Some interesting debating points have arisen around Dunkirk and I thought it might be interesting to air them here and see what the Dope’s views are.
If you haven’t seen it, look away now!
In another thread on the film, the question has been raised around the lack of people of colour in leading roles. Should this have been corrected - there’s no question there were a number of Indian regiments there on the beaches, for example. Or would this have felt tokenistic?
The French media are apparently upset at the uneven tilt towards the British involvement in the film, calling it ‘witheringly impolite’. Do the French have a point?
That train carriage interior at the end looked terribly modern to me - it looks like the interior of the train I sometimes catch to work. Any train buffs can tell me if it’s authentic? (Sorry, I can’t find a picture)
Is par for the course. Don’t know many films where British Indian troops are seen. WarHorse was a surprising exception. Who cares frankly. It’s a movie.
Several thousand French were evacuated. However, the French assessment of the UK role has always tended to be along the lines of “the British did a runner”! An accurate assessment if an incomplete one.
I think taking a piece of fiction, saying something written in the 1920s or 30s and adding some diversity to the cast is fine and often preferable. However, for a movie about history staying as close to the historical truth as possible is best.
I agree about the train car. I immediately thought that it looked too modern. And they were pretty tight on the shots of the actors in the car which makes me think they were trying to hide the modern nature of the location.
Actually, nearly 120,000 French were evacuated from Dunkirk, along with Polish and Belgian units.
As for the other points the OP made, with over 400,000 troops either on the beach or fighting a rear-guard action, and given that the number of Indians (and blacks serving with the French) were limited and probably few at officer rank, and given the tenor and way the movie was told, I don’t really see the objection on not having ‘people of color’ not prominently portrayed. But that’s just me.
No idea about the train carriage. I’m sure we have some railway buffs that’ll be along to answer that.
Just seems like a strange thing to do if that’s the case - it’s not like we don’t have dozens of old trains sat in museums or even working as tourist cars. It’s not like the film was short of cash.
The train carriage seemed awfully wide inside, but that’s common in films.
My biggest issue was with the final Spitfire taking forever to nail that Heinkel, then, while gliding down to the beach, still finding time to shoot down another Messerschmitt, then the pilot having time to go over his engine-out landing checklist and still being able to pump down the gear (bad idea; the plane should have flipped, then finding something to burn the plane with even with no gas left. He started his approach with the beach full of soldiers, but they’d all been evacuated by the time he landed. That had to be the *longest *damn emergency landing in film history.
I saw just a single black solder among the French troops being kept off the mole. Given all of the troops on the beach (far fewer, it seemed, than appeared in the amazing one-continuous-take scene in Atonement, Atonement - Dunkirk Beach Scene - YouTube), I wouldn’t get my nose out of joint at not seeing more black troops or any Indian troops. We didn’t see a lot of other soldiers of all types; this was a pretty narrowly-focused movie.
The interior of the train car looked too modern to me, too.
And jeez, that had to be the longest dead-stick landing in all of WWII (but on the way down he shot down a Stuka, not another Me-109, didn’t he?)
Probably an accurate criticism which can be levelled at the film about the minorities, and the french.
For minorities, there may not be quite the makeup of WWI, where all the british empire’s people had roles. There were far more theatres of war in WWII, and the Indians and Australians for instance would be under threat in their own countries. India was always a high priority for the brits.
Indian troops did serve in France in 1940 (the Government of British India, having responsibility for everything East of Suez, were none to keen to send troops to Europe if they could help it, but an expeditionary Corps was in the stages of being shipped for service in Farnce when the capitulation happened, most of these troops ended up serving in Iran and later North Africa). They also served (4 plus divisons) throughout the Italian campaign, as well as in Greece, North and East Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East.
They did not serve in NW Europe in 44-45 as units, however since the early 1920’s it was reletively common for comissioned Indian Army offciers and NCO to serve with British Army regiments, one of my Great Uncles served with a British Army regiment throughout the Normandy and Norther France Campaign, until he returned to his parent unit in late '44 (who were in Burma). The same man served with a different British unit in 1940 in France, however, he was not at Dunkrik, but was withdrawn from the Channel ports later in the campaign. In between he saw service with his parent unit in N Africa FWIW.
I don’t think non-white absence in the said movie is particulalry relevent. However, the claims made in the above linked thread that absense was due “historical accuracy” is laughably, hilariously inaccuragte.
I think it’s a damned if you do… situation. If you look objectively at the actions of the two main characters on the beach, they are actually quite cowardly, and what do you think the reaction would have been if one of those characters had been cast as a ‘person of colour’? :dubious:
As to the complaints of the French, nonsense IMO. The film is about the British evacuation. In fact at the very end, Kenneth Branagh’s character says he’s staying to help the French evacuate. So does Christopher Nolan need to add an hours run time just to keep the French happy?
No, it’s a film, not a history. The focus was on a few individuals who were white - as were the vast bulk of those on the beaches, on the ships and in the air. There were some Indian troops there - three companies of muleteers from the Indian Army Service Corps - but given they were probably 1 in a 1000 of those at Dunkirk it would have been blatant tokenism, just as including some of the few civilian women and children who were evacuated would have been. I suspect there is a great film to be made about the Indian troops experiences serving with their mules thousands of miles from home but shoehorning them into Dunkirk would have messed up the very good film.
Same answer, it was a film about a few (British) individuals not a history. Actually I thought that right from the opening scenes Nolan was pretty good at making it clear that the French were holding the perimeter. If the French want a film about their army in 1940, great! But this was not the place.
I’m not a real expert on railway carriages (!) but you are probably right. It was filmed on the Swanage Railway in Dorset and most of their coaches are from the late 40s/early 50s so later but not much later. Looking at pics of the carriages I think the interiors are on Swanage’s “British Railways Mk 1 Tourist Standard Open” which came into service in 1952. Though the Southern Railway (which in real life provided the bulk of the stock to move the returning troops) did have open carriages before the war.
My understanding is that there are 3 different time lines on the screen – that of the boat in the water, the dogfights the air, and the soldiers stranded on the beach. One of C. Nolan’s signature moves is to have multiple timelines intersect, so that in the space of 140 min of screen time, the viewer can experience what it must have felt like to belong to any of these groups. In practice, because of fuel limitations, the spitfires could only be airborne for an hour or so. The little boats would have taken at least 14 hours to go from Dover to Dunkirk, and the actual evacuation lasted for 9 days from May 26 to Jun 4, 1940. In the movie, the timelines are interwoven so as to convey a sense of suspense, with scenes abruptly cutting from land to air to sea, between the “present” (from Mr. Dwason’s point of view) to the past (the shell-shocked sailor remembering the torpedo which had struck his ship the previous night), and the future (the flotilla of small boats gathering finally at Dunkirk beach, to evacuate the soldiers). If all 3 time lines were to scale similarly with the screen time, then the spitfire would have made an emergency landing within the 1st 15 minutes.
I forgot to add: The Spitfire landed beyond the perimeter – i.e. the zone defended by the (mainly) French and (some) British forces. The Wikipedia article on the movie (and some critics too) state that Farrier is taken prisoner by the Nazis, but I do not recollect seeing that in the scene. After he burns the Spitfire (where did he get the fuel to start the fire from?), he turns around and starts walking. I was hoping that he would make back to evacuation shoreline, but apparently, he fate is supposed to represent that of the nearly 40000 French and British troops who were left behind, and who ended up as slave industrial and agricultural labour for Nazi Germany and occupied territories.
After Farrier lands and sets the plane on fire, you see multiple soldiers over a hill coming at him, and one soldier just behind him. Presumably this is the one who captures him.
