What I'm Watching

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.