Al Murray's Great British War Movies

MUSIC: "633 Squadron Theme"

Hello. I'm Al Murray

and over the next hour I'll be looking at a subject

really, really close to my heart - the Great British War Movie.

I grew up on war movies.

As a kid, my Sunday afternoons and bank holidays were spent

glued to the telly, wallowing in the inspiring heroism of

The Dam Busters,

the shoot-'em-up excitement of Where Eagles Dare,

and the dazzling dogfights of the Battle Of Britain.

Widescreen epics like A Bridge Too Far

whetted my appetite for history far better than any school lesson could.

The stars were my heroes,

such as David Niven's dashing corporal in The Guns Of Navarone,

Jack Hawkins' grizzled commander in The Cruel Sea or

Alec Guinness's thoughtful colonel in The Bridge On The River Kwai.

I didn't care about the dodgy special effects of Angels One Five

or the dodgier accents of The Guns Of Navarone.

GERMAN ACCENT: The commandant will telephone you shortly

to congratulate you, Muesel.

No, I was too busy absorbing the stuff upper lip

and jolly camaraderie of films like the charming Reach For The Sky.

I'm not ashamed to say that I absolutely love these films

and they helped make me the person I am today.

I'm going to take a look at some of my favourite British war movies

and try and figure out what makes them so great.

To help me with this crucial mission I'm joined by historian, Dan Snow,

writer, Natalie Haynes

and broadcaster and film expert, Matthew Sweet.

So, welcome everybody.

Now, Dan, as a historian, how do you approach a Second World War film?

Well, with a huge amount of enjoyment, but I'm not expecting to

learn a great deal about the events that they describe or portray. But I think they're wonderful.

I get a lot of strife cos people say to me, "You're just some weirdo.

"You find warfare fascinating and fun and think it's amusing."

That's not true at all. The reason that war is

so fascinating to audiences in the 1950s, or to many of us still today,

-is because it's unbelievably extremist.

-Yes.

The most extreme thing that human beings do to each other. The reason that's fascinating...

-We're trying to make sense of it.

-..we're trying to make sense of it.

We're going, "So, hold on, ships sailed across the Atlantic and

"then other boats, underwater ships, tried to sink them with torpedoes? Are you joking?"

You know, so I think actually, rightly,

the British public were, at the time, and still to a certain extent

are totally obsessed by this remarkable event only 70 years ago.

-And in the '50s, they were THE big movies, weren't they?

-Yes absolutely, yes.

I mean, it was a kind of guaranteed box office subject.

There's always an attempt to sort of process what happened to us.

But then they turn into entertainment quite quickly.

Natalie, are you entertained by war films?

-Yeah, I really am, but then you knew that already!

-LAUGHTER

That's why I asked you on the programme, you know, let's be honest here.

Yes, no, I've never been so disgusted...and I think it's true,

though, that we've always, I mean, from the very

beginnings of people wanting to hear stories, we wanted to hear about

what our fathers did in the war, what our parents did in the war.

We're always investing identity in what

we see as the kind of conflicts that existed to allow us to exist.

I reckon the best place to start is probably with the British at their

most ingenious, their most heroic,

at their very best - The Dam Busters.

MUSIC: "The Dam Busters Theme"

We've always known, deep down,

that we're cleverer than the Bosch,

and the film that best shows how smart the British are is

The Dam Busters, Michael Anderson's fantastic 1955 film

about the invention of the bouncing bomb.

It's arguably the best-loved British war movie of all time.

It's the story of two men - Barnes Wallis, the maverick,

boffinish inventor of the bomb,

played by the brilliant Michael Redgrave who nails Wallis's

dogged ingenuity in the first half of the film, and Wing Commander

Guy Gibson, played by Richard Todd, who is British professionalism

and patriotic duty personified, despite what he called his dog.

But while we all remember the stirring music

and thrilling bombing raid, it's much more sombre than you remember,

leaving you in no doubt about the sacrifice involved,

with an end scene that really leaves a lump in your throat.

56 men.

If I'd known it was going to be like this, I-I'd never have started it.

You mustn't think that way. If all these fellas had known from the beginning

they wouldn't be coming back, they'd have gone for it just the same.

There isn't a single one of them would have dropped out. I knew them all, I know that's true.

Look, you've had a worse night than any of us.

Why don't you go and find the doctor and ask for one of his sleeping pills?

Aren't you going to turn in, Gibby?

No, I-I have to write some letters first.

And the first half is basically a physics lesson.

Why has a film so lacking in bombast endured so strongly?

LAUGHTER AND CHEERING

-That's probably the moment of highest emotion in that film...

-LAUGHTER

..when they realise that their bomb actually works.

1940s man-hug, it's sort of arms.

Yeah, just arms. Yeah, belts are very distant.

What is fascinating about that clip is you do see that the

censor's pencil is on it and although they're trying to tell

the true story, the upkeep mine, and in that clip it's the highball,

which is its cousin, were still top secret.

Yes, which is why there is this sense of an audience learning something,

of going back to something that they may have

read about, you know, in some kind of translated or censored form.

The reason why there were

so many films made in the '50s about the Second World War is, I think,

on some very basic level, people were discovering what happened.

There was a sort of newsy quality to them,

these operations that were conducted, these, you know,

these espionage stories that were beginning to emerge.

Part of it is just an audience acquainting themselves

with what the story was, matching it up with their own experiences.

Well, The Dam Busters was cast with people who'd been servicemen

so that they would behave like servicemen,

and you do get this rather strange emotional detachment, and is

that a British characteristic or is that a characteristic of the '50s?

I don't know, but in a very odd way it speaks to me,

I sort of aspire to be as emotionally...

-As stiff and upper lippish as they are?

-..antiseptic as these people.

It's a very interesting point that he makes of saying, "I think you've had the worst night of all of us."

In a world of constant communication, we have to kind of take a step back ourselves

and remember what it was like to just not know what had happened for hours on end,

and I think it's such a beautiful scene, at least in part, because when

he says, "You've had the worst night of all of us," he really means it.

Yeah. Why do we think this film endures today? Cos it does, doesn't it?

It's... Some of the black and white '50s war movies, and we're going to

get into some of those later, I don't think stand up very well.

Why does this one still resonate with people, do we think?

I think it might be because of the emotional honesty of that

conclusion and the complexities that are allowed to flourish there

at the end, that get denied in a lot of pictures of the same period.

-There's an awful lot of subtlety in it.

-Yeah.

Yeah, and Barnes Wallis is filling in for the great British eccentric.

He's a maverick genius - it's not the idea that he's some

sort of square boffin, we like the flair of his character, don't we?

-And we like technological-led solutions.

-Yes.

We don't like sending 500,000 19-year-olds into battle to

suffer 20% casualties, we like the idea that you can win wars

by just being clever and sort of keeping it gentlemanly and blowing

up their industrial infrastructure but avoiding the children's homes.

You know, I think that's still an attractive idea, you know, you can

win wars by dropping cruise missiles through people's ventilation shafts.

-Just on the bad guy.

-Yeah, just on the bad guy.

So, Gibson and Barnes Wallis, our idea of precision-bombing heroes,

give it 13 years and things have changed a little. You end up with this.

MUSIC: "Where Eagles Dare Theme"

THE most ludicrous World War II film ever has got to be

Where Eagles Dare.

Brian G Hutton's 1968 bruiser starring Richard Burton

and Clint Eastwood as unlikely crack commandos who have to storm

a Nazi castle to rescue an American general.

Along the way there is the classic cable-car fight,

seamless use of green screen that puts our stars

right at the heart of the action, textbook heel-clicking,

saluting Nazis, stunt doubles who look nothing like the two leads,

cars that randomly blow up when pushed down a hill. A worse-for-wear

Richard Burton desperately hoping that Danny Boy will pick up soon...

Broadsword calling Danny Boy.

..and Clint Eastwood taking on the entire German army with

a couple of machine guns.

Why didn't they just lob a grenade at him?

And this gun would, basically, tear down the wall he's hiding behind.

This is an ultra-violent shoot 'em up -

our boys rubbing the Germans' noses in the fact that we won,

and making the victory look bigger and sexier than ever.

13 years on from The Dam Busters, how have we drifted

so far from the facts?

And does it matter when we're having this much fun?

Ha! That's a completely different kind of heroism to Gibson

and Wallis, isn't it? I mean, that's extraordinary.

If he came out with a gun between his teeth, we wouldn't think anything of it.

-You wouldn't be a bit surprised.

-You wouldn't bat an eyelid.

-Now, Natalie, I know you love this movie.

-I do love it.

-Why?

But partly... Well, partly because you can't really go that far wrong

if you say, "Hey, man-with-no-name, could you pop that poncho

"over there and put a uniform on, and go and get some Nazis for us?

"That'd be perfect."

And then, also, there is the mystical power that is Richard Burton.

I know, you're right, of course, he does

look like at 43 he's had a tough paper round.

He's still extraordinary, he's still madly compelling.

So, yes, it's a sort of a romp, I guess,

is probably the fairest description for it?

-It's a dream, isn't it? It's like a dream of the war.

-Yeah, maybe it is.

It has elements from the war but somehow they're

coalescing in ways that they never could have done anywhere real.

So it's almost as if we've used up all of the real secret operations

that we know about that documents have been

declassified from - let's create one from our own fantasies, our own

imaginations that pushes all of those buttons but is like something

that you... It's almost something that you inhabit, isn't it? It's like a world that you go into,

like a computer game or something like that.

Well that's very like a shoot 'em up, that scene,

-with Clint... he dispatches 85 people, probably, in this film...

-In about 15 seconds.

..it's hard to count cos you never quite know

-how many people are in a lorry.

-Not a drinking game you want to play.

-It's not a drinking game, no.

-No.

-But why... How has this mutation occurred?

How have we... How have the British, who, you know,

we saw not even two decades earlier the stiff upper lip on display,

there's ingenuity, there's some subtlety, I mean, none of those were...

-No, we don't need those any more.

-..none of those words apply.

A lot of people have forgotten what war's about,

and war's, you know... war's quite industrial, it's quite

processed and it's quite boring for 99% of the time for most people.

My grandad just went back and forward across the Atlantic,

living in...with that low-level terror the whole time,

but not seeing a huge amount of kind of shoot-'em-up action.

In the '50s, it was about small cogs, big machines,

everyone doing their duty.

These films later on are about heroes, individuals that can win

it in a day, make a difference on their own, bullets bounce off them.

Well, cos the tag line... the movie poster is,

"Major Smith and Lieutenant Schaffer and a beautiful blonde called Mary,

"decide to win World War II in a weekend," or something.

-Yeah.

-That's it. That's the pitch. You can see the pitch meeting.

But the joy is that nobody saw that and then said,

"Give me another ten words, I need to know more."

They went, "Oh, brilliant, yes, that's exactly right."

Where Eagles Dare is a blockbuster, isn't it?

It's an action movie set during the Second World War,

and I think this blockbusterisation of the Second World War began

seven years earlier with this film.

MUSIC: "The Guns Of Navarone Theme"

If you want a big deluxe, World War II blockbuster

then you can't beat The Guns Of Navarone.

J Lee Thompson's 1961 epic men-on-a-mission movie.

Its got an all-star cast, including a gruff, rugged Gregory Peck and

a suave and charming David Niven, as part of a team sent to invade a Nazi

fortress on the island of Navarone, to destroy the aforementioned guns.

It's a heavyweight, stately film that balances super-serious themes

with an escapist adventure movie,

that lets Peck demonstrate his mastery of accents.

HE SPEAKS GREEK

A homoerotic subtext between David Niven

and Anthony Quayle as they tenderly smoke a cigarette,

stock characters so thin I call them Stabby and Shooty, and Nazis

so dumb they have to use every tool in the box to open their own fortress.

But amongst the Hollywood heroism, the carnage

and the massive guns, the film also tries to deal with

some big moral issues, certainly heavier than Where Eagles Dare,

as seen in this argument between Niven and Peck.

Previous films were all about getting the history right.

Is this the point where Hollywood starts to bleed in?

Someone's got to take the responsibility

if the job's going to get done! Do you think that's easy?!

I don't know!

I'm beginning to wonder who really is responsible

when it comes to the dirty work.

Who really is guilty? The man who gives the order or the one who has to do it

with his own hands?

-Which is a good philosophical question.

-Heavy.

It is a good philosophical question, and he's perfectly cast to ask it.

Well, he's perfectly cast. What's so striking, how old they are!

There's two sort of geriatric blokes on a special forces' mission

when actually, all their real-life peers, if they had them,

-or real-life equivalents would've been sort of 21 or, you know, that.

-As you all know,

real-life special forces' people all look like Steven Seagal. That is the rules.

-LAUGHTER

-It's true in Under Siege, it's true in the world.

It's interesting how that feels, in a way, like an extension

-of the conversation at the end of The Dam Busters, doesn't it?

-Yes.

This is where they might have got to after their third or

fourth pint, isn't it?

When the gloves were off and they're really starting to say what they feel.

But it's a weird moment in the film this because the action stops

and it turns into this moral chamber drama.

Yes, I mean, I remember as a little boy watching that thinking,

-"Oh, this is a bit boring," you know, because that...

-"Where are the guns?"

Well, cos The Guns of Navarone

operates on a Boy's Own adventure level that,

you know, it's behind enemy lines,

it's... They're being searched for...and all that proper exciting

Boy's Own stuff but

you can see that they're trying to inject this element.

I mean, it feels a little parasitic and the body of the film

sort of rejects it, like a transplanted organ or something.

Of course, heroes are crucial to a Second World War film but,

you need villains as well and when it comes to the Second World War

and you need a villain, who you going to call?

The Nazis. And here's a few of my screen favourites.

Villains don't get much more villainous than the Nazis,

and they come in all shapes and sizes.

The most evil-looking Nazi has to be Derren Nesbitt in Where Eagles Dare.

He looks like his whole body has been dipped in peroxide to

look properly alien.

The scariest Nazi has to be this slap-happy guy

from The Guns Of Navarone, who's so villainous that he's practically

Voldemort judging by the way these doors magic-shut behind him.

He also speaks perfect var-film German,

which was great fun to imitate in the playground.

I shall personally rearrange this officer's splints.

Something lost on Michael Caine, who plays Colonel Steiner

in The Eagle Has Landed, with a Cockney accent.

He reminds me of something that I occasionally pick up

on my shoe in the gutter!

His voice coach is just off camera tearing his hair out.

But my favourite Nazi has to be

this worryingly-alluring Gestapo interrogator from 633 Squadron...

Take off his clothes.

..seen here bearing down on the guy from West Side Story

and interfering with his nether regions.

Well, Lieutenant?

Of course, none of these films go into the genuinely grim stuff

the Nazis did. They're pantomime baddies.

But why did they so often turn out a little bit sexy?

-Well, crikey!

-Crikey is the very word!

LAUGHTER

-It's sort of like an adult version of 'Allo 'Allo!

-Yeah.

-Yes.

-Yes, she certainly is a sort of dominatrix figure, isn't she?

-Hmm.

-Cruel.

And filmed from very low down, so we get to see...

-It's a very unflattering angle.

-..all of the bottom of her face.

Yeah, everyone wants to be shot up the nostrils.

But it's his angle, isn't it? It's what it's like when she's bearing down on you,

is, I think, the idea... It's really very odd, that film.

I think it's something that... I think it's something that probably

sold a lot of tickets.

It's certainly something you get the strong sense that with

all of the representations of Nazis, that when those sadistic figures

are brought in, if they're not comic, then they're something else.

They're meant to be alluring.

And that something is not entirely unpleasant for the audience,

-or for some of the audience.

-But I think the Germans shouldn't feel too bad about this because

actually, that's what baddies do look like throughout history. It just happens that the kind of genre we're

talking about it's Germans who are the baddies. But if you look at Hollywood,

that's what British baddies look like -

they're all a bit sexually perverted,

very straight-backed, clipped, nasty people.

You think of Braveheart or The Patriot,

and I think it's not a function of what we think about the Germans,

and I think it's just what you do with cinematic baddies.

It's about who's lucky enough to be making the film.

I think, though, there is something historically-specific about this.

I think there's a sort of circuit of sadomasochism buzzing away

in a lot of these war films,

and in films made during the war as well, and just after.

Like the Gainsborough melodramas made just after the war were

full of people being slapped.

You went to see James Mason slapping Phyllis Calvert,

slapping Patricia Roc. People responded to that.

Read the fan magazines, a lot of people rather liked

the idea of being slapped by James Mason. And I think somehow...

-No-one knows what you mean(!)

-LAUGHTER

But it also suggests something about unresolved trauma

in the audience, doesn't it?

-And the question of...

-Definitely.

..you know, and that people have committed violent acts aren't talking about them,

don't know what to make of them even all these years afterwards.

And are repressing them and this is also the period of "no sex, please, we're British" isn't it?

That idea, and that we're clean-living people

and the Nazis are so evil

they're getting off on a sort of fetishised violence.

There's something peculiar, isn't there,

the Nazis who are, you know, synonymous with evil being

reduced to this sort of... They're ciphers, they're stooges.

Yeah, and background players.

Well, cos Nazis turn up in Indiana Jones' movies as a

personification of evil and they're the bad guys in The Sound Of Music.

-Yes, they are.

-They fill in... if you need a bad guy...

-If you need a baddie.

-..you don't need to explain... all someone has to do is

come on in a black uniform and you're allowed to shoot him.

The actor doesn't need to sit the director down and say, "What's my motivation?"

Of course, what all these films have in common is ideas of what it

means to be British - stiff upper lip, cups of tea,

all that sort of British stuff. Let's have a look now.

And what could be more British than a stiff upper lip?

In many war films, the line between being a bit reserved

and being completely barmy is paper thin.

Guy Hamilton's 1969 epic, The Battle Of Britain,

is a beautiful recreation of real events in retina-scorching Technicolor,

but it's also full of characters like this fellow

who seems remarkably non-traumatised by his crash landing.

-Thanks awfully, old chap.

-Fags for the win.

Or how about the bonkers briefing scene from The Man Who Never Was?

Again, based on real events

but delivered by actors who could barely keep a straight face.

It's the most outrageous, disgusting,

preposterous, not to say, barbaric idea.

But work out full details and be on hand at the War Cabinet offices at 4.30 tomorrow afternoon.

Thank you, sir.

But my favourite, by a mile, is Angels One Five,

George More O'Ferrall's 1952 take on the Battle of Britain, which is

filled with the loopiest bunch of toffs ever assembled on screen.

Take this scene where they wisecrack their way around the fact that

he's just smashed what's basically a £10 million aircraft into a house.

Hello, old man. Dropped in for tea?

Thought there'd be more room at the end of the runway.

Well, our guests do usually park their aircraft up there,

I'll admit. Hurt your neck?

Who lives on the end of a runway anyway?

But the British have a secret weapon, a drink that can

help us overcome anything, even your base being bombed.

Tea, sir? It's a bit gritty, I'm afraid, sir.

Unlike this film.

Is this really how the British behave?

Foster, that's an inspiration. Remind me to have you promoted.

And that's why we won the war - tea, cups of tea!

It is definitely part of our national character cos I,

as I think you know, don't drink tea.

-Yes.

-And I feel constantly obliged to apologise for it.

-You're a fifth columnist of some kind.

I know, isn't it, though? You kind of think, "I'm terribly sorry, everyone."

I sort of feel like my passport is dependent on drinking tea

and because I don't, I do vaguely worry I'll be asked to give

it back, I'm not going to lie to you.

But it's inextricably linked with the stiff upper lip, isn't it?

The cup of tea, the robustly-jaunty optimism.

They even drink their tea with a stiff upper lip in Angels One Five, don't they?

It feels useful, somehow, doesn't it?

This is one of those films

that feels faintly therapeutic for the audience.

We get to see people not responding by screaming and crying

and acting terrified, we get to see the opposite of that.

What's interesting about all of these British war films,

nearly all the ones we've seen so far,

is that they're very effective at pedalling a straightforward message.

It's a message about stiff upper lip, how we won the war,

boffins, all this kind of stuff we're talking about,

in the same way that Hollywood's very, very good today

at pedalling a certain type of the American dream, it's multi-ethnic,

it's aspirational and...

-Individualistic and stuff.

-..individualistic.

And what's fascinating is, as you say,

at the time the idea that everyone was walking around in the 1950s

acting like this in day-to-day life is just complete nonsense.

And if you look at it, books have been written about how during

the Blitz, all the East Enders and everyone else was busy running

around nicking everything from all the houses, why wouldn't you? And that sexual mores

loosened up fantastically during the war, fantastically in both senses.

So, in a way, what we're sort of getting towards here is

that in the British war film, Where Eagles Dare is as realistic

as Angels One Five, which is... they're both pedalling a fantasy.

Yes.

And they're pedalling a fantasy of a national identity, as it were,

an idea of Britishness.

And yet, it's one that resonates with us and because they've been

on TV so much, it's one we've sort of...we've sort of

imbibed of and maybe some of us have actually swallowed it, so to speak.

If we're talking Britishness,

then the ultimate British stiff-upper-lip film,

the stiffest upper lip of all,

where the idea is tested to destruction is this movie.

MUSIC: "The Bridge On The River Kwai Theme"

The ultimate stiff-upper-lip film has to be The Bridge On The River Kwai,

David Lean's classic 1957 film about loyalty

and codes of conduct all played out in a Japanese prisoner of war camp.

WHISTLING

With its chirpy whistling and sense of decency,

we start off in familiar territory but then things get messy

as Lean takes British reserve to another planet.

Alec Guinness's Colonel Nicholson is heroic, dutiful to his men

and dogged in his adherence to the Geneva Convention,

as seen in this tense moment.

The code specifically states that the...

Stand fast in the ranks!

But his values ultimately lead him to collaborate with the Japanese

and build the eponymous bridge, and an Allied mission to destroy it

sets the film on an unstoppable course

towards this morally-ambiguous but devastating ending

in which no-one wins.

What have I done?

Is this film anti-British? Or is it anti-war?

Now, I think it'd be fair to say this is a terrifically confusing

and ambivalent film, isn't it?

Very. Very much so.

Alec Guinness was worried that it was an anti-British film.

I mean, it...it is, isn't it?

Well, it's a film that suggests that war is something that has to,

and must, produce insanity, produce derangement.

These people are following the rules,

they're doing what they're supposed to be doing according to the rules

of their different cultures and it literally produces insanity,

the desire to kill oneself, or to sacrifice oneself.

The sanity of everybody involved evaporates as the picture goes on.

Yeah.

Everyone has a code and every character is fed into war

and is broken by it.

There's the young commando who can't kill a man, he can't do it,

he can't bring himself to do it because he knows it's wrong,

and Jack Hawkins who's...even his character

who's the most sort of balanced warrior in it, perhaps,

emerges damaged at the end for having killed people,

and it's an incredibly bleak film and contemporary.

I mean, I suppose this is what happens when you get an art director to make a war film.

And it's a very controversial film.

I mean, all... Lots of films we're talking about are pretty a-historical

but this one, particularly,

and the veterans' associations, the POW Association were absolutely

appalled that this British officer could be portrayed like this when

the character, that's very loosely based on what...you know, didn't

collaborate in that respect either,

and it's thought to, in fact - I'm showing my nationalism here -

but it's thought to be based loosely

on some collaborating Vichy French officers

in South East Asia at the time.

But coming at the same time as some of the other films, it would

have been hugely challenging, I imagine, for the British audience to watch this stuff.

Now this is one of the great movies, isn't it?

I mean, it may be because Lean makes what looks like a British war movie

and makes it with his sensibilities as an art film director,

it's...we've popped out of genre, hasn't it?

And regularly comes up on the best-films-ever lists.

I mean, we're almost dealing with something that is beyond our pay grade here.

Well, it is a strange and disturbing film, I think, because it...

all the phenomena in it that we're invited to observe

are something to do with illusions or madness,

so it's as if they're all in a world of delusion.

Oh, wait, although not enough not to get him

out of a box where he's been being cooked to death essentially

and go, "Would you like some corned beef?" The world's saltiest food.

And/or some Scotch, the world's most dehydrating drink.

No, he'd like a glass of water and some lettuce, don't be ridiculous!

LAUGHTER

It's a particularly bizarre scene.

A big feature of war movies, of course, is rousing speeches

to inspire the troops.

But there's one film in particular where, basically,

the speechifying takes over the whole movie.

And the award for most speeches in a motion picture goes to Noel Coward

for his 1942 film In Which We Serve - a pure

piece of patriotic propaganda, co-directed with David Lean.

I've come to say goodbye to the few of you who are left.

We've had so many talks and this is our last.

Taking his cue from Churchill's tried

and trusted motivational techniques, Coward plays the paternalistic

Captain Kinross of the HMS Torrin, a generous and wise commander with

a rousing address for every occasion and a nice line in understatement.

Well done.

We got him but I'm afraid he's got us too.

He's also unbelievably fair to those who let him down,

including the stoker who abandons his post,

played by an incredibly young Richard Attenborough.

You'll be surprised, therefore, to learn that I have let him off

with a caution...

or perhaps I should say with two cautions -

one to him

and one to me,

for in a way I feel that what happened was my fault.

He may as well be walking on water at this point.

Coward might be an odd choice to play a military leader,

with his cap at a permanently jaunty angle and his crew of

Jean Paul Gaultier models, but it's hard not to get swept up

by the patriotic enthusiasm

with which he plays his part in the war effort.

Then we'll send Hitler a telegram saying,

"The Torrin's ready, you can start your war."

It's kind of Henry V meets Binky Beaumont's opening-night speech,

isn't it, from some West End show?

But that point you were making about the ages of the participants,

Dan, but there's a lot of very young actors in this scene,

I mean, not the least of which, is little Dickie Attenborough!

-Teeny-tiny Attenborough(!)

-Brilliant performance of this terrified young boy who

doesn't really, you know, come up to the mark when it comes to it.

Obviously, this programme isn't from a '70s polytechnic

so we've skirted around class but now's the time to talk about this.

The British obsession with class -

its portrayal in these films - these films...

we could've just done this about class in British war movies.

We've seen a lot of posh officers and a lot of working class people

who maybe don't even get to say anything.

In Which We Serve - the class system works, that seems to be

part of the message of that film, is it's working for us.

Well, Montgomery gave speeches about this exact thing.

He said, "The whole...the reason this war's gone so well is

"because the people that are designed to lead have led

"and the people designed to follow have followed.

"And that's why it's all gone jolly well and we need to keep that

"spirit going into rebuilding Britain following the war."

-Of course, the British electorate had different ideas. Who...

-But this is from 1942, isn't it?

So, you're right in the thick of the war and,

I mean, Noel Coward of all people...

-He is a posh man.

-Yes. He could be...

-IMITATES NOEL COWARD:

-"I mean it's quite remarkable, isn't it?"

I mean, I don't know if I'd follow him anywhere if he...you know,

"By the way, old boy, if you'd just go over there and attack those Germans, it'd be most delightful."

-I mean, I wouldn't do it, would you?

-He does seem a bit daft now, doesn't he?

But In Which We Serve is a kind of step forward.

There are films made before this

that try to depict this relationship,

this ship-board relationship

particularly between officers and men...

Upstairs, downstairs.

..in the Navy and there's a film called Convoy, where Clive Brook

plays a character who's very like this Noel Coward one, and really all

that the working class characters ever do is bring him his cocoa.

Here, this is like a slice taken out of the ant hill, isn't it?

And we see this working, a happy ship, an efficient ship, he keeps telling us.

But he's portrayed as paternalistic, merciful and wise, isn't he? Yeah.

Yeah, but he's also going through the same thing. He's not asking them to do anything

he's not prepared to do. He says, "We won't..." you know, stop. "We won't do anything..."

He's not asking them to do it for him, he's part of it too.

So although he's in a leadership role, it is

a very patrician kind of attitude but still, he's mucking in.

Yeah. Yeah, the year before the Beverage Report

and we have a patrician officer. It's very interesting.

Well, just think, there was the unsaid thing,

I mean, lots of the elite were sending their kids off to

North America to avoid the war, to avoid the violence.

There was, again little not often talked about, the Blitz but

East London had huge amount of bombs falling, of course, during 1940.

West London, largely, not as many.

And there were actually riots, you know, there was

a mob turned up at the Savoy one night saying, "We know you've

"got bomb shelters down there," so there was huge tension going...

They weren't a mob, they were an orderly...an orderly protest(!)

OK, an orderly protest but... And what's interesting about these films,

maybe they are trying to say, maybe you're right, it's

a message not just to working men and women saying, "Do what you're

"told by your betters," but actually also saying, "You guys need to be

"patriarchal, you need to benevolent, you need to play your part as well."

Well, In Which We Serve is a slice of history.

It was made during the war, it's about the war but other later

films have tried to offer up slices of history themselves,

and this is my favourite war film of all and it does exactly that.

For pure, unbridled history porn, nothing beats A Bridge Too Far,

Richard Attenborough's epic, star-studded re-enactment

of Operation Market Garden, and probably my favourite war movie.

It's painstaking in its historic detail, although this means

the moments where they get it wrong annoy me hugely.

Look, I'm sorry, but that's clearly a tank made in the 1960s,

what were they thinking?

These things might not bother you but as a history hound,

it's infuriating, especially in a film that tries so hard,

too hard, perhaps, to get it right.

It's also got a distracting number of top names in the cast,

such as Robert Redford, Gene Hackman, Sean Connery,

Michael Caine and Dirk Bogarde.

Well, as you know, I've always thought that we tried to go a bridge too far.

Take Connery gunning a Nazi down at the window, for example.

This actually happened but you're sort of expecting a cheeky one-liner

and the James Bond music to ring out.

How realistic can a film with this many celebs be?

But for all its flaws, it's a magnificent effort

chock-full of moments that are genuinely stirring,

such as this scene where Edward Fox is briefing his men.

I like to think of this as one of those American Western films.

The paratroops, lacking substantial equipment,

always short of food, these are the besieged homesteaders.

The Germans, well, naturally, they're the bad guys.

And 30 Corps, we, my friends, are the cavalry

on the way to the rescue!

CHEERING

I can't help feel that this speech isn't some

version of something that Dickie Attenborough must have

said at a meeting with the American backers, trying to explain

what this picture was about and why they should invest in it.

Cos I think also this film is about where the British film industry

is at this point, kind of backed-up against a wall

and creating this giant all-star vehicle to try and save itself.

You know what? If we're being clever, we could say it's like Operation Market Garden itself.

Britain is playing the junior partner,

desperate for one last big hoorah on the continent,

showing the Americans, showing the Russians, that we've still got

-superpower status and it all goes a bit disastrously wrong.

-And it's a turkey.

Yeah, although I love this film... I love this film and what I love

about this film is that on set, you know, people like Frost, you know,

the guys featured in the film, they're on set advising the actors.

I mean that's the only... Frost was there saying to

Anthony Hopkins, "I never ran when I was on this bridge," you know.

I mean, that's extraordinary that level of detailed historical advice.

I was talking to Richard Todd, who was part of Operation Market Garden,

who took a very dim view of Dirk Bogarde's casting in this film.

-Oh, really?

-Not military material, as far as he was concerned.

-AL CHUCKLES

Well, speaking of military material, it's sufficiently far away from the war that you've got a generation

of actors coming through who actually had never been anywhere near

-the armed forces and didn't they go to boot camp for this is what...

-This was the first movie..

It's now de rigueur, isn't it, that, you know, be it we send all

the young Hollywood starlets and young fellas off to boot camp?

It's interesting, actually, that A Bridge Too Far's desires to

be a film of record are unbalanced by the fact that it's

as packed with stars as Airport 75, for much the same reasons, I think.

It's, you know, it's a rather lovable film, though, isn't it?

Gene Hackman's first line is, "I am a Pole." And...

Because, otherwise, to be fair, you would not have known.

Sean Connery's first line has the word "reconnaissance" in it.

Any film that makes Sean Connery say "reconnaissance" can't be all bad.

-Or Gene Hackman repeatedly saying "Ghermans". I mean, that's...

-"What about the Ghermans?"

"What about the Ghermans?" But I really like this film

and I'm fascinated by its attempt to be historically accurate.

Yes, but in A Bridge Too Far,

there's a couple of proper calumnies...

the things that really didn't happen that are represented in a film

that says, "This is history," and that, for my money,

don't tell a deeper truth about anything but to get it wrong...

-Are you talking about Nijmegen Bridge, by any chance?

-I'm talking about Nijmegen Bridge.

The moment where Cook's men... where Robert Redford's men finally

made their river crossing and they hook up with the British

who've taken their tanks over the bridge.

They stop... The British stop for tea, "Oh, no, old boy, we can't go."

And that is just...it's so not what happened, and so painting

the British as sort of slow and incompetent

and without any of the elan and the vigour that the Americans had,

and it's a horrible...er, libel.

-It's all right, Al, it's all right. It's a film, buddy, don't worry. Come on.

-No! No! Absolutely not!

-Drink some water, give him some water.

-It's a film masquerading as a piece of history

and that's the real problem with that film, for me.

But if we're going to talk about realism in war movies, there's

one film we simply can't ignore, we wouldn't get away with it.

It's the brain-splattered, gory elephant in the room,

which is, of course, this.

OK, so we're deviating a bit by talking about a Hollywood film,

like Saving Private Ryan,

but Steven Spielberg's 1998 epic is an absolute game changer -

the film that makes all previous war movies look old-fashioned.

It's a film of two halves. The second bit

feels very much at home with all the other movies we've looked at,

men on a mission, Nazis, dutiful heroism, that sort of thing,

but it's really all about the first 20 minutes, a harrowing

recreation of the D-Day landings

that forensically lays bare the brutality, the senselessness

and the unpredictable carnage of a battle

where strength of character is no match for the speed of the bullets.

After a film this immersive,

could we ever go back to the jolly high jinks of Angels One Five?

I mean, this couldn't be further removed from the British war movies genre,

even at its most ludicrous

and fantastical in the form of Where Eagles Dare.

No matter how many... how stiff your upper lip is,

it's not designed to cope with this supposed realistic depiction of war.

It's hyper-realistic, isn't it?

And I think it says something about how memories

of that moment are slipping away.

It's an attempt to kind of fix and capture something, and I think

it's something that Steven Spielberg has kind of got form on.

I think there are quite a lot of people who see the Holocaust

through the lens of Schindler's List, and I wonder whether,

you know, future generations when they want to try and conjure what

-the D-Day landings were like, aren't going to go to Saving Private Ryan.

-They certainly will.

In a way, it sort of stands for the real event.

Well, it does but it... not entirely by accident

because I've met loads of D-Day veterans and quite a few of them,

if you say, "What was it like?" they'll say, "Have you ever seen

"the first 20 minutes of a film called Saving Private Ryan?"

That's a pretty staggering cinematic achievement that Spielberg's made

and the producer of that film made.

And for me, I'm just perhaps showing my sort of bias here

but I think it's...that is a watershed moment and I think

war films, it's pre and post first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan.

-Yes, there's no way back from it.

-There's no way back from that.

And I...some people look very fondly back at the kind of really clunky, you know,

special effects of Bridge Over The River Kwai or The Dam Busters.

For me, I think the modern cinema, the technology available to modern cinema

has made it hyper-realistic and more engaging, I'm afraid.

But it's also meant that the moral conundrum of war is much

more to the fore because you can't kind of fudge it by going,

"Oh, well, it's all happening a really long way away, brackets,

"because we can't afford the special effects, and therefore

"everybody who is not one of our heroes is other, and miles away."

It means that war films that have happened subsequently,

the films that have been made about Iraq and Afghanistan,

have been, morally, very much muddier, we've been very much more uncertain

who the heroes and who the villains are, and that's still happening now.

Though in Saving Private Ryan, the German characters conform to

a lot of the things we've talked about.

Cos they're either in silhouette like they are in that scene,

so they're, basically, machine-gun operators, or there's the character

who appears to be a good German and turns out to be a proper Nazi,

who's a pivotal character in the last act of the movie.

And the British are marginalised very much in it as well, aren't they?

Well, they're disparaged. There's a line about Monty...

That's the only time the British are mentioned, "Monty's late." That's all they say...

Which is just... Again my history hackles rise, Dan, and I...

Do you want to write in, Al? "Dear, Steven Spielberg..."

-We really ought to write in.

-More British troops, more British ships fought at D-Day than Americans

but, by the same token, you pay the bills, you get to write the story.

I mean, you look back at the British films, as a Canadian,

where are the Canadians in the great British films of the '50s?

Let alone, where are the Polish code breakers

in the films? But that's the reality. We used to be...

-Gene Hackman could play them. He's trained for this.

-But we...

the Brits used to be top dogs, we used to make the movies,

we got to make...be the heroes, now we're not any more.

And one day, it'll be Chinese heroes up on the big screen.

Well, isn't that the story of all of these films?

Isn't that what their... what their greatest use is, maybe to future historians?

They do track something about our self-image,

about our self-pity and our self-confidence.

Yeah. Well, we've been talking about

Second World War movies, obviously, but there's

a bank-holiday-Sunday-afternoon classic

we simply wouldn't be able to avoid talking about, and it's this.

MUSIC: "Zulu Theme"

War films are generally about holding it all together

and keeping a stuff upper lip, but the one film your dad was

allowed to cry at was always Zulu.

Cy Endfield's classic 1964 take on

the battle at Rorke's Drift and the film that made Michael Caine a star.

Fire!

It's got all the war movie staples we've seen so far -

a bit of class tension, manly camaraderie...

SINGING

..and British courage and determination beating the odds.

But unlike many World War II films, Zulu wears its heart on its sleeve.

This is a war film where once the fighting's done, the tough guys open their hearts,

tear up and say what they really feel about the horror of it all.

Is this the most emotionally frank war movie ever made?

How do you feel?

Sick.

Well, you have to be alive to feel sick.

You asked me, I told you.

There's something else.

I feel ashamed.

Was that how it was for you, the first time?

The first time...?

Think I could stand this butcher's yard more than once?

I didn't know.

I told you.

I came up here to build a bridge.

It's an incredibly powerful moment.

See, I've only ever watched Zulu as a kid every weekend

and then I watched it again about a few months ago, and all of the bits

that I'd forgotten came rushing... I mean, those bits are extraordinary.

I remember it simply as a kind of... quite a jingoistic film

but it's not at all. It's a very, very interesting film

and their relationship's fascinating at the end, and actually they both

die broken men quite young in real life,

and I think they portray that.

Neither of them feel particularly heroic after it

and that's very, very powerful.

And, I think, has the luxury of distance from its events

that you can express these things aloud.

It's like a Shakespeare Roman play, he can...you can try those ideas out

because it's not actually the event we're really talking about.

Absolutely, and, of course, the most obvious 20th-century example

is MASH, which is ostensibly set in the Korean War, but is

all about the Vietnam War with which it's very much more contemporary.

It's interesting how in the '60s the First World War is

returned to as a subject.

You know, maybe as a way of dealing with Korea, you know,

these things are all mushed up together.

To talk about one war you're talking about another one as well.

What's so brilliant about this is it raises that idea of shame,

and also the idea that these experiences are in some way

fundamentally incomprehensible, and this is maybe why the stories

keep getting made over and over again, and why the actual

wars themselves keep happening, because it seems utterly mysterious.

So, Zulu is really emotionally frank but,

let's have a look at a film now that I know Matthew loves,

and hold your horses, but is, for my money, genuinely disturbing.

The creepiest war film ever made has to be Went The Day Well?

Made in 1942, it's about a stealthy German invasion of a sleepy

English village, populated by cheeky schoolboys...

HE WHISTLES Posh pyjamas!

..matronly post mistresses and a gun-toting Thora Hird.

Half a minute now, I'll have a go.

The drip-drip realisation that the British soldiers

billeted in the village are actually an invading German force

in disguise plays out like a horror movie

with a rising sense of creepy paranoia as the penny slowly drops.

And what does "wien" mean?

Schokolade is the German for chocolate.

And the villagers realise they have to fight back.

CLAMOUR

The subsequent retaliation

and sacrifice involved are harrowing and in the case of this scene where

Muriel George takes matters into her own hands, extremely violent.

Is there a World War II film more shocking than this?

I'll do it. I never had any children meself.

Mr Collins blamed me for it and I blamed him,

and then he was taken, so we never found out.

HE SCREAMS

HE GROANS

SHE WHIMPERS

I think that's one of the most powerful scenes in all cinema.

I can't watch that without it doing something very strange to me.

The way that Muriel George plays that scene,

where we hear in a moment an entire lifetime of...of disappointment...

..and she reconciles herself to that life

and makes that decision to murder that man in an instant,

and what's so powerful about it, I think, is because it reflects

something that would have happened if this country had been invaded.

We might have been saved by a resistance made up of

post mistresses and vicars' daughters.

These would have been the partisans, you know,

up in the hills around Bramley End, and when you watch that

and feel all the things that it stirs in you, then something

of that is an incredible relief that we just have to watch films about

it without it stirring any memories of anything that actually happened.

And this is from the war, right? This is 1942?

It's after the invasion scare, so there aren't too many people

who really think that Britain is about to be invaded en-masse but...

But it's something we're obsessed with, right?

I think, because we haven't been invaded since 1066, we're obsessed...

-Ish.

-Ish.

..with the idea of being invaded, right? I mean, we really are.

If you look at films right up to, I think, 2011,

maybe, Resistance which is the Welsh war movie, the extremely rare

sub-group of the British war movie, which is counter-factual history.

What if the Nazis had invaded and they were in Britain

and they come to a Welsh village?

And we're constantly fretting about the idea of it, that's why all those

John le Carre novels, and indeed adaptations, are so compelling to us because,

they're amongst us, they might look like us, they're exactly like us. What if they were here?

And what's interesting about that film is,

I mean, Churchill used to say quite often, when he was advised,

in the event of an invasion, would you go to Bermuda or Canada?

And he said, "Well, no, the royal family should

"and some people should, but I'm going to stay here,"

and he said, "Because you can always take one with you."

-So, even an old granny can take one down with them.

-If the old granny has got an axe.

And having talked about class so much,

-the squire is the arch traitor in this film.

-Yep.

He's the protagonist who's allowed the Nazis in, so it's...

And again, the women are heroes, which doesn't happen too often

but every now and then you get that film where the women properly

step up and get to do the heroic thing.

You're right, Natalie, I think women do get short-changed in war movies.

I think it's fair to say it's a man's world. Let's have a look.

As an eight-year-old, my favourite thing about war films

was that they didn't have any silly girls in them.

They'd creep in occasionally,

like Cliff Robertson's love interest in 633 Squadron,

an anachronistically-'60s blonde bombshell, or this undercover

operative being ogled by a half-cut Richard Burton in Where Eagles Dare.

She's been one of our top agents in Bavaria

since 1941 and, er...

..what a disguise.

But, mostly, this is men's stories about men for men.

A few home-front movies made during the war,

such as 1943's The Gentle Sex, did try to redress the balance

and at least show that the push to get women into work during the war

was liberating and even fun, however clumsily it comes across now.

I know there's a war on, you don't have to tell me there's a war on.

And it'll take more than a war to stop me combing my hair.

-I'm sure of that.

-But the biggest exception to the rule is 1958's brilliant

Carve Her Name With Pride, which stars Virginia McKenna

as an SOE operative whose bravery is self-evident.

But being a woman in a war movie is usually a pretty thankless task.

Take Celia Johnson in In Which We Serve, with nothing much to do

but neck cocktails and clean up after Noel Coward.

Who'd be a girl in this world?

However busy you are, and however quickly you've got

to get your commissioning done, I should like to come on board

just once before you go to sea, just to give the ship my love.

You'll have to, whether you like it or not. My cabin's got to be made presentable.

-Does the chintz look all right?

-Absolutely first class.

-Good.

We'd better drink these up quickly and go up to the children.

Dinner will be ready in a minute.

Ah, were there ever any people like that?

I do hope so.

Yeah, you've got...it makes that whole wine o'clock thing look a bit lightweight now.

LAUGHTER "Go up to the children."

"Let's neck the gin before we can go up to the children and then have dinner."

-"Yes, of course."

-Well, we did actually see a film with ass-kicking female lead there,

Carve Her Name With Pride, really unusual.

But also somebody who looks like killing someone is painful to her...

-Yeah.

-..not because she's girlie but because it's nauseating.

That she's...we can see she's brave. Even when she gets hit she doesn't stop, she stops for, you know,

long enough to go "Ow!" and then, you know, she's right back there.

But the actual act of killing somebody as they're running

towards her, so she can see the consequences of her actions

right in front of her, it's a really powerful moment.

But there aren't that many films that put you in the position of

the combatant quite so powerfully, I think, as Carve Her Name With Pride,

especially when it's a film with - how shall I put it? -

a very unhappy ending.

-Yeah.

-And you don't often see blood.

Normally when somebody gets shot in films of that era, you see...

there's perhaps a small mark

-and then they sort of politely collapse almost off screen.

-The thing is, though,

it's not just women that get left out of these war movies.

There's other stuff - romance, sex, all sorts of other things are taboo.

In a way, one of the attractions of the genre

is that it's a kind of sex-free zone.

In many ways, these are films about relationships between men,

uncomplicated by women.

The women are extracted from these stories in order to allow

other things to happen.

We don't often sense that there's any kind of, anything

homoerotic in the air apart from when Angus Lennie is around.

Angus Lennie who's in 633 Squadron and The Great Escape...

-Of course.

-..and who later ran the kitchens at Crossroads. Whenever he's there,

he's always looking adoringly at his commanding officer.

LAUGHTER

Is this, though, because war films wouldn't be able to bear

the weight of this as well,

that there's one too many things to sort of stuff in one too many

ingredients, do we think?

I think perhaps the romance means...element means that we'd

always end up hedging towards melodrama,

just that extra notch would probably take it a step slightly further.

I mean, the truth of the matter is that when it's just women

being focused on, there's no sex either, that similarly is completely

airbrushed out of history, and in something like In Which We Serve,

where there are men and women at the same time, or in Went The Day Well

when there are men and women at the same time, there's no possibility.

They even consider when they're billeting, the soldiers who at the time they believe to be

British in Went The Day Well, and they say, "Oh, no, he can't stay with

"her cos, you know, that wouldn't be proper," and it's pretty much

-ruled out as a mission statement at the beginning of the film.

-Taboo busting's all very well,

there are things the British are far more comfortable with -

football and celebrities, which, unfortunately, leads us here.

And you get both by the bucket-load in the worst war movie ever,

John Huston's baffling Escape To Victory from 1981, which tells the

story of a football game between the Nazis and a bunch of Allied POWs.

It has the strangest ensemble cast ever assembled -

Michael Caine, again and at 48,

playing a man whose West Ham career was supposedly interrupted

by the war. Sylvester Stallone, Max von Sydow, Bobby Moore and Pele!

Nothing about this terrible film makes any sort of sense,

least of all the ridiculously gruesome way

they rule out the goalie so Stallone can play!

MAN CRIES OUT

Why do they have to break his arm? Can't they say he's got a tummy bug?

Or how about this maddening scene in the tunnel at half-time when they're

four-one down yet insist on turning back to play the second half!

Michael Caine appears to be cueing his co-stars by pointing at them.

-Colby!

-If you don't... If you don't come back, we can't go!

This is the war movie at its lowest ebb.

How did this ever get off the drawing board?

We can win! Come on.

Hatch, if you run now, we lose more than a game.

Please, Hatch.

Really? I mean...

It turns out that if you add football to war you also get

melodrama, who knew?

Yeah, and the new Shoot The Rehearsal.

I mean, it's the most extraordinary film this.

Oh, you say that, I'm not sure they could do that any better.

I thinks that's as good as they ever were!

-LAUGHTER

-I don't think they had a second take in them.

What concept of honour says, "Actually, well, we're four-one down, we're in the escape tunnel,

"it's more important to go win a football match?"

-What on earth is... What... I mean, it's nuts!

-It is mystifying, isn't it?

There is a sort of desperation about it, isn't there?

The cinema is not very healthy

while this...at the moment that this film is being made.

Putting a load of football players into it is like, you know,

it's like Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man

or Bela Lugosi Meets A Brooklyn Gorilla.

It's incongruous things packaged together in order to appeal

to an audience who might not find themselves in a cinema ordinarily.

I mean, it's two world wars and one World Cup is also resonating in this film, unfortunately.

I mean...

-Yeah, that's the whole pitch, wasn't it?

-Yeah.

The whole pitch was, "Do you know what we could do?

"Ta-da!" And also...and they went, "Ah! Yeah, no."

But it's very peculiar as well because,

it has a good German in it, Max von Sydow as a good German

who at the end sort of is sympathetic to the...

-IMITATES VON SYDOW:

-"Oh, the crowd are revolting,

"this isn't so bad", which, in fact,

probably the Wehrmacht would have machine-gunned the cheering crowd

back into their seats at least. I mean, it's...it's... Oh!

We're not really allowed to find out what happened at the end...

-No.

-..are we? It just sort of ends with a...

with a... with commotion in the stadium.

It's the most extraordinary load of rubbish.

What a shame there was no record, though.

-If only they'd recorded a song together, like the...

-Yeah, yeah.

-..like they do for World Cups and things? We could be all listening to that now, couldn't we?

-God help us.

-We could. Let's not, though...

-Well, actually, funnily enough,

speaking of records, erm, I've brought this in.

Now, I don't know if any of you owned this - I had a copy of this

when I was a lad.

Geoff Love And His Orchestra play Big War Movie Themes.

Geoff Love.

Geoff Love - Colonel Bogey, Lawrence Of Arabia, Guns of Navarone.

In fact, I had heard many of these theme tunes long before I ever

saw the films and I... Many a happy afternoon playing with

an Action Man with this record on, when I was a little boy, but

the music is an incredibly important part of how we remember these films.

MUSIC: "The Dam Busters Theme"

I think every war film needs a catchy theme tune.

How else was I going to re-enact them at home or in the playground?

Go to any football match

and you'll hear someone singing The Dam Busters theme,

although it, actually, only turns up three times in the film.

Much of the action plays out over engine noise.

633 Squadron, on the other hand, has a brilliant theme tune and knows it.

The film itself is like the straight-to-video

version of The Dam Busters -

the same plot and none of the subtlety.

Appropriately, you hear this tune 17 times, that's once every six minutes,

like in this bombastic raid scene that's a million miles

away from the restraint of The Dam Busters.

Come on, you're way behind. Come on.

MUSIC: "633 Squadron Theme"

But perhaps the most famous war theme of all is The Great Escape,

another US film

but co-opted as an honorary British classic through

endless repeats on the telly.

MUSIC: "The Great Escape Theme"

The theme tune's another favourite on the football terraces,

which always confuses me.

This film is so much bleaker than the cheerful music implies.

Even Steve McQueen, the coolest man in Hollywood,

couldn't escape, as seen in this famous scene.

Is our memory of these films skewed by the jaunty theme tunes?

MACHINE-GUN FIRE

Imagine if The Sound Of Music had ended like that.

LAUGHTER

It is great, though, isn't it?

That he's escaping from... Everybody we've seen in every war film

has basically been either wearing a uniform or a really

bedraggled uniform because they're in a POW camp, and he is escaping

from a POW camp looking a bit like he might be advertising jeans,

or, you know, any other high brand, he looks unbelievably cool.

Yeah, he wears, essentially, a sort of GAP chino outfit for the whole movie and rocks it.

-Yeah, while riding a motorbike.

-That's a bleaker story than most people remember it.

I think people remember the music and forget

that it's sort of all fun and games right up to the point

-where it becomes a story about murder...

-Yes.

..where the 50 are recaptured and murdered,

and you wonder about the people who play this tune at the football,

whether they really thought, "No-one escapes!"

Well, four... three or four people do.

-It's a disaster.

-No, it's a total disaster.

-And there's something extraordinary...

-Maybe they do know then, at the football.

-LAUGHTER

-There's something very melancholy about the way that he gets

-caught up in that barbed wire at the end.

-Yes.

It always makes me think of Peter Rabbit

caught in the blackcurrant... the blackberry nets in

Mr McGregor's garden, you know.

-"The sparrows implored him to exert himself."

-It's very un-heroic, isn't it?

It's very un-heroic to be caught up in barbed wire

and struggle to escape and not be able to, I agree.

I have to say, it was a real treat to see these films on a big screen.

I think I'm like most people and I saw them first on the telly,

and they were on all the time, weren't they, Matthew?

They were a huge attraction, weren't they?

They were very bankable in ratings' terms.

So, they would always turn up at Boxing Day and Christmas

and bank holidays.

Mm. But they're not shown any more.

-Films aren't shown on television any more, really, are they?

-But I worry for the...

-Yeah, I do too.

I worry for the current generation who aren't growing up on,

you know, whether it's the stiff-upper-lip films

or Where Eagles Dare, I mean I'm worried...I'm worried about...

Do you think they won't know how to behave when...?

-Well, don't YOU worry?

-Well, no, I guess not.

I mean, we've talked about how we think the kind of stiff-upper-lip

thing is, at least in part, a construct, so when I hear people saying,

"Oh, well, all the young people auditioning for The X Factor just

"cry at everything, they've got no idea of a stiff upper lip," I think,

"Well, maybe we never had as much of a stiff upper lip as we think."

I think they all need to be made to watch Reach For The Sky.

-Do you?

-I think it's good for...

Then maybe that could be part of the audition process for future series!

Well, Douglas Bader's sob story beats anything any X Factor

-contestant would ever have.

-There it is.

It is a shame that, perhaps, the young are no longer acquainted

with our history of repression and neurosis

that made us the people we are.

Exactly.

Unfortunately, we're almost out of time and I know we could all

talk about this for ever but what is your favourite war film?

-Time to decide.

-Has it got to be British? Has it got to be sort of one of these?

-We're talking British war films here, Dan.

-OK!

-Did you not get the e-mail?

-Well, no, we've looked at things like Saving Private Ryan.

I think I'm probably going to go with...

probably going to go with A Bridge Too Far, actually. I...

An excellent choice. Natalie?

-I call Where Eagles Dare. You can't, you can't buy Richard Burton.

-What?!

-What do you want from me? What do you want from me?

-Matthew?

-Went The Day Well? It's agonising.

-It is good, though.

And it's got Thora Hird shooting people.

Well, that's a pretty good call.

I'm going to, I'm afraid, agree with Dan.

For all its faults, A Bridge Too Far for me

is the...is the greatest war movie of all time.

Well, all that remains is for me to say thank you to my guests,

Dan Snow, Natalie Haynes and Matthew Sweet,

and for all of you watching at home - tally-ho!

MUSIC: "633 Squadron Theme"