MovieChat Forums > Fire Over England (1937) Discussion > Spoilers: Pretty Good Movie, history or...

Spoilers: Pretty Good Movie, history or not?


When I first began the movie, I thought it was going to be a long, laboriously wordy, "holier then thou" boring film with long proclamations about king and county and life and religion. But to my surprise to turned out to be a fairly good action movie with only a limited amount of proselytizing. But did Olivier and the turn-coat gentlemen single handily go out and torch and beat the enemy fleet? The turncasts were really too old for such an enormous and phyical undertaking, fit for only younger men. Was this event really history?

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The English fleet did use fire ships against the Spannish fleet. It was an organised undertaking, probably thought up by Drake (the Queen had nothing to do with it). The ships were donated by owners and crewed mostly by volunteers. Did not directly sink any Spaniards but it thru them into disorder before the next battle and had a terrific effect on Spanish morale

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I agree this was a better film than I thought. This film came in a large pack of dvds (mostly because they were all public domain), so I didn't have high hopes for it. But my goodness, what a cast! Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Raymond Massey, and a bit part from James Mason; you can't really ask for more from a public domain film. This film really caught most of these stars at the beginning of their remarkable careers, so it is worth a watch just to see a young Vivien Leigh and a hardly recognizable James Mason. Is this the best film I've ever seen? Or the most believable action? Well, no, but it was a very pleasant surprise to see how good the film was since I had lower expectations.

As for the history, I must agree with the previous poster that the queen had little to do with the strategy employed to defeat the armada. Also, the "assassin turncoats" are more of a plot device than a historic fact. There were several assassination attempts on Elizabeth, but the assassins never fought in her army and no attempt was made at Tilsbury. However, the fireships really did sink some of the armada's ships. The armada was in formation and at anchor when the English struck with the fireships, and a good portion of the ships were sunk or damaged by the fire. As the previous poster stated, there was a lot of confusion caused by the fireship attack and when the armada retreated, they had the misfortune of running into harsh storms in the Atlantic and many sank. So as a long winded answer to your question, yes, the fireship attack on the Spanish armada was a real historical event; however, the film's portrayal is a loose interpretation of the events.

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I think we are in agreement, one can argue if ships run aground fleeing from the fireships were "sunk" by them and other such semantics, but such is picking nits. For the English, the key was they had (finally!) broken up the diciplined formation that the Spanish had maintained up till then....

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