The Home of the Creative Mind

Welcome to PooBahSpiel, the online voice and home of the creative mind of Mark Monlux, Illustrator Extraordinaire. Prepare yourself for an endless regaling of art directly from the hand of this stellar artist. And brace yourself against his mighty wind of pontification. Updates are kinda weekly and show daily sketches, current projects, and other really nifty stuff.

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

The Comic Critic Reviews: The Dam Busters

Back in 1955, The Dam Busters was the biggest movie in Britain. One of my fans reminded me about this film when I asked you for Blockbusters. I’d forgotten nearly all of the details, so I watched it again. The importance of this film, and the book that inspired it, was the accuracy of the facts reported. Some of them were withheld for national security reasons, but the book got nearly all of them right. What few historical flubs there were in the movie (such as a plane crashing on the wrong side of the river) were criticized. You won’t see it played very often on television anymore because of the dog’s name, which is repeated at surprising frequency. You might think that they would just change the name of the dog. But that wouldn’t be the British thing to do. I wonder how it will be dealt with if there’s a remake.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Great review! FYI:

Back in the 90s my folk dance performance group went on a tour of England to dance with similar groups there. One of them was in a small village where there was a local connection with the Dam Busters: they had taken off from, or stopped for fuel, or done some training there.

We stayed at a b&b that was the former military airfield. Before it was an air field it was a family farm, but one day a "government man" showed up and told them they had to leave, the air force needed their fields and farmhouse. The family, after much petitioning, got the farm back decades later. The house, now a b&b, still had part of the radio apparatus built into the wall.

The local dance group took us on a pub tour where we started singing drinking songs - one of them was a comic song about the Dam Busters, everyone was required to form "goggles" with their fingers and hold them over their eyes while singing the chorus.

--Bill