Heads Up- BBC2 tonight 21:00 Saturday 1st Sep.

‘British Film Forever’.

One hour thirty-five minutes discussion on the success of the British War films. Colditz, Dambusters etc.

Mark

And if that’s no good, it’s aeroplane night on Discovery Turbo. Another re-run of ‘Flying Heavy Metal’ beckons…;)

Just out of interest, how long ago did the British film industry actually make a good expensive war film, black and white stuff in the 50’s were appearing every week, and they are still good to watch today

As a matter of interest, the budget of the original Dam Busters film was quoted by the recent book on the filming of that feature as £200,000, which the author equates to around £3.5million in today’s terms – which is peanuts, really. The book claims that an ‘average’ Hollywood budget of the time was around £1million, so around five times what British postwar war films were being made for. Not sure how accurate or meaningful these calculations are, but suggests that even in the fifties, the British film industry typically operated on quite modest funding.

I think ‘Dark Blue World’ was officially a Czech-British collaboration – the producer was British I think – but this was also quite a moderate-budget affair.

Yeah me too, thanks for the reminder!

Ooh, I’ll give this a looky tonight!

Good lad. Thanks

Steve

Just out of interest, how long ago did the British film industry actually make a good expensive war film

Perhaps not all for the cinema but instead some for TV, but Britain has produced some great war films in recent years. Off the top of my head there has been Enigma, Charlotte Gray, Sword of Honour (TV, 2001), All The King’s Men (TV, 1999), yet another version of The Four Feathers, the Hornblower and Sharpe series were excellent too. One I wanted to see but never have found is Two Men Went to War.

Still, I guess you’re wanting to see the war epics that cover an entire battle or war event and not just focus on a personal or fictional story? Perhaps you should wait for Dambusters to be released.

Having watched some of the previous programmes it will be mainly snippets of the films, I have a real problem here as my missus is unlikely to want to watch it and I no longer have room to room TV coverage.
Just out of interest, how long ago did the British film industry actually make a good expensive war film, black and white stuff in the 50’s were appearing every week, and they are still good to watch today, I reckon that the last major production must have been A Bridge Too Far, and that was over 30 years ago, or do we consider Empire of The Sun as it had a mainly British cast and some wonderful flying scenes from Mr Hannah and Co.
Personally, my favourite war film of recent times is Thin Red Line, not much aviation interest, but an amazing film, well presented from some unexpected actors, some very famous, others not.