I happened to catch the ending of this series on TV when it was aired in the 90s. That is powerful and I always wanted to see the whole thing. Finally I got the 2-disc series from Netflix. The production values are high, but the beginning totally turned me off: it opens with a young soldier being seduced for fun in a bar (in a way that doesn't help define the characters of him or his buddies in any depth) and then goes on to some blarney in a bathtub made for the movies (with a degree of realism that was hardly portrayed in real movies back then: it is just meant to shock the modern viewer early on and set them up for the ending). I hung in there despite all this, but they totally lost me when they showed the two soldiers stealing food during Churchill's speech and the glib justification for crime the one soldier gave; nonsense. This is all modern stuff--the emphasis on sex, the cynicism, the foolery; they didn't seem interested in portraying the real times and mores of the people back then, so I just took the disc out and watched something else.
Dieppe
(1993 TV Movie)
Pretty, but not necessarily accurate re: the people
6 October 2009
Warning: Spoilers