DavidW1947

I've just watched this film for the first time and it's simply an absolute mess. John Boorman wrote, produced and directed the film based on his childhood memories of the war with Sebastian Rice-Edwards playing him as a child (named Billy rather than John) an an assortment of out-of-their-depth actors and actresses playing his family. The trouble is that, if this is anything to go by, his family, especially his mother and older sister and aunties, were insufferable bores of the worst kind and this was fatal for the film. The characters are dull and uninteresting and I was completely unmoved by the film and never became involved with the characters or their story.

Boorman couldn't get any film company interested in financing the picture and spent a fortune of his own money on it...a million pounds alone on building, on an old, abandoned airfield, a reproduction of the street of semi-detached houses where Boorman lived as a little boy. Eventually, he ran out of money and couldn't finish the film. But David Puttnam, a friend of his who was now running Columbia Pictures agreed to finance the rest of the film and distribute it.

One wonders what a top director of the calibre of Fred Zinnemann would have done with this subject in his heyday. Probably the first thing he would have done would have been to have it completely re-cast and re-written. So are there any good points about it? Well, the film has great attention to period detail and looks just about as good a recreation of wartime Britain as could possibly be achieved and Sebastian Rice-Edwards, although he's not called upon to do much in the way of acting, at least looks lovely as Billy...a sort of cross between Rupert Osborne in "Konga" and Simon West in "Swallows and Amazons". He's certainly very photogenic and the centre of attention, but I know that if I had been him, I would have walked off the picture when I realised what Boorman wanted me to do and say in it. "You can't walk off the picture like this", he would have protested, "I've got a lot of money invested in you!" "Well now, ain't that just too bad!", I would have sneered and walked off the set. I wouldn't have wanted to be associated with such a disaster and have people make fun of me. Obviously, when I was nine (in 1956), I was far more of a rebel than Sebastian was thirty-one years later.

I can see why this wasn't chosen for The Royal Film Performance in 1987, with Sebastian called upon to use a choice four letter word on two occasions...not something to present to the Queen even in 1987...especially when being spoken by a nine year old. My verdict: The cast and script and director prevent it from becoming the classic it should have been. Two stars out of five for effort (maybe even that is being overly generous).

The Sony DVD CDR 11368. Excellent transfer of the film with very clear image and sound. 1.85:1 and anamorphically enhanced for 16 x 9 computers and televisions. A far better transfer than this dreadful film deserves.

When I went to see this film at the now long gone Focus cinema in Longton, Stoke on Trent on Thursday, September 12th, 1957, it marked the first time that I, then aged 10 and a half, had gone to the pictures on my own. The film was an eternal triangle love story set against a background of the preparations for the Normandy landings in June, 1944, which, when this film was released, had happened only twelve years earlier. Set in England as it prepared for the invasion, but filmed in California, the film told of the love of married American Captain Brad Parker (Robert Taylor) for English girl Valerie Russell (Dana Wynter), who is engaged to be married to English Colonel John Wynter (Richard Todd) and the film posed the question of which of the two would get killed in the forthcoming battle and not get the girl. I had recently met and fallen in hurtful unrequited love a with local girl of my age, Ann Barlow, and the music in the film by Lyn Murray was very haunting in the romantic interludes and reflected just how I felt in my feelings for Ann and it also featured the hit song of 1944, "You'll Never Know".

That side of the film is what I remember it for. But sixty-two years later in 2019, I can see the flaws in the rest of the film. Notwithstanding the usual hilariously inaccurate Hollywood view of wartime London, there were scenes in it that must have been so insulting to British war veterans who went to see the film that it must have gone down like a lead balloon with them and it's a wonder that the film didn't get banned shortly after release, as "Objective Burma" had been. In one scene, a group of American G.I.s, fresh over on the troop ship, were seen making fun of a Home Guard platoon as they drilled in a village square and in another, one American soldier says to Captain Brad Parker "I don't go for those Limey's. They talk fast and fight slow". I can't remember if I noticed how insulting this was to the British army when I went to see the film in 1957, but I certainly notice it now and I don't like it one little bit. I hope whoever was responsible for these scenes was reprimanded over them at the time. They should never have been included in the final release version of the film.