Tag: war

She Goes to War

  By

★★★
“S_e _o_s t_ W_r”

If the above doesn’t make much sense, there’s good reason for that. Things tend not to, when half of them are removed. Albeit for reasons that are largely not the makers’ fault, because this film only partially survives. Originally released in 1929 with a running-time of 87 minutes, the only version that remains is one re-released about a decade later, which has been chopped down to under fifty minutes, including new opening captions which comment on the looming second global conflict. What remains still packs quite the wallop, as an anti-war movie which doesn’t shy from the brutal nature of World War I. It’s a part-talkie, with sounds for some of the music and dialogue, and it’s very effective when used.

For example, we hear Rosie (Rubens, in one of her last roles before dying tragically young) sing a jaunty little number called “There is a Happy Place (Far, Far Away)” to cheer up the troops. A few minutes later, she sings it again to a dying soldier, as heroine Joan Morant (Boardman) watches from the shadows, and it’s utterly heart-breaking. Joan is there for reasons which have largely been lost in the edit down to the shorter version. But they seem to be related to her boyfriend, Reggie (Burns), who has gone off to war – he has a drinking problem, though whether this is a result of the conflict is similarly hard to determine. She disguises herself as a man in order to replace him after his drinking renders him unfit for active duty. This exposes her to the true horrors of trench battles, which go far beyond what she could possible have imagined.

It’s an area where the poor quality of the surviving print work for the film, because the battle re-enactments (including some impressive model work for the nineteen twenties) almost look like grainy newsreel footage. Of course, Boardman is as convincing a man as most cross-dressing soldiers are i.e. not very. You have to accept that conceit as a given, and not ask awkward questions about things like bathroom facilities. After about the half-way point, the dialogue all but stops, and things unfold thereafter accompanied only by music and some sound effects. Some sections are truly the stuff of nightmares, such as when the soldiers have to advance, only to be driven back by the enemy unleashing a tidal wave of liquid fire against them.

Seeing the men trudging back, as the entire skyline burns behind them, or (the then newly-invented) tanks driving into the same fiery hell, are images which feels like they could easily come out of 1917, or any modern war movie. The chaos of warfare is reflected in the way it’s almost impossible to tell friend from foe, in the flames and the smoke and the near-darkness. The troops advance again, coming under withering fire from a German machine-gunner. Joan shoots him in the head, after running away from a would-be rapist (!). But it’s all too much for the poor girl, and she has to be carried back to safety by the truly heroic (and non-alcoholic) Sergeant Pike (Holland), whose entire back story was another victim of the editing. It’s all frustrating, and makes it very difficult to judge, because I’m basically watching half a movie. What there is, however, packs considerably more of a punch than I expected.

Dir: Henry King
Star: Eleanor Boardman, John Holland, Edmund Burns, Alma Rubens

Convoy 48

  By

★★½
“Derailed train of thought.”

I guess this is a slightly different take on the typically heroic stories to come out of Russia concerning their battles against Germany in World War II. Rather than focusing on members of the military, it’s the story of civilians – many with little or no previous experience – who were brought in to keep the railway supply line to Leningrad open. These wee crucial to the city’s survival, as the Nazi blockade threatened to starve the city into submission, being responsible for thee-quarters of the resources going into the city. Naturally, the German forces wanted to cut this off, so subjected the tracks and trains to a relentless bombardment, from artillery, mortars and planes, placing those operating the trains in near-constant danger. 

With a severe shortage of engineers and staff, it’s very much a case of all hands available. Which is how Masha (Tsibizova) and Sonya (Smirnova-Katsagadzhieva), barely out of school, find themselves assigned to the 48th Locomotive Unit, after the most basic of basic training in how to operate a train. This comes courtesy of Georgi (Alekseev), one of the few people around with relevant experience. The otherwise novice crew have to handle dangerous terrain and the ever-present threat of German attack, as they ferry supplies in to the besieged city. Things get murky, when they evacuate orphans out in a Red Cross train: but there are those in the Soviet administration who want to take this opportunity to piggyback on to this, a considerably less humanitarian mission.   

It’s alright, I suppose. But it’s largely predictable, with elements such as the burgeoning romance between Masha and Georgi being straight out of the usual playbook. It’s also so unremittingly heroic as to feel like it might have been a product from the Soviet Ministry of Propaganda, in the later stages of the war. There are a couple of interesting touches: the nearest we get to seeing the enemy is a pilot who bails out when his plane is shot down, and is immediately beaten to death with shovels. Otherwise, the closest to an antagonist is one of the crew who turns out to be a saboteur. It does mean there’s not much sense of direct conflict, with no specific “villain”.

There’s a lot of train stuff here, to the extent that it feels occasionally to border on railway porn. If you are not a train spotter, this could feel overdone, and at a hundred and forty minutes, there feels like a lot of time to fill. Our heroines do get more back-burnered than I would prefer, in favour of their mail colleagues in the second half, though the climactic run, involving the orphan-laden train, requires full commitment from everyone. And, to my complete lack of surprise, no shortage of heroic and ultimate sacrifice. By this point, however, I’d gone beyond my capacity for footage of trains going through the forest, and I’d be lying if I said I cared more than on the most superficial of levels. 

Dir: Fedor Popov
Star: Svetlana Smirnova-Katsagadzhieva, Artem Alekseev, Anastasia Tsibizova, Igor Yasulovich

Burial

  By

★★★
“Werwolfs, not werewolves…”

There’s an interesting idea here, which somewhat works. But it’s perhaps a little too grounded for its own good.  It starts in a London flat, where senior citizen Anna Marshall (Walter) ambushes an intruder, handcuffing him to a radiator. Turns out he’s not just a burglar. He knows about her past, and wants the truth. So she tells him a story… At the very end of World War II, her identity was Brana Brodskaya (Vega). She was one member in a small group of Russian soldiers, who have been given a very important task: transport a box back from Berlin to Moscow. Oh, and bury it every night. Inevitably, their curiosity overcomes them, and the box is opened, to reveal Hitler’s corpse inside. 

Naturally, the remaining German forces are very keen to re-capture the Fuhrer’s body, to preserve the myth of his escape and survival. The group become bogged down in a Polish village, under attack from Nazi Werwolfs. Not, please note, actual werewolves. Though I have to say, that would have been pretty damn cool [I’m a big fan of Dog Soldiers, which does pit British soldiers against actual werewolves] The Werwolfs were resistance forces, left behind by the Nazis behind Allied enemy lines, as they advanced towards Germany. This is fact. As depicted here, they wear animals pelts when they attack, while burning mushrooms and lichen which cause their target to hallucinate. This is… rather less certain, albeit also kinda cool. 

Brodskaya is, clearly, the moral compass of the group, who tries to keep her comrades on task too – neither of which prove easy. When half of them split off seeking the “spoils of war”, she goes after them to stop them from committing war crimes on the civilian population. The locals are just tired of the conflict, and have little patience for either occupiers or liberators, not trusting either side. Parker does a good job of depicting the murkiness of a situation like this, where the lines of morality aren’t as clear-cut as you would initially expect. But the heroine is mission-oriented as well, and when control of the cargo is lost, she leads the charge to recover it, knowing the threat its loss would pose. 

Unfortunately, I found there to be significant issues with pacing, especially in the middle third which seems to contain several too many underlit action scenes in the woods. I’ve read multiple complaints about it being marketed as a horror movie, and certainly, if that’s what you are expecting, you will be severely disappointed. I had no such prejudices and so didn’t mind too much. Though I would have extended the flashback further, since there seems to be a lot of interesting material covered at the end, in a bit of an info-dump by Marshall. Between that and the non-lycanthropic werewolves, this is why I reckon there’s a lot of potential left unexplored here. An excellent concept, let down by only average execution.

Dir: Ben Parker
Star: Charlotte Vega, Tom Felton, Barry Ward, Harriet Walter

 

Huntress

  By

★½
“Ze German WW2 Chainsaw Massacre”

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was fairly notorious in Britain in the eighties and nineties, being famously banned on video. Naturally, this meant I had to see it, and… I was initially underwhelmed. However, I’ve gradually come to appreciate its raw intensity over the years. If I ever doubted its merits, watching this largely shameless knockoff should act as a reminder. Because it shows how flat and uninteresting the premise can be, when executed poorly. This relocate things from seventies Texas to Germany in the last days of World War II. A medevac team is trying to get injured and grumpy officer, Colonel Franklin (Christian) to a hospital before his leg falls off from sepsis.

Along for the ride are nurses Ellie (McDowell) and Annie (Sarah Hawthorne), a pacifist medic, Will (Sohns), and a couple of GIs to provide protection. It’s not long before they run into trouble and out of fuel. Fortunately – or so it seems initially – they encounter friendly, and attractive local, Helga (Savage) who gives them her homemade sausages and says she has plenty of gasoline at her house, just over this way a bit. If you have read the opening paragraph, you’ll be able to work out where the rest of the film is going. Let’s just say, the moral of the story is: do not accept smoked meats of unknown provenance, from strange women in the middle of woods. Truly, words to live by.

Yeah, turns out she is the acceptable face of a family of psychos, along with sister Greta and mother Ursula. Or maybe it’s the other way round, I forget. Naturally, the convoy members enter the house in easily disposed of ones and twos, with an utter disregard for military protocol. For example, another moral might be, don’t drop your guard in order to slow-dance with mysterious veiled women, in the middle of large, spooky houses during wartime. Only bad things can come of it. The consequences are, a great deal of slowly creeping about corridors, which the makers mistakenly think generates tension. It actually generates tedium. I mean, Colonel Franklin has an excuse, having been shot in the leg. Everyone else? Not so much.

It’s not a terrible idea, and the performances are largely serviceable. However, the parallels to Texas become more blatantly apparent, the deeper we get, all the way until a final shot which is utterly a gender reversed clone of that in TCM. But rarely does this come anywhere close to capturing the same sense of unfettered insanity. If you’re going to try and ape a stone-cold horror classic, you have to bring your A-game, because otherwise, the comparisons will do you absolutely no favours. Instead, I was more left wondering how people go from running along a corridor in one shot, to being chased through the woods in the next. This one is a nightmare, alright. Just in all the wrong ways.

Dir: Matthew M. Howe, J. Christian Ingvordsen
Star: John Christian, Braxton Sohns, Maggie McDowell, Violet Savage

The Girl of Destiny

  By

★★★
“Lost in translation.”

I’m very cautiously giving this one our middest of mid-tier ratings, which I reserve the right to change in future. Because this one showed up on one of the… “less official”, let’s say Chinese movie channels on YouTube. While the likes of Youku and iQiyi make the effort to deliver subtitles which are typically at least intelligible, I’d say the subs here reached such a level, only about one line in five. Then I still had to figure out cultural context for this period piece, which also seemed to reference local folklore. I guess I should be grateful the soundtrack here was intact. The previous night, I’d watched another film on the same channel which, I kid you not, had random bursts of musak injected, presumably to avoid YouTube’s automated copyright system.

I have to discuss all this, because consequently, I really can’t describe the plot in more than the vague terms. It takes place in Shang Dynasty China, the earliest period for which there’s evidence, when the country was under threat from invasion by the Luo people. A heroine arose to stand against them, Fu Hao (You), who was destined by fate to be the country’s saviour. [There’s something here about her being descended from a heavenly bird, but I am absolutely vague on the details there!] She teams up with the Emperor’s heir, Wu Ding (Ma), despite the objections of his father. For the emperor wants him to marry a noble-born, yet less heroic woman (Li), rather than a peasant girl like Fu Hao.

It reminds me of the various versions of the Mulan legend, with a plucky heroine coming out of nowhere, when the country needs her most. There doesn’t appear to be quite the same element of needing to hide her identity; though for reasons discussed above, it’s hard to tell. I will say, it looks better than I anticipated, with some impressively large-scale battles. I was a bit concerned they were going to make her fly, in line with her avian lineage. Fortunately, Fu Hao’s talents appear to lie particularly in things like mountain climbing; there’s a nice moment where she and Wu Ding jump out a high window to escape, landing on a kite being flown by an ally.

If the broad strokes here are all decent, there’s a severe lack of detailed depth – again, that may be me more than the film. It does also feel rather comfortable and safe. It ended up exactly where I expected – she basically sends the Luo leader home, after giving him a good telling-off – and I don’t think any significant plot development (of the ones I understood!) came as the slightest surprise. I get the sense it may have been quite jingoistic, pitting the heroic Chinese against evil foreign invaders. Hardly the first there, and it wasn’t especially egregious. If this ever appears in a more intelligible version, I’ll probably give it a re-review. I feel it deserves that.

Dir: Dong Wei
Star: You Jingru, Ma Xueyang, Ma Shuliang, Li Linfei

Women Rescuers of WWII, by Elise Baker

  By

Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆

With the somewhat accurate and rather clunky sub-title of “True stories of the unsung women heroes who rescued refugees and Allied servicemen in WWII”, this is a book whose idea I liked rather more than the execution. The core is six chapters, each devoted to a woman or pair of women, who operated before and around World War II, mostly helping refugees to escape the Nazi regime as it swept across Europe. Every chapter has the same structure. Each begins with ‘The Threshold’, describing how they came to take on that role; then ‘The Move’, covering their heroic activities; and finally, ‘The Close’, detailing what happened to them afterward.

These stories are all worth telling, though perhaps not to the same degree. A couple appear more like glorified bureaucrats, and while their roles in facilitating emigration of refugees were important, you don’t get much sense they were in genuine danger. Others, however, such as Irena Sendler, was clearly risking her own life in smuggling Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto, being captured and brutally interrogated by the Gestapo. The same goes for Andrée de Jongh, who ran the Comet Line which allowed Allied soldiers trapped behind enemy lines in occupied Europe, to make their way back to friendly territory. She ended up in Ravensbruck concentration camp: that’s “real” heroism, putting yourself at personal risk, and definitely deserves to be better known.

However, the desire to cram in too much here works against the book. Each chapter typically covers only 20-25 pages, and as a result, you get not much more depth about each woman, than you would find in a well-written Wikipedia article. These are more like an appetizer, and you’ll probably be left hungry to know more about the likes of de Jongh. Baker has an odd tendency to shift from factual descriptions to what reads like dramatic restagings of scenes, an awkward shift that she does not manage to pull off. Rather than letting the stories speak for themselves, she tends to belabour her point about sexism being responsible for suppressing these stories.

It’s somewhat questionable, since many male heroes of WW2 are arguably more unsung: de Jongh, for example, was awarded decorations by multiple countries, including the George Medal, Britain’s highest civilian honour. That’s not “unsung.” I’d rather Baker had used the pages she spends on making such points, to tell the reader more about the women’s stories.  I will admit, I did learn things here, and if you’re looking for a primer – a Cliff Notes on wartime heroism – this and the other books in the series are probably worth a look. But it feels like Baker is only skimming the surface, and the subjects would have been better served by a more in-depth recounting, rather than trying to cover so many different candidates. Sometimes, less is definitely more, and this would be a good example. 

Author: Elise Baker
Publisher: Intrepidas Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book Part of the Brave Women Who Changed the Course of WWII series.

The Swimmers

  By

★★
“Sink or swim.”

This is the story of Syrian sisters Yusra Mardini and her sister Sarah, played by real-life sisters Nathalie and Manal Issa. Growing up, they were trained by their father, a professional swimmer himself, and had the goal of reaching the Olympics for their country. The (still ongoing) Syrian Civil War led to the sisters leaving their homeland, and this is mostly the story of their journey, through Turkey, across the Mediterranean in a very flimsy dinghy to Greece, then across Europe to Germany. It’s a journey fraught with peril, on which predators looking to scam migrants (or worse), lurk at every turn. However…

I don’t typically like to get political here, but when a film explicitly does, I will go there. I have every sympathy for refugees, who want safety. But once you leave your home country and reach a safe destination, that’s it. If you then decide to move on – making a beeline for a country where lax immigration laws let you pull the rest of your family with you – you’re not a refugee, you’re an economic migrant. My sympathy for you drops a whole order of magnitude. It’s like if your house burns down, I feel sorry for you. It doesn’t give you the right to move into the neighbourhood’s swankiest residence. Most of the film’s attempts to pull on my heartstrings failed due to this. As soon as the sisters left the Turkish beach, they were 100% responsible for putting themselves back in danger.

Rant over. What about the film? It’s a bit of a mixed bag. Having sisters playing sisters definitely works. Especially at that age, this is the kind of relationship which is hard to simulate for teenage actors. There’s a genuineness here, for obvious reasons, which makes the family devotion at the film’s core, easy to see and appreciate. Less successful is the apparent random switching between languages. Many conversations occur in a hodge-podge of English and Arabic. While I can’t speak to the authenticity of it, as a viewer, it was jarring to switch repeatedly from listening to reading subtitles. I ended up basically tuning out the dialogue and sticking with the subs.

I appreciate the necessity of bending the facts to fit a cinematic narrative, but this probably goes too far. It’s one thing to have Yusra overhear snark from other competitors about how she doesn’t deserve to be there. But maybe avoid this when the movie then omits to mention the only swimmers she beat were, basically, other charity cases? The Olympic Selection Time was 60.80 seconds. Mardini finished in 69.21, and even her personal best is more than five seconds off the OST. The awkward truth is, she really did not deserve to be there, but few are greater at virtue-signalling than the IOC. It all feels like there are probably better refugee stories which could have been told. All the gloss this applies to its tale. can’t disguise that it is uncomfortably close to well-made propaganda.

Dir: Sally El-Hosaini
Star: Nathalie Issa, Manal Issa, Ahmed Malek, Matthias Schweighöfer

The Escape

  By

★★
“Not so great…”

I’m just going to begin by quoting the opening credit titles. Spelling, grammar and punctuation as received. “At the early stage of Republic of China, Yuan Hsi Hai wanted to rebel the democratic government & be the king. But there were 300,000 soldiers at Yuan Wan under the command of General Tsai obstructed his desire, so he cheated General Tsai to Peking & confined his movements. So Yuan who lived in Chu Jen Hall could fulfil his ambition but…” I reproduce this because, to a large extent, that’s everything I’ve got in terms of the over-arching plot here. It’s all about Tsai (Kwan) getting out of the city, in order to lead his troops and, presumably, frustrate Yuan’s dictatorial ambitions.

Key to this is Peking Opera star Hsiao Yu (Lee), who is hired by Yuan’s men to keep an eye on the General. However, she’s not as loyal as her employer would hope, and she gradually becomes attached to and involved with Tsai. This eventually results in her helping him to escape the house arrest under which he has been placed. I believe this to be true with… let’s say 90% confidence. There does appear to be other stuff going on: none of it is able to make it through the terrible presentation, and out the other side, to provide details which I prepared to commit to the keyboard. It’s kinda clear why Lee’s Queen Boxer made it out in the West, and this didn’t, even though both were made around the same time.

This did rather well at Taiwan’s 1973 Golden Horse awards, winning Best Film, Leading Actor, Screenplay and a special award for “Outstanding Performance” going to Lee (she lost Best Leading Actress to Hsiao-Lao Lin in A Heroic Fight). All I can say is, it must have been a very slow year in cinema, for this largely plodding and uninteresting history-political drama to have triumphed. Though, again, the presentation does it no justice. For example, there’s one scene where Tsai is repeatedly writing something in large letters on paper. It’s clearly very important to him. Unfortunately, the subtitles – as ever, intended for a Chinese audience, not a Western one – don’t bother to translate it. So its significance is entirely lost.

Lee is about the only reason to watch this, and the film definitely goes up a gear whenever she’s on screen. Her background actually was in the Peking Opera, making this right in her wheel-house. The director – and some sources also credit both Kwan and Florence Yu Fung-Chi – wisely lets her talent shine through, and it’s a no-nonsense approach that works. Witness, for example, the casual way, she shoves a victim out of the way with her feet, after crushing his larynx. But one of the problems is, I honestly couldn’t tell you who’s she’s fighting at the end, or why, since the General has already escaped. It’s just another element lost in translation here, like so many others, and leaves this an underwhelming entity, in the only form available.

Dir: Min-Hsiung Wu
Star: Judy Lee, Peter Yang Kwan, Lee Hung, Cheung Kwong-Chiu 

Marilia, the Warlord, by Morgan Cole

  By

Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆

This is a fairly classic “rise from nowhere” story, yet is well-executed and done in a world which is interesting for its differences. The heroine is – surprise! – Marilia, whom we first meet on the battlefield, about to face an opponent of superior numbers. We then flash back to her childhood, growing up in a Tyracian brothel. Her mother was one of the “painted ladies,” but after she dies, Marilia and her brother Annuweth are on increasingly thin ice. Their effort to run away is unsuccessful, yet does bring them a chance at a new life. While it’s here that Marilia discovers her tactical savvy through board games, it’s not without its downside, the siblings being split up after Marilia enters an arranged marriage in another territory.

Yet that, too, has its pluses, for her new home of Svartennos is a little more liberated in terms of gender equality. This matters, especially after her husband dies and she inherits his responsibilities, which include war. There’s also a somewhat convenient prophecy about their warrior queen Svartana: “That someday, when the island is in peril… the spirit of Svartana will return in the form of another, to lead out people to victory and save the island.” No prizes for guessing, this is something which Marilia can leverage to her advantage, especially when combined with her genuine tactical wits.

There are a number of other threads woven into the plot, such as her relationship with her brother, and their joint passion for revenge on the warrior, Sethyron Andres, who killed their (absentee) father. That he’s known as “The Graver” gives you some idea of what to expect, and awkwardly, he’s now part of the forces on their side for the war. The resolution of this will bring them both back to Tyrace, and the very house where they grew up. This provides one of the rare bits of meaningful action for Marilia. While she is well-practiced with the sword, she discovers there’s a big gap between that and the hellish realities of the battlefield: it’s something Cole does not soft-pedal, to good effect.

I was quite surprised to realize the book is almost five hundred pages long, as it feels considerably shorter: I’d call this a good sign. It does take some time to get going, with the second half definitely moving at a quicker pace, compared to the first, which is more concerned with Marilia’s upbringing. Turns out, she’s gay – not that the book makes anything out of it, and even the heroine doesn’t quite know what she is (I’m guessing the culture doesn’t acknowledge it). It’s just a “Why do I want to spend my time with that woman?” thing. The first volume offers a nicely self-contained story, without many dangling elements, except the ultimate fate of The Graver. I suspect I may well end up finding out what happens there, in due course.

Author: Morgan Cole
Publisher: Self published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 4 in the Chrysathamere Trilogy series.

The Wild Women of Chastity Gulch

  By

★★★
“Civil War of the Sexes”

This sprightly TV movie from 1982 boasts a rather decent cast and, at least in the first half, manages to go in unexpected and interesting direction. It does end up descending into rather familiar territory thereafter, and the finale doesn’t manage to be as rousing as it should be. Yet it managed to keep my interest, and as this genre goes, that probably makes it better than average. It takes place in the last stages of the American Civil War, when the Southern women of Sweetwater have been left bereft of men, after the Confederate Army has recruited them all to their cause. Newly arrived in town is doctor Maggie McCulloch (Barnes), who has arrived to help her ailing aunt, Annie (Collins). She is shocked to discover Annie is less the mine owner touted in her letters, and more the owner of the town brothel.

With the men out of the picture, the local townswomen try to drive Annie and her business out of town, only to find the madam is made of sterner stuff. Such petty grievances are set aside with the arrival of Union forces under Colonel Samuel Isaacs (Duff), who demands Maggie’s services to help his injured son, Frank (former teen heart-throb, Donny Osmond!). Leaving Frank behind to take care of business elsewhere, the Colonel promises to leave the town alone if Frank is saved, though Confederate surgeon John Cain (Horsley) doubts he’ll keep his word. The women of Sweetwater need to be formed into a fighting unit capable of repelling Isaacs and his men if they return with ill intent.

From a modern perspective, perhaps the most unusual thing is seeing the Union soldiers (with the exception of Frank) portrayed as the villains of the piece. These days, the Confederate flag is basically the same thing as the swastika, yet the movie seems perfectly happy to accept that there were basically decent people on both sides. Pointedly, at the end, nobody mentions who won the war, because that’s not important – just that it’s over. Though on the other hand, there is literally not a single non-Caucasian in the entire movie. It’s flat-out impossible to imagine any depiction of the Civil War like this being made nowadays, making it a period piece almost as much as the era it represents.

That aside, the plot unfolds largely as you’d expect. There’s the initial tension between whores and housewives, and the women struggle to come to terms with the everyday business of running the town. For example, there’s a fire drill, which ends up with half the ladies thrashing around in shallow water, and some other slapstick involving whitewash, that is somewhere between lightly amusing and embarrassing. However, Barnes – at the time a sitcom star in Three’s Company – does a very good job of keeping the film grounded, and the supporting cast help admirably in that aspect. Collins is particularly good, projecting an attitude which clearly proclaims she will take no shit from anyone.

Inevitably, there’s the expected romance between Maggie and John, and the latter slowly succeeds in getting the townsfolk from literally falling over when they fire their weapons, to a reasonable degree of competence. On the one hand, it is implausible that civilians could defeat trained and experienced soldiers in a firefight. However, they don’t have to win, just make the situation unpleasant enough the Colonel decides it’s not worth it, and moves on. That perhaps happens rather too quickly, and the film might have benefited from devoting less time to the romantic aspects, in order to give us a more satisfying finale.

Obviously, given the medium, it’s never quite going to be able to live up to a title which feels considerably more “mature viewer” than the content here ever reaches. However, considering the limitations, it wisely concentrates on the dramatic elements, and that’s when it comes admirably close to being, not just a “real movie”, but a good one at that.

Dir: Philip Leacock
Star: Priscilla Barnes, Lee Horsley, Joan Collins, Howard Duff