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WW2 - World War II

Gaith

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^ Interesting; never heard of that one.



The Good German (2006)

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A Steven Soderbergh homage to Hitchcock, Casablanca, and classic film noir in general, set in and around the July 1945 Potsdam Conference where Truman, Stalin, and Churchill negotiated the European peace as Japan fought on. George Clooney arrives in Berlin as a journalist with an Army commission, searching for his pre-war flame (Cate Blanchett), who happens to be entangled with his slimy driver (Tobey Maguire). This leads to an entanglement with Operation Overcast (later called Operation Paperclip), in which German rocket scientists with dirt - or worse - on their hands were rehabilitated as American citizens in order to win the incipient arms race against the Soviets. (Marvel fans may recognize Paperclip as the program which allowed Arnim Zola to infiltrate SHIELD in the backstory to The Winter Soldier.)

The movie was a box office flop and critical disappointment, and hasn't been released on blu. Worse, the DVD has no bonus features, which could have provided a fascinating look at how the crew used period cameras to shoot on color film (for greenscreen purposes) that was then finished in grayscale. Anyhow, I quite like the film, though it's no classic. Blanchett underplays her knockout/sexual goddess role; Kate Winslet, who was apparently considered for the part, might have made more sense in this regard, but this actually kind of works for the plot, if we're to regard Clooney's character as a man out of his depth rather than a figure to strongly identify with. An interesting experiment all around.

B+
 

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The Exception (2016)   (US Amazon Prime)

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Ludicrous but solid quasi-romantic/erotic drama very loosely based on real persons. When Hitler invades the Netherlands in May 1940, former emperor (and key WWI instigator) Wilhelm II finds himself in German lands once more. Might the time have finally come for his return to the throne and some degree of power? (With those goons in charge? Er... no.) A young, wounded, and honorable SS officer is sent to oversee the old man's security at his wooded villa, but there are rumors of an enemy spy lurking about. And, in a completely different plot thread, why do you ask?, there's a new housemaid on the site.

He may have been the worst Kyle Reese imaginable, but Jai Courtney is fine as the German officer, Christopher Plummer is suspiciously likable as Wilhelm, and Janet McTeer, who memorably played Clemmie Churchill in Into the Storm, is first-rate as his wife. But the key attraction here is the astoundingly beautiful and excellent actress Lily James (also of Darkest Hour), around whom the movie rightly revolves:
 
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Grade: B. An odd but entertaining sequel featuring the villain of the WWI countdown film 37 Days, decades later.
 

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TM2YC said:
'Where Eagles Dare' is supposed to be QT all time favourite movie and it's pretty high on my list too. Richard Burton as an octuple Agent, Clint Eastwood taking on half the German army single handedly and that theme music... it don't get much better!

Welp, let's give it a look! :)


Where Eagles Dare (1968)

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Three years before Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood scores a career-high body count in this 2.5-hour action epic also starring Richard Burton. Fans of character dramas should look elsewhere, as Eagles is all plot (and action, though it takes half the movie to get there). And there is one big plot whopper that occurred to me during my viewing, but I soon forgot about it amidst the explosions:

At Burton's behest, one of the Nazis has their radio operator place a call to Italy... even though the movie made a big deal out of Eastwood killing both those guys, and leaving them in their station!

Also, I wasn't clear why Burton was so intent on dragging his traitorous comrades around... was it just on principle, in order to have them stand trial in Britain? Seems like way too much trouble and danger for its worth. Or was it to dispose of one at a time, as distractions/feints - in which case, why were they going along with it? Didn't make much sense either way.

Apart from magically bottomless ammo supplies, however, the movie does have two big flaws: for starters, pretty much everything goes according to plan - all heist movies should have one major hiccup/setback for the heroes to work around or fight their way through, but we don't get that here. Second, all the villain characters die en masse a little more than halfway through, and then we're left with a full hour of wasting mooks, which gets a bit old.

Still, despite its dramatic shortcomings, the scenery is spectacular, the kills are numerous and crunchy, the explosions plentiful, and the upper lips stiff as steel. I'll be generous, and give Where Eagles Dare a B+, in large part for sheer production values.
 

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A League of Their Own (1992)

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A corny and overly broad flick that deliberately and falsely implies (as reflected in Ebert's review) that the War threatened Major League Baseball by cannibalizing its players - in reality, the majors did just fine, in part by cannibalizing the minors, many of whom folded. The fact that MLB and the All-American Girls' Professional Baseball League both thrived is no demerit to the latter, but the filmmakers evidently disagreed. (Indeed, the Midwest-based league survived the end of the war, not meeting its actual doom until the television boom of the 50s.)

Anyhow, the characters and scenes are thinly and cartoonishly sketched, the story meanders, and the late 80's bookend sequences (full disclosure: I skipped the first one entirely) are both long and unnecessary. Like The Tuskeegee Airmen, this would probably fare better as a TV series (a short-lived one actually spun off from the movie, carrying over a few of the actors), and without the considerable star power of Tom Hanks and the stunning 6'0 Geena Davis (why on Earth did the WB not give her a Wonder Woman movie at the time?!), the movie wouldn't amount to much at all. But, in spite of the pretty awful "There's no crying in baseball!" scene, Hanks and Davis are great, and I give the movie compensatory points for not painting the League in overly heroic/grandiose strokes, which it easily could have done. (First-rate, spoilerific Todd in the Shadows video review here.)

Grade: B

(And, the Madonna end credits song suuuuucks.)
 

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Mrs Henderson Presents (2005)

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An outrageously rich and eccentric widow (Judi Dench) buys a run-down West End theatre on a whim, and hires a similarly sharp-tongued manager (Bob Hoskins) to run it. When revenues for their vaudeville revue show plummet, she decides to bring live nudity to the masses - but, per the censors, the unclothed ladies must remain immobile while on stage, so they can be considered pieces of fine art (while the rest of the performers sing and dance in front of them). Enter WWII - eventually - and suddenly there's the very real prospect these immobile stage nudes will be the only real breasts some young servicemen will ever see.

A thoroughly old-fashioned, hokey, charming pic, with fun interplay between Dench and Hoskins. There aren't many dramatic stakes, but, hey, that's all right, sometimes.

Grade: B
 

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^ Really? You like this?! :p


The Dirty Dozen (1967)

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The central gimmick, wherein twelve Army convicts and one badass major are selected for a suicide mission in pre-D-Day Occupied France, is a cracking one, and the leisurely first half of training and bonding is decent enough. Alas, the mission itself is a dud: instead of some impossible assault on an impregnable fortress that could only be justified by using utterly expendable prisoners (think Where Eagles Dare), their task is to shoot up... a cocktail party in a fancy estate. Meh. Also, a number of the actors are much too old to be grunts. For American troops committing outlandish anti-Nazi war crimes, go with another watch of Inglourious Basterds.

Grade: C+
 

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Number 92 on the BFI's Top 100 British films list...

In Which We Serve (1942)
British war-time patriotic/propaganda movie written, produced, starring and co-directed by Noël Coward (David Lean did the action scenes). On a technical level this was probably like 1942's answer to Star Wars, with model work so far ahead of other films of the period, that I struggled to tell what was real and what wasn't. That's mixed with some large scale real footage because Coward had the full cooperation of the government.

The "birth, life and death" of a Naval Destroyer HMS Torrin (and the crew who serve upon her) is told from shipyard to sinking and it's exploits in between. The ensemble cast features the very young looking John Mills and Richard Attenborough. Noël Coward plays the unflappable and stern Captain, he is excellent in the battle scenes and when talking to his men but I thought he was fairly wooden in the domestic scenes. Those scenes are part of a flashback structure where we learn about the home lives of the crew and how the war is going back home. This gives it an "upstairs downstairs" flavour with the Officers being upper-middle class, contrasting with the working-class crew and then some in the middle. The dialogue is dense with Naval nomenclature, which sounds researched and authentic. Overall I'd compare this to 'Das Boot', another film about men at sea and their deep bond with the vessel they live in.

 

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Hope and Glory (1987)

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The Blitz wasn't all grimness and drudgery. For a particular young boy, at least, all the upheaval was kind of fun, even if his teenage sister was being a total brat. John Boorman wrote and directed this very episodic and autobiographical film that's a pleasure to watch, even if it doesn't necessarily amount to a great deal, story-wise. The child performances especially are uniformly remarkable.

Grade: B+
 

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^ I must re-watch that sometime. Terrific film.

The Battle of the River Plate (1956)
One of the last films by "The Archers" (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger) is this portrayal of the hunt for the German battleship Graf Spee in December '39. The battle sequence in the middle is an excellent depiction of naval tactics, range and slow attrition (at least it seemed that way to this landlubber). Barely a model is insight as they seem to have had an impressive flotilla of fullsize cruisers at their disposal (including one of the actual ships from the battle). Lots of convincing sounding military dialogue and observance of Naval customs, lend authenticity. I noticed many of the cast of trusty old thesps went on to take prominent roles in the Bond movies. Outside of the violent middle act, the opening and closing are devoted to the theme of honour and nobility. Enemies giving no quarter but when the fighting is done, sharing a friendly drink. By The Archers' usual genius standards, this is a middling entry but a solid war movie by anyone else's measure.

 

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Okay, now this is weird: I mentioned upthread that for the past four years, the YouTube channel The Great War has been making excellent weekly WW1 summaries in real time one century after the fact. It's a great conceit, and it's almost done. So, given that WW2 started in September 1939, the obvious thing would be to start that recap, if not in 2039, then at the very least 2019, and make weekly summaries from 80 years ago... but no, the main guy behind The Great War, Indy Neidell, started a WW2 recap channel called World War Two last month, charting history 79 years later, before the WW1 recap has even finished! Weirder still, the WW2 recap appears to be a separate venture from the WW1 one, with no cross-promotion.

As one who's been following WW1 since the spring, I can't handle two wars at once! If anything, I guess I'll have to start my WW2 recap viewing next September, watching the weekly summaries a year late, but a pleasing 80 years on rather than 79. (To make things even more confusing, an inter-war series from the same team has been appearing on the again separate channel Time Ghost History, and is not yet complete! Okay, my head's spinning.)

Reading some of the WW2 recap comments, it seems the decision to jump the gun (sorry!) on the Second World War series was largely an economic one for the host and his partner, which is understandable, if still a bit disappointing. Anyhow, if you're ready to start a six-year recap show of WW2 right now, and don't mind starting 79 years after the fact rather than a clean eight decades, here's the first episode:

 

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This thread seems as good a place as any to mark the centenary of the Great War-concluding Armistice:


A happy Veterans Day greeting to all US armed forces veterans, and a solemn Remembrance Day greeting to service members, veterans, and their families in the Commonwealth of Nations. :blush:
 

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Gaith said:
Willems gets it:


Thought of you and this thread when I watched that video.

Who's putting the chronological list together?
 

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^ You mean "Film World War"? I've been working on it... slooowwwly... finally got my old man to sit down to record a full pass of my 17-page script right before the fall semester began, and while I spend significant chunks of time neglecting my studies in various frivolous ways, I don't like to fan edit while classes are in session; it just seems de trop. (I did, however, do some work over Thanksgiving break.) Hoping to make some serious headway over the winter holidays... we'll see...
 

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The Brylcreem Boys (1998)

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Little-known fact (at least in the US): the Republic of Ireland was officially neutral throughout WW2 - indeed, they were the only Western Democracy to officially express condolences for the Third Reich's passing of a certain head of state in '45. Also little-known: 1998's The Brylcreem Boys, which I had to procure on eBay in the form of a crappy fullscreen dvd with a glitchy sound transfer, as it has yet to find a home on the digital market.

Anyhow, there may be a great movie to be made about "The Emergency," as the Irish call it, but this isn't that. (It is, however, another WW2 flop for Billy "Rocketeer" Campbell.) Also, it was filmed on the British Isle of Man, not Ireland. The plot concerns (sort of) a Canadian and a German POW pilot vying for the affection of a fetching red-headed (obviously) local lass. More interesting are the interactions between the British and German camps, separated by a small fence and a big gap in senses of humor. The whole thing is pretty clunky, but I guess I'm just a WW2 movie sucker, because I didn't hate it.

Grade: C, because hey, it's the best movie about Ireland's WW2 "Emergency" I've ever seen. (And because I want my wee collage project to capture a positively dizzying variety of flicks about the time, which severely limits my options at times.)
 

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Gaith said:
SS-GB (2017)

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Just read for the first time about this five-hour BBC miniseries from last Feb/March: an alternate history murder mystery in Nazi-occupied 1941 Britain, from a '78 novel of the same name and 007 house scripters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade. One of the leads from And Then There Were None co-stars.

Finally saw this! It's available for streaming on the STARZ network. It's... okay. The lead actor, Sam Riley, seems to be worn by his black trenchcoat and fedora rather than the other way around, his character's romance with a foxy New York Times reporter doesn't convince, the pace is pretty slow, and the last episode sets up a second season that probably won't get made. The show seems to have come under criticism in Britain for its mumbled dialogue, and I indeed watched most scenes with the subtitles on just to be safe, as there were enough barely-audible words here and there to justify the distraction. Production-wise, the show looks good when it wants to, though much of it plays out in dark, empty streets and rooms.

The best part of the show is how the British Resistance plays into a power struggle between the German Army and SS when it comes to a certain prisoner. Ultimately, however, the season is built around a murder mystery that's only mildly interesting, and in retrospect it would have been more fun to have focused on the Resistance the whole time, instead of peeking at it from the margins. WWII enthusiasts won't waste their time with this, necessarily, but everyone else should at the very least go for Amazon's The Man in the High Castle first.

Grade: B-
 

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The Eagle Has Landed (1976)
The movie title and the opening red font of the credits over snowy Alpine footage (the film is actually set in rural England) seem designed to make you think "Oh goody, this is going to be like 'Where Eagles Dare'!". It doesn't have quite the same level of thrilling action but the character studies are a little deeper. On the surface this a WW2 film but its perhaps closer to the Heist-Movie sub-genre. Planning the caper, assembling the team, training and the execution and aftermath of the plan. The only difference is that instead of some ex-cons trying to steal diamonds, it's German paratroopers trying to steal Winston Churchill. The script is very careful to show us that our heroes are the "good Germans", courageous, moral, brave and all despising the SS and the Nazi command. The theme of honest soldiers having contempt for the top brass is reflected in the allied opposition, who are led by a vain and incompetent US Colonel.

Just about every celebrated character actor of the 70s is here and there is barely a part that isn't played by somebody you'd recognise. Michael Caine is great in the lead and a twinkle-eyed Donald Sutherland is fun but it's Robert Duvall as the grave and noble old Colonel planning the heist that take the prize. I watched the European theatrical cut but apparently there is also an extended cut with another quarter-hour more character stuff. I'll have to check that out next time.

 

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At my old man's insistence, I once tried to read Catch-22, and covered five or six pages before concluding that it was utterly and entirely unbearable. But I do love Kyle Chandler, so... might have to give this a look.

 
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