If you loved this filum....

The Americans also did a remarkably accurate battle movie called Midway. As I remember, Tora, Tora, Tora wasn't bad either, although no-one seems to give credit to the great instigator of Pearl Harbour, Admiral Andrew B. Cunningham.

Sink The Bismark is great fun but lacks the attention to detail of Powell and Pressburger's Battle of The River Plate. Compare the battle scenes with the Director Control Towers in "Plate" with the repeated shot in "Bismark" of an officer shouting "shoot" into a telephone!

The only real fiction in "Plate" is the conference of Captains prior to the battle - it never happened, just an invention for dramatic reasons. Most of the rest is accurate, although the suicide of Langsdorf is not mentioned. Careful viewing of the opening credits reveals the participation of some of the portrayed people, including McCall, Lewin, Millington-Drake and Miss Shaw. Harwood had sadly died in 1950.

Shame though that we were not shown the action from Graf Spee's perspective - the German bridge.

No, don't watch Sink the Bismarck for accuracy. It completely mischaracterizes Lütjens, portraying him diametrically opposite of what he really was. Just the line, "never forget that we are Nazies" makes it so I can hardly stomach that movie. As if they were all Nazies. As if the Nazies would ever dream of calling themselves "Nazies", which was a derogatory term even then (kind of like having Malcolm X saying "never forget that we're n!ggers"). As if referring to National Socialism had any place in a pep talk. As if Lütjens was a Nazi. It's just blatantly false on so many, many levels. Lütjens was actually opposed to Nazi ideology, and one of the few who dared to show it.

I love most of the films mentioned. I think that 'The Battle of the River Plate' and 'Sink the Bismarck!' are my two favourite war films, shortly followed by 'Reach for the Sky'. I also love 'In Which We Serve' (absolutely excellent, pure brilliance) and 'We Dive At Dawn'. I also like 'Above Us The Waves'. I would like to see 'Dunkirk', 'The Way to the Stars', 'The Cruel Sea' and 'The Colditz Story'.

I'm not a great Englishman - Charles Dickens, Laurence Olivier and William Shakespeare were great Englishmen!

The other fantastic movie I have seen similar to this is one I always forget the name of, but it's the story of destroying the only Nazi dock on the Atlantic that was large enough to service the likes of the Bismarck and was, I think, French.

Can never remember the name of the movie but it details the plan to ram the dock with a ship full of explosives and to deploy a group of marines beforehand to stave off the defenders who would no doubt try to sink the fireship.

Great 60's or 70's movie, think it had Jeff Bridges' dad in it... Attack on the Iron Coast, that's the bugger!



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