something queer going on

I'm still watching a lot of shows and movies related to the world wars, though I'm starting to think I've seen all the really good ones already.

A Perfect Hero was a 1991 six-part miniseries that aired on London Weekend Television. It's about Hugh Fleming, an RAF fighter pilot and all-around golden boy who is severely burned on the hands and face when his Spitfire is shot down in 1940. The bits of it that were actually about his treatment and his recovery process were interesting (and the marvellous James Fox plays his plastic surgeon), but unfortunately a large chunk of the show was about Fleming's love life, which can be summed up as: he was a lying cheating dickhead before his injury and remained a lying cheating dickhead afterwards. That, too, might have been interesting if that had actually been the point, but we were meant to think that he was a better person after the accident, even though he continued to treat his girlfriends badly, including the one he eventually married (after treating her as second-best and panting after a society beauty who no longer wanted him once his face was scarred), who was far too good for him. Also, the ending was pure wish fulfillment that drastically undermined the realistic view of Fleming's injuries up to that point. Fleming was supposedly based on the historical Richard Hillary, but the movie didn't have the courage to give us the ending Hillary had, which was that after using every bit of influence and pressure he could muster to get himself cleared to fly again despite his badly injured hands, he promptly crashed a plane on a training run, killing himself and his radio operator. The miniseries goes for an inspirational ending instead, although the ultimate outcome is left ambiguous. Verdict: Worth seeing if you're a completist like me, or a big fan of James Fox or Bernard Hepton (who plays Fleming's father) but not of general interest.

The Captive Heart, from 1946, tries to be both a gritty POW drama and a romantic melodrama and doesn't quite succeed at either. The main character is a Dutch escapee from a concentration camp, who assumes the identity of a British officer killed in the Dunkirk retreat and is sent to a POW camp. He then gets a letter from the officer's estranged wife, to which he has to reply in order to keep a suspicious Gestapo officer off his trail. Naturally, he falls in love with the wife, and the wife falls in love with her mysteriously kind and thoughtful husband all over again. The Captive Heart a rarity among POW movies in not focusing on escape--escape in barely mentioned and never shown--and I liked it for that and for the fact that it gets some of the details of POW life right, such as the crowding and the hunger (especially in 1940 when the Germans suddenly had tens of thousands of POWs to feed, but a good system for getting Red Cross parcels to them hadn't yet been established). However, a lot of the details, including some plot-crucial ones, are wrong, and the overall picture of POW life is pretty rosy in a way that must have infuriated any ex-POWs who saw it. The romances (there are actually three storylines about three different prisoners, each of which centers on a romance--heterosexual of course) are very movie-ish and did nothing for me. I had hopes for this, because it was directed by Basil Dearden, who later went on to "social issues" movies including Victim, the first relatively positive portrayal of homosexuality in British cinema, but The Captive Heart didn't feel Dearden-y to me. Verdict: another one I can only recommend to WWII completists.

Finally, and unrelated to the world wars, last night I watched the first part of the Red Riding Trilogy. It turned out to be an example of how my spoiler aversion can lead me into trouble. Not having read much about it, I thought Red Riding was about the investigation of the actual Yorkshire Ripper case and would be a sort of procedural. Instead, the first installment deals with a completely fictional case and is about as far from a procedural as you can get. The journalist hero seems to have no clue how to investigate anything; instead, he goes around baiting the suspected bad guys and having lots of explicit sex with the mother of one of the child victims. The bad guys, meanwhile, do the classic conspiracy-movie bad guy thing of starting to threaten the hero long before he knows anything, when if they had just left him the hell alone, his leads would probably have petered out. The plot is implausible on every level. Plus there are a bunch of pointless dream sequences. And did I mention the explicit sex? There are seriously four or five sex scenes in a movie less than two hours long (all het, of course), a total pretty well matched by the number of graphic scenes of beating and torture. I hated this so much that I have moved the other two installments off the top of my Netflix queue and I may not bother with them at all. Because I do not want to see any more torture sequences, thank you.

As a palate cleanser, I've put some comedies next in my queue.