My husband, myself, and my stepson can rarely find a movie we all want to see together: the latter is 16 so of course all summer movies are made for him, but I can’t stand the bombastic computer-generated imagery and violence and the predictable scripts. When Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk came out, we all wanted to see it and so went together last week: a rare occasion. We did not return home together, however, as I had to run out less than halfway through! It wasn’t that it was bad–it was actually riveting–but also just too painful for me to watch all those men on the beach, so exposed and so vulnerable. I knew the Armada was coming but I couldn’t wait for it.
The film and the reality, June 1, 1940 ©Imperial War Museum, London
It’s ridiculous I know, but I think I prefer the Mrs. Miniver version of Dunkirk, in which the gentleman-architect Mr Miniver takes his pleasure craft (conveniently docked in front of his Hollywood-perfect expansive English cottage) out into the Channel and returns only slightly battered (and bearded) a few days later. During his absence, Mrs. Miniver battles a downed Nazi in their kitchen. She wins, of course, but the Director William Wyler gives him a speech intended to bolster the Allied effort (by the time the film was released in 1942, the United States had already entered the war, but during its production Wyler was concerned about American isolationism): We will bomb your cities…Rotterdam we destroy in two hours. Thirty thousand in two hours. And we will do the same here! Combined with all other “inspirational” details in the film, including the bombing of the Miniver house, the heartbreaking death of their new daughter-in-law, and the village vicar’s closing sermon, it’s no wonder that Joseph Goebbels was afraid of it.
It was acceptable to make propaganda films in the 1940s: today things must be as real as (technically) possible and sometimes that is unrelenting, at least for me: I fear my stepson is inured due to a steady diet of video games. I would like to see the Dunkirk miracle play out so I think I’ll have to steel myself to go back and see this film again, but in the meantime I’ll occupy myself with more distant records of this epic event, in paper and a paint. The Imperial War Museum in London has many photographs (including several of the Germans moving in after the evacuation), oral histories, and paintings of Dunkirk among its collections, although after I spent some (digital) time with these memorials I realized they weren’t that distant after all.
June 3 headlines from the Sydney Morning Herald and the Los Angeles Times; a small fraction of the 200,000 British Expeditionary Forces who were evacuated (+140,000 French troops), ©IWM; Charles Ernest Cundall, The Withdrawal from Dunkirk, 1940, © IWM (Art.IWM ART LD 305); “little ships” in Muirhead Bone’s The Return from Dunkirk; Arrival at Dover, 1940, © IWM (Art.IWM ART LD 251); Rudolf A. Haywood, The London Fire-Boat ‘Massey Shaw’ approaching Dunkirk at 11 pm on the 2nd June 1940, © IWM (Art.IWM ART LD 248).
July 30th, 2017 at 4:45 am
Reblogged this on O LADO ESCURO DA LUA.
July 30th, 2017 at 5:41 am
Hi Donna,
I feel like a kindred spirit because I would probably have left with you. My daughter and 13 year old granddaughter saw DUNKIRK last week (I declined) and thought it excellent although they admitted, “There was an awful lot of waiting.”
I suggested that they follow up at home with MRS. MINIVER which I haven’t seen in decades, but recall as being a wonderful film. I guess I forgot about the propaganda angle, yet Wilder was a genius in his time.
Last summer I finally made it to the Imperial War Museum in London. It had been closed for renovations on my previous trips. Its reincarnation was well worth the wait.
Thanks for sharing…
July 30th, 2017 at 6:51 am
Too nerve-wracking for me! As soon as the British officers admitted that they could only evacuate perhaps 40,000 while there were 400,00 on the beach–I was looking to get out of there, even though I knew they would do much, much, much better than that.
July 31st, 2017 at 4:07 pm
We have a friend, a very old man, who was the last man rescued. He literally had to run down a jetty and leap onto the last departing boat as the gap widened. I hate the idea of war and the horrors it inflicts but it can also strangely bring out some very good and kind traits in some people.
July 31st, 2017 at 4:47 pm
Oh absolutely! and heroism. They were all so absolutely valiant.
July 31st, 2017 at 4:08 pm
PS I quite agree about Mrs Miniver:)
August 8th, 2017 at 12:09 pm
On the anniversary of the D-Day invasions the BBC broadcast contemporary actors reading the radio warnings that were read on air in advance of the troops’ arrivals. They made for fascinating and harrowing listening.
August 8th, 2017 at 12:23 pm
Oh, I’m sorry to have missed that!