War dramas are often held to a higher standard than other movies, and it’s a rare one that doesn’t bring generals – active, retired and armchair status – out into the open to condemn some appalling misrepresentation of the facts or other. A fate The Forgotten Battle largely dodged when it debuted in 2020.
That’s mayb ebecause for the most part it kept its background (the facts) and its foreground (the fiction) separate.
The facts: after the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944, the Allies started pushing the Germans back out of France, Belgium and the Netherlands, eastward, ever eastward. But progress eventually started to be held back by overstretched supply lines. Cherbourg, the main source of supplies, ammunition and equipment, was now a long way West. If only the Allies could liberate Antwerp, a major port much further east, things would swing more decisively in their favour. But to get to Antwerp they had to get across the River Scheldt (the film’s original title is De Slag om de Schelde – Battle for the Scheldt), which gave large ships access to a port close to the border with Germany. Naturally, the Germans weren’t going to give it up without a fight.
Over this factual background, the story of that campaign through the eyes of three separate participants. Teuntje, who works for a collaborationist mayor in the area. Marinus, a Netherlander who has volunteered to fight alongside the Nazis’ Waffen-SS. A British glider pilot, Will, who will attempt to float into enemy territory as part of Operation Market Garden, and then find himself caught up in the battle for the Scheldt.
Each has an arc. Teuntje will discover a patriotic fervour she didn’t know she had, bolstered by the arrest and torture of her brother. Marinus will increasingly realise that he’s fighting on the wrong side, for the wrong values. Will, the cocky, devil-may-care son of some high-up in the British army, will find maturity, or it will find him.
This is the handsomely mounted, well acted war drama of yore brought back to life, full of characters who don’t ask an awful lot of the actors playing them. But it’s none the worse for that. The skill of director Matthijs van Heijningen and his writers (in the main Paula van der Oest, who gets the “screenplay by” credit) is to keep the big picture ever-present in the movie while also telling the three separate smaller stories of Susan, Marinus and Will.
That Heijningen directed it at all is a battle won in itself. In 2011 he’d directed a prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing (also called, confusingly, The Thing) which had gone so badly that he almost gave up directing completely, and spent the next years on TV commercials and promotional teasers.
To go from those to this, an epic made on a slim budget, is something of a stretch but Heijningen pulls it off. His two big battle sequences are particularly good, especially considering budgetary constraints, the first up in the air, where computer graphics do most of the work, the second on the ground, where the filth and chaos of Saving Private Ryan clearly provide the inspiration. The lack of finance meant the whole thing was extensively rehearsed, minus the crew, to keep costs down.
Gijs Blom as Marinus, Jamie Flatters as Will and Susan Radder as Teuntje deserve awards for standing out against the chaos but their characters are largely ciphers, figures in a historical tide. This is a story of dirty loyalty and compromised heroics, not the grand gesture, a message delivered via desaturated visuals, a muted soundtrack and a sound design that’s full of incidental atmospherics.
There are a few severed limbs to remind us that war is indeed hell, and it’s nice to see Tom Felton, a onetime member of the Hogwarts gang, in an “it’s ony a flesh wound” role as a British officer, not only all a proper adult but seemingly entering middle age. They grow up so fast. Nice also to see other reminders of other war films of yore – like the cultured, polite Nazi who’s also a brute, played this time out by Justus von Dohnányi (do German drama students do a module on playing Nazis?).
Familiar. Skilfull. Effective. Tick the boxes. Ground-breaking? Hardly. You OK with that? I am.
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
