Dunkirk Revisited Again

Even with the strict wartime censorship it was obvious to everyone that the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk in May and June 1940 was a disaster. Winston Churchill—who had been Prime Minister for only a few weeks—may have celebrated the deliverance, but was careful to include in his speech to the House of Commons the warning that “wars are not won by evacuations”.

The legend of Dunkirk began early. Late in 1940 Paul Gallico’s story The Snow Goose was published in the Saturday Evening Post. It told of Philip, a crippled artist who comes to love a young girl after she brings him a wounded snow goose that he nurses back to life. The bird returns regularly to its saviour and is with the artist when he takes his boat to Dunkirk and saves some hundreds of soldiers. In the best tradition of romantic fiction the artist lives in a lighthouse and is a skilled sailor.

The Snow Goose is outrageously sentimental. Philip dies heroically, leaving only a portrait and soldiers’ stories about his courage and the bird that stayed with him until the end. It was enormously popular. I recall hearing a moving radio adaptation as a boy in which the artist was played by Herbert Marshall. There was also a famous reading of the story broadcast in 1944 by Ronald Colman. Both men had served in the Great War (Marshall lost a leg), had magnificent voices and were always truthful, if at times romantic actors.

The story, only slightly expanded, became a best-selling novella and is arguably the beginning of the Dunkirk legend of ordinary men rescuing their army; although in fairness to Gallico, in the book Philip is ferrying the men to the transports. Even in Christopher Nolan’s 2017 Dunkirk, which emphasises the vital role of the Royal Navy, there is a touch of this same legend when Kenneth Branagh’s Commander Bolton puts his binoculars to his eyes and the “little ships” come into focus. He is asked, “What do you see?” “Home!” he replies. My friend, the cinematographer David Brill, observed that there are not quite enough boats in the wide shot; but it is a great moment nevertheless.

The first portrayal on film of Dunkirk as a civilian triumph was by Hollywood in Mrs Miniver (1942). The screen is filled with increasing numbers of small craft, the sound of their engines rising to a dull roar. Their orders to take their boats across the channel are from a disembodied voice coming from a ship. The sequence may have been staged with models on the MGM lake—the lake later used for the Esther Williams water ballets directed by Busby Berkeley—but it was very powerful; a symbol of Britain reaching out to reclaim its own. A report from the British Navy corrected the film’s inaccuracies, but it got nowhere at the time; the film, directed by the great William Wyler, was too useful to the British-American alliance, and was very effective propaganda much admired by President Roosevelt. A more reluctant admirer was Dr Goebbels: “It makes you want to go out and kill Germans. Why can’t we make German films that will make audiences want to go out and kill the British and Americans?”

Mrs Miniver’s Dunkirk sequence is a companion to one of J.B. Priestley’s most famous radio postscripts. These were devised by the BBC as a response to the broadcasts by William Joyce from Germany that were sometimes very acute. It was decided to counter them with late-night postscripts, commentaries delivered by well-known personalities such as Robert Donat, Leslie Howard and Priestley. After Dunkirk, Priestley gave one of his best-remembered broadcasts in which he described the paddle-steamers and ferries that went to Dunkirk, evoking memories of summer holidays and very British picnics. The sound survives and it is clear that the pleasure boats represent the British people. It is now a people’s war. This too was the final message of Mrs Miniver. The film’s rousing last speech by the local vicar, urging his congregation to fight this new people’s war, and delivered in the film in the bombed church with Spitfires flying in a V formation overhead, accompanied by “Land of Hope and Glory” on the soundtrack, was written by the British actor Henry Wilcoxon, who played the vicar, and William Wyler. The film’s “Britishness” may have been enhanced by uncredited contributions from the British playwright and screenwriter R.C. Sherriff.

The first feature film to portray the Dunkirk story itself was released in 1958. Directed by Leslie Norman, Dunkirk was one the last of the Ealing films and came at the end of a series of unpretentious war films made by the men and women who had experienced the war. It was based on The Big Pick-Up, a novel by Elleston Trevor, plus what appears to have been a factual account, Keep the Memory Green, by Lieutenant-Colonel Ewan Hunter (also credited as an adviser to the film) and Major J.S. Bradford. (I have not been able to locate a copy of this book.) The adaptation was by David Divine and the veteran screenwriter W.P. Lipscomb.

The film cuts between two narratives. One comes from the novel. It is a journey through the Dunkirk experience by a platoon of five soldiers whose officer has been killed and who are now led by a corporal. Trevor, who had been in the RAF—the subject of his first novel—decided to advertise in the press for Dunkirk veterans to give him background. He seems to have evoked a good response. Almost certainly the characters in the book reflect real people. They are well drawn, and this has carried through into the screenplay. John Mills portrays the main protagonist, Corporal Binns. The growth in his authority as he leads his men to Dunkirk is conveyed with the kind of subtlety and sensitivity that allow the character to grow before the viewers’ eyes. We often forget the late Sir John Mills’s gallery of working-class characters that extend back to the 1930s and how well he played them. The humanity of this portrayal makes it one of his best.

The second strand of the narrative is dominated by two civilians who take their boats across the Channel to rescue the troops—Bernard Lee’s Charles Foreman and Richard Attenborough’s John Holden. Foreman is a disillusioned reporter disgusted by the “phoney war”. The film, even in 1958, is unusual in giving vent to this bitterness. During the war such expressions were censored; or at least the government tried to discourage them. There was a bureaucratic campaign against Powell and Pressburger’s film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). The campaign failed, but the bitterness in the wider community about the earlier bungling, not to mention appeasement, was real and can be found in the Mass Observation reports at the time.

Although not explicit, these attitudes are implied in the portrayal of Mr Foreman and all he stands for, as he battles with an information policy more concerned with covering up disaster than allowing people to come to terms with bad news. The scenes at the Ministry of Information are very fine, with Anthony Nicholls smoothly evasive and untrustworthy as a military spokesman.

The character of Holden could easily have degenerated into a stereotype—the weak man with an overly dependent wife and a new baby, in a reserved occupation benefiting from the phoney war as a buckle manufacturer. But Attenborough, helped by some deft touches from the writers, makes it all work. He was one of the finest screen actors of his generation, and like Mills gives a beautifully understated performance portraying the character’s developing sense of responsibility. Clearly for Leslie Norman the characters mattered. As he said himself, he was a council boy who rose to be a major and thought Dunkirk was a very gallant effort.

Ealing films had been influenced by the documentary movement—real locations whenever possible, stories about believable middle or working-class characters. Norman was not able to use Dunkirk or the original beaches, so these were recreated reasonably accurately in Britain. They did make skilful use of actuality footage. In one shot there is even a paddle-steamer. The film uses only a few images of the deadly Stukas, concentrating on the sound and the effect on the ground.

No doubt Leslie Norman would have given anything for some of the German footage that has surfaced recently. A compilation film of the Stuka attacks on Dunkirk from the German perspective has been uploaded on YouTube and is very good. Much of this material appears in the German propaganda film Stukas (1941) directed by Karl Ritter. One terrifying shot, at least for German viewers, shows what seems to be a squadron of Spitfires peeling off and going into action. (It could have been more—at one stage of the air battle Air Chief Marshal Dowding was sending planes to France four squadrons at a time.) For anyone brought up on tales of the Battle of Britain the sequence is inspiring and is superbly photographed by the German combat photographer.

Both films emphasise the role of the RAF in the evacuation, a subject of bitter dispute at the time. Not many British planes had been seen by those on the beaches, as the dogfights were fought at such high altitude they were invisible from the ground. Moreover, the bulk of the RAF was concentrating on the airfields being used by the Germans further inland. In Norman’s film this is explained in a conversation on the beach with a pilot who has been shot down.

Dunkirk also dramatises Vice-Admiral Ramsay’s role in planning the evacuation, and the commander of the BEF, General Gort’s determination to act independently. They are well played by Nicholas Hannen as Ramsay and Cyril Raymond as Gort, but tactfully the moment when Gort, without reference to either the British government or the allies, decided to get his army back to England and abandon the French is omitted. Gort made many mistakes in France but this was his great moment and it should have been in the film; although what it might have done to Anglo-French relations at the time one shudders to think.

The film’s budget was quite small but Norman managed some exciting action scenes on his British locations. Above all he had lots of boats that he sailed triumphantly down almost every waterway in Britain with recognisable landmarks. On the soundtrack is Malcolm Arnold’s Elgar-like score. The film makes the Royal Navy’s part absolutely clear but the legend is alive and well. Shot in an unostentatious style in black-and-white, the 1958 Dunkirk gets the people and the history right.

The legend and the history are also in good hands in Christopher Nolan’s 2017 Dunkirk. His main protagonist is the rock-like civilian Mr Dawson, played splendidly by Mark Rylance. He and his son beat the Navy to their boat and head to France. We get more boats later but the civilian story is well established from the outset, and of course the Navy is in the very best of hands when Kenneth Branagh’s Commander Bolton appears. This version concentrates on the experience. There are no strategic debates, just the suspense of who will or won’t survive and a little exposition.

Nolan filmed in Dunkirk and on the beaches using Imax 65mm and large format 65mm film. The aim is to surround the viewer with the experience visually and aurally. The idea of creating the sound of real battle goes back a long way. Chester Wilmot, advised by Damien Parer, recreated the authentic sound of Japanese machine guns for the timbered-knoll sequence in Sons of the Anzacs (1944). William Wellman took his cast and crew into the snow and recorded the sound of real rifles for Battleground (1949). Leslie Norman seems to have done much the same in Dunkirk, although there was no snow! In 1998 Steven Spielberg used the full array of modern sound technology to create a soundscape for Saving Private Ryan that surviving participants found disturbingly authentic. Nolan does much the same but adds a pulse to screw up the tension and a powerful musical score by Hans Zimmer. Some veterans of Dunkirk have found the movie louder than the real thing. However, they added that the film was true to the experience as they recalled it.

Dunkirk cuts between three interconnected narratives, each with a differing perspective and time frame. On land the action covers one week. At the outset we follow Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), a young soldier who first comes under fire in the streets of Dunkirk then tries to get onto a ship on the beach. Although the film doesn’t use the experiences of any particular soldier or group of soldiers, his adventures are similar to incidents that did occur, while Branagh’s Commander Bolton represents the actions of a number of naval commanders involved in the evacuation. Exposition dialogue explaining the situation is perhaps a little too abbreviated. Having Bolton at the end stay behind to embark the French rearguard could have been even more effective than it was but we needed to know they had been holding the line so the British could escape.

At sea the film covers the events of a single day, with Mr Dawson rescuing a downed Spitfire pilot, taking on troops from a sinking ship, and duelling with German fighter bombers.

In the air Nolan is arguably the first to dramatise the dogfights over Dunkirk where the Spitfires had only minutes of flying time before they ran out of fuel. It is well done with authentic machines and the action deftly woven into the main narrative. Even the splendidly executed landing on the beach is based on a real incident. The shortage of planes and the desperate attempts to repair shot-up aircraft as soon as they landed could have added much-needed context. Nevertheless these interwoven strands make for effective film-making and give events that have been described so often by participants a disturbing immediacy. The British film record of Dunkirk is understandably meagre but there are some fine stills. Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema used these as the basis for the spectacular long shots of the air attack on the beaches.

My main criticism is the sometimes frantic intercutting between storylines before each thread of the plot has been resolved. Doubtless it was done to increase the suspense but at times it spoilt some fine film craft.

Each version of Dunkirk explores an aspect of the experience and does it very well. Only a few fiction films can enhance the teaching of history. But if I were back in the classroom or lecture hall I would screen both of these fine works for students studying the Second World War.