I love me a good submarine movie and this is the film that essentially created all of the usual tropes of the genre. It isn’t the best that was ever made, but it isn’t far from it either. Anytime you’ve got Burt Lancaster and Clark Gable in a picture you know you’re gonna get something interesting. Anyway, here’s my full review over at Cinema Sentries.
George Orwell once stated that All Art Is Propaganda, and after watching Went the Day Well? I wanna ask, is that such a bad thing?
My tongue is planted firmly in my cheek, and to be fair, I’ve never even read that Orwell book, but Went the Day Well? is a piece of wartime propaganda. And it is excellent.
The thought experiment goes – what if the Nazis successfully took over a British town? What if they invaded England? The answer the film proposes is that we’d have to fight back. Sometimes brutally.
In the small village of Bramley Inn a group of what appear to be British soldiers arrive unannounced. They state that they are there to judge the village’s preparedness and ask to be quartered there for a few days.
At first, the villagers believe them and are excited to see some real action (or as real as they think they’ll ever get). The village has done its preparations, they have a Homeguard and have practiced what to do if the war comes to them.
But soon they begin to think these soldiers may not be what they say they are. One of them slips up in their English and another writes his “7s” in the European way. Just as they are trying to decide what to do, the soldiers reveal themselves as Germans setting up the invasion.
The Nazis are ruthless. They mow down the Homeguard without a second’s thought and have no problems shooting anyone else who causes trouble.
The message is clear: the villagers have to be just as tough. In an amazing scene – and I’m sorry for the spoilers on an 80-year-old film – a sweet little old lady is serving dinner to one of the Nazis. She prattles on as she cooks, revealing a surprisingly intimate detail about her life – that she and her husband couldn’t have children and they both blamed the other one. Then, when the Nazi isn’t looking she tosses pepper into his eyes, grabs an axe, and gives him a whack.
It is a surprisingly violent film for a 1942 film, but the message is clear again. The enemy will not hesitate to kill you and the British way of life, and you must be willing to fight back with all you’ve got. Even if you live in a little village that will likely never see any sort of action, you must be prepared.
As a piece of propaganda, it is quite effective. But better yet as a piece of cinema, it is excellent all around.
This is exactly the kind of film I was thinking about when I decided to dedicate September to British cinema. Night Boat to Dublin isn’t splashy, original, or all that imaginative, but it is well-constructed, solidly made, and darn entertaining. It is the type of jolly-good spy-thriller that only the Brits can make.
At the height of World War II British Intelligence Services fear someone is passing information about the atomic bomb to Nazi Germany. Two intelligence officers, Captain Grant (Robert Newton) and Captain Wilson (Lawrence O’Madden) board the titular night boat to Dublin hoping to sniff him out. Suspicion quickly falls on Paul Faber (Raymond Lovell), a shady-looking lawyer.
Captain Grant secures a job in Faber’s offices posing as a down-and-out military man who (as the story he’s created for himself goes) has secretly gone AWOL. When Faber learns of this he blackmails Grant into doing some illegal business for him. This includes marrying Marion (Muriel Pavlow) an Austrian desperate to become a British citizen.
It is full of fun cloak-and-dagger stuff including a wonderful finale at a grand gothic, cliff-side mansion and an underground cavern. None of it is groundbreaking stuff, but it is very well-made and quite entertaining.
I’ve talked a little in this series about memory and the movies. Or rather, how this series continually brings up memories of both me watching certain movies or just knowing about their existence in various ways. That probably isn’t interesting to anyone but me, but I find it fascinating, and this is my blog so I’m gonna keep talking about it 🙂
My first memory of The Big Red One, Samuel Fuller’s movie loosely based on his experiences in World War II, is of the DVD cover. I was in Walmart many years ago looking through their movie selection and came across a copy of The Big Red One. It was an evocative cover that was mostly black with a big white outline of a rifle and the title was all in white except for the word “red.” Well, you can see what I mean up above.
I immediately wanted it. I read the back cover and it promised to be a full restoration of Fuller’s lost film. It had lots of extra footage. It was a masterpiece. That sounded great.
I put the film back. I’ve been burned before. The film sounded interesting but I wasn’t ready for another blind buy.
I haven’t really thought about the film since. Oh, every now and again it would pop up on a streaming service or whatever and I’d think about watching it. Then I’d find something else. And now, I’ve finally seen it.
It is pretty good. Unfortunately, I wasn’t paying attention and I watched the original, non-director’s cut which is missing something like 45 minutes of footage. I might go back and watch that version someday. But not anytime soon.
The film follows a man only known as Sergeant (Lee Marvin) as he leads a squad of infantrymen from the 1st Infantry Division (who were known as The Big Red One due to the patch on their shirts.)
It reminded me quite a bit of the HBO series Band of Brothers as it follows this squad From North Africa to D-Day, the liberation of France to a concentration camp. They deal with battles and injuries, death, and replacements. In its own way, it is just as episodic as that series.
It was made on a low budget and unfortunately, it shows. The battle sequences aren’t particularly exciting. There are quite a few characters, but none of them are all that memorable. Mark Hamill is second billed but he gets very few lines of dialogue. His performance is mostly reaction shots. Most of the other characters are indistinguishable. I’d be hard-pressed to tell you any of their names or what they did. Marvin is great and he gets almost all of the screen time. He’s a hard-worn war veteran (in an early scene we see him as a private in World War I), but he’s kind to his men.
There are some really wonderful scenes. One inside a mental institution stands out. And the D-Day landing involves the Sergeant sending his men, one by one, across the beach to try and blow up a barbed wire fence keeping everyone from advancing. One guy goes, gets shot and he sends another. Then another. And another. He calls them out by number, not by name. It is harrowing to watch. These men are literal cannon fodder. More meat for the grinder.
It very much feels like an incomplete film. I’d like to see the longer cut (which was put together from surviving footage based on Fuller’s notes, he was dead when it was done). Forty minutes is a lot of time for these characters to be better filled out and their lives explored.
This version isn’t enough for me to be begging to see even more of this film, and the reviews of the extended cut don’t call it a masterpiece, so I expect it will be a few years before I decide to go back. But it is an interesting film, and I’d be interested to see if any of my readers have seen the longer version.
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I liked all kinds of movies, all sorts of different genres. I’ve recently come to really love old westerns. But sometimes Westerners are hard to watch through modern eyes. Their treatment of Native Americans is shoddy at best, and racist at worst. Shenandoah does ok by Indians, but its treatment of the Civil War and slavery is a little muddy.
I try very hard in this blog to not get political. I have political opinions, of course, but I want this site to be a place where all sorts of views can come and enjoy what I have to offer. This was especially true when I was just sharing live music. But now that I’m writing more reviews some politics will inevitably slip in. It is difficult to review certain types of art without letting some political opinions in. But I’ll try to keep it to a minimum.
That being said there are certain opinions that I will let out proudly. I think it is pretty safe to say that slavery was bad. It was a great evil in this country. That’s not controversial, and if you want to argue that point then you can just see yourself out.
A lot of westerns are set during the Civil War. Very few of them are pro-slavery, but their treatment of that institution, and of black people in general, can be suspect. The older I get the more difficulty I have watching Civil War movies that make folks fighting for the Confederacy into heroes. I know not everyone who fought for the South owned slaves or was particularly pro-slavery. Lots of young men fought for the South because that was their patriotic duty, many probably had no opinion on slavery whatsoever.
I don’t want to get too far into the weeds with this. Shenandoah is a pretty good movie starring James Stewart. He plays a character who wants nothing to do with the war. He has no love for slavery, but neither will he lift a hand to help fight against it. My review wrestles with what to do with a character like that. It is something I wrestle with every time I watch a movie with outdated stereotypes. Sometimes I love the movie, but it is difficult to parse that with the way the movie handles certain issues.
Anyway, you can read my review here.
themidnightcafe.org 