Reviews

This is an outstanding film about a story I knew nothing about. However, my review is more a review of IMDb and its voting system.

I note that this film has, at the time of writing twenty-two 1 star reviews. Maybe these are genuine but I suspect they are not. For one thing the film has not had many screenings so have as many as twenty-two different people really hated it that much?

Secondly, 1 star films do not get selected for the Toronto Film Festival or for the opening night film for the London Film Festival. The programmers and selectors of these highly regarded festivals are at the top of their game and each year they are offered several thousand films. None of them are going to risk their hard fought reputations on selecting a bad 1-star film.

My feeling is that these 22 people are members of the KKK who hate black people or else they are people who are jealous of the those involved in the production.

Either way IMDb needs to have an algorithm that can deduce whether these people are genuine, or not. Maybe they are and the press reviews so far, which rave about the film, are wrong, but maybe these people are racist bitter bigots who hate the success of others because they themselves are failures and they have nothing better to do in their small sad lives but set up false IMDb accounts and vent their spleen in the only way they can.

Time as they say will tell.

Richard at the Flicks makes a number of interesting points. However I would like to comment on two of them.

The harbour scenes were shot in Charlestown in Cornwall just a few miles from where the two dentists actually sailed. While making the film the elders of the village pointed out that although harbour lights should not be shone at night, their village kept them on during most of the war. There reasoning was that no one had ever bombed them and nobody would. That part of Cornwall was not bombed and was out of way of most German flight paths.

Also from a purely technical point of view if there had been no lighting in that scene the audience would not have been able to see anything.

When King & Cuthbertson actually landed in France there was no enemy along that particular stretch of the coast. This was well documented in newspapers at the time. For the Germans to patrol every bit of Northern France would have taken hundred's of thousands of men, men who could not be spared. The crossing at Cherbourg was long and few at the time thought this would be an area that soldiers would land. (On their return to their boat they did encounter a German officer, as can be seen on the deleted scenes on the DVD).

Also it was 1942. Up to that point the war had not been going well for the British and an invasion of France at that time was not considered feasible both by the Germans and by the British. The Germans were convinced that it was only a matter of time before Britain fell. The British they thought were no threat to the mighty German Army.