Steve McQueen finds the key of C major for this well made and unashamedly old-fashioned wartime adventure, heartfelt and rousing and – yes – a bit trad overall, sometimes even channelling the spirit of Lionel Jeffries’s The Railway Children, although for me that’s no put-down.
This is a film about the blitz of 1940 which tries to restate the accepted imagery, the dramatic stock footage and familiar ideas but also absorb revisionist approaches – themselves increasingly accepted nowadays: it evokes the way that the British wartime authorities reverently invoked the loyalty of empire and Commonwealth but maintained a casually racist attitude to actual people of colour.
The cheerful obedience of the London East End working class was sentimentally taken for granted and yet they were not widely or promptly allowed to shelter in the underground stations and their safety was overlooked once down there. Then there is the grisly and commonplace history – not widely acknowledged until recently – of looting and corpse-robbing in the ruins. And for these macabre, neo-Dickensian scenes, Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke come very close to stealing the whole film; their gargoyle faces are like something from a nightmare-melodrama, and in another mood, another genre, another career-phase, McQueen might have given a freer rein and greater importance to these people’s inner world of evil and fear.
