The films about the possible end of human life that we are being asked to watch now (October 29 and 30 posts) are divertissements compared with the docudrama that I was made to watch at school in 1968 or ’69.
Peter Watkins’s The War Game (UK, 1965) was intended for the BBC, but “The effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting.”
The final passage must be the bleakest ever filmed. More below.
The War Game had been scheduled for transmission on August 6 1966, the anniversary of the Hiroshima attack. The BBC decided in November 1965 not to show it. Watkins asked it to allow a limited release in cinemas. This compromise was approved in March 1966. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament arranged many of the early screenings in the UK, and the film was seen on US college campuses in 1966 and ’67. It represented the UK in the 1966 Venice Film Festival and won an Academy Award in the same year. The BBC did not show it until 1985.
Watkins left Britain soon after making The War Game. He has been forgotten there and now lives in Sweden. Wikipedia links are at the top of this post. Here is his website.
The BBC retains all rights to the film, wherever shown. Consequently, these YouTube clips may not survive for long.
The scenario.
The US authorises tactical nuclear warfare against the Chinese, who have invaded American-occupied South Vietnam. Russia and East Germany threaten to invade West Berlin if the US does not withdraw that decision. The US does not acquiesce. Two US Army divisions attempt to fight their way into East Berlin, but the Russian and East German forces defeat them. The US launches a pre-emptive, NATO tactical nuclear attack on the eastern bloc. We are not told on what targets. Russian missiles strike Britain.
The story’s centre is Rochester in Kent, which is struck by an off-target missile aimed at Heathrow airport. Other targets mentioned are RAF Manston and the Maidstone barracks. The credits at the end tell us that much of the film was based on information obtained from the bombings of Dresden, Darmstadt, Hamburg, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and from the 1954 Nevada Desert nuclear tests.
The film contains a quotation from Stephen Vincent Benét’s poem Song for Three Soldiers:
“Oh, where are you coming from, soldier, gaunt soldier,
With weapons beyond any reach of my mind,
With weapons so deadly the world must grow older
And die in its tracks, if it does not turn kind?”(It was a line of Benet’s poetry that gave the title to Dee Brown’s history of the destruction of Native American tribes by the United States, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.)
The other anti-war film we were shown in the same school hall at roughly the same time was Joseph Losey’s King and Country (UK, 1964).
Watkins
November 2, 2009 at 8:30 pm
The English are shown as singularly charmless (and ugly) in the early sequences. The list of food rations in the third clip reminds one of the old British diet: “Two ounces of butter and half a pound of margarine, two ounces of tea, a quarter pound of sugar, two eggs, half a pint of milk when available, a quarter pound of meat, two loaves of bread, a pound of potatoes when available and two ounces of bacon.” I can almost smell it.
The film doesn’t so much mock officialdom in the ’60s style as seek to show that all official contingency plans are futile in the face of a nuclear attack.
November 4, 2009 at 5:25 pm
I suppose this is the best war film ever made, along with The Battle of Algiers.
November 11, 2009 at 8:36 pm
[...] The War Game [...]