DUNKIRK
Director: Christopher Nolan
Cert 12A, 146 minutes
Something wonderful happened between 27 May and 4 June 1940.
The British and French armies had been overwhelmed by the Nazi war machine. While expecting to be able to evacuate perhaps 30 – 40,000 troops from France, in fact some 338,000 were eventually rescued from the beaches of Dunkirk.
One soldier’s escape
This film is a very realistic pastiche of air, sea and beach action and what it would have been like to be there, as it follows the story of one British soldier’s escape. Kenneth Branagh plays a naval officer organising the embarkation of troops and wounded from the mole at Dunkirk – a role for which he seems perfect conjuring up memories of many a 1950s war film. Meanwhile, the excellent Mark Rylance is among the ‘little ships’,s bravely sailing his motor vessel The Moonstone from Dorset with his son and another youngster, to do what he can to get to the French coast and pick up men. A gamut of experiences are unfolded, from fear to brutality to cool common sense and self-sacrifice under fire. If there is a message to the film, it would be about Britain and British values being worth fighting for. But of course those values are somewhat different now from what they were in 1940.
Day of prayer
And therein lies the distortion of the movie. It is a very secular telling of the story which offers no real explanation of the ‘miracle.’ In actual fact the whole operation was preceded by a National Day of Prayer on Sunday 26 May. The commentary on an old Pathé News clip from the event says ‘we still believe in divine guidance, in the laws of Christianity. May we find inspiration and faith from this solemn day.’
Interestingly, the director has said that the weather and the sea were far worse while filming the movie than during the crucial week in 1940. Many at the time saw this as God’s hand.
Also, it has always been a mystery as to why Hitler halted his tanks for three days instead of driving the allies to annihilation. This is dismissed in the film in terms of the Führer simply wanting to save his panzas while the Luftwaffe finished off. But in his seminal History of the Second World War, Sir Basil Liddell Hart is unconvinced by this. Rather he produces evidence from those in the German high command that, by allowing the British to escape Hitler, was hoping that this would make a peace deal with Britain easier to reach. Whatever the true explanation, Liddell Hart writes: ‘ His action preserved the British forces when nothing else could have done… [thus producing] his own ultimate downfall… five years later. Acutely aware of the narrowness of the escape, but ignorant of its cause, the British people spoke of “the miracle of Dunkirk”’.
