Michael Anderson (1955)

On the Time Out website, there’s a short, snotty piece about The Dam Busters in which the reviewer, Derek Adams, scoffs that ‘you can just imagine audiences back then cheering the screen at the sight of the first dam blowing, and being wholly impressed by the hilariously elementary special effects’.  A comment on Rotten Tomatoes – an ‘audience review’ rather than a critic’s – reckons ‘This isn’t a bad movie, it’s just boring, it would work better as a documentary or something because as a narrative film it’s too boring’.  This latter opinion deserves more attention than Derek Adams’s but it ignores the picture’s context.  It was important in the aftermath of World War II for people to be able to celebrate what the armed forces did to win it.  Cinema-goers in 1955 would mostly have been too impressed by the heroism of the RAF’s 617 Squadron to pay much attention to special effects, hilarious or otherwise.  I’d guess those behind The Dam Busters intended to create, at least as much as a drama, an admiring historical record of the attacks on the Ruhr Valley dams – recognising and probably sharing the prospective audience’s desire not to be distracted by, for example, concentration on individual character or romantic sub-plots.  The list of credits includes what look to be scrupulously correct details of the various military initials of the men portrayed in the film or who advised on its production.  Yet if The Dam Busters had been a straightforward documentary, it wouldn’t have sold as many tickets as it did.  This was the most popular picture of its year at British box offices.

The screenplay by R C Sherriff, drawn from the books The Dam Busters by Paul Brickhill and Guy Gibson’s autobiographical Enemy Coast Ahead, is functional and it’s quite possible that, if Sherriff and Michael Anderson had set out to make a dramatically more complex and nuanced movie, they would have struggled to do so.  Sherriff’s script is creaky when he attempts conventional theatrical dialogue:  this is particularly noticeable in a sequence in which the exasperated Barnes Wallis runs through the various powers-that-be that he’s tried to persuade to support experiments with his bouncing bomb.  In the early stages, the perfunctory characterisation of government and military top brass seems merely a shortcoming and Michael Redgrave’s richer portrait of Barnes Wallis is a godsend.  But Anderson’s taut direction enables the film’s impersonal tone to become more expressive.  It goes beyond stiff upper lip cliché and connects with the necessary attitude of the RAF pilots:  to shut feelings out and treat the daring bombing raids as a job to be done.  Anderson’s description of the restless boredom of the pilots in the hours leading up to the first raids is economical and eloquent.  Once this momentum has developed, Redgrave threatens to become too actorish but he comes good again in the scenes in the control room, as Wallis and others anxiously await news from the pilots.  Anderson’s cross-cutting between the control room and the exciting flying sequences is very effective.

Richard Todd was no great shakes as an actor but the modesty of his talent is fused here with a modest approach to playing – and commemorating – Guy Gibson, which works well.  The cast also includes, among many others, Basil Sydney (as Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris), Ursula Jeans (Mrs Wallis), Patrick Barr, Ernest Clark, Derek Farr, John Fraser, Harold Goodwin, Raymond Huntley, Bill Kerr, Richard Leech and Robert Shaw.  The relatively few moments of personal emotion in The Dam Busters are powerful:  Wallis’s tetchiness and his outbursts of quickly mastered excitement in the control room; Guy Gibson noticing the scratch marks on his office door made by his dog, which has just been killed by a car; Gibson’s calm final words to Wallis that he has ‘a few letters to write’ – to the relatives of the men who’ve died in the Ruhr or on their return home – and his walk away from the camera.  The poignancy of this is greater because Gibson himself was killed, at the age of twenty-six, in 1944.  Also more rationed than you’d expect, so famous has it become, is Eric Coates’s ‘Dam Busters March’.

The one obvious emotional bond in the film is between Gibson and his black labrador retriever.  My (early teenage?) memory of The Dam Busters was that it was a sad story because the dog was killed on the afternoon before the night of the raids, and Gibson, although of course he isn’t upset in a tearful way when his batman tells him the bad news, clearly takes it hard.   The dog’s name, ‘Nigger’ (also the codename for one of the dams being targeted), has, to put it mildly, aged badly.  Derek Adams ‘can’t help but notice … how the word … could be bandied about with such jaw-dropping nonchalance’.  Autres temps, autres moeurs, Derek.  Press coverage a few years ago of the planned (still awaited) remake of The Dam Busters under the auspices of Peter Jackson, and with a screenplay by Stephen Fry, focused on the renaming of Gibson’s dog as ‘Digger’.  A new name will certainly be required but Jackson and Fry had better take note that, according to the online Free Dictionary, ‘digger’ has been used not only as a nickname for Australasian soldiers but ‘as a disparaging term, especially in the 19th century, for a member of any of various Native American peoples of the Great Basin, such as the Utes, Paiutes, and Western Shoshones’.

1 January 2014