4 saturday review Saturday April 9 2022 | the times
I
grew up watching black-and-
white war films. The theme tune
of The Dam Busters immediately
transports me back to Sunday
television matinees in the Seven-
ties. Like many middle-aged
men, I can quote large chunks
of The Great Escape from memory, and
frequently do.
“It’s so stupid it’s positively brilliant.”
The Longest Day never seemed quite
long enough for me. Along with one
third of the entire British viewing popula-
tion, my family watched every episode of
the BBC TV series Colditz as a quasi-
religious rite.
These screen representations of war
were extraordinary achievements, but in
reality they were also one type of film,
in which brave British (or occasionally
American) chaps (always chaps) win the
war efficiently and gallantly (and above all
cheerfully) by doing the right thing, the
forces of virtue triumphing over an evil
enemy. There are plenty of stiff upper lips
and complicated moustaches. Inevitably
these films contained elements of postwar
propaganda, making sense of a ghastly war
as Britain struggled to find a new place in
the post-imperial world.
Where Eagles Dare (1968) offered some-
thing different from the plodding wartime
saga by introducing a much-needed touch
of espionage, but the movie was still about
Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton
killing as many Germans as stylishly as
possible in two hours and 38 minutes.
David Cameron has admitted to watching
it 17 times.
Real war is not like that, of course. War
is mostly very boring, and confusing for
everyone involved, morally as well as prac-
tically. For much of the time on the battle-
field nothing happens at all, punctuated by
unpredictable moments of wild exhilara-
tion and raw terror. Some individuals
respond gallantly to the exigencies of
war; some do not. War can make heroes,
but also monsters.
In the decades since those postwar
moral fables, the genre has evolved enor-
mously, as a backdrop to the entire range
of human emotions: love, loyalty, mad-
ness, hope, despair and the blackest sort of
comedy. The postwar film was relentlessly
chirpy, to be sure, but never remotely
comic. Much of war is ridiculous.
War films have become psychologically
realistic. Some of the great modern war
films are not about battlefield heroics but
the conflict inside an individual’s mind: the
choices that ordinary people are forced to
make in circumstances not of their choos-
ing and beyond their control.
A turning point came in 1979 with
Apocalypse Now, an extraordinary depic-
tion of the breathless excitement and
degrading mental impact of conflict. It
starkly portrays the horrors of war, yet it
remains ambiguous: US Marines fighting
in Iraq in 1990 watched the Ride of the Val-
kyries sequence to raise adrenaline levels
SEE-SAW FILMS/WARNER BROS UKcover story
What I’ve learnt from war movies
As the film of his spy
story hits cinemas,
Ben Macintyre looks
at the battle tales that
most inspired him
before going into battle. Martin Sheen had
a heart attack during the filming.
Francis Ford Coppola claimed the film
was not so much opposed to war as an
assault on official mendacity. “That a cul-
ture can lie about what’s really going on in
warfare, that people are being brutalised,
tortured, maimed and killed, and some-
how present this as moral, is what horrifies
me, and perpetuates the possibility of war.”
In a different theatre of conflict, the de-
humanising impact of war was chillingly
depicted in Elem Klimov’s 1985 master-
piece Come and See, showing the transfor-
mation of a young Belarusian boy into a
resistance fighter under the traumatising
horror of Nazi invasion and mass murder.
It is practically a psychological guidebook
to what is happening in Ukraine today.
Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot (1981)
realistically portrayed the boredom, fug,
tension and horror of a German U-boat in
action during the Battle of the Atlantic.
You can smell the sweat and oil.
Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line
(1998) is another astonishing achieve-
ment, a dream of war an a ferocious anti-
war polemic depicting the Guadalcanal
campaign, fought in the Solomon Islands
in 1942-43; amid a stunning landscape,
with trademark waving grass, the death
and destruction appear as obscenities. The
“thin red line” is Rudyard Kipling’s, but theinvisible line in this film lies between
sanity and lunacy, in a place of eternal
beauty wrecked, temporarily, by man.
But it was Steven Spielberg’s Saving Pri-
vate Ryan (1998) that reinvented the war
film for the modern age. The first half-
hour of the assault on Omaha Beach still
shocks: all is deafening confusion, churned
blood and sand, and orders barked to
corpses. Much of the rest of the film is
sentimental and contrived, yet it asks an
insistent question: where does redemptive
decency lie in the hell of war?
In Operation Mincemeat, based on my
book of the same name, the director John
Madden has created another kind of war
film. Jeopardy and tension run throughevery scene, yet there is barely a gun in the
entire movie. This is the story of the
hidden spy war, a battle of deception and
imagination in which the protagonists
try to convince the Germans that black
is white and white is black by sending
into war a combatant different from any
deployed before: he is already dead.Saving Private Ryan
asks: where does
redemptive decency
lie in the hell of war?
This bizarre wartime operation, so
stupid it was positively brilliant, was first
adapted for the screen in 1956 as The Man
Who Never Was, starring Clifton Webb as
Ewen Montagu, the mastermind behind
the plan. That was a wonderful film, but
firmly in the patriotic postwar mould. It
also planted a deception of its own, by
covering up the fact that the body used in
the operation had been seized, illegally, by
British intelligence officers. That set off a
guessing game over the man’s identity that
still continues today, even though the body
was proved to be that of Glyndwr Michael,
a Welsh vagrant, in 1996.
The decision to declassify MI5’s wartime
intelligence files made both the book and
film possible, and with a war of smoke and
mirrors taking place in Europe once again,
the subject could hardly be more timely.
Operation Mincemeat not only tells the
full story for the first time but does so with
a rich sense of the absurdity that the real
operators of Mincemeat were fully aware
of, and played up to. “We’re going to play a
humiliating trick on Hitler,” declares Colin
Firth as Montagu.
This is a Second World War film for our
own time: espionage, conflict, adventure,
suspense, love story and black comedy all
rolled into one. It is the war as never seen
before, for one simple reason: it was secret,
until now.dead secret Matthew
Macfadyen, Colin Firth
and Johnny Flynn in
Operation MincemeatSEE-SAW FILMS/WARNER BROS UKOperation Mincemeat is
in cinemas from Friday