The Dam Busters (1954)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Dam Busters (1954) – M. Anderson

Michael Redgrave’s wartime inventor Wallis is hard at work to make a “bouncing” bomb that will destroy well-protected Nazi dams in western Germany – so hard at work that he is obsessed.  But he keeps facing setback after setback.  This isn’t the film I thought I was going to watch but it is intriguing; the bombs are shown as animated black blobs (which turns out to be because even in 1954 their actual design was a state secret).  Eventually, of course, Wallis gets the design right but then it is up to the RAF to learn how to drop these special bombs from a distance of 600m and a height of only 60m.  Guy Gibson (Richard Todd) is chosen to lead the squadron as they train for this difficult task and also come up with some unique methods.  This is a very task-focused agentic movie – little time for character development.  Wallis has a tolerant wife and Gibson has a doting black lab (whose name is the unfortunate N-word –I was shocked but this is the racist UK in 1950s).  As they struggle to get the bomb right and the training runs accurate, time is running out because the bombs need to be dropped when the dams and the moon are both full – on a particular day in May.  And then, the mission is on and, wow, this turns out to be where George Lucas got his ideas for the attack on the Death Star in Star Wars (1977).  The same shots of the squadron members in their planes, the same banter between pilots/crew, and the same difficult shot to make to win.  Not everyone makes it home.  Strangely compelling in its obsession with this one particular goal but also I drifted in some of the many moments of aircraft flying...