A portrait of London in 1940, as the German’s attempted to bomb the city into submission, Steve McQueen’s Blitz is in many ways a very familiar war movie, a subversive ruse by McQueen. Whether his gambit works is another question.
Superficially it’s a fine story, about a young lad being evacuated from the East End and sent off to safety out in the countryside, as thousands of children were during the Second World War.
Except George never makes it to his billet. Instead, jumping from the train en route, he starts making his way back towards home and his mother, Rita, having adventures and meeting characters who are Dickens characters in a 1940s wrapping, though the wrapping is fairly transparent.
These include a trio of brothers, who are salt-of-the-earth Cockneys like George himself. A very decent black air-raid warden who instils in the mixed-race George a new awareness of who and what he is. And a couple of very bad people who are taking advantage of the raids to loot bombed-out buildings.
McQueen switches the action about. One minute we’re with George, played with real skill by Elliott Heffernan, then we’re back with his mother, Saoirse Ronan very good as a Cockney sparrer, and her dad, who is played, unexpectedly, by the musician Paul Weller (and quite understated and effective he is too).
Occasionally McQueen dips back into the past, when George’s mum Rita was first courting George’s now-absent (dead?) dad, Marcus (CJ Beckford), against a backdrop of a racially intolerant London.
Dropped in periodically are visually impressive big set pieces – bombs falling, buildings collapsing, firefighters trying to bring the inferno under control as fire rages through the streets and, in the film’s most dramatic moment, the River Thames breaking through the roof of an underground station and threatening to drown the people sheltering there.
What’s the point of all this? Wartime London is presented as the template for developments in later decades – women working, a mistrust of the authorities, assertion of individuality, a lively mix of people with different skin colours (as you tend to get in cities with busy ports). But it’s intrusively done. The “author’s voice” asserting itself, sometimes insistently. It’s what Charles Dickens did, for sure, but he did it less clumsily. Maybe with a bit of Dickensian humour it might have worked better.
McQueen does have quite a lot of time for Cockney Rita, dad Gerald, who plays the piano in the local pub, and Rita’s mates, man-hungry Tilda (Hayley Squires) and larky Doris (Erin Kellyman). They’re presented warmly and affectionately, though it must be said that everyone in this film tends to the one-dimensional (or archetypal, if you want to be generous).
Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke play the Fagins. That’s not their real name and we are not really told their relationship to each other, except that they’re wicked, awful looters taking advantage of the misfortune of others, pressing George into service as a ferret who can wriggle into spaces grown-ups can’t access. Burke is particularly good as the ghoulish Beryl, foul of face and cackling of demeanour. Against her even Graham struggles a touch to get his full Guignol going.
Those two apart, it’s a touch tasteful and chocolate-boxy. McQueen appears to be hypnotised by period detail. And when it finally shifts into the sentimental, as we wheel towards the closing moments, you might wonder if this really is the same director who started out making minimalist arthouse shorts, then graduated to features with a film about a man starving himself to death, Hunger, and three years later made a film about a sex addict’s adventures, Shame. Sir Steve McQueen is a man of many surprises.
Blitz – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
