BEFORE: Judi Dench carries over again from "The Last of the Blonde Bombshells". I could have worked "Belfast" with Dame Dench into this chain, but it's not on cable yet, or the big streaming services - I could pay $5.99 to watch it on iTunes but I just don't know if that's worth it. Perhaps it's better to just keep it on the "maybe" list and hope that it becomes more available by next March for St. Patrick's Day.
THE PLOT: 17 days before World War II, an English teacher disappears from a coastal boarding school with 20 German teen girls. Thomas Miller gets the job six days later, secretly trying to find out what happened.
AFTER: If you tell me that there's a film where Eddie Izzard plays a secret agent, immediately I'm going to think that it's a film like "Johnny English", or something even more campy like "Mystery Men", but this film is NOT that, it takes itself more seriously than that. Perhaps a bit too seriously, but that's for each viewer to determine, I suppose. Izzard's hometown is Bexhill-o-Sea, which is in Sussex County in southeast England. The town is known for its schools, most of which were evacuated at the start of World War II, simply because of the town's location, on the English Channel, therefore close to France. And as I saw in a film last week, the Nazis did take over Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands, because of its strategic location. Now, whether a bunch of teen girls who where the children of prominent Nazis attended a boarding school in Bexhill, that's what I'm trying to determine - is this based on a true or semi-true story?
Apparently so, the Augusta Victoria College was a real place, named after the last empress of Germany, and it opened in 1932 and closed in 1939 - though I suspect that the final days of the school were probably not as dramatic as those depicted here, with double agents and lists of secret spies, those tiny cameras that everyone used to photograph documents, secret codes to use when making phone calls to the Central Office, and so on. Agent Thomas Miller is sent to take a job as an English teacher at the school when the previous teacher (also an agent?) failed to check in. I think he reported for an interview before the headmistress even placed a classified ad looking for a replacement, which honestly should have raised a red flag.
Considering that the Nazis have, for some reason, sent their daughters to the U.K. to be educated, that also sort of creates a weird situation - who else in the town are undercover agents, and for which side? The other teachers, the town constable, the bus driver, is everyone who they claim to be, and if not, who are they? And if war should be declared, what happens then? Do the girls become valuable assets that can be held hostage, or will they be forced to make a hasty escape back to the Fatherland? All we can tell is that the days leading up to the official declaration of war were very confusing ones, everyone was trying to position themselves in the best possible places, even the undercover agents. It didn't help poor Thomas Miller that shortly after he started teaching, the previous English teacher's body washed up on shore. Then Miller met with his contact, Col. Smith, and then HE got taken out. Before long Miller's trying to finish his assignment while also being accused of murder, with his face splashed across the front page of the local paper.
Then things got even more confusing, once the double agents started hitting town. At one point I knew Miller had secret photos of an important document, but I wasn't sure if that held the names of English spies in Germany or German spies in England. I don't even know if that was ever made clear - or did I miss something? Honestly the spy stuff seemed quite basic here - not all cartoony like James Bond stuff, but maybe a little bit too much on the boring, reality-based side. Somewhere in between there might be some kind of happy medium.
NITPICK POINT: The German teens are standing on the beach, holding flares, and it's a nice touch that their formation resembles the one seen during their morning exercises. BUT the flares are meant to light a makeshift landing strip, and from the plane's POV it looks like they're standing much further apart. In the medium shot of the girls, there doesn't look like there's enough space between them for any plane, even a small one, to land - ideally the plane should be able to land between the girls without also knocking them all down, if the plan is to rescue them. Why on earth couldn't they light the flares, drop the flares straight down to the ground, and then step out of the way?
More World War II stuff tomorrow - I'm going to get back on to Winston Churchill movies, two of them - this happened a few years back with "Churchill" and "Darkest Hour", now I'm doing that again. And tomorrow also marks the halfway point of Year 14 - can you believe it?
Also starring Eddie Izzard (last seen in "Romance & Cigarettes"), Carla Juri (last seen in "Blade Runner 2049"), James D'Arcy (last seen in "W.E."), Jim Broadbent (last seen in "Iris"), Celyn Jones (last seen in "The Current War: Director's Cut"), David Schofield (last seen in "Mary Magdalene"), Maria Dragus (last seen in "Mary Queen of Scots"), Tijan Marei, Luisa-Celine Gaffron, Daria Wolf, Bianca Nawrath, Franziska Brandmeier, Kevin Eldon (last seen in "Johnny English Strikes Again"), Joe Bone, Richard Elfyn, Finty Williams (last seen in "The Importance of Being Earnest"), Evie Ward-Drummond, Mali Georgina Davies, Rebecca Beale, Georgia Reed, Rebecca Thomas, Georgia Walsh, Lydia Blakemore Phillips, Amy Doubtfire, Tamika Thomas, Adina-Rae Nyahwa, Bethany Wooding, Molly Owen, Poppy Charlton, Sophia Holmes, Ellie Watermeyer, Rupert Holliday-Evans (last seen in "Wuthering Heights"), Toby Hadoke.
RATING: 5 out of 10 verses of Die Räder am Bus (drehen sich rundherum, rundherum)
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