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ACTOR
Richard ToddMichael RedgraveUrsula JeansBasil Sydney
DIRECTOR
Michael Anderson
SYNOPSICS
The Dam Busters (1955) is a English movie. Michael Anderson has directed this movie. Richard Todd,Michael Redgrave,Ursula Jeans,Basil Sydney are the starring of this movie. It was released in 1955. The Dam Busters (1955) is considered one of the best Drama,History,War movie in India and around the world.
The British are desperate to shorten the length of World War II and propose a daring raid to smash Germany's industrial heart. At first, the objective looks impossible until a British scientist invents an ingenious weapon capable of destroying the planned target.
Same Actors
The Dam Busters (1955) Reviews
One of the great British war movies
Now that everyone has taken their shots at this magnificent movie, just a couple of comments about it to help put it into context. A) No we didn't see Russian prisoners of war trying to flee for their lives and drowning. We didn't in fact see anybody drowning. But this is war and people die in wars, it's the nature of the beast. B) Seen in its current setting, especially in North America, the use of the name Nigger for the Black Labrador may seem upsetting and racist, explaining why that section of the movie is left out sometimes. But back in Britain in those days, it would not have been regarded as so nasty and derogatory as it now seems here. It was actually a fair common name for Black Labs at the time - though not any more of course. C) Nope, the movie isn't entirely accurate in all aspects - many years after I first saw it back in the UK, a bomber pilot from those days told me that they used not a Lancaster but I think a Halifax to plough into the ground. D) Maybe it did glorify Guy Gibson, but he earned that Victoria Cross, if I recall, for all his diversionary flights to draw off the flak from the other aircraft, who must have felt like sitting ducks the way they had to drop every bomb at precisely the same spot and height, very low over the water. If the movie gives him credit for thinking up the overlapping spotlights, we can take that as artistic licence. Finally, anything which slowed down the German war machine was crucial to Britain. This movie did its best with hardly-developed special effects and produced an exciting and fine picture, made still during the days of rationing in England. I know because I was there at the time. I was just six when this movie was made in 1954 but it's still a real favorite of mine, not least because we were living on the shores of Lake Windermere, England's largest lake, in the English Lake District at the time, and they flew right in over our house for about six weeks that summer to film some parts of it. Remember the scene where after one of the practice runs, they were picking bits of tree out of the undercarriage of one of the aircraft? My father always used to remind that they clipped one of our trees in the filming one day and he used to claim that those bits of branch and foliage actually came from our tree. I guess they probably didn't really and they faked it a bit for the movie, adding that bit of dialogue into the script after the incident because it showed how low they flew. Quite why they showed it in the landing gear I'm not sure, because of course they wouldn't have been flying with their landing gear down, but it is effective in showing how low they flew both in the raid and in the filming. I've always loved this movie though - it's a beaut, as they say - not least because I grew up with Black Labradors. I wept like a baby when Nigger died. Have just watched it for about the zillionth time - have literally lost count. It's still a fine and fitting tribute to the men who gave their lives in the raid all those years ago.
The force of understatement
***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** Ten years after the Second World War ended, the British film business had covered most theatres and many episodes of derring-do. But the bomber offensive against Germany presented a problem. On the one hand, it was a huge and daring venture, more costly of life than almost any other. But even before the war ended "area" or "carpet" bombing had been denounced, within Britain as well as by Dr Goebbels, as a callous terrorisation of civilians. Thousands had burned or suffocated in Hamburg and Dresden. How to make celluloid heroics out of that? The solution was to depict a strategic shift from blanket to pinpoint bombing: the raid on the three key Ruhr dams. Historians have disagreed about its effects on Nazi Germany's war effort; after all, Albert Speer's astonishing improvisations kept industry churning out weapons until 1945. However, the heavy new Lancasters which breached the dams using Dr Barnes Wallis's revolutionary bouncing bombs struck an almighty blow against Germany's prestige and morale: comparable only with the A-bombs on Japan, impressing the rest of the world and encouraging the British while we waited for America to augment our land and sea forces for the liberation of Europe. The film's screenplay by RC "Journey's End" Sheriff is a model of direct, purposeful exposition. We go from A to Z with no sidetracks, no "balancing" subplots or obtruded light relief. When posters complain that today's big budget films are let down by inept storytelling, this is the skill they are missing. Special effects are sometimes hokey, more suited to a cartoon than live-action, but it matters little: the film is not for little boys playing video games. It is among the most mature and memorable pictures of reluctant warrior-dom. "The Dam Busters" conveys the dogged skill of Bomber Command pilots who flew hundreds of miles at zero height, below radar cover, to deliver their payloads with fantastic exactitude. Eight "Lancs" and 56 men did not return. But most of the film is about the delays, false trails and frustrations Wallis endured trying to make the bombs bounce and the bureaucrats and brasshats okay the project. Had the film's tyro director, Michael Anderson, seen Powell and Pressburger's "The Small Back Room", released five years before? Wallis's disconsolate trail through the committee rooms of total war, his dogged faith in his concept, and the young Guy Gibson's patient nursing of 617 Squadron into a finely honed instrument for delivering the triple punch unfold in concise scenes, carefully paced and reeking of the atmosphere of quiet suspense between 1940 and 1944. The film is yet another beneficiary of the low-key, documentarist spirit which continued to infuse British fiction films long after John Grierson had migrated to Canada. Some American viewers may well feel exasperated by its downbeat quality. Nothing about the girls the pilots left behind. No evil Spielbergian Nazis- the enemy is barely mentioned and hardly seen except for a few figures fleeing the floods. It is as if the Royal Air Force is fighting Nature. No big speeches about saving Democracy, no invocations of service tradition: the RAF was barely 20 years old, though it was the world's first independent air force. Not even much jolly banter in the mess, and no dogfights in the skies either. Just a bunch of "types" thrown together by the need to get a tough mission over and done with. There is even a moment where Bomber Command's chief, Sir Arthur Harris (Basil Sydney), who was still very much alive and kicking, is implicitly criticised. Wallis recalls how the Luftwaffe wrongly thought London could be blitzed into ruins, hinting that the British are now making the same blunder about Germany. Typical of Anderson's throwaway approach is the scuffle in the mess between 617's members and other pilots who jovially accuse them of shirking. As soon as the fight breaks out, he cuts away to Gibson saying that he must get his boys settled down. After the raid, the camera roams round the deserted sleeping quarters of the men who didn't come back. It is more cinematic to show symbols of fear and loss than to chatter about these emotions; here the British stiff upper lip, the equivalent of the grace under pressure which the anglophile Hemingway looked for in Americans, works in the service of visual communication. Redgrave likewise shows his character more than he talks. His body language evokes the boffin who is better at thought than speech. He fiddles with his spectacles, shambles around with an unmartial gait, bunched up with his arms pressed to his sides as if pinioned by frustration. When the bomb finally bounces, he says nothing but flings his arms aloft for once. He utters mildly, donnishly, and at moments of maximum feeling he cannot speak at all. His performance is all of a piece: the best movie work by one who in other roles often looked unsuitably stiff on screen. The airplanes are posted "missing" on a blackboard; a BBC radio announcer with only a hint of triumph tells of the raid's success and cost. Wallis and Gibson exchange awkward congratulations, tinged with remorse, in the justly famous final scene. "The flak was bad, worse than I expected" says Gibson, beginning to apologise for his triumph as soon as he lands. Perhaps only a Brit, soaked in the mythology of honourable defeats such as Dunkirk and Coruna, can understand such understatement. We are superstitiously afraid to gloat over victories, as Orwell noted. Eric Coates's splendid march is played in full only at this finale, as if to reward the audience for understanding why the chief protagonists' hearts are too full for rhetoric. And even then the string-based orchestration sounds sober and slightly plaintive, not jaunty like Sousa or Miller, or bombastic like a German brass band. In the spirit of economy which guides "The Dam Busters", no real life sequelae are given over the credits. "Gibby" was killed on a sortie after receiving the Victoria Cross (Britain's equivalent of the CMH) and publishing a guarded memoir, "Enemy Coast Ahead". Wallis was knighted and hailed, but Harris was insulted at the war's end by being denied a peerage- unlike Fighter Command's Dowding, winner of the Battle of Britain. Harris was also refused permission to issue a final despatch on his campaign. For the rest of his days he resented the slight on "my bomber boys", of whom 50,000 died. Like Wallis he lived into his tenth decade, old enough to see Speer confirm in his autobiography that area bombing had indeed devastated the Nazi war effort. War can be cruel even after it is over. But a statue of Harris now stands opposite Dowding's outside the RAF Church. Two footnotes: (1) Flt Lt Edward Johnson- at 31 one of the oldest men on the raid- died aged 90 on October 1. He invented the simple Johnson Sight for aiming as shown in the film. (2) The Germans were impressed enough to invent a smaller rocket-propelled bouncing bomb, codenamed "Kurt", which was never used in anger.
Some Dam fine flying
Just like to respond to Howard Morley's comments. The dam's raids were urgently needed, and it took only a few months to form 617, train them and attack the dams. Quite a feat I'm sure you'll agree. The film nicely conveys the struggles and the friendships of the crews, put together from the best of the Commonwealth fliers. Even if the screenplay does take some rather large liberties with the story. As to Guy, he was killed in 1944 on his way back from acting as Master Bomber on a raid over Germany. His Mosquito crashed in Holland, killing him and his navigator. To this day there are no explanations for the crash. Guy should not have been flying at all, but he was so desperate to get back in the air that Bomber Harris gave in and let him. A tragedy. Of the crew of G-George (Guy's ship on the raid) none of them survived the war. The crew crashed whilst trying to bomb the Dortmund-Ems canal later in 1943. The film is a fitting tribute to the raid, and the massive losses of 617. Of the 19 ships to go out, 11 came back. Of the 77 crew lost on the raid, only 1 survived. This is why the dams were not bombed again. And the problem with the Sorpe was that it was an earth damn, the bombs were not very effective as with the Eder and Moehne. How do I know all this? My Great-grandmother was a Gibson. Watch the film and marvel.
Classic Untouchable War Film
The Dambusters is a true story in which the men of 617 Squadron (originally Squadron X) are sent to bomb three key dams in the Ruhr Valley with the famous bouncing bomb. The film shows the young bomber crews training and eventually the mission itself. Many people have said that this raid was a waste of human life and resources but war IS a waste of human life and resources and these men gave the UK a boost in morale and made the Germans realize we weren't beat yet. Apparently Mel Gibson wanted to recreate this movie some years ago but did not get the backing of the MoD,the BBMF or 617 Squadron. With fantastic performances from Richard Todd as Guy Gibson and Michael Redgrave as Barnes Wallis this is a classic film.
Tally-Ho!(etc.)
By God, this is as definitive as a war film gets. It's on every year, and is as much a part of Christmas as getting drunk and Monopoly. Everyone in this Sceptred isle knows the theme to Dam Busters, and it causes more people to stand up and salute than God Save The Queen. It has moustachioed R.A.F boys, politely bespectacled scientists, laughable special effects, and an entirely predictable ending. It's a British institution, and I don't know where we'd be without it. You can keep your devolution and your New Labour, I've got Dam Busters and I'm not bloody budging.