Reviews

There is a fundamental difference between British and American war movies of the 1950's and 60's. Where as Hollywoods output tends to have gung-ho heroes gun in each hand, knife in the teeth, winning the war for Uncle Sam and getting the girl to boot, the British war movie tended towards a more factual almost documentary style. Almost as if British cinema was saying 'something of great importance has recently happened, so lets document the facts for future generations lest we forget.' Hence we have films like Dunkirk, Sink The Bismark, Battle of The River Plate and most famously of all The Damn Busters.

Coming back to this movie 54 years after it was made and over 60 since the events portrayed this movie can at time seam rather odd. The acting is stilted and dialogue clipped, but this is a stylistic thing rather than bad acting, after all the same style of acting can be witnessed in Ealling Comedies, the proto-hammer horror films and any number of 'The Blue Lamp' type police films. The bulk of the cinematography is also nothing special, being straightforward 'one' or 'two' shots with lighting that can be described as bog standard.

However this film really scores on two fronts. Firstly the use of real true to era aircraft (Leased from the RAF who still used Lancasters as trainers at the time) flown by genuine RAF bomber crews and filmed using the various lakes around Cumberland and West Yorkshire where the real 617 squadron trained for the real mission. And secondly it's dogged sticking to historical detail, or at least as much that could be adhered to without breaking the official secrets act!! There is no Pearl Harbour rewriting of history here. What you see is as near as damn it what really happened. Even now the a comparison of the attack as portrayed on film and the most recently published accounts of the raid as released by the British ministry of defence show very few factual flaws.

Also it must be born in mind that the early 1950's were not a pleasant time for the UK populous. The nation was still crippled by US war debt, many items were still rationed and the teething pains of the change that would lead to the welfare state and the cultural and economic boom of the 1960's were still cutting deep. So it is hardly surprising that a film showing a heroic and resourceful Britian would strike such a strong chord with its viewers.

I must be said some aspects of this film haven't aged well compared to some of the other Brit war flicks of the time ('Battle Of The River Plate' springs to mind), but as a historical document and comment on Britian in the immediate post war era it stands tall as one of the most important films of its time.

Take a wise cracking thirteen year old kid whose elder brother is an inept gumshoe, a host of classic British Actors (Jimmy Nail, Susannah York, Saeed Jaffrey, Roy Kinnear) amongst others, an intelligent plot and witty script from the pen of Anthony Horowitz (based on his own novel 'The Falcons Malteser'), a cult - and rather obscure - Brit heavy rock band (Mammoth) to play a gang of heavies; film it around North London in a classic film noir style and sprinkle with a cartload of tongue in cheek references to some of the greatest noir thrillers of all time and you have cooked up a rather tasty family friendly film that is a real joy to watch.

This film works on so many levels, it's well paced with so great moments of slap stick (such as the dropping of a grand piano onto a van full of bad guys) and full of crooks cartoony enough to entertain the kiddies, yet at the same time if full of enough references and in jokes to movies such as Kiss Me Deadly, Cassablanca and (of course) The Maltese Falcon to keep the hardened film buff entertained for hours.

This is the kind of left field quirky comedy that the British do best and is well worth 94 minutes of anybodies day to watch.

Not the best film in the world. The lighting is poor, he acting wooden and the plot, although interesting is buried in a pile of ham-fisted direction. BUT, when you consider this film was made on a the sort of budget that would cover an assistant sparky's wages on a Tom Cruise movie using minimal equipment, by a bunch of part timers, you have to give them high marks for an ambitious effort that just manages to keep the right side of interesting from beginning to end.

Indeed there is enough art house style camera work, cleaver use of a 78 RPM soundtrack, and fairly natural dialogue to make the whole 90 minutes a worth while watch; provided you are able to over look the restrictions of the minute budget. Add in some blackly funny Stan and Ollie type moments, such as the suicide by gas cooker sequence, and the result is a film that has cult classic scrawled all over it.