Film Review
Given that France's own involvement in its liberation from the Nazis is
now easily overlooked it is perhaps surprising that the first film to
reference the Allied invasion of Normandy is a French film that
celebrates this very fact.
D-Day might have gone
very differently if it hadn't been
for the efforts of the French parachutists in the Special Air Service,
who played a crucial role in impeding the German troops whilst the
Allies made ready to seize France's northern extremity.
Le Bataillon du ciel faithfully
records the heroic exploits of a parachute regiment that sustained a
staggeringly high casualty rate on the eve of D-Day, and in doing so
helps to set the record straight regarding France's participation in
its liberation.
Le Bataillon du ciel was
filmed immediately after the war but wasn't screened in France until
the spring of 1947. It was the most eagerly anticipated French
film of the year and proved to be a phenomenal success. With its
audience in France of 8.6 million, it was the most successful French
film ever made up until this time - although this appears modest
compared with the 11.9 million that Darryl F. Zanuck's
The
Longest Day would attract in 1962. Whilst it had
nothing like the resources Zanuck was able to lavish on his overblown
blockbuster,
Le Bataillon du ciel
is still a highly respectable war film, easily one of the best to have
been made in France.
The film was directed by the Hungarian born director Alexander Esway,
who had previously co-scripted another well-known war film, Tay
Garnett's
The Cross of Lorraine
(1943).
It's an unusually ambitious film for Esway, who is
better known for his lowbrow comedies, including his popular Fernandel
vehicles
Hercule (1938) and
Barnabé
(1939).
Le
Bataillon du ciel is by far the most impressive film that Esway
directed, and this it owes at least in part to a doggedly realist
screenplay by Joseph Kessel, who was involved in the events depicted in
the film. The film is also impressively cast, with two
lead actors - Pierre Blanchar and René
Lefèvre - who were actively involved in the French Resistance
during the Occupation. Bernard Borderie and Robert Darène
both worked as assistants on this film, shortly before embarking
on their own film directing careers.
Running to just over two and a half hours, the film divides neatly into
two halves that were originally screened separately (presumably in an
attempt to recoup the film's enormous production cost). The first
half, titled
Ce ne sont pas des anges,
focuses on the intense programme of training which the parachutists
undertook in England ahead of their drop into Nazi-occupied
Brittany. Even though it is overlong and somewhat repetitive
(the screenwriters clearly had their work cut out trying to stretch this out to 76
minutes), this first part of the film gives us time to become
acquainted with the handful of favoured protagonists, so that the
second half has greater impact and poignancy. The monotonity of
the training exercises is relieved by some unexpected humour (the
highlight being a scene in which an embarrassed officer attempts to
give the parachutists a sex education class in, of all places, a girls'
school). The mood may be lighter in this first part of the film
but there is a hint of the horrors that lie ahead when a fatality
occurs during a routine training exercise.
After this languorous, and mostly superfluous intro, the pace of the
film picks up with a vengeance in its gripping second half, entitled
Terre de France. Once the
parachutists have landed on home soil, there is scarcely a dull moment
as they link up with the local Resistance and go on the
offensive. The action scenes are impressively staged and there is
no shortage of nerve-wracking tension. After the light-hearted
prelude, the film's second half feels unremittingly bleak and it is
shocking how grim it gets with its graphic depictions of firing squads,
torture and general brutality. Lacking the strained romanticism
that tended to creep into most American war films of this era,
Le Bataillon du ciel is
blisteringly modern and honest in its portrayal of the barbarism of
war, and it is only in its last few minutes that the abject bleakness
is overturned with a respectful coda set in the aftermath of the
Normandy landings. Although the film does not dwell on it for
long, we can hardly fail to be struck by the enormity of the sacrifice
made by those steel-willed parachutists, without whom the liberation of
France might have been a far longer and bloodier affair.
© James Travers 2015
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