The Dam Busters (film)
This page is about a film. For the event on which it is based see Operation ChastiseThe Dam Busters is a
1954 British war film, set during
World War II, and documenting the true story of the
RAF's
617 Squadron, the development of the "
bouncing bomb", and
Operation Chastise - the attack on the
Ruhr dams in
Germany. It stars
Michael Redgrave as
Barnes Wallis, and
Richard Todd as
Wing Commander Guy Gibson. The movie was based on the book,
The Dam Busters, by
Paul Brickhill.
The film has two distinct halves: firstly the story of engineer
Wallis and his struggle to develop a means of attacking
Germany's dams, in the hope of crippling
German heavy industry.
Wallis hits on the idea of a bouncing
bomb which can skip over the
water of the dam avoiding
torpedo nets and then sink in contact with the dam, explode and burst them open. Wallis calculates that the aircraft will have to fly extremely low (60 feet), in order for the bombs to skip over the water correctly. A special squadron of talented pilots will have to be formed -
617 Squadron, led by
Guy Gibson.
The second part of the story follows Gibson and his crews as they train for and then carry out the mission.
The flight sequences that take up the second half of the movie were filmed using real
Avro Lancaster bombers supplied by the RAF. The aircraft, four of the final production B.VIIs, had to be taken out of storage and specially modified, and cost £130 per hour to run, which amounted to a tenth of the film's costs. (An
American cut was made more dramatic by depicting a plane flying into a hill and exploding. This version used stock
Warner Brothers footage of a
B-17 Flying Fortress as opposed to a Lancaster.)
The
Upper Derwent Valley in
Derbyshire,
England (the actual test area for the real raids) doubled as the
Ruhr valley for the film. The scene where the Dutch coast is crossed was filmed between
Boston, Lincolnshire and
Kings Lynn, and other coastal scenes near
Skegness. Some more of the film was shot over
Windermere, in the
Lake District. The airfield used was
RAF Hemswell, a few miles north of
RAF Scampton. Hemswell was operational during the war, but not when filming took place.
The film is accurate historically with only a few minor exceptions.
Barnes Wallis said that he never encountered any opposition from
bureaucracy. None of the bombers flew into a hillside on the actual raid, unlike in the film. The film also makes it seem as if the raid is Wallis's idea but the dams had been identified as a target long before the method was devised. Gibson did not devise the '
altimeter' using two spot-lights whereas the film shows him inspired by
spotlights in a
theatre. Finally, the film was made before some of the details about the bombs used in the attack were declassified (which only happened in 1962), and thus is (understandably) somewhat inaccurate about some of the fine points of how the bombs were actually delivered.
Eric Coates's stirring theme, critically and popularly acclaimed, made a tremendous contribution to the film, achieving iconic status. For many, it is synonymous with the film - indeed, with the exploit itself. The Dam Busters March'' remains a favourite
military band item at
flypasts in the UK.
The attack on the "Death Star" in the climax of the film
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope is similar in many respects to the strategy of Operation Chastise — Rebel pilots have to fly through a trench while evading enemy fire and drop a single special weapon at a precise distance from the target in order to destroy the entire base with a single explosion; if one run fails another run must be made by a different pilot. Some scenes from the
Star Wars climax are very similar to those in
The Dam Busters and some of the dialogue is nearly identical in the two films. These scenes are also heavily influenced by the action scenes from the fictional wartime film
633 Squadron.
The 1982 film
The Wall, and the
Pink Floyd album upon which it is based, contains scenes from the film, notably when Gibson's dog called 'Nigger' is killed by a car, just before the planes take off.
These scenes were cut from
ITV's last showing of
The Dam Busters after their previous broadcast received complaints for the use of the word
nigger. While ITV has been criticised for censoring historical fact, and maligning the impact of a moving cinematic sequence in the process, the edited showing received many fewer complaints than the previous un-edited broadcast.
The Dam Busters has been praised as one of the greatest war films of all time, but also criticised as glorifying war and destruction. The music commissioned for the film, 'The Dam Busters March', by
Eric Coates has also remained popular
(2). In
2004 the
magazine Total Film named
The Dam Busters the 43rd greatest British film of all time.
#
Richard Todd, who plays Guy Penrose Gibson, took part in the airborne assault on
Pegasus Bridge on
D-Day. #The film's theme tune,
The Dam Busters' March, by
Eric Coates became an instant classic for
brass band and can still be heard in
football grounds during
England Football Team matches. One version released featured dialogue extracts from the movie (the bombing run).#There were two television advertisements for a brand of beer,
Carling Black Label, which played on the theme of
The Dam Busters. Both adverts were made before the English football team broke a 35 year
losing streak against Germany. The first showed a German guard on top of a dam catching a
bouncing bomb as if he were a goalkeeper. The second showed a British tourist throwing a
Union Jack towel like a
bouncing bomb to reserve a pool side seat before the German tourists could reserve them with their towels. Both actions were followed by the comment "I bet he drinks Carling Black Label"[
1].#Three of the four Lancaster bombers used in the film had also appeared in the
Dirk Bogarde film
Appointment in London two years earlier. [
2]#This was
Patrick McGoohan's feature film debut.
The Music Man (song)*
Brit Movie*
Photos of settings for lake scene.*
Article in The Guardian revisiting the actual sites of the film, and testifying to the iconic status of The Dam Busters March *
More information.
