The Dam Busters (1955) - film review

In 1942, at the height of WWII, aircraft engineer Barnes Wallis has become obsessed with the idea of flooding the Ruhr valley by a single bombing raid on its dams.  If this could be achieved it would inflict a palpable blow on the Nazis, wiping out an entire industrial complex at a single stroke.   Despite the scepticism of his superiors, Wallis perseveres and develops a bomb that can bounce across the surface of the water, thereby avoiding torpedo nets, and explode on impact with the wall of the dam.  When Barnes’s trials prove successful, the war office authorises the project to go ahead.  The man who is assigned to lead the mission is R.A.F. Wing Commander Guy Gibson, who immediately begins to assemble a squadron of men whom he trains without yet knowing the intended target.  Many technical problems still have to be solved, however.  The aircraft have to fly at a very low altitude, but at this level the existing altimeters are unreliable.  The bombs have to be dropped at a precise distance from the dam, so the crews needs to know when to drop the bomb.  And the bomb casing must be strong enough to withstand the impact when it hits the water.   Wallis is confident that these obstacles can be overcome.  If not, the mission is doomed to failure...

A remarkable film that tells a remarkable story.  The Dam Busters is quite possibly the best loved of British war films, offering both a gripping account of a fascinating war time exploit and a theme that, once heard, you will end up humming for the rest of your life.  The film and the story it tells are quintessentially British – who but a Briton could rig up an altimeter from a pair of spotlights and make a bombsight from what looks like bits of an old coat hanger?   The theme is so well known that it has become a surrogate national anthem, and quite frankly most people in Britain would rather hum a few up uplifting bars of "daaa da da, da da-da da da" like a jingoistic Morse code transmitter than intone "God save our gracious Queen/King" to the tune of what sounds like a death march.  

Yet The Dam Busters is not a war film in the traditional sense.  There are no battles, we don’t see the enemy, indeed there is hardly any sense that a war is taking place.  It is fair to say that this is not so much a war film as a celebration of those virtues – initiative, courage and resolve – which allowed Britain and her allies to win the war against Fascism.  This is how the British people like to think of themselves – brave, resilient and resourceful, but on an amazingly low budget.

Hard as it may seem at times, The Dam Busters is a pretty accurate account of the true story which Guy Gibson relates in his book Enemy Coast Ahead.  Playing Gibson in the film is Richard Todd, who had himself seen active service during WWII, being one of the first British officers to land in Normandy on D-Day.  As in his other war films, Todd’s military background allows the actor to bring a natural authority and realism to his performance, but he also shows us a more fragile, human side in the film’s quieter moments.  Equally, Michael Redgrave is well chosen for the part of Barnes Wallis, portraying him as a complex man who, whilst committed to his work, was deeply troubled by its consequences.   That 56 men died during the dam buster raid is something that distressed Wallis greatly, and Redgrave conveys this very succinctly, and with great poignancy, in the last scene of the film.  

It is interesting to compare The Dam Busters with the kind of war films that had been made in the previous decade.  During the Second World War, most, if not all, British war films had an obvious propaganda dimension, so there was always an unequivocal anti-German, pro-British slant.  Characters were often portrayed as caricatures: the British as courageous salt of the Earth types who always did the decent thing, the Nazis as soulless gun-toting villains who hadn’t even heard of the Queensbury Rules.  The war films of the 1950s gave a more balanced and accurate view of things and were less drum beating melodrama and more realistic docudrama.  

One thing that these later war films did not shy away from was the human cost of the war – on both sides.  It is interesting that The Dam Busters ends not with a jingoistic flourish of self-congratulation (of the kind that still featured in American war films) but with a solemn meander through the now empty dormatories of the men who had not returned from the bombing raid.  The British filmmakers had the right idea – this was a time not to celebrate the victory that had been won but to reflect on the enormity of the sacrifice which that victory had demanded.  The message was simple: this must never happen again.

A remake of The Dam Busters is currently in preparation, with the actor-writer Stephen Fry working on the screenplay.  This film is likely to be released in 2011, unless it gets – er – torpedoed.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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