Milligan and Warrington's own Warren Brown.

So, why am I talking about a TV show in an Out On Blue Six post? Well it's because the closing moments of the first episode featured an unusual and really good cover version of the Blondie classic One Way or Another by British band Until The Ribbon Breaks. I'd never heard it before and I was immediately bowled over. So, by way of a public service, here's a good new show for you to discover and a track you may not have heard before too.

End Transmission

Wish Me Luck, Series Three Review

The third series of Wish Me Luck (you can find reviews of series one and two also on this blog) brought the exploits of our brave SOE agents behind enemy lines to a close in early 1990. The series feels rather different from the previous two and for a number of reasons.

Firstly, this series is set in the summer of 1944 around the point that the war was finally coming to a head. There's much talk of the allied invasion of France and there's a sense of desperation from the Nazi occupiers this time around. Not that such mood makes them any less ruthless - if anything, it makes them more so. The agents are bedded in with an intrepid and courageous band of Maquis resistance fighters in the fictional plateau of 'Le Crest' and the village of Couermont near the Swiss border. Their mission this time is to aid the resistance in the planned uprising against the Germans, and this is very much based on the real-life incident which saw the Maquis du Vercors' stand in making Vasssieux-en-Vercors a free republic; an act that was brutally suppressed by the Nazis.

The location for this series affords us with another welcome difference; some splendid summery location shooting at the foot of the Alps. Whilst this series continues the trend of mixing exterior with interior filming, I have a feeling series three has far more exterior scenes than any of the previous two series of Wish Me Luck and it really helps to give the drama some air and room to breathe. Granted things are still shot on videotape rather than film, but this is just a minor grumble this time around because it's hard to fault the location on offer in any guise.  

The crucial difference this time around frankly pulled the rug right from under my feet. I had always presumed that once Suzanna Hamilton left the show at the end of series one, her fellow leading co-star Kate Buffery was the star of each series. So imagine my surprise when series three commences without Buffery's character Liz Grainger! I was really worried about this at first, but there are enough new characters and enough examples of strong storytelling and high drama to lessen this potential blow to the series. Nevertheless, I was really pleased to see Liz return for the final two episodes (after penning one episode earlier on in the series with her co-star Michael J Jackson) as it was only fitting that she brought the drama to a close. 

Also AWOL for this third and final series is another crucial regular, Julian Glover's Colonel James 'Cad' Cadogan, whose absence is explained away with the information that he has now joined Eisenhower's staff. This means that Faith Ashley, his dutiful assistant played by Jane Asher, now fronts the show. This is both a blessing and a curse; a blessing in that it strengthens the show's feminist angle, but it doesn't feel all that believable to have Cad leave and not be replaced by someone of a similar military standing. Nevertheless, given how shoddy the SOE is treated this series, it's quite fitting that Faith is in charge as it makes the snooty powers-that-be's damning decision to ignore her requests that little bit more credible. But it's a shame that the character development of Cad in series two (which saw him rocked to his very foundations following the death of his son, an incident that really did occur to the SOE's chief Colin Gubbins) is so cruelly curtailed - audiences deserved to see the next step in that particular journey. Joining Asher in the corridors of Whitehall is Gordon Stewart (Stuart McGugan) who was last seen 'in the field' in series two, before  a Nazi bullet meant he had to be whisked back to England. This is a much better fit for McGugan to be fair, and his constant exasperation at the red tape he finds himself having to battle through feels suitably authentic. Also appearing this series is the Gaullist Colonel Max Dubois played by Damien Thomas whose friendship (and perhaps potentially something more?) with Asher's Faith feels palpable.

Returning for this final series are the wireless operator Emily played by Jane Snowden and resistance fighter Luc Ferrier played by Mark Anstee. Both characters spend much of the series in a seemingly endless lovers tiff, exacerbated by Luc's belief that the British are leaving the Maquis forces on the ground high and dry. Their relationship is further put to the test with the arrival of Nicole, a young French girl who is determined to prove herself to the resistance, but whom Luc has his suspicions about. Nicole is played by Felicity Montagu who later found fame as the long suffering, meek and mild PA Lynn in I'm Alan Partridge. I don't think I've ever seen her perform in a straight drama before and, without wishing to criticise her performance which is perfectly fine, she does seem to have found her natural home in comedy. 

Joining the series are two new SOE operatives, the aristocratic Virginia Mitchell (code name 'Dominique') and the flamboyantly homosexual and former drag queen Lewis Lake (code name 'Antoine') played by Catherine Schell and Jeremy Nicholas. In keeping with previous series of Wish Me Luck, these characters are somewhat based in fact. The gay SOE agent and sometime theatrical Denis Rake is clearly the inspiration for the Lake character, whilst Virginia Mitchell owes a debt to both Polish aristocrat Christine Granville and the American Virginia Hall, to the extent that it's rather strange that the programme makers insist that the Hungarian born Schell play the role as an Englishwoman. Jeremy Nicholas brings some much needed light comic relief to the proceedings as the witty and charming 'Antoine', but (and this being the late '80s/early '90s) the programme seems a little shy of addressing his sexuality; in Catherine Shoard's 2010 restrospective article on the series for The Guardian she applauds the 'pioneering' manner of the series, incorrectly claiming that the character was a "bisexual operative (who) saved lives by coaxing secrets from SS officers on the pillow". Quite apart from Lewis clearly being gay rather than bi, the only example of him using his sexuality to gain secrets from the Nazis is in one scene where he befriends a lonely German soldier in a bar to elicit valuable information. If made today there would be so much more scope for the character of Lewis/'Antoine' that would arguably be fitting recreation of the real-life exploits of Denis Rake (who was briefly imprisoned after an affair with one German officer) but then Wish Me Luck never really explored the 'sleeping with the enemy' angle even with its female characters. If I had any complaint to make regarding Schell and Nicholas it's that, being both in their forties, they seem a little long in the tooth for the action.

Perhaps the most notable new characters this series are Trevor Peacock's tenacious Maquis leader Renard and the Jewish girl Sylvie, played by an incredibly young Shirley Henderson. Both characters have much to do with Michael J. Jackson's Kit Vanston; Renard is a fine comrade in arms and confident, almost replacing Liz in that respect, whilst Sylvie is essentially a surrogate daughter for the agent who lost his family in the blitz. When Kit describes what Sylvie means to him, that she represents the hope of something better if and when the war comes to an end, Jackson delivers the line with real conviction, reminding us that the whole notion of family could be a tragically precarious thing in times of conflict. It also serves to remind us that, as the war and the series progresses, Kit is getting older and wearier and, as such, it is understandable that he would place so much stock in someone who unequivocally represents youthful optimism. Henderson shows that she was a talented actress right from the start with her performance here, but it is Trevor Peacock who impressed me the most. To many, he is crusty old Jim in The Vicar of Dibley, but here he really convinces as a staunch socialist and French patriot, willing to sacrifice all for a free France.

The other significant newcomer in this series is the chief villain, the Nazi General Stuckler played by Terrence 'The Demon Headmaster' Hardiman. There's arguably a touch of déjà vu here as Hardiman had previously played a Nazi in the BBC's classic WWII resistance drama Secret Army in the 1970s, but his Stuckler is a worthy and unsettling adversary to our heroes by virtue of both Hardiman's icy portrayal and the more active role played by the Nazis in this series. Interestingly, the Teutonic accent previously dispensed with in the last series returns here with Hardiman's clipped, accented delivery. 

The tone of the series becomes progressively darker, and the desperation our heroes and heroines feel is really palpable. As previously alluded to, the plot of the series is based on the situation at Vasssieux-en-Vercors, so there's a real bedded-in feel to the series and equally a sense of being cut off and of characters trading in hopes and fears. The uprising at Vasssieux-en-Vercors was pivotal to the allied success at Normandy; the British using its stand as a tactical diversion which saw some 20,000 German soldiers busy quelling this lesser known third front made up of around 200 villagers, 600 Resistance fighters and a further 4,000 volunteer force soldiers. They were vastly outnumbered of course and the drama of this series plays on this frustration with Jane Asher and the powers-that-be in London repeatedly making promises of support that ultimately they fail to keep. As a dramatic tactic, this can get pretty tiring; it seems that every episode has London promising supplies, weapons and parachutists to the relief of the villagers on the ground, only for them to go back on their word at the last minute as one by one the British, American and French refuse to play ball, leaving them isolated and alone to face the music in the action packed final episodes.

On reflection, I'd argue that series three is probably better than series two and, in terms of quality, is on a par with the first series. The writing is good, although it is often prone to the dramatic (in inverted commas) soliloquy which rather dates it in terms of TV production. This is best exemplified by Bryan Pringle's warrior priest and his crisis of faith. Having been rescued by his comrades from a Nazi prison cell, he is horrified to learn that his freedom came at a price; as the village is hit by reprisals. Even more dated is the manner in which Sylvie's mother, played by Fiona Walker, is handled. Traumatised by the death of her husband at Nazis hands back in Vienna, Walker's character's mind is rapidly deteriorating which means she spends the series wandering aimlessly around burbling to herself. The intention is clearly to earn audience sympathy, but its so clumsily handled as to be rather irritating, almost as if Walker has literally walked in from a different show with a performance at odds with those around her. Nevertheless, this series provides Wish Me Luck with a fitting send off, and the icing on the cake is the return of Liz in the final pair of episodes. It would have been strange not to have her appear.

Mosquito Squadron (1969)

If you're looking for one word to sum up Mosquito Squadron it would be 'derivative'.

This 1969 effort from Boris Sagal is hanging on to the coat tails of 633 Squadron (which itself was hanging on to the coat tails of The Dam Busters) to the extent that it even re-uses footage from that film along with a pre-titles sequence that is lifted from Operation Crossbow. Indeed, so closely and similarly does this film follow 633 Squadron that many mistakenly believe it to be an official sequel. It isn't a sequel, but there is a direct reference to 633 taking part in this raid when, in reality, no such squadron existed - so we are definitely occupying the same world here. The earlier film wasn't exactly the starriest of productions to begin with, but Sagal certainly assembles a lower division team of players to breathe life into this tale. David McCallum, fresh off the back of TV's The Man From UNCLE returns to the RAF uniform he last wore in The Great Escape to deliver a rather subdued and uninvolving lead, which is a bit of an issue as he is clearly also the film's biggest name, playing a Royal Canadian Air Force officer (bizarrely, given that he's English and doesn't even attempt the accent) who finds himself torn between duty - both to his country and his friend - and love.

Based in part on the 1944 RAF/Maquis operation that was codenamed Jericho - a still highly secretive raid on Amiens gaol that helped liberate the French prisoners contained within - the film tells the tale of an RAF squadron whose mission is to destroy the Chateau de Charlon in Northern France where the Nazis are currently developing new weapons based on the V-1 programme. Their mission to attack and destroy the Chateau and the missile installation with Barnes Wallis' bouncing bomb is thrown into jeopardy when the Nazis get wind of the RAF's intentions and transport RAF POW's to the Chateau in an attempt to deter them from the raid. One of those POW's just happens to be the previously presumed dead Squadron Leader David 'Scotty' Scott (David Buck), the lifelong friend of Squadron Leader Quint Monroe (David McCallum) whose comfort of Scotty's 'widow' Beth (Suzanne Neve), has seen a romance develop between the pair.

Rounding out the cast are Nicky Henson, Dinsdale Landen, Bryan Marshall, Vladek Sheybal and David Dundas (pictured above), before he found fame as a musician with his 1976 hit single 'Jeans On' and composed the score to Withnail and I. Dundas, the son of the 3rd Marquess of Zetland, is now Lord Dundas and made a fortune from his jingle 'Fourscore' which was the music over Channel 4's ident from its launch in 1982. It is said that he earned £3.50 from every play, raking in approximately £1000 per week for the ten years it was used. I doubt he misses acting all that much! Charles Gray also pops up for an elongated and mellifluous cameo as a genial Air Commodore with a steely, determined glint to his eye. 

Mosquito Squadron might be a bit cheap, it might be derivative, but it still has enough stirring drama to keep you mildly entertained whenever it pops up in the TV schedules as it did this weekend. Worth a watch, but by no means a classic of the genre. McCallum would go on to wear the RAF uniform more convincingly and with greater success in TV's Colditz just three years later.