Tag Archives: D-Day

Two films

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Here are some first impressions of two films I’ve been to the cinema to see over the last couple of weeks.

‘Pressure’ was directed by Anthony Maras and co-written with David Haig, the author of the 2014 stage play on which the film is based. It’s a vehicle for a fine central performance by Andrew Scott as the scratchy but brilliant British meteorologist, group captain James Stagg, who had to argue his case vehemently to overrule his American counterpart’s insistence, on the basis of a wrong-headed trust in historical data, that the D-Day invasion scheduled for June 5, 1944 should go ahead. Stagg, basing his prediction on scientifically up-to-date meteorological data, finally wins the agreement of supreme commander Eisenhower – the predicted storm duly shows up on cue, and Stagg is vindicated.

It’s a bit slow at times, and some of the invented material not based on historical fact is a little contrived, but the screenplay writer, director and cast did a fine job in making what must have been a very static and technical central premise – which scientist to believe and trust – sustain the whole film. Especially as we all know from the start what happened in history, so creating the dramatic tension that’s so apparent in this film was a fine achievement.

‘Sense and Sensibility’ is a brave but flawed attempt by British director Georgia Oakley to bring Jane Austen’s first published novel (1811) to life on the screen. Many of us will recall director Ang Lee’s fine film version of 1995, with a radiant 19-year-old Kate Winslet as Marianne Dashwood, the impulsive, passionate and emotional representative of ‘sensibility’, and Emma Thompson, who wrote the screenplay, as older sister Elinor, the more restrained, rational embodiment of ‘sense’.

Hugh Grant played Elinor’s love interest, Edward Ferrars, while Alan Rickman was Colonel Brandon, whose constancy, moral probity and decency are rewarded when Marianne learns to rein in her impetuous, romantic infatuation with the philandering gold-digger, Willoughby, and recognise the more sober decency and probity of Brandon as a better bet for a happy marriage.

It’s a complicated plot, revolving around the usual urgency for a young woman to find a wealthy husband (I’ll resist the temptation to quote the famous opening of Pride and Prejudice, a novel that sets the scene more ironically and subtly than in this less mature and nuanced Austen effort). Love might conquer all, but economic security was the more ‘sensible’ route. Elinor’s outwardly more rational, restrained, self-denying character perhaps represents Jane Austen’s moral touchstone in the novel; I read it so long ago I don’t remember it well enough to assert this definitively.

What this new film version does convey is that the sisters can benefit from learning something from each other: Marianne’s immature, exuberantly emotional approach to life is endearing but potentially leads to catastrophic misjudgements, and an element of more temperate rationality, she discovers, leads to a less precarious outcome. It’s worth remembering that in the novel she’s only 16. Brandon is 35 – a sort of prototype Mr Knightley.

Elinor, for her part, comes to realise that repressing her own powerful feelings and sacrificing her hopes for happiness to a higher moral purpose doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness – though I suppose Jane Austen ultimately tips the balance in her favour by engineering plot devices to make Edward conveniently available again, freed from his honourable but loveless engagement to another heartless gold-digger, Lucy.

When Edward’s decency leads him to refuse to break off this arranged match, his mother ruthlessly strips him of his inheritance, making his newly enriched brother a more desirable match for Lucy.

That rather clumsy summary probably conveys some of the overly apparent authorial (by Jane Austen I mean) inclination to favour Elinor as the guiding spirit of the novel. What Oakley’s film failed to achieve, as Mrs TD and I found, was to make Marianne’s character appealing while she overdid the teenage emotional stuff. Instead she tends to come across as irritatingly self-absorbed and foolish. We just didn’t care what happened to her (and to a lesser extent to Elinor) – we left the cinema half an hour before the 132-minute film ended.

There were some touching moments depicting the love of the sisters for each other, but Marianne’s self-destructive impetuosity led to some serious overacting by Esme Creed-Miles. Even allowing for her character’s youth, she failed to engage our sympathy. Daisy Edgar-Jones does a better job as Elinor, but she still seemed to us to be a bit colourless.

It all looked wonderful, with some atmospheric indoor evening candlelit sequences, but many scenes just went on too long, and slowed the pace to the point of tedium. The actors playing Edward, Willoughby and Brandon came across as too one-dimensional and vapid – especially stiff and seemingly bored Brandon.

On a more positive note, the film succeeds in portraying the dismal necessity for young women at that time, and to a lesser extent young men not in possession of a large fortune (or inheritance), to balance the prospect of a happy, loving marriage against the reality of needing to secure a suitably wealthy spouse.

A soldier’s life: Alexander Baron, From the City, From the Plough

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Alexander Baron (1917-1999), From the City, From the Plough, Imperial War Museum Classics, 2019; first published 1948 (library copy)

The soldier lives in a drama: he never has the time to perceive it. His life, even in battle, is a succession of chores.

 The title From the City, From the Plough refers to the soldiers recruited to the newly-replenished (fictional) Fifth Battalion Wessex Infantry during WWII: it’s made up mostly of cockney wide-boys and rural south-western ‘bumpkins’ – farmboys bemused by the military life, and longing for the familiar routines of land work.

The novel follows the progress of the unit from tedious, repetitive training in the south of England through the D-Day landings and subsequent campaign fighting the German forces across France. It’s a sort of collage narrative structure, an impressionistic sequence of scenes in which soldiers grumble and hustle through manoeuvres, pointless route marches and frequent unexplained changes of location.

There are many memorable incidents or vignettes. A tough, swaggering and battle-hardened Irishman challenges his sergeant’s authority and gets humiliated. A young lad has his first sexual encounter and is whisked away by the army as he’s on the point of marrying his sweetheart. The CO grieves for his missing-in-action son, and this clouds his judgement and influences his behaviour towards his men.

The last third of the novel reminded me of Saving Private Ryan; it depicts the noise, dirt, confusion, exhaustion and numbing terror of battle as the unit storms the Normandy beaches and advances through northern France with painful slowness.

They suffer fearful losses trying to take a well-fortified hilltop ridge. Many of the colourful characters we’d met earlier in the narrative are killed in action. Those who survive can’t grieve – they couldn’t go on if they felt too much. Nevertheless there’s a heart-breaking moment when a young recruit, blinded during the beach landings and sent back to England for medical treatment, sends his comrades a gift of cigarettes; the fact that he was feeling sorry for them touches them deeply.

It’s a powerful, fierce account. The blurb praises it highly, likening it to WWI classics like All Quiet on the Western Front. It probably justifies that comparison, though it clearly reflects a more modern sensibility in the style and approach to a war novel. The cynical, weary response of the unit’s second in command when told by his brigadier that his exhausted, decimated battalion had to go back into action against the strategically advantaged ridge-top German troops – purely as a diversionary tactic – sums up the unromantic, emotionally numbed heroism mixed with stoicism of these ordinary men sacrificed to the relentless military machine. The stark realism of the novel doubtless stems from Baron’s own experience as a soldier who served in the Sicilian, Italian and Normandy campaigns during the war.