Fleeing Nazi Bombs
British-born director of West Indian immigrants, Steve McQueen has a new film, “Blitz,” set in WW2 London. Since his “12 Years a Slave” won a 2013 Oscar for best picture, he has been one of the world’s most famous directors, and his films have often been reviewed or alluded to on this Hollywood Progressive site.
After viewing the film, I thought of the opening of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
Worst of times? Yes, because in early September 1940 Nazi war planes began bombing London and other British cities. As columnist and military historian Max Hastings tells us, “Between September and mid-November, an average of 200 Luftwaffe aircraft attacked every night save one. In that period...bombs were dropped on London, Bristol, Birmingham, Portsmouth and other major cities.” He quotes one London woman as writing, “The bombs came down in a cluster, close together.”
In Their Finest Hour Winston Churchill (then prime minister) has a chapter entitled “The Blitz’ and he writes, “Never before was so wide an expanse of houses subjected to such bombardment or so many families required to face its problems and its terrors. [One of the German goals] was to break the spirit of the Londoner, or at least render uninhabitable the world’s largest city.” And he adds, “from September 7 to November 3 an average of two hundred German bombers attacked London every night.”
As the opening words of McQueen’s film reveals, “1.25 million people” were “evacuated from bombed cities to safer areas. More than 1/2 are children.” And the film focuses on one of those children, 9-year-old George (Elliott Heffernan). He is the mixed-race child of a white Londoner, Rita (four-time Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan), and Marcus (C. J. Beckford), an immigrant from Grenada, an island country in the Caribbean. But George has never seen his father, who was long ago arrested--though innocent and the victim of a racist attack--and deported. Instead, George lives with his mom and her dad, at least he does so until in September 1940 his mom puts him on a train so he can live a safer existence in a rural area, one not subject to German bombing.
But unable to endure the separation, George jumps off the train an hour or so after it leaves London, and most of the remainder of the film chronicles the adventures he faces making his way back home.
In London itself we see the results of much of the bombing, with explosions, bombed-out buildings, people huddling as they live and sleep in subway stations, and injured or dead people littering the city. Yes, in one sense “the worst of times.”
But we also see people displaying their humanism, their essential decency, and at times even their love of other humans. Thus, in that sense we can also say that “it was the best of times.”
There’s the behavior of Mikey, a very short adult, who gives a speech in a subway station used as a bomb shelter. He says, “We're here for your well-being and to give all equal care, regardless of whoever you are or wherever you come from. . . . I grew up in the East End as a Jew, and in my community, we helped each other. We joined together with good working-class men and women to fight the fascists.” He relates that he’s been called a communist, but that his ”ideals are more closely associated with Christianity than with communism.” His ideals include, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." (All film quotes are taken from the “Blitz” filmscript.)
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There’s also the actions of Ife (who explains that “my people are the Yoruba.
But I grew up in the Gold Coast--now Ghana--and his name means “love”). The African Ife is an air-raid warren who befriends George after he jumps off a train and returns to London. Taking George into a subway shelter as he completes his rounds, he comes across a sort of segregation dispute between a Londoner and his wife who are trying to hang a blanket between them and someone of Asian descent--in London at the time there were some people from “British India.” Ife says, “There is no segregation here. We are all equal members of this country, willing or not. This is exactly what Hitler is doing. Dividing man against man and race against race. We are in a situation of war, banded together, asked to do our absolute best. And I'd like to think...I'd like to think that we step up to the occasion and see our fellow human beings as equals and that we treat each other with compassion.”
And George’s mother, Rita, despite missing her son because she put him on the train to go to a safer place, volunteers at the subway shelter where Mikey gave his speech. She tells him that she’d like to volunteer, offering that she “can make beds, clean floors,” that she doesn’t “mind doing anything.” After Mikey has Rita change the dressing on a little girl’s arm, a girl who apparently lost her mom in a bombing, Rita asks her is she wants a cuddle and then hugs her.
To deal with all the miseries they’re encountering under the relentless German bombing, we see Londoners not only helping each other, but employing other universal coping mechanisms like music and humor.
In one scene, in an underground shelter with the sound of bombs exploding outside, we see people, including Rita and the little girl she’s caring for, singing:
Show me the way to go home.
I'm tired and I wanna go to bed.
I had a little drink about an hour ago
And it's gone right to my head.
Wherever I may roam
On land or sea or foam
You can always hear me singing a song
Show me the way to go home.
That scene reminded me of a similar one, in a similar shelter--but this time during the 900-day siege of Leningrad. A woman there in a bomb shelter that echoed with German bombs exploding outside recalled how an old man got out his violin and played a beautiful melody. She thought that the terror people had been feeling lost its grip, replaced by an “extraordinary sense of belonging.”
Regarding humor, on one occasion when George runs into an underground shelter a puppet show is being put on featuring Punch and Judy, puppet characters that go back more than three centuries in England. There is confusion between the character of Mr. Punch and punching Hitler and those watching the show get a good laugh from the mix up.
“Blitz,” however, contains more than moral lessons about evil and good. There is plenty of tension and the acting is good. It’s not hard to identify with the young boy George and root for him as he faces very obstacles and dangers before finally being reunited with his mother. In one scene, he and a few other boys are sitting on the top of a train car, and we worry about their falling off. Then later for some time, an evil gang forces him to enter bombed-out homes and retrieve valuables, and we wonder how and when he’s ever going to escape its clutches.
Although most of McQueen’s earlier full-length films deal with racism, usually in Britain, his last one (before “Blitz”) also had WW2 as a background. It is based on his Dutch wife Bianca Stigter’s book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945, and his four-hour-plus documentary chronicles the brutal treatment of Amsterdam’s Jewish population during the war. But the film suggests parallels between past and present racism, and in a BBC interview, McQueen comments on some of the present racism and anti-immigrant feelings sweeping through Amsterdam and other European cities.
In that same interview, however, he said, "Love is supreme. I think that's the biggest thing about this film, is a want and need to find love." In words that could be also applied to “Blitz,” he states that his Amsterdam documentary is a testimony to human strength. Or, in his words, "We're so resilient as human beings, and no matter what's put in front of us, we sort of keep on going.”
The opinions expressed here are solely the author's and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the Hollywood Progressive.
