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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 author is on much stronger ground in his three-to-four-page analyses of major war movies. For instance, his accounts of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The Best Years of Our Lives, The Cruel Sea, and The Bridge on the River Kwai make fascinating reading. His insights into combat in Fury or Enemy at the Gates, and his account of life under occupation in Hiroshima Mon Amour, are very much worth reading.
Also, he has an excellent chapter on Vietnam. This covers not only the well-known movies but underacknowledged classics like La 317ème Section (which the historian Antony Beevor called ‘the greatest war film ever made’). He analyses the absurdity of 59-year-old John Wayne in The Green Berets, and then the long gap as America grappled with understanding the meaning of failure in Vietnam. Then come The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, and Platoon – powerful movies concerning American struggles in which the Vietnamese provide a backdrop but rarely appear. It’s not until Ken Burns makes his 10-episode, 17-hour television epic The Vietnam War in 2017 that we find the first honest and open representation of the Vietnamese perspective, from both North and South, alongside the American record. Many Americans accused it of being far too long.
Thomson is surely right when he says that war movies tend to be expensive, as battle scenes cost a lot to pull off effectively, even using large dollops of CGI. They also have to be exciting, in order to attract an audience big enough to cover their costs. But that’s not to say they cannot be informative, emotionally powerful, humane, and intelligent as well.
The Fatal Alliance: A century of war on film
David Thomson
Harper, hbk, 448pp (£30)
ISBN 978-0063041417
