Dad's Army

During the nine years ‘Dad’s Army’ played to hugely appreciative audiences on the BBC, the Nazi threat never got closer to the Home Guard platoon of Walmington-on-Sea than a few cartoon arrows in the opening credit sequence. This was as it should be: the show, at its best, satirises Englishness, cowardice, incompetence and the class system and finds them to be almost incestuously interrelated. The best British sitcoms have always been studies in failure and microcosms of parochialism – ‘Steptoe and Son’, ‘Porridge’, ‘Open All Hours’, ‘Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads’ – and ‘Dad’s Army’ upped the ante with its wartime setting that took a big shiny pin to the translucent balloon of jingoism.

Or, to put it another way, the last thing ‘Dad’s Army’ needed was the Hun. However, 30-minute sitcoms can happily run for season after season and delight their fans simply by having their ensemble casts recreate in comically specific ways to any given situation (that’s why they’re called sitcoms, after all) while a 100-minute film – at least a mainstream one with well known actors in the lead roles and a chunk of studio money behind it – must necessarily have a plot. And thus it is that ‘Dad’s Army’ – the franchise’s first big screen outing since the original cast were assembled for a dreadful mishmash of a motion picture in 1971 – almost inevitably sees them tangle with invading German forces.

The 1971 film, directed by Norman Cohen and mercilessly buggered about by Columbia Studios (who saw fit to junk whole tranches of series creators Jimmy Perry and David Croft’s screenplay), is essentially an origin story – dear God, a ‘Dad’s Army’ origin story! – culminating in the bumbling platoon finally cohering as a unit to rescue hostages taken by the crew of a downed German aircraft. The new film, directed rather more ably by Oliver Parker, has the common decency to raise the stakes and throw in secret codes, D-Day plans and a glamorous double-agent. But does this make it any more successful?

If transferring small-screen situation comedy to a narrative-driven big-screen dynamic isn’t a difficult enough proposition as it is, doing so without the comfort blanket of the original cast presents a whole other problem. ‘Steptoe and Son’ (1972) and ‘Steptoe and Son Ride Again’ (1973) might be woefully inept attempts at film-making, but at least that’s Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H. Corbett up there on screen verbally gouging each other. The biggest pitfall ‘Dad’s Army’ faced from the outset was the potential embarrassment factor of watching a septet of (mostly) A-list movie icons doing impersonations of TV actors.

And, by God, is the cast of ‘Dad’s Army’ its selling point! Here we have Toby Jones as Captain Mainwaring, Bill Nighy as Sergeant Wilson, Tom Courtenay as Lance Corporal Jones. Michael Gambon as Private Godfrey, Blake Harrison as Private Pike, Daniel Mays as Private Walker and Bill Paterson as Private Frazier. By and large, all filter their performances through the audience’s memories of the original actor while bringing enough to the role to reinvigorate it if not (purposefully, one feels) reclaim it. Only Jones seems on a mission to make Mainwaring his own, while Harrison and Mays happily play to the audience’s expectations. Nighy, Paterson, Gambon and – especially – Courtenay fare the best.

It’s the ladies of the cast who really excel, though. Catherine Zeta Jones, as vampish journalist Rose Winter, has more fun than I’ve seen her exhibit in a performance since she cut lose with ‘Hit Me with Your Best Shot’ in ‘Rock of Ages’. Of course, Zeta Jones could play the vamp in her sleep, and the script, by Hamish McColl, doesn’t require her to do much more than smoulder and purr seductive double entendres, but she goes for broke and emerges as one of the film’s greatest assets. Its other assets are: Sarah Lancashire as Mrs Pike, Alison Steadman as Mrs Fox, Annette Crosby and Julia Foster* as Godfrey’s sisters Cissy and Dolly (their double act is priceless), Emily Atack as Walker’s dollybird girlfriend Daphne, Holli Dempsey as Pike’s long-suffering girlfriend Vera and Felicity Montagu as Mrs Mainwaring.

Yes, you read that correctly. Never seen in the show and avoided with almost tactical precision by Arthur Lowe’s Mainwaring, Mrs M not only gets a belated appearance, but leads a corresponding platoon of Walmington’s womenfolk in the climactic action scene. I use the term “action scene” purely as a generic description. It’s actually as geriatric as any of the main cast.

The shoot-out finale is as good an example as anything in the film of how uneven the humour is. There are moments of quiet snobbish one-upmanship, mainly between Mainwaring and Wilson, but also (taking the chain of command up a notch) between actual officer Colonel Theakes (Mark Gatiss) and Mainwaring; the film scores its most effective points during these moments. Slapstick predominates elsewhere, and there’s an extended sequence where various members of the cast dive behind sofas and snag their trousers climbing out of windows, that makes your average Brian Rix farce look like Strindberg. This is offset against the borderline surrealism of inflatable tanks coming loose from their mooring and floating off (one ends up impaled on a church spire, leaking air in a flatulent manner as Mainwaring tries to make a heartfelt speech). There’s also a sequence, early on, where the aforementioned cartoon arrows of the opening credits are recreated as blocks on a map in a German war room; a Nazi officer sniggers that any thoughts of England having the Third Reich on the run are misguided, and asks rhetorically “Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Churchill?” For all I know, it might have been funny as hell on paper; I was a little bit sick in my mouth watching it on screen.

For all its problems, though, I’ll admit to enjoying ‘Dad’s Army’ a lot more than I had any right to. Maybe the tradition of British sitcoms utterly failing as feature-length expositions – the first ‘Dad’s Army’ film, both ‘Steptoe’ attempts, ‘Porridge’, ‘The Likely Lads’ – justifies a certain creative accountancy as regards my usual critical standards. Maybe it’s because it was a cold, wet and miserable evening and a few good belly laughs in a warm cinema auditorium were worth an hour and three quarters of my time. Maybe it’s because Catherine Zeta Jones looks good in a burgundy two-piece and a pillbox hat. Or maybe it’s the unalloyed delight I took in the cameo by Ian Lavender (Private Pike in the original), a piece of reverse-casting that works a treat.



*Meta moment: Julia Foster starred alongside Tom Courtenay 54 years ago in ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’; there’s a lost episode of ‘Dad’s Army’ called ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Walker’.

King & Country

'King & Country' - the very title just the first of several bitter pills the viewer is forced to swallow - was the third of Dirk Bogarde's five collaborations with Joseph Losey. For me, it's second only to 'The Servant'. Powerful, unflinching and bludgeoningly grim, it's no surprise it did sod all at the box office. Forty-five years on, its impact is undiminished. This is partly because of Losey's low-key and brutally realistic portrayal of trench warfare, and partly because of a cluster of great performances. It says something that this is one of the rare titles on the Bogarde filmography that he doesn't steal from his co-stars, wittily and elegantly, every time he's onscreen.

Briefly, and with SPOILERS ALL OVER THE PLACE, 'King & Country' concerns the trial and execution (told you it was a spoiler fest!) of Private Hamp (Tom Courtenay), charged with desertion after he leaves his post and goes walking away from the British lines. He was, he explains, trying to walk home. Assigned to defend him, educated officer Captain Hargreaves (Bogarde) finds himself unexpectedly moved by the working class, simple-minded Hamp.

Convinced that Hamp - a volunteer (on account of his wife and mother pressuring him) who has been in the trenches a soul-destroying three years - acted while the balance of his mind was disturbed, and with sympathetic testimony from Hamp's superior Lieutenant Webb (Barry Foster), Hargreaves makes his case. But he's up against by-the-book prosecutor Captain Midgley (James Villiers) and a Colonel (Peter Copley) who's already made his mind up about Hamp. To make matters worse, Captain O'Sullivan (Leo McKern), the orderly Hargreaves hopes will corraborate the medical evidence, refuses to play ball, scorning the suggestion of nervous breakdown or mental illness and asserting that Hamp was basically yellow.

Bogarde's verbal duel with McKern in this scene is intense. Bogarde - at the height of his fame in the early 60s - was wilfully casting off the matinee idol image and engaging with progressively more challenging material. Gone the dashing heroism of 'Ill Met by Moonlight' and 'They Who Dare'; in its place a harried, world-weary characterisation that points the way towards the controversial roles of his later career - a shift already heralded by his slithery turn as Barrett in 'The Servant', made a year before 'King & Country'. McKern is also on top form, Foster does easily the best work of his career, and Courtenay disappears into his character so completely it's as if he were a chameleon.

'King & Country' opens with a series of extended close-ups of a war memorial - a huge, joyless sculpture of a soldier lying lifelessly on a plinth - and ends with an archive photo of a dead horse adrift in the shell-scarred mud of no-man's-land. Losey incorporates other archive photos at pertinent moments. When Hamp speaks of trying to walk home, Losey cuts to a picture of a featureless terraced house that could be on any street in any working class town anywhere in England, a woman sweeping up outside. The image is anonymous to the point of bland. Then the poster on the wall leaps out at you: 'WOMEN OF BRITAIN SAY GO!', a reminder like a slap in the face of the spousal and matriarchal motivation behind Hamp's enlistment.

Losey's black-and-white camerawork conjures life in the trenches as a symphony of mud. The incessant crump of shells - sometimes way off in the distance, sometimes dangerously close - is a constant. The rain is ceaseless. Shattered emplacements, fetid puddles and the agony of waiting. 'King & Country' is a war film without scenes of battle. The Germans are never shown. They don't need to be. The trenches themselves, the conditions in which men are forced to live (and die) - these are the enemy. What men become when war comes to define them, what they are reduced to by the stubbornness and arrogance of their leaders - these are the enemy. There are no Germans in 'King & Country'. They're not needed. The British are bastards enough.

Hamp's fellow tommies stage a mock trial with a rat standing in for him. Cruel? Definitely, but nothing compared to their behaviour on the eve of Hamp's date with the firing squad. They crowd into his cell, ply him with rotgut. Thoroughly drunk, he is barely aware of what is happening as they blindfold him and enact a mock execution. The whole thing degenerates into a grotesque approximation of blind-man's-bluff, Hamp - finally snapping - blundering around arms akimbo, yelling "Where are you, you bastards?" just as the padre enters. It's a horrible scene to watch and as damning an indictment of man's inhumanity to man and the pointlessness of war as anything in 'All Quiet on the Western Front' or 'Paths of Glory'.

Passing judgement on Hamp, the Colonel dictates his report for onward transmission to his superiors. He omits everything Hargreaves introduced into evidence, adding "Don't make any mention of mental illness. They don't need to know about that kind of thing at HQ." When Hamp is taken out to be shot, it is under the watchful gaze of O'Sullivan; his executioners are the men who made a mockery of his last night alive, and Webb is forced to give the order to fire. When the fusilade fails to kill him outright, it is left to Hargreaves to adminster the coup de grace.

Told you there were spoilers. Told you it was grim.

HELLRAISERS: The Night of the Generals

An all-star production of the over-produced, over-publicized, over-long archetypally ’60s variety, ‘The Night of the Generals’ blends murder mystery, conspiracy thriller and war movie tropes into a heady cocktail of WTF. We’re talking two and a half hours of hopelessly confused narrative digressions and howlingly incongruous scenes.

Occupied Poland, 1942: Major Grau (Omar Sharif) attends the scene after a prostitute is murdered in a dingy tenement building. Dressed in an ankle length greatcoat and black boots, he questions a witness who is hesitant about co-operating. And with good reason. “He was an officer,” the witness mumbles fearfully. Grau asks how he knows. “He was wearing trousers like yours.” Trousers, that is with a red stripe. The kind of natty apparel you don’t get to strut around in till they make you a general.

Like me reiterate at this point that Grau is dressed throughout this scene in a long greatcoat and high boots. His trousers are obscured. The man could be wearing a freakin’ kilt! Also, he’s played by Omar Sharif, whose swarthy Egyptian looks, while toned down with a dusting of white powder, remain more swarthy and ethnic than you’d credit anyone with in a military hierarchy based on Aryan purity.

The incongruities continue. The Polish hooker is revealed as a German agent, only for this tantalising subplot to disappear. A Corporal who’s a talented pianist complains at having to play Chopin when Wagner is his composer of choice. (Aside from the orchestral piece ‘Siegfried-Idyll’, Wagner’s entire output was opera or lieder; he wrote no piano music.)

Then there’s the lurching flash forwards to the mid-Sixties as Interpol agent Inspector Morand (Philippe Noiret) – a man whose connection to the events of the war isn’t established until halfway through the film – plods around tracking down the surviving protagonists and asking them blandly procedural questions in a manner that makes ‘Midsomer Murders’ look like James Ellroy on crack.

Oh yeah, and no sooner has the mise-en-scene returned the audience to Poland in 1942 than it’s suddenly Paris in 1944 and everyone’s been transferred and have co-incidentally met up again. Or maybe it’s not such a co-incidence, since ‘The Night of the Generals’ takes another lurch at this point and the 20th July plot (you know, the old bomb-in-a-briefcase under the table, let’s kill der Führer routine) is in full swing and all but one of the potential murderers are involved in the conspiracy.

But wait, you protest. The 20th July plot took place back in Germany. What’s all this malarkey about the conspirators being in Paris? Well, they’re waiting for word that the craply-moustachioed one is toast, whereupon they can establish a new government and curtail the war and … oh, what the hell? The point is, the conspirators have to keep the non-conspirator out of the way for a couple of days, and some fucking genius involved in the production of this Euro-pudding decided that huge amounts of tension and suspense could be wrung from one of the major characters being driven around Paris interminably and having a Stendhal Syndrome kind of turn when he goes to view some allegedly decadent art (you know, the kind that features naked women). This character being a hardcore Hitlerite and having a tendency to viciousness, could he be the murderer?

There is absolutely no mystery to ‘The Night of the Generals’. No suspense. It is by turns ludicrous, clichéd, overacted and pedestrian in its direction. It boasts a powerhouse cast – Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, Tom Courtenay, Donald Pleasance, Charles Gray (two Blofelds in the same movie! playing Nazis!), Christopher Plummer, Coral Browne, Philippe Noiret, John Gregson and Nigel Stock – all of whom are miscast, underused or saddled with appalling dialogue: Noiret’s is exposition-heavy and, although at ease in English-language productions elsewhere in his filmography, he seems distinctly unconfident here; and pity Pleasance, desperately trying to breathe life into a clunker of a line like “am I to assume that if Stage 1 meets with resistance we will go to Stage 2 and possibly Stage 3” (I can only quote Paula’s monumentally derisive comment: “Wow, so there isn’t a Stage 1a, 1b or 1z, then?”)

All, I should say, except Peter O’Toole. He takes hygiene-obsessed General Tanz (ostensibly the most one-note character in the whole piece) and imbues him with the insouciance of T.E. Lawrence (or at least the version of Lawrence essayed by O’Toole in David Lean’s epic), the provocative and oddly threatening dandyism of Dirk Bogarde in ‘The Singer Not the Song’, and an icily ironic remove that pre-supposes Anthony Hopkins’s portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in ‘The Silence of the Lambs’.

Armed with cap, boots, swagger stick, leather gloves and a piercing thousand-yard stare, O’Toole stalks through the film, disdaining Anatole Litvak’s somnolent direction, rolling the deficiencies of the script around in his mouth before spitting them out, and making mediocre material memorable simply by treating it, imperiously, with the contempt it deserves.