Dunkirk

It may be a phoney war to you, but it's not to all the blokes at sea. Never has been. Dunkirk is directed by Leslie Norman and adapted to screenplay by David Divine and W.P. Lipscomb. It stars John Mills, Richard Attenborough, Bernard Lee, Robert Urquhart, Ray Jackson and Robert Hines. Music is by Malcolm Arnold and cinematography by Paul Beeson. "Dunkirk was a great defeat, and a great miracle. It proved, if it proved anything, that we were alone but undivided. No longer were there fighting men and civilians. There were only people. A nation had been made whole" I think it's safe to say that to fully "get" this version of Dunkirk it helps to have some knowledge of the actual events. This is no standard war film, more so given it's about a defeat and the subsequent extraction of the armed forces from the beaches of that part of France. Narrative is two fold, one strand follows soldiers as they strive to make it through perilous lands to get to the beaches, the other comes from the civilian angle and those back in Britain, where there's an ignorance about how seismic this war is going to be. While the film is hardly a rousing battle laden spectacle - it's more an appreciation of a critical moment in history - it's very authentic in its teaching, the various human interest stories and their respective emotions are absorbing and always attention holding. Absolutely a must see piece of cinema for anyone who needs to understand just why the evacuation of troops from Dunkirk was so important. Superbly played by the cast, directed with safe hands and produced with class by the brilliant Michael Balcon, Dunkirk 58 a smart bit of classic war cinema. 8/10

This is an excellent war movie, especially considering it is from 1958. It has aged well. Today’s war movies are more visually impressive, of course, with the special effects that make it seem like you are witnessing the real thing. This version can’t match all that, but except for setting it up politically with newsreel clips and people discussing the “phony” war, this film shows the personal journey of Dunkirk. The home front, soldiers caught behind the rapidly shifting line of battle, and later on the masses of soldiers on the beaches waiting for the civilian “navy” who lent their boats and themselves to the impossible task of getting the trapped army back home to England. The voiceover narration seemed unnecessary at times. I felt they should just get out of the way and show this human side of the battle of Dunkirk, which could have been a massacre but was instead a stunning rescue operation. We almost expect our war movies to be three-hour spectacles these days, and they are visually impressive, but I still appreciate movies like this one, which balance realistic small-scale warfare scenes with scenes depicting the human interest stories of war.

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John Chard

Peter McGinn