Fifties British War Films: Days of Glory

The Cruel Sea, one of the most moving and gripping films ever made.

It's the war.

The whole, bloody war.

The Dam Busters, one of the most exciting films ever made.

It's gone!

The Colditz Story, the mother of all POW films.

There will be no escape unless you wish to die.

Welcome to the 1950s British war film.

For those of us who grew up in the 1960s and '70s,

the British war film was a staple of the wet Sunday afternoon

in front of the television.

For that reason, it's easy to dismiss it as cheap entertainment.

But this programme is about the massive cultural impact

of these films and what they said about the state

of the British mind in the 1950s when they were made.

Full ahead!

Ha-ha!

Christmas daisies, where's my crib?

I think you're crazy ones.

Cocoa's just coming up, sir.

Halt!

French from head to toe.

Splendid.

Absolutely, old man.

These films have been part of my life for as long as I can remember.

They're in my DNA, they helped influence me

and millions like me about what it meant to be British,

displaying values such as courage, heroism, patriotism, and decency.

Millions of people saw these films.

This is how they liked to see themselves portrayed, indeed,

it reshaped their memories of what they'd actually lived through

to quite a high degree, probably.

But how interesting. And if they thought this was as they were,

there must have been something in it.

The names of the films in which the cream of Britain's acting profession

served, or rather, acted, in the 1950s,

evoke, not just the war, but a very particular idea of the war.

And while dozens of war films were made during these years,

a handful have become particularly special to me, so it's these

I want to look at, with the help of the men and women who made them.

Did you do your own stunts, by the way?

What do you call the stunts, now?

-Forward rolls, parachute jumps, all that.

-Oh, yes.

Jack Hawkins dived in and brought me out.

-But for Jack, I wouldn't be here today.

-But it was all right?

It was quite enjoyable.

These films have shaped our understanding of modern Britain.

They tell us not just about the war

but about the 1950s world from which they emerged.

They're also among the most ridiculed and most denigrated,

attacked from the moment they were released for being cliched

and stereotyped.

This clot doesn't understand English.

Sorry, old boy, but I had to make sure, and this clot had some

difficulty understanding your Arabic.

In 1957, the critic, Lindsay Anderson,

later a director himself, led the charge

against the British war picture.

He castigated films which he claimed were produced only because,

as he said, they were profitable, endorsed the class system,

enabled the nation to wallow in the past, escaping the complex

uncertainties of the present and the challenge of the future.

Our '50s war films have been looked down upon and mocked ever since.

We short-change ourselves if we casually ridicule these films

and the stereotypes they seem to embody.

We might, instead, reflect upon a time when we were,

in many ways, a more serious nation, filled with people who,

only a few years before,

had been prepared to give their lives for their country.

Britain in the early 1950s was still living in the shadow of the war.

Many town centres were still in rubble, national service was

mandatory, and uniformed men were common on the streets.

Smog evokes the eerie aftermath of bombings.

We were a nation still struggling to come to terms

with the psychological and emotional impact of the war.

So there never was a better time for an avalanche of war films.

First of all, an experience of that magnitude takes a lot of absorbing.

The particles take a long time to settle.

The second thing was

that it was still very fresh in the memory

but it was the most remarkable collective effort

that anybody could remember in their lifetime.

And this awed people, I think, retrospectively,

and made them feel very special.

When, as in 1950, almost 1.5 billion cinema tickets

were sold in Britain, films became a key way

in which this collective experience was remembered.

The first war film I want to look at is Angels One Five,

released in March 1952, the month after George VI died.

It was the first post-war attempt to capture

the heroism of the Battle of Britain.

The title sequence alone makes me want to stand to attention.

It starred one of the very greatest figures of the 1950s cinema,

Jack Hawkins, who, as a colonel in the Royal Engineers had,

like many other actors of the time, seen war at first hand.

We both serve the King, pull the same rope,

on the same team, you understand?

-Yes.

-Cribs won't help us. Supposing I'm flying

an aircraft, it gets into a spin, Christmas daisies, where's my crib?

And before I can find the right pieces, St Peter tap-tapping on my

fuselage, demanding my soul of me.

Angels One Five simultaneously reinforces stereotypes

of jolly japes among the officer class, while maintaining

the British tone of, "Keep calm and carry on," whenever possible.

Look out!

Hello, old man. Dropped in for tea?

There's...

a great deal of understatement in all these films of the '50s,

these war films,

which seems to be a projection of the national character.

How far do you think that was accurate in the '50s?

I think, whatever your background,

you were a member of a country that didn't blub or blab.

You kept the secrets and you might have felt the emotion intensely,

but you didn't actually collapse in public.

However intensely you felt things, you let yourself down, your family,

your group, your regiment, your platoon, your boat, whatever it was,

if you...fell apart.

In the film, these British qualities of understatement

and stiff upper lip determination are a necessary defence

in a nerve wracking Battle of Britain.

These attributes, the film suggests, helped pull us through.

WOMEN SCREAM

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

Foster, that's an inspiration.

Remind me to have you promoted.

Hawkins's towering performance is a masterclass of reserve.

The losses of the British few against the Nazi many

are etched in every line of his face.

Hello, Septic. Hello, Septic. This is the Tiger answering.

Oh, message received

and understood.

The public who watched the film in the early '50s had,

like Hawkins, lived through the war.

Angels One Five complimented them

by showing the bravery of the British people during a battle

for the existence of Britain and the future of civilisation.

You're looking at the making of the Titfield Thunderbolt.

It was kind of whimsical comedy that made Ealing Studios famous.

It was produced the same year that they made another,

quite different film, which blasted the Thunderbolt clean

out of the water as far as the box office was concerned.

The Cruel Sea, based on Nicholas Monsarrat's

graphically realistic novel,

is one of the titanic films of the British cinema.

It's not just one of the great war films, it's one of our great films.

The Cruel Sea is the story of the Compass Rose.

It's a support vessel, initially engaged

in the Battle Of The Atlantic.

Her captain is played in another

monumental performance by Jack Hawkins.

Pass the word, we're going to turn beam on.

In his first big screen role,

Sir Donald Sinden played First Officer Lockhart.

-Good morning, sir.

-Morning, number one.

You look as though you've been busy. What's the score down there?

Two dead, one more to go, I think. 11 others, they'll be all right.

Was there a great demand among people in the 1950s

for films like this?

Oh, yes. Cos they were all just recently come out of the services.

I was not in the forces because of asthma.

-Where did you film?

-We stayed in Plymouth.

And each morning we set off from Devonport in the Compass Rose,

down the Tamar and out to sea.

And when we were out of sight of land,

that's when they started shooting.

But the sea, damn it, wasn't rough enough.

And they wanted it really sort of exciting.

There's a thing called the Portland Race,

-I don't know if you've heard of that...

-I have.

..where seven tides, I believe, all meet at this point.

So the sea is rough at the best of times.

And the British Navy are not allowed to go through it

because it's not worth the risk.

-Right.

-But they took us through it.

One of the film's main messages is that Britain doesn't prevail

without a struggle, and the psychological consequences of that.

When the Compass Rose discovers a U-boat, Hawkins must decide

whether to destroy it.

He knows that if he does, he'll kill the Allied sailors

struggling in the sea above the submarine.

There are some chaps in the water just there.

Well, there's a U-boat just underneath them.

It's an impossible decision.

Bearing 191, range 300.

Attacking, standby.

Standby.

It was a terrifying scene to do

because we were all participants, we're on the ship, on the deck.

And a stuntman, believe it or not, Frankie Howard,

not the comedian, Frankie Howard was the stuntman.

And he stayed in the water

as the Compass Rose went straight for him.

'And as the bow of the ship came,

'he pushed himself off and he went over with the wave.'

Aye-aye. I mean, a split second later, he'd have been dead.

It's one of the pivotal scenes in all British cinema.

EXPLOSION RUMBLES

You don't see the men being blown up but you do see

some of the crew looking at their bodies being blown into the air.

Do you feel that any more explicit detail would have ruined

the film, would have been impossible to get past the censors?

-I don't think anything more explicit was necessary.

-Right.

As so many film-makers have discovered,

it's what you don't see that is important.

And the imagination does the work for you.

Bloody murderer!

Here, war is not glorious but agonisingly painful,

and Hawkins's character is tormented by the consequences of his order.

I identified it as a submarine. If anyone murdered those men, I did.

No-one murdered them.

It's the war.

The whole, bloody war.

The deadly struggle against the Nazi U-boats

carries on for the Compass Rose, until she, too, is torpedoed.

-Coxswain.

-Sir.

-Pipe "Abandon Ship".

-Aye-aye, Sir.

Abandon ship!

90% of the film was shot at sea, but the sinking of the Compass Rose

was filmed in the water tank at Denham Studios.

It was a dangerous place for non-swimmer, Donald Sinden.

There was steam escaping from the sinking ship, steam,

an aeroplane propeller was blowing a spray of the sea

and we could only just hear a whistle going, which was action...

WHISTLES

And we had to run to the other side of the ship

and jump ten feet down into the sea.

I jumped, I went...

GURGLES

And I was in 12 feet of water.

Which was not funny when you can't swim. I went, "Christ!"

And everyone in the company got out of the tank.

The director suddenly said, "Donald? Where's Donald?"

And there was I, still there...

I was sinking and thank goodness Jack Hawkins dived in

and brought me out.

But for Jack, I wouldn't be here today. It was terrifying.

The Cruel Sea was directed by Charles Frend,

a veteran of the '40s British documentary movement.

When the men are cast adrift in different life rafts,

he brings an astonishing and searing realism to their struggle

to survive in the cruel sea.

Finally, after a harrowing night, the two rafts meet in the morning.

Hello, number one.

Hello, sir.

You were a young man during the war. Do you feel that

that stiff upper lip that was conveyed in that film,

particularly in that scene,

was absolutely typical of British attitudes at the time?

Totally, totally. There was nothing strange or tongue in the cheek

about... We played it for real.

It had clearly struck a chord with the British public

and it catapulted Hawkins to stardom.

The Cruel Sea was released in 1953, I wasn't even born, but it was

a Britain I like to think was more pleasant and decent than today's.

It was a golden moment for a boy in the early '50s,

particularly the Coronation year.

Because in '53, there was this beautiful, young Queen

and the Coronation was extremely well done,

exquisitely well done, even though there was not much money around.

And it gave you a sense of immense tradition and stability

in this country, which is very precious.

And we hadn't gone under in the war, unlike so many other of our

neighbours and it was all part of that.

But you felt you belonged to a success story nation.

Although the Coronation prompted a surge in television ownership,

there's no doubt times were tough.

It was the era of austerity, after all.

Food rationing was still in force

and you had to queue for your sugar and meat.

Compared with Europe, Britain was in relative economic decline.

So, even within this pleasant land, we needed cheering up.

And what better way to do that than by putting one over on the Germans?

And that was perhaps done best in the POW film.

There were many thousands of British prisoners of war in World War II,

many of the survivors would have been in the audience to see

the prisoner of war film to end all prisoner of war films.

It offered a chance to see the Germans at close quarters

and had some rather good jokes.

Starring another of the great actors in the story of British war films,

that picture is The Colditz Story.

-What's your name?

-Reid, sir.

-Reid, ah, yes. Yours?

-McGill, sir.

Both old boys, I think. Tell me, what's it like in here?

I don't know, sir, we only came in last night.

We were picked up on the Swiss frontier.

Pity. Still, it's goodbye to all that now, isn't it?

Goodbye to all that, sir?

You heard what the Kommandant said,

he said escaping's verboten, didn't he?

-Silly old woman ought to be repatriated.

-Who'd want him?

I bet he lives in a Bath chair in Cheltenham.

He said escaping is verboten, didn't he?

-I don't know what verboten means, do you?

-Haven't a clue.

Sir John Mills plays the lead role of escapee, Pat Reid,

on whose memoir the film is based.

Mills was an indispensable figure in the 1950s war film.

His everyman qualities lapped up by all those who saw him

on the big screen.

He could play Cockneys, he could play generals, as he did.

And he's a superb human being and great fun to work with.

..zweiundviewzig...funfundvierzig.

Colditz was an exceptionally interesting story for me

because it was the most distinguished

POW camp in the whole war.

The Germans had this wonderful idea of taking all the naughty boys

and putting them in one place where they would be watched

and they couldn't escape from.

And, of course, it wasn't long before they realised that it was

the greatest mistake they'd ever made,

because you're now putting 400 or 500 men of different nationalities

whose absolute ambition is to escape.

There was a strange disjunction at the time between films

in which war is a psychologically catastrophic experience,

such as The Cruel Sea, and others, such as The Colditz Story,

that seemed, at times, archly comic.

CALLS OUT

Moi, je suis volontaire.

'There's a knockabout feel to this scene, in which the Germans

'have asked for volunteers to help in the Nazi war effort

'in return for special privileges.'

Je prefere m'occuper de vingt allemands plutot que d'un seul francais.

He says he'd rather work for 20 Germans than one Frenchman.

Ich arbeite lieber fur zwanzig Deutsche als fur einen Franzosen.

Was ist Ihr Beruf?

-Occupation?

-Croque-mort.

LAUGHTER

He says he's an undertaker.

INDISTINCT FRENCH

LAUGHTER AND WOLF-WHISTLES

The film was one of the biggest successes of 1955.

Audiences savoured the adventures of John Mills and Eric Portman,

who played the senior British officer in Colditz,

Colonel Richmond.

Earlier POW films like The Wooden Horse and Albert R.N.

had also set the box office alight.

The public, it seemed, couldn't get enough of the genre.

The Colditz Story offered the audience a war film without

too much war in it.

It was also one where the prisoners were treated reasonably well.

The film is fascinating in its depiction of the Germans,

not least of the Kommandant, who is, fundamentally, a good man.

We see that here when Richmond tells him

that a Polish prisoner is about be killed by his comrades.

You realise the prisoner whom we speak has been condemned to death?

Condemned to death? By whom?

His own people.

Sentence will be carried out tonight.

He will be transferred forthwith.

Thank you, sir.

Ultimately, this is a film about British triumph.

# I belong to Colditz Dear old Colditz Schloss

# There's something the matter with Colditz

# If someone's just come by bus

# It's only a dirty old prison camp

# As the Kommandant knows quite well

# If I get to a coast

# I will post you a letter

# And Colditz can go to hell. #

While our boys staged a diverting pantomime for their hosts,

Reid pulls off a daring escape, disguised as a German officer.

When the other prisoners become unruly

and the Germans show their incompetence, the Kommandant appeals

to the officer values he shares with Richmond to restore order.

Colonel, call your men to order or there will be bloodshed.

MEN SINGING

'I think he respects Richmond.'

The war goes on, you'll still be trying to escape,

I will still try to do my best to stop you all.

But I have to accept the fact that you run this goddamn place.

If you please, Colonel.

MEN SINGING

Parade!

All that remains is for Richmond to read out a postcard from Reid.

Wit and not brute force has brought about this triumph.

"Dearest Guy, we are both very well

"and enjoying the refreshing Swiss air.

"How we wish you could be with us. Your loving aunts, Gert and Daisy."

They're perhaps better known to you as Pat Reid and Jimmy Winslow.

CHEERING

I hadn't seen the picture for I think about 30 years or so.

And I ran it and I confess that I quite enjoyed the picture.

Parade!

They have made our first home run.

I have a feeling that it won't be the last. Good night. And thank you.

Carry on, please, Lieutenant Cartwright.

'When it got to the end, to my surprise,

'I had a tear in my eye, because that's not really me.'

I find it rather moving.

Of course, it was good to be reminded we'd won the war,

but when The Colditz Story was released, reality was that we

were rapidly slipping down the economic league tables.

Meanwhile, the Germany we'd defeated, had in scarcely ten years

started to become an economic and industrial powerhouse.

Rumbach, you'd never guess that only ten years ago,

three quarters of this neat, little town was in ruins.

Dusseldorf, further up the Rhine is probably the richest

and most prosperous industrial city in Western Germany.

I remember seeing it in ruins at the end of the war,

you'd hardly recognise it today.

So, if ever there was a time

when we wanted to feel good about being British, this was it.

And, luckily, a film came along that did just that.

It's a film that's possibly entered our consciousness more than

any other war film of the 1950s.

And it featured a whole squadron of these magnificent Lancaster bombers.

Ladies and gentlemen, the legendary, the incomparable,

The Dam Busters.

It's gone! Look! My God!

The Dam Busters is the story of the daring low-flying raid

in 1943 by the specially formed 617 Squadron of the RAF

on three dams, deep in Germany's industrial heartland.

It stars Michael Redgrave as Barnes Wallis,

the inventor of the bouncing bomb, and Richard Todd

as Wing Commander Guy Gibson, the 24-year-old who led the mission.

I'm going in to attack.

Standby to come in on your order when I tell you.

The film was directed by Michael Anderson,

who now lives on Canada's West Coast.

The release of the film was a boost to British morale.

Post-war Britain was waiting, I think,

for something to excite them about the wartime exploits.

And this film seemed to fire up

A) the critics, and B) the public.

I think there was a feeling of euphoria in terms of

the feat that had been done on Britain's behalf.

The film was an instant smash hit. It had two royal premieres,

the first, 12 years to the day after the raid.

One of the contributing factors to the film's deep appeal

to our sense of Britishness is Eric Coates's

stirring Dam Busters March.

MUSIC: "The Dam Busters March" by Eric Coates

Eric was sitting at a piano, slightly out of tune piano, I must say,

and he started to play this rather sort of...it was the opening to

the march, and it sounded very nice but not very impressive.

And then suddenly, he stopped, and he started to play...

# Da-da-da-da...# The march.

I was electrified.

Absolutely. I said, "Eric, that's it."

At that moment, I made that decision and that was it for the movie.

Aside from its magnificent theme,

in Richard Todd's performance as Guy Gibson, The Dam Busters

offered 1950s audiences a wonderfully restrained image of

British heroism that remains undiluted by the passage of time.

Well, the training's over.

For obvious reasons,

you've had to work without knowing your target or even your weapon.

You've to put up with a good deal

from other people who think you've been having a soft time.

But tonight, you're going to have the chance to hit the enemy

harder and more destructively than any small force has ever done before.

You're going to attack the great dams of Western Germany.

'There's yet another reason why the film struck such a chord

'and that was the international make-up of 617 Squadron.'

'The actors involved were Canadian, they were Australian,

'they were New Zealanders, they were from all walks of life.

'It was as though the British Empire had come back'

and gotten together to do this great exploit,

to rekindle the spirit that had made

Britain great in the first place.

And to say, we did it in the past, we can do it in the future,

we can do it again, we can be together, we can conquer everything.

We are England, we are Britain.

The Dam Busters shows us the bravery of these young men

who fought against Nazism.

Bomber Command had a death rate of 44.4%.

You had more chance of returning from the trenches in the Great War

than you did of surviving as bomber crew.

Until recently, Bomber Command had been largely overlooked

when it came to medals and memorials, but no group of fighting

men ever had a better tribute than these heroes did in The Dam Busters.

-All set?

-Yes, sir.

Well, you've done a fine job with this team.

-I couldn't have asked for a better one. Good luck.

-Thank you, sir.

The Dam Busters is also a film about the dependence

of the art of warfare on science.

Barnes Wallis, in his experiments,

is doing every bit as much to defeat the enemy as the pilots.

Three, two, one.

140.

We've been trying for months to find the rule by which

we can fix the height of each bounce.

You can see, if the bomb is released too soon, it won't reach the dam.

If it's released too late, it'll bounce over it

and explode directly under the aircraft, killing everyone.

But now, we've got it. Just wait here a moment and I'll do that again.

Wallis's dignity and the quiet heroism of the aircrews give the

film a tone of powerful understatement.

Look how the men react to the deaths of their comrades during the raid.

It is in itself a heroic piece, and therefore,

to emphasise the heroics seemed to me totally unnecessary.

And I have to give great credit to the writer, who, of course,

the screenwriter RC Sherriff. It was a masterpiece of understatement

and I didn't want to do anything that would take away

from the understatement that he had created in his writing

by over-dramatising something which was dramatic enough in itself.

The Dam Busters mythologises rather than romanticises war.

In a country still populated by ex-servicemen,

Britain did not want be patronised by overblown, triumphalist heroics.

The last scene, where Barnes Wallis meets Gibson on his return,

exemplifies the contrast between the civilians'

and the airmen's conception of death.

The flak was bad, worse than I expected.

56 men.

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

You mustn't think that way. If the fellows had known at the beginning

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

There isn't 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 a 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.

'The reaction on Wallis's face and Gibson's face tells a story,

'especially when Gibson almost undercuts what he said by saying,

"I have some letters to write."'

And almost the sense of relief that he'd given to Wallis

when he said, "These men would do it again,"

is undercut again by saying,

I have to go and tell their relatives that they're no longer with us.

And...

they played it with such dignity that to this day,

I'm moved when I see it.

To my mind, The Dam Busters tells us

more than any other '50s war film what it means to be British.

I would rate it as retaining the values

that I think it started off with.

You're going to attack the great dams.

To glorify the heroism of those men and the raid that they undertook.

You've done a fine job with this team.

I couldn't have asked for a better one.

The extraordinary valour and sacrifice that was made

at a time in the war when the war badly needed turning around.

Despite The Dam Busters' success,

film audiences were in rapid decline from the mid-1950s.

The big exhibitors, Rank and ABC, shut dozens of their cinemas.

And in 1956, Ealing Studios was taken over by the BBC.

In the last days of Ealing's operations as a film studio,

Sir Michael Balcon, the long-standing head of the company,

was asked what his greatest achievement had been.

I think, perhaps, The Cruel Sea.

Because when we saw that for the first time, we realised

that we really had brought it off.

It seemed to just gel and be absolutely right and

sometimes you don't get that feeling.

So why was the British film industry starting to struggle so much?

The tingle you get when you brush with SR is much more than

a nice taste, it's a tingle of health.

It tells you something very important,

that you're doing your gums good

and toughening them to resist infection.

Television audiences had grown rapidly,

and with the arrival of ITV in 1955, there was suddenly

plenty of entertainment free of charge at home.

At the same time, we'd started to look to America

for our cultural influences. So when we did go to the cinema,

it wasn't quite the refined experience it had once been.

The press really overheated on

Teds jiving in the aisles, and pulling out those seats.

It was almost the done thing to get up and jive

and misbehave in the cinema, shout at the usherettes

and the manager and rip out the odd seat or two.

And Elvis, of course, the sound of Elvis,

and that conspicuous sexuality, we'd seen nothing like it.

# We're licking a stick of rock

# We were lickin' a stick of rock

# We're lickin' a stick of rock Beside the sea side. #

Britain was becoming a very different place.

Rationing had ended and teenagers were obsessed with Bill Haley,

Elvis and rock 'n' roll.

Our film producers adapted accordingly.

For the makers of the mainstream war film, this meant they, too,

needed some new ingredients, such as a working-class heroine.

Contemporary critics of our 1950s war films

accuse them of focusing on middle-class officers

and indulging in cosy nationalism.

In Carve Her Name With Pride,

the leading character is not only working class,

but a woman and half French.

This is the memorial statue to Violette Szabo,

the real-life heroine of the film.

She was a shop assistant who, at 22,

joined the Special Operations Executive,

the organisation Churchill had charged to "set Europe ablaze",

who, after a brief career of almost incomprehensible heroism,

gave her life for her country.

Szabo is superbly played by Virginia McKenna.

How do I look?

The perfect secretary.

I hate this jacket.

As worn this year in Rouen.

You can't check the rest of me, but I assure you, it's all French.

That's fair enough. Oh. One other thing.

Your lethal pill, just in case of accidents.

Keep it somewhere safe and handy.

No, thanks.

You had to train very hard for your role as Violette.

Did you do your own stunts, by the way?

What you call the stunts, now?

-Forward rolls, parachute jumps, all that sort of thing.

-Oh, yes.

I didn't jump out of a plane, I have to admit that.

But I went to Abingdon and I learnt to jump

from a high platform on a harness

and then they had this huge, great wind machine,

which they turn on as you leap off,

they turn it on and it guides you gently to the ground.

And my trainer, Major Fernandez,

he said the most important thing is the landing and how you fall,

otherwise you could break your ankle or whatever.

So the way you fall is deeply important and he also taught me

how to shoot a Sten gun.

So I used to go up to London to some barracks or other,

I can't quite remember where, and learn how to shoot the Sten gun.

Of course, it has a big kick

and I had to get used to that so I didn't sort of faint

when I was doing the film.

One of the most moving scenes in the film is the poem.

What do you remember about filming

that scene when the poem first appears in the film?

Well, the poem has always been very important in my own life, actually.

Because of its economy and its simplicity,

and the depth of what it's about.

The life that I have is all that I have

And the life that I have is yours

The love that I have

Of the life that I have

Is yours and yours and yours

A sleep I shall have

A rest I shall have

Yet death will be but a pause

For the peace of my years

In the long green grass

Will be yours

And yours and yours.

That's all of it.

Thank you, darling.

It's beautiful.

And it's become this fantastic little thread

through the lives of so many people, many of whom I've never, ever met.

And I still get these letters saying,

"Could you send me a copy of the poem?"

And of course I do, with the greatest pleasure, because

it's wonderful that something so beautiful touches so many people.

Director, Lewis Gilbert, serves up a story of astonishing self-sacrifice.

Szabo undertakes her missions knowing it's unlikely she'll return

to see the child she's left behind.

Tragically, she's proved right.

'When she's captured by the Germans, she won't accept defeat.

'In her defiance, Szabo articulates all the feelings of the ordinary

-'Britain against the Nazi beast.'

-Cigarette?

Understatement was a particular feature of these films

in the writing of the script and the acting.

Was that because that's how the British are or

do you think it was a deliberate decision

to play everything down?

I think it's English. Thank goodness.

And I wish we had more of it now

because I think we've gone so much the other way that I think,

"Oh, don't say so much, you know, keep it back."

Because you'll never bring people in, you're doing too much for them.

The Gestapo torture scenes were filmed in a very understated way.

So, too, was the execution scene at the very end of the film with you

and the other two women in Ravensbruck.

What do you remember about filming that?

Was it a particularly harrowing and traumatic scene for you?

Did it have a great effect on you, filming that scene?

Because Lewis left that scene to the end,

cos after you've done that scene,

it would have been quite difficult to go backwards in the story.

So, in his very sensitive way, he kept that to the end.

And we'd had some pretty horrid scenes,

you know, in the concentration camp and digging in the mud

and all that horrible side of things.

So we were all three of us, actually,

quite immersed in the horror of it all.

I do recall getting a message

from someone very high up to say

when my moment came to be shot,

would I please smile?

And I thought to myself,

"I'd rather die than smile. I'm absolutely not going to do this."

But I was just the actress and I didn't know what to do,

so I went to Lewis and I said,

"I've been asked to do this thing and smile,"

and I said, "I absolutely can't, I absolutely can't do that."

He said, "No, of course you can't."

"Of course you're not going to smile, absolutely quite wrong."

So I thought, "Marvellous."

So I didn't have to smile cos I thought it would wreck the film.

Laden!

Feuer!

The setting up of the canal zone was agreed upon in 1936.

Ismailia was to become the RAF headquarters

while Fayid would become the Army base.

That treaty has now been denounced by the Egyptians.

By the second half of the 1950s,

Britain had become a more cynical nation.

And the 1956 Suez Crisis played a big part in this change of our mood.

The Suez affair was the most almighty shock.

Right across the piece, wherever you were

in the political or social spectrum.

And I felt it as a very young boy, I was nine,

because having spent a lot of time in those cinemas,

reliving the war through those films, and family chat, everybody used to

talk in terms of before the war, during the war, and after the war.

We were a country that didn't lose wars.

Britain's impotence was laid bare.

People took a less rosy view of the war and patriotism.

And we were broke.

The time was right for a cynical film of epic proportions.

And Dunkirk was that film.

It features ships as big as this but also,

because, of course, this is Dunkirk,

many hundreds of smaller vessels, too.

The War Office were really reluctant to cooperate,

the wounds in 1958 of their incompetence in 1940

were still pretty raw.

However, co-operate they did.

And they helped produce one of the great and epic

neglected masterpieces of the British cinema.

Dunkirk takes the audience back to May, 1940

when 335,000 soldiers were rescued from the beaches in Northern France.

The film tells parallel stories.

One is of the official bungling

and the slow gathering of rescue vessels in Britain,

and the other is of John Mills, who,

as Tubby Bins, leads his men through enemy territory to Dunkirk.

The people Tubby takes charge of are shown to be bolshy and defeatist.

A heroic, romantic escapade this was most certainly not.

Barlow, wake up, we're moving.

-Come on, Miles, up on your feet.

-What for?

-On your feet!

Ah, go chase yourself.

What's the matter with you lot?

If we don't move while it's dark, we may not be able to move at all.

That suits me.

Me, too. I'm fed up with the Army anyway.

The film is unsparing in its realism from the start,

even about the lack of solidarity among the civilian population.

Richard Attenborough's self-satisfied businessman

is about to aggrieve a merchant seaman,

his hand bandaged from frostbite,

a veteran of the Battle Of The Atlantic.

-War's a blasted phoney, anyway.

-I'm a bit tired of that.

-Tired of what?

-This phoney war business.

-Well, isn't it?

No, it's not. I've just come out of hospital after ten days

in an open boat off of the Faroes and I'm sick and tired

of blokes like you with soft jobs ashore.

-Come outside.

-Don't be silly.

I've lost two fingers off that hand but I'm going to take you outside

and knock your block off with my right.

But whereas The Cruel Sea implied but didn't show,

Dunkirk was remorseless in illustrating war's horrors.

Defenceless refugees are attacked, a woman lies twitching, dying.

And the audience are reminded that the horrors of war could not

be escaped, no matter what your age.

CHILD CRIES

Dunkirk was criticised for its dullness,

in fact, set piece follows thrilling set piece

while its cynicism grows deeper.

It doesn't shy from dishing out blame on all sides

and leaves the audience in no doubt that this was

one massive military debacle.

I never thought I'd see a sight like this.

Us neither, sir.

What a mess.

What a shambles we've made of this whole rotten affair.

In these films, as in the war itself,

Britain usually does come out on top.

But usually only after a struggle.

There's nothing remotely revisionist about the film of Dunkirk.

It reinforces the myth of victory in defeat,

getting those 335,000 soldiers back to Blighty.

And it never fails to remind the audience that the enemy were beasts.

ALL: Forgive us our trespasses

As we forgive them that trespass against us

ALL: As we forgive them that trespass against us

Lead us not into temptation

ALL: Lead us not into temptation

But deliver us from evil

ALL: But deliver us from evil

For thine is the kingdom...

AEROPLANE ENGINES

BOMBS EXPLODING

In the real world, social norms were shifting.

The traditional, coherent culture celebrated in these films

was under assault and the principal legacy of the war now

was the determination not to fight another one.

Yet there was still time for the black and white British war film

to have one last great hurrah.

It gave us sand, spies, sex, and, inevitably, John Mills.

It was Ice Cold In Alex.

God!

Directed by J Lee Thompson,

Ice Cold In Alex is the gritty and thrilling story

of a group of army personnel who take an ambulance through

the German-occupied Egyptian desert.

John Mills plays an officer with a drink problem,

Anthony Quayle, a German spy,

and the ravishing Sylvia Syms is Sister Murdoch.

-What's this? A party?

-No, just one for the road.

I thought the first part of the road was through a minefield.

Is that the usual kind of training?

This was a very different role for a woman,

compared with many of the women's roles in films

in the '50s about the war.

Normally, they're just Wrens pushing things around in ops rooms.

Do you feel that women were under-appreciated in the

British cinema in the '50s and do you feel that there should have

been more credible roles written for them in films of this genre?

Most of the women

looked too smart in their uniforms. Nobody ever looked that smart.

Or they said, "Goodbye, darling, I'll see you soon."

You know, I think, at the time, I thought I was jolly lucky

to have a fairly well-rounded character to play.

I was always determined that I wouldn't become one of those nice,

middle-class ladies who had awful things happen to them

but never changed the tone of voice.

I have to get some more dressings.

Will you stay with her?

Is there anything I should do?

No. No, just be near.

Like Carve Her Name With Pride,

Ice Cold In Alex reminds us that women won the war, too.

It's an extraordinarily physical film.

Actors like John Mills and Anthony Quayle,

who'd fought in the war,

brought an all-in-it-together attitude to the film.

Their characters fight as much against the elements

as they do against Rommel's forces.

Here, Quayle's spy is in danger of drowning in mud.

'There seem to be scenes in the film where the actors look as if

'they're in some physical danger.'

One is Anthony Quayle almost drowning in the mud.

How was that filmed?

Well, in fact, the latter part of it was done in the studio.

And I don't think anybody, including Lee, the director,

thought he would go as far as he did.

-Hold on, hold on.

-'But Tony Quayle was that sort of person.'

Throw it to me, man.

Throw it to me. Hurry. I'm being sucked under.

'They made a great, big tank of the most revolting stuff.'

But he never stopped doing what he was requested to do.

And eventually he went right under.

And, of course, it got in up his nose, in his ears, in his mouth,

it was quite incredible.

And so when you see Johnny squeezing it out of his nose,

it was like that. It was truly tough.

But you have to realise Anthony Quayle was a war hero.

They weren't baby boys, they weren't lads out of drama schools,

he'd been through the war, it's a different generation.

Ice Cold In Alex was a startling picture.

As well as gruelling physical challenges,

it showed that the people at the front had sexual urges.

A love scene between John Mills and Sylvia Syms had to be recut.

The censor's scissors were twitchy from the amount of cleavage

on display the first time round.

What about this rather steamy scene

where you had too many buttons on your blouse undone?

What was that like?

Quite pleasant, as I remember.

Bit sandy, I remember the sand got down my bra. The...

Yeah, what can I say?

I had to kiss... Johnny Mills had to kiss me,

and I had to reveal the fact that I had rather a good pair of...

The...

But the truth is, it was so mild compared to what you see nowadays.

It's just, I think, buttons came undone

and a bit of bosom came out and whatever.

So a lot of it was cut.

I think Lee was a bit disappointed.

He was a sexy beast, Lee.

And it was all right?

It was quite enjoyable.

Do you always know what you want?

Always.

The scene of that film, which has

passed into the national consciousness,

is the scene in the bar at the end.

-Was it real beer? Did he really drink?

-Oh, Johnny.

Did he really drink six beers?

They couldn't get the colour right. Coca-Cola was too dark,

and so eventually they had Carlsberg.

Tony couldn't glug-glug-glug.

Harry couldn't glug-glug-glug.

And Johnny could.

It's such a good take. Being Lee, he has to do another one.

And then he does another one from another angle.

And Johnny got off this tall stool and literally went...

It was so funny.

So we had a bit of a pause because everyone was laughing so much.

Worth waiting for.

'That scene was popularised in a beer commercial.'

But it can only be used because it was already firmly

rooted in the British folk memory.

Ice Cold In Alex and all these films are landmarks of our culture.

Where most of us see even a few fleeting seconds of them,

we know where we are and what we're expected to feel.

They portrayed history,

but they themselves have now become part of our history.

But with Ice Cold In Alex, that was more or less that.

The film industry had wandered into its own minefield,

one populated by television sets

and an audience now too young to feel much about the war,

or to care about what their stuffy parents had been through.

Against the backdrop of plummeting cinema attendances,

down by almost 60% during the 1950s,

the British war film experienced the first rumblings

of a coming satire boom.

First, the Army was ridiculed as corrupt, absurdly bureaucratic,

and verging on the criminal

in the Boulting Brothers' superb Private's Progress.

Hey, you two.

Double.

I know you. What's your name?

-521 Jones, Sir.

-You're an absolute shower.

No doubt you think I'm a shower, too.

-I wouldn't like to say, sir.

-Well, I would.

I've got to be, to command rotters like you.

Do you know how long you've been on the job out there?

No, sir. We got so stuck into it, we've lost all sense of time.

I'll give you just five minutes to finish it or you'll be up

before me on a charge. Get going.

And the British silver screen's ultimate war hero, Jack Hawkins,

sent himself up in his favourite of his own films,

The League Of Gentlemen.

The League Of Gentlemen identifies a class of people with whom, actually,

British audiences were quite familiar by this point.

The ex-military person who is deeply iffy,

deeply dodgy, not what he seems,

has probably lied about his war record, is semi-criminal.

Playing an embittered lieutenant-colonel,

Hawkins's character brings together

a group of disgraced former officers for an audacious armed robbery.

Take a good look, gentlemen, because it's all there.

Operation Golden Fleece.

This is the battlefield on which we shall fight.

And here, I promise you, we shall enjoy our finest hour.

What price glory?

£100,000 each, tax-free.

You won't have to sign a single form for it,

you won't even have to salute.

'And I think that one of the things that League Of Gentleman plugs into'

is this suspicion of the middle-aged man

who relies for his status in society,

upon his war record, which may not bear that very much examination.

So those figures are ripe for satire,

the idea that you fought in the war, at this point,

is no guarantee of your heroism.

Thus was the British war film slain by its own hand.

The glory days of Jack Hawkins in a turtleneck sweater,

Sylvia Syms holding her own in the desert,

John Mills escaping from Colditz, were numbered.

The appetite for the glorious black and white war film was no more.

We'd done the Navy, we'd done POWs,

we'd done the RAF, we'd done...

And the war was receding,

slowly receding, from people's minds

and we're now starting to look forward to something else.

You know, the life that is... that we're now living.

And as filmmakers,

I don't think we were...

We were looking sort of ahead, not back.

Now we've got over the class-bound cliches, starched upper lips

and arch humour, we can perhaps see these films

for what they really are -

moments of clear and vivid representation

of an intense passage in our collective experience,

and as vital cultural documents.

Let him have it, chum!

This is bloody dangerous.

Attacking, standby.

We must have got her.

Darned if I know.

You see. It wasn't a fluke, it works.

Come on, let him have it!

I think it's terrific.

It's beautiful.

These films depict an astonishing chapter in our national story.

They helped form millions of us because of the way they filled

the lives and memories of our parents.

The pictures now have a historical value

that angry critics like Lindsay Anderson could

scarcely have imagined when they attacked their stuffiness

and lack of imagination.

The generation that fought the war has now almost gone.

But these films are with us for ever.

Not just as a realisation of how things were in the war,

but also of the way the generation who fought it

wish to have it and their part in it recorded in our cultural memory.

Understanding these films and the characteristics of decency, bravery,

and heroism that they portray is part of what it is to be British.

And in that respect, for you, Tommy, the war will never be over.

You can't get rid of me so easily, you know.

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