REVIEW BY TAYLOR DOWNING
Film critic David Thomson grew up in south London in the late 1940s and ’50s on a diet of British war films. He has since moved to San Francisco, and has written 30 books about cinema, but The Fatal Alliance is his first book about war movies.
It is a rambling book, with no chronological thread, and it jumps from one film to another. There are loose themes to the chapters, and Thomson asks some important questions. Is courage always pretentious in war films? What is the connection between sexuality and shooting? Are all war movies made by the winners? But I disagree with him when he says it’s impossible to come to terms with the horror of war by watching a movie because we, the viewers, are always in a safe, dark space. It is the great power of film to suck the viewer into the emotional experience of what you are watching. You don’t need a projectionist to fire a real machine-gun over your head in the cinema to feel a sense of fear when watching the opening 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan, or to feel the jeopardy of being isolated on the streets of Mogadishu in Black Hawk Down.
There is also an extraordinary howler in the book. Much of the first section deals with the First World War, specifically the Battle of the Somme. Thomson asks the reader to imagine a film being made on the first day, 1 July 1916, and asks: how long would the war have lasted had such a film been shown? Has he not seen one the most important war films ever made, The Battle of the Somme, in which two cameramen, Geoffrey Malins and J B McDowell, filmed extensively on that day and the days following? The 75-minute feature was in the cinemas by the following month, attracting enormous crowds and immense interest. It has been estimated that over the following year nearly half the British population saw the film, with its footage of troops preparing to go over the top and the consequences of that first day. Were there riots in the streets of Sheffield or Manchester demanding peace? No. The war carried on for another two years. Remarkably, Thomson doesn’t seem to be aware of this important early war film.
The Princess of Khok Phanom Di