 |
Went the Day Well? - Digitally Restored (80 Years of Ealing) (1942) (Blu-ray)
by hogsflesh
This Optimum Home Entertainment Blu-Ray is currently £13 on amazon.
Went The Day Well is a remarkable British war film made by Ealing Studios in 1942. Although designed as propaganda, it endures as an unusually tense thriller.
The sleepy English village of Bramley End is infiltrated by a platoon of German soldiers. ... They're there to disrupt communications for Hitler's invasion, which is due to start that very week! Disguised as British troops, they are initially welcomed by the trusting villagers. But they're soon exposed by their continental way of writing numbers, and their fiendish Nazi chocolate. Taking over the village, the Germans have to prevent discovery just long enough for their plans to succeed - but the villagers have other ideas.
This film is absolutely brilliant. It really doesn't put a foot wrong from beginning to end. It evokes a beautifully old-fashioned view of Englishness, with all social classes living happily together in their delightful little village. The only rogue element is a poacher, and it's clear that no one really minds him. The vile fascist jackboot comes clomping into this rural paradise, and the film takes a certain amount of glee in brutalising the good honest yeomen of old England before the villagers fight back and the inevitable happens. (Spoiler: Germany didn't win the Second World War.)
Actually, the film takes the odd-seeming step of revealing right from the start that the invading Germans all end up dead, as we're shown their spot in the graveyard. Perhaps this was necessary to reassure audiences at the time, although 1942 is a bit late for real invasion fears. But that doesn't make the film any less thrilling, as we don't know how the Germans are going to be stopped, nor who will survive.
Survival is the crucial question. The film is not shy about killing off loveable English-village types. The film is full of the sort of characters who'd be background detail in a light romance about a farmer's son falling in love with the daughter of the local lord of the manor. It is - even at this distance - genuinely shocking to see some of these people die, even more so if they've just killed a Nazi with an axe. Imagine the Vicar of Dibley beating a German soldier to death with a rolling pin and then being hung from a lamppost and you've got some idea of how distressing this film is.
And that's the point - this is such a cosy glimpse into an idealised world that seeing it get torn apart in this way is pretty horrible. This lets us cheer on the villagers all the more when they get to fight. The film genuinely stirs the emotions, and a brief flicker of patriotism sparked in my breast. Then I remembered what year it was, and mused on the unlikeliness of the country being able to pull together in a crisis now. Then I got bored of thinking about things like that and made myself some toast. It seemed like the most quintessentially English thing I could do at that moment.
The film is unbearably tense. The plucky villagers spend the middle third of the film trying to find inventive ways of letting the outside world know what's going on, and there's real suspense about whether they'll succeed and what will happen to them if they don't. The characters are broadly drawn stereotypes of English decentness, and there's not a single character you can bring yourself to dislike (apart from the Germans, of course, who are regulation evildoers).
The cast embody their English archetypes very well. Especially good are Valerie Taylor as the vicar's daughter and Muriel George as the shopkeeper. There are a few familiar faces - Mervyn Johns and a very young Thora Hird both have prominent roles. The best German is David Farrar, a handsome devil who takes considerable relish in shooting the vicar and threatening to execute children. The standout is top-billed Leslie Banks (who was brilliant in The Most Dangerous Game ten years earlier). He plays the caddish upper-class fifth columnist, trusted by all but secretly in league with the Nazis. The rogue!
It's all made extremely well by Brazilian director Cavalcanti, who shows a fine affinity for the English way of life but is perhaps more willing to smash it up than a British director would have been. The music, by William Walton, is stirring in a home-fires-burning kind of way. This is probably the greatest propaganda film I've ever seen - it shows a society pulling together to do the unthinkable in order to protect their way of life. Scenes in which the village spinster calmly takes a revolver, walks into a room and shoots a man are superb, because they're so unexpected and yet so right.
While the film certainly looks good on Blu-Ray, I'm not sure this is a huge improvement on the DVD version - perhaps not enough to warrant upgrading, anyway. Although there's plenty of detail visible, the whites occasionally looked slightly pixelated (which could be an issue with either my TV or player, but it doesn't happen on other disks). There are a few scratches on the film, especially early on, but they don't detract from the enjoyment.
There are two extras. Yellow Caesar is a short propaganda film made by Cavalcanti about Mussolini, acting as a scornful biography of Il Duce. It was made in 1941, and reassuringly paints the Italian dictator as an incompetent, vainglorious buffoon. It mixes newsreel footage and occasional staged scenes, and is pretty entertaining for what it is, although it feels slightly too long at 22 minutes.
The other is a radio programme (from Radio 3) in which Simon Heffer discusses the film for about 15 minutes - there's no obvious indication of when it was broadcast. Heffer makes some interesting points, although his heavy breathing style of delivery is a bit off-putting.
But don't get this for the extras. Get it for the film. The Eagle Has Landed shamelessly borrowed the plot but did it from the Germans' point of view. But this is the original and best.
Read the complete review |
|
|
Valkyrie (Blu-ray)
by samueltyler
Tom. Tommy. The Tomster. These are some of the names that I don't call Tom Cruise. To me he is the epitome of late 80s and early 90s US cinema with his flawless grin and tiny stature. There is no doubting that in recent years his off screen life has had a derogatory effect on his onscreen charisma, no longer is he the handsome guy ... next door, but a spooky mannequin of insincerity. However, to dismiss the man because he comes across as a bit of a kook is a disservice as his performances in films such as 'Magnolia' and 'Born on the Fourth of July' show that he does have some talent as an actor. Therefore, as much as every fibre in my body wants me to never watch a film starring the Cruisinator, the Cruisal, the CruiseforaCorpse (more names I don't call him), I will watch 'Valkyrie' in the hopes it is good.
By 1943/44 it was becoming increasingly certain that Germany was losing the war. The allies had grown stronger with the might of the American industrial engine and Germany was running out of young men to send to the front. This did not stop Adolf Hitler and his leading cronies from keeping an iron grasp on power. Throughout his reign of evil several attempts where made on Hitler's life, the most famous being Valkyrie, an in-depth conspiracy by some of the leading political and military thinkers in Nazi Germany. Could this batch of old fashioned German men overthrow Hitler before he destroys everything they believe in?
Spoiler Alert. Hitler did not die in 1944. This may come as a shock to some readers of this review who do not list history as one of their favourite subjects. With this in mind the outcome of 'Valkyrie' should be an obvious one and any tension in the plot mute. However, this is not the case as although some people will know the general results of the attempted coup, not many will know how the plan came about, who was involved and why is failed to achieve success. Bryan Singer rightly concentrates on these elements as a way of increasing the tension.
With this in mind you have a cast of characters played by a who's who of British talent. Established thespians such as Bill Nighy and Kenneth Branagh are joined by the likes of Eddie Izzard. Every British actor in the film plays their role well up to David Bamber as Hitler himself. However, a decent proportion of the audience are not watching this film for a British ensemble cast, but for Tom Cruise as Colonel von Stauffenberg, the man who would prove the eventual driving force behind Valkyrie. On set rumours where abound that the performance was abysmal and that Cruise was using a ridiculous German accent. On seeing the film, this is just not true as most of the cast use their own accents and so does Cruise. His performance is decent enough one and you believe he could be a war hero. However, he is not really able to shine against a great British cast until the very end of the film.
It is not the cast that are the issue with the film as they all do a good job. It is director Bryan Singer's approach to the material that falls short. When creating a film that is based on fact, a director has to decide early on whether to be liberal with the truth or not. Singer seems to have found some strange middle ground were he uses a lot of artistic licence and Hollywood hoopla, but in a film that almost feels like a docudrama at times. The static use of shots and over reliance on talky moments means that the momentum of the film ebbs and flows to such a degree that one minute you feel like you are watching a blockbuster, the next the History Channel. Over the course of the film, and especially the final third, 'Valkyrie' does justify itself as a feature film, but it could almost have been better designed as a documentary.
With its languid pace 'Valkyrie' is a film saved by a strong ensemble cast and an inherently compelling story. Very little of the tension in the film is created by Bryan Singer as a film maker, but the actual events that happened. Rather than draw the viewer into the world, Singer instead adapts a slightly cold feel to the film that comes across as documentary-esque. As von Stauffenberg, Cruise does a decent enough job to keep the audience at least partly engaged with the human element in the film, but overall the film is passable, but nowhere near as strong as a story of this magnitude could have been.
Director: Bryan Singer
Year: 2008
Cert: 12
Starring: Tom Cruise et al.
Price: Amazon uk £17.99 (BluRay)
Play.com £10.99 (BluRay)
Extras
I saw the film in BluRay and for a movie that has a lot of open countryside and period features it should have looked amazing. However, as mentioned before Singer's leaning towards a docudrama feel means that HD is not really needed.
Read the complete review |
