Kitch’s Top 5 World War One Movies: #1 – Gallipoli

Director: Peter Weir
Release Date: August 1981
Starring: Mel Gibson, Mark Lee & Bill Kerr.

In A Few Words: The story of two friends from rural Western Australia who volunteer to join the Australian light horse and find themselves on the Gallipoli battlefield.

Spoilers Ahead

Peter Weir is a genius. 

The gold standard of Australian war films – and one that sparked the creation of some other good ones, like The Lighthorsemen and Breaker Morant – and quite possibly one of the best Australian films of any genre. Peter Weir’s work is a masterpiece, and although the title suggests a close look at the battle, the reality is that the story sends an anti-war message and is more about the closeness of two mates who end up on Gallipoli, and involved in the fateful Battle of the Nek in August 1015, which was a part of a greater August offensive designed by Sir Ian Hamilton.

Gibson and Lee as Frank Dunne and Archy Hamilton are fantastic. Their chemistry was apparent right from their first scene together. They are contrasting characters: Archy, a track sprinter who idolises 100 yard sprinter Harry Lascelles, is swept up in the fervour of war, whilst Frank joins up because Archie is going. He’s not so gung-ho about things, and can even be classed as a little jaded and cynical about the need to protect the British empire.

The two friends are separated at enlistment, because Frank can’t ride a horse with enough talent to enlist with the light horse. Whilst Archy heads off with the light horse, Frank joins up with three friends who worked with him on the railway in Western Australia and heads to Egypt as an infantryman. It’s during a training exercise in the desert outside Cairo that Frank and Archy reunite, and because the light horse regiments are being sent to Gallipoli without their horses, basically as extra infantry.

One of the overriding themes in the movie is a loss of innocence, and you can feel it coming, as the Australians, naïve and not knowing what they’re getting themselves in for over on Gallipoli, spend their time touring Cairo, climbing the pyramids and generally enjoying themselves.

All of that changes once they arrive on Gallipoli. The battlefield is first glimpsed in the night time, and with no small amount of wonder by the two friends. They arrive an undetermined period of time into the campaign, and the trench system is well defined. Most of the men who have been on the peninsula since the first day deal with the battle in a rather nonchalant manner, making jokes about everything, which belies the grim situation that the Australians find themselves in. They’re clinging precariously to a very narrow slice of Turkish countryside. Archy and Frank have to learn quickly how things work.

It’s soon clear that the light horse regiments (and others) have been brought to Gallipoli to be the forefront of a new offensive that is designed to break the stalemate on the Peninsula. There will be two Australian attacks: the infantry at Lone Pine and, later, the lighthorse at The Nek. Elsewhere, British infantry will make a fresh landing at Suvla Bay and New Zealand troops were to try for the summit.

After the infantry attack is a half-success – the infantry takes the first enemy trenches, but are subject to heavy Turkish counter attacks – Frank learns that one of his friends was killed and another mortally wounded during the initial charge.

What follows is the most extraordinary end to a film I can remember. The light horse wait out the night, knowing they will be charging into the teeth of the Turkish guns. An early morning bombardment concludes too early, due to officers’ watches not telling the same time. Archy is recognised as a track star by his commanding officer, and is requested to become a runner. He declines, wanting to take part in the attack, so Frank takes the job.

The attack is a disaster. Two waves are cut down, and Frank is sent to brigade headquarters to tell them the situation is hopeless, but the officer in charge has received incorrect reports that marker flags have been seen in Turkish trenches, so the attack is ordered to proceed. Another wave is killed outright, so Frank is sent to the beach, to General HQ, to try and have the last attack, of which Archy is a part, cancelled.

Frank receives those orders, but doesn’t make it back in time. The attack is called, and the last wave leave their trenches. The anguished cry from Frank as he collapses against the sandbagged wall, so close yet so far, is one that will remain with you forever, and perhaps one of the most iconic moments in Australian cinema. Second only, perhaps, to the last scene of the movie – a freeze-frame that will definitely remain imprinted on your mind. It’s of Archy, his chest hit by a flurry of machine gun bullets. 

That’s the film. It fades to black, and you’re left to ponder the futility of war. The action at The Nek was as close to organised murder as there was on a Great War battlefield. The West Australian lighthorsemen had no chance. None at all. As a final message in a movie epic full of them, it’s pretty poignant.

Kitch’s Top 5 World War One Movies: #2 – The Lighthorsemen

Director: Simon Wincer
Release Date: September 1987
Starring: Jon Blake, Peter Phelps, John Walton and Sigrid Thornton.

In A Few Words: The story of a four-man section in the Australian light horse regiment fighting in Palestine in 1917, and particularly focusing on.

Spoilers Ahead

Where Gallipoli’s ending was a tear-jerker, the ending to The Lighthorsemen, a similar new-wave Australian film – you know, the type that portrays the Anzacs as being knockabout larrikin rogues who dislike British officers and are better soldiers than the stuffy Brits allow them to be – has a much happier end.

A vehicle for the promising star Jon Blake, who had taken all before him starring in The Anzacs miniseries alongside Paul Hogan, it was at the conclusion of filming, and after a wrap party that Blake was involved in a car accident that turned him into a vegetable for the rest of his life. For that reason, The Lighthorsemen will always be remembered in the annals of Australian cinematic history with more than a touch of sadness attached. Even so, this is one of my favourite films.

The story of four mates, led by Irish-Australian Scotty (Blake), along with fellow Gallipoli veterans Tas (Walton), Chiller and Frank, leads up to the Australian charge on Beersheba. That event, a resounding victory, is the last great cavalry charge, and successful mostly because the Turks kept expecting the Australians to dismount and finish their attack on foot, as they had done in previous encounters. Instead, they remained on horseback and bold charged wielding only bayonets, into the teeth of the Turkish guns, and saved the entire army, who were, by that stage, dangerously close to running out of water.

After an early skirmish robs the foursome of one of their number, a replacement from Victoria, Dave (Phelps) comes aboard, but it is soon clear that he does not have the stomach for war, and fails to fire his gun in a couple of engagements. This enrages Tas, who doesn’t like the idea of having a man he perceives to be a coward in his midst. His unwillingness to pull the trigger nearly gets him killed during an ambush on some Turkish horsemen.

Dave is wounded during a raid by enemy aircraft – a very spectacular scene – and transfers to the Red Cross ambulance service, where he doesn’t have to kill anyone. There, he meets nurse Anne (Thornton), and the two quickly strike up a romantic relationship. Meanwhile, there are plans afoot by British intelligence to distract the Turks from the real target of the next push by the Allied armies, which is indeed aimed at the town of Beersheba. The German adviser to Turkish defenders in Beersheba buys the ruse. This is crucial, because the decision is made not to destroy the town’s water supply, which is really what the Australians need. The town is fairly inconsequential, but it’s wells are not.

The South Australian desert doubles nicely for Beersheba and the flat valley in which the town sits. Throughout most of the day, the light horse regiment is forced to wait as British cavalry and New Zealand infantry attack the town with no success. Then, late in the afternoon, with daylight and water running out, the Australians are sent at the town, a proper charge, rather than dismounting halfway.

Director Dean Semler rises to the occasion in the last quarter of the film, and it’s not hard to see how much money was poured into the movie, and, especially into the final charge sequence. There are extras galore, sweeping helicopter shots of the charge unfolding through the large, flat valley, and a fantastic musical score that’ll get your heart racing. Semler’s switching between the approaching Australians and clearly-confused enemy gunners is well done, with generals on both sides counting down the distance to the town.

It’s amazing to think that the Australians were thrown into the fray at the last minute, galloped towards the town – and into history, for that matter – with just bayonets and a fair amount of guts. There are shockingly realistic scenes of horses and men driven into the desert floor as their bandoliers of ammunition explode.  Miraculously, only 31 Australians were killed in the unlikeliest of charges.

Once the Australians make it over the trenches, vicious hand to hand fighting takes place and Scotty, as befitting the hero of the movie, needs to stop the Germans from destroying the wells. He’s so good as Scotty, Blake, and it’s such a shame that his talents were lost to us so soon afterward.

A remarkable victory for the Australians saves the attacking army from true disaster, and vaults the light horse regiments into the annals of our country’s military history. Of course, there’s a happy ending to roll us to the credits, which is not necessarily a bad thing, and some rolling text before the credits let us all know what happened to the characters in later life.

The Lighthorsemen is a fitting tribute to an oft-overlooked victory, and one that, sadly, seems to have been shadowed by Weir’s Gallipoli. It deserves wider acclaim and broadcast.

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!