BRITISH STORY ON A U.S. BUDGET
War flick Dunkirk a welcome departure
In 1945, Warner Brothers released Objective Burma, a film travesty that saw American paratroopers led by Errol Flynn triumph over the Japanese in a war actually won by British and Commonwealth forces.
The year 1977 brought A Bridge Too Far, British director Richard Attenborough’s recreation of a disastrous Allied operation in the Dutch town of Arnhem in 1944. But because the movie’s American backers demanded Hollywood star power, a key scene involving the British Grenadiers was reworked to focus on the heroics of a fictional American portrayed by Robert Redford.
In 2000, there were further distortions with the release of U-571, in which American seamen Matthew McConaughey and Jon Bon Jovi retrieve an Enigma code machine from a disabled German submarine. The problem here? Well, it was actually the British crew of HMS Bulldog that recovered Enigma.
But this offensive pattern of Hollywood revisionism was broken with the arrival of Dunkirk. Warner Bros. — the same studio that allowed Errol Flynn to win the Burma campaign 72 years ago — provided the financial backing for Dunkirk, but this time there were no bogus depictions of American heroism in the film’s lacerating recreation of the evacuation of some 330,000 beleaguered Allied forces from the beaches of Normandy in 1940.
That rescue operation was deemed a “miracle” at the time, but it’s also something of a miracle that this new film happened — given that it deals with events that occurred before the United States entered the war, events about which most American filmgoers are totally ignorant.
So director Christopher Nolan had reason to thank Warner Bros. the other day “for this American budget for a very British story.” British critics also weighed in. “Dunkirk is every inch a British film with no detectable concessions to the international market,” raved the London Daily Telegraph. “There isn’t for instance the commercially fortunate presence of an American face among the cast.”
There’s something ironic about the arrival of Dunkirk at a time when Donald Trump is proclaiming an “America first” philosophy. That’s the same strategy that has long dictated Hollywood’s approach to history, but Nolan’s film has blown a hole in it.
“Americans are only interested in themselves.” That was the blunt message one prominent Hollywood executive delivered at the Banff, Alta., TV festival several years ago. He was responding to complaints by foreign producers that they were having trouble breaking into the American market — and he essentially told them to stop trying.
Indeed, Hollywood has long been indifferent to foreign sensitivities. It saw nothing wrong in falsifying history 72 years ago in Objective Burma. But when that film showed up as movie-night entertainment in one British military camp in the Middle East, it provoked a riot among those who had fought in the Burma campaign. In Britain, where its untruths enraged then-prime minister Winston Churchill, it triggered so much controversy that it was banned until 1952.
In 2000, American director Jonathan Mostow left foreign journalists speechless with his defence of U-571, a movie falsely crediting the Americans with capturing the Enigma machine. Mostow saw no harm in making the capture of Enigma “an American story.” What was wrong with a movie that made American audiences feel “patriotic?”
When the Oscar-winning Argo was released in 2012, history was again altered to make Americans feel good about themselves. The film blatantly misrepresented the 1980 Iranian hostage crisis, glorifying the U.S.’s Central Intelligence Agency at the expense of Canadian embassy officials who risked their lives to offer sanctuary to their endangered U.S. counterparts. Ben Affleck offered a mealy mouthed justification for this travesty, arguing that because it was only “based” on a true story, it passed the smell test.
The thoroughly entertaining 1963 film, The Great Escape, would have us believe that Steve McQueen and his motorcycle played a pivotal role in the mass breakout of 50 Allied prisoners from Germany’s infamous Stalag Luft lll camp. That the escape was an overwhelmingly British initiative, from a camp containing only a few Americans, was of no consequence to the film’s producers: They wanted a big American star, and they complied with McQueen’s demand that his fictional character be allowed to ride his beloved machine on screen.
“Hollywood is risk-averse and what makes them secure is to have an American in the lead,” Harry Potter producer David Heyman told Postmedia several years ago. But by that time, pushback was starting to happen, and the Potter films remained solidly British, thanks to author J.K. Rowling who had quickly shot down early Hollywood efforts to transfer the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry to California, where it could become a reworked Beverly Hills, 90210.
American director Michael Mann’s plan to star Tom Cruise in a movie about the Battle of Britain encountered so much hostility that the project was scrapped. Ridley Scott is working on his own Battle of Britain project. If he’s able to make it on his terms, the success of Dunkirk will clearly have paved the way.