When I heard Danny Dyer say they were trying to recreate an old-school British war film with Age of Heroes I was sceptical to say the least. Even the title seemed too syrupy.
The key to the success of our classic war pictures is their sheer simplicity – films with names like The Cruel Sea and Went the Day Well? drew on simple plots and simple settings.
Now, with directors able to call on the previously impossible effects of CGI, the temptation to go large must be over-whelming and in doing so that magical key might be lost.
It rarely gets simpler than my all-time second favourite Ice Cold in Alex where John Mills leads a small party to safety across the Libyan desert with the promise of an ice-cold Carlsberg as their final reward. That’s the plot.
And then take Virginia McKenna’s under-stated portrayal of heroic SOE agent Violette Szabo in Carve Her Name with Pride, where possibly the biggest expense was the hiring of a war-surplus Lysander aircraft.
I’m not saying big is bad but when we do make them big we tend to make them messy and confused. Struggle through the cast of glitzy characters and the175 minutes of A Bridge Too Far and you start to wish the US Airborne will come and rescue you from the cinema.
Obviously, there are exceptions. The five minute single-shot Dunkirk beach scene in Atonement was breath-taking and told the story better than it has ever been told before.
But if the Brits were to make a war film on the scale of Saving Private Ryan we would probably end up with a sickening celebrity fest set in a stately home where everybody has expensive flash-backs to their war gone by.
With a limited budget, Age of Heroes director Adrian Vitoria had to literally call the shots when he found the cost of blank ammunition too expensive.
“How can we compete?” he asks. “The idea for me was we can’t really compete as a full-on action movie but maybe we can readdress the idea that the British were involved in the Second World War and because I have a knowledge of that period and British Commando units I thought it would be interesting to portray those units and look at their legacy - which is what we have today in Afghanistan.”
Danny Dyer, who plays the loveable Cockney hard-nut Corporal Rains, says he loves the film’s simplicity. “There’s no tricks or gimmicks. It’s not Hollywood.” But he was staggered to see someone counting every blank he fired. “I thought we’re making a fucking war film! But it is what it is and I’m very proud of it.”
With a modern take on The Dambusters in the making, more British directors are likely to seek inspiration from our current austerity and add that authentic underdog feel to the kind of films we make best.
These tend to fall into four groups: the propaganda films made during the war – Life and Death of Colonel Blimp a prime example to get us knuckling down to the new concept of Total War.
Those made immediately post-war were invariably based on officers’ best-selling memoirs like Douglas Bader’s Reach for the Sky or they turned excellent novels like Elleston Trevor’s The Big Pick-Up into appallingly pro-Establishment cornballs like Dunkirk.
But in the 1960s the tales of ordinary folk began to filter through and along came simplicity itself in The Long and the Short and the Tall and prime examples of the dogged British character with The Password is Courage .
Arguably the worst of the bunch came in the 1970s when everything went Technicolor. But some stand out like the high-tension Anglo-American blockbuster The Eagle has Landed.
Director Adrian Vitoria’s Age of Heroes passes muster as great British war film. To hold it up against the classics of the past is to ask a lot but it works so well on every level that it slips neatly into my All-Time Top 10.
It also bares more than a passing resemblance to another recent low-budget success. The King’s Speech captured a very British sense of time, place and decency, and so does this new post-Crunch take on the British war film.
Danny Dyer says the film harks back to a time when ordinary people were called on to do extraordinary things. “That’s why I like the title Age of Heroes,” he says. “Because that’s what it was. It’s about spirit and heart. Putting yourself in these situations and having to deal with it.”
My All-Time Top 10 British War Films
(1) Carve Her Name with Pride (1958) Heart-rending true story of London shop assistant Violette Bushell. When her French officer husband is killed at the start of the war Special Operations Executive take an interest in her. She soon finds herself parachuted into German-occupied France and a nightmarish game of cat-and-mouse. .
(2) Ice Cold in Alex (1958) Alcoholic Captain John Mills takes charge of an ambulance, two nurses and a couple of stray soldiers and leads them on an arduous trek across the North African desert in search of a cool bar in Alexandria and a chilled glass of Carlsberg.
(3) A Matter of Life and Death (1946) Returning to England from a bombing run over Germany, pilot Peter Carter's Lancaster takes a hit, his crew bailout and it seems he is doomed. But when he wakes up in the surf and discovers Heaven has made a mistake and they want him back, dashing David Niven takes the matter to court.
(4) Went the Day Well? (1942) Scores an extra point for such a great title. The residents of a war-time English village welcome into their homes a platoon of soldiers but the trusting locals soon discover dastardly Germans in disguise and out come the bread knives.
(5) The Long and the Short and the Tall (1961) An Army recording unit find themselves trapped in the jungle just a few miles from a Japanese camp. When a Japanese soldier is taken as their prisoner, the true colours of each man come to the surface.
(6) The Cruel Sea (1953) Cmdr. Ericson is assigned to convoy escort HMS Compass Rose with inexperienced officers and men just out of training. The winter seas make life miserable enough, but the men must also harden themselves to rescuing survivors of U-Boat attacks, and strange sausages called Snorkers.
(7) Age of Heroes (2011) Based on the real-life events of Ian Fleming's 30 Commando during WWII, the story follows our heroes from the beaches of Dunkirk to the mountains of Norway on a dangerous mission behind enemy lines that, if successful, could change the course of the war.
(8) The Password is Courage (1962) A British NCO is captured by the Germans but they soon wish they hadn’t bothered. Based on a true story.
(9) Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) The life and loves of General Clive Wynne-Candy, a blustering old duffer with a love for Deborah Kerr and a colourful past, who must adapt his sense of military honour to modern notions of ‘total war’.
(10) Battle of Britain (1969) Best air-flick ever with the added bonus of Susannah York. Watch out for the silent dog-fight sequence as Hitler tries to clear the skies of Britain ready for an all-out invasion.
(Editor’s note: The best war film of all time is the Belorussian masterpiece Come and See.)
Alan Pearce is author of the novel Dunkirk Spirit – the story of the men and women who saved an army and turned the tide of WW2.
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