Jackboots On Whitehall

Jackboots On Whitehall

There has been plenty of talk about the proposed Nazi invasion of England, codenamed Operation Sealion, that was supposed to happen once Herman Goering's Luftwaffe defeated the RAF in the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940. I can even remember a Len Deighton book from my youth called SS-GB, but that was quite serious.

From the imaginations of brothers Edward and Rory McHenry comes puppet masterpiece Jackboots On Whitehall which takes more than a few liberties with British history and finally sees the Nazi master race setting foot in London. A few liberties with history is a slight understatement as Wales doesn't actually exist and Scot Land hasn't been ventured near since the abortive Roman invasion that culminated in the building of Hadrian's Wall. So whilst the cigar chomping Churchill (Timothy Spall) is still very much in charge, it's more an English Empire than British.

The Battle of Britain has just been lost as the last remaining Spitfire is shot down (although I think the RAF only actually had two in this rewriting of history...) and the Germans are off to bomb Kent and London at will, overseen by Goering, Himmler and Goebbels in the bullet proof zeppelin Hindenburg. In Kent, we find farmers son Chris (Ewan McGregor) who desperately wanted to join up and fight but whose hands were just too big to get past the trigger guard of the standard English rifle. Chris is in love with Vicar's daughter Daisy (Rosamund Pike), but it's a forbidden love as Daisy's father doesn't approve of the big handed labourer.

With the entire English Army is trapped at Dunkirk, the Nazi's decide to dig a channel tunnel from France to the centre of London, panzer tanks emerging from a big hole in Trafalgar Square. They then march on Downing Street where Churchill is still esconced in his underground bunker whilst above and outside number 10, Captain Ruppee (Sanjeev Bhaskar) and his platoon of Punjabi Rifles protect the PM's residence with the help of US aviator Billy Fiske (Dominic West). Sadly this intrepid bunch of disparate heroes is vastly outnumbered, but help arrives in the nick of time as Chris, Daisy and some farmers arrive in a steam engine to rescue Churchill and retreat to Hadrian's Wall for their last stand.

With the Nazi's burning everything in their path in their march up North, can anything save England?

This is not a bad idea really and one I've been waiting to see in serious films before now and been disappointed that no one's tried this before. Still, whilst a comedy of puppets was not quite what I had in mind, here we are. This is pretty clever really as it is mostly puppet work with a degree of CGI used for facial expressions. There's plenty of behind the scenes footage to show how this was made and there was a surprising number of sets created for this films, I think I heard the McHenry's father who acts as Production Designer say that there were 41 sets. That's quite impressive. All the puppets are about a foot tall and actually look just like Action Men and Barbie dolls with redesigned heads on them. Kudo's also to the costume designer as creating costumes is normally a bit of a thankless task and rarely gets the credit it deserves, but to have to create these costumes (and an awful lot of them) at a miniature scale is pretty impressive. The animation is pretty basic but it works.

What about the film? Well, it's not Team America, that's for sure. It's good but it's not as funny as it thinks it is, despite the rather impressive cast list. There are the basis of some jokes in the script but I just felt some were not utilised as well as they could have been - such as F.A.N.Y. The Scots are all stereotyped as variations on the Braveheart theme and Scot Land is the puppet equivalent of Mordor, whilst Hitler is a crossdresser with a penchant for Elizabethan dress. There are some good gags in there though, such as the retreating Punjabi's travelling on the top of a London Doubledecker bus and the Polish worker in Downing Street who can't stop working despite the fighting going on around him and the gag with the King of England locked up in the Tower whilst proclaiming he's two-thirds German is also pretty funny.

When all is said and done, it's a fine effort but not one that you'll remember that long into the future and not good enough dialogue for repeated quotes in the pub or at work. Good effort though...

**NOTE** I have a retail copy of this disc rather than the usual review copy and there appears to be a huge problem in that at least a good chunk of approx. 15 minutes or so is missing from this film based on the running time documented on the box. It's the climactic battle between the Scots and Nazi's and makes a bit of a mess of the end of the film. I thought at first it was a problem with a layer change and that the disc had jumped, so I ran it again with an onscreen counter which just continued as normal. I then had a look at the Scene Select options and same issue. There was no feedback of any errors that I could find on iMDB so I'm guessing the limited theatrical release was fine. My marking is in spite of this error, as this must be due a recall. If not and this is deliberate (can't think why it would be...) then it would be around 2 for ruining the flow of the film.