There’ll Always Be an England
by Gavin Smith
New York Film Festival 2024:
Blitz
Dir. Steve McQueen, UK, Apple
Death from above never gets old. Today, missiles are raining down on Ukraine and Israel (and tomorrow on Iran). Supposedly surgical air strikes are pulverizing Gaza and Lebanon, and Yemen and Syria are getting some for good measure. From on high, drones and gunships obliterated friend and foe alike in Afghanistan. And let’s not forget those multi-year bombing campaigns in Vietnam and Korea. If you’re in the ordnance business, right now business is good.
Conscious as he surely is of present-day parallels, Steve McQueen has other things on his mind. And so Blitz is not so much a war movie as it is film about—alas, this is the only phrase for it—life during wartime, in this case World War II. Much the same is true of the only other notable film set during the Blitz, John Boorman’s nostalgic, semi-autobiographical 1987 film Hope and Glory. Neil Jordan’s 1999 The End of the Affair and Terence Davies’s 1988 Distant Voices, Still Lives feature scenes of the Blitz, but in these the air raids are aspects of a broader social framework and set of concerns. The action-spectacular movie that fully tackles the relentless havoc of the Blitz head on—effectively a retort to postwar Germany’s Truemmerfilme (“rubble film”) genre—has yet to and may never be made. Britain’s Heritage Cinema only goes so far. For the most part, after its opening scene, Blitz mostly confines the demands of visceral ILM-facilitated spectacle to its final 30 minutes, unleashing a stunning and harrowing rendering of the Blitz’s death and destruction.
Blitz unfolds over the course of three long days and two longer nights in September 1940. We are at the inception of history’s first ever urban bombing campaign, courtesy of the German Luftwaffe, whose Heinkel bombers are here dimly glimpsed as their payloads tumble from the night skies. The targets were the industrial plants and dockyards of London’s East End, but as McQueen’s recreation of life and death in London makes clear, working-class neighborhoods in the vicinity bore the brunt of the destruction. Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, and St. Paul’s Cathedral sustained only light damage.
Like a more comprehensive and expansive update of Humphrey Jennings’s nine-minute 1940 documentary London Can Take It!, the film opens with a corrective-cum-homage to Fires Were Started, Jennings’s 1943 hour-long fictional dramatization of the heroics of London’s firefighters. Nothing if not immersive, Blitz hits the ground running in a small corner of an urban hellscape as Yorick Le Saux’s camera hurtles every which way in the midst of firemen struggling to gain control of a whirling, bucking fire hose, while a row of terraced houses goes up in flames. Cut to… abstraction: a tight close-up of the surface of dark blue sea racing below, then a seething high-contrast black-and-white blizzard of flakes, alighting finally on an out-of-focus bed of white daisies. You can take the man out of art school, but you can’t take the art school out of the man.
Next comes a man with a deeply creased face playing the piano in his front parlor. It’s singer-songwriter Paul Weller, a dependable icon of white London working-class authenticity, cast here as Gerald, father of Rita (Saoirse Ronan), a single mother employed in an armaments factory, and grandfather to George (Elliott Heffernan), a solemn mixed-race nine-year-old. Under protest, George is soon aboard an evacuation train, shipped like over a million and a half city children to the safety of the British countryside under the auspices of “Operation Pied Piper.” Angrily rejecting the prospect of “an adventure for children only” and being separated from his mother indefinitely, this resourceful, determined boy leaps from the train and heads back to London—and embarks on an adventure of his own. Rita, meanwhile, has started her shift at a bomb manufacturing plant, part of a cheerful war-effort sisterhood doing their part in licking Hitler while the boys are away preparing for war.
A Turner Prize winner who received a knighthood in 2020, McQueen has belonged to the upper echelon of British cinema for nearly 20 years. If his is an uneven movie career, its peaks (Hunger, 12 Years a Slave, and the Small Axe miniseries) more than make up for its duds (the ludicrous Shame and the superfluous genre exercise Widows). With last year’s monumental Occupied City, McQueen made a bold pivot to documentary with a forensic, topographic deep dive into the history of Amsterdam’s Jewish community during the Nazi occupation. Exhaustive (and exhausting) as it was, Occupied City was a feat like no other. But the long-nurtured ambition of Blitz is something else again. In the wake of the Small Axe cycle, McQueen now sets out to submit British cultural identity to a stress test during a period of maximum crisis.
Until recently, the wartime London of popular imagination was an all-white one—but McQueen knows different. His protagonist, George, is the issue of a relationship between Rita and Marcus (CJ Beckford), who is of Grenadian origin. In an ecstatic flashback sequence of dance and music, the couple enjoy a night out at an Afro-Caribbean community hall, but the good vibes are short-lived—Marcus is attacked by five racists, arrested by the police, and reportedly deported. Throughout, Blitz is peppered with African and Asian-Indian characters, and there’s also a memorable performance by little person Leigh Gill as real-life Jewish shelter marshal and community activist Mickey Davies, an exponent of community socialism who, after the war, would go on to become a Labour Party councilor and Deputy Mayor of Stepney.
Postwar Britain’s patriotic self-image was defined for generations by three events: the unlikely pluck of the evacuation of Dunkirk (May-June 1940), “our finest hour” according to Winston Churchill; the RAF’s derring-do defeat of the Luftwaffe for air superiority in British skies in the Battle of Britain (July-August 1940); and the supposed high morale and keep-calm-and-carry-on resilience of Londoners as the bombs fell, dubbed the Spirit of the Blitz. McQueen, who was born in 1969, would have grown up in an era during which these cultural touchstones were still potent and near the forefront of national consciousness. And since these touchstones endure to this day, McQueen aims to reframe the national myth of the Spirit of the Blitz in several ways.
To begin with, an early scene depicts a crowd’s panic and outrage when refused entry to Stepney Green tube station during an air raid. A few scenes later, after Rita performs a song, broadcast live on the factory shop floor by BBC radio as part of a morale-boosting “Works Wonders” talent showcase, her coworkers stage an “Open the Underground” demonstration (and are fired for their troubles). McQueen’s inference that public pressure forced the authorities to reverse their policy somewhat subverts the romanticism of those iconic images of huddled Londoners sheltering on tube platforms. And the Spirit of the Blitz myth really takes a beating in the sequence in which George is pressed into service by a sinister gang of looters led by a Cockney Fagin figure (Stephen Graham). In what has to be the film’s most macabre scene (one based in fact), the gang ghoulishly loot jewelry from the still-seated corpses of revelers in the West End nightclub Café de Paris, which took a direct hit.
Blitz takes its place in a rich tradition of films that show the adult world from a child’s point of view. Once he reaches London, George undertakes an eye-opening odyssey through the drab streets of a city coming to terms with a brand-new way to die. But the boy’s perilous path back to his East End home in Stepney is also an instructive journey through the British Empire, affording him a glimpse of how the one percent live: peering through the window of a Hamleys toy shop before a policeman moves him along; and later finding himself in the Empire Arcade, where he takes in self-serving depictions of British colonialism in its shop windows. Sir Steve isn’t afraid to bite the hand that pats him.
The Arcade scene is pivotal since it’s here that George meets and is taken under the wing of Ife (played by singer-songwriter Benjamin Clémentine), a Nigerian Air Raid Warden—and presumably the first Black adult he’s ever encountered. (He asks him “Are you Black?”) Ife’s advent undercuts the inevitable whiteness of the Spirit of the Blitz myth, all the more so when he breaks up a dispute in a shelter for people made homeless by the bombing over a sheet hung by a racist couple to cordon themselves off from their Sikh neighbors. “I like to think we step up to the occasion,” he says, calmly putting the couple in their place, and (anachronistically) condemning segregation, before concluding that “We’re all equal members of this country.” Self-possessed and conscientious, he represents the humane face of authority and a perhaps too obvious potential surrogate father figure in the boy’s eyes. It’s after this that George, having denied it earlier, affirms “I am Black.” (In a street cricket flashback he reacts impassively when he’s called a “black bastard.”) Not all Black parental surrogates are so benevolent, however. While peering at cakes in the window of a bakery, George is picked up by Jess (Mica Ricketts), who delivers him into the hands of the gang of looters, who need children to crawl into bombed shops in search of valuables. (On the way they pass a Black street preacher named the Oracle in the credits and played by poet and activist Linton Kwesi Johnson.)
Our first sighting of Rita and George in Blitz is in bed on the morning of the boy’s evacuation. They are pretending to play the drums together in a bit of tomfoolery, creating a sensation that they can “feel thru your whole body.” This seemingly throwaway bit of silliness establishes the loving connection of mother and son but also combines with the previous shot of Gerald at the piano to initiate a musical motif. “Winter’s Coat,” the song Rita performs for the BBC broadcast, is tellingly cowritten by McQueen; later the strains of “Whistle While You Work,” a Disney song repurposed for war-effort morale boosting is heard on the factory shop floor. Alongside two bravura musical interludes—the vibrant dancing in the community hall and the glamorous big band number in the Café de Paris— Blitz also acknowledges a wide range of homegrown musical traditions: the bomb factory’s brass band, the briefly glimpsed skiffle trio, the pub singalong.
This unforced musical survey culminates in a wrenching shot of terrified Londoners in an air raid shelter singing “Show Me the Way to Go Home” as the bombs fall. This is followed by George’s dream, as he sleeps on the subway tracks, in which he finds himself watching a singer performing “I’m Coming Home to You” in the Underground to a spellbound audience, among them the figures of Ife and Tommy, a boy with whom George briefly bonded during his escape to London, and whose shocking death on the railway tracks he witnessed. Both songs speak of “home” and McQueen’s integration of fleeting or sustained moments of musical respite reframe that idea, affirming a conception of Britain and British cultural identity in all its many colors, with the coping mechanisms of popular music and song now a central aspect of the Spirit of the Blitz, maintaining a way of life under threat for each and every one of the King’s subjects.