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"Alternative" World War II Films
"Mach schnell!"
Stan Laurel in BLOCKHEADS took twenty years to realise World War One was over, but it's taking Hollywood a lot longer to come to terms with the non-continuation of its sequel. Not that we've got anything against a good war film, but there are so many of them, especially clogging up the daytime TV schedules which are our critical domain, that we often find ourselves wishing they hadn't bothered. Among the usual gung-hoery, however, there are plenty of war films that are clearly as bored with the straightforward conflict template as we are, so we thought that, while we're waiting for COCKLESHELL HEROES to crop up on BBC2 again, we'd have a crack at ranking the oddball WWII films.
It's a brave filmmaker indeed who departs from the usual heroes against the odds/war is hell format at the best of times, and that bravery takes on a whole extra dimension when the war's still going on, so really the best alterno-WWII film award should be a tie between Graham Greene and Cavalcanti's sublime imagined British village invasion WENT THE DAY WELL? and most of Powell and Pressburger's wartime output, with the magisterial A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH heading the pack. Unoriginal choices, but we make no apology for that whatsoever. And what could be more `alternative' than A MATTER OF..? A bureaucratic heaven, stopping time, colour/black-and-white shenanigans, the final historical debate - it beats anything cooked up in the sixties, as we'll see.
WWII was the subject for comedy in a morale-boosting vein during hostilities, of course. Chaplin went for the heartfelt but rather too on-the-nose satire of THE GREAT DICTATOR, while the Little Man of Nuremberg was also at the centre of Ernst Lubitsch drama farce TO BE OR NOT TO BE, which we always find is one of those films the daring of which you have to keep reminding yourself of while you watch, as it's sorely dated now (but still clearly superior to Mel Brooks' slack `80s remake). Of course, everyone joined in for the war effort, from Donald Duck (with a little help from Spike Jones) in DER FUHRER'S FACE, through those rather unpleasant in retrospect Bugs and Daffy propaganda toons, to The Three Stooges' I'LL NEVER HEIL AGAIN!
In Britain Will Hay taught the young Peter Ustinov to flick the Vs at Hitler in THE GOOSE STEPS OUT, while Formby got to doff the man himself on the napper in LET GEORGE DO IT. Meanwhile, 954024 Gunner Milligan was having a less easy time in the real thing, and his unreliable memoirs were recreated with Jim Dale as Spike and Spike as Spike's dad in the patchy but worthwhile film of ADOLF HITLER: MY PART IN HIS DOWNFALL. Rather more patchy and commensurately less worthwhile was fellow Goon Aircraftsman Sellers, taking on the dual role of a British intelligence office and Gestapo chief with seemingly little interest, along with four other for-the-sake-of-it cameo roles (including Addie H) in regrettable Boulting brothel farce SOFT BEDS, HARD BATTLES. Still, at least that had Jenny Hanley and Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart on its books. All feeble Askwith- starring wartime sex romp LET'S GET LAID can offer is the perennial Linda Hayden and a fancy fag lighter. Beating even that for half- arsed period trappings is the film we've said enough about elsewhere, CARRY ON ENGLAND.
On a more positive note - well, positive in quality terms - Sellers excels, alongside Charles Aznovoice and Peter `Grouty' Vaughan, in decidedly non-comic trapped PoW drama THE BLOCKHOUSE, the rarity of which has lent it a slightly elitist cachet, but with the praise very much deserved. D-Day attacks on a prison camp in France lead a handful of prisoners to take refuge in an underground shelter, which explosions trap them inside. Fortunately, the officers' stores are in easy reach, so candles, food and wine by the cellarful are at hand. Unfortunately, no-one comes to rescue them for six years, so distrust, drunkenness, violence, furtive homosexual wrestling and, erm, domino tournaments are on the cards, until all but two of the initial seven captives end up doing themselves in. It's a fantastic, claustrophobic film, still a bit ragged round the edges from when the money ran out, but beautifully understated all the same, and it's up there with Life and Death, we reckon. Based on a true story, would you believe?
More underground captivity is to be had in the decidedly lighter SITUATION HOPELESS… BUT NOT SERIOUS, in which Robert Redford and Mannix off of Mannix are a pair of US airmen captured by lonely old Cherman duffer Alec Guinness, who locks them in his air raid shelter for seven years, pretending Germany has won the war and they must stay there for their own safety. Doesn't exactly hit its targets like The Blockhouse, this one, though Guinness is as good for you as always. Based on a novel by Robert Shaw, would you believe?
Also novel-derived is Richard Lester's kitchen sink-including satire HOW I WON THE WAR, in which a motley English platoon led by Michael Hordern and Crawford, and incorporating stoic Roy Kinnear, misanthropic John Lennon and crazed Jack McGowran, take a convoy across Egypt to build a cricket pitch. Cross-talk, slapstick, David Lean pastiches, random violence and weirdo devices like having killed characters reappear among the troop, painted head-to-foot in primary colours. Well, it was the sixties. Incidentally, this wasn't the only WWII satire that traded on Lennon's name - truly weird `70s effort ALL THIS AND WORLD WAR II juxtaposed Beatles songs (albeit sung by the likes of Rod Stewart and Frankie Lane) with cut-up WWII archive footage, to what end exactly who can fathom?
The most famous WWII satirical novel must be CATCH-22, though the film's not nearly as good as the book, despite having a fair crack at it, and a hogload of big name support. We've no idea how good the novel of CASTLE KEEP is, but we do have a residual fondness for this confused Burt `Ulcer' Lancaster oddity. One-eyed Burt leads a platoon guarding a French castle full of paintings and whores against the Germans. Gradually the soldiers settle in and drift away from fighting. Peter Falk takes up baking. There's a bizarre bit of business with a Herbie-eque sentient VW Beetle. The Germans roll up and blow the up the castle, war is inevitably deemed to be "hell", and the puzzled viewer is left to his or her own devices thereafter. Now, move that castle to Romania, swap the American soldiers for Nazis (headed by Jurgen Prochnow), and ramp up the supernatural schtick, and you've got well-loved Michael Mann curio THE KEEP, which looks great but doesn't do much for us we have to say, spending the early stages moodily pottering about with dry ice and Tangerine Dream synth noises before fizzling out in an orgy of dodgy monsters and optical effects.
They're all based on novels, these, you know. As is the epitome of sci-fantasy WWII obsession, SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE, another film fans of the book decry as a botch job, with its time-mangling hero suffering flashbacks to the bombing of Dresden, and flash forwards to an idyllic existence with a nubile film star in a giant dome in some kind of human zoo on an alien planet. A far cry from Tora! Tora! Tora!, that's for sure. Much nearer is THE FINAL COUNTDOWN, in which modern yet stupidly-named aircraft carrier USS Nimitz finds itself back in 1941, just before Pearl Harbour. What to do? A few years later, THE PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT reversed this plot exactly, with a WWII battleship finding itself zapped into the mid-'80s. Based on a true story, would you believe? Well, the bit about a battleship vanishing, anyway. Perhaps the apotheosis of time travel war-fiddling was Joan Collins/Tom Bell romance QUEST FOR LOVE, in which the Bellmeister propels himself into an alternative reality where WWII had never taken place, and celebrates by getting off with Joan.
What about the very worst alternative take on Dubya Dubya the Second? We can almost hear the massed chorus of "ESCAPE TO VICTORY!" from here, but really, we can't totally condemn a film that stars Mike Summerbee, can we? For the worst in Hitler-inspired experimentation, we reckon you need look no further than the mini- genre of, er, Hitler experimentation. Yes, THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL heads up this genre, but risible as it is, there's still fun to be had from Gregory Peck's mad casting as Dr Mengele. Predating that, and a million times worse, is the mish-mash that is THEY SAVED HITLER'S BRAIN, which doesn't even bother with cloning nonsense, instead keeping Adolf's head alive in a jar on top of an old Bakelite radio in order to reinstate the Reich. This late '60s film is actually a partial reheat of early `60s drive-in effort MADMEN OF MANDORAS, with an acre of spy chase scenes stuck on the front.
Still, in both you get the famed shot of the head of Hitler screaming "Mach schnell!" for his life, which is more than you can say for FLESH FEAST, in which a Florida plastic surgeon's magical maggot-based facial rejuvenation technology is exploited by - you'll never guess - some neo-Nazis who just happen to have an ageing Hitler in their midst who could do with a quick nip `n' tuck before getting on with unfinished business. Boasting camerawork that makes your average wedding video look like PATHS OF GLORY, and a truly tragic lead performace from an end-of-career Veronica Lake (former forces' favourite in many a gung-ho wartime morale-booster), this truly is the nadir of both the Hitler Returns subset, and indeed the whole alternative WWII film genre. Never in the field of Movie! Movie! has so little been achieved by so many, for an audience of so few.
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