Movies - The Dam Busters

Home > Listing Index > Movies > The Dam Busters (film)

	Movies - The Dam Busters

The Dam Busters is a 1954 British war film, set during World War II, and documenting the true story of the RAF's 617 Squadron, the development of the "bouncing bomb", and Operation Chastise - the attack on the Ruhr dams in Germany. It stars Michael Redgrave as Barnes Wallis, and Richard Todd as Wing Commander Guy Gibson. The movie was based on the book, The Dam Busters, by Paul Brickhill.

The plot

The film has two distinct halves: firstly the story of engineer Wallis and his struggle to develop a means of attacking Germany's dams, in the hope of crippling German heavy industry. Wallis hits on the idea of a bouncing bomb which can skip over the water of the dam avoiding torpedo nets and then sink in contact with the dam, explode and burst them open. Wallis calculates that the aircraft will have to fly extremely low (60 feet), in order for the bombs to skip over the water correctly. A special squadron of talented pilots will have to be formed - 617 Squadron, led by Guy Gibson.

The second part of the story follows Gibson and his crews as they train for and then carry out the mission.

Filming

The flight sequences that take up the second half of the movie were filmed using real Avro Lancaster bombers supplied by the RAF. The aircraft, four Mk. 7s, had to be taken out of storage and specially modified, and cost £130 per hour to run, which amounted to a tenth of the film's costs. (An American cut was made more dramatic by depicting a plane flying into a hill and exploding. This version used stock Warner Brothers footage of a B-17 Flying Fortress as opposed to a Lancaster.)

The Upper Derwent Valley in Derbyshire, England (the actual test area for the real raids) doubled as the Ruhr valley for the film. The scene where the Dutch coast is crossed was filmed between Boston, Lincolnshire and Kings Lynn, and other coastal scenes near Skegness. Some more of the film was shot over Windermere, in the Lake District. The airfield used was RAF Hemswell, a few miles north of Scampton. Hemswell was operational during the war, but not when filming took place.

The film is accurate historically with only a few minor exceptions. Barnes-Wallis said that he never encountered any opposition from bureaucracy. None of the bombers flew into a hillside on the actual raid, unlike the film. The film also makes it seem as if the raid is Barnes-Wallis's idea but the dams had been identified as a target long before the method was devised. Gibson did not devise the 'altimeter' using two spot-lights whereas the film shows him inspired by spotlights in a theatre. Finally, the film was made before some of the details about the bombs used in the attack were declassified (which only happened in 1962), and thus is (understandably) somewhat inaccurate about some of the fine points of how the bombs were actually delivered.

Influence

The attack on the "Death Star" in the climax of the film Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope is similar in many respects to the strategy of Operation Chastise — Rebel pilots have to fly through a trench while evading enemy fire and drop a single special weapon at a precise distance from the target in order to destroy the entire base with a single explosion; if one run fails another run must be made by a different pilot. Some scenes from the Star Wars climax are very similar to those in The Dam Busters and some of the dialogue is nearly identical in the two films. These scenes are also heavily influenced by the action scenes from the fictional wartime film 633 Squadron.

The 1982 film The Wall
, and the Pink Floyd album upon which it is based, contains scenes from the film, notably when Gibson's dog called 'Nigger' is killed by a car, just before the planes take off.

These scenes were cut from ITV's last showing of The Dam Busters after their previous broadcast received complaints for the use of the word nigger. While ITV has been criticised for censoring historical fact, and maligning the impact of a moving cinematic sequence in the process, the edited showing received many fewer complaints than the previous un-edited broadcast.

The Dam Busters has been praised as one of the greatest war films of all time, but also criticised as glorifying war and destruction. The music commissioned for the film, 'The Dam Busters March', by Eric Coates has also remained popular⁽²⁾. In 2004 the magazine Total Film named The Dam Busters the 43rd greatest British film of all time.

Trivia

#Richard Todd, who plays Guy Penrose Gibson, took part in the airborne assault on Pegasus Bridge on D-Day. #The film's theme tune, The Dam Busters' March, by Eric Coates became an instant classic for brass band and can still be heard in football grounds during England Football Team matches. One version released featured dialogue extracts from the movie (the bombing run). #There were two television advertisements for a brand of beer, Carling Black Label, which played on the theme of The Dam Busters. Both adverts were made before the English football team broke a 35 year losing streak against Germany. The first showed a German guard on top of a dam catching a bouncing bomb as if he were a goalkeeper. The second showed a British tourist throwing a Union Jack towel like a bouncing bomb to reserve a pool side seat before the German tourists could reserve them with their towels. Both actions were followed by the comment "I bet he drinks Carling Black Label".

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for The Dam Busters (film) ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article The Dam Busters (film); it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay