The release of a book about Where Eagles Dare by no less a high-culture luminary than Geoff Dyer has us wondering: when did the war movie stop being a pillar of mainstream entertainment? The simple answer might be once the politics of war became divisive, but recent films like Lincoln and Darkest Hour have shown the political side of conflict can be more of a box-office draw than the actual shooting and bombing. The genre continues to be a solid seller in the straight-to-home-release market, and time will tell whether the commercial success of Dunkirk is a new dawn for the genre or merely further proof that Christopher Nolan can make anything into a hit. In the meantime, two new releases from the BFI and Eureka – the first a reissue, the second a contemporary film – show the genre moving with changing times.
Dunkirk crossed over to wider audiences largely because it wasn’t so much a war film as a survival thriller in the mould of recent hits like Gravity and The Grey. The mission it dramatized didn’t involve pushing back on the enemy’s defences or capturing a strategically important site, it involved saving lives. It’s a simple, graspable, empathetic motivation that appealed to audiences who might otherwise go cross-eyed at the discussion of military tactics and historical battles in Richard Marquand’s Eye of the Needle, released on dual format by the BFI. Ken Follett’s source novel launches its story from a little-remembered but fascinating detail of the British war effort – Operation Fortitude, an elaborate and successful plan to construct fake tanks, ships and barracks to fool the Nazis into thinking the landings would take place at Calais rather than Normandy. Follett’s novel imagines an Axis attempt to capture these plans using a deep-cover spy codenamed The Needle, played in Marquand’s film by Donald Sutherland.
Sutherland’s breakthrough lead role, M*A*S*H, was advertised with a tagline proclaiming it to be “what the new freedom of the screen is all about!” Sure enough, for this writer, it’s Sutherland rather than Pacino or de Niro who best encapsulates the changes in North American cinema during the 1970s. A sombre-looking Canadian with a wicked sense of humour and permanently alert, inquisitive eyes, he simply wouldn’t have been a star in any other decade. There is a part of Eye of the Needle that wants to be a traditional war yarn, not least Miklós Rózsa’s score, which is stirring and melodramatic enough to make you wonder if he thought he was doing music for The Four Feathers again. Having Sutherland in the lead, though, automatically makes it a more modern proposition.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Certainly Sutherland, who’d already worked with Fellini, Pakula, Bertolucci and Roeg by this point, is very comfortable with the Needle’s sadism, and the scenes where he uses his signature weapon are gruesome enough to remind you we’re a long way from The Dambusters. The problem comes when we’re asked to believe there might be a conscience under there. When the Needle stays with a British family he finds his fanaticism wavering, much like the German soldier in Jean Bruller’s novel The Silence of the Sea (turned into a brilliant film by Jean-Pierre Melville just four years after the war ended). But Bruller’s book is a novel of ideas and Follett is a thriller writer, which means in place of the French author’s wrenching depiction of inner turmoil we get a lot of violence followed by a bit of sex. Kate Nelligan is lovely as the housewife he develops feelings for, but it’s still hard to credit that she might inspire some mercy in him when we’ve been presented with such graphic evidence of his capacity for heartless brutality.
Marquand’s direction doesn’t have the sense of place that made a film like Went the Day Well? such a chilling portrayal of evil on British soil, but it’s pacy and suspenseful – enough to catch the eye of George Lucas, who immediately brought him on board for Return of the Jedi. Star Wars is perhaps given too much stick for ending the 1970s New Hollywood, but it really did sound the death knell for the blockbuster war movie. Not immediately, granted, but once Hollywood realised you can play out all of the fun bits of a war movie in a fantasy setting and get rid of all the depressing stuff about politics and real people suffering and dying, the writing was on the wall for the likes of The Great Escape.
Thirty-five years on from Marquand’s Star Wars entry, Eureka have released Adolfo Martínez Pérez’s debut film Rescue Under Fire – or Zona Hostil, to give it its pithier Spanish title. There are probably devoted world cinema fans who haven’t seen a Spanish war movie before – I can’t remember catching any – but the packaging is marketing this straight towards the mainstream audience who might pick up a war movie or two out of curiosity in their local supermarket. Eureka deserve plaudits for that, even if the film is a mixed bag.
Like Dunkirk, Rescue Under Fire is a story of survival, in this case concerning the retrieval of a helicopter and its crew brought down in Taliban-controlled territory in Afghanistan. In its focus on courage, brotherhood and problem-solving it sits neatly alongside recent war films like Kajaki and Lone Survivor. It doesn’t have the merciless tension of the former or the star power of the latter, but it’s a cut above most of its DVD shelf-mates in terms of spectacle. And it might be about something.
An early cutaway to a command centre establishes that the mission has been authorised because, if the helicopter is abandoned, Taliban fighters will pose with it and disseminate the photos as propaganda. The safety of the soldiers seems to be a secondary concern – but, as the film goes on, it spends more and more time on the battlefield, where survival is the only concern. The difference in attitudes between the commanding officers and the troops isn’t dwelt upon enough to qualify as satire – indeed, the film ends with a heartfelt dedication to Spanish soldiers who served in Afghanistan. This might be the point, though. Rescue Under Fire begins by showing you soldiers from different backgrounds, of different genders, with different attitudes towards life and it ends with a third act full of co-ordinated group action.
Rescue Under Fire and Eye of the Needle share some common flaws, most notably their scores. (There’s a burst of Arabesque music over a shot of an Afghan boy on a bicycle that’s so loud and so sudden I wondered if it was a spoof) In other areas, they contrast each other. Rescue Under Fire‘s Taliban soldiers are shot like Apaches in an old Western, mostly stood on the lip of a distant hill; they don’t give you the sense of personal, calculating evil that the Needle does. If the newer film is less ambitious, though, it’s also more sure-footed; it promises an incredible rescue against impossible odds and it delivers. Seen together, they remind you of the essential thrill of the war movie: the highest possible stakes, with real people fighting for real ideals. It’s a pleasure that’s lasted through countless, very different wars, and it won’t go away any time soon.
RESCUE UNDER FIRE IS OUT NOW FROM EUREKA ENTERTAINMENT
THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE IS OUT NOW FROM BFI
