Kitch’s Top 5 World War One Movies: #3 – Beneath Hill 60

Director: Jeremy Sims
Release Date: April 15, 2010
Starring: Brendan Cowell, Harrison Gilbertson & Gyton Grantley

In A Few Words: An account of the First Australian Tunneling Company and their experiences on the Western Front, and particularly at the Battle of Messines Ridge.

Spoilers Ahead

Oliver Woodward (Cowell) is a miner recruited from Far North Queensland to carry out the difficult and dangerous work of tunnelling out into No Man’s Land, trying to reach enemy lines, to lay explosives that will be detonated in the beginning of a traditional charge to the German trenches. The screenplay was based on the real-life Woodward’s memoirs.

With the campaign in France and Belgium grinding to a stalemated halt, commanders on both sides were being forced to rethink strategy. Throwing thousands of men against a trench fortified by machine guns and barbed wire wasn't working, and casualty numbers were high, so men like Woodward and his colleagues were brought to the front in an effort to try and give the Allied armies some sort of advantage after the best part of two years’ worth of futile frontal attacks that have cost literally hundreds of thousands of men their lives.

Of course, the Germans had thought of the same thing, so there were tunnels going in both directions, often passing within a few earthy feet of one another. On other occasions, Germans ended up breaking into British/Australian trenches and vice versa, resulting in bloody, split-second confrontations often just about in the dark.

The very claustrophobic feel of the movie – working in a tunnel barely wide enough for a man to squeeze in, and only high enough for a man to do so crawling – ramps up the tension and the simple fact that the men doing the tunnelling basically into the unknown provides more than a few minutes of incredible suspense.

There are flashbacks to Woodward’s pre-war days in Australia, just to set the scene for what Woodward has waiting for him at home, but much of the film takes place in tunnels on the Western Front No Man’s Land as the battle between the Australian and German sappers becomes more violent. The company loses a man when he is killed by enemy explosives after a confrontation brought about by their tunnels running into each other.

Woodward has taken a young Australian soldier, Frank Tiffin (Gilbertson), under his wing, and after a brief respite behind the lines – including a muddy game of football against some British troops – the company is redeployed to Belgium, and to Messines, where Hill 60 is a major thorn in the side of generals planning the attack. They want Woodward to blow it up, now that Canadian engineers have planted 21 mines of more than a million pounds of ammonium nitrate. The Australians must continue to maintain the tunnels and keep an eye out for any German response.

That sets the scene for a remarkable last third of the film. It’s brutally and genuinely gripping, as the hour of attack approaches. The Germans are alerted to the plan, and dig forward in an effort to try and disable the explosives before the mine can be set off. It’s heart-in-mouth stuff as Woodward’s men lose one of their own in a tunnel collapse, and try to stall the detonation of the mines so they can rescue their man.

The ending is gripping, the race against time taut with pressure, and there’s so much going on in such a short space of time that you barely breathe as the countdown to the detonation (which was so big it could be heard across the Channel in England) and the following battle really takes hold. It's urgent stuff.

Think of the ending to Peter Weir’s Gallipoli – well, Beneath Hill 60 has a similarly desolate finish. There’s no glory or celebration here, just more death, and the way the film concluded left me pretty dejected afterward as I walked out of the cinema. Brilliant Australian cinema!