Old Yorker

  • The War Game

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Peter Watkins (1966)

    Peter Watkins’ The War Game was scheduled for TV screening in the Wednesday Play slot in October 1965 but withdrawn at short notice.  An official statement at the time explained that ‘the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting.  It will, however, be shown to invited audiences …’  The BBC thus implicitly took responsibility for pulling The War Game; Cabinet papers since released indicate the decision was the government’s, whom the BBC had consulted.  As well as being ‘shown to invited audiences’, the film was shown in 1966 at festivals and in the United States, winning a special prize at Venice and an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.  The War Game made its belated first BBC appearance in the summer of 1985 to mark, with several other programmes, the fortieth anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.  Not having seen Watkins’ film until now, I guess I’ve always thought of it as cause célèbre rather than screen reality.  Watching it has certainly changed that.

    There’s a lot to unpack from the bare facts in the paragraph above.  A fair amount to say, too, about the context of this BFI screening, and I’ll start with that.  Peter Watkins died last year, on the day following his ninetieth birthday.  This month’s BFI programme – ‘System Critical: The Radical Films of Peter Watkins’ – is the most extensive Watkins retrospective yet, according to its co-curators, James Bell and William Fowler.  The War Game was the programme’s opening event, in conjunction with ‘an extended conversation’ about Watkins’ career more generally, chaired by the broadcaster Samira Ahmed, who put questions to Kevin Brownlow, venerable documentarian and film historian; Kodwo Eshun, an academic at Goldsmiths; and Kristofer Woods, a film researcher based in Belgium.  This four-way conversation – punctuated by illustrative clips, either from Watkins’ work or, in one case, from a filmed interview with him – turned out to be not just ‘extended’ but discursive, despite Samira Ahmed’s best (at times, understandably bossy) efforts to keep it on track.  James Bell and William Fowler’s introduction to the conversation was rather leisurely, too: the NFT1 audience was informed, almost as an afterthought, that we were sitting in the theatre where the very first screening of The War Game, for an invited audience of politicians and press, had taken place in April 1966.

    The film clips, one chosen by each of Ahmed and the three other contributors, were from Watkins’ amateur short The Forgotten Faces (1961), a reconstruction of the 1956 Hungarian revolution; his relatively mainstream Privilege (1967); and his marathon La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000 – original running time 345 minutes).  All three clips were interesting, but not even the excerpt from the reconstructed violence in Budapest prepared you for The War Game.  Nor did the eight-minute curtain-raiser that followed the extended conversation:  Watkins’ The Controllers (1963), made through the Central Office of Information (and for the Ministry of Aviation), unremarkably dramatises the process of arranging an emergency landing at Gatwick Airport for a plane with a sick passenger on board.

    How did a piece originally intended for The Wednesday Play, famously the home of mid-1960s original TV drama on the BBC, go on to win a Best Documentary Academy Award?  The War Game depicts a hypothetical nuclear attack on South-East England:  how could the Academy have thought it was presenting ‘real’ events?  They can’t have done, so was The War Game’s cinéma vérité treatment of real, urgent issues in contemporary Britain (and internationally), enough to qualify the film as documentary?  Surely not on its own (that description applies equally to, for example, Cathy Come Home, perhaps the most famous of all Wednesday Plays), but there’s no doubt that Peter Watkins’ film is, in formal terms, very unusual.  A paragraph by William Fowler, which began the BFI handout for the screening, describes The War Game as a ‘documentary report from the future’.  Wikipedia terms it a ‘pseudo-documentary’ and IMDb a ‘docudrama’.  None of these labels is simply wrong.  None captures the forty-six-minute film’s complex construction.

    The War Game begins with maps showing British military airfields and V-bomber bases, with voiceover explanation of how these clustered targets, and dense population centres, make Britain especially vulnerable to the threat of a Soviet nuclear attack.  The viewer assumes this information is factually accurate.  The same voice then describes a developing political crisis that would have been plausible, but which is invented.  US forces in South Vietnam, faced with an invasion of the country by Communist China, have been authorised to use tactical nuclear weapons.  The Soviet Union and East Germany threaten to invade West Berlin unless the American government withdraws this authorisation.  Before the situation escalates into nuclear conflict, there are interviews with citizens of the Kent towns where Watkins shot The War Game, to illustrate how much – or, as soon emerges, how little – they understand of nuclear war issues and terminology:  the purpose of the V-bomber deterrent, the effects of thermal radiation, and so on.  Amid a cluster of don’t knows, one woman’s description of Strontium-90 – ‘I think it’s a sort of gunpowder, or something, that blows up’ – stands out.  You assume these vox pops are spontaneous reality, but nearly all the citizens who feature in subsequent sequences and tell an unseen interviewer about the horrors of living and dying in the aftermath of a nuclear attack, are just as believable.

    Almost needless to say, very few of the residents of Tonbridge, Gravesend, Rochester and elsewhere used for both forms of interview were professional actors:  Peter Watkins’ achievement in getting these people to behave so naturally and powerfully on camera is remarkable.  As for the ‘action sequences’ (for want of a better phrase):  Watkins’ realisation of the consequences of air bursts caused by the detonation of nuclear warheads near Canterbury and in Rochester – the physical effects on individuals, a firestorm that sets Rochester ablaze – is brilliantly and horribly credible.  (The cameraman was Peter Bartlett and the editor Michael Bradsell.)  Emergency services are overwhelmed and civil order breaks down.  Essential supplies and medical treatment are hopelessly inadequate to the demand for them.  Dying people are left to die or, in some cases, shot dead by armed police – a kind of violent euthanasia.  Police firing squads also execute those who’ve exacerbated the breakdown of law and order.

    These scenes are punctuated by, as well as a few fragments of newsreel from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, actual, official words of the time, which take the form of quotes both from official British government pamphlets and from politicians, churchmen and others.  These snippets of advice to households and establishment reassurances, although often grimly comical in effect, are delivered straight.  The film’s main narrator, who has what sounds like a generic BBC voice, was Dick Graham, who worked principally for Anglia Television.  But the quotes are read by a voice that I knew from childhood and still recognised today:  it’s Michael Aspel, one of the BBC’s regular team of daily newsreaders in the 1960s – in other words, a voice both familiar and authoritative to television audiences of the time.

    Peter Watkins plays fair.  Although The War Game sometimes describes itself, through Dick Graham, as ‘documentary’, Graham’s voiceover also occasionally makes clear that the events on the screen are not actuality, but what could happen in the very near future.  Even so, the mixture of real and imagined elements, in combination with the frightening impact of The War Game’s sustained momentum, is disorienting for a BFI audience even now – and would surely have been overwhelming sixty years ago to a mass television audience settling down to watch a piece of fiction.  Orson Welles’ legendary radio version of H G Wells’ The War of the Worlds in 1938 had already provided a notorious example of the deceptive power of inventive broadcast drama.  Many viewers of Cathy Come Home, directed by Ken Loach from a script by Jeremy Sandford, would believe, when the piece was first shown in the Wednesday Play slot (a year on from the War Game controversy, in November 1966), that they were watching a news report rather than a play.  It’s unsurprising, to put it mildly, that The War Game wasn’t shown by the BBC as originally planned.

    Once the government became involved in the discussion, the outcome was inevitable.  That government was Harold Wilson’s first administration, and the decision to pull the plug on The War Game was specifically that of the Postmaster General, Anthony Wedgwood Benn (as he then was).  Labour had only returned to power following the General Election of October 1964, after thirteen years of Conservative governments.  Although The War Game’s scathing criticism of Britain’s civil defence arrangements and education of the public on matters nuclear could hardly therefore be laid at Wilson’s government’s door, it’s clear that Peter Watkins didn’t expect anything to change with the change of party in power.  Most of the handout for the screening comprised an interview with Watkins that he gave even before completing The War Game and which appeared in the Fall 1965 issue of the US publication Film Comment.   The interview includes an accurate prediction:

    ‘It’s not that facts are deliberately withheld from people as there being a gentleman’s agreement not to tell people – and this is why my film … will really curl the eyeballs of a lot of higher ups.  They will have to decide that it is not right for people to know these things, because ‘this will affect the war morale of Britain’, and that’s going to be a hell of a thing to decide.’

    That pre-screening clip of a much later interview with Watkins, in the early 2000s, made clear that his anti-establishment fury only increased with the passing years.  Despite retaining a strong desire to communicate with a mass audience, it seems that he moved increasingly towards work of interest to decreasing numbers of potential viewers.  Watkins blamed this entirely on the ‘thugs’ responsible for the broadcasting trends that developed in the last decades of the twentieth century – but you couldn’t help feeling he was kidding himself about this.  Even before the thugs got to work in degrading public taste, it’s hugely unlikely that the BBC in the 1960s would, for example, have commissioned a five-hour-plus dramatised documentary about the Paris Commune; even more unlikely that the average Wednesday Play audience of six to eight million viewers would have tuned in; inconceivable that most of those who did start watching would have stayed watching to the end.  The filmed interview with Peter Watkins left an unfortunate aftertaste, but only until the main event of the evening got underway.  Because The War Game is a truly extraordinary piece of filmmaking.

    2 August 2026

  • A Man for All Seasons

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Fred Zinnemann (1966)

    Watching A Man for All Seasons again, for the first time in probably half a century, was very enjoyable – not least because this can fairly be described as a Fred Zinnemann film, not just a screen record of Robert Bolt’s famous stage play.  The original is opened out judiciously.  Bolt did the screenplay so may well deserve some credit for that, but it’s Zinnemann’s movie craft that ensures the outdoor sequences strike the right balance.  They give the material cinematic life.  They never try to compete with the dialogue yet are never merely filler – this is especially true of Henry VIII’s visit, by royal barge, to Thomas More’s Chelsea home on the banks of the Thames.  Zinnemann ably builds the central drama of More’s refusal, through his Catholic faith and moral convictions, to sign a letter to the Pope requesting the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon or take an Oath of Supremacy that declares the King to be Supreme Head of the Church of England.  More’s three years as Lord Chancellor elapse abruptly (though that’s partly because Zinnemann commendably doesn’t resort to a ‘Three years later’ signpost on the screen).  The interrogations and his imprisonment in the Tower of London go on a bit too long.  The ‘realistic’ staging of his conclusive trial is sometimes shaky.  But Fred Zinnemann’s storytelling is for the most part, and as you’d expect, bracingly fluent and clear.

    Under the skilful filmic surface, though, this is still Robert Bolt’s play and that’s an irresistible difficulty.  One of Thomas More’s contemporaries, the grammarian Robert Whittington, coined the description of him as ‘a man for all seasons’.  This supplied Bolt with a good, striking title, but puts his admiring cards on the table virtually before the curtain rises.  Paul Scofield, who played More in the original West End and Broadway productions of A Man for All Seasons (in 1960 and 1961 respectively), reprises the role here.  Scofield gives an immaculate performance.  That’s not entirely a compliment, because Bolt’s Thomas More is an immaculate conception – thoroughly principled yet worldly wise, a saint in waiting, and with more than his fair share of Bolt’s best lines.  When someone else is speaking, More listens, almost always patiently, before coming out with a reply that bests the other person epigrammatically as well as morally.  (Times change … In A Man for All Seasons, Thomas Cromwell is a bullying villain, but in the BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2015), Thomas More is a chilly, sneaky ideologue, Cromwell is morally nuanced and thoughtful, and Mark Rylance’s portrait of the latter often brings Scofield’s More to mind.)  Even so, Paul Scofield’s precision and vocal musicality are very pleasurable to watch and listen to.  And when More does occasionally lose his cool – either in anger or in distress and anguish, when his wife and daughter visit him in prison – it’s powerful:  a fine illustration of the benefits of an actor’s keeping his emotional powder dry.

    As mentioned elsewhere (see The Ghoul), I was once in a school production of A Man for All Seasons; I still have my copy of the Heinemann Educational Books edition of the text used at the time.  This includes a preface by Robert Bolt, along with his notes on ‘People in the Play’, which, although succinct, are highly prescriptive.  Richard Rich, for example, is,

    ‘Early thirties.  A good body unexercised.  A studious unhappy face lit by the fire of banked down appetite.  He is an academic, hounded by self-doubt to enter the world of affairs, and longing to be rescued from himself.’

    Bolt’s notes anticipate the qualities of his dialogue – consistently crisp, often witty, but, in effect, telling the audience the same thing repeatedly about the person delivering the lines.  There’s little scope for the actors in A Man for All Seasons to explore for themselves what makes their character tick and develop that character over the course of the play.  This is liable to be even more of an issue when the piece moves from the stage to the screen, where faces and gestures will naturally express thoughts and feelings more transparently.  If the faces and gestures convey the same message about the character as their words, some of what an actor does is liable to be superfluous.

    The risk is all the greater if the actors are as high-powered as most of Zinnemann’s cast were.  I chose Bolt’s summary of Rich as the example above because John Hurt’s playing of him is a prime example of the issue in question.  Rich was Hurt’s first high-profile role in cinema.  A very gifted actor, understandably eager to make a strong impression, Hurt nails the anxiously driven and unscrupulous careerist Rich in his first scene:  the role is so thinly written there’s nowhere else to go with it from there.  Something similar happens with actors less talented than Hurt – Leo McKern as Cromwell, Susannah York as More’s daughter, Margaret.  The protagonist’s dilemma and fate make for an absorbing story, but Thomas More’s satellites are too often figures in a medieval or early Tudor morality play – that is, personified vices or virtues, with just the one vice or virtue per person.

    A few of the cast achieve more agency in their roles, with mixed results.  Not surprisingly, Bolt’s screenplay jettisons the stage play’s quasi-Brechtian narrator, the Common Man (the role that Leo McKern played in the original West End production).  In the theatre, the Common Man, as well as commenting on the action in direct address to the audience, is a succession of pleb bit parts – publican, boatman, jailer, jury foreman, executioner, and Thomas More’s servant.  A different actor plays each of these characters in the film:  Colin Blakeley, as the servant Matthew, does quite a lot with very little.  Orson Welles’ vast, decaying Cardinal Wolsey is an extraordinary image but Welles, in the exchange between More and Wolsey, goes too far in doing his own thing:  he’s intent on making an impact with his every line, but there’s next to no emotional continuity.  Robert Shaw’s Henry VIII is much more successful.  Although his shouting bits are hit and miss, Shaw, in his shiny gold costume, is dazzlingly volatile, and comes through as a living screen presence.  She’s hardly tested in the role of More’s simple-minded, exasperated wife, Alice, but Wendy Hiller is always entertaining and, in the couple’s final meeting, surprisingly moving.

    1 August 2026

Posts navigation