Historical Films That Become Part of History

Sometimes the film of an event becomes part of the history it is portraying. I first came across this phenomenon with Guy Hamilton’s The Battle of Britain (1969). The movie vindicated the strategy of Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding and his principal air commander Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park and portrayed their rival, Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, the advocate of the notorious Big Wing, as at best misguided. The film-makers on the whole got it right. The Battle of Britain included a long overdue tribute to the two great airmen who had won the battle by attacking the enemy piecemeal instead of letting the bombers reach their targets then assaulting them in force.

Back in the late 1960s it was far from certain that the film would go as far as it did. There were still forces hostile to Dowding and Park in the Air Ministry. The famous fighter ace Douglas Bader, who had been used by Leigh-Mallory to discredit Dowding, was still alive, and still a believer in the Big Wing. This had been dramatised on film in the bio-pic of Bader’s life, Reach for the Sky. But in the fifties there had been some excellent research on the battle, a good biography of Dowding by Basil Collier, and Len Deighton’s Fighter, both of which had eloquently defended Dowding and Park’s tactics. Earlier the journalist and historian Chester Wilmot had met Dowding at the Army and Navy Club (where else?) as part of the research for his book The Struggle for Europe. Using that interview and the official dispatch he had been the first to give Dowding the credit for winning the Battle of Britain.

Laurence Olivier, who had been cast as the Air Chief Marshal, spent some days with Dowding and according to contemporaries his performance precisely captured Dowding’s shyness and incisive intellect as well as the man’s melancholy and compassion. Here the actor’s art served history well. Trevor Howard, cast as Keith Park, wrote to Sir Keith promising to do him justice, which of course he did. Later he revealed that on a visit to the set Dowding told him that if it hadn’t been for Keith Park they would never have won—a fitting tribute to arguably the fiercest air commander of the war.

The film did not go quite as far as did the historians who uncovered Leigh-Mallory’s intrigues against Dowding that resulted in his “retirement” soon after winning the battle. But there is a well-written confrontation scene between Park and Patrick Wymark’s Leigh-Mallory over Big Wing tactics, and Olivier’s Dowding is shown making some of the key decisions that ensure the final victory. Even in 1969 the Air Ministry managed to resist the pressure to make the dying airman a marshal of the Royal Air Force. Nevertheless the film was selected for the Royal Command Performance where it was well received, and its portrayal of Dowding was reinforced later by research on his relationship with Churchill and recently by an excellent biography by Vincent Orange. Although clearly historical fiction, The Battle of Britain became part of the debate.

Zero Dark Thirty’s relationship to the hunt for Osama bin Laden is more immediate. Along with some necessary fictions the film almost certainly includes new revelations. This is not unusual with movies and novels about spooks. The fact that the head of the Russian section of MI6 was a mole had been used in spy novels and some notable films well before Kim Philby was exposed by the Sunday Times team. But just what is fact or fiction in Zero Dark Thirty? The screenwriter, Mark Boal, has admitted that Maya (Jessica Chastain), the obsessed operative who uncovers the trail that leads to Osama bin Laden, is based on a real member of the CIA who did in fact discover vital evidence. Boal first found out about her when one of his sources mentioned that there was a mysterious woman at the SEAL base just before the assassination team left for Afghanistan.

The character is similar to the agent played by Clair Danes in the mini-series Homeland, now in its second season. Homeland is known to be President Obama’s favourite television program. “On Saturday afternoons I go into the oval office and pretend to be working while I watch Homeland,” he told Damien Lewis, who plays the war hero who has been turned by the terrorists in the series. Although Homeland’s plot and counter-plots are outrageously melodramatic—and hugely enjoyable—its portrayal of politicking and infighting in the bureaucracy is all too believable. All of which tends to confirm one’s worst suspicions about intelligence organisations generally and the CIA in particular.

Even more disturbing, Zero Dark Thirty’s portrayal of the CIA’s use of torture seems to be only too accurate. The opening scenes show Maya accompanying Dan (Jason Clarke) to a CIA “black site” as he interrogates Ammar, a “detainee” with suspected links to Saudi terrorists. These brutally confronting sequences provoked heated debate when the film was first released. Director Kathryn Bigelow was accused of justifying torture, which segued into an oblique justification of the whole detainee program by right-wing pundits who argued it elicited information that led to Osama bin Laden. After two viewings of the film I could find no suggestion that Bigelow was justifying torture. The torture sequences are simply filmed with a detached realism and the film makes no excuses for its CIA characters.

When I described the interrogation methods shown in the film—such as water-boarding and shouting at the prisoner—to former ASIO officer Warren Reed, he was horrified. “You never shout at a suspect,” he told me. “That simply shows you are impatient.” As for questioning a prisoner through an interpreter, “That is a basic error. You can’t pick up nuances or the revealing minor slip that can be used to break a suspect’s cover story.” Clearly the American interrogators could have done with a few lessons from the real-life counterpart of John le Carré’s George Smiley. It is no wonder the Americans took nearly ten years to find Osama bin Laden.

Even though the film is supposed to be a dramatisation of the Osama bin Laden operation, Zero Dark Thirty is almost certainly far closer to what really happened than anyone is prepared to admit. Bigelow and Boal had prepared a screenplay on the December 2001 battle for Bora Bora and the unsuccessful hunt for Bin Laden in the region. They were about to begin shooting when they heard Bin Laden had been killed. Bigelow cancelled the film and Boal went back to his sources in the intelligence community. He heard about the young case officer recruited from college who had spent her whole career chasing Bin Laden. She became Maya, and I’m sure there are more thinly disguised real operatives along with the historical characters in Zero Dark Thirty. Bigelow’s film reflects this insider’s view. Scenes are fragmented; there is a lot of murmured jargon; and while the film never loses sight of Maya’s quest there are all sorts of elliptical references to the recent history of the CIA. Once again this seems to be how events unfolded in real life. Still, the film would have benefited from a few more exposition scenes in the style of the BBC’s Smiley mini-series, where the writers, basing their work on the dialogue in the novels, used a lot of supposedly insider jargon, but it soon became self-explanatory. (In fact le Carré made up his own jargon, only to find it adopted by MI6.)

To the credit of Bigelow and Boal, Zero Dark Thirty is anything but triumphalist. Bigelow makes it clear that the death of the senior CIA officer Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) in a suicide bomb attack, happened because in her anxiety to create a new contact she ignored basic security. The intricate steps that enable Maya to make the link between Bin Laden’s courier and the man himself are portrayed without any obvious contrivances. Her work seems to have been based on just the kind of local knowledge and close analysis of evidence that was so conspicuously lacking when her colleagues were torturing suspects.

The actual raid on the Bin Laden compound in Pakistan is brilliantly shot, intercutting shadowy images of the Stealth helicopters, fragmented shots seemingly taken through the team’s night glasses, and tightly framed hand-held photography covering the action. Again Bigelow shows the blunders: the civilians, including children killed in error, the messy assassination of Bin Laden himself and the crash of one of the helicopters. Some regret for the mistakes is suggested but there is no moralising; just heartfelt relief that nothing else has gone wrong.

Zero Dark Thirty—the term means half an hour after midnight, the time of the raid—has already become part of the debate over who should be given the credit for “getting” Osama bin Laden and the controversy over the use of torture. In some ways it is very similar to a film like Brian Desmond Hurst’s Theirs Is the Glory, which less than a year after the events it portrays, used actual participants to re-enact what happened at Arnhem during Operation Market Garden in the ruins of the town. In Zero Dark Thirty India stood in for Pakistan and if there were any real participants in the movie no one is saying. But the recreations are done so well that veteran reporter David Brill, who knows the area, thought they were using the real locations. The main difference between the American film and the British classic is that while Hurst’s film gives the viewer a wonderful feel for the events as experienced by participants and is a tribute to the courage of the British troops, Zero Dark Thirty leaves us with disturbing questions about the conduct of the CIA. It is going to be part of the continuing debate about the “War on Terror” for many years to come.