Peter Watkins' The War Game
Given the spate of nuclear Armageddon films made in the 1960s — e.g., Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe, Franklin J. Schaffner's Planet of the Apes — and up through the early 1980s television production The Day After, it’s remarkable how such a low-budget effort like The War Game retains its effectiveness when almost all other films on the topic seem corny.
In fact, it’s likely that the timelessness of Watkins' film is the very reason it was banned for nearly two decades. Scenes of British police shooting civilians were probably deemed too disturbing. Worse yet, the film’s realistic feel and unflinching look at the total inability of the U.K. government to protect its citizens from a nuclear attack — or to care for them following one such attack — surely caused waves.
When The War Game was delayed for broadcast, Watkins resigned from the BBC, which had been pressured into private screenings for public officials. Many of those denounced Watkins' film as anti-British agitprop. Film critic Kenneth Tynan, however, championed the documentary as possibly the most important film ever made, a gesture that spearheaded a letter-writing campaign by anti-nuke forces. (That was one of the relatively few instances when a film critic played a positive role.) The War Game then received limited theatrical release on college campuses across Europe and America in 1966.
Although limited, much of the film's information about a nuclear strike was cannily accurate for its day, including the claim that over a third of all Britons would die in the attacks and their aftermath. The War Game was made before the "nuclear winter" concept, so most of the information was taken from the reported effects of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the fire bombings of Tokyo, Dresden, and other Japanese and German cities.
The effectiveness of the extras in makeup, some with severe deformity and scarring, is jolting, but made even more realistic by the film being in black and white. Curiously, some of the vox populi interviews pull back from the tale of nuclear horror to ask Britons whether or not the U.K. should retaliate against the USSR in such a scenario — most unstintingly agree their nation should. This is a nice contrast to some of the intertitle sequences that show often hilariously naïve comments by British officials written out in full.
Near film’s end, a voiceover intones that by 1980 the chances of such a scenario playing out at least once in the world is very high. That it never did is something to seriously pause over, for despite the film’s accuracy in depicting governmental inadequacies in responding to such an attack it has to be acknowledged that Peter Watkins grossly underestimated the human will to survive — whatever role that played at keeping the Cold War nuclear powers at bay for nearly half a century.
Now, even though The War Game is technically a mockumentary — however un-Christopher Guest-like — one could argue that it is also a documentary since it so perfectly captures its era’s zeitgeist without seriously dating itself. Besides exposing Cold War Civil Defense failures, Watkins' film slyly comments on the failings of the media of the day, especially in their approach to the classism of that era. One wonders if any documentary made today could as readily capture the true and false beliefs we now have regarding global warming, Islamic terror, the international financial crisis, etc.
In sum, The War Game is a terrific, innovative, and profound film. I recommend its rediscovery to all who want to know what art and journalism can do, even if that only happens far too rarely. In fact, The War Game is a truly rare film, in all respects.
© Dan Schneider
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of Mr. Schneider, and they may not reflect the views of Alt Film Guide. A version of this The War Game review was initially posted in November 2009.
1 Academy Award Win (1966)
Best Documentary Feature: Peter Watkins
I'm surprised there's no mention of the 1984 BBC docudrama, "Threads", written by Barry Hines and directed by Mick Jackson (principally known for directing Costner and Houston in 'The Bodyguard').
I always assumed that (since it appeared at roughly the same time) it was the UK's variation on the same nuclear war theme as America's made-for-ABC-TV movie, The Day After, or the slightly later U.S. film, 'Testament'.
Like The War Game, 'Threads' focused on the fate of a single British city near a NATO air base, Sheffield, and two families: The upper-middle-class Becketts, whose daughter Ruth has been going with (and now pregnant by) the eldest son of the working-class Kemps. World War III leaves almost everyone dead — except for the pregnant Ruth, who gives birth in a stable during a thunderstorm, while a chained dog barks frantically.
Decades pass; the postwar population of the British Isles is lower than that of Midieval England. Ruth is now a white-haired crone in her forties, dying of cancer, blinded by cataracts caused by increased UV exposure. Her daughter, now twentysomething, is pregnant and delivers her child in a makeshift hospital; in the last scene, a midwife casually drops her newborn baby on her stomach, and the daughter gasps — the child was born with deformities, due to radiation-induced damage to her DNA (hence, the 'Threads' in the title).
This production was, to me, more affecting than its Hollywood cousins because its horror was more understated than cinematic, and so had higher production values — again, my opinion. I'm not sure why, but the scene of fire engines, silently deploying in the darkness to predetermined 'safe areas' outside Sheffield, the night before the war begins was chilling enough that it has always stayed with me as emblematic of impending disaster.