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What a shambles we've made of this whole rotten affair
Connoisseurs of anti-epic should not overlook Leslie Norman's Dunkirk (1958). Especially in a decade supposed to be setting comfortably into the aftermyth of war, it's notable how matter-of-factly near to a cynical tragedy its docu-realist treatment leans with the naïveté of the Phoney War and the disorientation of the British Expeditionary Force—if Operation Dynamo was a miracle, it was also a seat-of-the-pants shitshow in which no one ever knew what to expect next, whether an attack from the Luftwaffe or orders from the Admiralty. The action of the film never approaches the triumphalism of the credits' crisp fanfare. The critical eye it casts on the state of Britain in the spring of 1940 wouldn't stand for it.
In service of its scope of chaos, the screenplay combined by David Divine and W. P. Lipscomb from Elleston Trevor's The Big Pick-Up (1955) and Lieutenant Colonel Ewan Butler and Major J. Selby Bradford's Dunkirk (Keep the Memory Green, 1950) distributes its confusion, disillusion, determination, and dithering among three narratives which cascade inevitably into one another as national attention and effort converge on the event horizon of Dunkirk. Fed up with the waffling and pettifogging of the Ministry of Information, Bernard Lee's Charles Foreman is starting to feel like a Fleet Street Cassandra as every attempt to confirm the reports of German forces massing on the borders of the Low Countries blandly receives the official brush-off: "I have nothing to add to the communiqué . . . That's a matter for the censor." Despite his side hustle of small-scale military subcontracting which exempts his garage from the petrol ration, Richard Attenborough's John Holden doesn't yet feel the war as much more than an embarrassment, especially when it obliges him to justify his reserved occupation: "Anyway, would I have done any more by sitting on my backside in France for the last six months? Well, would I?" Even John Mills' Corporal Tubby Binns of the 2nd Wiltshires spends most of his time in country catcalling the newsreels with his mates until all of a sudden the German advance has overtaken the Pathé Gazette and left him holding the closest thing to an officer's bag of shepherding the survivors of his unit through refugee columns and sitting-duck fields, making up the numbers of the lost with the odds and sods of other companies and even branches of the service until they should reach the sea-breeze nightmare of the beaches where waiting around to hit the sand as Stukas whine down on the middle of church parade is even more nerve-racking than laying up in half-abandoned farmhouses and hedgerows as deceptive with birdsong as their own English countryside, a sightline of ocean and a sea-change of war away. A shocked private could be speaking for the nation as he stares at the smoke-cratered coppice that seconds ago housed a battery of Royal Artillery: "I hope somebody knows what they're doing."
It's an open question down to the last of the film's two and a quarter hours, which decently epic runtime does require a little set-up before it can use its deliberate pace for as much horror show as history lesson: all quiet until it isn't on the western front. Cartoons of Allied confidence look impossibly innocent in hindsight—Chamberlain of all people chasing off the Führer with an umbrella—but when Holden finds his machinists listening to Lord Haw-Haw, he has to switch off the programme himself after one of them objects, "How do you know it's twaddle?" In a London pub, the phoniness of the war isn't a rhetorical question to the merchant seaman who lost two fingers and ten days drifting off the Faroes to the Kriegsmarine. Flanagan and Allen hang out their washing on the Siegfried Line while the Maginot Line is circumvented by the animated arrows of Fall Gelb and the British positions crumble back to the Channel coast far more neatly on the map than in scrambling, fractious life, where even before the situation assumes its full pear shape the soldiers on the ground have only the haziest and most blackly joking idea of their deployment up to the Dyle: "We sit up on the end of a line held by the French to connect up with the Belgians. You know, like closing a door." – "And we're the door, eh?" – "Well, supposing someone puts their foot in the bloody door?" Even with our intermittent advantage of the bigger picture, the audience is encouraged less toward admiration at the audacity of the operation than amazement that any of its moving parts actually meshed: the pair of staff colonels contemplating their commander-in-chief's call to pull out the BEF at the expense of the French First Army, the vice-admiral who has to prove that it's mathematically worth risking further destroyers on Dunkirk instead of reserving them against the likelihood of invasion; the French journalist bitterly observing the English failure to recognize the scale of the disaster for France. The score by Malcolm Arnold saves its most inspirational motifs for the assembling of the little ships including the real-life Medway Queen and Massey Shaw and one of the same RN officers who has just been requisitioning all the shallow-draft small craft the Admiralty can get its articles on sighs from the tall bridge of his destroyer, "I suppose they're going to try to bring the army away. There's not a chance, you know." It is standard practice for war movies to sneak their suspense into the uncertainties of the historical record, but Dunkirk rather breathtakingly makes the record itself feel like a long shot. "Fools at the top. Fools at the bottom. There are times when I don't think we ought to win this war."
Fools or not, Dunkirk cares too much for its people at the bottom to let its skepticism write them off; they may be pieces of the vast, struggling mosaic of the evacuation, but they have more than archetypal lives, fragile, unpredictable, and governed by irony as often as not. "It's a funny thing about those flowers, Mike," Meredith Edwards' Private Dave Bellman notes over their improvised, oil-lit dinner in a farmhouse as ghostly deserted as if its former occupants knew something its current ones don't. They have been trying to estimate the days since Belgium, the season their only real clock: "I used to like the smell of lilac. I hate it now." The same fair weather that shone impartially on the strafing of refugees and the dive-bombing of the battery will last catch him lying under the leaf-light of an orchard, calling faintly in Welsh for his mates and God—Binns with the weight of his unwanted stripes on his shoulders has had to leave the wounded man for the Germans, swearing he'll be safe as a prisoner of war and hoping to believe it himself. He lingers in absentia and not just because Binns has a flare of near-mutiny on his hands over the decision, a loose end the film can never go back for. We are left guessing similarly when a naval rating disappears in the explosion of the civilian boat from which he stared with its owner in horror at the smoldering horizon of the town and the straggling piers of men reaching into the sea. "I've had two tries—ain't got away yet," one old hand of the beaches warns the newcomers who are still processing the fact of a full-on run-out rather than a line to hold when another cuts into their hopes of an orderly embarkation, "Be ruddy lucky if you did. It's my fourth try." Destroyers are sunk before our eyes, thrashing with men, barely clear of the overcrowded mole. Men under bombardment grip themselves to the sand, their mutter and babble of counting, praying, one voice crying over and over that he doesn't want to die until his neighbor can't take it another dirt-showered second and shouts back, "You might bloody well have to, chum!" Thanks to the distance of the dogfights from the beaches, the grounded airman played by Michael Bates spends most of his time being cursed out for the fuck-all efforts of the RAF and stubbornly refuses to take camouflage in khaki. Wringing out his wrong uniform as their little company shockily reconvenes from the incendiary sinking of the paddle steamer they optimistically wangled themselves aboard, he flashes a bedraggled grin at Binns: "We had to get back to you, Corp. We knew you couldn't do without your glamour boys." It feels like more than the ticked boxes of propaganda, this attention beyond some universally assumed experience of Dunkirk. When the medical officers at the café turned casualty clearing station draw lots to determine who'll remain with the wounded, a short straw is understood to mean something particular for Stepney-bred Harry Landis' Lieutenant Levy turning quietly back to his patient as the rattle of German machine guns closes in. Even the protagonists have less plot armor than might be expected from their telephoto functions as their paths collide in ways only the audience can see the twists in. Of the crowd of weekend sailors tapped to deliver their boats to Sheerness at the tight-lipped behest of the Navy, Foreman was the first to volunteer to take his on to Dunkirk as soon as he'd seen the day's catch of blanket-wrapped soldiers stumbling wearily ashore and almost at once an air attack on the Vanity leaves the journalist as subject to the vagaries of fate and tracer fire as anyone else stranded on the sands. Holden couldn't look more of a civilian with his rimless glasses and his hesitant stammer and his indignant failure to register his boat because it's "not thirty foot—not since I ran slap into Teddington Lock it isn't," but when the Heron is swamped by a squabbling rush of soldiers and Robert Urquhart's Private Mike Russell steps in to lend his grease monkey's expertise to the jammed engine, the windblown little man at the tiller responds in a kind of reminiscent surprise, as if in one crashing, oil-soaked night it slipped his mind, "I own a garage." If Binns is another of his actor's national everymen, the camera is always catching him at helpless, hurting moments, his tenacious face creased with more second guesses than pluck and the conviction of an inglorious welcome home: "I suppose they think we've made a muck of it." The wry comfort offered in so many words by Dunkirk is the knowledge that the muck was well and duly made before Binns and his people got anywhere near it.
It is a truth chronologically acknowledged that any current appraisal of this picture has to squint back through the blockbuster acclaim of Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk (2017), but I am not convinced that the earlier film suffers by comparison. Certainly it's as much survival horror as the later version and perhaps more effectively, being so much less stylized. Its political edge, however carefully negotiated with the War Office, strikes me as more subversive when it really doesn't leave the impression that a muddle through is as good as a mile; its caution against complacency feels like a corrective not only to the received myths of Dunkirk but the back-patting war films which preceded it. So successfully stark and pragmatic is this telling that it almost loses the ending when a narrator cuts suddenly over model shots of the wrecked mole, half-sunken ships, windswept beaches strewn with abandoned vehicles and artillery to claim that this "great defeat and . . . great miracle" was the crucible that unified Britain for the rest of the Second World War, but fortunately it catches itself in time with the Kiplingesque punch line of Binns and Russell back to the Army again, sergeant, who dresses them down for drilling as sloppily as if they'd just won a war instead of damn near—and don't they know it—lost one. It suits one of the final productions of Michael Balcon and original flavor Ealing Studios, whose propaganda in actual time of war ranked with the weirdest of Leslie Howard and Powell and Pressburger. Its heroism is as real as it's back-handed, beautifully shot by DP Paul Beeson as if filling in the lacunae of the historical footage that mainly supplies the aircraft and armies to which the otherwise ambitious effects budget did not extend. Its reconstruction of Dunkirk is no sleight-of-hand of glass mattes but a cast of honest-to-goodness thousands shivering in the water or sloping around the dunes of Camber Sands like some surrealistically live-action Paul Nash. Their Beckettian efforts to get off the beach approach black comedy except for the body count. Sean Barrett ended up on the original record cover of the Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?" (1985). I caught this Dunkirk with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch on Tubi, but it can be viewed clearly on the Internet Archive and even on Blu-Ray if you live in the right country and can ignore the really appalling error in the advertising copy. As he watches the motley flotilla of the little ships accruing water boats and passenger launches and pre-war tugs, an incredulous seaman begins to sing in time with his mooring, "Oh, roll on the Rodney, the Nelson, Renown, that one-funnelled dinghy is bound to go down." This shambles brought to you by my miraculous backers at Patreon.
In service of its scope of chaos, the screenplay combined by David Divine and W. P. Lipscomb from Elleston Trevor's The Big Pick-Up (1955) and Lieutenant Colonel Ewan Butler and Major J. Selby Bradford's Dunkirk (Keep the Memory Green, 1950) distributes its confusion, disillusion, determination, and dithering among three narratives which cascade inevitably into one another as national attention and effort converge on the event horizon of Dunkirk. Fed up with the waffling and pettifogging of the Ministry of Information, Bernard Lee's Charles Foreman is starting to feel like a Fleet Street Cassandra as every attempt to confirm the reports of German forces massing on the borders of the Low Countries blandly receives the official brush-off: "I have nothing to add to the communiqué . . . That's a matter for the censor." Despite his side hustle of small-scale military subcontracting which exempts his garage from the petrol ration, Richard Attenborough's John Holden doesn't yet feel the war as much more than an embarrassment, especially when it obliges him to justify his reserved occupation: "Anyway, would I have done any more by sitting on my backside in France for the last six months? Well, would I?" Even John Mills' Corporal Tubby Binns of the 2nd Wiltshires spends most of his time in country catcalling the newsreels with his mates until all of a sudden the German advance has overtaken the Pathé Gazette and left him holding the closest thing to an officer's bag of shepherding the survivors of his unit through refugee columns and sitting-duck fields, making up the numbers of the lost with the odds and sods of other companies and even branches of the service until they should reach the sea-breeze nightmare of the beaches where waiting around to hit the sand as Stukas whine down on the middle of church parade is even more nerve-racking than laying up in half-abandoned farmhouses and hedgerows as deceptive with birdsong as their own English countryside, a sightline of ocean and a sea-change of war away. A shocked private could be speaking for the nation as he stares at the smoke-cratered coppice that seconds ago housed a battery of Royal Artillery: "I hope somebody knows what they're doing."
It's an open question down to the last of the film's two and a quarter hours, which decently epic runtime does require a little set-up before it can use its deliberate pace for as much horror show as history lesson: all quiet until it isn't on the western front. Cartoons of Allied confidence look impossibly innocent in hindsight—Chamberlain of all people chasing off the Führer with an umbrella—but when Holden finds his machinists listening to Lord Haw-Haw, he has to switch off the programme himself after one of them objects, "How do you know it's twaddle?" In a London pub, the phoniness of the war isn't a rhetorical question to the merchant seaman who lost two fingers and ten days drifting off the Faroes to the Kriegsmarine. Flanagan and Allen hang out their washing on the Siegfried Line while the Maginot Line is circumvented by the animated arrows of Fall Gelb and the British positions crumble back to the Channel coast far more neatly on the map than in scrambling, fractious life, where even before the situation assumes its full pear shape the soldiers on the ground have only the haziest and most blackly joking idea of their deployment up to the Dyle: "We sit up on the end of a line held by the French to connect up with the Belgians. You know, like closing a door." – "And we're the door, eh?" – "Well, supposing someone puts their foot in the bloody door?" Even with our intermittent advantage of the bigger picture, the audience is encouraged less toward admiration at the audacity of the operation than amazement that any of its moving parts actually meshed: the pair of staff colonels contemplating their commander-in-chief's call to pull out the BEF at the expense of the French First Army, the vice-admiral who has to prove that it's mathematically worth risking further destroyers on Dunkirk instead of reserving them against the likelihood of invasion; the French journalist bitterly observing the English failure to recognize the scale of the disaster for France. The score by Malcolm Arnold saves its most inspirational motifs for the assembling of the little ships including the real-life Medway Queen and Massey Shaw and one of the same RN officers who has just been requisitioning all the shallow-draft small craft the Admiralty can get its articles on sighs from the tall bridge of his destroyer, "I suppose they're going to try to bring the army away. There's not a chance, you know." It is standard practice for war movies to sneak their suspense into the uncertainties of the historical record, but Dunkirk rather breathtakingly makes the record itself feel like a long shot. "Fools at the top. Fools at the bottom. There are times when I don't think we ought to win this war."
Fools or not, Dunkirk cares too much for its people at the bottom to let its skepticism write them off; they may be pieces of the vast, struggling mosaic of the evacuation, but they have more than archetypal lives, fragile, unpredictable, and governed by irony as often as not. "It's a funny thing about those flowers, Mike," Meredith Edwards' Private Dave Bellman notes over their improvised, oil-lit dinner in a farmhouse as ghostly deserted as if its former occupants knew something its current ones don't. They have been trying to estimate the days since Belgium, the season their only real clock: "I used to like the smell of lilac. I hate it now." The same fair weather that shone impartially on the strafing of refugees and the dive-bombing of the battery will last catch him lying under the leaf-light of an orchard, calling faintly in Welsh for his mates and God—Binns with the weight of his unwanted stripes on his shoulders has had to leave the wounded man for the Germans, swearing he'll be safe as a prisoner of war and hoping to believe it himself. He lingers in absentia and not just because Binns has a flare of near-mutiny on his hands over the decision, a loose end the film can never go back for. We are left guessing similarly when a naval rating disappears in the explosion of the civilian boat from which he stared with its owner in horror at the smoldering horizon of the town and the straggling piers of men reaching into the sea. "I've had two tries—ain't got away yet," one old hand of the beaches warns the newcomers who are still processing the fact of a full-on run-out rather than a line to hold when another cuts into their hopes of an orderly embarkation, "Be ruddy lucky if you did. It's my fourth try." Destroyers are sunk before our eyes, thrashing with men, barely clear of the overcrowded mole. Men under bombardment grip themselves to the sand, their mutter and babble of counting, praying, one voice crying over and over that he doesn't want to die until his neighbor can't take it another dirt-showered second and shouts back, "You might bloody well have to, chum!" Thanks to the distance of the dogfights from the beaches, the grounded airman played by Michael Bates spends most of his time being cursed out for the fuck-all efforts of the RAF and stubbornly refuses to take camouflage in khaki. Wringing out his wrong uniform as their little company shockily reconvenes from the incendiary sinking of the paddle steamer they optimistically wangled themselves aboard, he flashes a bedraggled grin at Binns: "We had to get back to you, Corp. We knew you couldn't do without your glamour boys." It feels like more than the ticked boxes of propaganda, this attention beyond some universally assumed experience of Dunkirk. When the medical officers at the café turned casualty clearing station draw lots to determine who'll remain with the wounded, a short straw is understood to mean something particular for Stepney-bred Harry Landis' Lieutenant Levy turning quietly back to his patient as the rattle of German machine guns closes in. Even the protagonists have less plot armor than might be expected from their telephoto functions as their paths collide in ways only the audience can see the twists in. Of the crowd of weekend sailors tapped to deliver their boats to Sheerness at the tight-lipped behest of the Navy, Foreman was the first to volunteer to take his on to Dunkirk as soon as he'd seen the day's catch of blanket-wrapped soldiers stumbling wearily ashore and almost at once an air attack on the Vanity leaves the journalist as subject to the vagaries of fate and tracer fire as anyone else stranded on the sands. Holden couldn't look more of a civilian with his rimless glasses and his hesitant stammer and his indignant failure to register his boat because it's "not thirty foot—not since I ran slap into Teddington Lock it isn't," but when the Heron is swamped by a squabbling rush of soldiers and Robert Urquhart's Private Mike Russell steps in to lend his grease monkey's expertise to the jammed engine, the windblown little man at the tiller responds in a kind of reminiscent surprise, as if in one crashing, oil-soaked night it slipped his mind, "I own a garage." If Binns is another of his actor's national everymen, the camera is always catching him at helpless, hurting moments, his tenacious face creased with more second guesses than pluck and the conviction of an inglorious welcome home: "I suppose they think we've made a muck of it." The wry comfort offered in so many words by Dunkirk is the knowledge that the muck was well and duly made before Binns and his people got anywhere near it.
It is a truth chronologically acknowledged that any current appraisal of this picture has to squint back through the blockbuster acclaim of Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk (2017), but I am not convinced that the earlier film suffers by comparison. Certainly it's as much survival horror as the later version and perhaps more effectively, being so much less stylized. Its political edge, however carefully negotiated with the War Office, strikes me as more subversive when it really doesn't leave the impression that a muddle through is as good as a mile; its caution against complacency feels like a corrective not only to the received myths of Dunkirk but the back-patting war films which preceded it. So successfully stark and pragmatic is this telling that it almost loses the ending when a narrator cuts suddenly over model shots of the wrecked mole, half-sunken ships, windswept beaches strewn with abandoned vehicles and artillery to claim that this "great defeat and . . . great miracle" was the crucible that unified Britain for the rest of the Second World War, but fortunately it catches itself in time with the Kiplingesque punch line of Binns and Russell back to the Army again, sergeant, who dresses them down for drilling as sloppily as if they'd just won a war instead of damn near—and don't they know it—lost one. It suits one of the final productions of Michael Balcon and original flavor Ealing Studios, whose propaganda in actual time of war ranked with the weirdest of Leslie Howard and Powell and Pressburger. Its heroism is as real as it's back-handed, beautifully shot by DP Paul Beeson as if filling in the lacunae of the historical footage that mainly supplies the aircraft and armies to which the otherwise ambitious effects budget did not extend. Its reconstruction of Dunkirk is no sleight-of-hand of glass mattes but a cast of honest-to-goodness thousands shivering in the water or sloping around the dunes of Camber Sands like some surrealistically live-action Paul Nash. Their Beckettian efforts to get off the beach approach black comedy except for the body count. Sean Barrett ended up on the original record cover of the Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?" (1985). I caught this Dunkirk with
spatch on Tubi, but it can be viewed clearly on the Internet Archive and even on Blu-Ray if you live in the right country and can ignore the really appalling error in the advertising copy. As he watches the motley flotilla of the little ships accruing water boats and passenger launches and pre-war tugs, an incredulous seaman begins to sing in time with his mooring, "Oh, roll on the Rodney, the Nelson, Renown, that one-funnelled dinghy is bound to go down." This shambles brought to you by my miraculous backers at Patreon.
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We really need to see Henri Verneuil's Weekend at Dunkirk (1964) now.