Jackboots on Whitehall

Military Puppet Satire

Entertainment Motion Pictures

Reel DVD

R4 DVD

It’s hard to place this film in a particular genre. Satire, definitely, because it lampoons the American revisionism of history. It also satirises those great British characters like the rough but honest farm workers, the village vicar and the pretty farmgirl. It also manages a passing swipe at the French, Indians, Americans, Scots and even Australians. No famous historical character is safe – Churchill is a cigar chomping defeatist, Montgomery has a massive overbite and can’t stop grinning foolishly, and Hitler likes to wear Queen Elizabeth 1’s dresses. The war genre? It could fit in here but you are too busy laughing to regard it as war. It’s more like a lampooning of a John Wayne film. Drama? No, not when you can see every joke coming a mile off.

Perhaps the classification is given away at the start of the film. It is, we are told, “Filmed in Panzervision” and behind the titles are comic book panels with caricature Germans being killed by caricature British. Speech balloons feature immortal lines like “Englander schweinhund” and, of course, “Gott in Himmel”. That fairly adequately describes the film – an animated comic book with touches of Thunderbirds are Go and The Goon Show. If you have seen the irreverent Team America you will get the idea. The animatronic puppets are perfect for setting the scene. Live actors just wouldn’t do.

It is let down a little by a plot that just doesn’t deliver enough jokes to fill the couple of hours that the film takes. Compress it by thirty minutes and it would work better. Still, it is the McHenry Brothers’ first feature and on the strength of it we are going to see a lot more of their work in the future.

The plot is simple. The British are being massacred at Dunkirk. The Luftwaffe has not shot down al the British fighters. Hitler decides the best way to invade England is by digging a tunnel under the English Channel and coming up in London. This way they can conquer England from within and capture Churchill without all that messy boat stuff. They complete the tunnel in a couple of days. Churchill has no forces left except for a small group of loyal Punjabi guards so he has no option but to retreat north to Hadrians Wall on the Scottish border.

The hero Chris (voiced by Ewan McGregor) rescues Churchill and his men in an old steam traction engine and they race desperately for the border at about three miles an hour. The Germans, who have zeppelins and plenty of aircraft, apparently don’t notice this. They attack when they find out Churchill is at the Wall. The small remaining force of English, Punjabis and Americans are helped by an unlikely ally – the Scots, led by Braveheart, who are pissed off by the way they were depicted in the Mel Gibson film.

Even if it was a bit too long I loved the film. The animation scenes looked deliberately fake, the script was delightfully corney and the characters were lampooned mercilessly. There were enough one-liners to make up for the lack of better gags. If we are going to put up with revised history this is the way it should be done.

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