When I heard Danny Dyer say they were trying to recreate an old-school British war film with Age of Heroes I was sceptical to say the least. Even the title seemed too syrupy.
The key to the success of our classic war pictures is their sheer simplicity – films with names like The Cruel Sea and Went the Day Well? drew on simple plots and simple settings. Now, with directors able to call on the previously impossible effects of CGI, the temptation to go large must be over-whelming and in doing so that magical key might be lost.
It rarely gets simpler than my all-time second favourite Ice Cold in Alex where John Mills leads a small party to safety across the Libyan desert with the promise of an ice-cold Carlsberg as their final reward. That's the plot. And then take Virginia McKenna's under-stated portrayal of heroic SOE agent Violette Szabo in Carve Her Name with Pride, where possibly the biggest expense was the hiring of a war-surplus Lysander aircraft.
I'm not saying big is bad but when we do make them big we tend to make them messy and confused. Struggle through the cast of glitzy characters and the175 minutes of A Bridge Too Far and you start to wish the US Airborne will come and rescue you from the cinema. Obviously, there are exceptions. The five minute single-shot Dunkirk beach scene in Atonement was breath-taking and told the story better than it has ever been told before.
But if the Brits were to make a war film on the scale of Saving Private Ryan we would probably end up with a sickening celebrity fest set in a stately home where everybody has expensive flash-backs to their war gone by.
With a limited budget, Age of Heroes director Adrian Vitoria had to literally call the shots when he found the cost of blank ammunition too expensive.
"How can we compete?" he asks. "The idea for me was we can't really compete as a full-on action movie but maybe we can readdress the idea that the British were involved in the Second World War and because I have a knowledge of that period and British Commando units I thought it would be interesting to portray those units and look at their legacy - which is what we have today in Afghanistan." Danny Dyer, who plays the lovable Cockney hard-nut Corporal Rains, says he loves the film's simplicity. "There's no tricks or gimmicks. It's not Hollywood." But he was staggered to see someone counting every blank he fired. "I thought we're making a f**king war film! But it is what it is and I'm very proud of it."
With a modern take on The Dambusters in the making, more British directors are likely to seek inspiration from our current austerity and add that authentic underdog feel to the kind of films we make best.
These tend to fall into four groups: the propaganda films made during the war – Life and Death of Colonel Blimp a prime example to get us knuckling down to the new concept of Total War.
Those made immediately post-war were invariably based on officers' best-selling memoirs like Douglas Bader's Reach for the Sky or they turned excellent novels like Elleston Trevor's The Big Pick-Up into appallingly pro-Establishment cornballs like Dunkirk. But in the 1960s the tales of ordinary folk began to filter through and along came simplicity itself in The Long and the Short and the Tall and prime examples of the dogged British character with The Password is Courage . Arguably the worst of the bunch came in the 1970s when everything went Technicolor. But some stand out like the high-tension Anglo-American blockbuster The Eagle has Landed.
Director Adrian Vitoria's Age of Heroes passes muster as great British war film. To hold it up against the classics of the past is to ask a lot but it works so well on every level that it slips neatly into my All-Time Top 10.
It also bares more than a passing resemblance to another recent low-budget success. The King's Speech captured a very British sense of time, place and decency, and so does this new post-Crunch take on the British war film. Danny Dyer says the film harks back to a time when ordinary people were called on to do extraordinary things. "That's why I like the title Age of Heroes," he says. "Because that's what it was. It's about spirit and heart. Putting yourself in these situations and having to deal with it."
For my All-Time Top 10 British War Films go to:
http://civilwargb.typepad.com/alanpearce/ @AlanNPearce
The key to the success of our classic war pictures is their sheer simplicity – films with names like The Cruel Sea and Went the Day Well? drew on simple plots and simple settings. Now, with directors able to call on the previously impossible effects of CGI, the temptation to go large must be over-whelming and in doing so that magical key might be lost.
It rarely gets simpler than my all-time second favourite Ice Cold in Alex where John Mills leads a small party to safety across the Libyan desert with the promise of an ice-cold Carlsberg as their final reward. That's the plot. And then take Virginia McKenna's under-stated portrayal of heroic SOE agent Violette Szabo in Carve Her Name with Pride, where possibly the biggest expense was the hiring of a war-surplus Lysander aircraft.
I'm not saying big is bad but when we do make them big we tend to make them messy and confused. Struggle through the cast of glitzy characters and the175 minutes of A Bridge Too Far and you start to wish the US Airborne will come and rescue you from the cinema. Obviously, there are exceptions. The five minute single-shot Dunkirk beach scene in Atonement was breath-taking and told the story better than it has ever been told before.
But if the Brits were to make a war film on the scale of Saving Private Ryan we would probably end up with a sickening celebrity fest set in a stately home where everybody has expensive flash-backs to their war gone by.
With a limited budget, Age of Heroes director Adrian Vitoria had to literally call the shots when he found the cost of blank ammunition too expensive.
"How can we compete?" he asks. "The idea for me was we can't really compete as a full-on action movie but maybe we can readdress the idea that the British were involved in the Second World War and because I have a knowledge of that period and British Commando units I thought it would be interesting to portray those units and look at their legacy - which is what we have today in Afghanistan." Danny Dyer, who plays the lovable Cockney hard-nut Corporal Rains, says he loves the film's simplicity. "There's no tricks or gimmicks. It's not Hollywood." But he was staggered to see someone counting every blank he fired. "I thought we're making a f**king war film! But it is what it is and I'm very proud of it."
With a modern take on The Dambusters in the making, more British directors are likely to seek inspiration from our current austerity and add that authentic underdog feel to the kind of films we make best.
These tend to fall into four groups: the propaganda films made during the war – Life and Death of Colonel Blimp a prime example to get us knuckling down to the new concept of Total War.
Those made immediately post-war were invariably based on officers' best-selling memoirs like Douglas Bader's Reach for the Sky or they turned excellent novels like Elleston Trevor's The Big Pick-Up into appallingly pro-Establishment cornballs like Dunkirk. But in the 1960s the tales of ordinary folk began to filter through and along came simplicity itself in The Long and the Short and the Tall and prime examples of the dogged British character with The Password is Courage . Arguably the worst of the bunch came in the 1970s when everything went Technicolor. But some stand out like the high-tension Anglo-American blockbuster The Eagle has Landed.
Director Adrian Vitoria's Age of Heroes passes muster as great British war film. To hold it up against the classics of the past is to ask a lot but it works so well on every level that it slips neatly into my All-Time Top 10.
It also bares more than a passing resemblance to another recent low-budget success. The King's Speech captured a very British sense of time, place and decency, and so does this new post-Crunch take on the British war film. Danny Dyer says the film harks back to a time when ordinary people were called on to do extraordinary things. "That's why I like the title Age of Heroes," he says. "Because that's what it was. It's about spirit and heart. Putting yourself in these situations and having to deal with it."
For my All-Time Top 10 British War Films go to:
http://civilwargb.typepad.com/alanpearce/ @AlanNPearce