In my humble opinion, one shouldn’t read too much into 1917 , which is, essentially, a ‘mission movie’ (the mission in this case being to deliver a letter and avert a doomed attack). The mission is very nearly ‘impossible’, and the main character, although no Tom Cruise superhero, is nevertheless confronted by a string of ever-more-dangerous difficulties, every one of which he overcomes – losing all his army kit by the climax, but sustaining only a bang to the back of his head and a slightly cut left hand…
That’s one way of looking at the film. But Sam Mendes is a more than competent director and the cast (especially perhaps all the cameo performers) do not let him down. It’s a thoroughly gripping story which, apart from its surprising and virulent anti-German tone, goes out of its way to avoid all (or at least many) of the clichés of war movies generally and WW1 movies in particular.
I was once required to review D.W. Griffith’s epic The Birth a Nation (1915) from a horribly scratched 16mm print. The scenes depicting the American Civil War were reckoned for many years to be unsurpassed – and some thought unsurpassable. Well, in the mid-1970s they looked impossibly dated. Now, technologically speaking, you can do almost anything – and the joins don’t show. And in this respect 1917 is a tour de force.
The look of the film is its real selling point – that, the immaculate production design, and the scale of the sets (digitally enhanced though they may be). This is certainly a depiction of trench warfare that seems authentic – and may perhaps be authentic, in some respects. One of the most striking moments for me was the arrival of the two British letter-carriers at the abandoned German frontline and their disbelief at the extraordinary defences the enemy had managed to construct.
A mission movie it may be, but at the same time it’s also a movie reaching for something else – simple and profound – and sometimes managing to grasp it. It has its moments of sentimentality, but these are outweighed by the acerbity and humour of much of the dialogue.
Certainly worth seeing!
My profound thanks to John Pym, faithful follower of Calderonia and for many years editor of Time Out Film Guide, for this superlative e-mail response to my request for his opinion of ‘1917’, a film that I had felt curiously unattracted to seeing. As well as having worked for many years as a film critic, John Pym is the grandson of George and Kittie’s close friends Charles and Violet Pym. Charles Pym and Brigadier-General Sir John Gough, V.C., John Pym’s other grandfather, both served in the First World War, as did his great-uncle General Sir Hubert Gough. I hope followers will find John Pym’s appraisal as useful as I have and perhaps share their experiences of the film in a Comment. PM
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Related
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
George Calderon c.1901
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
George Calderon, 1912
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Captain of the 11
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Guest Post: John Pym on the film ‘1917’
In my humble opinion, one shouldn’t read too much into 1917 , which is, essentially, a ‘mission movie’ (the mission in this case being to deliver a letter and avert a doomed attack). The mission is very nearly ‘impossible’, and the main character, although no Tom Cruise superhero, is nevertheless confronted by a string of ever-more-dangerous difficulties, every one of which he overcomes – losing all his army kit by the climax, but sustaining only a bang to the back of his head and a slightly cut left hand…
That’s one way of looking at the film. But Sam Mendes is a more than competent director and the cast (especially perhaps all the cameo performers) do not let him down. It’s a thoroughly gripping story which, apart from its surprising and virulent anti-German tone, goes out of its way to avoid all (or at least many) of the clichés of war movies generally and WW1 movies in particular.
I was once required to review D.W. Griffith’s epic The Birth a Nation (1915) from a horribly scratched 16mm print. The scenes depicting the American Civil War were reckoned for many years to be unsurpassed – and some thought unsurpassable. Well, in the mid-1970s they looked impossibly dated. Now, technologically speaking, you can do almost anything – and the joins don’t show. And in this respect 1917 is a tour de force.
The look of the film is its real selling point – that, the immaculate production design, and the scale of the sets (digitally enhanced though they may be). This is certainly a depiction of trench warfare that seems authentic – and may perhaps be authentic, in some respects. One of the most striking moments for me was the arrival of the two British letter-carriers at the abandoned German frontline and their disbelief at the extraordinary defences the enemy had managed to construct.
A mission movie it may be, but at the same time it’s also a movie reaching for something else – simple and profound – and sometimes managing to grasp it. It has its moments of sentimentality, but these are outweighed by the acerbity and humour of much of the dialogue.
Certainly worth seeing!
My profound thanks to John Pym, faithful follower of Calderonia and for many years editor of Time Out Film Guide, for this superlative e-mail response to my request for his opinion of ‘1917’, a film that I had felt curiously unattracted to seeing. As well as having worked for many years as a film critic, John Pym is the grandson of George and Kittie’s close friends Charles and Violet Pym. Charles Pym and Brigadier-General Sir John Gough, V.C., John Pym’s other grandfather, both served in the First World War, as did his great-uncle General Sir Hubert Gough. I hope followers will find John Pym’s appraisal as useful as I have and perhaps share their experiences of the film in a Comment. PM
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
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