Tag Archives: WWII

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Goodnight Sweetheart (1993- 1999) A British WWII Time Travel Comedy Series

One thing is for sure, the British comedy series Goodnight Sweetheart is quite different. I watched the first few episodes now and thought it was quite funny and certainly not known by too many.

Gary Sparrow, a young married man, lives in a little house, somewhere in London, with his wife. Their marriage is a bit shaken as she is on a steep career path and reproaches Gary his lack of ambition. He does try though, but gets something wrong all the time. Either he isn’t dressed appropriately for his job interview or his lack of stamina keeps him from moving up.

He and his new friend Ron spend a lot of time drinking beer and moaning about their wives.

Gary works as a TV technician and one day, looking for an address in London’s East End, he lands in an alley called the Duckett’s Passage. In a bar he asks for directions when he realizes people are dressed in clothes of the 40s. At first he thinks he is in a theme pub but soon he realizes that he really is in war-torn London in the 40s.

He falls in love with the barmaid and for some 58 episodes we will be able to travel with him back and forth between 90s and 40s London and watch him lead a double-life with two wives.

It is quite amusing and the period pieces are well done. A lot of the fun stems from Gary’s mentioning things that will happen much later or sing songs that haven’t been written yet, pretending they are his. But it’s equally funny to see him forget, that he is really in the 40s and how shocked he is when there’s an air raid.

I think it’s a fun twist on WWII, amusing and entertaining alike and infused with some serious 40s nostalgia.

I attached one scene and a nostalgic fan video.

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Spike Lee’s Miracle at St.Anna (2008) The Story of the Buffalo Soldiers and the Massacre at St. Anna

I would say that Miracle at St.Anna is one of the best American war movies and the best American WWII movie of the last ten years. I was surprised to see how good it is, as critics and public have been equally harsh. I assume they are biased because of its director. The end is corny but overall it is absolutely excellent and tells a lesser known story in a very engaging way.

The movie starts somewhat surprisingly in 1982 New York. A modest post-office worker kills a man who buys stamps from him. He shoots him with a German Luger. The incident attracts a lot of attention, even more so when they discover the head of an Italian Renaissance statue in his apartment.

Next we are in Italy, in 1944. The 92nd company, the so-called Buffalo soldiers, a company consisting almost only of African-American soldiers gets under heavy German fire. A small group is separated from the rest and makes their way to a little mountain village that is surrounded by Germans.

One of the soldiers, a huge man, saves a little boy who seems to be ill and slightly crazy. He takes the disturbed little kid with him, all together they find refuge in the house of some Italians, one of them a Fascist. The Germans aren’t really looking for the Buffalo soldiers, they are hunting Italian partisans. And the partisans are hunting them. The Italians know, and so it seems does the little boy, that there is a traitor among them.

While they stay at the village, some of the soldiers realize that the Italians treat them much better than the white people back home. And they also treat them better than some of the white American civilians living in Italy. There is a particularly infuriating scene with an American bar owner who doesn’t want to serve black people. They fight for their country but their country doesn’t appreciate them.

The core scene of the movie is the massacre at St. Anna, a true story, in which hundreds of Italian civilians got killed by the Nazis because the Partisans have killed some of the Germans. The Germans have been told by their command that they have to shoot 10 Italians for one dead German.

Miracle at St. Anna is very rich. It combines a multitude of elements and many stories that circle around different relationships but still feels like a whole. It’s sad, it’s moving and it is very suspenseful as it also works like a thriller. We really want to know why the guy killed the other one. There aren’t many good WWII movies showing the African-American participation and there aren’t many good ones on Italy during WWII. This covers both. And there is also some fighting, for those who want this from their war movies.

Miracle at St. Anna is also part of the Children in War Movies List and African-American Soldiers in war movies.

For those of you who like to watch TV series, the actor who played Shane in The Shield and the guy called “Omar” in The Wire are in this movie.

This is a highly watchable and very original movie that can be named together with other great WWII movies like Saving Private Ryan or The Thin Red Line. 5/5

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Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Maybe Inglourious Basterds is a good movie. Maybe it is not. In any case I have hardly seen any other movie being misspelled so often. That’s at least one achievement. “And the Oscar for most misspelled movie goes to…. “.

Inglourious Basterds is in many ways a typical Tarantino. If you don’t like Tarantino, you will probably not like this. It has graphic elements and there are a few moments of shooting gone wild like in any Tarantino. The score is also very Tarantino, although toned down.

The main story of Inglourious Basterds is a retelling of the end of WWII. It’s purely fictionalized and far from historically accurate.

We have different story lines that are all interwoven.

The Basterds are a group of American soldiers led by Lt Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), many of them of Jewish or German origin. They are dropped in Nazi-occupied France to hunt and kill Germans. They either club them to death or take their scalps. Brad Pitt is extremely good in the role of Tennessee-born tough-guy Raine who shows no mercy when it comes to Nazis.

Another story line starts with “the Jew hunter” Col Landa (Christoph Waltz) whom we meet when he is exterminating a family of Jews. One of the daughters, Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent) manages to escape. Landa is maybe one of the most annoying film characters ever.

The different story lines come together when Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), a German war hero, meets Shosanna aka Emanuelle in Paris where she meanwhile owns a cinema. He plays himself in a movie about his exploits that has been  financed by Goebbels. He tries to convince Shosanna to have the opening in her cinema. It will be an event that the whole of the German high command, including Hitler, will attend.

Many people hear of this event, among them the Basterds. This unique opportunity to have the most important Germans together in one location for an evening gives more than just one group ideas.

At the end all the different storylines come together for an ultimate typically Tarantino finale.

As far as war movies go, this was quite entertaining but not exactly my thing. As far as Tarantino movies go, it could be one of his best. I did like a few elements but was surprised that there are so many scenes that come across like theater scenes and found them actually very boring. Despite the boring elements, it offers strong pictures, some really good ideas and the genre blend is interesting. It is not a movie I liked but I would highly recommend it as it is an original addition to the genre. Tarantino fans will watch it anyway, I guess. There is one thing I really enjoyed and that is how accents were handled. One of the rare movies in which this was handled with perfection. Most of the German actors (they are all internationally acclaimed), are either bilingual or very strong in English which was an asset.

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U-571 (2000) US Sub on a Secret Mission

If you are a fan of the war movie  sub-genre U-Boot and submarine movies then you might consider watching U-571. It’s not great, it’s not innovative, it’s corny at times but it’s decent and gripping enough – despite an anti-climax towards the end – and offers two hours of entertainment. The cast is well-chosen (Bill Paxton, Matthew McConaughey, Harvey Keitel, Thomas Kretschmann, Jon Bon Jovi), the story is somewhat stretched in its plausibility but not totally far-fetched either.

The American submarine U-571 is sent on a secret mission to capture the Enigma machine on a German submarine. They will achieve this by diguising the boat and the crew as German.

While the initial part of the mission works out – they get on the boat – , they are not able to return to their own sub and have to stay on the German boat that has been damaged badly before. There are not many survivors of the German crew apart from the character played by Thomas Kretschmann. Kretschmann is one of those actors who will always be casted in a newer war movie in which there is need for a cool-looking, blond German. He is the prototypical Aryan-looking German soldier, so to speak. I’m generally very fond of him but this isn’t his best role.

Of course all kinds of other submarines will start to chase the U-571 while the boat gets more and more damaged. All the cliché elements of the subgenre are present, waiting for being hit, diving too deep, water leaking in.

Now the truth is that there were far more British missions of this kind during WWII than American ones and the episode shown in the movie is purely fictional. Fact is that Germany sunk far over 1000 Allied ships in 1941 and almost achieved a total blockade of Great Britain. The same year a British crew managed to board a German U-Boot and captured the so-called Enigma machine. The Enigma machine (more of it can be seen in the movie Enigma) was a machine that encrypted messages between the German U-Boots and their high command. Capturing the machine led to a significant breakthrough in decoding messages. But all this is history and little of it can be seen in this movie.

All in all this is a movie for fans of the subgenre and of some of the actors and is decidely more of an action than a war movie.

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Saints and Soldiers (2003) War Movie With A Religious Theme

Saints and Soldiers is loosely based on a true story, the Malmedy massacre. During The Battle of the Bulge, in 1944, a group of American soldiers got captured and subsequently massacred by Germans near Malmédy. The movie starts with the massacre and follows four of the men who manage to escape and are now deep behind enemy lines.

It’s a group of four very different men, one of them very religious. On their way back to their lines they save a British pilot who says that he has important information for the high command.

It is the middle of winter, the snow is high, the forest swarming with German troops and they are constantly in great danger. One of them, Deacon, the religious one, cannot sleep anymore. He has accidentally killed civilians, women and children and cannot forgive himself. He will have plenty of possibilities to atone, don’t worry, or the movie wouldn’t be called Saints and Soldiers.

Now if there is one thing that needs to be handled with care it is the blending of war and religion or let’s say war and Christian faith. There are religious or rather very spiritual undertones in The Thin Red Line but they are not Christian. Platoon got away with it but let’s face it, Platoon is one of a kind. A Midnight Clear, that is very similar to Saints and Soldiers, overdid it and this movie overdid it too.

Something I found insufferable was the pseudo-Brit. They really couldn’t find a British actor for that role? They had to take an American one who is supposedly good at accents? Well, he is not, he sucks.

This is too bad because from a purely cinematographic point of view this movie is beautiful. There are a few haunting images of the snow-covered forest and the story had, despite many clichés (a beautiful and helpful French woman, a German who is good although they are all monsters, some Germans that are monsters, many more Germans who are monsters) a lot of potential. I have a special interest in the Battle of the Bulge and the Battle of Bastogne (brilliantly shown in Band of Brothers) but we don’t see much of this. This is really only the adventurous story of a few men who had to cross enemy territory and find back to their line.

Despite all this I think it does deserve 3/5.