Funmurphys: the Blog

Battle of Britain

I had a good Christmas, very relaxing, and I hope you had a good one too - or if you don't celebrate Christmas, then I hope you had a good holiday. One of the gifts I received was The Battle of Britain which is one of the great air combat & historical movies. Some of the special effects are cheesy -- they couldn't do flak worth a darn -- but the aerial combat scenes are first rate. And the movie took great care with historical accuracy - something that seems to have gone completely out of style in Hollywood these days (the movie is British) - right down to hiring German actors to play Germans speaking german with subtitles instead of speaking english with a heavy german accent. It even continued the tradition of the pointless romantic subplot in a war movie with Susanna York and Christopher Plummer as husband and wife torn apart by the war. It has one of the great montage scences from the dawn of the montage era towards the end that captures the nerve racking terror of massive aerial combat. It's interesting that it does a good job of capturing the horror of war, does justice to both the British and the Germans involved, but clearly isn't an anti-war movie.