BASED ON THE NOVELS 'THE BIG PICK-UP' BY ELLESTON TREVOR AND 'DUNKIRK' CO-AUTHORED BY LT. COL. EWAN HUNTER AND MAJOR J.S. BRADFORD.
STARRING JOHN MILLS, BERNARD LEE, RICHARD ATTENBOROUGH, SEAN BARRETT AND MICHAEL GWYNN.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
'Dunkirk was bloody difficult to make from a logistics point of view. Yet it was made for £400,000 and came in under budget... I was the council school boy who became a major in the war, and that had a lot to do with the way I felt about Dunkirk. I didn't think that Dunkirk was a defeat; I always thought it was a very gallant effort but not a victory.' Director Leslie Norman.
Imagine being a soldier, maybe even a very young soldier away from home for the first time in his short life. Imagine fighting a war that wasn't of your own making, which is bad enough to begin with, and then finding yourself in a strange country where you don't even speak the language and the natives all seem to be hostile to you, even though you've only come there to help them.
Imagine again then, if you will, that you and your buddies are surrounded by the enemy and gradually being pushed towards the sea, where you'll likely all be slaughtered if the enemy succeeds in cornering you all the way it looks like he intends.
Not a pleasant situation to be in by any stretch of the imagination. That's the situation that roughly 400,000 English and French soldiers found themselves in during the Second World War, however. In May and June 1940, to be precise, when things were still all tickety-boo for the Germans, who didn't start to feel like they were losing the war until about mid-1943.
These exhausted and no doubt traumatised soldiers gathered on the beaches of Dunkirk in France and prayed for a miracle. Their prayers were answered. Their rescue and safe return is the basis of this movie, and also of the re-make that came out over the summer of 2017. I haven't at the time of writing this seen the re-make, but I've heard that cute mop-topped popster Harry Styles, formerly of One Direction, was quite good in it...!
The story is told mainly from the point of views of two main protagonists. John Mills is marvellous as the worn-out Corporal Binns, nicknamed 'Tubby' by his men (though he's not in the least!), who's attempting to find his way back to his unit in France with six or so of the soldiers under his command.
It must have been quite nerve-wracking being separated from your unit in a strange country where you know neither the lay of the land nor the language, and German bombs are dropping on you every few miles. It felt more like every few yards in the film, making their situation all the more perilous and threatening.
Through a mixture of coaxing, cajoling, jollying and even downright bullying, Tubby pushes and pulls his men across country, eventually joining up with the world's biggest beach party at Dunkirk. While he's in Dunkirk, he and many of his friends are worried sick about their own families back home in London, which was then being bombed to Kingdom Come by Hitler's sneaky Luftwaffe.
Tubby has to make tough executive decisions from time to time as well, such as when he orders his men to leave behind one of their injured comrades. If they bring him along, he'll die and they'll be caught up to by the pursuing German soldiers. It's a tough call but what else can they do? War situations usually favour the saving of the many over the saving of the few, or even the individual. Tubby's got to do what's best for the majority in this case.
I loved the farmhouse scenes where they found rest and relief for a bit, tucking into yummy-looking fried-egg sandwiches and red wine courtesy of the French chickens and the deserted farmhouse's former French owners, who seemingly have all fled the German advance. It's the one oasis of brief calm in the movie when you also realise just how hungry and tired these poor chaps are.
Bernard Lee plays a disillusioned British journalist called Charles Foreman. He volunteers
without hesitation to sail his own little boat, the VANITY, over to Dunkirk to supplement the British Navy's efforts to bring the brave soldiers home from foreign shores.
He's disgusted with the likes of Richard Attenborough's character, John Holden, a garage-owner who's made a packet out of the Phoney War fashioning buckles for soldiers' uniforms. Shouldn't Holden be doing more to help the war effort than simply sitting on his backside counting his fat wads of money?
When it comes to it, both Holden (who finally cuts the apron-strings fastening him securely to his clinging wife) and his plucky young curly-haired apprentice Frankie (was this the character Harry Styles played in the re-make?) answer the call of duty and make their way to Dunkirk in Holden's little boat.
Speaking of Holden's wife, the scene with the baby in the gas-mask would really bring home to the viewer what these wonderfully courageous men were fighting for. A newborn baby, as I'm sure we all agree, shouldn't have to ever wear a gas-mask, one of the most terrifying accoutrements of war-time.
I love the scene where Tubby and Foreman are thrown together, as it were, on the beaches of Dunkirk and have a philosophical, rhetorical-style discussion on the war. Why are we here, how did all this happen and where do we go from here and suchlike. Questions that have been asked by many since those days and probably never been satisfactorily answered.
I love the scene where Tubby and Foreman are thrown together, as it were, on the beaches of Dunkirk and have a philosophical, rhetorical-style discussion on the war. Why are we here, how did all this happen and where do we go from here and suchlike. Questions that have been asked by many since those days and probably never been satisfactorily answered.
Michael Gwynn (VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, HAMMER'S SCARS OF DRACULA, FAWLTY TOWERS) has a small role in the film as a delightfully plummy-voiced commander. He looks so young here!
Bernard Cribbins and Barry Foster who, if I'm not mistaken, starred together in one of Alfred Hitchcock's last and best movies FRENZY, also each have small roles in the film which I'm sad to report I wasn't astute enough to spot. Maybe you guys can succeed where I've failed, haha.
Shot on the beaches of south-east England, the film is so realistic and authentic that I wouldn't be surprised if it had the same effect on war veterans on its release that the opening scenes of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN are supposed to have had.
The Germans, referred to usually as 'Jerry' or 'Jerries,' are really only seen here from a distance. No matter, because this is not their film. It's a remarkably British film about a set of remarkable British (and French) soldiers whose lives were saved by a mixture of Navy personnel and incredibly brave civilians who offered their boats, their time and, in some cases, even their lives for their country and their countrymen. To these men, DUNKIRK is a fitting monument.
NEW 2K RESTORATION OF DUNKIRK (1958) BEING RELEASED ON BLU-RAY, DVD AND DIGITAL DOWNLOAD 25TH SEPTEMBER 2017. THIS IS COURTESY OF ORGANIC PUBLICITY AND STUDIOCANAL AS PART OF THE VINTAGE CLASSICS SEASON.
DUNKIRK is part of the 'VINTAGE CLASSICS COLLECTION,' showcasing British films, all fully restored and featuring brand new extra content.
www.facebook.com/vintageclassicsfilm
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger and movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens' fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra's books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
You can contact Sandra at:
http://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com
No comments:
Post a Comment