Went the Day Well?

While England were winning the test match and the Chinese were impressing the world with their lavish Olympics opening ceremony – doesn’t interest me one iota – the Russians were invading Georgia. (I expect more than a few Americans were taking shelter in their cellars on hearing the news).

It’s a good excuse for aggression against a neighbouring country, isn’t it? Just dish out passports to citizens of a foreign state and then claim to be going in to protect them.

It reminds me of Germany and the Sudetenland in 1938.

That thought brings me to Went the Day Well?, a 1942 Ealing film directed by Cavalcanti. The title is taken from an anonymous poem, which begins:


Went the day well?
We died and never knew.
But, well or ill,
Freedom, we died for you.
Went the day well?

A sleepy English village is surprised to find itself playing host to a company of army sappers. It’s not long before they are revealed as Germans in disguise, there as an advance guard for an imminent German invasion.

Once unmasked they behave with great brutality, but the villagers show enough initiative and no little brutality themselves in fighting back until relief arrives.

The same plot was used in The Eagle Has Landed, the 1976 John Sturges film based on Jack Higgins’ novel. The following link will take you to a pretty full analysis of how the depiction of Germans changed in the years following World War II.

http://www.britmovie.net/britforum/best-british/3649-went-day-well-1942-eagle-has-landed-1976-a.html

I’m sure it started earlier but offhand the earliest film I recall which showed Germans in a sympathetic light is The Enemy Below (1957), which tells the story of two decent professionals, one American one German, full of respect the one for the other despite their need to kill the other.

In particular it draws a distinction between ‘Germans’ and ‘Nazis’, a dubious distinction used again in The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare, and then of course in The Eagle Has Landed, where the leading German is played by the English national treasure, Michael Caine.

In Went the Day Well? Nazis are Germans, Germans are Nazis, and both are bastards. One even twists a boy’s ear for nosiness. That’s one of the little giveaway signs with which these not-so-efficient Teutonic fifth columnists arouse suspicion.

But, no carping. This is a good film, not just a piece of wartime propaganda and an interesting social document.

Things to enjoy include the intrusion of real war into a sleepy English village, previously for the most part a mere spectator of the conflict; the clever creation of a microcosm of England with such as evacuees, land girls, a sailor on leave; the depiction of class from the lady of the manor to the local poacher; the humorous prejudice shared by English and Germans about the French, and the comment about the Italians – morale’s wot the Italians ain’t got.’

There are parallel stories of betrayal as the woman who increasingly suspects the German charade mirrors that of the traitor whom she had loved. And most of all, in scenes reminiscent of Straw Dogs, there are one or two startling outbursts of horrific violence from the most unlikely characters.

The film, though made in 1942, begins in the future, after the war has been won. The action is a memory, and Hitler has had his come-uppance.

The Germans, probably, learnt their lesson. Not so the Russians.

8 August 2008

After day one of the Oval Test I’m looking forward to being forced to eat my words about Pietersen.

Time for a metaphor: the bitter bread of repentance is sweet when soaked in the honey of success.

It was correct to go with five bowlers, because that is effectively a team of four quicks. Panesar can only be used at the right time or when conditions help him, and for all his qualities, he would be the one to drop if an extra batsman were considered necessary.

What Pietersen rightly did was to tell his five batsmen that, if they did their job right, they were enough, especially when Flintoff, Ambrose and Broad were to follow.

Well, it was a good first day, marred only by Strauss’s early departure. The captain was everywhere, consulting, encouraging and cajoling. He used Panesar judiciously, and effectively. Harmison repaid the trust he’d been shown, Anderson maintained his new-found maturity and Flintoff was Flintoff.

* * *

The Today Programme had a numerologist on this morning. It is the silly season after all. The reason was all this nonsense about the Chinese superstition about the number eight.

Apparently, if you convert the letters of ‘China’ to numbers, you end up with the total ‘8’. Wow! What ‘The People’s Republic of China’ adds up to was not made clear.

What did interest me was the admission that this year is the eighth of the century. So we did celebrate the new millennium a year early after all.

* * *

I saw The Dark Knight, the new Batman film, the other day. Disappointing, I’m afraid, and not the ‘thunderbolt [that would] rip into the blanket of bland we call summer movies’, as Rolling Stone promised.

It was good fun but too long. The action sequences were brilliant but so many and so protracted that they lost their power to thrill.

The reviewers have been impressed by the film’s insertion of a bit of moral philosophising, but it’s all a bit old hat. The dark side of heroism, the linking of hero and villain, the cruelty of fate which can push a good man onto the dark side, the moral choice imposed on ordinary people.

These things were a staple of the Western fifty years ago. Bend of the River, for example, where James Stewart and Arthur Kennedy are two sides of the same coin; High Noon, where the townspeople make the wrong choice, and At Gunpoint where they make the right one; Red River, The Searchers, Lawman, where the heroic lead moves further and deeper into psychosis.

In those films, the moral choices faced are essential to the plot, not tacked to help an action fantasy appeal to would-be intellectuals.

Here's a review that says it better than I can:

http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2008/07/17/dark_knight/index.html

Harriet Harman

If Gordon Brown loses the premiership it will be through sheer carelessness; if in doing so he allows Harriet Harman to take over it will be nothing short of criminal neglect.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1039714/QUENTIN-LETTS-So-Harriet-Harperson-WAS-PM.html

In fact, it may turn out to be Brown’s salvation that that those plotting against Brown will wake up to the fact that they run the risk of allowing Miz Harperson to transfer her posturing to Downing St.

She has denied confiding to an aide that ‘this is my moment’, following Labour’s humiliating defeat in Glasgow East, but I doubt there is anyone who doesn’t believe she thought it.

This is the woman who used the NCCL as the springboard for a political career which was to attack increasingly everything that organisation stands for.

Appointed to the Cabinet in 1997 she failed spectacularly as Secretary of State for Social Security and was sacked. After a short time she was back, holding a series of junior posts, biding her time and never forgetting to parade her feminist credentials, even to the extent of insisting that her children bear her father’s name rather than her husband’s – I’ve never understood the sisterhood’s logic in that. But playing the ‘we oppressed women must stick together’ card always a good way of trumping criticism, almost as useful as being black.

Then she stood for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party, the main plank of her platform being that it was about time a woman did it, as long as it wasn’t Hazel Blears. Throw in a few leftist remarks about equality, some safely vague criticism of the Iraq adventure, an overcrowded field and a slice of luck and, hey presto, she feels entitled to be catapulted from apparatchik non-entity to Deputy Prime Minister.

But this was before Gordon Brown was transformed from Stalin to Mr Bean and he made it clear that a meaningless party job was just that, not a passport to greatness.

But he felt obliged to have her in the Cabinet, and there she sat, biding her time, for she has learnt the virtue of patience. And it wasn’t long before dear Gordon, weary, weighed down by the cares of office and no doubt worn down by ceaseless nagging, let her take PMQs. And then, to demonstrate his total lack of political nous, goes on holiday leaving at least three people to argue about who’s in charge. Harriet, of course, made the most of her opportunity.

So, will she succeed? I fear she might, for she has several factors in her favour.

First, Brown’s position is precarious. He may survive to the next election, but is unlikely to win it. Even if he were to scrape in the pressure for change would be strong.

Second, most of the potential contenders for Labour Leader are associated with the Iraq invasion and recent economic failure. Harman, only recently a Cabinet minister, can appear relatively clean of either mess.

Third, unlike, say, David Milliband, she has cultivated the grass roots and appears to have principles. The fact that she doesn’t is neither here nor there.

Fifth, after their expected defeat, Labour will probably feel an urge to return to more traditional ways and Harman will score there. I think it likely that Alan Johnson would beat her in the Commons vote if such an urge is in the air, but she will win in the constituencies.

Sixth, she will shamelessly demand to be elected on the basis of her sex. ‘If you don’t vote for me, it won’t be because I’m unprincipled, devious and downright incompetent; it will be because I am a woman. Don’t you oppress me!’

KP? - They must be nuts.

'I'll do it my way,' says Pietersen.

God help us!

SUNDAY MORNING, following England’s defeat to South Africa in the Edgbaston test, the press was its usual fatuous self.

‘South Africa’s first series win in England for 43 years!’ they cried. All of them, because the newspapers and radio merely report each other. Well, they beat us 1-0 in 1965 and then apartheid meant a suspension of hostilities until 1994. That’s nearly 30 years we can ignore.

Since their release from the leper colony they’ve drawn a couple of series here and beaten us more often than no over there. So winning a series in England is hardly earth-shattering.

And how often do they come over here anyway? Every three years or so, I believe.

I don’t like all this talk about ‘series’ wins. These matches are not a series, they are a sequence. I don’t care that they’ve all got names now – this one was in aid of the ‘Basil D’Oliveira’ trophy.

My blood boiled when I heard even Jonathan Agnew, who surely should know better, declaring that the fourth test at the Oval was ‘dead’, ‘meaningless’. And yet, when it was suggested to him that therefore it was an opportunity for some experimentation, as a test match were akin to a football friendly, he immediately contradicted himself, saying it was a test match and only the best players should represent their country and the aim should be victory.

SUNDAY LUNCHTIME and Michael Vaughan, with tears in his eyes, was announcing his retirement. I was sad to see him go, although I had been questioning his ability to do the job.

It’s not that his form was poor, nor that we were losing matches. It’s the way we were losing them. Batsmen were throwing away their wicket; the bowling was loose and undemanding; the spirit in the field was often defeatist.

And it’s the captain who has to be held responsible for that. Vaughan’s trouble was his over-identification with his men, although he no doubt would call it loyalty. I recognise that his involvement in selection was limited, but I wonder how much he fought for greater ruthlessness over under-performers like Collingwood and Panesar.

KEVIN PIETERSEN, the radio announced, was immediately the favourite to succeed Vaughan. Frankly I’d been surprised when he was mentioned as a possibility, but to hear William Hill say that the book on him was closed was barely believable.

It’s not that he’s a South African, for all that he parades his English ‘patriotism’ on his biceps, that repels me. And the man is obviously not without talent. I can’t understand, though, the argument that being ‘the best player in the side’ is a qualification for captaincy. It didn’t work for Botham and Flintoff. Moreover, it can hardly be said that successful captains like Brearley and Illingworth held their position in the side on ability alone.

Another specious argument is the fact that he’s the only player guaranteed his place in all three forms of the game, and the selectors want one captain for all of them. Why?

I’ve heard that he has a good cricket brain. Where did I hear that? Oh yes, Kevin Pietersen said it.

No, he’s not suitable because he’s a self-serving prima donna, far more concerned with milking the applause of an ignorant crowd than helping his team win. That attempted six to get his century at Edgbaston was criminal arrogance, predicted by South Africa and punished accordingly. The tragedy is that it was a major contribution to England’s defeat.

But what else can I do but wish him well? He’s England captain and I want England to stop disappointing me. If he can grow up, temper aggression with caution, out-think the opposition and motivate his players, I’ll salute him.

In the meantime I comfort myself with the thought that he won’t over-identify with his men. I just worry that he won’t even know that they’re there.