I am a movie junkie who is always searching for a movie
fix. In the week between Christmas and
New Year’s, I searched for World War II movies [what a shock!] that had a “different”
perspective. In other words, a
perspective that isn’t American or British.
I found some good ones, to include the following:
The King’s Choice [2016] – In April
1940 the Nazis invaded Norway and Denmark.
This well-executed Norwegian movie is centered on Norway’s King Haakon
VII and his efforts to evade Nazi capture.
The choice in question is whether to accept Vidkun Quisling as his prime
minister. In an extraordinary act of
rare political intervention by a constitutional monarch whose role was mostly
ceremonial, he told his government that if they decided to accept Quisling, he
and his entire house would abdicate. This would leave the government bearing
sole responsibility for what happened to Norway. The government acceded to the King’s wishes,
after which Norway resisted Nazi occupation for five years. The King, the Crown Prince, and the
government escaped to the UK and continued as a government-in-exile until the
war’s end.
April 9th [2015] – This Danish movie
takes place during the same time as The
King’s Choice. Like their Norwegian
counterparts, Denmark did not want to take any action the Germans would see as
a “provocation” and risk a German invasion.
This story is focused on an army company of bicycle infantrymen. Yes, the Danish went to war with troops on
bicycles and motorcycles against German mechanized infantry. Against overwhelming odds, these intrepid
Danes held out two hours longer than their own government.
Army of Shadows [1969] – This French
film about the French Resistance during World War II was so controversial it
didn’t see a US release until 2006. The
source of the controversy was the student protests in Paris in May 1968. When this movie was originally released it
was seen by many as a glorification of Charles De Gaulle. This movie follows a
small group of Resistance fighters as they deal with Vichy collaborators, kill
informants, work with Allied militaries, protect sources and fellow resisters, and
try to avoid capture and/or execution.
This is a bleak, realistic, unromantic look at what the Resistance was
really like. The movie has an ending
which She Who Must Obeyed would like – everybody dies at the end. This film is the gold standard against which
movies of similar subject matter are measured.
Yeah, it’s that good.
Lidice [2001] – This Czech movie is
streaming on Amazon Prime under the title Fall of the Innocent. The timeframe of this movie is 1939-42,
during which time Czechoslovakia was under Nazi occupation. The main character is a guy named František
Šíma, who is imprisoned for four years of labor for manslaughter. He accidentally killed his own son, who
drunkenly attacked him at a wedding. Šíma’s
younger son is friends with another teenager, Václav Fiala, who tries to
impress a girl he’s seeing with lies about his involvement with Czech
resistance fighters. When Deputy
Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich is assassinated by British-trained Czech
resistance fighters, a letter Fiala wrote to the girl he’s trying to impress lies
about his involvement in the Heydrich assassination surfaced. What resulted was the destruction of the
village of Lidice and the mass deportation and/or massacre of its citizens,
including Šíma’s son. All of this
happens while Šíma is incarcerated, and the news of Lidice’s fate is kept from
him until after his release. Lidice was
wiped off the map, so the scenes depicting Lidice were filmed in Štětí, which
is approximately 30 miles north of Prague.
Flame & Citron [2008] – In keeping with the Norse Resistance
thing, this Danish movie is about two Danish resistance fighters, the noms de
guerre of whom were Flame and Citron.
Unlike the French resisters depicted in Army of Shadows, Flame
and Citron confined their activities to assassinations. Their primary targets were Danish
collaborators. For the most part, the
killing of Germans was off limits in order to avoid any German
retaliation. That changed when things
got personal between Flame and the head of the Gestapo in Denmark. The movie has the dreaded “based on true events”
tag, so the historical accuracy is somewhat suspect. Given that, this movie is still a riveting
look at Danish resistance that is every bit as cold-blooded as Army of
Shadows. And like the heroes of that
French film, the two Danish assassins met with a premature end. Citron had a William Holden moment like in The
Wild Bunch and went out in a blaze of glory. Flame was cornered by the Gestapo in the
basement of the house where he lived, and rather than get taken alive or get shot
to pieces like Citron, Flame took cyanide.
Both were buried in the same unmarked grave. After the war ended, they were given a state
funeral. They were also awarded the US
Medal of Freedom.
