The Rubble That Never Was ?


Strange overview shot of London at the opening of the movie --- for a movie that was set during WW II, there seemed to be surprising little evidence of rubble / destruction wrought by German bombs and V-rockets !

"J'ai l'oeil AMÉRICAIN !"

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The movie took place in 1943. The V-1s and V-2s didn't appear until after D-Day in 1944. Also, while London was still occasionally bombed, the heaviest, daily bombings of the Blitz had ended in May, 1941.

Obviously the peacetime London of 1956 didn't look like the war-ravaged city of 1943, but in fact there were big stretches of rubble and bomb craters in the city well into the 1960s, and even in the 70s. The area around which the panoramic view was filmed actually suffered relatively modest bomb damage during the war, though places seen more distantly and imprecisely did, of course -- particularly the East End.

Of course, if you look really closely at that overview shot, you can tell that most of the cars down below are postwar models. (I'm not kidding: you can see their configurations well enough to tell the difference.)

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hobnob53 --- Thanks very much for your helpful information ! Guess I've seen one too many BBC dramatic series on WW II, not realizing that the rockets & heavy bombings were only in play for select periods of time.

Strange thought that the filmmakers chose a relatively unscathed portion of London for the opening of a war movie !

Thanks very much again for clarifying the scene.

"J'ai l'oeil AMÉRICAIN !"

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Well, the buildings at the center of that shot were around Westminster, the location of the Houses of Parliament, so from that point of view the site was a logical place to film from.

It's true that Parliament itself was bombed, as was Buckingham Palace, but I think only one time each. Somehow the German bombers and rockets managed to miss the biggest target of all, St. Paul's Cathedral, throughout the war, though they did bomb many places nearby, including The City of London, the one-square-mile business and financial center that is technically separate from the rest of London. (Very confusing set-up, in my view!) My wife is British, so she fills me in on some of these details.

Of course, in the end, the filmmakers just hoped no one would look too closely (like we have) and just accept that it was wartime. Obviously everybody knew the scenes were shot in 1956, so the usual suspension of disbelief is supposed to be at work.

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I just wonder why they didn't use some stock footage from the war, with damage visible.

Flat, drab passion meanders across the screen!

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That's true. My guess is that they couldn't find color footage that would have been suitable for what they needed for the movie, or more likely probably never thought of it. Of course they didn't have to do that opening panorama shot either -- they could've thought of something else where the absence of rubble wouldn't have mattered.

Besides rubble, there are other street scenes shot in London where 1950s cars are plainly visible. The filmmakers simply didn't take any care in what they were filming, which was one reason you never got much sense of wartime London in all the location work.

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