The Dam Busters

War films. These days they're all about the tortured psychology of individual combatants and gory realism. Back in 1955 they were all about celebrating the heroic sacrifices made by often ordinary people (well, men, it was the fifties) or the clever inventions made necessary by World War II.

You know The Dam Busters tune. Or you do if you were one of those kids who made their hands into goggles and zoomed about the playground taking out the Luftwaffe in your imaginary Spitfire during the Battle of Britain. Which is ironic because this movie features Lancaster bombers and is not a retelling of the missions of 'the few' but of the development of Barnes Wallis' 'bouncing bombs' which took out two key power dams in Western Germany.

Michael Redgrave plays Wallis as a quiet genius whose internalised emotions are only depicted by frowns, handshakes or a bit of pacing up and down. His eccentric idea for bombs delivered from exposed and dangerously low heights almost doesn't come to fruition until Bomber Harris himself decides to back the plan and force Whitehall's hands.

Richard Todd's squadron leader, Guy Gibson, is a stoic Adonis who at no point acknowledges quite what a suicidal mission he has been ordered to take on. Upper lips have never been stiffer. That's how men were in those days. Even the cowards. Although they sometimes undermined their own heroism by giving their pet dogs extraordinarily racist names.

What's astonishing is how standard black and white footage of calm seas and cloudy skies somehow provides a perfect chiaroscuro backdrop for the sight of the Lancasters as they finally head for their targets after two thirds of a film about overcoming technical and administrative obstacles. The lack of colour adds a layer of realism that isn't based in reality at all unless the past truly was in black and white. Which it wasn't. Ask Alexander the Great.

It's possible there were only three working bombers available to the film makers as we only ever see three in shot at any one time. How many set off is therefore a matter for historians rather than cinema buffs but very few return. A couple are taken out by enemy flak as they deliver their single bomb payloads, the rest go missing on the journey back to Blighty. Gibson survives (his own account of the mission was one of the sources for the film) but rather than a high octane, Top Gun style celebration of the success of the mission, the film ends on a more sombre note, reflecting the loss of more than fifty men.

There is no sombre reflection of how many Germans would have been killed as the torrid waters of breached dams flooded the land below. We are informed that at one of the targets a power station below the dam is destroyed, something earlier footage alluded to with shots of workers trying to escape rising floodwater. Workers. Not Nazis. Power station workers. Oh well, it was war, remember. Stiff upper lip, eh? Pip pip, old sport, let's watch Top Gun now. Or Top Gear. Old Top Gear.