Passchendaele

Introduction

Due South…that's the way I'm going…due South…

Paul Gross will forever be known to me as Dudley Do-right mountie Benton Fraser from the series Due South, a wildly popular TV series that aired in the UK during the latter half of the 90's. He's done a lot of other things, lots before and afterwards, but for me Paul Gross is stuck in a little bottle on my shelf marked Due South and it's unlikely that I'll move it anywhere else.

One of Gross' latest projects is as writer, director and star of Passchendaele, a film that focuses on the pivotal battle of 1917. Gross likens his obsession with his written script to that of Eastwood with The Unforgiven, knowing that he would eventually make the film, but only when he was ready. The grandfather of Gross served in World War One and the opening sequence was based upon a story his grandfather told him, a story quite horrifying in its pointlessness really if you think about it and something that probably haunted his grandfather in the same way it haunts the character in the film.

Sgt Michael Dunne (Gross) is on patrol in France when he comes across a German machine gun emplacement built on the altar of a ruined church. During the attack on this emplacement, his patrol suffers casualties but he manages to throw a grenade into the huddled enemy. Fixing bayonet, he then charges the altar and finds all the enemy dead bar one young German with almost watery blue eyes, who attempts to surrender before Dunne bayonets him through the skull. Dunne is then caught in an artillery explosion that sees him evacuated to hospital back in Canada.

Dunne's wounds heal, but the psychological damage is severe and goes AWOL for a short time. Dunne is haunted by the young German he killed and is suffering from battle shock, a condition not well established during this period. Dunne is helped back to health by a young nurse called Sarah (Caroline Dhavernas), whereupon the medical board decide that there is something not quite right with him and post him to a small town in Alberta as a recruiter. Dunne is assigned to work alongside a British officer called Dobson-Hughes, an arrogant soldier who served in the Boer War but with no experience of the more modern form of trench warfare. Dobson-Hughes makes no secret of the fact that he believes that Dunne is a coward.

Meanwhile Sarah's brother David (Joe Dinicol) has a passionate relationship with Cassie Walker (Meredith Bailey) and wants her father's blessing to be with her. Sadly for him, Dr Walker (David Ley) has other ideas, seeing David as a boy with no prospects unless he can prove himself in battle, even though he has asthma. He attempts to enlist but Dunne blocks him at every stage until the Doctor forges a letter showing him clear of asthma and he is posted off to France.

When Dunne hears what has happened he volunteers to return to the front under a different name in order to try and protect the young man from harm, just as the battle for Passchendaele is about to begin…

Visual

The visuals are pretty spectacular, especially the location shots in Canada. It's no real surprise to learn that the Tourist Board of Canada were part involved in the financing of the film.

The Passchendaele set is no less impressive even though it is essentially a couple of acres with the topsoil removed, logs planted to represent a bombed out forest and then soaked in water to get the boggy condition of the battlefield. In reality this set could have been as dangerous as the real thing.

Extras

Making Of - quite a long featurette that explores the inspiration behind the film and how it all came together. Standard fare really, not the best but also not the worst of its kind.

Overall

Passchendaele, or the Third Battle of Ypres as it is more commonly known, was one of the major battles of World War One. It took 6 months and approx 600,000 lives across both sides for the Allies to capture Vimy Ridge, some 5,000 of them Canadian lives. What made it worse was that the following year the German retook the same land within a week. Passchendaele has become synonymous with attrition trench warfare played out in the thick mud and watery conditions that most people now think off when discussing the first world war.

There have now been a few films based on WW1 but few have done trench warfare any justice and the one I can remember that came closest recently was one that introduced a supernatural element, so not really a straight forward war film. Paul Gross clearly wants to tell the story of his countrymen in action but wisely doesn't waste all his time in mud and blood. Instead he bookends the film with battle scenes and uses the middle section to show the Canadian home front and focus on the love story that is at the heart of the film. It's clear that part of the remit was to highlight Canada as a tourist destination, based on the film's sponsors and some of the rather spectacular Alberta scenery, but there's a little more to it than that. It's clear that a lot of emotional blackmail was used to get young men to enlist and this is shown quite clearly, alongside some very dated attitudes about war - remembering that previous military experience was based on the Boer War and previous conflicts rather than trench warfare and that civilian experience was limited to letters home or newspaper reports which would put a glossy spin on conditions.

Gross plays his character well, although in truth his acting style is so close to Fraser Benton that you could easily imagine that this was one of the Due South mountie's ancestors. Caroline Dhavernas is rather good as the love interest and nurse with a secret, and a slightly unrecognisable Gil Bellows is good value as a one armed man and friend of Dunne's who pretends to be a war hero to pull girls. Overall a pretty good cast and only really Joe Dinicol is totally unconvincing, and even then only at the film's denouement.

Passchendaele makes some good points about the Great War and depicts the action in quite a realistic way. It's generally the smallest things that make most soldiers the happiest and here the focus is on keeping matches dry, with Dunne even correcting a Doctor by saying that this is more important to the man in the field than the fear of vaporisation through an artillery direct hit. And it's more than likely true. The conditions and fighting on the main battlefield look pretty realistic with the example of a young infantryman, not under fire by the way, falling into a water filled mud crater and his 'friends' choosing to leave as they assumed he was going to die in the mud and they didn't want to join him at that time. Close quarter fighting looks as bloody as it probably was and even the ceasefire wasn't that unusual at the time, when there still appeared to be some honour on the battlefield.

Overall I found this quite enjoyable, not great but not bad either…