There is a fundamental difference between British and American war movies of the 1950's and 60's. Where as Hollywoods output tends to have gung-ho heroes gun in each hand, knife in the teeth, winning the war for Uncle Sam and getting the girl to boot, the British war movie tended towards a more factual almost documentary style. Almost as if British cinema was saying 'something of great importance has recently happened, so lets document the facts for future generations lest we forget.' Hence we have films like Dunkirk, Sink The Bismark, Battle of The River Plate and most famously of all The Damn Busters.

Coming back to this movie 54 years after it was made and over 60 since the events portrayed this movie can at time seam rather odd. The acting is stilted and dialogue clipped, but this is a stylistic thing rather than bad acting, after all the same style of acting can be witnessed in Ealling Comedies, the proto-hammer horror films and any number of 'The Blue Lamp' type police films. The bulk of the cinematography is also nothing special, being straightforward 'one' or 'two' shots with lighting that can be described as bog standard.

However this film really scores on two fronts. Firstly the use of real true to era aircraft (Leased from the RAF who still used Lancasters as trainers at the time) flown by genuine RAF bomber crews and filmed using the various lakes around Cumberland and West Yorkshire where the real 617 squadron trained for the real mission. And secondly it's dogged sticking to historical detail, or at least as much that could be adhered to without breaking the official secrets act!! There is no Pearl Harbour rewriting of history here. What you see is as near as damn it what really happened. Even now the a comparison of the attack as portrayed on film and the most recently published accounts of the raid as released by the British ministry of defence show very few factual flaws.

Also it must be born in mind that the early 1950's were not a pleasant time for the UK populous. The nation was still crippled by US war debt, many items were still rationed and the teething pains of the change that would lead to the welfare state and the cultural and economic boom of the 1960's were still cutting deep. So it is hardly surprising that a film showing a heroic and resourceful Britian would strike such a strong chord with its viewers.

I must be said some aspects of this film haven't aged well compared to some of the other Brit war flicks of the time ('Battle Of The River Plate' springs to mind), but as a historical document and comment on Britian in the immediate post war era it stands tall as one of the most important films of its time.

For a period piece it is a pretty good movie though there are many and varied prints out there, some made for the American market have gratuitous shots of B-24's exploding cut into it to make the movie "more exciting" and in more modern releases there has been some editing to remove some code names and the name of Guy Gibson's dog which back then was called "N****r" in reference to his black coat - rather than a derogatory mention of a particular colour of human.

So if you can obtain an original British print of this movie (you can get it from Amazon in the UK - though it is a UK region DVD with PAL output) then you will see the unedited version.

The film deals with the RAF's May 1943 - "Operation Chastise" - an early attempt at what is now known as "precision bombing" using special munitions - in this case a bomb code-named "Upkeep" but known to all UK citizen's as "the bouncing bomb" - because that is what the bomb did. In order to defeat torpedo netting in front of the dams and in order to place the bomb in close contact with the dam face in order to disrupt it and blow a hole in it - planes had to fly at a precise course, speed and height over water in order to drop their bomb and knock out the hydro-electric dams that provided power to the German industry in the Ruhr valley.

The film is historically important because it records an event that gave the UK a HUGE morale boost when the country was tiring of a series of defeats and at the time the raid took place Churchill was visiting Roosevelt who was having serious concerns about the effectiveness of the UK's forces in the fight against Germany. The raid took place while Churchill was meeting with Roosevelt and gave Churchill some political capital during the visit. A single squadron of bombers in one night had achieved more than the US Army's 8th Air force had achieved in a year of bombing. (and to be fair - the RAF had not been doing much better up to that point).

The movie is in two parts - inventor Barnes Wallis's fight with officialdom to get his idea recognised and the training and actual operation.

The first part is a condensation of a very complex political process and historically suffers from the compression of the facts. Wallis was not the lone voice in the wilderness portrayed in the movie but the analogy serves well with the British movie-going public who in 1954 could remember when the UK stood alone against Germany. This part of the movie is helped by actual wartime footage of the bomb design and testing - though the edited large black "blob" hanging under the real test aircraft was to disguise details of the workings of the bomb which - even in 1954 - were still secret.

The training for the operation and the actual raid sequence uses Lancaster bombers on loan from the RAF and gives a sobering impression of just how hard it was to safely fly a 12,000 lb; 4 engined heavy bomber just 60 feet over water in order to deploy the weapon correctly. The actual raid follows the events as known in 1954 when the film was made. Subsequent research has corrected some of the finer details but the sense of the story is correct. Special effects - by modern standards - are pretty weak but the mixing of real wartime footage plus a stroke of luck for the producers when the Dutch dykes (dams to keep out seawater - like New Orleans' levees) failed in 1953 and Holland was flooded - produced real footage of a flooded countryside.

Careful before and after sequences of crew's rooms, mess halls and the airfield portray the huge casualties suffered by the air crews pressing home this particular raid.

Naive political incorrectness aside (which is over debated in many on-line forums - it is a reasonably historically accurate film for goodness sake!) this movie gives a fair account of the operation and tells the tale from the point of view of the human cost. Worth a watch.