The Dambusters

source: The Dambusters

It's interesting to note the frequent comments about the special effects being poor and letting the film down. This was a British film made just 9 years after the war when Britain was still in the grip of post war austerity. There wasn't a lot of money to chuck at films in those days and this film is no exception. There is an expectation these days for fx to be seamless and when we see old movies like this we are surprised at just how crude the fx can be. I wonder if audiences in 1955 felt the same way? Maybe not. The optical effects were done on some pretty ancient equipment. A 1917 Bell and Howe camera modified for stop frame work using a DC motor and clutch. This was the sort of stuff used in Britain at that period. Whatever we think of the fx now the film was nominated for a Special effect Oscar at the 1955 Oscars. It didn't win, but someone must have thought it pretty good! I do have a somewhat biased view though. My Dad, Ronnie Wass, was the optical effects cameraman.

This movie faithfully follows the actual raid which was carried out. The other remarkable feature is that this movie was made using real aircraft and crews from the RAF, the low flying is incredible. Models are only used during crash sequences. Richard Todd actually met Guy Gibson during the war and he plays him as he remembers his character. The music was a hit during the 50's and 60's and is still popular today, it has even been made into a hymn in the US! The movie ran in the cinemas until well into the 1980's a remarkable 30 years. As a child it inspired me to become a bomber pilot in the RAF and I flew the Vulcan BMk2 and I even tried to emulate the raid over the dams using a modern aircraft with modern aids and still found that trying to keep the speed, height and steadiness they managed under fire as well almost impossible!

I frankly do not understand the low rating of this movie. How could it be bettered? Certainly the explosions at the dams are phony, as indeed are many of the 'landscape' shots. But budgets were budgets in that decade of austerity, and effects were limited by the technology of the day. It was as good as it could have been. This is a movie that takes you through the whole story. We begin with Barnes Wallis grappling over an idea in the garden, firing marbles and employing his children as fielders. Despite the fact that there's a war on, it's so civilised and sublimely innocent. A homely GP pays a house-call and stops for a cup of tea. A woman is content to be a wife and mother and make it her career. Children call their father 'daddy', and go to bed when told. Honest, decent middle-class England, when playing well was more important than winning; does anyone else remember it? Next we see Wallis bouncing off the even bigger dam of official scepticism and bureaucracy. Again, there are wonderful performances and excellent script. When told he wants a Wellington bomber to play with he is asked something to the effect, 'What possible justification could I give to get a bomber allocated to you?' Wallis replies, 'Would it help if you told them I designed it?' Evidently it would. In fact, the plane we mostly see is a mosquito, but let's not dwell on that. Right up until the critical time, Wallis's design struggles against the prohibitive schedule. It's touch and go, and it's nerve-racking. On the other side of the equation we see the development of the special squadron. A hand-picked team is led by Guy Gibson - perfectly played by Richard Todd. They begin low-level flight training. It's worth the price of the movie alone to see those huge, bulldog-muzzled Lancasters cart-wheeling around hills at hedge-clipping altitudes with their four Merlins roaring fit to pop your eardrums. You definitely need a sub-woofer with this one. Gradually the two elements are married together and the fateful night arrives. The huge war-planes stand like sentinels on the airfield. Incidental music is pensive. It's the calm before the storm. We only ever see 3 bombers at any one time and that's probably because even just 10 years after the war they were woefully obsolescent and mostly scrapped. The low-level flights from the pilot and bomb-aimer perspective seem to be entirely authentic. AA guns open up from time to time. 150 or so men coolly set forth to do their duty, knowing that not all will return. We glimpse the tension at bomber command. Hits are scored but the dams remain intact. It looks as if Wallis may have got his sums wrong. Maybe he's a fruitcake after all. Finally we see him encounter Guy Gibson on return. He is grief-stricken at the number of air-crews who have been lost despite 2 of the 3 dams being destroyed. Gibson walks resolutely back to his billet. He has a lot of letters to write. There's nothing missing from either the story or the drama. It's a 2-hour movie that doesn't waste a second. It's also a history lesson; because it accurately portrays all of the social nuances of the day by people who - one way and another - lived through them. This movie simply could not be made in the third millennium. Oh-yes, the bombers and the bangs and the rushing waters could easily be computer-generated, and mighty fine they'd look too. But all of the subtle mannerisms of that age could never be authentically replicated by modern actors no matter how hard they tried. To this extent at least, Redgrave and Todd didn't have to act at all. They were from that age. Every kid should be shown this movie today. It ought to be required viewing at school. It shows what real men and women are and what they did. The theme music should be our national anthem. It's a genuine historical classic, like 'Zulu', or 'A Night To Remember'. And like them; it's a must-see.

It appears that the attack sequences in The Dam Busters were the direct inspiration for the attack on the Death Star in the first Star Wars film. Some of the dialogue is word-for-word, and it is very interesting to watch these two films back to back. Also, in the original edit of the film, the dog's name (a black labrador) was a historically accurate but socially unacceptable "Nigger". One edit changed the spoken word to "Trigger," while another release cut all scenes with the offending word. This was unfortunate, because parts of the plot became unintelligible -- the dog's name was one of the code-words used during the attack.

There is a fundamental difference between British and American war movies of the 1950's and 60's. Where as Hollywoods output tends to have gung-ho heroes gun in each hand, knife in the teeth, winning the war for Uncle Sam and getting the girl to boot, the British war movie tended towards a more factual almost documentary style. Almost as if British cinema was saying 'something of great importance has recently happened, so lets document the facts for future generations lest we forget.' Hence we have films like Dunkirk, Sink The Bismark, Battle of The River Plate and most famously of all The Damn Busters. Coming back to this movie 54 years after it was made and over 60 since the events portrayed this movie can at time seam rather odd. The acting is stilted and dialogue clipped, but this is a stylistic thing rather than bad acting, after all the same style of acting can be witnessed in Ealling Comedies, the proto-hammer horror films and any number of 'The Blue Lamp' type police films. The bulk of the cinematography is also nothing special, being straightforward 'one' or 'two' shots with lighting that can be described as bog standard. However this film really scores on two fronts. Firstly the use of real true to era aircraft (Leased from the RAF who still used Lancasters as trainers at the time) flown by genuine RAF bomber crews and filmed using the various lakes around Cumberland and West Yorkshire where the real 617 squadron trained for the real mission. And secondly it's dogged sticking to historical detail, or at least as much that could be adhered to without breaking the official secrets act!! There is no Pearl Harbour rewriting of history here. What you see is as near as damn it what really happened. Even now the a comparison of the attack as portrayed on film and the most recently published accounts of the raid as released by the British ministry of defence show very few factual flaws. Also it must be born in mind that the early 1950's were not a pleasant time for the UK populous. The nation was still crippled by US war debt, many items were still rationed and the teething pains of the change that would lead to the welfare state and the cultural and economic boom of the 1960's were still cutting deep. So it is hardly surprising that a film showing a heroic and resourceful Britian would strike such a strong chord with its viewers. I must be said some aspects of this film haven't aged well compared to some of the other Brit war flicks of the time ('Battle Of The River Plate' springs to mind), but as a historical document and comment on Britian in the immediate post war era it stands tall as one of the most important films of its time.

I plowed through the most recent 5 user reviews of this movie, burrowing past the recitations of historical minutiae and the quibbles about its 50 year old (un)special effects, and thought to myself that everyone missed the point. Yes, the effects are crude -- the film was made in 19-fricking-54, people! Yes, it gets some of the historical details wrong -- it's entertainment, people! The real point is that it's a fantastic yarn, told with great skill and excitement. When I first saw it (as a teen, before Star Wars) I was glued to the screen. I still am today. And evidently, I'm not alone because in 1977 a certain geeky film maker from Northern California stole a large portion of Dam Busters, mixed in a heapin' helpin' of Hidden Fortress, and peppered it all with a dash of Laurel & Hardy & Flash Gordon, calling it Star Wars. So I'm giving props where props are due. Don't miss this classic.

First of all, it's a pretty darn good depiction of the factual events of Britain's destruction of German hydroelectric dams in WWII, including the sometimes single-handed efforts of Dr. Barnes Wallis, engineer, scientist and visionary, to convince British high command to implement his plan. Second, excellent footage of the AVRO Lancaster, Britain's premier heavy bomber of the war, at times yanking and banking at extreme low level. Third, it's a very good depiction of the combat crews and their emotions before and after the missions. Fourth, it's just a damn good movie, no pun intended. The main plot is to develop a means of destroying the three main dams that power most of Germany's war industry in the Ruhr Valley, and then executing the plan. Sir Michael Redgrave's rendition of Wallis treats the audience to the same enthusiasm, exhaustion, disappointment and triumph that the man himself must have felt. A very interesting part of the movie is when, after finally winning over bureaucratic lethargy and getting his plans for the destruction of the dams approved, he now realizes his pet project will put young men in danger, and many, even possibly all, will die. Richard Todd and a competent cast play the Lanc crews with a minimum of schmaltz. All depictions of the Lancasters are live footage with the exception of the few crash scenes, which are done using miniatures. Legend has it that George Lucas used footage and even duologue from this film for his Star Wars movies. Warning: Todd's character, Wing Commander Gibson, has a black Labrador Retriever named "Nigger." In fact, they use the dog's name as a code word indicating success. Obviously, the word means something much different in the US today. The US version of the movie and the one seen on TV had "Trigger" dubbed in, but the DVD version uses the original duologue. It take a bit getting used to, and may be a distraction for some. Look for future greats Robert Shaw and Patrick McGoohan in bit parts.

Now that everyone has taken their shots at this magnificent movie, just a couple of comments about it to help put it into context. A) No we didn't see Russian prisoners of war trying to flee for their lives and drowning. We didn't in fact see anybody drowning. But this is war and people die in wars, it's the nature of the beast. B) Seen in its current setting, especially in North America, the use of the name Nigger for the Black Labrador may seem upsetting and racist, explaining why that section of the movie is left out sometimes. But back in Britain in those days, it would not have been regarded as so nasty and derogatory as it now seems here. It was actually a fair common name for Black Labs at the time - though not any more of course. C) Nope, the movie isn't entirely accurate in all aspects - many years after I first saw it back in the UK, a bomber pilot from those days told me that they used not a Lancaster but I think a Halifax to plough into the ground. D) Maybe it did glorify Guy Gibson, but he earned that Victoria Cross, if I recall, for all his diversionary flights to draw off the flak from the other aircraft, who must have felt like sitting ducks the way they had to drop every bomb at precisely the same spot and height, very low over the water. If the movie gives him credit for thinking up the overlapping spotlights, we can take that as artistic licence. Finally, anything which slowed down the German war machine was crucial to Britain. This movie did its best with hardly-developed special effects and produced an exciting and fine picture, made still during the days of rationing in England. I know because I was there at the time. I was just six when this movie was made in 1954 but it's still a real favorite of mine, not least because we were living on the shores of Lake Windermere, England's largest lake, in the English Lake District at the time, and they flew right in over our house for about six weeks that summer to film some parts of it. Remember the scene where after one of the practice runs, they were picking bits of tree out of the undercarriage of one of the aircraft? My father always used to remind that they clipped one of our trees in the filming one day and he used to claim that those bits of branch and foliage actually came from our tree. I guess they probably didn't really and they faked it a bit for the movie, adding that bit of dialogue into the script after the incident because it showed how low they flew. Quite why they showed it in the landing gear I'm not sure, because of course they wouldn't have been flying with their landing gear down, but it is effective in showing how low they flew both in the raid and in the filming. I've always loved this movie though - it's a beaut, as they say - not least because I grew up with Black Labradors. I wept like a baby when Nigger died. Have just watched it for about the zillionth time - have literally lost count. It's still a fine and fitting tribute to the men who gave their lives in the raid all those years ago.

Lets make no bones about it, Dambusters is a film stuck in its time - just a look at some of the 'special effects' is enough to prove that, which is a shame, as a bit more care and attention would have at least removed the cringe factor. The editing and direction of some of the film also leaves a lot to be desired at times, the tension should be at level 8 for most of the film and at 11 for the last quarter, but barely manages to get near seven until the last 15 minutes. The lack of focus on individuals (with the exception of Wallis and maybe Gibson) is also a bit of a problem - who is who during the raid? The switching from Lancaster to Lancaster is pointless unless the viewer has at least some idea of who is in it! I'm not asking for awful Hollywood character-driven filming, just a little more focus. There are some good points though, especially Redgraves cracking portrayal of Barnes Wallis and the use of real Lancasters instead of the usual airfix on piece of string. The bombing of the dams is also well executed (except the terrible explosions). The last 15 minutes is pretty good, especially post raid - showing tiredness in every sense of the word. None of the Pearl Harbour histrionics. The dog - well, that was its name. Whether Gibson used the name for its Latin meaning or just plain offensiveness I don't know. But it's historical fact. And it was upper-middle class Britain the 1940's. Take it as a lesson in hindsight rather than a terrible problem. Essentially, this film feels perfunctory - tell the story, put in some FX and finish. If this film was remade lovingly with a director who could keep within history it would be corking, but I doubt in this day and age that will happen. 6