A War Movie Too Far

They never do manage to take that last bridge at Arnhem, do they?  No matter how many times Channel Five show A Bridge Too Far, it always ends the same damned way.  And they do show it a lot, whether on Channel Five itself or one of its various subsidiaries, (5Star, Paramount. 5SElect, etc), it has become their default war movie for filling a bank holiday afternoon.  It has surpassed even Anzio and Battle of the Bulge in that respect, (although both of these are used by Channel Four and ITV 4 in similar capacities at present).  It was on again last Friday, on that bank holiday they hijacked and moved from the Monday in order to use it to commemorate VE Day, (the VE, of course, standing for Victory in Europe, not, as the Daily Mail seemed to think, Victory over Europe).  Look, I have nothing against giving people a day off for VE Day, but give it its own bank holiday, for God's sake, don't co-opt Labour Day instead.  But to get back to the point, you'd think that, with the number of times the film gets shown on TV, they'd have figured out by now that they are dropping the British Airborne Division in the wrong place and equipping them with the wrong radios, not to mention the fact that, by now, they must surely know that the intelligence saying the Germans have armoured units in the are is correct.  But they never learn.  Anthony Hopkins is doomed to forever lead his men to defeat in Arnhem.

But, as I say, A Bridge Too Far was the main war movie offering on the VE Day 75th anniversary bank holiday.  I know that ITV4 had a double bill of The Sea Wolves and The Battle of Britain on, but they had shown the same double bill the previous weekend, so it hardly represented any kind of effort on their part.  Feeling under some vague moral obligation to watch some kind of war movie in order to 'honour' the fallen of WWII, but balking at the idea of watch XXXth Corps fail to reach Arnhem for the fiftieth time, I turned to my Roku box and its streaming channels. Surprisingly, I couldn't find much in the way of WWII movies, or war movies at all, in fact.  Unless you count Zulu, that is.  Or one of those movies set in an SS sex camp.  I did, briefly toy with the idea of watching one of these, but they make me feel uneasy at the best of times.  As I've noted before, I have a high tolerance level to bad taste, but somehow, sexploitation movies set in concentration camps seem to be just a step too far.  Eventually I found the excellent Battle of Algiers on offer.  Not a WWII movie, I accept, but a war film nonetheless.  Its examination of the war against colonial imperialism made for a sobering antidote to all the Tory-led jingoism accompanying our own VE Day commemoration.  Its a film that still impresses with its willingness to unflinchingly show the atrocities carried out by both sides in Algeria, despite its obvious sympathy with the Algerian rebels.  It is also unafraid to present the French military commander in a relatively sympathetic light, emphasising that his strategy was driven public opinion in France, on both the left and right, that France should retain control of Algeria.  Anyway, that was my VE Day - no lockdown busting street parties or congas, just a serious and thought-provoking war movie.