What do British war films tell us about ourselves? | Little White Lies

What do British war films tell us about ourselves?

19 Jul 2017

Words by Mark Allison

Young boy in school uniform saluting, wearing a dark grey coat and cap.
Young boy in school uniform saluting, wearing a dark grey coat and cap.
Sto­ries of com­bat and der­ring-do were once com­mon on our screens. What does their decline reveal about our nation­al identity?

They don’t make em like that any­more.” It’s a phrase you’ve prob­a­bly heard an elder­ly rel­a­tive utter after a Sun­day after­noon screen­ing of Zulu or The Guns of Navarone. And, to an extent, they’re right: the sight of a British ser­vice­man in com­bat has grad­u­al­ly van­ished from our screens over the last 40 years. When British war films do appear, they’re usu­al­ly a far cry from the adven­ture epics of old, and notice­ably devoid of the elab­o­rate­ly vio­lent com­bat sequences which have become stan­dard in Amer­i­can cinema.

This change in British film­mak­ing habits doesn’t just reflect the bud­getary lim­i­ta­tions of UK cin­e­ma, but sug­gests a fun­da­men­tal change in how we per­ceive our­selves as a nation. It’s not the case that we don’t like to think about war any­more – indeed, defeat­ing the Nazis and the Blitz spir­it” remain a nation­al obses­sion – but in recent years, British films have come to deal with con­flict in dis­tinct­ly opaque terms.

Of course, there was once a time that the British film indus­try held domin­ion over the war genre. Begin­ning in the ear­ly 1940s with the wartime morale pro­pa­gan­da of In Which We Serve and The Way Ahead, domes­tic cin­e­ma excelled at hero­ic sto­ries of plucky Britons (and, very occa­sion­al­ly, colo­nials) fight­ing hordes of for­eign­ers against all the odds. Lat­er films, such as David Lean’s The Bridge on the Riv­er Kwai, offered con­tem­pla­tive reflec­tions on the mad­ness of war. Oth­ers, like Bri­an G Hutton’s Where Eagles Dare, pitched them­selves as escapist orgies of Nazi-mur­der­ing violence.

By the 1980s, war movies were chang­ing. Like today, much of the British film indus­try could only exist with the sup­port of Amer­i­can financiers and audi­ences, and the British war movie would only sur­vive as long as for­eign mar­kets remained interested.

Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far was prob­a­bly the last of the orig­i­nal cycle of war epics, a British-Amer­i­can co-pro­duc­tion direct­ed by a home­grown tal­ent. Its under­per­for­mance at the US box office echoed wider devel­op­ments in the film indus­try, all of which con­tributed to the decline of World War Two adven­tures. The suc­cess of Star Wars ush­ered in a new­er mod­el of block­buster for a gen­er­a­tion raised in peace­time. Mean­while, per­sist­ing fans of the war genre were sat­is­fied by the emerg­ing crop of Viet­nam movies, an acute­ly Amer­i­can sub-genre which had lit­tle room for British stories.

At the same time as Hol­ly­wood shift­ed its focus, so too did British pop­u­lar cul­ture. The way in which war, par­tic­u­lar­ly World War Two, was memo­ri­alised and under­stood in the UK began to change. The events of The Trou­bles in North­ern Ire­land made any rep­re­sen­ta­tion of British sol­diers some­what prob­lem­at­ic, while Britain’s increas­ing­ly dimin­ished sta­tus on the world stage caused mem­o­ries of her for­mer impe­r­i­al pow­er to fade. Thus, pop­u­lar under­stand­ings of World War Two in Britain began to over­look the actions of ser­vice­men abroad, in favour of a renewed empha­sis on the home front and the toils of ordi­nary Britons.

This devel­op­ment was reflect­ed in John Boorman’s Hope and Glo­ry, and has since come to dom­i­nate British cul­ture. The recent phe­nom­e­non of Keep Calm and Car­ry On’ posters (which were not wide­ly cir­cu­lat­ed dur­ing the War itself) appeals to a part of nation­al char­ac­ter which has been nur­tured by three decades of film and tele­vi­sion. On both the big and small screens, the wartime home front has been plun­dered var­i­ous­ly for sit­u­a­tion­al com­e­dy (Good­night Sweet­heart), crime mys­tery (Foyle’s War) and polit­i­cal dra­ma (The King’s Speech). The expe­ri­ence of World War Two has become a sin­gu­lar moment of nation­al pride through which we all must live vicariously.

When bat­tle­fields are depict­ed in mod­ern British films, they rarely serve as the focus. Antho­ny Minghella’s The Eng­lish Patient uses the North African cam­paign of World War Two as the set­ting for an evoca­tive romance. Like­wise, Joe Wright’s Atone­ment fea­tures a brief but pow­er­ful depic­tion of the Dunkirk evac­u­a­tion in what was oth­er­wise an inti­mate love sto­ry. More recent­ly, Ter­ence Davies’ Sun­set Song tack­les World War One with­in a com­ing-of-age fam­i­ly drama.

This is in sharp con­trast with the direc­tion Amer­i­can cin­e­ma has tak­en over the last 20 years. Since the release of Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan in 1998, the Amer­i­can war movie has main­tained a near con­stant pres­ence in mul­ti­plex­es. The bru­tal, vis­cer­al style of com­bat cap­tured in Steven Spielberg’s mas­ter­piece hav­ing been repli­cat­ed in all-Amer­i­can escapades from Rid­ley Scott’s Black Hawk Down to Mel Gibson’s Hack­saw Ridge. The grim real­i­ty of war is the pri­ma­ry focus of these films, fore­ground­ing bloody action sequences to an extent that is alien to British cinema.

Indeed, films about British mil­i­tary his­to­ry are today more like­ly to be pro­duced by for­eign film-mak­ers than domes­tic tal­ent. It took an Amer­i­can pro­duc­tion team and an Aus­tralian direc­tor to make 2003’s Mas­ter and Com­man­der: The Far Side of the World, the only major film on the Napoleon­ic Wars in recent times. Sim­i­lar­ly, it fell to Spiel­berg to record the bat­tle­fields of Flan­ders and the Somme in War Horse.

The con­trast between Amer­i­can and British depic­tions of war has per­sist­ed into mod­ern con­flict. In many ways, this was typ­i­fied by the 2014 British war dra­ma, Kaja­ki, a pow­er­ful but under­stat­ed sto­ry of a British Army squad trapped in a Hel­mand mine­field in 2006 – with­out a shot fired nor a Tal­iban fight­er in sight. This serves as an effec­tive anti­dote to the likes of Lone Sur­vivor, Peter Berg’s gung-ho war thriller in which Mark Wahlberg and a team of Navy SEALS mas­sacre their way through an Afghan for­est brim­ming with insurgents.

Of course, the British film indus­try today large­ly lacks the finan­cial clout to pro­duce the high-octane com­bat films which are so com­mon in Hol­ly­wood. Opti­misti­cal­ly speak­ing, we might also be miss­ing the jin­go­is­tic and mil­i­taris­tic ten­den­cy which fuels flag-wav­ing war dra­ma – or, per­haps, it could be that our coun­try is less will­ing to own up to our his­to­ry of vio­lent and often unsavoury con­duct across the world.

There are signs, how­ev­er, that this may be chang­ing. Christo­pher Nolan’s lat­est epic, Dunkirk, delib­er­ate­ly harks back to British war adven­tures of yore, with nary an Amer­i­can in sight. Rid­ley Scott is also lined up to direct a pas­sion project” about the Bat­tle of Britain, an engage­ment not prop­er­ly com­mit­ted to film since Guy Hamilton’s 1969 effort. It’s pos­si­ble that the Brex­it spir­it has reignit­ed an inter­est in Britain’s finest hour” – a time when Spit­fires ruled the skies and bananas were as bendy as we pleased.

Nev­er­the­less, the his­to­ry of the British war film remains the sto­ry of a soci­ety in flux. How we have under­stood our­selves and our nation­al her­itage has been tinged by images of our coun­try in con­flict. Where once we cel­e­brat­ed dar­ing com­man­do raids on Japan­ese rail­ways and hero­ic bomb­ing runs over Ger­man dams, we now hail the sto­ic for­ti­tude of a gen­er­a­tion which endured bombs, rationing, and sep­a­ra­tion. War remains an endur­ing aspect of our nation­al cin­e­ma and, by exten­sion, our iden­ti­ty. Even if they don’t make em like that anymore.

You might like