Cinema and Unconventional Warfare in the Twentieth Century: Insurgency, Terrorism and Special Operations 9781350055698, 9781350055728, 9781350055704

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Cinema and Unconventional Warfare in the Twentieth Century

Also available from Bloomsbury Anatomy of Post-Communist European Defense Institutions: The Mirage of Military Modernity, by Thomas-Durell Young Armoured Warfare: A Military, Political and Global History, by Alaric Searle Cinematic Terror: A Global History of Terrorism on Film, by Tony Shaw

Cinema and Unconventional Warfare in the Twentieth Century Insurgency, Terrorism and Special Operations Paul B. Rich

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Paul B. Rich, 2018 Paul B. Rich has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover image: La Battaglia Di Algeri (The Battle Of Algiers), directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966. (© Moviestore collection Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-5569-8 PB: 978-1-3501-5119-2 ePDF: 978-1-3500-5570-4 eBook: 978-1-3500-5571-1 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To Imen, with love

Contents List of Figures Preface Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Cinema’s Encounter with Colonial Insurgencies Special Operations on Screen Hollywood, Terrorism and the Myth of Special Forces Italian Neorealism and Beyond The Mercenary Subgenre and Counter-Insurgency France’s Bitter Retreat from Empire Israel and Reframing Siege Warfare into Counter-Terrorism

viii ix 1 25 49 75 99 129 151 179

Epilogue

207

Notes Select Filmography Bibliography Index

215 240 243 254

List of Figures 4.1 The FLN underground activist Ali La Pointe engaged in a violent demonstration in The Battle of Algiers. By permission of Kevin Durst 4.2 Three FLN women receiving instructions on the bombing campaign to be conducted in Algiers from The Battle of Algiers. By permission of Kevin Durst 4.3 General Matthieu leading the French paras into Algiers from The Battle of Algiers © Moviestore collection Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo

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110 111

Preface Despite its tendency to mythologize and exaggerate, war cinema can often illuminate the study of armed conflict. This has been broadly recognized for years by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, although it is astonishing how little attention has been paid to unconventional forms of war, arguably the form of war that characterizes conflict in the present age. I have written this book as a means of complementing the huge body of writing on the cinema of war by focusing on increasingly familiar forms of war in our age involving insurgency, terrorism and special operations. The parameters of this arena of ‘unconventional’ warfare will always be debated and contested, but, broadly speaking, it is this form of warfare that defines much contemporary conflict in contrast to the great set piece naval, air and land battles of the past. I have written for both the general and the specialist reader and have attempted, wherever possible, to limit the use of jargon and technical language. The book traverses the fields of military and strategic studies, on the one hand, and film studies on the other, and I hope students in both fields will profit from what I have covered and discussed. I realized, while writing the book, that this is a huge arena that deserves far more specialist study. This will doubtless occur in the years ahead, buttressed by specialist conferences and the odd special issue in an academic journal. The journal I edit, Small Wars and Insurgencies, had a special issue on ‘Cinema and Insurgencies’ in August 2015 (Volume 26, No 4) in which I included a paper that forms an early version of Chapter 3 of this book on Italian neorealism. It became clear from the various papers in this issue that only a small number of film directors in the decades since 1945 have been bold enough to confront many of the themes of insurgency and counter-insurgency head on. There remain amazing cinematic gaps: no film so far, for instance, has tackled Mao’s guerrilla war in China from the middle 1930s to the 1949 Revolution. Certainly, the Provisional IRA is far less of an enigma cinematically given the range of studies that have now been published on the Irish conflict, while other terrorist organizations of the 1970s and 1980s have been only poorly portrayed by cinema. Interestingly it has been the Baader Meinhof ‘gang’ which has been most successfully brought to the screen in film, such as The Baader Meinhof Complex (dir. Uli Edel) which I examine in this study. Cinema creates a world of its own and often generates powerful myths. These can often provide a substitute for the real understanding of war, especially for those who do not actually get into a real war zone. Few can doubt though that it has been films such as Apocalypse Now, Hamburger Hill and We Were Soldiers that shape many people’s understanding of the Vietnam War, which continues to have an extraordinary hold on the popular imagining of war post 1945. I have attempted, where possible, to examine the mythology of war generated by certain key films with the historical record. As might be expected, some films broadly reflect some of the conflict with quite degrees

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of realism while others never attempt to do so and glamorize and falsify in the interest of good box office receipts. I have several people to thank while writing this study. I would especially like to thank the staff of the Reuben Library of the British Film Institute, Tom Durrell Young, Tom Marks, Ian Beckett, Shanthie D’Souza, Robert Bunker and Jackie Kalley for reading and commenting on earlier draft chapters. I am also eternally grateful to my wife Imen Yaqoobi for her support and suggestions during the writing of this book. 12 December 2017

Introduction

In this book, I will be exploring the differing ways that feature films have dealt with the inter-related themes of guerrilla insurgency, terrorism and special operations, forms of conflict that can be termed unconventional war (UW). Film producers have usually been wary of filming this kind of war, though there are several notable films that stand out as giving absorbing representations of unconventional kinds of conflict such as Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), Costa Gavras’s State of Siege (1972) or Uli Edel’s Baader Meinhof Complex (2008). Unconventional warfare has also often been poorly understood within western militaries. Unconventional warfare consists of terrorist attacks, retaliation by counterinsurgent forces, the blowing up of cars and buildings and draconian police and military controls over civilian populations. Transferring unconventional warfare of this kind to the cinema screen involves controversial ethical and political issues, with the risk of films being banned if they offend cinema audiences or confront too abrasively a society’s dominant historical mythology of its past wars. This has not prevented some important films from being released; but they have tended to be made by a relatively small coterie of directors creating what Michalczuk terms ‘political fiction films’ attempting to inform, document or mobilize public opinion.1 Unconventional warfare has become, in the decades since the Second World War, an increasingly important part of modern military conflict. The post-war period certainly saw several conflicts of the inter-state conventional type; the Arab–Israeli wars of 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973, for instance, as well as the 1965 and 1971 wars between India and Pakistan and the Falklands War between Britain and Argentina in 1982. Film producers, significantly, have largely avoided these wars which have never formed the basis of a major feature film. It is still the case that conventional war cinema continues to pivot around military myths anchored in the First and Second World Wars or military conflicts stretching further back in time such as the American Civil War or the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century. The aversion to unconventional war derives from a longstanding dislike of this type of conflict by professional military hierarchies and their accompanying military intellectuals. It is, after all, a form of war that great powers have often not been very good at fighting, given that these powers are also in the business of maintaining large conventional militaries to contain as far as possible threats from rival great powers. Unconventional wars and conflicts have frequently been viewed as annoying forms of ‘small war’ on the fringes of empire that threatened to divert resources and manpower

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from potentially serious arenas close to home. Despite immensely superior firepower the imperial great power has frequently been dogged by a simple inability to match the sort of commitment and resourcefulness of the smaller enemies it finds itself up against; enemies fighting, very often, for their very survival or at least the protection of core values and ways of life. ‘Asymmetric’ wars of this kind constantly pose a problem for great powers since they are difficult to win, short of the diversion of massive manpower and military resources that might lead less to complete victory but simply the containment of enemies who can live to fight another day.2 The historical record is littered with instances of this problem, with the ruins of Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England standing as one major defensive remedy to contain incursions from warrior Scottish tribes as well as avoiding needless losses by Roman legions in misty Highland wastes. What, though, do we exactly mean by unconventional war? This is a type of warfare involving relatively small groups of mobile fighters operating across a wide and sometimes vague battle space, where the conflict might be viewed considerably differently by the opposing parties. It is also a form of war fought not only by sub-state groupings and small nations and tribal societies but also by specialized sections of conventional militaries in the form of ‘special operations’. Unconventional warriors have a range of tactics, including sabotage, raiding, kidnapping, propaganda and assassination; tactics that in turn can lead to draconian political and military responses, rationalized very often in more recent times through various doctrines of ‘counter-insurgency’. Some unconventional formations act as auxiliaries to full-scale armies, such as those operating behind enemy lines in the Second World War, like the SAS, LRDG and US Rangers. Others form part of a wider guerrilla strategy that may eventually escalate into full-scale conventional conflict, as occurred in the case of the wars of ‘national liberation’ in China and Vietnam. Unconventional war forms a major component in the historiography of war, even if it runs contrary to ‘conventional’ precepts of warfare centred on hierarchical chains of command, battlefield honour and large-scale conflict by rival professional militaries. It is a form of war that has often been poorly understood within mainstream militaries. David Maxwell has argued that UW is complex and time-consuming to fight, based as it is on popular political engagement.3 It does not fit easily into the conventional western military ethos, especially in the United States, of full-frontal assault on the enemy of the kind familiar from more conventional conflicts like the Second World War and Korea. UW, Maxwell suggests, is really about revolution, resistance and insurgency, a highly political form of war that is ‘complex, violent, messy and difficult to control’.4 It is the latter theme of lack of control that is particularly disconcerting for military high commands since it implies a disconcerting level of unpredictability that can be made up only by effective training, coordinated planning and reliable intelligence. As I shall seek to show in this book, this is a problem that has often confronted film producers too, who often prefer to avoid depicting this form of warfare through fear of upsetting audiences, angering governments and upsetting military establishments, who in all likelihood will refuse to cooperate anyway in making any serious and realistic film about operations threatening to undermine widely held military myths.

Introduction

3

The term ‘unconventional’ implies, of course, that this is not a ‘normal’ or ‘conventional’ form of war, defining it negatively in terms of what it is not. Some scholars and military analysts have adopted several other terms over the years to pin down this form of warfare, such as ‘irregular war’, ‘internal war’, ‘low intensity conflict’ and ‘small war’. Some of these have fallen out of fashion with ‘small war’ tending to be linked to conflicts on the borders of European empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many contemporary counter-insurgent or counter-terrorist operations are anything but ‘small’ since they can involve the huge mobilization of military power, such as the national mobilization of troops and ‘states of siege’ in response to modern terrorist attacks or the protracted and bitter battles currently being fought by Iraqi forces against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. The advantage of ‘unconventional war’, though, is that it is an established term that is widely known and encapsulates a variety of different operations.5 One of the questions for film producers when dealing with unconventional war narratives was how far could they go in the direction of historical realism? There is always a high degree of myth-making in any sort of war movie, though the American director Sam Fuller, who had fought in the Second World War as a GI, was highly critical of the constant tendency of Hollywood producers to create images of heroism when the reality was that most soldiers were thinking only of survival of themselves and their mates. ‘Heroes,’ he later angrily wrote, ‘were anointed by brain trust boys, generals, or newspaper editors behind desks far from death and destruction’.6 It would take decades for the contrived and invented nature of much modern war heroism to be brought to screen in the form of Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers (2006) showing the media manipulation of the myth of the Marines erecting the flagpole on Iwo Jima in the Second World War. All wars depend on myth, but unconventional wars often run against the grain of much war-time mythology that cinema audiences usually come expecting to see.

History and cinematic mythologies Most films embrace myths in one form or another, defined as stories that help explain the origins of population groups or lessons from the past involving heroes. Even modern societies with a developed written history and a sophisticated sense of the past fall back on myths, especially in times of crisis such as war. Cinematic myths have become an arena of considerable debate among film studies scholars; some films can reflect several myths at the same time, while others, as I shall try to show in this book, can create cinematic myths of their own.7 Cinema has emerged as a media industry capable of creating its own moral universe. In their heyday, huge cinemas almost rivalled churches in the way they could secure weekly gatherings of the faithful, though this tradition has obviously been eclipsed by the rise of other media forms such as television, networked films and, more recently, amateur movies released on social networking sites.8 Some critics have viewed these trends as representing alarming threats to traditional cultural forms and Karen Armstrong has argued that cinema and modern mass media have undermined ‘traditional’ myths rooted in folk stories and

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Cinema and Unconventional Warfare in the Twentieth Century

poetry, creating only a shallow set of mythological constructs linked to the world of celebrity.9 This dismissal of modern cinematic and media-generated myths is, I would argue, over-stated. It is important to distinguish between mythological constructs or grand narratives at the heart of any society and more ephemeral or time-bound ‘public myths’ serving as temporary consensual statements behind public actions of one kind or another.10 All societies have mythological grand narratives, especially foundational myths for how the society came into existence, such as the Romulus and Remus myth of Ancient Rome or the myth of the Founding Fathers in the United States. The myths may not seem all that important until periods of crisis loom, such as war or an acute polarization over national identity and purpose, as is currently the case in the America of Donald Trump. Public myths are far more visible than deeper foundational myths. They come and go quite frequently as they are used to explain a relatively short time span, even a decade: hence the myth of ‘Roaring Twenties’ in the United States or ‘Swinging Britain’ in the 1960s. Such myths may be basically cultural or be associated with certain styles of governance, such as the myth of the New Deal era and ‘big government’ in the United States; or of ‘Cool Britannia’ of the early years of the Labour government under Tony Blair. These public myths are often forged by the media but acquire a life of their own and shape popular conceptions of the past, ones that professional historians often end up challenging through more ‘solid’ forms of evidence. This becomes particularly true in the case of feature films. Cinema tends to pander to popular myths about the past, especially in times of crisis. Even the most apparently accurate of historical films are viewed by many historians as a highly dubious way to understanding the past. Robert Rosenstone has suggested, though, that film is no more a ‘fiction’ than written history, which is also selective in the sources used and the narrative structure employed to recount past events. Film, he argues, has the advantage of being able to collapse into one integrated whole a range of different perspectives that are normally separated, in the conventions of written history, into categories like ‘economic’, ‘social’ or ‘political’. While film can obviously falsify history, it can also dramatize it and bring emotion into the study of the past, a dimension often lacking in the work of historians sifting through piles of documents and written records.11 More recently, McCrisken and Pepper have amplified this by suggesting that Hollywood films are ‘complex cultural documents which speak either implicitly or explicitly to the concerns and preoccupations of their own moment of production’.12 Film directors confront a range of issues in making historical features. Historical accuracy might be desirable but hardly guarantees a good film. Too much detail can overload a film to the point, as Bernard F. Dick has suggested in the case of the film Tora Tora Tora, that the movie ends up being a rather dry history lesson.13 A good feature film requires a narrative involving some human drama to take place to sustain audience interest; and this will involve a range of additional issues such as lighting, characterization and cinematography. Overloading an historical war movie with several big-name actors can also be a bad strategy, exemplified by The Longest Day (1962) that ended up confusing audiences over who the main hero really was. This is also true for many of the films that I examine in this book that portray terrorist or insurgent movements, counter-insurgency or special operations. They all tend to have

Introduction

5

a limited hierarchy of military command and are very often better using lesser-known actors with just one or two main characters having star status. Unconventional wars are ‘dirty’ wars involving operations such as sabotage, assassination, kidnapping and disinformation. It is a form of war that is controversial politically, especially for the generation of military professionals that came through the First and Second World Wars. This outlook began to change slowly after 1945 with the emergence of various insurgencies in the era of European decolonization and the upsurge of terrorism in regions like the Middle East. Many unconventional war features have entered popular debate, while traditional concepts of heroism associated with conventional combat in ‘clean’ wars have tended to be side-lined in favour of antiheroes in recent popular cinema. The discussion on the cinema of unconventional war also leads to the question of cinematic boundaries and genres and subgenres. I will argue in this study that the war genre needs to be rethought, given its capacity for internal evolution and innovation over time. In contrast to the genre’s functioning from the 1940s to at least the late 1960s centred on inter-state war, the war genre encompassed a range of subgenres. These can be categorized as counter-insurgency (COIN), counter-terrorism and special operations as well as narratives centred on mercenaries and soldiers of fortune examined in Chapter 5. The relative importance of these subgenres reflects the different kinds of conflicts that various countries have been involved in over the post1945 period and will change over time.

The evolution of the war genre Genres are a major category in understanding different types of films as well as locating them in a longer tradition of film making. There are a variety of reasons shaping the way genres have emerged. In the early days of sound cinema, genres emerged as useful marketing tool to fickle, unpredictable and often rather unsophisticated audiences. There were also other factors at stake, such as the cultural and political influences on directors and film producers together with the shifting demands of audiences, whose interests might change like those of women’s fashions.14 Genres were closely linked to the Hollywood studio system, certainly until these began to break up in the 1950s, ensuring the studios could parcel out among themselves musicals, romances, westerns, comedies and crime thrillers. In the early period of cinema, the war genre remained weak, given the horrors of the First World War, though the western often served as a kind of war movie genre by default. War films as a distinct genre really emerged during the late 1930s, at a time when they faced stiff competition from gangster movies, romantic comedies and musicals in the years of the Depression. They came into their own with the US entry into the Second World War and, by 1945, were associated with such themes as national pride, collaboration between civilians and the military and the defence of core national values against enemy aggression. These would over time consolidate the war film as a major cinema genre until a crisis set in during rising tensions over the Vietnam War in the 1960s.15

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Cinema and Unconventional Warfare in the Twentieth Century

Studying film genres can be tricky as they are often inconsistent and hard to pin down. Clichéd writing about genres pervades a lot of film criticism and studying genres historically requires an examination of their internal dynamics, and the role of auteurs in addition to marketing considerations and changing audience tastes.16 Subgenres can drive the main genre forward, providing, for a period at least, new approaches and fresh impetus. Movies made in a subgenre are less tied to the conventions of the mainstream genre. They can provide space for greater experimentation and cross-over with other film genres. If they are low-budget movies, they can serve as a good opportunity for experimentation with cinematography, characterization or narrative construction as well as the incorporation of features from other film genres. But subgenres can also be quite short-lived: even when there are signs that a new subgenre emerging it may, in the end, never take off, given political, commercial or marketing considerations. The storyline in the war movie genre in its heyday was both predictable and simple, with romantic themes minimized to avoid too much digression from the main narrative. On occasions, the movie might start with real combat footage and be embellished by a discussion of military tactics, aided with maps and the odd military briefing. Action and combat scenes would constantly intrude, though interspersed with quieter periods; if violent action is relegated to the latter part of the movie, it usually requires a strong cast and storyline to sustain the previous narrative involving escalating tension towards the inevitable climactic battle scenes. These, too, are usually accompanied by death scenes of one or more of the heroes with suitable background music. War films were usually set in the past in some form or another, and this historical framing tended to reinforce popular mythologies of war. Over time, it would be possible for directors to re-employ some of the war movie tropes into other genres, for instance science fiction movies set in a dystopian future such as Universal Soldier (1992) or Starship Troopers (1997). The archetypal war film was concerned with what Kathryn McMahon has termed ‘retroactive productions of meaning’ and the reinterpretation of past events, sometimes with only minimal attention to historical truth.17 To this extent, the war movie broadly continued previous mythological reinterpretations of past wars of the Elizabethan theatre or historical novelists such as Stendhal, Thackeray and Tolstoy. Most of war cinema was concerned with celebrating, as well as occasionally questioning, wars fought by nation states. War movies were mainly focused on interstate wars, especially those of the First and Second World Wars and Korea, which for Hollywood was the last great epic war fought by rival armies on a clear battle space until the brief 100-hour Gulf War One in 1991. Relatively few films paid much attention to unconventional war including terrorist and guerrilla insurgencies, though several embraced special operations behind enemy lines, themes that became the subject of several British movies in the 1950s and 1960s, as I shall show in Chapter 1. It is probably fair to say that, for the average cinema-goer, any mention of a war film conjures up a range of classic films fought between rival national armies, navies or air forces.18 The North African desert? Think of the battle-hardened Australian soldiers led by Richard Burton at Tobruk in The Desert Rats (1953) or the more cynical British squad led by a drunken John Mills and their German prisoner in Ice Cold in Alex (1958). War in

Introduction

7

Northern Europe? Consider The Longest Day (1962) or A Bridge Too Far (1977). The list of course can go on, but the essential point is that a good many of the war and combat films released since the early 1940s have dealt, in one form or another, with large-scale inter-state war. The classic war movie tended to feed off established images of ‘conventional’ war closely linked to the rise of the nation state embodied in patriotic symbols such as uniforms, flags, national and regimental anthems and battle honours, whether these be the US Marines, the US 1st Infantry Division (Sam Fuller’s The Big Red) or the British Commandos. Insofar as we can talk of a specific genre of war films, we tend to associate it with tropes of battlefield honour, comradeship among bands of brothers and the authority of established military chains of command. There was relatively little space here for ‘dirty’ forms of war involving flattened combat units under no fixed hierarchy of command and observing little obedience to conventional forms of military combat. By the 1960s, the tropes of the conventional war movie were beginning to come under attack in a climate of anti-war political activism and an end to the post-war era of victory culture in the United States.19 The conventional war movie genre still proved to be remarkably durable and adaptive; by the 1990s, it began to make a comeback, aided by an increasingly graphic cinematic realism such as exploding squibs to replicate gunshot wounds, slow motion photography and the use of sound to indicate the impact of bullets and explosions on the human body. Stephen Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) was a milestone in this regard with its opening scenes of graphic conflict on Omaha Beach in June 1944. Despite predictions of its demise, the war film appears to be here to stay. The Second World War continues to grip film makers’ imaginations for its apparent lack of moral ambivalence compared to later wars. While the First World War has led to some 130 feature films, it is estimated that the Second World War has produced to date over 1300. Its popularity was well exemplified by the film Fury (2014), which follows an American tank moving across war-torn Germany in the last stage of the war in April 1945.20 More recently, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017) has returned to the disaster of Dunkirk in 1940, but through a prism of popular heroism that perhaps chimes with a more isolationist mood in Brexit Britain. The relatively simple moral framework of the mainstream war genre went through a period of crisis in the late 1960s and 1970s and has, arguably, never been completely reconstructed. The shift can be partly explained in terms of the emergence of a younger (baby boomer) cinema audience no longer sharing the values of its parents and driven to questioning the very nature of war at a time of the American involvement in South East Asia. A lot of the moral anguish surrounding the war was driven by the fact that this was a counter-insurgent war the United States proved unable to win. Several successful Hollywood films abandoned any serious attempt to justify an apparently unjust war and in the case of Rambo: First Blood, that I examine in Chapter 3, emulated some of the methods of Vietnamese guerrillas.21 The late 1970s and 1980s were a watershed in the evolution of the war genre. The new moral compass within the genre veered away from uncritical commitment to duty and nation and began to address issues of atonement for misconduct in war and the futility of sacrifice for an end that was at best only vaguely understood.

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Cinema and Unconventional Warfare in the Twentieth Century

The cinema of unconventional warfare is more diffuse and eclectic than the tropes of the mainstream war film. Wars of an unconventional type are largely disconnected from the world of national myths anchored in large-scale inter-state conflict. The cinema of unconventional war has, in effect, been the harbinger of what some analysts by the 1990s, in the aftermath of the Cold War, have termed a post-heroic ‘new war’ that are no longer attached to any clear Ideological cause. This became evident with the rise of warlord movements in West Africa depicted in films such as Blood Diamond, Johnny Mad Dog and Beasts of No Nation that I examine in Chapter 5.22 More recent conflicts in the aftermath of 9/11 suggest an increasingly complicated picture of multiple conflicts going on side by side, as in the current Syrian civil war. Jihadist insurgencies fought by movements such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, Al Nusra (now renamed Jabhat Fateh as-Sham) and Islamic State or Daesh in Iraq and Syria have exhibited remarkably traditional forms of macho heroism as well as a commitment to ideological interpretations of Islam justifying violent jihad against the west. The western powers involved in conflict in the Middle East, as well as antiterrorism operations against jihadist terrorist cells in Europe, have attempted to define the core values for which they fight as well as commemorating both military and civilian personnel lost in military operations and terrorist attacks. There is some uncertainty over how far core myths are at stake in these newer forms of conflict and film producers have not been under anything like the pressure to produce films celebrating western moral ‘resolve’ as they were in the Second World War. The war film has become the terrain to investigate themes of civilian courage and sacrifice in an era of mounting disaffection with traditional forms of military honour among western cinema audiences. While action films have become the key generic form for more traditional images of masculine combat and heroics, the war film evolved by the 1990s to the point where the traditional imagery of military sacrifice became widened to include the civilian population. Traditional male heroism in war performing superhuman deeds as well as, like Ulysses or Beowulf, saving the society they defend has become unfashionable in the modern western world. As the film United 93 suggested, heroes can be found in ordinary non-military people in situations of disaster and terrorist attack.23 It is also hard to see military heroes emerging on the modern hi-tech battlefield of drone warfare. The emerging cinema of unconventional war has provided a rather different set of images and tropes to those of conventional inter-state war. Counter-terror operations usually lead to highly professionalized elite forms of war, with only limited forms of citizen participation. For some analysts, this has amounted to a new form of ‘war without the people’, suggesting that earlier forms of ‘peoples’ war’ have been marginalized in the modern conflicts.24 The high degree of professionalization of the special forces teams sent in to fight terrorist gunmen and suicide bombers ensures that they are rather unlike the earlier combat heroes of the Second World War, who often achieved fame during the war itself and or in newspaper obituaries decades afterwards. The modern elite anti-terrorist warriors are heavily armoured squads in black uniforms and helmets with visors or face masks: their robotic imagery is exacerbated by the use of drones or robots in combat with an enemy who is also faceless. These new warriors look as though they might well have come off the set of a dystopian science fiction

Introduction

9

movie. They are hardly modern war heroes, a role that has increasingly been taken over by the civilian victims of the terror attacks, with stories, often narrated through social media, of courage in the face of merciless gunmen. I shall now examine the three strands of unconventional warfare – guerrilla warfare, terrorism and special operations – in the context of the mythologies surrounding them and the problems they present for film producers.

Guerrilla myths The first of the three components of UW, guerrilla war, is one of the hardest to fight as well as being surrounded by numerous myths. While ancient in origins, it is also dogged by controversy over its military effectiveness. Exactly what sort of tactics are to be employed in a guerrilla war and how far can a guerrilla band be self-supporting? What is its relationship to other forms of military action. Is it to be just an auxiliary of a conventional army, as was the case with T.E. Lawrence’s Arab guerrillas in the First World War, or is it part of a wider strategy of Maoist ‘protracted war’ which means that the conflict is destined at some point to evolve onto a conventional level? How far, too, are the political aims of the guerrillas understood and supported by those fighting the insurgency? Before the twentieth century, many rural insurgencies were backward-looking and politically reactionary; it was only by the 1930s and 1940s that they became firmly linked to concepts of national liberation and social justice.25 For American film audiences, guerrilla wars in China, Malaya or Algeria were remote and to be taken far less seriously than myths of frontier conquest of Indian communities such as Sioux and Apaches in North America that often featured in Hollywood westerns.26 In Europe, similar mythologies emerged alongside romantic images of rural bandits standing outside the norms of polite, urban middle-class society, though this would on occasions be taken up by Hollywood. Popular ‘bandit’ novels across Europe fostered the idea of the bandit as the embodiment of national and social and personal liberation.27 These myths grew out of various insurgencies in the nineteenth century, starting with the Peninsula War of 1808–1814 and continuing in Italy, Eastern Europe and eventually Spain, where they would be perpetuated by Ernest Hemingway in the Spanish Civil War novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a novel turned into a rather apolitical movie by Hollywood in 1943 starring Gary Cooper.28 Throughout this period, guerrilla war was viewed negatively in professional military circles as a degenerate form of conflict on the fringes of empire. The image would be perpetuated in the US military well into the 1960s, as Green Beret counterinsurgent professionals mobilized stone-age ‘Montagnard’ peoples to fight against the NLF and NVA in South Vietnam.29 By the end of the nineteenth century, the bandit/guerrilla had become quite an appealing figure for left-wing and liberal urban opinion critical of jingoist imperialism, as well as those concerned about vanishing folk cultures and declining peasantries. Some of this became evident in ‘pro Boer’ opinion in Britain during the South African War of 1899–1902, shocked at the widespread incarceration of the Boer civilian

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Cinema and Unconventional Warfare in the Twentieth Century

population into concentration camps to isolate them from the guerrillas fighting on the veld.30 The Boer guerrillas were viewed by some anti-imperial critics as fighters for national liberation, even if they did seek to entrench a state based on the segregation of the black African majority. The South African War was one of the twentieth century’s first major colonial insurgencies as well as being a guerrilla war that was largely ignored by early cinema. It occurred a few years prior to the development of the Hollywood cinema, which quickly became fascinated by events closer to home in the form of the Mexican Revolution that broke out in 1910. The South African War failed to produce any serious cinema guerrilla heroes and the Boer guerrillas who fought in it remained stranded in the past, exemplified by some of the photographs of the period. With slouch hats, rifles and bandoleers these are rural fighters clearly several notches up from traditional peasant bandits and would sustain a myth that would evolve over the following few decades into the global image of the guerrilla Che Guevara, staring out under beret and star, symbolizing both youthful revolt and an apparent ability to survive in rural and jungle wildernesses against technologically advanced western military machines. With the Boers largely excluded from any major feature film, it was Mexico that largely fed the early twentieth-century cinematic myth of the guerrilla, centred on insurgent leaders such as Pancho Villa and Emilio Zapata.31 Mexican guerrillas suffered from being constantly likened to stereotyped bandits, while Villa and others like him were usually represented in Hollywood movies as villainous anti-heroes or comic buffoons. This was far less true with Asian guerrilla leaders such as Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap but the problem here was the general indifference of cinema. Neither Mao, Giap nor Ho has ever featured in any major Hollywood feature, though Giap’s victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 eventually reached the screen in the film Dien Bien Phu by French director Pierre Schoendoerffer in 1992 (see Chapter 6). This is less a case of orientalist stereotyping but simple occidentalist indifference, since the imagery of the guerrilla exponents of national liberation failed to accord with Hollywood’s post-war mood of American triumphalism and the building of benign and colourful images of US power in the Asia Pacific region, starkly exemplified by the musical South Pacific.32 The omission of Mao Zedong is especially amazing. Hollywood’s silence can be explained when Mao’s historical role is evaluated in the context of war against the invading Japanese in the late 1930s and early 1940s, culminating in the communist victory in the civil war in 1949. The defeat of the KMT shattered certain deeply held American myths about the sort of society China was and the relationship the United States had with it. The revolution ended the long tradition of American missionary involvement in China that did much to shape the popular image in the United States of China as a society highly responsive to western-style modernization, a myth popularized by Pearl Buck (the daughter of American missionaries) in novels such as The Green Earth. This novel was successfully brought to the screen in 1937 as a Chinese version of American frontier myths of hard work and family solidarity over backwardlooking European feudal ideas of social hierarchy. Over the next few years Hollywood aligned itself behind this frontier myth centred on Chiang’s KMT regime, aided by the explosion in public support for Buck’s East and West Association campaigning for

Introduction

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mutual understanding between peoples of Asia, the United States and Australasia.33 In the process, alternative narratives centred on guerrilla war being fought in the Chinese interior by Mao’s Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) were almost completely marginalized. Perhaps it is too much to have expected US film producers to have recognized the significance of what was usually seen as a remote guerrilla movement. Well into the 1940s, Mao’s own ideas on guerrilla warfare were largely unknown in the west; even if they had been, it is not clear they would have been taken all that seriously. It was the mobilization of peasant nationalism by Mao’s communist cadres that was so poorly understood even by informed opinion before 1949. Indeed, it would not be recognized in scholarly circles until the early 1960s with the publication of Chalmers Johnson’s path-breaking study Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power in 1962.34 In the 1930s and 1940s, there was little serious theory of how nationalism develops in a society like China. In so far as there was one, it was assumed that this would be largely achieved under the auspices of a westernized and educated elite. This would be especially true of cinema from the late 1930s onwards, as a considerable number of films focused on the efforts of both Chinese leaders and ordinary Chinese traders and businessmen to modernize Chinese society on western lines. Well into the late 1940s, China remained the focal point of the US commitment to the ‘upliftment’ and ‘modernization’ in Asia, despite some warnings to the contrary by the small number of observers who knew the society more closely.35 There were few serious critics of the modernization thesis, and almost none in Hollywood. One prominent critic was the writer and journalist Edgar Snow, who had visited Mao in the caves of North West China after his Long March in the mid-1930s. Snow’s book Red Star Over China came out the same time as The Green Earth in 1937 and went on to sell 12,000 copies. It tried to develop an alternative idea of the Chinese political future recognizing the reality of peasant revolutionary mobilization, though the book failed to make much headway in transforming the dominant American view of China. Later vilified as a communist or communist sympathiser, Snow was part of a group of ‘new China hands’ who had a less patrician view of China compared to the ‘older China hands’ of the missionaries, traders and exponents of the ‘Open Door’ policy and were deeply critical of the corrupt KMT regime.36 Snow’s views failed to achieve the same degree of circulation as Pearl Buck’s, partly due to the fact that he did not write novels or film scripts that might just possibly have been taken up by Hollywood. Chiang-kai Shek, by contrast, was highly successful in cultivating American opinion through his American-educated wife, Soong MeiLing. She tried to represent some aspects of the ‘New China’ already exemplified in Hollywood by the Chinese-American actress Anna Mae Wong, though Anna May disliked Soong Mei’s extreme puritanism. After a successful visit to the United States in 1943, Soong-Mei helped ensure that the films released by Hollywood on the war in China were largely favourable to the KMT and did little or nothing to reveal the scope of support for Mao’s communist guerrillas. The 1943 film Gung Ho, based on a Marine Ranger Battalion raid on the island of Makin in August 1942, features a Lieutenant Colonel Thorwald (Randolph Scott, based on the real-life figure Major Evans Carlson). The raid was a diversionary guerrilla-type action during the battle at Guadalcanal

12

Cinema and Unconventional Warfare in the Twentieth Century

when the US army was still fighting from a defensive standpoint before the victory at Midway. Carlson, significantly, had been in China before the war and he was a strong admirer of Mao’s guerrillas. The film managed to relay some of this when Thorwald tries to inspire his men with the achievements of the Chinese 8th Route Army led by General Chu De, which, he stresses, outmanoeuvred the Japanese using mobile guerrilla tactics that could not be learnt simply from textbooks.37 The film was not entirely accurate since the raid did not lead to a complete victory; thirty men were lost and only a few Japanese installations destroyed. But the fact that there was any reference at all to the Chinese guerrillas was unusual and would be impossible after the war was over. Carlson was a bitter critic of Chiang Kai Shek, describing him as a ‘betrayer and compromiser’. After his death in 1947 Carlson was posthumously blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), even though he was buried in Arlington Cemetery. The blacklisting was due as much for his support for the Committee to Win the Peace with Paul Robeson as for his support for Chinese communist guerrillas, but the case underlined how difficult it was by the late 1940s to come out publicly and stress the importance of Maoist guerrilla warfare.38 It is hardly surprising Chinese guerrillas remained shadowy figures in most Hollywood films released during the war years. Many blurred into bandit figures or illiterate peasants with no serious political ideals or military organization. They formed a backdrop for the main action performed almost always by white American actors with just a few Chinese or oriental-looking stand-ins. This was true in the case of Anna Mae Wong’s cheaply made ‘Poverty Row’ B films shot for Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), never costing more than $100,000 each. The 1942 PRC film Bombs Over Burma (dir. Joseph H. Lewis) had Anna Mae playing a Chinese school teacher Lin Ying. For the first 10 minutes, the film is entirely in Mandarin as she teaches a class of school children. Japanese bombers then come and bomb the school, which stands as a symbol of modernization. The film portrayed Chinese guerrillas (of uncertain ideological orientation) helping with the construction of a supply road to Burma. The villain of the film turns out not to be an ‘oriental’ at all but an English aristocrat, Sir Roger Howe (Leslie Dennison), who is a German agent in disguise. Howe is helping to coordinate the Japanese bomb attacks on the road by transmitting messages to them via his electric shaver – a sort of early James Bond–style gadget – but his cover is eventually blown. Lin Ying whistles to produce out of the undergrowth a group of rural guerrillas who cut Howe down with farm implements. The imagery of Asian peasants murdering an English aristocrat was a novel trope for the time, and indicated just how far some film producers were prepared to go to support the Chinese republic in the aftermath of the Japanese invasion. The defeat of Japan in August 1945 led to a decline of interest in Hollywood in Chinese themes, even though General Marshall had concluded by the end of 1946 that any sort of political coalition between the KMT and the communists was going to be impossible.39 There was a general war weariness among much of the American cinemagoing public and a big demand for escapist films such as musicals, spy thrillers and films noirs. The 1947 film Intrigue, released by United Artists and directed by Edwin L Marin, was indicative of the new trend. The story focused on the black market in post-war China and the exploits of cashiered ex-pilot Brad Dunham (George Raft).

Introduction

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Dunham sends in goods for people in desperate need, though he was less a missionary than a benevolent mercenary, perhaps a fitting role for an actor closely linked in real life to the mob. At no point in the film is there any real indication that China was in an escalating civil war. The failure of Hollywood to portray any of the real political battle lines in China contributed to the general sense of shock and malaise in the United States at Mao’s political victory in 1949. It led to a stab-in-the-back myth in the form that US policy had been betrayed by communist spies in government, especially the State Department, leading to the ‘loss’ of China. Even before the 1949 revolution a strong anti-communist consensus had been established in the United States as the Cold War led to frozen lines across Europe.40 The hysteria of the HUAC did much to ensure that the films made on China would have a markedly hostile tone compared to the early 1940s. There is not the space here to deal in detail with Hollywood’s shift in focus from China to Vietnam during the 1950s.41 The shift can be partly explained by China’s retreat into isolation and economic disaster with the ‘Great Leap Forward’ in the late 1950s, while the guerrilla baton was passed onto the Vietnamese by the time of the resumption of the guerrilla war in South Vietnam in the late 1950s. The Vietnamese now gained much of the devious and untrustworthy imagery previously projected onto Communist China, though over the next couple of decades it would not be Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh or Vo Nguyen Giap who would appear as the subject for a major feature film but the bearded figure of Che Guevara, dressed in olive battle fatigues, who formed a major part of the guerrilla myth in the 1960s. Che emerged as an iconic figure for a campus-educated younger generation in the United States and Europe in the mid- to late 1960s. His image as a guerrilla appeared to epitomize simple rural people standing up and fighting for themselves against a superior enemy. The image only vaguely influenced the wave of urban insurgency around the world over the next few decades. It was also one that Che helped to create after the Cuban Revolution. As I have suggested elsewhere, Che embraced Castro’s revolutionary movement in Mexico in 1955 after years spent travelling round South America as a kind of revolutionary tourist. He viewed the Indian societies in South and Central America societies as largely static and standing outside history and avoided any detailed ethnological analysis for a simplistic Marxism. Revolution was thus an all-embracing answer to the continent’s problems, since it would apparently lead to the millstone of American imperialism being thrown off. Encountering widespread popular adulation in Cuba as a revolutionary internationalist, Che cultivated this image through both written propaganda and revolutionary Cuban cinema.42 The 1969 Hollywood film Che (dir. Richard Fleischer) tried unsuccessfully to tackle this mythology. The film was released two years after Guevara’s death in Bolivia and was panned by critics for its wooden characterization; it even gained inclusion in The Fifty Worst Films of All Time.43 The movie was no cut-price affair with a budget of over $5 million but proved to be a desperate bid by Hollywood to try and explain Guevara’s global cult status.44 Che proved to be an expensive ‘youth movie’, though one considerably undermined by its appearing at the same time as Easy Rider. Unlike John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968), it was a box office failure that was also disliked by film critics.

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Cinema and Unconventional Warfare in the Twentieth Century

Che tries to examine Guevara’s image by adopting a documentary style involving ‘interviews’ with people who had known Che during his life. Fleischer adopts an apparently balanced approach with a New York taxi driver predictably dismissing Che as a murderer who can ‘burn in hell’, while a Cuban school teacher declares that he was taught to read and write by Che fighting as a guerrilla. Fleischer attempts to interrogate whether Che’s activities match up to the myth generated about him. None of this overcomes the film’s poor understanding of the relationship between Guevara and Castro. It appears from the film that Fidel was easily influenced by the ideas of the apparently stronger intellectual figure of Che, while the reality was more complex.45 In the Sierra Maestra, Castro repeats word for word Che’s ideas on guerrilla warfare and is apparently an uncritical follower of the Argentinian revolutionary committed to the liberation of the whole South American continent. Given this background, it is evident that Castro was not anything like the novice portrayed in Fleischer’s film. Castro had a rather more strategic vision of leading the guerrillas in separate columns westwards towards the capital Havana while Che appears as a messiah figure leading a long column of guerrillas and civilians through the sugarcane fields. The film cuts to brief battle scenes at Santa Clara before Batista flees the country. The film avoided looking at how Che’s column recruited its supporters or even how his tiny guerrilla army of some 340 men and women succeeded against vastly superior opponents. Largely avoiding the politics behind the guerrilla struggle, Che depicts the revolution as some form of natural event outside the compass of individual decisionmaking or group mobilization. At best, this is a rather crude film showing the crowd of Cuba sweeping up Castro into victory celebrations in Havana while at the same time cutting to scenes of Che, now a commander of the La Cabana fortress in Havana, busy arranging the execution of political enemies. We see a ruthless side to Che coming to the fore when he shows no compunction in shooting a traitor discovered among the guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra. Che starts to turn into a gangster film where a young would-be mobster takes charge and succumbs to the corruptions of power. This would not be due to women, drugs or booze, but the allure of a purified ideological vision ensuring that, in time, the revolutionary messiah feels forced to leave Cuba after Fidel’s apparently spineless acceptance of the Soviet withdrawal of nuclear missiles from the island after the Missile Crisis of October 1962. Che now takes his leave of a bespectacled, boozy Castro searching for another bottle in a drinks cooler. There is no effort to track his movements around the globe as the film shifts to the mountains of Bolivia, where the disastrous guerrilla campaign was fought against the US-trained Bolivian army. The last part of Fleischer’s Che shows how Guevara’s vision of a continental guerrilla-based revolution ended with the dramatic failure in Bolivia in 1967. Che is interrogated by a Bolivian army captain who has read his book on guerrilla warfare; the captain dismisses the guerrilla venture for its ‘arrogance’ and failure to understand the mood of the ordinary people. He brings in an old peasant man who has walked all morning to come and see him. The old man expresses his wish for all the forces to leave his region as the fighting has upset his goats. Che’s revolutionary vision, the captain declares, has basically ‘failed’; we see a moment of self-doubt in Sharif ’s face,

Introduction

15

suggesting (with no evidence to support it) that Guevara went to his death believing that his life had been a failure. Che attempted to challenge the myth that emerged around Che Guevara following his death, though the movie failed to generate any serious counter-myth. Indeed, at points it seems almost to confirm it with shots of the helicopter flying Che’s dead body lying on a stretcher attached in a Christ-like posture. Che ended up as a fumbling and uncertain attempt by Hollywood to understand one of the mythological figures behind the radical anti-war opposition in the late 1960s. It was nearly forty years before another Hollywood film on Guevara was released in Hollywood, Stephen Soderbergh’s Che in 2008. This is a more-wide ranging and ambitious project than Fleischer’s film as it encompasses the revolution in Cuba and the Bolivian debacle, though it overlooks Guevara’s brief guerrilla foray into the Congo. Despite its length of 257 minutes, Che was received far more positively than Fleischer’s film, though it failed to recover its costs grossing only $40.9 million at the box office along with receipts from the two-disc version released on DVD. Significantly, the broad bulk of these receipts have come from outside North America, where the film is estimated to have grossed a mere $1.4 million, compared to $29.8 worldwide, suggesting that Guevara remains a figure of minimal interest for US film audiences. Nevertheless, Che stands out as one of the major cinematic works of guerrilla warfare, though the movie also fails to address the reasons why the guerrilla strategy was chosen in the first place while Che was in Mexico, as opposed, say, to an FLN-style campaign of urban terrorism or a more broadly based strategy of mass strikes and urban insurrection championed at the time by the urban-based Cuban llano. Soderbergh used a handheld digital camera to make the film that resembles a 35mm film in quality. The purpose of this was to attempt to get the viewer to peer over the shoulder of Che in something that resembled a ‘guerrilla film’ in the way that it adopted an agile perspective close to the ground level of actual combat.46 This groundlevel approach did not mean that the film was interested in the strategy and tactics of guerrilla warfare, and there is little real effort to deal with Guevara’s political ideals. The film preferred to dwell on Guevara’s commitment to improving the lives of the poor rather than the violent process of revolution, which Soderbergh termed an ‘analogue revolution’ based on committing works and ideas to paper compared to the modern world of electronic communications. Che’s struggle, Soderbergh has suggested, was part of a world very different to our own, though critics have pointed out that we use as much, if not more, paper for communicating information and ideas compared to the 1950s. Che certainly has some sense of history, tracking as it does some of the high points of the career of a figure who, by the time the movie was made in 2008, had become a global icon of youthful revolution.47 The movie, to some degree, played upon this global mythology, ignoring in the process the actual revolution in Cuba after 1959 and its own rather sad trajectory into growing state control and censorship. While Che has a documentary quality, it ignores several key parts of Che’s life and his rather delusionary view of revolution; focusing more closely on this, such as the disastrous entry into the Congo in 1965, would have helped audiences understand the reasons for the failure in Bolivia. By juxtaposing in the early scenes of the film Che’s visit to

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Cinema and Unconventional Warfare in the Twentieth Century

New York in 1964 (filmed in black and white) with the earlier scenes in Mexico and Cuba, Soderbergh framed Guevara’s Cuban venture within a pattern of wider events. But there is no serious opposition in the film to Che’s ideas, exemplified for instance by his discussions with Gamel Abdul Nasser in Egypt in 1965, and the film fails to engage with a man who became a victim of the myth that had been forged around him.48

Cinema and terrorism If film producers found guerrilla insurgencies difficult to bring to the screen, it has been a different matter with terrorism. This has supplied a range of tropes that have embellished film genres ranging from war cinema and action movies to crime, horror, science fiction and even westerns and comedies. Compared to many guerrillas, the terrorist has often been projected as a deracinated figure fighting for no homeland, often wandering the world deprived of social or cultural roots and employing violence in an apparently random manner. This is an image that was often promoted by some terrorism analysts in the 1970s and 1980s, though it clearly does not apply to all terrorist movements or leaders. For some analysts, the actual differences between guerrilla warfare and terrorism are not that significant. Linguistic terminology has often added to the confusion since many governments label the insurgents they fight as ‘terrorists’ rather than ‘guerrillas’ on the assumption that the word carries more pejorative connotations. We also need to distinguish between ‘terror’ from ‘terrorism’ since ‘terror’ is an abstract noun used to describe the emotional state of people who experience fear, whether this be real victims of violent crime and terrorist attacks as well as cinema audiences. ‘Terror’ in this sense is not so different to ‘horror’, though, strictly speaking, ‘terror’ is the anticipation of something ghastly or horrible that is about to happen while ‘horror’ is the emotional state felt in the aftermath of some atrocity, whether this be a single event like a bloody fight, a murder or the mass killing of innocent victims. Film producers have never seriously observed the distinction and what has often been terror in cinema has been classified as different to the horror genre centred on narratives that frighten audiences with a build-up of suspense and anticipation of some ghastly event about to unfold. Most horror films before the 1990s were quite muted when depicting the actual ‘horror’ of the bloody deed – whether this be blood and guts everywhere, limbs being cut off or eye balls spliced out. These were usually shown sparingly by film directors before the increasingly violent spate of horror movies that emerged in the 1980s such as Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and The Evil Dead (1982) and continuing into recent features such as Hostel (2005) and the Saw franchise (starting in 2004). ‘Terror’ has been far more diverse in cinema compared to ‘terrorism’. It not only formed the base of the horror genre from the earliest days of silent cinema but also of many crime and detective features, making it a far more wide-ranging phenomenon than ‘terrorism’. Anthony Shaw’s recent study of ‘cinematic terror’ tends to confuse this distinction by examining less ‘terror’ in cinema but ‘cinematic terrorism’, a rather more accurate title for the book. Terrorism is essentially a tactic of psychological warfare

Introduction

17

involving, in Bard O’Neill words, the ‘threat or use of physical coercion, primarily against non-combatants, especially civilians, to create fear to achieve political objectives’.49 Though ancient in origins (it was used, for example, by Jewish insurgents against Romans in first-century Palestine), it has been a form of warfare that came into its own in the modern world of mass media. Mounting terrorist attacks in the heart of modern cities have, since at least the 1880s, been a relatively low-cost and attractive means for underground insurgent movements to gain wider political recognition and support.50 ‘Terrorism’ is basically a tactic and a means to a political end. Shaw’s study is important for showing that terrorism in cinema has not been a recent phenomenon, since it is possible to see images of ‘terrorists’ from the era of silent cinema such as the 16-minute feature The Voice of the Violin by D.W. Griffith in 1909. Set in New York, the film depicts a music teacher who decides to join a group of anarchists after being spurned by one of his female students. The film defined all political violence as effectively immoral and establishing the trope of terrorism being essentially the preserve of unhinged and mad losers, though this trope rather contradicts Griffith’s own more positive imagery for the terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan in his later film Birth of a Nation (1915).51 It is hard to pinpoint The Voice of the Violin as part of a distinctive subgenre of early terrorism movies. While it might be an important film for scholars seeking to establish an aetiology for later terrorism movies in the 1980s and 1990, it needs to be set in the context of a large number of shorts made by Griffith and other directors at this early stage in American film history. As often occurs with this sort of scholarly quest, there is the danger of erecting a Whiggish theory of history. The Voice of the Violin was but one of a huge number of short films often only lasting 10 or 15 minutes. Griffith alone produced some 450 between 1908 and 1913, many of which are lost. ‘Terrorism’ was a marginal theme in most of the films that reached cinema audiences and would be largely subsumed, by the inter-war years, by crime and horror genres. Only a few directorial auteurs such as Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford managed to rise above this general cinematic indifference to terror and terrorist movements, releasing films such as The Secret Agent, Sabotage and The Informer that portrayed underground terrorist movements such as Russian nihilists or the IRA. But even then, there were problems in tackling the political motives of terrorist movements. Contrary to what many critics over the years have assumed to be apparently mindless and psychopathic acts of aggression, terrorism usually has some political rationale, involving short-term as well as long-term tactical and strategic goals.52 As one study by Frederick J. Hacker pointed out years ago, we should avoid the assumption that terrorists are necessarily insane psychopaths; undoubtedly some have been over the years, like the 9/11 plane hijacker Mohammed Atta, but they only form one small category of ‘crazy’ terrorist recruits who also include what Hacker terms ‘crusaders’ and ‘criminals’.53 Most terrorist groupings prove to be highly resistant to political dialogue and negotiation, ensuring that the negotiated end to a terrorist campaign can be protracted, as proved to be the case in Northern Ireland. But we should not assume from this that terrorist movements are bereft of strategic purpose. As Neumann and Smith have pointed out, this mistake has often been made

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Cinema and Unconventional Warfare in the Twentieth Century

by terrorism analysts who have never seriously looked at the strategic rationales behind many terrorist operations. Most terrorist movements do broadly pursue a strategy aimed at disorienting their enemy, forcing them to respond on terms favourable to the movement and, thirdly, gaining political legitimacy by publicizing their cause. Such a strategy can reach a finite stage beyond which it cannot easily develop, at which point a terrorist movement undergoes a major (and often internally divisive) rethink of the strategic utility of the strategy.54 Terrorism remains, though, a rather slippery concept analytically. From the late nineteenth century, the rise of terrorist movements across Europe and in the United States focused attention on terror at the sub-state level rather than states using terror to consolidate power and maintain control over subject populations. The terror propelled by these sub-state movements never matched what Hannah Arendt called the ‘total terror’ practised by the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia (as well as later Maoist China).55 Precisely because it was often hidden behind the wall of secrecy created by an all-pervasive secret police and physical barriers of entry (especially in the Soviet Union) this form of ‘total terror’ that killed huge numbers of people remained far less visible, and even now is approached through dark comedy rather than serious cinematic realism, exemplified by the recent 2017 film The Death of Stalin (dir. Armando Iannucci). Terrorist movements from below, on the other hand, have been far easier to transfer to the cinema screen. By the early twentieth century, a mythology of terrorism had spread across Europe centred on images of apocalyptic anarchist terrorism seeking the downfall of western civilization, themes captured in such novels as Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed (1871–1872) and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907). By the inter-war years, the anarchist wave was spent, though the mythology lived on in a few releases of the era such as Alfred Hitchcock’s film Sabotage (1936). The rise of state terror in the form of Soviet Union under Stalin and Nazi Germany largely eclipsed the earlier demonic image of sub-state terrorism that only re-surfaced at the end of the Second World War in the form of terrorist movements such as the Irgun in Palestine.56 IRA and other anarchist terrorism continued in fits and starts throughout this period, and formed the basis for the narratives of such films The Secret Agent (1936), Sabotage (1936) and The Informer (1936) and other British post-war films such as Odd Man Out (1947) and The Gentle Gunman (1952).57 The Irish terrorist model of underground urban cell groupings launching sporadic attacks on industrial, military or symbolic targets formed one of the templates of post-war terrorism before it became bypassed by alternative narratives of targeted urban terrorism in pursuit of national liberation, exemplified especially starkly by the ‘Battle’ of Algiers in 1957, examined in Chapter 4. One major dimension in the growing adoption of increasingly brutal terrorist tactics in the post-war years was the war itself, a link that is hard, though not impossible, for film producers to bring to the cinema screen. As Matthew Carr has noted, much of the savagery of post-1945 terrorism was a result of the collapse in standards of warfare during the Second World War ‘in which the rules that supposedly governed conventional warfare were routinely disregarded through new military innovations such as the introduction of strategic bombing’.58 A further dimension was the growth

Introduction

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in state support for sabotage and quasi-terrorist tactics by specially trained formations such as the SOE, the LRDG and the SAS, examined in Chapter 2. Terrorism after 1945 continued to be viewed, in many circles on both sides of the Atlantic, as the abnormal sub-state activity of sociopaths, nihilists and exemplars of cultural despair. The outlook pervaded a lot of the early research work on terrorism in the social sciences in the 1970s: ‘not all … political terrorists are insane or mentally disturbed,’ wrote one American expert in 1976, ‘but most are.’59 This was one of the shibboleths of the pseudo-science of ‘terrorology’ that emerged at this time, fuelled by a wave of publications that tended to examine terrorism as a weapon employed against western governments and societies rather than in many cases by many of these governments too, especially in parts of the developing or ‘third world’.60 The outlook also shaped some feature films, leading, very often, to cinematic images of terrorism as abstract and timeless activities employed by dehumanized nemeses acting outside the norms of mainstream society. This was especially true of Hollywood, as I shall seek to show in Chapter 3, where movies from the 1970s to the 1990s consolidated the idea of evil terrorists meeting their inevitable come-uppance at the hands of action heroes such as Bruce Willis, Arnie Schwarzenegger, Steven Seagal and Chuck Norris. These features did much to reinforce the idea of ‘terror’ as a phenomenon standing outside history, a conception later embodied in the Bush administration’s indefinite ‘war on terror’ in 2001. Almost all terrorist movements have a finite life span, which is often ended by negotiation and imaginative statecraft. This is exemplified by the eventual ending of the Troubles in Northern Ireland with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Cronin has shown how various terrorist campaigns tend to fizzle out, transition into something else or experience military defeat. There are in essence, she has suggested, six major ways this can occur: the first is through decapitation of its leaders such as the capturing of the head of the Peruvian Sendero Luminoso terrorist movement Manuel Ruben Abimael Guzman in 1992; secondly, terrorist movements might eventually transition into political parties such as occurred with Sinn Fein following the negotiations in Northern Ireland that led to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement; thirdly, terrorists might actually ‘win’ and achieve their objective: this is quite rare but happed with the ‘victory’ of The Zionist terrorists with the departure of Britain from Palestine in 1947 and the creation of the state of Israel the following year; fourthly, terrorists campaigns might simply fail and provoke a popular backlash that forces them out of existence, as eventually happened with the Baader Meinhof ‘Gang’ and Red Army Factions in Germany or Red Brigades in Italy. Fifthly, the terrorist movement might be simply defeated as with the British defeat of Chinese communist guerrillas in Malaya in the 1950s or the Sri Lankan government’s defeat of the Tamil Tigers in 2009. Finally, the terrorist movement may simply transition into another type of movement, such as a guerrilla movement: this occurred in the case of the terrorist movement in Cuba after the landing of Fidel Castro’s guerrillas on the Granma in 1956 or, more recently, with the FARC in Colombia.61 Cronin’s work shows how complex terrorist movements can be as well as the tendency for cinema to oversimplify, since protracted negotiations are not usually viewed by film producers as the subject matter for exciting movies. Film producers

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often prefer to take the soft option in representing terrorists in simplistic and demonic terms, drawing on other genres such as horror to reinforce the image of terrorists as one-dimensional figures impervious to reason. Cronin’s first path of lopping off the terrorist head has occurred relatively infrequently in cinema, suggesting that it has rarely occurred in practice. It is the sort of narrative best suited to a James Bond movie involving the final elimination of terrorist nemeses such as Dr No or Goldfinger. One film known internationally to tell the story of the operation to capture Guzman is the American thriller The Dancer Upstairs (2002), directed by John Malkovich. As I point out in Chapter 4, this film focused on the eccentric leader of a major guerrilla movement in Peru to the exclusion of the movement’s impact at the local level in the Andes. There has been almost no serious feature that has looked at terrorist movements transitioning into political movements. One of the closest is the British-South African film on the career of Nelson Mandela entitled Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (2013), directed by Justin Chadwick. The focus on Mandela allowed film makers to personalize South Africa’s transition from apartheid to non-racial democracy in the early 1990s. But the focus was less on Mandela’s brief period of involvement with the ANC strategy of ‘armed struggle’ by its insurgent wing known as Umkhonto we Sizwe than his arrest, trial and imprisonment on Robben Island for twenty-seven years. The personalization of the issues meant that the wider pattern of accommodation between the South African government and the exiled ANC, leading to the political transition between 1990 and 1994, was largely overlooked in a movie that elevated Mandela to heroic status and interpreted South African political change in terms of a rather oldfashioned ‘great man’ theory of history. The third pattern of exit from terrorism cited by Cronin of terrorists achieving their objectives has also been almost totally neglected by cinema. This is not especially surprising since film producers in the west have considerable difficulties in releasing movies that show western governments failing in their battle with terrorism. The theme appeared in Otto Preminger’s film Exodus in 1960, portraying the terrorist campaign by Irgun and Haganah against British rule in Palestine after the Second World War. The movie gained a warm reception in the United States, though far less so in Britain, where there was a more critical response to what was viewed as a campaign of wanton murder. Likewise, Gillo Pontecorvo’s iconic film The Battle of Algiers depicted the FLN as ultimately succeeding with its campaign of terrorism in Algiers in 1957, though the film markedly failed to show how this terror campaign related to the eventual French decision to concede independence in 1962. Cronin’s fourth pattern is one where terrorist movements fail through public rejection and a popular backlash. It is an area, once again, where cinema has been weak. Historically, it is possible to find a few films that have shown how a terrorist movement lacked wider public support: High Bright Sun (1964), for instance, set in Cyprus during the ‘emergency’ against the EOKA terrorist underground, led by General Grivas, shows a terrorist campaign enjoying only partial support from the Greek Cypriot population. But this is a controversial area for film makers since it assumes that terrorist movements do not always act in complete isolation but with some degree of popular support, or at least complicity. Many European governments

Introduction

21

such as France, Britain and Belgium have Muslim minority populations that have provided some degree of cover and support for terrorist groups. These are populations that are now targeted by various forms of government ‘deradicalization’ policies, and commercial feature films can often act as unwelcome interventions into delicate and complicated patterns of community relations. It is the fifth of Cronin’s six patterns of ultimate defeat of terrorist movements that has gained the greatest support from film makers, though it is one that has only rarely occurred in the period since the Second World War. Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers can be read, at one level, as showing how repressive state counter-terrorism tactics involving torture, reprisal bombings and the penetration of underground terrorist cell networks can lead to the defeat of an urban terrorist movement, even though this strategy failed politically in the longer term. There was a similar narrative in Costa Gavras’s 1972 movie State of Siege depicting the use of death squads by the Uruguayan government to destroy the Tupamaros terrorist movement. Here a rather bleaker picture emerged as a counter-terrorist campaign by the state ended up destroying a South American democracy, a theme later tackled in the Hollywood film The Siege in 1998 where American troops are sent into a New York under siege from a Muslim terrorist campaign, leading to a zealous general initiating a state of terror in the city like the French paras in Algiers in 1957. The last of Cronin’s six paths has also been poorly portrayed on the cinema screen. The transitioning of terrorist movements into another form of organization has often been a complex process which does not, perhaps, lend itself easily to a successful film script. One of the closest is Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins (1996) depicting the career of one of the leaders of the IRA’s war against Britain between 1919 and 1921. But the film completely ignored Collins’s role in negotiations with the British government in London, preferring to have him return from there with an agreement that is promptly denounced by diehard opponent of the Treaty led by Eamon de Valera. The film then focuses on Collins’s emergence as leader of the newly established Irish army fighting a second civil war against the anti-treaty rebels before his assassination by an anti-treaty insurgent. For the most part, western film producers opted for a debased variant of Cronin’s fifth strategy of terrorist defeat. Movies of this kind often end up as latter-day westerns, with the good sheriff and his posse seeing off the bad guys in the final reel. Many of the terrorism films that I examine in this book ignore the complex motivations of terrorists in favour of portraying them as antiheroes who are eventually defeated by the decisive use of force (usually by white men) securing the triumph of civilized values over chaos and mayhem. Such movies became prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s and ignored the complex forces driving individuals into terrorist actions. This is a subject area that has been of growing interest to terrorism analysts. Griffin, for instance, has argued that terrorism is not necessarily driven by a vacuum of moral, religious and political belief. Terrorist movements usually have grand narratives that might appear ‘fanatical’, but have an underlying strategic rationale.62 Understanding the terrorist’s need for meaning is essential as part of a protracted process of political resolution of conflict that has given rise to terrorist violence in the first place.63

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In this regard, cinema, especially Hollywood, has been as much part of the problem as providing any serious solution. The 1970s and 1980s saw the emergence of action movies frequently portraying Arabs and Palestinians in villainous terms. Many Hollywood films depicting terrorists have been anchored in a series of demonic stereotypes linking terrorism with images of ‘evil Arabs’. The same pattern occurred in the case of Ireland, with the stereotyping beginning in the inter-war years and continuing into the 1970s and 1980s before a progressive humanization began to occur in the context of negotiations ending the long war.64 The conspiratorial element in the popular perception of terrorism has ensured that the terrorism subgenre has remained closely linked to the crime genre, though many terrorism films were usually action features. The 1970s served as a watershed period as the terrorism film became increasingly mainstream in Hollywood during a period of mounting concern about the spread of ‘international terrorism’, centred on the activities of Palestinian groups such as Al Fatah and Black September. As I show in Chapter 3, Hollywood released several features involving Islamic or Palestinian terror threats in the two decades prior to the 9/11 attacks in 2001 such as Black Sunday (1977), Executive Decision (1996) and The Siege (1998). The US public was well prepared cinematically for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which unfolded like a particularly shocking disaster movie.65

Cinema and special operations The third component of UW is special operations. In contrast to insurgency and terrorism, this appeared on film early in the post-war years based on operations by both British and American forces during the Second World War. Several war films after 1945 involved groups of highly trained men (and some women) acting behind enemy lines in operations involving intelligence gathering, sabotage, assassination, kidnapping of enemy officers and diversion. Many of these films would later fall into the genre of action films by the late 1970s and 1980s. In the period after the Second World War, they were part of a subgenre of war film that was frequently viewed as controversial given the reluctance of many senior commanders in both the United States and Britain to accept special operations. Many saw these sorts of operations as risky distractions from the ‘normal’ methods of fighting war achieving minimal results despite the large amounts of resources and manpower expended on them. The term ‘special operations’ came into its own during the Second World War, especially in the dark period of Allied retreat in 1941–1942 in Asia, North Africa and Eastern Europe. This was a time when political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic were open to new ideas about fighting war involving the use of small groups of highly mobile forces operating clandestinely to cut enemy supply lines, mount sabotage attacks and kidnap or assassinate enemy officers. Tactically, special operations were by no means new since they were deeply embedded in the history of war, even if many military experts and military strategists viewed them as ‘unprofessional’. This hostility re-surfaced during the Second World War, as some senior commanders viewed the activities of such groups such as the Long Range Desert Group in North Africa (often

Introduction

23

closely involved with the SAS) and the Chindits in Burma under Orde Wingate achieving only limited military success. This official disdain for special operations was partly replicated by post-war cinema. A few films were made that dealt with special operations such as They Who Dare (1954) and The Cockleshell Heroes (1956) in Britain and Objective Burma (1945) and Merrills Marauders (1962) in the United States, though they tended to be dwarfed by the many more films dealing with conventional military conflict. By the 1960s, film producers released increasingly fantastical and violent special operations films such as The Guns of Navarone (1962) and The Dirty Dozen (1967). Special operations also formed the basis of other combat subgenres such as the mercenary subgenre that I examine in Chapter 5 involving mercenaries and soldiers of fortune on missions into ‘enemy’ territory, such as Dark of the Sun (1968) and The Dogs of War (1980). One notable feature of this story is the belated involvement by Hollywood in special operations features. As I suggest in Chapters 2 and 3, this is in part due to the resistance of senior commanders in the United States to giving special operations forces (SOF) much support when there was a more general attachment to doctrines of conventional war. Throughout a large part of the Cold War the envisaged future war was a beefed-up variant of the land battle in Europe in the Second World War, and the few occasions when the United States did seek to involve special forces, such as the disastrous attempt to free the hostages in Tehran in 1979 or the later foray into Somalia in 1993, the operations went awry, with a serious public relations blow-back. Hollywood did not seriously attempt to emulate the British spate of post-war special operations movies until much later. Indeed, it might be said that special forces finally came of age with the successful Seals raid on Abbottabad to kill Osama bin Laden in 2011, leading to two features the following year – Seal Team Six and Zero Dark Thirty. By the time these movies were released UW had taken a major new turn with the rapid escalation in new military technology, symbolized by the expansion of drone warfare and the growing prospect of robots and artificial intelligence being used for military purposes. UW is only unconventional to the degree that it does not mean the immediate prospects of major land sea and air battles of the past, though the kinds of special operations now being mounted are increasingly intelligence-led, with the prospect that intelligence from increasingly sophisticated drones will secure nearcertainty in the identification of targets (though as we are reminded in Zero Dark Thirty no intelligence ever reaches complete 100% certainty). This is the kind of war that eliminates, or at least seriously reduces, the prospects for heroes of the old sort courageously battling uncertain odds and we are left wondering where the heroes might come from in the future.

Summing up Of the three forms of unconventional war, guerrilla war has been clearly the hardest to bring to the cinema screen. Terrorism and special operations have all been quite widely filmed; but it has been guerrilla insurgencies that have remained problematical. Guerrilla warfare during the twentieth century acquired a mystique

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that many terrorist movements and leaders sought to emulate, with a group of RAF guerrilla at one point travelling to Jordan in 1970 to receive training from Palestinian guerrillas. Guerrillas and guerrilla insurgencies have certainly appeared in several films, and Steven Soderbergh’s Che remains one of the most outstanding cinematic treatments. Filming guerrilla struggles is never easy and can pose serious problems for directors attempting to answer key questions about a guerrilla campaign. Why have guerrilla tactics been chosen in the first place and what is its overall strategy? It is usually possible for cinema audiences to understand this in movies dealing with terrorist campaigns or special operations, but far harder with guerrilla war movies, where the goals may change during a long period of struggle. The sheer tedium of guerrilla operations is enough to put many film producers off, and how do you film a guerrilla war that may last several years with different commanders and involving a huge range of battle spaces and fields of operation? It is easy to confuse audiences demanding fast pace and spectacular and decisive outcomes. Guerrilla war is ‘dirty’ war of the worst kind, though terrorism and special operations also lead to torture, random killings and abuse of civilians. All three form the kinds of UW that have shaped many of the conflicts being conducted in various arenas around the modern world. Terrorism movies will remain staple items of the action genre, though it is likely too, as I suggest in Chapter 3, that many at the upper end of the action movie market will develop as ‘cerebral action features’ that will seek to be thoughtful over how they interrogate ethical issues of UW, such as the morality of drone strikes and collateral damage inflicted on civilians. Some of these ethical issues have previously emerged in other cinemas investigated in this book such as French films made on the Algerian war investigated in Chapter 6 or the morality of inserting Mossad hit squads into Europe to destroy the leadership of the Palestinian terrorist underground, examined in Chapter 7. In the end, some of the grimmest forms of UW that I examine in this book are of the mercenary kind that I examine in Chapter 5. Here special operations are performed, or at least attempted, by those whose only motivation is financial. The movies that emerged around mercenaries in post-colonial Africa from the late 1960s onwards, such as Dark of the Sun in 1968, are violent early examples of action movies, though the attempts of film producers to impose some sort of moral gloss on these narratives have been unconvincing. Moreover, what I have called the mercenary subgenre of the action movie did not stop with the ending of any serious interest in the fate of mercenary squads in post-colonial terrains, but has evolved into a new kind of mercenary-type film centred on warlords and child soldiers, exemplified by such movies as Johnny Mad Dog and Beasts of No Nation. Here UW becomes emulated at the local level in fractured third world states, suggesting significant possibilities for directors to develop combat movies of their own that defy the conventions of Hollywood.

1

Cinema’s Encounter with Colonial Insurgencies

In the years after 1945 powers such as Britain, France and Holland began to wind up their colonial empires in a period that has come to be known by historians as ‘decolonization’.1 The model of ‘flag independence’ was established by the United States in the case of the Philippines in 1946 and was followed in 1947–1948 by independence in India and Pakistan and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and the Dutch East Indies as Indonesia after a colonial war between 1945 and 1949. Over the next three decades European colonies in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean also gained independence, first from Britain and France and later from Spain and Portugal, in some cases following insurgencies. In the case of British cinema, the retreat from empire ensured that many post-1945 war films lacked any serious sense of imperial mission, unlike some pre-war movies such as Clive of India (1935) and Rhodes of Africa (1936). As I shall show in this chapter, the management of declining imperial power led to a focus lower down the imperial pecking order on junior or middle-ranking army officers, colonial policemen and civil servants carrying on their duty in a world of colonial retreat. To some degree this reflected a wider interest in the war movie genre on men in combat, as well as offering the occasional exposure of incompetence and rigid attachment to past glories, exemplified especially starkly by Richard Attenborough’s absurd Regimental Sergeant Major Lauderdale in Guns at Batasi (1964). Such factors had an important bearing on the cinematic representations of postwar ‘emergencies’ in the British colonies of Malaya (1948–1960), Kenya (1952–1960) and Cyprus (1955–1959). These were all examples of counter-insurgency deployed to restore political order against indigenous insurgent movements in order to secure a managed transfer of power to a western-orientated post-colonial elite. At the same time, the United States, though formally committed to the end of European colonial empires, found itself fighting colonial-type insurgencies, especially in South Vietnam as I shall show later in the chapter. All the ‘emergencies’ were resolved by the time of independence and there was no British equivalent of Algeria, where France eventually withdrew in 1962 leading to the departure of over 1 million white colons from a colony they had known as ‘Algerie Francaise’. It was only in Southern Rhodesia that Britain faced anything resembling the Algerian example, as a white settler regime of some 270,000 under its leader Ian Smith declared a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1965. But Rhodesia was, for the British public, a relatively remote colony and successive governments remained uninvolved in the bush war that developed in the late 1960s and 1970s before

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the eventual decision by the government of Mrs Thatcher to temporarily recolonize Rhodesia in 1979 and manage elections to secure the country’s passage to independence as Zimbabwe in 1980, an event that has so far not reached the cinema screen.2 In this chapter I shall examine the cinematic representation of these emergencies in two sections. The first section will look at five films depicting aspects of the counter-insurgency in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus: The Planters Wife (1952), Simba (1955), Windom’s Way (1957), The High Bright Sun (1964) and The 7th Dawn (1964). The second section will look at one major film that examined American counter-insurgency in Vietnam, The Green Berets (1968), though the disastrous reception of the film among critics (though not film audiences) helped to put Hollywood off filming serious counter-insurgency films for years, a theme that I will tackle in more detail in Chapter 4.

Tackling insurgencies in an era of decolonization The decolonizing narrative that developed in Britain paid little attention – unlike in France – to radical insurgent movements, which were mostly seen as aberrations from the ‘normal’ parliamentary trajectory imposed by Whitehall. There was rather less need to use the cinema in any coherent propaganda role as in the Second World War, though film producers were broadly expected to produce films that were not too critical of colonial policy.3 In any case, most British film producers were keen to choose themes that resonated with the British cinema-going public and avoid anything too controversial or unpopular at the box office. The films released in the 1950s emerged at a time of some hostility among sections of the British upper class towards the appeals of ‘Americanization’ from across the Atlantic, though many working-class cinema goers admired the American lifestyle, with its compelling images of suburban affluence, exciting dress styles and glamourous movie stars. For the British imperial establishment, the United States appeared to offer little to sustain a myth of empire that faced the possibility of oblivion in the post-war world, though they were forced to tag along with it during the 1950s in a Cold War climate of anti-communism.4 Cinematically, the United States remained an uneasy ally for Britain when it came to representing the Second World War and colonial emergencies. The end of the war had seen an especially emotive battle over ownership of the memory of the war and military combat with the release of Operation Burma (1945) by Warner Brothers. The movie showed a group of American paratroopers sent behind enemy lines in Burma under a Captain Nelson, played by Errol Flynn. The team has the usual range of characters drawn from the various cultural components of the United States: a Jewish guy and an Italian American, for instance, as well as a Nepalese Gurkha who acts as a guide and tracker for the team. The film had started life before the end of the war in 1944 and recognized at the start that the campaign in Burma had been an ‘Allied’ and not just an American one. The film provoked fierce attacks by the British press on its apparent misrepresentation of the American role in Burma, to the point that the film ended up being banned from British cinema screens for five years. The press opposition in Britain reflected

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anger at the film’s subtext suggesting an inherent British subordination to the theme of ‘American derring-do, small scale or large scale, delivered at the right moment by men with the right qualities, can do the job’.5 The British public soon grew used to this phenomenon and there was only muted criticism in 1953 when the film Red Beret was released with the American actor Alan Ladd cast as a Canadian officer leading a British para raid on a German radar station. Cinema owners, by this time, were only too keen to have films with American stars since their appearance usually ensured good box office receipts. Operation Burma, coming as it did at the end of the war, struck a raw nerve. It confirmed all too clearly declining British imperial power as well as Hollywood’s evident willingness to expose its own ideological practices to public gaze by ransacking the successes of other national cinemas and projecting them as if they were its own.6 The issue helped to define some of the contours of post-war British feature films, especially in relation to war movies. During the 1940s two major film combines emerged in Britain, the Rank Organisation and ABC, that attempted planned programmes of production. Both became seriously hampered by the failure of the British government to enforce the 1947 quota of foreign film imports and, by the end of the decade, the larger of the two combines, Rank, had made a loss of between £4 and £6 million, a drain made worse by declining cinema audiences. Rank’s response to this crisis was to secure a relatively safe income by exhibiting American films in its cinemas and using the profits from this to fund its own more modest ventures in film making.7 This strategy managed to work during most of the 1950s, though by the decade’s end time was beginning to catch up on Rank. In 1960, it withdrew from mainstream cinema and concentrated on documentaries. In its heyday, Rank released several iconic war films that helped shape the post-war British memory of the Second World War. The American film distributors did not need many of the films that Rank produced, so there was a degree of parochialism about its films, made even more evident by the enforcement of a distinctly Rank ethos. The company was closely controlled by its managing director, John Davis, together with his American executive producer Earl St John. Actors had to sign seven-year contracts while film scripts were submitted to both British and American censors in advance of filming. Davis also followed a strongly right-wing political stance on the Cold War and was keen to see films produced with a markedly anti-communist tone. One of the most overtly political of these films was the Boulting Brothers High Treason in 1951, where police engage at the end in a shootout with an underground communist terrorist group attempting to sabotage Battersea Power Station.8 Nevertheless, Rank found itself navigating between a series of powerful institutional constraints in its ‘colonial war’ features. One issue that never went away was the need to break, where possible, into the American market. Here the familiar ideological battles of the Cold War helped steer the company into emphasizing the importance of counter-insurgency in the struggle against world communism. Another, and sometimes contradictory, issue was pressure from the British government to release films that accorded with the narrative of moving from old-style ‘empire’ to a new ‘multi-racial’ Commonwealth of newly independent states. A third consideration was the need to maintain the core values of Rank that were strongly shaped by the

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Cinema and Unconventional Warfare in the Twentieth Century

puritanical values of its founder, J. Arthur Rank, who was a Methodist lay preacher as well as multi-millionaire grain wholesaler. Rank proceeded to release a series of iconic films that appealed to the generation who had come through the Second World War. In addition to war features such as The Cruel Sea (1953) and Reach for the Sky (1956), it released the odd comedy with a military theme such as The Bulldog Breed (1960) starring Norman Wisdom, and Carve Her Name with Pride (1958) starring Virginia McKenna, depicting the SOE agent Violette Szabo in France in 1944–1945. There were also several films depicting daring British exploits in special operations, while others projected an image of relatively benign and well-intentioned colonial officials fighting counter-insurgencies as part of an orderly retreat from empire. Rank released three ‘colonial war’ films in the 1950s – The Planters Wife (1952), Simba (1955) and Windom’s Way (1957) – while the later Malayan insurgency 7th Dawn (1964) was released by United Artists. The movies reveal some of the competing pressures on British producers of adventure films, especially between the demands of the American market and liberal ideas of the British Commonwealth. Commercial pressures to secure a profitable film usually ensured that some form of romantic narrative intruded to the point where it could almost completely marginalize the wider political and military narrative. Where there was any sort of political focus, the demands of Cold War anti-communism tended to come uppermost so that the underlying reasons for the campaign by the anti-colonial ‘terrorists’ were usually ignored or bypassed by a focus on loyal and subservient members of the colonized ‘native’ population, whether these be servants or members of the colonial police. If there was any focus on the ‘terrorists’, the usual device was to see these as led by ‘alien’ outsiders who had often been educated with ‘foreign’ ideas and values that conflicted with the ‘normal’ patterns of the colonial society. At the extreme, these foreign ‘agitators’ were nothing short of evil, rather like some of Hollywood’s later terrorist nemeses in the 1980s and 1990s. As Susan Carruthers has suggested, some of the features released in Britain reinforced counter-insurgency efforts, especially in relation to Kenya and Malaya. They grew out of earlier propaganda efforts by film units organized by the Colonial Office after the Second World War.9 Rank’s first foray, The Planters Wife (dir. Ken Annakin who later filmed The Battle of the Bulge), was released in 1952. It is set in Malaya during the early phases of the communist insurgency and starred Jack Hawkins as a rubber planter Jim Frazer, Claudette Colbert as his wife Liz and Anthony Steel as Hugh Dobson the local police inspector. The narrative focuses on attacks from communist guerrillas, known by the British army at the time as ‘CTs’ or ‘communist terrorists’, especially on the Frazers’ rubber plantation. Released in the middle of the McCarthyite anti-communist witch-hunt in the United States, the film certainly had all the basic ingredients of an anti-communist Cold War melodrama, though the film grossed a paltry £32,000. Nevertheless, the film was quite popular with British audiences and was the sixth most popular film for 1952, reflecting perhaps the continuing insularity of British cinema. The story of the insurgency in Malaya is one of the most widely known in the history of modern guerrilla warfare, partly because it influenced a school of counterinsurgency (COIN) exponents in the United States in the early 1960s. The insurgency

Cinema’s Encounter with Colonial Insurgencies

29

was stimulated by the lightening conquest of Malaya by the Japanese in early 1942 which destroyed the structure of the colonial state. This state had in the pre-war years only marginally impacted on the lives of many over whom it ruled, though this became even more evident as the Japanese advanced down the Peninsula. The British released some 200 members of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) they were holding in jail and gave them a crash course in guerrilla warfare at the 101 Special Training School (STS). The guerrillas then dispersed into the jungle where they formed the Malaya Peoples Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) that fought an insurgency against the Japanese until the end of the war.10 The British had not been particularly successful in maintaining contact with the guerrillas in the jungles of Malaya and had rarely supplied them via submarine, unlike the US navy with its guerrillas fighting in the Philippines. The MPAJA mostly continued the war on its own, helped by some from the civilian population, especially Chinese, who were usually described as ‘squatters’. Many of these ‘squatters’ followed the guerrillas into the jungle where they grew food crops by the war’s end. Most MPAJA insurgents knew the jungle well and had developed sophisticated guerrilla fighting skills. The guerrillas remained far more isolated from Allied contact compared to guerrilla groups in Burma or the Philippines; some officers from Force 136 (part of SOE) were sent in to assist them but were rarely involved in operational planning and did not even know the whereabouts of MPAJA camps and arms caches. The relative failure of the British-led resistance fortified a myth, evident in some later feature films, that the jungle itself was a kind of malicious geographical influence on British military personnel. The jungle appeared considerably different to other, apparently cleaner, terrains such as mountains, forests or even deserts where it was possible to have a straight gentleman’s fight with Arab tribesmen or, later, the tanks and aircraft of the Afrika Korps. The jungle was often viewed as a dangerous hell complete with snakes, constant rain and tropical diseases which sapped men’s strength. It was also difficult to penetrate and required survival skills that were rarely taught in the British army before the Second World War. At the war’s start, moreover, the jungle was perceived through a popular set of mythologies that associated jungles with exiled and marginal men festering away in remote wildernesses alleviated only by booze and native or ‘half caste’ women. This had been the theme of Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, while the novella The Heart of Darkness Conrad portrayed it as a hellish terrain where white men are at risk of slipping back into savagery and the only escape is death.11 This pessimism was occasionally offset by more exotic imagery in cinema where the jungle is home to a super strong white man such as Tarzan (who first appeared on the silent screen as early as 1918), though this imagery soon dissolved in the face of rapid Japanese advances in early 1942 and the re-emergence of the jungle as a terrain of death and disaster. Things were certainly different by the early 1950s when British and Commonwealth forces were no longer fighting a desperate battle for survival. It was the highly lucrative Malayan rubber plantations that was one of the chief reasons for the British government’s decision to fight a communist insurgency, as well as the chance to make up for the humiliating defeat in Malay and Singapore in early

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Cinema and Unconventional Warfare in the Twentieth Century

1942. It became a commonly accepted precept in the post-war years that the jungle had only been dangerous in the Second World War because so many British soldiers had been poorly trained in ‘jungle warfare’. The Japanese army had learnt well how to survive in the jungle and its invading army came suitably equipped and trained. British soldiers who were not taken prisoner often found surviving in the jungle extremely difficult as they could not rely on much support from local Malays or Chinese. Many from these communities had been poorly paid ‘coolies’ working on rubber plantations before the war and there were few institutional structures binding them to the colonial regime, such as missionary schools and hospitals. Many British soldiers who stayed on to fight constantly feared being betrayed to the Japanese as well as having their food and equipment stolen (in a manner somewhat different to Burma, where both British and American forces received considerable support from the Kachin minority). The situation led to a rapid decline of morale that was later noted by the enthusiastic jungle fighter Freddie Spencer Chapman. Untrained British privates, he wrote, were lucky to survive a few months while NCOs might hold out a bit longer. But failing to adapt to the privations of jungle life, involving a diet largely of rice and vegetables, ensured eventual death, though he considered the jungle was a ‘neutral’ terrain in the sense that it provided ‘any amount of fresh water and unlimited cover for friend as well as foe – an armed neutrality, if you like, but a neutrality nevertheless’.12 This was not a message that either senior British commander wanted to hear. It was pointed out that dense jungles with full canopies were often much cooler than areas where vegetation had been cut down exposing soldiers to constant sunlight, while the idea of the jungle’s ‘neutrality’ really depended on the military abilities of those fighting in it.13 The guerrillas the British were up against had an initial advantage through their extensive knowledge of the terrain since the early 1940s, though this was hard to explain to film audiences who, in the 1950s, were almost completely unaware of the realities of bush craft and jungle survival. These really became popularized only decades later when the former Royal Marine Ray Mears hosted the TV series Extreme Survival in 1999. Freddie Spencer Chapman, however, certainly articulated a view that accorded with the cinematic image of the jungle as an inhuman terrain where lurked both wild animals and a dangerous enemy. By the time of the Malayan insurgency in the 1950s it became easy for film makers to equate the dark menace of the jungle, reinforcing an image, as Tony Shaw has pointed out, of communism as ‘a dark, clandestine, underground movement burrowing its way by stealth into liberal democracy’s weak points’.14 The insurgency in Malaya returned within a few years of the Japanese surrender in 1945 when a communist-led guerrilla insurgency broke out in 1948 in the Peninsula. The insurgency was organized by the MCP under its leader Chin Peng, who had served as a MPAJA’s liaison officer with Force 136 and even been awarded the OBE. The insurgency aimed at securing a communist revolution not dissimilar to the Viet Minh in Vietnam, despite the narrow ethnic base of support for the MCP among the Chinese ethnic minority (some 10 per cent of the population) and the evident problem of waging a guerrilla insurgency on a peninsula that could be easily cut off from outside support.

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By the late 1940s, the insurgents presented a growing challenge to the colonial rulers in Malaya. The insurgents were now formed into the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) and operated from jungle hideouts to attack rubber plantations and force the civilian population into supplying them with food. The campaign lasted for twelve years until its suspension in 1960, though by the time of Malayan independence in 1957 the state had expanded enormously to control population movements and isolate the guerrillas. The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 led to a massive increase in the price of tin and rubber and this led to more resources being devoted in Malaya to building up the colony’s police force. The new High Commissioner in 1952, General Sir Gerald Templer, favoured a political, rather than simple, military solution to the conflict and this ushered in a new political process that culminated in independence five years later, though by this time some 500,000 people, including 400,000 Chinese squatters, had been resettled in ‘new villages’ to isolate them from the guerrillas.15 Despite these figures, Malaya remained a ‘small war’ since by its end only 519 British and Commonwealth troops were killed compared to some 6,710 guerrillas.16 Little of this emerges in The Planters Wife which marginalized the insurgency in preference to domestic melodrama. The film starts with a map that is focused first on China before wandering down to the Malayan peninsula. We see a cinematic example of the fashionable domino theory of the 1950s that the Malayan insurgency was part of a wider strategy by Communist China to spread revolution throughout South East Asia. This ‘strategic’ framework is developed during the film by three separate interlocking narratives anchored in distinct territorial spheres: the insurgency itself, centred in the jungle and depicted in terms of wild animal noises and animals such as snakes, monkeys and elephants. It is from this jungle terrain that the insurgents menacingly appear to attack the rubber plantations. This contrasts with the second sphere of white colonial power exemplified by the local barracks, the police, army and colonial club. This world is a tightly interlocking one; the rubber planter Jim Frazer (Jack Hawkins in one of his numerous imperial roles) who gets the army to supply him with a Bren gun to turn his home into an armed fortress: it is almost as if the film was finally answering the apparently hopeless request in Noel Coward’s song about the Home Guard ten years earlier. Finally, there is the third domestic and essentially feminine sphere inside Frazer’s home dominated by Frazer’s wife Liz (Claudette Colbert) but maintained by servants who cook food, bring tea and nanny Frazer’s son Mike (played by Peter Asher, brother of the actress Jane Asher). Claudette Colbert came to the movie with considerable cinematic baggage. Though now in her fifties she had starred in a few previous films with strongly imperial and orientalist themes, especially the seductive and manipulative Cleopatra in Cecil B DeMille’s vast melodrama Cleopatra (1934), where she is a white Egyptian queen ruling over a dark-skinned population. Of the three spheres, it is the domestic melodrama between Jim and Liz Frazer that gets the most focus in the film. Both are committed colonials who have been imprisoned by the Japanese during the war, though the stress of the emergency has produced tensions in their marriage. Jim has gone on to make a success of his rubber plantation in the post-war years but all appear to be at risk from the communist insurgents led by Ah Song, a character clearly based on Chin Peng since he, too, had fought for Force 136 in the war.

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The film was really a western given that the insurgents appear as jungle versions of bloodthirsty Indians constantly bent on attacking rubber plantations and rubber planters and the film descends at the end into an Alamo-type shoot-out that kills off the insurgent band, Ah Song included. This is also less an adventure film than a narrative of white colonial survival. Though it is not yet evident that independence is on the horizon this is no paean to colonial settlement. The rubber planters are a small and isolated community heroically defending their right to grow rubber in a situation where, it is asserted in an explanatory preface, ‘the jungle is neutral’ (a phrase taken from Spencer Chapman’s memoir). The white community in Malaya was a mere 12,000, though they often demonstrate resolute and stalwart qualities; even the vulnerable and occasionally hysterical Liz knows how to handle firearms and shoots one menacing insurgent dead with a hidden pistol. There is a Kiplingesque subtext exemplifying the law of survival in the jungle with a dramatic encounter with a snake threatening the young school boy Mike. A pet mongoose eventually comes to the rescue and kills the snake after a struggle. The sub-narrative suggests that the law of the jungle, and by implication the threat of a communist takeover, can be mastered only by the rule of law embodied in the British colonial presence, though how far this can be maintained given the talk in the colonial club of returning to Britain is somewhat doubtful. Mike is eventually packed off to school in England and the film strongly suggests that the British colonial presence is only temporary. The reasons for the insurgency are never properly examined in the film or the use of ‘new villages’ to isolate Chinese squatters from contact with the jungle guerrillas. We at least see some of the faces of the guerrillas and Ah Song himself puts through a telephone call to Liz Frazer, during the attack on Frazer’s house, asking for Jim to come to the phone so he can be killed by a sniper’s bullet. He is as much the clever and menacing terrorist as a resolute jungle guerrilla fighter. But it is not clear what exactly the tactics of the guerrillas are as they focus mostly on the rubber planters rather than the army. The Chinese population in Malaya during this period was mainly second generation, and some still owed allegiances to mainland China rather than Malaya. The film shows this by portraying a poster attacking the ‘running dogs’ who volunteer to help the British and one Chinese businessman (who had fought in Force 136) is taken off a bus and shot by an insurgent for collaborating. The British army plays, somewhat surprisingly, a rather limited role in this film. It supplies weapons to the rubber planters and turns up, rather like the US cavalry, late in the day to save Frazer’s house from the attacking insurgents. The film is largely uninterested in the wider counter-insurgency developing in Malaya, though by the time it was released in 1952 this was already well under way under General Templer. The film failed to deal in any depth with civil-military relations in Malaya while its portrayal of the stoic and resolute rubber planters detracts from the army’s role which involved – at the peak of the insurgency – some 40,000 British and Commonwealth troops against a guerrilla army of some 7,000–8,000. Despite these weaknesses, the American head of production at Rank, Earl St John, was pleased with the success of The Planters Wife and began to look for a followup. The obvious other colonial emergency to turn to was the Mau Mau insurgency

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in Kenya. St John sent a young script writer Anthony Perry to Kenya to research the film, while further advice was sought from the Colonial Office in London and the white settler organization The Voice of Kenya. Perry secretly sought guidance from a black Kenyan barrister living in exile in London, Charles Njonjo, who was widely viewed to be a Mau Mau suspect. Whatever advice Njonjo gave did not stop the resulting film titled simply Simba in 1955 following the conventional colonial imagery of the Mau Mau insurgency, though the movie attempted at times to impose a rather thin liberal gloss on it, comparable to some later mercenary films.17 This was also another British colonial feature that went down a western path given that its director, Brian Desmond Hurst, had learnt movie making in Hollywood under the guidance of John Ford. The slender political focus of Simba reflected the dominance in political debate in the early 1950s of the imperially minded establishment in Britain together with its colonial offshoot in Kenya. There was for most of the 1950s relatively little open criticism of British colonial policy in Africa in the wake of the establishment of the Central African Federation in 1953, a year before Simba was released. The colonial government in Kenya had already got away by this time with a blanket suppression of virtually all African political activity, including the trade union organization the Kenyan Federation of Labour. There was also only a muted response in Britain to the colonial administration interning almost all the colony’s ablest African politicians, including Jomo Kenyatta. This was still a time when it was widely assumed that colonial rule would continue for the next few decades, given the rich resources of Kenya and its increased strategic importance in East Africa following the withdrawal of British forces from Egypt.18 Rank’s film Simba was released during a period when there was still strong support for the continuation of a British colonial role in Kenya, although the British public remained generally uninformed over the reasons for the Mau Mau revolt. Unlike the more ideologically driven insurgency in Malaya, Mau Mau was centred on ethnic Kikuyu who sought the restoration of land rights that had been taken away by white settlers since the foundation of British rule, first as a Protectorate in the 1890s and later as a crown colony in 1920. The colonial ‘pacification’ of the Kikuyu had never been complete and Mau Mau was a proto nationalist movement seeking both the expulsion of the settlers and the restoration of traditional patterns of African governance. The issue became complicated by issues of race as the white settler community fell into a panic in the face of Mau Mau oathing ceremonies that appeared to confirm entrenched racist stereotypes of Africans as innately ‘savage’. By the time that the new governor of the colony, Evelyn Baring, arrived in 1952, the white community was in some state of hysteria – comparable, perhaps, to the colons in Algiers in 1957. Baring adopted a counter-insurgency strategy not so different to the one being pursued in Malaya. He avoided declaring martial law since the insurgency occurred only in parts of the colony and opted instead for declaring certain areas, such as Mount Kenya and the Aberdare Hills, ‘Prohibited Areas’, rendering them, in effect, ‘free fire zones’ where aerial bombing was permitted and there were no restrictions on the use of weapons. Other areas such as Nairobi and the Kikuyu Reserves were classified as ‘Special Areas’ where a more limited range of restrictions were applied.19

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Despite these draconian provisions the British army found itself hard-pressed to control the Mau Mau secret societies without adequate local intelligence. There was a real vacuum of knowledge over how the secret societies worked among the semiproletarian African labour force working on settler-owned farms or in nearby towns. To some observers Mau Mau appeared little more than a mythical cult, as in the case of the 1956 adventure film Beyond Mombasa (dir. George Marshall), as an exotic tribal ‘leopard men’ cult. Mau Mau was really a label for a rural insurgency in Kenya among landless squatters who waged a low-level war involving the hamstringing of cattle, the destruction of crops and the murder of a few settlers (fewer than forty in all). White settler propaganda in Kenya was quick to depict Mau Mau activists as the embodiment of a dark and innately savage ‘evil’ African nature standing in opposition to the ‘enlightened’ forces of British colonialism.20 The insurgency would also be likened to a disease in a manner later used to describe the spread of terrorist movements, though it was hard to link it to the spread of international communism like other insurgencies in Vietnam and Malaya. Some of these issues emerged in the film Simba, which starts with a stark contrast between the worlds of Africans and colonial whites. As the camera roams across a picturesque rural scene it comes to focus on an African cycling down a dirt road: this could almost, it seems, be an excerpt from a film to promote tourism until the African stops when he sees a bloodied white man lying on the ground. Instead of helping him he takes out a machete to finish off the job and hurriedly cycles away. The scene then switches to a plane about to land in Nairobi airport: it is Alan Howard (Dirk Bogarde) who has returned to his farm and family after years away in England. There is, clearly, a much starker gulf of culture and civilization between Africans and settler whites in Kenya compared to the Malaya of The Planters Wife. Equally, the colonial Kenyan whites appear far more vulnerable to attacks from insurgents who are not confined to jungle spaces but operate within their midst and can strike at any time. The film’s imagery of colonial settlement in Kenya is one of fragility. There are no attempts by the settlers to fortify their homes, as in Malaya, and the wooden structures they live in seem highly vulnerable to attack. When Mau Mau warriors attack one house the terrified wife fires through a wooden door to hit one insurgent in the eye. The Mau Mau commander fires back through the door to shoot her down. There is little to protect the isolated white farms who are supplied by the police with rockets normally supplied to ships in distress. As in The Planters Wife, telephone connections can be easily cut by the insurgents while the police are over-stretched; lacking airpower they depend upon a force of uniformed loyal Askaris transported on the back of a lorry carrying rifles and the odd machine gun. Their movements too can be hampered, when the Mau Mau destroy a wooden bridge. Much of Simba is concerned with identity, exemplified by cuts on the bodies of Africans revealing them as Mau Mau supporters. This practice was eventually abandoned to help disguise the Mau Mau activists, though one scene shows a group of Africans awaiting to be searched. One African man panics and runs off to be shot down by an Askari; his body has cut marks identifying him as a Mau Mau insurgent. The film also depicts a Mau Mau oathing ceremony, providing a good opportunity for reproducing images of ‘savage’ African ceremonies reminiscent of colonial adventure

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yarns such as Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. One of the posters for the film described the movie as capturing the ‘white heat’ of the Mau Mau conflict in the ‘green hell’ of Africa, while Mau Mau cuts on the body were embodied in the slogan ‘Mark of Mau Mau!’ Simba provides no serious explanation for the insurgency in terms of the increasing landlessness among the Kikuyu of the Central Highlands. Africans are for the most part depicted as living a tribal existence, though some wear western clothing such as trousers, shorts and hats.21 There is only one educated and ‘civilized’ African in the story in the form of a black medic, Dr Karanja (played by the American actor Earl Cameron). Karanja is not, on his occasion, a secret fanatical nationalist but – we find later – the son of the local chief who supports the insurgency. Simba contains stark gender divisions linked to images of female domesticity. The homes of the settlers are the core symbols of white ‘civilization’ in Africa and the main targets of Mau Mau attacks. The film goes to considerable lengths to show the destructiveness of the insurgency; artefacts in the homes are destroyed and buildings set on fire, while the only things taken away are firearms. Family life lies at the heart of white colonial society: Bogarde’s Howard character has returned to meet again with his former girlfriend Mary Crawford (played by Virginia MacKenna) whom it seems he is destined to marry; his fatherly qualities are already on display when he takes charge of an African orphan child. The Africans, on the other hand, lack any real family life of their own or are under the brutal control of traditional leaders such as Karanja’s father, a tribal headman who despises western education and dismisses his own son for being a white man at heart. The film was certainly in tune with Cold War fears of subversion, graphically brought to the cinema screen the following year in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Simba embraced some of the features of the Hollywood western like The Planters Wife: the hunt by a posse of Askaris across the African bush for the escaping Mau Mau leader; as well as the final shoot-out in the beleaguered house of Alan Howard with savage Mau Mau warriors advancing bedecked in war paint; the Askaris, too, arrive in the nick of time to rescue the situation like the US cavalry. Such tropes were symptomatic of Earl St John’s efforts to break into the American market and Simba indeed had quite a positive reception in the United States, where the critic in The New York Times felt it ‘a compassionate and chilling melodrama, spread across a fine semi documentary canvass in striking Eastman colour and threaded about equally with sensitivity and violence’.22 In Britain, critics were less impressed and Penelope Houston thought the film a ‘narrow and thin-skinned piece of melodrama’. Adopting some of the features of the western reinforced the film’s indifference to African society in Kenya. The imagery of Mau Mau combined a series of screen stereotypes reminiscent of imperial adventure movies as well as conflicts in the American west between settlers and ‘savage’ Red Indians. The film interpreted the innate ‘savagery’ of Mau Mau as a product of weak social structures that left Africans an amorphous mass easily led by fanatics like Karanja’s father, a figure desperate to cling on to a vanishing way of life. There were this tropes in the film that accorded with the wider ‘modernization’ theories that were becoming increasingly prevalent in both American and British Cold War political discourse. African society appeared

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to be in a marked process of decay and dissolution markedly different to the rather more coherent society of the insurgents in colonial Malaya in The Planters Wife. To the extent that it had any sort of political message, Simba developed a superficial line of discussion about the destabilizing effects of education on ‘the African’ in Kenya for which it failed to come up with any answer beyond its bleak ending of a final shoot-out in which most of the insurgents apparently end up dead. The third of the Rank ‘colonial war’ films, Windom’s Way, was released in 1957. It is set in an unnamed Asian country that has now passed out of formal European colonial control. Some critics thought the film referred to Malaya since the story is centred on a rubber plantation but the script (written by Jill Craigie, wife of the left-wing Labour politician Michael Foot) was based on a novel by James Ramsey Ullman set in Burma. The film, directed by Graham Neame, marked a significant change of tone from The Planters Wife since the British rubber planter Patterson (Michael Hordern) is a signally unappealing character with little interest in negotiating with his plantation workers and committed to draconian methods of control. Windom’s Way is interesting for the way it moved post-war British cinema towards issues of ‘pacification’ and counter-insurgency in post-colonial states where western powers have considerable investments at stake. This was no simple Cold War film since the plantation workers are not apparently led by communist activists. Meanwhile in the surrounding jungle an insurgency rages whose origins and exact political goals remain unspecified (though it is vaguely based on the Karen insurgency in post-war Burma). At the end of the film government forces take on the insurgents, a battle heard only in the distance as the focus turns back to the central character of the story, a liberally inclined British doctor Alec Windom (sympathetically played by Peter Finch) managing a local hospital. Windom’s life has been dramatically transformed by the sudden arrival of his former socialite wife Lee (Mary Ure) who has abandoned London to come and live with her husband. Once more a romantic theme detracts from wider political issues, though the film portrays the problems in establishing legitimate authority in post-colonial societies. The plantation workers are Buddhists and become outraged when their religious leader dies in a police cell after his arrest. They burn down Patterson’s house and force Patterson to flee to the capital where he asks for military assistance. The new state appears strongly supportive of western commercial interests and quickly obliges since it is engaged in a long-running war with the insurgents. Windom tries to calm the situation down by urging a more conciliatory policy towards the rubber workers and warns the duplicitous government commissioner Belhedron (played by the Anglo-Indian actor Marne Maitland) that unless he offers them a safe passage back to the plantation and the removal of the soldiers he risks more people going over to the insurgents. Belhedron appears to take the advice but then plans the opposite by having his soldiers surround the village. Windom by this time has started on a journey through the jungle into the highlands with the local mayor to try and bring the workers back, but finds he is too late as they have now joined the insurgents – their young leader explaining that they have been taught by the insurgents to see the situation in a new way. The mayor is taken away and shot as a government collaborator.

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Ullman’s novel Windom’s Way was broadly based on the real-life American doctor Gordon Seagrave. The son of Baptist missionaries, Seagrave was born in Rangoon and graduated from Johns Hopkins in 1921. In the Second World War he worked with the Chinese New 5th Army at Toungoo in South China.23 He preferred to work under the Americans rather than the British and took part in Joseph Stillwell’s retreat into India in 1941. Over the next few years he developed a medical unit in Burma at Ramgarh Hospital and he continued after the war as chief medical officer in the last years of British colonial rule in 1945–1946.24 He stayed working in Burma after independence but was charged with treason in 1950 for helping Karen rebels. The sentence was commuted to six months and finally lifted by the three-man Supreme Court of Burma. Windom’s Way presents a glamorized and misleading view of Seagrave’s career as well as the Karen insurgency, which would be later portrayed in more graphic form in Rambo III. The film script stuck to some degree to the original novel, though shifted the terrain of the conflict to a newly independent colony that appeared to resemble Malaya. Given this was a British-produced film this is not altogether surprising given that that British cinema audiences would be more likely to be familiar with Malayan issues compared to Burma which had largely disappeared from media scrutiny following its independence from Britain in 1948. Ullman’s novel also had some features that made the newly independent Asian state resemble South Vietnam, especially with its American military adviser and COIN expert Colonel Hasbrook who has the ear of the government in the capital. Unlike Graham Green’s Alden Pyle in The Quiet American, Hasbrook has no illusions about any sort of ‘third force’ standing between the government of the unnamed state and the communist guerrillas operating in the north of the country with both Soviet and Communist Chinese assistance. At the start of the novel Hasbrook has considerable faith that Windom’s medical work advances the prestige and interests of the United States in the country: he is ‘the only American who’s really living out with the gooks’25 and ‘the sort of work you’re doing here’, he tells Windom, ‘is better propaganda than all the loans and V.I.P delegations and radio programmes put together’.26 The strategy of winning hearts and minds is undermined by Hasbrook’s dismissal of Windom’s efforts at mediation, which he views as politically naïve and failing to recognize the country’s critical geopolitical position in the wider global Cold War. For all its liberal efforts, the film captures many enduring orientalist and colonial stereotypes of the period: generally placid Buddhist Asians driven to run amok by the blinkered attitudes of the plantation owner and the untrustworthy double-dealing commissioner Belhedron, ably performed by Marne Maitland (who would go on to perform various evil characters in Hammer horror films). The film ends with Windom back in his hospital helped by his wife treating patients who have been injured in the insurgent war. The message appears to be that applying western liberal principles in such a polarized non-western political settling is unlikely to be all that successful and the best thing to do is focus on what can be achieved through medical support: a moral in effect for many western aid agencies in the decades to come in various parts of the world. Jill Craigie’s morally ambiguous script can perhaps be seen as reflecting doubts among many British intellectuals in the 1950s on the possible longterm benefits of colonial nationalism which, to many, appeared to threaten, even

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before the Congo crisis of 1960, the foundations of international order and civilized relations between states.27 Taken together The Planters Wife, Simba and Windom’s Way have been seen by Tony Shaw as possibly contributing to what he has termed a Cold War ‘siege mentality’ in Britain during the 1950s.28 If true, this idea might be extended even into the 1960s given the popularity of one of the most famous British siege movies of all, Zulu (1964) with Michael Caine and Stanley Baker. However, at another level, it is easy to overstate the impact of Cold War ideas on cinema audiences even if McCarthyite thinking was clearly evident among some British movie moguls like John Davis. In the end, fear of communism is not going to sell a movie unless the narrative is sufficiently thrilling, romantic, bloodthirsty or frightening enough. By the turn of the new decade, a newer cinema audience was starting to emerge with less commitment to empire, memories of the war or the containment of the communist ‘threat’ and this would be reflected in the progressive unravelling of the ‘colonial emergency’ subgenre. Another film centred on the Malayan ‘emergency’, The 7th Dawn, was released by United Artists in 1964. The movie, directed by Lewis Gilbert and scripted by Karl Tunberg (famous among other movies for scripting Ben Hur), was based on a novel The Durian Tree by Michael Keon. It had as its main star the popular American actor William Holden, who had previously appeared in David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai. By this time Rank had finished its run of colonial insurgency films and it was an American studio that was now moving into the arena of colonial insurgencies, with a rather different set of priorities. By the mid-1960s neither the British nor the American film industry had sought to put on screen the exploits of one of the great neglected heroes of the Second World War, Frederick Spencer Chapman, who had fought the Japanese in war-time Malaya. The story here though became complicated by prejudice and opposition from sections of British military’s High Command to irregular warfare along with wider Cold War ideological considerations. A skilled mountaineer and Antarctic explorer, Chapman was a Lieutenant in the Seaforth Highlanders when he joined the Special Training School 101 (STS 101) in Singapore to train Australians and New Zealanders in guerrilla warfare in 1941. The School came up with a plan for parties of soldiers to stay behind in the jungle should there be a Japanese invasion, though the whole project was quashed by the colonial governor Sir Shenton Thomas for being essentially defeatist. However, a few months later Chapman found himself involved in undercover operations with some members of Force 136 against the advancing Japanese and took part in several successful sabotage operations that blew up some seven Japanese trains along with fifteen bridges and over forty vehicles, leaving at least 500 Japanese dead. Here was a real-life British Rambo whose war record might well have become the stuff of movie legend, especially as Chapman’s guerrilla tactics went further than the special operations filmed in They Who Dare or Ill Met by Moonlight. After losing the rest of the 136 team, Chapman went on fighting in the jungle alongside the communist MPAJA guerrillas until he was eventually picked up by the submarine HMS Statesman. Chapman’s close war-time collaboration with the MPAJA soon became an embarrassment to the British government following the outbreak of the ‘Emergency’ in Malaya in 1948. He received the DSO and Bar in 1946, although an Efficiency

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Decoration had to wait until 1970. His war memoirs, published in 1949 as The Jungle Is Neutral, had a preface from Field Lord Wavell who admitted that Chapman had ‘never received the publicity and fame that were his predecessor’s lot’ and his war-time exploits languished in obscurity over the following few decades. Suffering major back pain Chapman committed suicide in 1971 and there the matter might have remained except that the upsurge in special operations in the 1980s and 1990s in both Britain and America sparked renewed interest in Chapman’s life, leading to a biography being by Brian Moynahan in 2009. The world of The 7th Dawn bears little relationship to Chapman’s experiences. The film had a thin narrative and weak direction. The central character, Major Ferris (William Holden), has fought with the guerrillas against the Japanese during the war, picking up some insurgency skills along the way. He is friends with a Chinese communist insurgent Ng (played by the Japanese actor Tetsuro Tamba) and a Eurasian school teacher Dhana (played by the French actress and fashion model Capucine). In his crumpled jungle clothing Ferris is markedly different to the welcoming British army commander and he expresses strongly anti-British feelings over the failure of the ‘limeys’ to come to the assistance of the guerrillas much earlier. These early scenes reflected the failure of Allied armies to invade Malaya before the Japanese surrender in August 1945. With little outside support, the MPAJA relied on its own resources during the Japanese occupation, though little of this emerges in The 7th Dawn. The movie starts with the guerrilla threesome of Ferris, Ng and Dhana breaking up as the war comes to an end. Ng is vaguely based on the character of Chin Peng and leaves Malaya to go for training in Moscow while Ferris settles down with Dhana, his mistress, in post-war Malaya. His character was loosely based on John Davis, an SOE operative in Malaya who worked for Chin Peng. He becomes a successful businessman owning extensive rubber estates, supported by Dhana, very loosely based on the Chinese novelist Han Suyin, author of the semi-autobiographical novel And the Rain My Drink. Ferris is no communist like Ng, though he remains sympathetic to his former friend; he is also far more understanding of the cause motivating the insurgents than the reactionary Patterson in Windom’s Way, though the film fails to investigate the issues of landlessness or the focus of the insurgency among the ethnic Chinese. Indeed, the film retains many orientalist stereotypes as Asians are either loyal and compliant servants, angry anticolonial insurgents such as Ng or duplicitous schemers secretly helping the guerrillas. Alongside such stereotypes is the mixed-race Dhana, a school teacher with an uncertain cultural identity and ambiguous loyalties. She finds herself slung between the world of the white colonizers, with whom her lover Ferris is associated, and the needs of the colonized whom she understands only too well from her position as a school teacher. Rather implausibly she becomes the leader of a people protesting against restrictions on the use of bicycles to curb the movements of the insurgents. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times thought she was a ‘pointless and platitudinous figure’ given she is eventually caught carrying two grenades hidden in a melon and sentenced to be hung.29 Though she can avoid execution, she refuses to disclose any information on the whereabouts of Ng and goes to the gallows in defence of principles of loyalty that we know to be worthless since it is Ng who admits, in a fight in the jungle with Ferris, that it was he who planted the grenades to mobilize the population behind

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the freedom struggle. Ferris and the young daughter of the British Resident Candace Trumpey (Susannah York) struggle to get back in time to inform the British of this information but are held back by a swirling flood that washes away a bridge. The 7th Dawn is an end of empire film with the message that the British are resolved to secure the colony’s independence in an ‘orderly’ fashion. It was still considered politically controversial by the British government, who refused any support, so that the British army and the soldiers in the movie are actually Australian. Despite the 1960s clothing of some actors, this was a fairly conventional movie portraying a zealous officer Cavendish (Allan Cuthbertson) relentlessly hunting down guerrillas. Cavendish demands the destruction of a village that is believed to be hiding weapons and explosives. He also insists on Dhana supplying information on the whereabouts of Ng, though we later come to realize that this was a foolish quest since the British discover the guerrilla base area anyway. For all its supposedly controversial status, little of the British counter-insurgency in Malaya is portrayed in The 7th Dawn. No features in the 1950s and 1960s attempted to show counter-insurgent resettlement programmes; indeed, the full scale of this would only emerge in the film Lion of the Desert in 1981 (starring Anthony Quinn as the guerrilla leader Omar Mukhtar), focusing on the Italian counter-insurgency of Marshall Graziani in Libya in the late 1920s. The 7th Dawn, by contrast, has a scene involving the firing of a village believed to be supporting the insurgents. The wailing that can be heard on the sound track of the film when squatters were ejected from the mock-up movie village was in fact those of real squatters who had inhabited it. Though it was considered necessary to remove them before filming could take place, the ejection by Australian soldiers was deemed essential since even the fake village was considered likely to be acting as a safe haven for insurgents.30 The movie does show, though, an SAS parachute drop into the jungle to attack Ng’s headquarters. A fierce fire fight ensues with extensive casualties on both sides; Ng himself flees into the jungle where he is tracked down by Ferris. The film fails to follow up the outcome of the raid and loses interest in it, though the scene was broadly based on a series of real parachute drops by both the SAS and regular army units in the early 1950s such as Operations Hive and Termite. The drops were always risky as the men were falling into a canopy of trees and The 7th Dawn shows some coming stuck and also being shot before they reach the ground. This was no jungle version of Arnhem since the casualties remained small. Even men in all for the largest one called Operation Termite. The 7th Dawn remains focused on the love triangle between Ferris, Dhana and Trumpey, while Ng’s apparently noble and committed role as a communist insurgent unravels as he emerges as a cruel fanatic willing to sacrifice the woman he loves for a doomed cause. The strongly Cold War anti-communist themes of the movie might have held some sway with audiences in the early 1950s but were already looking dated by 1964 while a martinet such as Cavendish was starting to be lampooned in films such as The Guns of Batasi (starring Richard Attenborough) released the same year. The fact that this was the third feature film set during the Malayan ‘emergency’ released in ten years (four when the comedy The Virgin Soldiers – released in 1969 – is included) indicated something about the importance of the colony to post-war British interests

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as well as the apparent success of the counter-insurgency waged there against the Chinese-based communist insurgency. To this extent, cinema played at least a limited part in the emerging myth about the Malayan insurgency which would later prove so important to the re-emergence of COIN in the United States following the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The release of The High Bright Sun in the same year, starring Dirk Bogarde, was set in Cyprus during the guerrilla insurgency of EOKA between 1954 and 1959, led by General Grivas, had a slightly more political edge. Directed by Ralph Thomas, The High Bright Sun came out after most major British colonies had gained political independence, including Cyprus in 1960. The film was impelled by little sense of real anger, though it depicts some of the losses in a small war. Even though this was a post-Suez movie, there was little sense of defeat regarding Cyprus by 1964. Grivas and EOKA might be able to claim they had secured independence and the ending of the island’s status as a ‘fortress colony’, but the British had still managed to retain their military bases there.31 So not much, in the end, had been lost from a British point of view: Britain even avoided being involved in escalating tensions between Greek and Turkish communities that eventually led to the Turkish military invasion of 1974 and occupation of the eastern half of the island. The High Bright Sun had a rather different view of Greek society compared to The Guns of Navarone. It starts with an EOKA attack on a British military lorry, leading to the deaths of two soldiers. The walls of Nicosia streets are daubed with ‘ENOSIS’ and ‘Makarios’, though EOKA itself is depicted as an underground terrorist movement heavily dependent on its leadership General Skyros, closely resembling the real General Grivas complete with military uniform and moustache. Skyros, like Saadi Yaacef in The Battle of Algiers, is hiding out in an urban area, in this case Nicosia, where Grivas organized the original insurgency before moving to the Troodos Mountains in the interior. Skyros’s whereabouts are discovered accidently by a visiting young American archaeologist Juno (played by Susan Strasberg). Skyros at first decides to spare killing her as she proclaims her neutrality in the conflict, though this proves worthless as she ends up being hunted down by EOKA after it emerges that she has a romantic relationship with British intelligence officer Major McGuire (played by Bogarde). Bogarde’s portrayal of McGuire is quite ironical as it emerges that this is a war in which the army has little real commitment. McGuire’s commanding officer sits at his desk reading women’s magazines while McGuire talks of ‘duty’ being a ‘subversive word’. He later tells Juno, ‘There are no rules. Just survive!’ He is eventually relieved of his command for hiding Juno without letting the army know and, in a climactic finish, shoots her would-be EOKA killer on the airport tarmac in Athens. MacGuire and Juno have by now fallen in love and the film ends on a happy note. True to form, the romantic interest comes out uppermost as the plot descends into criminal melodrama. The spate of British colonial war films had largely run their course with the release of The High Bright Sun. Audience interest in this type of colonial action movie was channelled by the late 1960s into the subgenre of mercenary films that we examine later in this book. Most former British colonies had now gained independence and much of the patrician gestures towards multi-racialism in the 1950s films seemed increasingly dated.

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Vietnam and the making of The Green Berets (1968) By the mid-1960s the United States was already bogged down in a counter-insurgent war in South Vietnam, a state that was nominally independent but had been conjured into existence in the middle 1950s in the wake of the 1954 Geneva conference that partitioned Vietnam into north and south. Like Britain in Malaya, the United States was fighting to maintain an independent state in South East Asia in order to stop what was often viewed in strategic circles as a threat of communist expansion from Communist China and the Soviet Union over a vulnerable set of weak non-communist dominoes. The United States became involved militarily in South Vietnam in the late 1950s through a body known as the Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG). The MAAG controlled special forces and counter-guerrilla operations at a time when the United States, like Britain, began to revive its special forces, using in some cases older OSS operatives from the Second World War as trainers. Two of these – Colonels Aaron Bank and Russell W. Volckmann – formed the elite counter-guerrilla group called the Green Berets in 1952 that was split into small ‘A Teams’. These teams had men with a range of skills such as foreign languages, sabotage, assassination, rock and mountain climbing and jungle warfare. For the first decade of its existence the work of the Green Berets was largely unknown to the US public, though it was first deployed to South Vietnam as the 1st Special Forces Group (SFG) in 1957. The Green Berets gained greater prominence with the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s. John F. Kennedy was an enthusiastic supporter of counter-insurgency and the Green Berets appeared to embody all that was best in this concept, though it was disliked by senior sections of the military and officials in the DOD for the way it kept strong control over local operations. Before the involvement in Vietnam, US military doctrine in FM31-21 Guerrilla Warfare and Special Forces Operations (1955) saw special forces performing a partisan, rather than insurgent, role especially in potential conflict in the European theatre involving NATO and the Warsaw Pact. It had little to say on special forces in extra-European theatres such as Indochina. This soon changed as the 1st SFG began training local anti-communist militias that helped implement civil-military development programmes organized by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an early example of what would later be known as ‘civil-military cooperation’ or CIMIC. In South Vietnam, this CIMIC programme tended to focus on creating ‘Civil Irregular Defense Groups’ (CIDGs), especially so-called tribal communities such as the Montagnards (otherwise known as Degars) in Vietnam and Cambodia, Tai tribes in Vietnam and Meos in Laos.32 The growing role of special forces led to tensions with military high command that came to a head with the formation of the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) in February 1962. Over the next couple of years, the MACV increasingly took over control of special operations from the MAAG, subordinating them in the process to a more conventional vertical structure of military command. The commander of the MACV, General Paul Harkins, had a career record stretching back to before the Second World War. He was an arch exponent of conventional warfare and keen to forge a close alliance with the Diem regime in Saigon, even if this meant frequently

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turning a blind eye to the weaknesses of the ARVN high command.33 He especially disliked decentralized special forces groupings operating in the Central Highlands and along the Cambodian border; the groups were bound by horizontal team networks with close links, in some cases, to the various local tribal groupings.34 Many of these communities consisted of small decentralized hill or mountain tribes that employed a simple agricultural technology before they started to be used by the French in the latter phase of their counter-insurgency against the Viet Minh in the early 1950s.35 They were often bitterly opposed to the majority populations of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians, who tended to look down on them as primitive, ‘dirty’ or, in Vietnamese, ‘moi’, though this was by no means as virulent as some later US propaganda would like to pretend. Some Montagnard communities had already moved during the 1950s towards the NLF, especially after it created a ‘Montagnard Autonomy Movement’ against the Saigon government. The work of USAID in establishing the CIDGs did much to change the situation over the next few years.36 The CIA began to revert to the position held by French ethnography in the 1920s as it asserted the cultural distinctiveness of the Montagnards compared to the mainstream Vietnamese population. This approach did not exactly accord with the orthodoxies of the mainstream US programme of nationbuilding and modernization, but worked as an effective strategy of winning over the Montagnards as vital intelligence assets behind counter-insurgency. However, a further Montagnard revolt in 1964 against the Saigon regime led the South Vietnamese government to insist on taking over direct control of the CIDGs through its own special forces.37 Harkins’s opposition to the independent role of US special forces in 1963–1964 was largely motivated by the political need of the US administration in Washington to be seen to be maintaining a close alliance with the Saigon regime. The differences between US special forces and the MACV leadership were in any case largely tactical rather than strategic. Both essentially agreed that the overall purpose of US involvement in the country was the defence of the South Vietnamese regime and the containment of communist expansion. The question was really over means, with the special forces advocates arguing that conventional forces were mostly ill-suited to fighting across jungles and rice paddies and in alliance with ARVN forces that were all too often corrupt and unreliable, while the US central command found that the war was increasingly moving beyond a simple guerrilla insurgency by 1964–1965 with growing infiltration of the south by regular forces of the NVA. The problem was that the special forces’ position had no serious long-term military credibility. They lacked any modern strategic figure like Orde Wingate to espouse the idea that the whole of US strategy should be converted to counter-insurgency, and argued instead for expanding the special forces and counter guerrilla operations beyond the confines of South Vietnam to encompass Laos and Cambodia. This would, they hoped, eventually deprive the communist North of effective safe havens and force them back to the negotiating table. The special forces and counter-insurgency camp remained ardent supporters of efforts to win ‘hearts and minds’ at the village level as well as establishing ‘strategic hamlets’ to remove peasants from contact with NLF cadres. However, they lacked

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serious support among the mainstream Vietnamese peasant population in the south and were forced to rely on tribal communities like the Montagnards. This was a hazardous and slender base on which to evolve a really credible counter-insurgency strategy since these communities could hardly be championed as noble warrior proxies, as in earlier phases of European imperial rule. The photos and images of apparently backwardlooking Montagnards ensured that they could hardly replicate warrior allies such as the Sikhs and Gurkhas in the British army or the Harkis fighting alongside the French army in Algeria. They had an image that hardly compared to that of the Plains Indians in the imagination of the American public and indicated that it would be increasingly difficult to forge reliable allies among the majority populations in Indochina. The tactics of the special forces thus largely confirmed their own marginalization when they allied with tribes almost uniformly treated with racist contempt by the majority Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians. This image of cultural inferiority would even rub off onto the Green Berets, who earned the nickname of ‘snake eaters’ after some Montagnards caught and ate a snake at Fort Bragg during a visit by President Kennedy in 1961.38 The CIA and special forces operated more like armed missionaries than as simple ‘advisors’ when it came to equipping and training Montagnard men for counterinsurgency operations. The Montagnards were not really a stone age people as some writers of the time suggested. They had become settled during the French colonial period into stable village communities where they grew both wet and dry rice and learnt to alternate crops. They also entered the cash economy by working on rubber plantations on both sides of the Cambodian-Vietnamese border, usually at very low rates of pay.39 The CIA offered better monetary prospects by paying young Montagnard men in the early 1960s to become mercenary fighters. By the middle 1960s, the American public began to learn more about the role of special forces in protecting the Montagnard communities via the strategic hamlet programme. In January 1965 Howard Sochurfk wrote in the National Geographic how the Green Berets had managed to build villages such as Buon Brieng which survived in a ‘sea of terror’.40 An information film at this time, Frontier Vietnam: Montagnard Tribes Defend South Vietnam, compared the Montagnards to North American Indians from the era of the frontier wars of the eighteenth century. ‘Americans encountering these (Montagnard) people and their situation’, the film’s narrator stated, ‘often feel transported’ two hundred years back into time to our own Indian wars … like the primitive tribesmen of those earlier wars the Montagnard on his own ground is a formidable ally’.41 It was in this context that Robin Moore’s collection of short stories, The Green Berets, was published in 1965. The book was partly based on personal experience along with a fantastical imagination. Moore was no military professional but an enthusiastic adventurer with a glamorous idea of covert special operations. His war service in the Second World War had not been in the mainstream army at all but the US Army Air Corps, where he was a nose gunner. He later went to Harvard before becoming a television producer in the 1950s. His background was wealthy (his father was cofounder of Sheraton Hotels) and this helped him to secure, via the Kennedy family, permission to train as a Green Beret. He eventually arrived in South Vietnam in early

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1964, less as a journalist than a well-informed, if subversive, military insider passionate about the idea of decentralized counter-insurgency led by fully trained special forces teams. Moore’s fictional work was at points a good example of the Cold War fantasy literature prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s. He was a champion of new technology, such as the Fulton surface-to air ‘Skyhook’ retrieval system that was first depicted at the end of James Bond movie Thunderball in 1965 (and later used in the movie The Green Berets). He also imagined the Green Berets going beyond a campaign of containment to a more offensive strategy inside North Vietnam itself. The last story of his collection ‘Hit em Where they live’ has the Green Berets leading, Rambo-like, a team of Montagnards into the fictional North Vietnamese city of ‘Hang Mang’, destroying parts of it and capturing a senior Communist Party official. The FilipinoAmerican leader of the team, Captain Jesse de Porta, declares after the operation is successfully accomplished: ‘Now we must keep pressure on the Communists. Next thing they know there’ll be A Teams around Hanoi and Uncle Ho will be asking for a new peace conference.’42 Moore’s stories were boyish fantasies that attempted to win on paper what the United States was clearly not winning at the local level. They elevated the Green Berets to military supermen dispensing weapons, medical assistance and superior technology to a backward but loyal people needing support against a cruel and unjust enemy. The outlook was already familiar on screen with the film Never So Few in 1959 focused on the minority Kachins in Burma though the Green Berets lacked as yet any sort of cult following in the United States. By 1964, Kennedy was dead and the COIN concept was falling out of favour with many senior strategists in the Pentagon, who doubted its worth against a North Vietnamese enemy increasingly resorting to more conventional forms of warfare. There was strong DOD hostility to Moore’s book and Moore had his security clearance removed; he was also threatened with indictment for breaching security, though this was clearly absurd once extracts of the book were included in the Congressional Record by Gerald Ford (then in the House of Representatives).43 The Green Berets certainly sparked a new popular interest in American special forces, aided by the release in January 1966 of ‘The Ballad of the Green Berets’ by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler. The song appealed to traditional codes of masculine valour as it praises the ‘fearless men who jump and die’ and are ‘trained to live, off nature’s land’. Such men are nothing less than ‘America’s best’ since ‘one hundred men will test today/ But only three win the Green Beret’. The song would over the years be sung in several other versions, including one by Dolly Parton, and suggested that codes of masculinity were clearly evident in popular representations of the Vietnam War a couple of decades before the emergence of Rambo in the 1980s. But turning Moore’s novel into a film was another matter. There was some degree of hostility in the Pentagon to the book’s suggestion that there were poor relationships between military commanders and Green Berets. The stories revealed sexual relationships between Green Beret men and Montagnard women while in the story ‘Home to Nanette’, the Green Berets operate in Laos even though this was illegal under the 1962 agreement neutralizing the country. The story’s hero, Bernard Arklin, works for several months with the tribal Meos, takes a Meo woman lover and is unkempt

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and long haired. He encounters Colonel Williston of the MACV who is angered by his unkempt appearance and the way a mission had been mounted without the MACV’s permission. ‘You Special Forces people’, he exclaims, ‘always go native or something.’44 None of this, fairly obviously, could appear in the film version of The Green Berets, eventually released by Warner Brothers in 1968 starring John Wayne. It was the one film released by Hollywood on the Vietnam War while it was being fought and Wayne was one of the film’s three directors. He dispensed with Moore as a script writer and hired the conservative writer James Lee Barrett. The result was a script that was far more acceptable to the Pentagon and created a considerably different image of special forces to the one in Moore’s book. In the movie, they are shown as being under the full control of central command in a campaign to protect defenceless Montagnards as well as in special operations reminiscent of the Second World War. Wayne’s film ended up as a curious hybrid war film/western. Wayne was a strong enough figure in Hollywood to alleviate any doubts in the DOD; his long film career even included a movie about jungle guerrilla operations (against the Japanese in Back to Bataan in 1945).45 The Green Berets had at the start a documentary quality as it outlined the basic goals of the Green Berets training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. This soon evolves into a more conventional war narrative as a Green Beret ‘A Team’, led by a Colonel Kirby (Wayne), are tasked with building a strategic hamlet rather like a North American frontier settlement to protect the local Montagnard population from attacks by the NLF and NVA. The movie was the first feature film on Vietnam to employ the Montagnards as active participants in COIN, though the imagery was considerably different to the nearsavage people depicted in Apocalypse Now a decade later.46 The film at points resembles a real Green Beret operation in the Central Highlands involving Montagnards from the village of Tra Trung on 1 November 1967. A total of 350 Montagnard villagers were burnt out of their homes by an NLF attack and their assistant village chief was murdered.47 However, the NLF/NVA remains largely faceless and depersonalized, only acquiring any sort of identity when the narrative turns to a kidnap operation by a Green Beret team to seize a leading North Vietnamese commander. The operation is partly based on one of Moore’s stories but might have been taken out of a Second World War movie involving a top Nazi officer somewhere in Europe. In a rather implausible location of a former French colonial chateau, the Green Berets seize and drug the senior North Vietnamese officer, who is one of the very few enemy characters portrayed in the film. But the scene was badly placed coming after the main NLF/NVA attack on the American fort and marked something of an anti-climax in the film. It appears in any case in a revised form since Pentagon officials objected to an earlier script version suggesting a foray into North Vietnam to secure the kidnap.48 The Green Berets was heavily burdened with conventional US Cold War propaganda: to some critics this appeared as a survival of a rather dated anti-communist ideology reminiscent of the films of directors like Sam Fuller over a decade before that were rooted in fears of the global spread of communism. The film’s more fundamental problem was its failure to engage with the mythology of the American war film, a mythology, as Bernard F. Dick has pointed out, that was based on the ‘paradox of a nation involved in global war but never attacked’, certainly not in the sense of being

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invaded or occupied. The mythology presumed a basic national unity in response to attacks on close allies and a national cause worth fighting for in terms of a sense of mission to spread freedom and democracy by a divinely protected nation.49 The myth could work in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and, slightly less convincingly, in the case of Korea following the invasion of the South by the communist North in June 1950 at the height of the Cold War. But this was never likely to be the case in the wake of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of the US Congress on 7 August 1964 authorizing President Johnson to take whatever measures he thought fit to deal with communist incursions into South Vietnam without any formal declaration of war. The attack on the US destroyer Maddox by three North Vietnamese PT Boats was hardly a ‘Day That Will Live in Infamy’ and it would not be until the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington of 9/11 that a similar mythology could resurface of an apparently innocent nation unjustly attacked by an external enemy with ideals and values totally at variance with those of the United States. The moral capital of the American war film was thus considerably degraded even before The Green Berets was made and has never been really restored in any subsequent waves of war films. The hostile response around the world to the film on its release was enough to put Hollywood producers off making further films on Vietnam for another decade, some years after the US troop withdrawal in 1973 and the collapse of the South two years later.50 The Green Berets became an easy target for anti-war groups and cinemas showing it were frequently picketed. The original film studio involved with the film, Universal, became disenchanted with the entire project and sold it to Warner Brothers, who ended up doing well on the whole venture: costing only $7 million the film proved popular at the box office and grossed over $21,707,000.51 This might seem surprising but it appears that many film viewers in the United States were drawn to the film as another John Wayne movie as well as one that they could enjoy as a traditional sort of western. The location of the film at Fort Benning, Georgia, was also a little odd. After all, by the 1960s a whole post-war generation of film audiences had become used to war movies against the Japanese being shot in dense jungle settings where military resolve is tested in murderous combat together with snakes, disease and a battle-hardened enemy. The location was due to the close cooperation between Wayne and the US military which secured some 20–30 Hueys for use as props, while the army brought a platoon of Hawaiians from Fort Devens, Massachusetts, to serve as ‘oriental’ extras.52 From early scenes of choppers flying over wooded terrains it is clear this is not a particularly Asian landscape as the trees turn an autumnal gold. Wayne was overweight and too old to give a credible performance as Colonel Kirby while the facilities in the strategic hamlet, complete with fridge and a beautifully designed ceiling made of pinewood supports and bunk beds, suggest more a holiday chalet than a serious military installation in a war zone. As the base camp comes under attack from waves of NLF and North Vietnamese, almost always shot from behind and menacingly faceless, this appears to be more a remake of The Alamo than a jungle war movie: when the NLF capture part of the camp they even make Indian-like whoops. Despite these weaknesses, The Green Berets struck an accord with the cinema-going public: it provided a limited space for criticisms of the war. The main character giving

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vent to such ideas, a newspaper correspondent, Collier (played by Richard ‘Cactus’ Pryor), later changes his views following his direct experience of the war itself in the strategic hamlet: a trope that would be later used in We Were Soldiers (2002). This was largely overlooked in the wider derision the film received when it showed the sun sinking over the sea at the film’s end: something that can only really happen in California rather than Vietnam. The false political geography at the heart of this trope revealed, for many critics, the imperialist mind-set at the heart of the film. But even the cartoon quality of the film can lead to a misreading of its longer-term impact. It is still widely shown to military audiences, and even used on training programmes. Its very absurdity perhaps helps bind together new military recruits and get them to at least talk and think about counter-insurgency as this was understood in the 1960s.

Summing up The colonial counter-insurgency films of the 1950s and 1960s now seem stranded in the past and displaced by action films that gripped audiences over the following decades. In part, this obscurity can be explained by the indifference of the American film industry which was generally averse to portraying colonial counter-insurgencies. Even the essentially American novel Windom’s Way became transformed into a British colonial feature closely resembling Malaya, with the American counter-insurgency advisor being transformed into a British diplomat. The one notable exception to this aversion to colonial insurgency was the film Exodus (1960), as I shall show in Chapter 7, where the sympathies of the audience are focused around the Jewish insurgents fighting for an independent Israeli state, while it is the British colonial administration and military in Palestine that are the external enemy. None of the British colonial insurgency films managed to rival the mainstream war movies of the era such as Reach for the Sky and The Dam Busters. The public memory of them has largely faded, though most of the films that I have examined in this chapter can be easily obtained on DVD. The films failed to establish any clear links with later films dealing with insurgency set in Vietnam or, more recently, Iraq and Afghanistan. The focus on competent or resilient fighters, doctors or commanders such as Jim Frazer, Alan Howard, Major Ferris or Major McGuire hardly ensured any long-term success for the films that lacked any distinct identity: Frazer, for instance, could easily be remembered as another settler fending off hostile Indians, while Dirk Bogarde’s portrayals of Alan Howard and Major McGuire have been largely forgotten compared to the same actor’s screen appearances in popular comedies of the 1950s or later more challenging films such as The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967). The British colonial war movies thus hardly created a distinct cinematic myth of unconventional war. At best they can be seen as helping form the basis for a subgenre that would emerge rather later in the 1960s and 1970s in the context of a major insurgent war in Vietnam and the growth of international terrorism. However, a far more striking development occurred in British cinema in this period in relation to films depicting special operations, and this will be the subject of the following chapter.

2

Special Operations on Screen

Special operations have many of the basic ingredients for compelling war cinema. They very often consist of a small group of selected men (with only a few women) tasked with a difficult, if not suicidal, set of objectives such as the sabotage of key enemy installations, assassination, intelligence gathering, the kidnapping or capture of enemy prisoners and military diversion. To be successful, the special operation, or ‘spec op’, requires speed, a clear set of objectives, surprise and a strategy for extraction. Fulfilling all these requires a high level of coordination, based as far as possible on constant rehearsal and reliable military intelligence. As William H. McRaven has argued, ‘spec ops’ are a distinctive form of war based on surprise and relative military superiority in the first phase of combat, though this can be very quickly lost.1 Such operations tend to defy conventional military wisdom, and it is not surprising that they have often been rather poorly viewed and supported by conventional military commanders as I shall show in the course of this chapter. What is interesting about special operations is the centrality of self-belief, a dimension far more important than ‘troop morale’ in conventional warfare. Self-belief is as important as the capacity to wage physical combat against the enemy, a point particularly well expressed by Major William Ellery Anderson, tasked during the Korean War with sending undercover units into North Korea. The men, Anderson said, faced a ‘battle within a battle in which one’s own mind becomes the field of combat, where hope, discipline and courage must fight against loneliness, fear and panic’.2 This would be a dimension that would emerge in a few post-1945 war film features. In many cases, special operations amounted to guerrilla warfare without the politics and supplied themes that offered some appeal to cinema audiences in search of suspense and excitement. The details and risks attached to this form of war were only vaguely understood by the public while senior commanders often opposed what was they viewed as a ‘dirty’ and unethical form of war with few apparent strategic payoffs. It is possible to distinguish between ‘tactical’ special ops which are used to help a more general conventional strategy (such as SAS hit-and-run raids behind enemy lines in North Africa) and strategic special ops where a single operation can have major longer-term consequences. The latter tend to be few in number, though there are a few notable instances such as the operation using mini-submarines to disable the German battleship Tirpitz in September 1943; the Israeli raid on Entebbe on 4 July 1976 and the Special Forces raid on Abbottabad to kill Osama bin Laden on 2 May 2011.

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The history of special operations in the Second World War has been emerging in recent years, though its representation on the cinema screen has remained partial and selective. A considerable number of special operations were mounted in the European and Pacific theatres; only a few have made it to the cinema screen. The criteria for selecting those deemed sufficiently cinematic often seem highly arbitrary. Several movies focused on Europe, especially Norway, France and the Eastern Mediterranean, while rather less attention was given to operations in Asia and the Pacific. This relative indifference of cinema reflected a lack of public knowledge on plans for both guerrilla warfare and civilian resistance during the Second World War, especially in Britain. In the late 1930s the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) became interested in sabotage and a sub-section was formed called Section D to plan covert forms of warfare. A section of military intelligence called MI(R) was also established to investigate covert operations. Neither of these bodies had any significant ties to the established army high command, which remained suspicious of the proposed operations. Following the collapse of France in April–May 1940, the British government’s interest in covert warfare markedly increased. There was now the possibility of a German invasion and some military experts began to consider mobilizing civilian resistance. Twelve days before the start of the evacuation of Dunkirk in May the government announced the creation of nation-wide Local Defence Volunteers (LDV), soon to become known as the Home Guard. The LDV was quickly swamped with huge numbers of eager applicants. The Home Guard brought together groups of older men with often extensive military experience (in some cases stretching back to late Victorian military campaigns on the fringes of empire, embodied in the fictional character Lance Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army) together with younger men, some of whom were only boy scouts. The LDV quickly acquired a reputation for bumbling amateurism that was only partly deserved. Its rather infantile image of men and boys playing at soldiers was confirmed for some, though, when Noel Coward released in 1942 the humorous song Could You Please Oblige Us with a Bren Gun, picking up on the Home Guard’s chronic lack of weaponry, while a year later Alison Utley added Hare Joins the Home Guard to her Little Grey Rabbit series of books for younger children. The Home Guard’s place in public memory as a comic body of incompetent and elderly men is largely due to the TV comedy series Dad’s Army, which ran from 1968 to 1977. The series was written by Jimmy Perry (who had served in the Watford Home Guard) along with David Croft and made use of real experiences of LDV veterans. The success of the series (there is still a Dad’s Army Appreciation Society) owed much to its nostalgic popularization of a myth of England anchored in a pre-war society of social hierarchy frozen in time, though its three-dimensional characters also drew on traditions of post-war popular comedy.3 The series secured an image of the LDV that has remained largely unexplored in feature films either during or after the Second World War, with a few notable exceptions such as Went the Day Well in 1942 and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). The bumbling image of the LDV was belied by its actual operations. It provided cover for a more serious underground guerrilla movement in England organized through the Auxiliary Units of Section D under the control of a Royal Engineer, Lawrence Grand.4 The units were supplied with weapons and explosives, though it is

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unlikely they would have halted a German advance for more than a day or two. In the mainstream army, the number of ‘blimps’ locked into outdated ideas and practices was grossly exaggerated during the war years.5 The same was true for many in the Home Guard, despite a large component of elderly members. Some LDV members went on courses in guerrilla warfare organized by Tom Wintringham (a left-wing veteran of the Spanish Civil War) and a small group of radical associates at Osterley Park outside London, though this was taken over by the War Office in September 1940.6 By the end of 1940, the Churchill government lost interest in organizing the civilian population into popular resistance once the prospect of German invasion had eased. From now on, spec ops remained firmly in the hands of military professionals, though much of this has remained hidden behind a wall of secrecy. Operations in enemyoccupied territories certainly received the lion’s share of attention from the press and cinema, aided by rapid advances in weapons technology. Compared to previous wars, those in special ops in the Second World War had access to easy-to-use light weaponry, such as the M1 Carbine or the Thompson submachine gun, though the latter weapon, popularly associated with Chicago mobsters, could prove unwieldy in densely forested and jungle terrains.7 For some, the Sten gun was the obvious weapon of choice since it could be broken down into parts that could be concealed in a bag. The weapon sprayed bullets at up to 500 rounds a minute and was accurate within a hundred yards, though it was vulnerable to jamming if it became clogged with dirt, dramatically exemplified when Jozef Gabcik’s Sten failed when he tried to shoot Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in May 1942.8 Similarly, the emergence of plastic explosives and miniaturized bomb-making with automatic timers or pencil detonators heralded the kind of destructive technology later associated with post-war terrorism. The invention of the ‘Lewis bomb’ by David Stirling’s right-hand man, Jock Lewis, proved an especially useful godsend for this deadly weapon consisted of a wad of plastic explosive and thermite rolled up in motor oil and weighing only 1 lb. It was heavy and bulky valve radios that presented one of the biggest headaches for commandos and the SAS struggling across difficult mountainous, desert or jungle terrains, often in appalling heat or cold, and dependent on temperamental pack animals or vehicles hard to maintain. The radios were not only heavy to carry around but their valves could fail; replacing them was often difficult in remote locations. The trope of the radio being shot up by enemy fire would be frequently used in post-war action movies, pinpointing the isolation of groups inserted into hostile territory with no obvious means of external support. ‘Special operations’ in the Second World War took two basic forms: firstly, specialized military groupings who acted as pioneers of modern ‘special forces’ and, secondly, secret intelligence operations involving the landing of trained agents into enemy-occupied territory by parachute or submarine. The two types of operations might have come together in a more integrated guerrilla-type strategy but the wartime Churchill government created several groupings with different specialisms. The first of these were the Commandos. These were largely the brainchild of Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clarke, who had been born in South Africa and was an admirer of the tactics used by Boer commandos in the Anglo Boer War of

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1899–1902. The Commandos came into existence in May 1940 after Dunkirk when the government was open to new approaches, though they met considerable hostility from the established military hierarchy.9 After a series of botched raids in 1940 hampered by poor planning and training and inadequate weaponry, the British government formed a separate organization to gather intelligence and aid resistance groupings known as the Special Operations Executive (SOE).10 SOE was established by the war cabinet in July 1940 at a time when the Chiefs of Staff had finally begun to look to the possibility of covert warfare following the collapse of France. It was formed out of a merger of the Section D and MI(R) and had as its political master the civilian Labour politician Hugh Dalton, tasked by Churchill to ‘set Europe ablaze’. Under its Chief of Staff Colin Gubbins, SOE began operations in November of 1940 in two former flats off Baker Street; it soon found itself working with various resistance groupings and exiled European governments. Its lack of trained personnel meant it could do little to define many operations and it was frequently beholden to the political aims of the exile governments, as I shall show later in the case of the decision of the exile Czech government of Edouard Benes to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich. SOE was also viewed with considerable hostility from other branches of British intelligence such as the Special Intelligence Service (SIS), even though many SOE staff had SIS backgrounds.11 After the war SOE shaped two feature films focused on female operatives in Nazioccupied France: Odette (1950) starring Anna Neagle and Carve Her Name with Pride (1958) starring Virginia McKenna as the SOE agent Violette Szabo. In neither movie was the SOE mentioned specifically by name and it only emerged into public prominence following some television documentaries as well as the novel and the 2001 film Charlotte Gray (dir. Gillian Armstrong). It was one of the most secretive of British ‘irregular’ forces, practising various forms of terrorist activity with its ‘Jedburgh teams’ that were parachuted into German-occupied Europe. Many of its agents ended up as victims of Hitler’s 1942 Commando Order that ensured that any captured non-uniformed soldier was to be tortured and executed. Surviving SOE operatives also tended to remain silent after the war, ensuring that many never received any recognition for their war-time activities, though identifying who they are has proved difficult with the destruction of so many SOE records.12 A third group emerged during the war in North Africa in the form of the SAS and the body that often helped in its insertion or extraction, The Long-Range Desert Group (LRDG). The main driving force behind the creation of the SAS was a lieutenant of the Scots Guards, David Stirling. Coming from a well-connected upper-class background, Stirling persuaded the British army to let him establish his own small private army to operate behind enemy lines, though in the early years he faced considerable opposition from sections of British high command. Lieutenant General Arthur Smith, Deputy Chief of the General Staff in the Middle East, expressed this attitude especially clearly in March 1942 when he wrote (rather like a despairing head teacher to a house master) in a letter to Deputy Chief of General Staff, General Ritchie, that ‘Stirling’s chief value is that of commanding a parachute force. We are, therefore anxious that he should not be thrown away in some other role’. In a postscript he added that ‘Stirling needs restraining’.13

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It was events in the Middle East that sustained the SAS as Rommel drove eastwards during 1942 before being stopped at El Alamein. The SAS went on to have a good war, successfully sabotaging German installations in North Africa before working with resistance movements in Europe prior to the Allied Invasion in June 1944. It operated alongside a sister organization called the Special Boat Service, or SBS, focused on maritime raiding operations involving midget submarines and canoes. The LRDG/SAS/SBS operated on limited sufferance from the senior British high command and was wound up at the end of the war. It would be revived again to fight against guerrillas in Malaya in the 1950s, largely due to pressure from the former Chindit officer ‘Mad Mike’ Calvert.14 But, here again, there was considerable opposition from senior sections of British high command. Ferret Force, formed in 1948 by former SOE operatives to pursue Chinese communist guerrillas in the jungles of Malaya, lasted only six months before it was replaced by more conventional sweep operations, though it did have some impact on emerging British COIN doctrine.15 Two years later in 1950, the SAS was reformed to fight in Malaya. It had a very small number of actual enemy ‘kills’ – 108 – for the eight years it operated in Malaya, but developed a range of tactics and procedures that would be later employed in other terrains such as Oman.16 The Commandos were not given any extensive publicity and, when they were, they were often seen to be plagued by informers among local anti-Nazi resistance groups. The 1942 Hollywood film They Raid by Night, for instance, followed a small British commando unit parachuted into German-occupied Norway to extract a prominent Norwegian general. The team is betrayed twice, first by a Norwegian woman collaborator who betrays the team to the Germans and later by a Norwegian doctor who turns out to be a Nazi collaborator. The team is only finally successful in getting the general out when the British launch a full-scale air and ground raid to extract the Commando team. The film suggested that the Commandos were very brave but their operation extremely risky given the duplicity and unreliability of the local population, a theme in several post-war films. The message of the film was that secret operations behind enemy lines could never be a proper substitute for well-planned conventional military attacks, which the film showed using real footage of the Commando operation in Norway in 1941. A different set of issues emerged with the 1942 film Went the Day Well, produced by Michael Balcon at Ealing Film Studios. The film was based on a story by Graham Greene published in 1940 and had a fictional English village in Norfolk fending off an attack by German paratroopers. The film was largely war-time propaganda and played on genuine public fears of confronting a real German invasion. These were partly alleviated by the device of inserting the story as a flashback told by a narrator at a future time, when we can assume the war is now over and the Germans defeated.17 The film depicts some of the central features of traditional Englishness in the form of a quiet English village coming under the occupation of Nazi paratroopers disguised as Royal Engineers. The villagers attempt to warn the Home Guard, though they are betrayed by the village squire who is a fifth columnist. The villagers rely on their own common sense and there is never any sense of panic; working-class child evacuees are told firmly to finish up their food at meal times, while it is not felt necessary to break into one house because the front door is locked. Eventually a boy scout alerts

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the army and the Germans are rounded up. The movie was copied by the scriptwriter John Milius in Red Dawn in 1985 – though this time a group of American teenagers adopt guerrilla tactics to resist Soviet parachutists (aided by Nicaraguans) who have taken over their town. The genteel resistance in Went the Day Well contrasted markedly with some Hollywood war-time releases, such as the exceptionally violent Edge of Darkness in 1943 (dir. Lewis Milestone) starring Errol Flynn and Ann Sheridan. The film has a mass uprising by Norwegian fishing villagers terrorized by a thuggish Nazi leader of the German occupying forces. With weapons smuggled in from Britain, the revolt starts when the villagers’ leaders are forced to dig their own graves; the village priest mows down a German firing squad with a machine gun from a bell tower of the village church and a running battle ensues in the surrounding forests. After killing the German garrison, the survivors disappear into the hills to fight on as guerrillas while women and children are loaded onto fishing boats, though it is unclear where they will go. The story was loosely based on some members of the Norwegian special operations Linge Group (trained by SOE) shooting dead two members of the Gestapo in April 1942 in the village of Telavag, south of Bergen. This led to a brutal German response involving executions, the destruction of the village and seventy-two men being sent to concentration camps, of whom thirty-one were murdered. Like many other Hollywood films of the era, Edge of Darkness preferred a stylized and full-frontal battle rather than a serious exploration of special operations. In comparison, the violence in Went the Day Well was extremely subdued, with only the fifth columnist being shot and a German paratrooper clubbed by a woman. The film reflected how reluctant British film-producers were to engage with the brutal effects of enemy occupation, a lacuna that would help ensure a warm reception to the post-war neorealist cinema of Roberto Rossellin that seemed to many like a breath of fresh air (see Chapter 3). The insularity of British cinema continued after the war when war films tended to focus on conflicts far from British shores. Many of these films helped shape the post-war popular memory of the Second World War centred on land, sea and air battles: The Battle of Britain in 1940; The Battle of El Alamein in 1942; the victory at sea in the U Boat campaign and the sinking of the Bismarck; D-Day and the invasion of France and Operation Market Garden and the battle at Arnhem. Commando raids and special operations formed only a small part of this cinematic repertoire.

Special operations in post-war cinema A few noted films released after the Second World War did manage to highlight some daring special operations. They would become linked with some of the most popular post-war British actors, such as Richard Burton, Trevor Howard, Peter Ustinov, Dirk Bogarde, Denholm Elliot and James Robertson Justice, along with a few American actors such as Gregory Peck and William Holden. As audience tastes started to change, these films would become increasingly spectacular as they formed the foundation for later action movies.

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The general lack of public knowledge about the SAS and SBS is reflected in the film They Who Dare in 1954 (dir. Lewis Milestone), starring Dirk Bogarde and Denholm Elliot. The film was based on a real SBS operation in the summer of 1942 involving an eleven-man SBS raiding group commanded by a Captain Allot. The group attacked targets in German-occupied Rhodes, including a dozen aircraft and fuel and storage dumps. All were captured except Allot and a Marine, John Duggan, who avoided hundreds of Italian soldiers to reach a pre-arranged rendezvous and wade out to sea. They were eventually picked up by the submarine Traveller, which twice had to crash dive to avoid Italian motor transport boats.18 The mission was judged a success since twenty aircraft at the Maritsa base on Rhodes were destroyed, though there was a heavy loss of trained commandos and illustrated that the SBS was really being asked to take on too much.19 They Who Dare had just six SBS commandos tasked with crippling a German airbase used to bomb British forces in North Africa. The party has two Greek officers and two local guides and was led by Lieutenant Graham (Bogarde) playing the role of Allot along with a Sergeant Corcoran (Elliot). They are taken to an undefined Greek destination by submarine and come ashore at night, traversing some mountains to reach their targets. At a pre-designated location, the party splits and presses on in two groups towards the airfields. Eight of the group are captured and just two get away. The two surviving men make it to the beach and wade out to sea to be rescued by an invisible submarine (that could be not be shown due to the film’s modest budget). The movie did not meet a warm response from critics (one press review was titled ‘How Dare They?’), though it was a forerunner of the big-budget Guns of Navarone in 1961, especially in the way it suggested to audiences that it was ‘daring’ rather than ‘courage’ that was the key motivating factor behind a successful special operation. They Who Dare reflected a widespread public ignorance of the SAS/SBS in the early 1950s. It has a documentary quality in the beginning as it outlined the nature of special operations at a time when the SAS lacked a clear public identity. It also revealed some of the difficulties in raiding in unfamiliar terrain. The party runs short of water and Graham considers the whole mission a failure; the group evades capture largely because of the support of local Greeks. But Milestone displayed a weak directorial hand and allowed Bogarde and Elliot to drive forward the narrative. Bogarde’s jaded and cynical character Graham drifts into an increasingly hysterical antagonism with Corcoran with no apparent relevance to the main narrative. Even the purpose of the mission becomes questioned when Westerby, implausibly, declares that he ‘did it for the kicks’. This was a weak special ops film, though it did hint at what could go wrong without careful planning. Another special operations film was released two years later in 1955 with The Cockleshell Heroes (dir. Jose Ferrer), starring Trevor Howard, Anthony Newley and David Lodge. The narrative was based on Operation Frankton in December 1942 involving a raid by ten canoe-borne British commandos in Bordeaux Harbour. The script by Bryan Forbes and Richard Maibaum was based on a book describing the operation by C.E. Lucas Phillips.20 The film was made with cooperation of the Royal Navy and the action scenes were shot in the Thames Estuary. The real operation only managed to damage a few German ships running a blockade between Germany and

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Japan, but had been supported by Earl Mountbatten, chief of Combined Operations, who wanted to stop the harbour being used by the German battleship Tirpitz.21 Early on, we become aware of the tensions between the exponents of special operations and a cautious old guard. There is an angry spat between the chief proponent of the raid, Major Hugh Stinger (Jose Ferrer), with a conservative martinet Captain Hugh Thompson (Trevor Howard), who considers Stinger lacks proper leadership qualities and will put the lives of the men at risk. But he is eventually won over after a test mission goes disastrously wrong and Stringer admits to leadership failings. He asks Thompson to knock the men into an effective fighting unit and the raid succeeds in damaging enemy shipping. But, as in They Who Dare, most of the men are taken prisoner and only one man manages to escape. Six of those captured by the Germans were shot in ignominious circumstances while a seventh drowned; only Hasler and one other Marine succeeded in escaping back to Britain. The Cockleshell Heroes certainly introduced film audiences to some of the problems in unconventional warfare, though all this tended to come with the proviso that spec ops could be effective only if those engaged in it conformed to conventional standards of military hierarchy and discipline. A rather less serious cinematic exploration of unconventional warfare occurred in the 1957 film Ill Met by Moonlight, written, produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The narrative had no real scenes of military combat, though it was based on a real-life SOE operation to capture the General in German-occupied Crete in April 1944, described in the book by W. Stanley Moss Ill Met by Moonlight: The Abduction of General Kreipe. The film portrays a small group of British saboteurs hiding among the local Cretan population and provided a good opportunity for Powell and Pressburger to continue their romantic tory imagery of local populations living in idealized communal settings under benign hierarchical authority, evident from instance in A Canterbury Tale (1944) and I Know Where I’m Going (1945) where an idealized Scottish rural community flourishes under the authority of a benevolent laird.22 This romantic toryism informs Ill Met by Moonlight. As the title suggests, the guiding literary text was Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the film attempts a comic portrayal of British guerrillas and the local Cretan population, though a voiceover at the start points out that the Cretan population suffered badly under German occupation. The moral cohesion of the local population is maintained through the constant presence of the Greek Orthodox Church, while the local guerrillas assisting the British have the comic features of ‘rude mechanicals’. It was Emeric Pressburger who was keen to make the film after reading an extract of Moss’s book in 1950, though it took six years to complete the project. By this time, Powell and Pressburger had left Rank to work with Alexander Korda and were buoyed by the success of The Battle of the River Plate in 1956. Powell had dreams of involving big mainstream actors such as Orson Welles and James Mason but the budget did not extend this far and instead they had to be content with Rank’s contracted star Dirk Bogarde. Powell later regretted this, considering Bogarde as a ‘picture post card hero in fancy dress’ rather than the romantic Byronic bandit hero he wanted as the actor playing the role of Patrick Leigh Fermor.23 Bogarde’s rather wooden performance was offset by strong performances by Marius Goring as Kreipe and Cyril Cusack as the unwashed but astute guerrilla, Captain Sandy Rendel.

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Ill Met by Moonlight was a safe film regarding special operations. The narrative pruned down Moss’s account to the basics of heroic upper-class officers conducting a successful kidnap while a young Cretan boy pretends to betray the British when he is given money by Kreipe to buy some German leather boots. The boy diverts the German search party into a trap where they are wiped out by Cretan guerrillas (not shown in the film). This never actually took place and the general was marched across the mountains to the southern part of the island, where the raiding party was picked up by a British naval vessel. Moss’s book was important for stressing the way that the party was highly dependent on the local population for food supplies; while Leigh Fermor also pointed out, in a later afterward to the book, the political and strategic objectives behind the operation, which involved more than just undermining German military morale. Following the collapse of the Mussolini regime in Italy in 1943 the Italian general commanding the 32,000 Italian troops in the eastern part of the island, General Carta, started to make overtures to come over to the British side. Leigh-Fermor initially considered using the Cretan guerrillas to block off the one road to the eastern part of the island to protect the Italians from any German reprisals, though this was preempted by the Armistice in September. Carta now decided to feign compliance to the post-armistice fascist state set up in the north of Italy and, over the next few days, considerable quantities of Italian weapons ended up in the hands of the guerrillas. However, a guerrilla attack on a German detachment on 11 September led to punitive reprisals by German forces, under their brutal commander General Muller, against seven Cretan villages that left over 500 civilians dead. Leigh Fermor came up with the idea of abducting Muller to paralyse German military morale, though this too became redundant once Muller was replaced by General Kreipe. Leigh Fermor decided to press on with the plan, seeing it as reducing the risk of high civilian casualties compared to more formal military engagements with German forces. The plan relied on the support of Cretan guerrillas, though Leigh Fermor considered it had the advantage of being ‘an Anglo Cretan enterprise with old and seasoned mountain friends, rather than a professional Allied coup de main entirely organised from outside’.24 It’s easy to see why a campaign of this kind had such an appeal to Powell and Pressburger. It had all the hallmarks of upper-class British camaraderie defined by depth of character and good understanding of the needs and values of the lower orders. Leigh Fermor describes how dependent the British team was on Cretan shepherds who ‘kept us in touch with the lower world’25 while, once captured, Kreipe – a classically educated German officer – found himself on the same wave length as Leigh Fermor, who could complete without prompting the General’s quotation from the Roman poet Horace. Ill Met by Moonlight’s celebration of effortless upper-class amateurism was becoming rather rare by the late 1950s. A considerably different depiction of special operation emerged in Bitter Victory (1957) (dir. Nicholas Ray). The film focuses on a Commando raid on a major post of the Afrika Korps in Libya in 1942 to seize vital military documents. The raid ends up being somewhat dwarfed by a love triangle between its two central male characters, Captain Leith (Richard Burton) and Major Brand (Kurt Jurgens) and Brand’s wife Anne (Ruth Romans). The two men are bitter

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rivals for the same woman though this conflict is overlain by a contrast of character as it emerges that Brand is a coward, while the more heroic Leith eventually dies from a scorpion that Brand sees going into Leith’s boot but does nothing to stop. This is a post-Suez movie that was ahead of its time as it interrogates the mythology of military heroism. It was less a British film than a Franco-American co-production made by Transcontinental Films and initially released in a truncated form with some 11 minutes involving the final scene cut out (the US version was even shorter at 83 minutes). The symbolism in the film is striking, starting with the opening scene of men training in unarmed combat on stuffed dummies, replicating mindless soldiers acting under orders. Though the film focuses on a behind-the-lines-op, the conventional chain of military command is never in doubt. The commanding officer, General Patterson (Anthony Bushell), decides to send both Leith and Brand on the operation though Brand is senior as he is a major while Leith only a captain (a rivalry later repeated in Cy Enfield’s Zulu in 1964). The audience is not encouraged to expect any great heroics in the forthcoming operation, given that this is playing out the war games the men have been constantly trained to undertake. There is a sub-text of infantilism pervading the film as the men act out childhood war games: one man at the bar emulates the action with his hands like a bloodthirsty school boy; the general holds a model wooden plane; and one of the Commandos looks at his blistered toes singing this ‘This little piggy went to Benghazi and this little piggy stayed at home’. The film at points seriously questions myths of masculinity that pervade most war films of this era. The anti-war theme reaches a climax at the end of the film when the returning Brand is awarded the DSO by the delighted general, though in the original screen version the documents are set on fire by the captured German officer Colonel Lutze. Brand now realizes his marriage is a sham as his wife walks off in tears on hearing of the death of Leith and, in the final scene, he pins the DSO onto one of the dummies. Brand is a South African and has the same dubious moral characteristics that Anthony Quayle’s Captain Van der Poel in J. Lee Thompson’s Ice Cold in Alex a year later in 1958. The drift of South Africa away from the British Commonwealth and towards apartheid in the 1950s under its Afrikaner Nationalist government made it only too easy to use South African characters as cinematic symbols for ambivalence and treachery. We also come to realize that much military heroism is ultimately a façade – themes that became very evident a decade later in movies such Oh What a Lovely War (1969) and Too Late the Hero (1970). Bitter Victory carried a lot of baggage as a special ops film along with an anti-war message and romantic triangle. Its British focus ensured that it did not gain much at the US box office, while its lack of any thrilling action scenes put a lot of British cinema-goers off. The anti-war themes might hold some weight in films depicting expeditionary warfare in far-flung terrains where no apparent national interest was at stake, such as Malaya, Kenya or even Korea. The same could not be said for battles closer to home, which was still remembered in the mid-1950s as a war for national survival. But French new wave cinema director Jean Luc Godard was impressed by the film’s imagery, seeing it as an example of real ‘cinema’. But this should not detract from some basic problems in the film which weighed down the action scenes with romantic tension. This is always a risky strategy to pursue in action movies. As some

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later film directors would realize, combat films require a limited role for women (if not their complete absence) since the resulting emotional entanglements interspersed with combat scenes always risked confusing the audience, though the eventual emergence by the 1990s of a tough group of female action heroes acted by global celebrities such as Angelina Jolie and Sigourney Weaver transformed the very nature of the genre. In 1958 a British film was at last released that portrayed in some detail the activities of the LRDG in North Africa. Sea of Sand (1958) was directed by Guy Green and starred Richard Attenborough, Michael Craig and John Gregson. It was shot in Tripolitania in Libya with the permission of the Libyan government of King Idris. The film was a ‘unit tribute’ in which it is the unit or regiment that is the main star rather than the individual characters in it (a good Hollywood example of this subgenre is The Fighting See Bees starring John Wayne). However, even when the unit concerned is well established in the public mind, there are always pressures on movie directors to heighten audience interest through individual stars. This is even more true when the unit concerned, the LRDG, has no real place in the public memory. The film starts by outlining the sort of work the unit did to audiences unfamiliar with this kind of warfare, though by the end of the movie the LRDG still remains rather shadowy. It has no clear insignia or motto or battle anthem, and the men are an odd assortment drawn from different military backgrounds and traditions. The film takes place in the run-up to the Battle of El Alamein and here the film navigates through rather more familiar territory in the public memory of the Second World War. The LRDG had been operating in North Africa since June 1940, when it was originally formed as the Long Range Patrol (LRP) by Major A. Bagnold, brother of novelist Edith Bagnold, mainly using New Zealanders and Rhodesians. By 1942 the LRDG was tasked with long-range penetration and sabotage behind enemy lines as well as monitoring traffic (known as ‘Road Watch’), on the highway between Tripoli and Benghazi.26 The movie moves on to the attack on the airfield at Barce in September 1942. The patrol starts out with fifteen men in five trucks led by Captain Tim Cotton (Michael Craig), whose task is to drive over 400 miles behind enemy lines to blow up a fuel dump. The sabotage is planned to coincide with a big push against the Afrika Korps by British forces in Egypt. The film follows the men in 1.5-ton Chevrolet trucks that the LRDG converted for use in desert operations. Early on, six men are killed and two of the Chevrolets destroyed when they encounter an enemy armoured car; the action scenes show vehicles circling each other rather like war ships. The patrol also faces problems from enemy aircraft before two of the men cut a path through a minefield to enable another team to move into the compound to blow up the fuel dump. They encounter new enemy Panzer tanks, something not picked up by military intelligence. Later the truck with the radio is destroyed and the remaining men face a desperate race to get back to their base to report the existence of the tanks. Sea of Sand moves beyond a quasi-documentary into a beat-the-clock suspense thriller as the men desperately flee their German pursuers. The last truck seizes up and the squad walks the last 40 miles on foot through sand dunes, leaving one injured man behind with a Lewis gun to pick off German pursuers (to the accompaniment of Vera Lynn singing on the radio). This was a patriotic war film typical of many of the war

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movies released by Rank. The film establishes the tight bonds forged between the men in a narrative that celebrates a restrained idea of military heroism largely disconnected from class ties. From an early stage, we are reminded that traditional ideas of military hierarchy do not apply in this sort of unconventional war. Captain Craig lets the new member of the unit Captain Bill Williams (John Gregson) that everyone is on first name terms while it is the duty of everyone including officers to help dig out any vehicle stuck in the sand. Likewise, Richard Attenborough’s character Trooper Body ends up under arrest when he is caught drinking alcohol but this does not in the end amount to very much as the men make their desperate way back to their own lines. This is a long way from the gentleman’s war of Ill Met by Moonlight, though Sea of Sand successfully combined a special operation with more conventional images of war-time patriotism. The Germans remain relentlessly unsympathetic, though the LRDG unit never functions as a serious partisan formation as it travels through the desert. It meets no Arab Bedouin who might provide intelligence or support. Indeed, Arabs only appear in an initial scene when they are briefly depicted sitting by the road as the LRDG convoy passes and goes into the desert. Nevertheless, this was a serious film that investigated spec ops with a considerable degree of realism.

The 1960s and growing fantasy violence The early 1960s saw the growing emergence of a younger cinema audience lacking personal memories of the Second World War beyond perhaps those of war-time evacuees. This newer audience was largely unfamiliar with the detailed history of a war that was not yet taught at school or college, even though the influence of television encouraged a growing demand for exciting and increasingly violent action features. Much of this was reflected in the successful film The Guns of Navarone (1961), based on a novel by Alistair Maclean. This was a fictional movie, though one broadly based on special operations in the Eastern Mediterranean. The film was interesting for the way it associated special operations with partisan warfare but has largely escaped critical attention. Guns had an all-star cast including David Niven, Anthony Quayle, Anthony Quinn, Gregory Peck and the Greek actress Irene Pappas. It was directed by J. Lee Thompson, following up his previous movie success, Ice Cold in Alex, in 1958. The film centres on a group of Commandos on a near-suicidal mission to blow up two German ‘radar-controlled guns’ on the island of ‘Leros’ in the Aegean Sea. These guns are preventing the British navy from rescuing 2,000 men stranded on the island. The Commandos achieve the near-impossible by scaling a steep cliff and shooting up seemingly limitless numbers of incompetent German soldiers (Quinn alone reaches a tally of some ninety-five). This was a fast-paced action movie that was a precursor of later Hollywood films with stars such as Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The dramatic landscape and fast pace ensured the film’s international success. With a budget of $6 million it ended up grossing nearly $29 million at the box office and became part of a series of big-budget Second World War films, including The Longest Day (1962), The Great Escape (1963) and later features such as The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Where Eagles Dare (1968). The triumphal ending of the film with a column of

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naval vessels blasting off victory hoots also ensured that it could be remembered as much as a conventional war narrative than one dealing with a partisan operation. Lost in the continuing interest in The Guns of Navarone’s relentless violence are a series of important scenes that reveal something of the challenges confronting a group of raiders acting as partisans, whose survival depends upon support from an unreliable Greek underground. The group is warned from the start by Commodore Jensen of Allied Intelligence (James Robertson Justice) that they cannot expect any significant popular support from the Greek population who risk severe retaliation from the Germans. They attempt to immerse themselves among this tradition-bound Greek community, celebrating a wedding that looks forward to Zorba the Greek in 1967. The British squad are easily spotted and arrested in the village market place. Links with the Greek underground prove to be disastrous since it turns out a young female Greek teacher in the Greek resistance is a German agent. The film dovetailed with some of Quayle’s own war-time experiences working for SOE in Albania where he found the Albanian partisans untrustworthy and politically divided, though it is doubtful if he ever really accepted the demands of unconventional warfare.27 The Guns of Navarone reinforced the historically false image that British and American special operations could best succeed when they were almost entirely self-reliant and with little or no local support. The Greek setting for the film was still controversial in the early 1960s, with memories of the Greek civil war of 1946–1949 still fresh. At the time the film was shot, the civil war was still being ignored by Greek film makers and interest only briefly resumed after 1963 during the Centre Union government of Georges Papandreou, before being once again closed off after the 1967 military coup.28 The Guns of Navarone was a landmark in cinema’s glamorization of raiding and special ops. It dramatically revealed the risks involved in any raiding venture and demonstrated that those involved needed to be multi-skilled and tightly knit; the smaller they are, the less hierarchical they tended to be, challenging the command structure of conventional militaries. The raiders disdain any common uniform and Captain Keith (Peck) turns up in a white suit. As a group, they lack respect for conventional military command and threaten one martinet British captain with reduction to the ranks and return to Britain unless he agrees to confine his servant to quarters after they catch him listening to their conversation. Over a timespan of more than fifty years, Guns seems very dated, with predictable acting styles and poor special effects. Its conventional masculine-orientated narrative reduces women to being, at best, silent and unreliable appendages or, at worst, treacherous informers ill-suited to a rugged and dirty form of war. It stands awkwardly beside the less-well-known Five Branded Women (1960) (dir. Martin Ritt), an ambitious Italian-American co-production shot in black and white that was years ahead of its time.29 Ritt had, for a period in the 1950s, been on the Hollywood blacklist; many of his films celebrated the cohesion of rural life in the face of aggressive urban capitalism and championed those oppressed by systems of racial and class inequality and, in this instance, gender oppression.30 Five Branded Women concerns five women in a Yugoslav town in 1943 caught up in the wider war between the occupying Germans and local partisan forces. They have their hair cut for having sexual relationships with German officers (one German officer

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is also castrated). Forced out of town, they eventually join the partisans in the forests, where some remarkable action scenes were shot by cinematographer James Wong Howe. During the movie, the women evolve from pitiful and helpless victims into tough and resolute guerrilla fighters, exemplified by the penetrating side-lit portrait of Jovanks (played by the Italian Actress Silvana Mangano). Ritt became a major director in the 1960s based on such films as Hud (1963) and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965).31 By the late 1950s, he had become interested in European cinematic movements and the semi-documentary style that would in time be termed cinema verite. Some of this can be seen in Five Branded Women, his only war film, especially the use of a hand-held camera following the partisans in combat; as well as some memorable long shots, such as the wide-angle view of a column of German soldiers following the partisans across an ice field. The women are reluctant guerrillas and embody a feminine link to nature as they chase a lamb before encountering bodies hanging in a barn. They then see German soldiers taking away the livestock of a village, and the angry villagers attempt to drive them away, accusing them of being partisans and responsible for the loss of their animals. The women (rather implausibly) decide to act as protectors of the villagers and attack the Germans, not knowing the partisans are poised to make an attack. This leads to an alliance of convenience with the partisans, though this eventually leads to one of them being shot after an affair with a man on sentry duty. Howe’s cinematic style had evolved over several decades since the era of silent films and his use of side lighting in dark and sombre settings had a noirish quality. He certainly brought out some of the festering anger and determination of the women in scenes that have far more depth than the flatter depictions of the women bombers in Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers I examine in the next chapter. Ritt had an international cast including the French star Jeanne Moreau, whose stare would be described as ‘jolielaide’ or ugly beautiful and the epitome of 1960s French cool.32 Hollywood tried a more traditional approach with Sam Fuller’s Merrilla Marauders (1962), a narrative that followed the American 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional) in Burma in 1944, a group otherwise known as Merrill’s Marauders after its commanding officer General Frank Merrill. It was one of the first serious Hollywood attempts to engage with special operations, following earlier weak treatments of American guerrilla resistance in the Philippines such as Back to Bataan (1945) and Fritz Lang’s American Guerrilla in the Philippines (1950), insurgencies which were mainly intelligencegathering operations in support of the long-expected conventional invasion under General MacArthur. Fuller’s film, by contrast, focused on a well-trained special operations force of three battalions trained in deep penetration warfare in Burma where there were few fixed battle lines. Merrill’s Marauders was made at the request of the chief producer Warner Brothers, Milton Sperling, and was filmed on a slender budget of $1 million in the Philippines. Fuller made good advantage of support from both the US and Filipino militaries, though the result was more a conventional war movie than one that seriously attempted to get inside the complexities of deep penetration warfare, a concept developed by the mystical British officer Colonel Orde Wingate of the Chindits and ardently championed by Winston Churchill at the Quebec Conference in 1943. With no serious possibility

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of a major conventional invasion of the Asian mainland, since most landing craft were diverted to Britain in preparation for D-Day, a more indirect strategy became inevitable. Both the British Chindits and Merrill’s Marauders operated, however, in close collaboration with Kachin tribal irregulars trained by the OSS (The Marauders were also aided by the Kachin-speaking British missionary Father James Stuart) as well as the Chinese forces of the KMT in Burma trained under the controversial command of General Stillwell.33 Though broadly based on Charlton Ogburn’s book The Marauders, Fuller took no serious notice of these external supports for the Marauders missions. He depicted the Marauders as a largely isolated band of brothers driven to their limits by the necessities of war. This was the approach of the classic American war movie, focused as it often was on a team of men who bend and buckle under the pressures of war but ultimately endure; divergent characters emerge during the conflict and there is the usual yearning to get home as periods of dramatic conflict are interspersed with rest periods, lightened very often by fights or dark humour. The approach had worked for Fuller in previous films such as the two Korean War movies, The Steel Helmet and Fixed Bayonets (1951), though inside the United States he was never viewed as seriously as internationally, and was often dismissed as a low-budget director of B movies.34 Even before the emergence of serious political divisions in the United States over the Vietnam War, Merrill’s Marauders looks rather tired and hackneyed, though Fuller did embellish the story with stock footage and maps to point out where the Burma war was being fought. One imaginative scene, filmed among concrete blocks in a railway marshalling yard, also recreated something of the frenzied confusion of the Burma jungle war as Americans and Japanese rush past each other in an orgy of killing.35 One critic certainly saw ‘individuality and merit’ in the movie, though the conventional war movie generic framework did not work particularly well in bringing Ogburn’s narrative to the screen.36 In a film of just 98 minutes, it is clearly unreasonable to expect the three separate missions of the Marauders to be covered in any detail. Fuller and Sperling started at the end of the first mission which they incorrectly claim had started in January 1944 (it started on 24 February), so enabling them to catapult the Marauders into something resembling a full-scale battle with the Japanese who defend their position at Walawbum with artillery. But this was a conflict fought for much of the time in the jungles of Northern Burma, though there is little evidence of this in Fuller’s sets in the Philippines, which are mostly grassland and the odd swamp. The fighting was also mainly conducted with mortars, machine guns, hand guns and hand-to-hand combat with bayonets though the Japanese did have deadly howitzers. On occasions, the Marauders were only too glad to get off the elephant paths for the darkness of jungle cover, which Ogburn described as being like the ‘invulnerable refuge of childhood’s bed’.37 Most of the film deals with the extension of the advance from Naubaum to Myitkyna, to take the pressure off the British, who had come under pressure in the west after the Japanese attack on Imphal and Kohima from early March to July of 1944. This was not the real motive for Stillwell’s decision to advance on Myitkina, which was to secure a landing strip to continue supplies over the Himalayan ‘hump’ into China

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for Chiang’s KMT. None of the Chinese divisions ever appear in Fuller’s film which gives the impression that the Americans were mainly fighting both for the glory of the US army and in support of their British allies. Securing the support of the American army behind the film probably ensured that these sorts of issues had to be omitted, while the Cold War prevented film makers in Hollywood from developing positive images for the Chinese forces fighting then as allies. As it was, Fuller complained that his final battle scene where some of the Marauders mistakenly fire on their comrades was removed in favour of a stock footage of modern US soldiers and a voice-over announcing that the Marauders were forerunners of modern US special forces.38 Merrill’s Marauders indicated some of the difficulties Hollywood film producers had in bringing any sort of serious treatment of special operations to the cinema screen, a difficulty already evident in Edge of Darkness in 1943. As I shall show later in this chapter, Hollywood has only begun to confront this since the end of the Cold War and the release of the (commercially unsuccessful) film The Great Raid in 2005. Returning to the 1960s, it is evident that Hollywood preferred to stick to British, rather than American, special operations and in 1968 the American director Paul Wendkos made the low-budget film Attack on the Iron Coast, based on the March 1942 British Commando raid, known as Operation Chariot, on the German naval base in St Nazaire in Brittany. The raid involved the use of a destroyer encased in concrete and explosives, serving as a giant torpedo to blow up the huge gates of the Normandie Dock, large enough to shelter the German battleship Tirpitz. This was not the first film to feature the raid since it had also been depicted in the 1952 British film The Gift Horse starring Trevor Howard. The Gift Horse had focused less on the actual raid than on the destroyer (called in the film HMS Ballantrae) and its crew in a manner reminiscent of the iconic war-time film In Which We Serve (1942) starring Noel Coward. The St Nazaire raid occupied only a few minutes at the end of The Gift Horse and was marred by poor special effects based on flimsy models. There was no reference to SOE’s role in the raid’s planning and it was little more than another heroic war-time naval drama. Attack on the Iron Coast was the first attempt to film Operation Chariot, though budget restraints led to the destroyer being down-graded to an unconvincing mine sweeper. The leader of the attack, Major James Wilson, was played by the American actor Lloyd Bridges posing as a Canadian officer fully committed to a high-risk venture called ‘Operation Mad Dog’. As in The Cockleshell Heroes, Wilson finds himself opposed by more conservative figures in military high command, especially a Captain Owen Franklin (Andrew Keir) who had lost his son in an unsuccessful Dieppe-type raid on the French coast. But this is not a simple clash of personalities, since a meeting of the heads of Combined Operations approve the raid that has the support of the prime minister and a Mountbatten figure, Rear Admiral Sir Frederick Grafton (Maurice Denham), who overrules the doubters. Attack on the Iron Coast presented a very partial film image of Operation Chariot. It failed to show the lack of co-ordination with the RAF, who were never clear what exactly the purpose of the mission was and returned to Britain after dropping only a few bombs due to cloud cover.39 But the film at least hinted at the strategic significance of the raid which was aimed at destroying an installation that could be a base for the Tirpitz. It showed some of the senior-level strategic discussion, though no attention

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was given to SOE’s role in planning the operation. It was, after all, an SOE junior officer, John Hughes-Hallett, who worked out that a ship could only be propelled onto the Normandie Dock during a brief period in the spring when the conjunction of a full moon and a rare flood tide ensured a high enough water level to penetrate the Dock’s defences.40 The film opted for individual heroics typical of many Hollywood war features as a wounded Wilson stays on the ship to reconnect two lose wires that were preventing the clock timer from setting off the explosives; in the actual raid, a pencil timer was used, one of the innovative inventions of SOE. The explosion also goes off soon after the surviving men have been captured by the Germans making this a raid with some of the features of a terrorist attack given the timer went off several hours later than expected the following morning, when a considerable number of Germans were inspecting the ship. An estimated 300–400 Germans were killed in the ensuing explosion, a feature that film makers evidently found difficult to bring to screen in the late 1960s. There were less inhibitions when it came to the making the fictional film The Dirty Dozen in 1967. This movie has proved to be particularly important in transforming the more specialized spec ops movie into a mass market commodity. The film, starring Lee Marvin and Telly Salavas, also reflected the increasingly violent trend in war movies and westerns during the 1960s. Marvin plays the wayward Colonel John Reisman of the OSS, tasked with training a group of US military convicts before parachuting with them into France before D-Day to kill German officers domiciled in a French chateau in Rennes, Britanny.41 Despite the wildly implausible story line, The Dirty Dozen proved a box office success at a time when cinema audiences appeared unconcerned about historical realism. The film caught the anti-establishment mood of the era among younger film audiences with its portrayal of group of hardened criminals being forged into a fighting group owing little allegiance to the United States but dependent on each other. Leaving out the psychopathic Maggott, played by Telly Savalas, the men learn to cooperate as a unit under Reisman’s command. They humiliate their main opponent in the mainstream US military, Colonel Everett Dasher Breed (Robert Ryan). As in many action movies, women make only a limited appearance, first as a group of English prostitutes brought in to service the needs of the isolated dirty dozen (they are indeed filthy when the shocked women meet them) as well as the rather smarter mistresses and wives of the German officers in Rennes. This marginal depiction of women appeared to Bosley Crowther of The New York Times to confirm the ‘gutter solidarity’ of the men in a generally ‘sadistic’ movie.42 This rather high-minded dismissal fails to understand that the film was essentially reflecting a changing audience appetite by the mid-1960s for war films that moved away from the conventional heroics of the post-war years. The last part of the film graphically depicts the coordinated attack on the chateau in which Reisman and the German-speaking Wladislaw (Charles Bronson) enter disguised as German officers, even though Wladislaw is supposed to be an American Red Indian. Once the attack commences, large numbers of the German officers and women flee to the cellars, while a gun battle ensues. The mission descends into wanton massacre as the one black member of team, Jefferson (played by ex-US football star Jim Brown), drops grenades through the ventilation shafts while Ryan pours in petrol,

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leading to a huge explosion that destroys most of the Chateau. This gruesome level of violence offended many critics, and the film still manages to shock, not least for the high-angle shots looking up the ventilation shafts showing Jefferson throw down grenades reminiscent of Zyklon B gas capsules at Auschwitz. These shots were removed from the version released in cinemas in Germany. The Dirty Dozen can be viewed as a vicious revenge narrative in which Germans have become almost completely depersonalized. This was, after all, a period in which the full dimensions of the holocaust were still not properly known. The twenty-sixepisode TV series The World at War would not go on air until 1973–1974 while the more detailed documentary examination of the holocaust Auschwitz, The Nazis and the Final Solution was only released in 2005 showing that not all Germans were involved in the planning of the mass extermination of Jews, gypsies and homosexuals. If there had been such public portrayals in the early 1960s it is hard to see how the film could have been made in the way it was. The film script of The Dirty Dozen also served as a harsh reminder of what happens to a novel when it is turned into an action movie. E.M. Nathanson’s novel, The Dirty Dozen, recounts Reisman’s efforts to turn twelve marginal and mostly condemned men into a fighting unit. It scarcely rates as a combat novel since the main part of the contemplative text focuses on the lives and background of the various men involved. Reisman, for instance, develops a tender and close relationship with Tisha, a girl twenty years younger than himself, while most of the other characters have complex and troubled backgrounds. The one black character, called Jefferson in the film, is a welleducated Lieutenant called Napoleon in the novel. He has been condemned to hang for a revenge murder of a white artillery sergeant who had been involved in a racial attack leaving him half dead in a ditch. Similarly, Bronson’s film character Wladislaw is a Navaho Indian who retains close links to his cultural past. None of this is explored in Robert Aldrich’s film. A more finely constructed movie might have used flashbacks to develop some of the characters of the men, even if this might have detracted from the pace of an action film driven towards an inevitable climactic violence. By the end of the film, all the dirty dozen, bar one, are dead in what was really a suicide mission. The preposterous idea that the US army would need to train a band of criminals for such a mission, given that it already had trained groups of Commandos, Rangers and OSS irregulars, largely passed by 1960s cinema audiences. The film reflected a continuing popular naivety concerning the use of special forces, a naivety that, arguably, changed only over the next decade with successful special forces missions such as the Israeli raid on Entebbe in June 1976 and the SAS lifting of the Iran Embassy siege in London in May 1980. The ‘dirty dozen’ are hardly conventional soldiers, even though they are not proper special forces either. They are more kamikaze-type mercenaries in a fantastical narrative that explores some of the facets of war not covered in the conventional war movie, which to many of the younger generation was starting to look tired and shopworn. This was exemplified all too starkly by the woefully poor Raid on Rommel, released in 1971 (dir. Henry Hathaway). The film starred Richard Burton as Captain Alex Foster, leader of a British Commando unit called The Desert Rats seeking to destroy German gun emplacements in Tobruk, though the recycled quality of the film

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was all too evident in footage taken from the 1967 film Tobruk. The film attempted to combine some of the themes of Burton’s classic performance in The Desert Rats (1951) with The Guns of Navarone (1961) as the commandos attack German guns located on a cliff face. The officers of the Commando group are taken prisoner and, as in The Desert Rats, come up against Rommel, this time played by Wolfgang Preiss. They destroy the guns and escape to Royal Navy ships, leaving a wounded Foster to be captured. The critic of the Radio Times dismissed the film as another example of ‘dreary Second World War action movies’.43 In 1975, Hollywood at last brought out a film that dealt quite realistically with one of the most important special operations of the war – Operation Anthropoid – involving the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in May 1942. The operation had formed the basis for a largely fictional and war-time propaganda film Hangmen Also Die (1943), directed by Fritz Lang and Arnold Pressburger, where the focus is on the aftermath of the assassination (which is not shown) and the desperate efforts of the Czech resistance to survive the Nazi reign of terror. Operation Daybreak (1975), by contrast, went into considerable detail to follow the planning before the actual operation in an action movie that is quite successful in its ability to build up audience suspense. The film (dir. Lewis Gilbert) played fast and loose with historical events to construct a narrative that builds up a steady suspense aided by an electronic musical score. This was as much an action as a special operations movie, though it was anchored in real events. But the movie ended up once again reinforcing the myth – perhaps by now a national conceit – about the capacity of SOE to organize and largely control special operations in occupied Europe. The movie begins in late 1941 when General Cross (Patrick Wymark) of SOE invites three British-trained Czech partisans to take part in an operation that he describes as one of the most important of the war. Heydrich has now been installed as Reich Protector in Prague for a few months and Cross predicts that he may very well succeed Hitler should the Fuhrer die: an amazing assertion given how little was known about the internal political rivalries in the Third Reich or indeed the likely outcome of the war before Stalingrad. Leaving this dramatic licence aside, Cross’s interview with the Czechs in the film is important for implanting the idea that this is essentially a British military operation, even if the men chosen are Czechs who know something of the lie of land in their native country. The Czechs are dressed in British army uniforms and behave as British soldiers. As we look over Cross’s shoulder in one scene, we see the men as very much the dutiful operatives for an apparently British-designed mission. The apparently British nature of the mission ensures that the film avoids wandering into the crucial political circumstances in which the real Operation Anthropoid took place. SOE had little influence over the decisions of exile governments in Britain such as the Czech government under Edouard Benes. Ever since the outbreak of the war, Benes had been frantically trying to assert his own government’s role and importance to counteract the possibility of the German occupation becoming permanent. Benes was haunted by the idea that Britain might decide to make peace with the Germans, leaving them in effective control of what was now called Bohemia and Moravia. This appeared rather more likely in the wake of the German invasion of Russia in June of 1941 and

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Benes was now even more determined to use his control over the Czech resistance, the strongest in Europe apart from the Poles, as a bargaining card in his relations with SIS, SOE and the Russians.44 He became especially keen on partisan operations to bolster links between the exile government in London and the underground as well as demonstrating the credibility of his government in any peace negotiations once the war was over.45 Benes took advantage of SOE’s minimal influence over Czech operations. Contrary to Gilbert’s film version, it was the Czech exiles in Britain who selected targets, chose operatives and organized briefings, allowing SOE little or no say. As far as the wartime Churchill government was concerned, the killing of a senior Nazi figure hardly went against any British strategic interests, though from an intelligence point of view there was considerable likelihood that a successful assassination would lead to a massive German response that might destroy most of the surviving resistance network. However, by late 1941 Benes was playing for high stakes and needed to demonstrate that the Czech resistance could achieve some results or else face the prospect that the beleaguered Russians might drop the exile resistance altogether in favour of the communist Czech exiles in Moscow led by Clement Gottwald. Operation Anthropoid got underway in December 1941 when Gabcik and Kubis were dropped from an RAF Halifax, seventy miles off target. The operation revealed some slipshod planning. The partisans had at least one tin of bully beef with an English label and failed to establish contact with the underground. It was through sheer luck that the two men encountered a local miller with links to the underground. They were taken to a safe house in Prague where they organized the assassination after a detailed study of Heydrich’s daily route from his residence outside Prague to his office in Hradcany Castle. The film depicts the assassination with considerable realism. The two men wait by a curve in the road near a tram stop; Kubis runs out in the road ready to fire but his Sten gun jams; he runs away pursued by Heydrich’s driver; Heydrich makes the mistake of standing up to try to shoot Kubis with his luger; Gabcik throws a grenade (a modified anti-tank grenade) that explodes by the side of the car severely injuring Heydrich; the driver runs after Kubis through the streets of Prague and shots are exchanged; eventually Kubis turns and shoots dead the driver on a bridge, though, in reality, he only hit him in the leg. This is an action movie and little attention is paid to the aftermath of the assassination involving brutal German repression. This eventually led the Czech partisan Sergeant Karel Curda, of the ‘Out Distance’ sabotage group, to give himself up to the Gestapo. In Gilbert’s film, he appears as a treacherous and tearful weakling, driven by concerns to protect his wife and baby son as he decides to walk through the doors of the Gestapo headquarters in Prague to confess all. This interpretation fails to account for the full impact of Nazi terror tactics in the wake of the assassination, perhaps reflecting the difficulties British cinema producers still had in the 1970s in dealing with terrorism themes. Curda’s betrayal occurred after an order by Hitler on 15 June 1942 for the execution of 30,000 politically active Czechs. Over 13,000 people had already been arrested and on 9 June the entire village of Lidice was destroyed with 199 men executed, 95 children taken into prison and 195 women moved to a concentration camp. In these grim circumstances, Curda broke down and wrote a note

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to the Gestapo identifying Gabcik and Kubis as the assassins. His decision was also a result of growing disillusion with Benes’s political leadership of the exile government, which Curda considered to be out of touch with the predicament of ordinary Czechs experiencing the Nazi terror.46 Curda’s betrayal led to a second high point in Operation Daybreak in the form of the gun battle in the Orthodox church of Sts. Cyril and Methodius in Prague. Kubis and Gabcik were hiding out here along with another four partisans. The church was besieged by 750 SS troops and in the shoot-out an estimated fourteen SS were killed and a further twenty-one wounded. The film recreates the battle with some accuracy, though the partisans mostly had small-calibre pistols rather than Sten guns in the movie; also, four men eventually committed suicide in the crypt, rather than Kubis and Gabcik in the film. For the period, Operation Daybreak was a realistic film that was generally well received by critics. It was released at a time when Hollywood found the subject of Vietnam difficult to bring to the screen. It was far safer to deal with more conventional concepts of military heroism of Second World War vintage. Despite the film’s misleading portrayal of the operation as one completely inspired and planned by the British government, this was a movie that took special operations like Operation Anthropoid rather more seriously than many previous films, despite the eventual betrayal of the Czech assassins. The monster Heydrich was also killed, though the price paid by the civilian Czech population proved to be enormous. It was these people who are often now judged to be the real heroes of the story, though they still lack a film detailing their experiences. Operation Daybreak certainly developed a compelling narrative of special operations. It also raised interesting questions on the risks involved when inserting small groups of trained specialists with apparently little detailed knowledge of the terrain or ability to navigate on their own. The problem becomes even clearer in the 2016 film Anthropoid (dir. Sean Ellis) starring Jamie Dorman as Jan Kubis and Cillian Murphy as Josef Gabcik. The movie, interestingly, completely avoids the British background to the operation and starts with Dorman and Kubis parachuting off course into a snowy Czech landscape. They have been trained but not that well, and compare rather poorly to the professionals in modern special forces. They are fortunate to meet up with the Czech resistance, though this has already been decimated by the crackdown instigated by Heydrich. Some partisans express surprise when they hear of the intended target of the two operatives, one offering the opinion that the basic reason was to boost the credibility of the exile Czech government in London. The movie maintains its focus on the two main operatives with more historical realism than Operation Daybreak. The romantic relationship of Murphy’s Gabcik with one of the female resistance members Marie Kovarnika (Charlotte Le Bon) is only briefly touched on, while the steady buildup of tension relies on dialogue and actual settings in Prague (shot in an appropriate brown filter) rather than a dramatic musical score. Even Heydrich barely makes an appearance in the film, having been briefly introduced via some real black and white footage at the start. There is no dramatic recreation of his domestic life with wife and children and he is only momentarily seen after the actual attack, falling back wounded into a shattered car (the grenade also

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blows in the glass of a passing tram). Ellis has paid scrupulous attention to historical detail and this continues into the final shoot-out in the Church of St Cyril and St Methodius. The Germans are led to this church after torturing a resistance leader to reveal their whereabouts, so tending to down-play Curda’s betrayal. Some of the resistance manage to take vials of cyanide to avoid this sort of torture and we become strongly aware in this film of the sheer scale of the German state terrorism in Prague, with propaganda leaflets and huge financial rewards for information leading to the arrest of the assassins. Ellis’s film reflects the growing importance of films focused on sub-state and state terrorism in the last two decades. Cillian Murphy had also starred as starred as an IRA guerrilla fighter Damien O’Donovan in the 2006 movie The Wind That Shakes the Barley (dir. by Ken Loach) and has the look of an urban insurgent. Anthropoid also debunked one of the major special operations myths in the Second World War. The assassination was not inspired by an indigenous Czech guerrilla resistance able to exert some say into the strategy of the underground. The leader of this resistance Jan (Toby Jones) maintains a discreet distance from the political and personal battles being fought out. He reflects an urbane and rather resigned bourgeois commitment to violent resistance of some form, but has neither the background nor training to equip him to lead it with any effectiveness. In the end, he manages to commit suicide before being captured by the Germans, his most decisive existential act in the movie. This is a film, then, that manages to be both an action movie and one that outlines some of the problems and difficulties in special operations. By the time Anthropoid was released, Hollywood turned to American special operations in the Second World War; particularly, the largely neglected US Ranger raid on the Cabanatuan prison camp in the Philippines on 29–30 January 1945. The Great Raid, released in 2005 and directed by the television writer and director John Dahl, was an important Hollywood foray into US special forces raiding, though it met with a poor audience response. The raid was undertaken by US Rangers and Alamo Scouts in early to rescue 513 allied prisoners from the Cabanatuan camp in the Philippines, many in poor shape after years of captivity. The raid briefly received extensive publicity back in the United States and helped to divert attention from a far greater disaster that had ensued a few months previously when an American submarine had mistakenly sunk a Japanese ship carrying some 1,800 American prisoners to Japan in October 1944, of which only five survived.47 Media interest in it proved to be brief for it was soon overtaken by the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan and the end of the Pacific War in August 1945. The raid had been briefly and inaccurately depicted in Back to Bataan in 1945 where the raiders are even shown wearing steel helmets, though these were avoided for fear that the sun flashing on them would alert Japanese guards. The Cabanatuan raid was briefly included as an extension to the main footage of Back to Bataan, which had been shot before the raid was undertaken. Even then, it presented an image problem for the US military since it threatened to turn attention away from the role of General MacArthur in personally ‘liberating’ the Philippines. The raid was also not driven by any clear strategic calculus beyond worries over reports of an increasing insanity among Japanese prison camp commanders, one of whom had authorized the burning alive on 14 December 1944 of some 150 prisoners herded into air raid shelters at the

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Puerto Princesa Prison Camp at Palawan. This atrocity reflected the bitter nature of the Pacific War with its markedly racial overtones; American troops had frequently used flame flowers to burn alive Japanese troops hiding in caves in Saipan as early as 1942.48 There were good reasons to try and forget this part of the Pacific War as the United States sought to cultivate its Japanese ally as the Cold War became entrenched in the North-West Pacific following the uncertain ending of hostilities in Korea in 1953. US prisoners being burnt alive forms the opening scene of The Great Raid, as American forces advanced inland in Luzon in early 1945. There were worries that the Japanese would massacre their surviving prisoners as they retreated into the forests on the northern part of the island, and possibly burn them alive. The film shows barrels of aviation fuel being delivered to the Cabanatuan Camp but there is no evidence to indicate that there any actual plans afoot to burn the prisoners alive. Nevertheless, here was an opportunity to use some of the early practitioners of special operations formed as the 6th Ranger Battalion. Many of the Rangers were former farm boys who had been muleteers in New Guinea, where their unconventional tactics had been viewed with considerable suspicion by US high command. The Rangers were also helped by intelligence collected by the Alamo Scouts and Filipino insurgents under an experienced commander Captain Juan Pajota, previously attached to the American guerrilla group known as Lapham’s Raiders.49 The Rangers advanced in silence on the evening of 29 January to attack the camp from both the front and rear; at the same time, the Filipino insurgents cut road links north and south to prevent Japanese forces coming to the assistance of the camp garrison, though this never made it into The Great Raid. The attack made full use of surprise as darkness fell. It wiped out an entire Japanese battalion with an estimated 270 Japanese soldiers and prison guards killed in the attack, though some estimates range up to 1,000 in all. The Rangers also disabled several tanks inside the prison with bazookas to clear the ground for the safe passage of weak prisoners back towards American lines, in a fleet of carts drawn by buffaloes supplied by local farmers. The raid provided an immediate heroic myth for the US media and twelve of the Ranger leaders eventually met the dying Franklin Roosevelt in the White House. The Great Raid was a fairly accurate recreation of the real raid, based on historical accounts.50 The movie was shot in Australia and has a few scenes showing the assistance of Filipino guerrillas. Mucci outlines to his men the strategy behind the raid based on night-time surprise and the use of a low-flying plane to divert the attention of the guards while the Rangers crawl towards the camp. The film builds up tension by focusing on this slow advance as well as how coordination was achieved only on ordinary wrist watches, since there were no field radios. The start and finish of the raid was signalled by the firing of a flare while the main weapons available to the raiders are automatic weapons and rifles, along with bazookas to destroy Japanese tanks. The generally slow pace of film put audiences off, suggesting it might have done rather better if had been released thirty years previously to more patient cinema-goers. It gained a mere £10.8 million at the box office on a budget of $80 million and was a major loss for Miramax. Roger Ebert praised the film for its realism compared to the film Stealth (which he considered to be more like a video game) though the absence of any major stars in the cast clearly did not help.51

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Summing up It was British film producers who started cinema’s interest in special operations after the Second World War, releasing a series of films that depicted small groups of specially trained men plunged into hazardous escapades in enemy-occupied territory. Few of these films dealt exclusively with men from privileged social backgrounds and there were almost no gentlemen adventurers of pre-war vintage. Only Ill Met by Moonlight openly celebrated upper-class public school amateurism and it is pertinent to ask, where did upper class interest in special operations go in the post-war world? Did it just melt away in the face of changing post-war culture or did it solidify around other heroes? One does not need to look too hard to find at least a partial answer to this question in the form of Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Fleming was instrumental in establishing another special operations group known as 30 Assault Unit that took part in landings in North Africa, Sicily and Normandy. The central aim here was less sabotage or assassination than the gathering of intelligence and the group had a less spectacular war than those other branches of spec ops I have been examining in this chapter. Moreover, Fleming eventually wrote not about a group of heroes but an effortless upper-class counter-intelligence agent with impeccable tastes in wine and women, a hero broadly drawn on his brother Peter, who, unlike Ian, went from Eton to Oxford and the Bullingdon Club. Fleming published his first Bond novel Casino Royale during the Cold War in 1953 and his character quickly became, in Ian Rankin’s words, ‘a neo Elizabethan hero for an age when the British empire was dissolving and Britain struggled to remain at the top table among the world leaders’.52 This was not only a fantasy about one man’s super-human capacity to survive in near-impossible situations but also one that broadly appealed to a nation facing imperial decline. Despite immense changes in the way that the myth is now represented in recent Bond films, the myth has endured remarkably well, certainly in contrast to spec ops features which have been largely taken over by Hollywood. Hollywood’s interest in spec ops occurred rather later than Britain. This was partly a reflection of American military suspicion of special forces stretching back to at least the Greek civil war in the late 1940s when some senior commanders worried that special forces might evolve into ‘private armies’ outside the control of central command (fears later dramatized in the Vietnam context in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now in 1979).53 Raiding by Special Forces teams would over time become a staple item in Hollywood, but the subgenre became delayed by the impact of the Vietnam War.54 The draw-down from Vietnam in the early 1970s led to a sharp reduction in Special Forces from 13,000 men in 1971 to a mere 3,000 in 1974, and the image of SOF continued to suffer with the disaster of Operation Eagle Claw in Iran 1979, the bombing of the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut in 1983 and the Special Forces ignominious retreat in Somalia in 1993.55 Indeed, US Special Forces really came into their own with the operation to remove the Taliban regime from power in Afghanistan only in the wake of 9/11. In this instance less appeared to be more for, unlike Iraq, the United States did not invade the country with ground forces but centred the operation on a mere

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300 Special Forces together with 100 CIA personnel, working in close alliance with the Northern Alliance. In just three weeks the Taliban were removed from power in Kabul.56 Hollywood’s idea of special operations evolved over the 1980s and 1990s largely as glamorized fictions divorced from serious military realities; quite lot of emphasis was given to the establishment in 1977 of the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta, generally known as Delta Force. As series of action movies were released over the next twenty or more years involving Delta Force a series of dramatic counterterrorism operations beginning with Delta Force in 1986, starring Chuck Norris. During the 1980s, the training of US Rangers was also considerably revamped and its military technology transformed under the leadership of General Stanley McCrystal.57 But US special forces still ended up performing no major strategic role in Gulf War One in 1991. The US-led invasion in Operation Desert Storm lasted 100 hours and was a very brief conventional war based on the doctrine of the air-sea-land battle. It confirmed the overwhelming superiority of US forces in any conventional military conflict. US Special Forces did not perform any major role, and none of their operations were transferred to the cinema screen. It was the British SAS which won the laurels with its engagement behind enemy lines inside Iraq; building on the earlier 1982 movie Who Dares Wins, the film Bravo Two Zero (1999) narrated the fortunes of an eight-man SAS patrol deployed into Iraq to gather military intelligence.58 The cinematic image of US Special Forces continued to be hampered in the 1990s by the disastrous standoff on 3–4 October 1993 in Mogadishu, when nineteen members of Task Force Ranger were killed attempting to arrest a local warlord, Mohammed Farah Aidid. The operation, known by the rather cinematic title of Operation Gothic Serpent, was judged a failure, and all US forces were eventually withdrawn from Somalia. Within a few years, the Hollywood movie Black Hawk Down (dir. Ridley Scott) was released in 2001 giving a more positive spin on the Ranger operation, likening it at points to a modern-day version of Zulu as outnumbered and encircled Rangers fight off mobs of angry Somali civilians. Black Hawk Down signalled, though, the start of a more serious approach to special operations by Hollywood culminating a decade later in three films focusing on the hunt for Osama bin Laden: the TV documentary The Hunt for Bin Laden (2012), directed by Leslie Woodhead; Zero Dark Thirty (2012), die by Katherine Bigelow and the TV movie Seal Team Six (2012) directed by John Stockwell. These films will be examined in more detail in the next chapter.

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Hollywood, Terrorism and the Myth of Special Forces

During the 1980s and 1990s Hollywood found for itself an increasingly profitable market in films dealing with terrorist movements and dramatic military responses, usually involving special forces such as Army Rangers, Delta Forces or Navy SEALs, collectively termed Special Operations Forces (SOF). Terrorism and counter-terrorism narratives became popular in a range of Hollywood movies from the 1970s to the late 1990s, before a major transformation came with the September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. The spectre of international terrorism now seemed all too real and close to home. It was as if a large civilian population instantly became an army of unplanned instant extras in a violent horror movie. With planes being turned into missiles by suicide bombers and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center collapsing in clouds of dust and smoke, the event almost became, in A.O. Scott’s words, ‘a movie scenario made grotesquely literal’.1 The attacks certainly did not occur in an imaginary vacuum. Many of Hollywood terror films released in the decades prior to the 9/11 attacks had been anchored in crime, disaster or action genres. Action movies such as Black Sunday (1977), The Delta Force series, Executive Decision (1996), The Sum of All Fears (2002) and the Die Hard franchise proved especially popular in representing ‘terrorism’ through tropes involving civilians as victims not of natural disasters or invading aliens but ‘evil’ terrorist nemeses. The terrorists always receive their inevitable come-uppance by resolute counter-terrorism forces, often led by super-masculine action heroes but aided, on occasions, by supportive women. Collectively, these movies served as uncanny examples of cinema’s capacity to prophesy future events at a time when intelligence agencies like the CIA and FBI struggled, by the 1990s, to make sense of mountains of data on terrorist organizations.2 The action genre proved a major prism through which to view international terrorism. It provided a series of fast-paced narratives in which little time is given to the actual motivations of the terrorist nemeses or even to the main heroes, who are driven on by the sheer momentum and pace of events.3 Action movies also provided cinematic support for an emerging discourse of ‘counter-terrorism’ across a range of federal government institutions that eventually became centralized in the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. However, the internal dynamics of the genre have led to the growing opportunity, as I shall argue in this chapter, of SOF forming the basis of a post-Rambo cinematic myth. Such a myth is centred on the insertion and extraction of

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small groups of highly trained warriors in overseas operations, fulfilling a calibrated, but decisive, counter-terrorism role. The myth became complicated, though, by the increasing sophistication of modern military technology and the growing centrality of intelligence over special operations, leading to increasing anxieties over technology threatening human agency in modern unconventional warfare. The Rambo myth was really part of a popular mystique surrounding Sylvester Stallone’s performance in three highly popular movies in the 1980s: Rambo: First Blood (1982), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) and Rambo III (1988). The myth started to run out of steam during the following decade and the supposed ‘age of Rambo’ was really quite short-lived. It was rooted in an assertive cult of masculinity that many critics have linked to an angry mood of denial among some American film audiences that there was any real American ‘defeat’ in Vietnam.4 The mood dovetailed with the aspirations of President Reagan in the early 1980s to restore American military assertiveness and, as he portentously declared, to make ‘America great again’ (a slogan later borrowed by Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election). Reagan famously remarked in 1982, in the context of a hijacking in Beirut, ‘After seeing “Rambo” last night I know what to do next time it happens.’ The hyper-masculinity of Rambo and the new Reaganite conservatism appeared closely related and mutually beneficial. Chuck Norris’s Missing in Action 2 in 1985 even started with a clip of Reagan declaring his wish to discover, once and for all, if any prisoners were still being kept in Vietnamese prisons. Both the Rambo and Missing in Action films sought to win on screen a war what the United States had lost on the ground, epitomized by John Rambo asking Colonel Trautman in Rambo: First Blood Part II, ‘Do we get to win this time?’. Rambo is an enraged warrior familiar from literature: Achilles, for instance, angered by the murder of his friend Patroclus or Beowulf, bent on revenge after Grendel’s mother killed Aeschere, King Hrothgar’s most loyal fighter,. The theme of anger in the Rambo movies resonated with the debate on the destructive effects of battlefield shock and trauma in Vietnam, as well as the apparent failure of the Vietnamese government to repatriate all prisoners of war.5 Rambo: First Blood Part II and Chuck Norris’s Missing in Action were essentially captivity narratives that were deeply embedded in American literature and the western genre, most notably John Wayne’s The Searchers (1956) and later amplified by the captivity of members of the American embassy in Tehran between 1979 and early 1981. Captivity narratives have played a significant role in the history of empires for they personalize overseas events for domestic audiences.6 They suggest victimhood and powerlessness on the part of those in captivity and do not, alone, provide a longerterm vision for any future order. They usually become displaced by more assertive military myths that move beyond revenge towards the prosecution of wider strategic goals: Achilles eventually leaves his tent to fight and defeat the Trojans and Beowulf resolves to go down into the deep to kill the monster once and for all. For Hollywood too, the Rambo myth became progressively displaced by myths of counter-terrorist action, indelibly shaped by the model Israeli operation against Palestinian and German guerrillas at Entebbe in 1976. In this chapter I will examine Hollywood’s response to terrorism in two sections. The first section will look at the impact of international terrorism in the six films Black

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Sunday (1977), Executive Decision (1996), Clear and Present Danger (1996), The Siege (1998), Swordfish (2001) and The Sum of All Fears (2002). In the second section, I will examine the formation of the Rambo myth and the degree to which Hollywood after 9/11 has succeeded in moving beyond it by looking at films centred on intelligence and operations by special forces. I will conclude by looking at two films focused on the hunt for Osama bin Laden – Seal Team Six and Zero Dark Thirty (both released in 2012) – as well as the recent film Eye in the Sky (2015) that deals with the use of drones in counter-terrorism operations.

Hollywood and international terrorism Hollywood has, since the late 1970s, tended to focus on terrorism largely (though by no means exclusively) as a foreign phenomenon. Action films before then had vigilante activities of the San Francisco cop ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan (played by Clint Eastwood) in Dirty Harry (1971), Magnum Force 1973, The Enforcer 1976 and Sudden Impact (1983) or disaster movies such as Airport (1970), The Poseidon Adventure (1972) The Towering Inferno (1974), Earthquake (1974) and The Cassandra Crossing (1976).7 The disaster subgenre proved, for a period in the 1970s, to be a substitute for real-life terrorism, focusing as it did on big budget spectacles involving massive casualties and a few characters that audiences could get to care about. Towering Inferno, with its dramatic spectacle of a skyscraper on fire, was especially important for preparing audiences for real-life terror attacks such as 9/11 as well as providing tropes easily transferrable into terrorism movies when the subgenre took off in the 1980s and 1990s. The essential problem with most terrorism narratives was their failure to supply a credible and coherent myth of national unity like the war genre during and after the Second World War. Terrorism tropes did not reinforce the American Dream beyond a negative idea of terrorists challenging certain core American values, a notion that becomes complicated when we include domestic terrorism narratives. As I have suggested elsewhere, Hollywood did not focus solely on externally based terrorism in its action movies of the 1970s to 1990s, for there was a spate of films concerning both ‘New Left’ terrorism in the 1970s and terrorism from the far right from the early 1990s onwards.8 The narratives of domestic terrorism movies were generally eclectic and no clearly identifiable domestic terrorism subgenre really appeared, certainly in comparison to the more numerous terrorism action movies focused on Palestinian and jihadist terrorists. None appear to have had much impact on US public opinion, which, as one survey reported in 2009, consistently believed, during the period 1994– 2008, that terrorism was externally based and represented a critical threat requiring international action and the use of torture to extract information from potential suspects.9 Movies depicting terrorism were usually sustained by heightening emotions of fear and anxiety in audiences before these are eventually overcome by the application of massive counterforce. This ensured that terrorism in Hollywood cinema became, in Prince’s words, a ‘rhetorical term that creates its own kind of theatre and makes the characters feel they are caught up in events that are more significant than they actually

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are’.10 They were degenerate types of fantasy narrative that had difficulty according with mainstream national myths such as those in westerns and war movies. This would be eventually confirmed by the relatively muted public response to the ‘war on terror’ waged by the Bush administration after 9/11. This was a ‘war’ that never secured the same sort of mythological status as the national mood of revenge in the wake of Pearl Harbor; it was not really a war in the proper military sense of the term with a coherent centre of gravity but an ideological construct to cover an enhanced counter-terrorism reliant less on civilian law than military tribunals to prosecute terrorist suspects.11 The terrorist movie subgenre in the 1980s and 1990s certainly created victims, such as the passengers on a hijacked airliner, with whom cinema audiences might establish a momentary identification. But these victims were eclectic groups that failed to generate the sort of ethnic and religious identification that the Israeli passengers had secured in the series of films on the Entebbe raid in the late 1970s, relying as these did on Jewish stereotypes and memories of the holocaust. Not until the 9/11 attacks and the resulting 2006 film United 93 (dir. Paul Greengrass) did a hijacking movie evoke similar emotions of national identification as the passengers fought back to overcome the Al Qaeda hijackers, apparently crashing the plane in the process. Greengrass broke some of the unstated rules concerning the depiction of terrorism in Hollywood features by showing ordinary civilians taking the initiative rather than waiting to be rescued by a special forces unit, that in this instance can never come. One of the problems with the terrorism subgenre was its generally fantastical quality prior to 9/11. The 1977 film Black Sunday (dir. John Frankenheimer), for instance, made good use of the disaster formula as it focuses on an attempted Palestinian terrorist attack on the Miami Super Bowl with a huge hot air balloon – the Goodyear Blimp – packed with a bomb and thousands of steel flechettes. The attack is aimed at assassinating the president of the United States along with some 80,000 spectators and marks a significant expansion in the scale of a terrorist attack.12 The movie sees terrorism in the United States as a form of blowback from involvement in overseas military operations, in this instance the Palestinian-Israeli war in the Middle East. The film starts in Beirut where Mossad mounts an attack to kill several Palestinian leaders in an operation based on the real-life Operation Wrath of God. It emerges that the group planning the Miami attack is Black September, though its driving force is an embittered vet, Michael Lander (Bruce Dern). The film never gives any serious reason why Black September would want to widen the conflict to the United States (one terrorist imagines eventually bombing the White House), beyond wanting to identify the United States more closely with Israel. However, US security personnel largely discount Kabakov’s warnings of the dangers and allow the Super Bowl game to go ahead. The Blimp flies over the game since it has cameras that ensure the game can be watched on television; it is only Kabakov who saves the day by diverting the balloon so that it explodes over the sea. From the vantage point of the ‘war on terror’ post 9/11, Black Sunday portrays a naïve America needing the counsel and expertise of the battle-hardened Mossad agent Kabakov. The US political establishment seems limp and dilatory when it comes to dealing with hardened and fanatical terrorists – even the vulnerable and uninformed president in the Super Bowl looks like President Carter. Frankenheimer’s film

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transferred into the terrorism genre a trope from the Dirty Harry crime series in which weak police chiefs and city mayors fail to stand up to maniac serial killers.13 The myth considerably diverged from historical reality. Terrorism did not dominate US policy during the Reagan, George Bush or Clinton administrations of the 1980s and 1990s, though there were rising fears in intelligence circles of possible terrorist attacks in the United States. Following the 1983 Beirut bombing the United States largely avoided an active counter-terrorism role internationally until its involvement in Somalia ten years later. Americans continued to be vulnerable to terrorist attacks, but these were far from the US heartland. In 1983 both the US embassy and the Marine barracks in Beirut were struck by suicide bombers, and later the same year the US embassy in Kuwait was bombed; while TWA flight 847 was hijacked to Beirut, where the hijackers killed US navy diver Robert Dean, an incident that appeared in Chuck Norris’s Delta Force in 1986. In April the same year the United States bombed Libya in retaliation for a bombing of a discotheque in Berlin, an action that was widely credited to causing the Qaddafi regime to bomb Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988 killing 243 passengers and 16 crew. As far as Hollywood was concerned terrorism remained locked in a world of fantasy with few narratives driven by real military and political events. The terrorism action genre began to become more mainstream by the 1990s, with a series of profitable blockbusters involving terrorists gaining initial control over public spaces such as airliners, buildings, ships, trains, buses or prisons; terrorizing their captives and making impossible demands before facing inevitable retribution at the hands of specialist hit squads or lone heroes in the mould of Bruce Willis, Wesley Snipes or Steven Seagal. These narratives were largely cut adrift from wider political debate about responding to terrorism and had simplistic plot lines and implausible scenes of violence. Unless a major star such as Bruce Willis, David Suchet or Alan Rickman could rise above these constraints, the movies tended to rely on technological wizardry and increasingly spectacular special effects to sustain audience interest. A good example of this trend in the 1990s was Executive Decision (1996) directed by Stuart Baird. The movie features the usual Arab terrorist squad led by fanatic Nagi Hassan (David Suchet) which hijacks a plane bound to Washington from Athens. The film had the novel spectacular trope of an anti-terrorist squad led by Lieutenant Colonel Austin Travis (Steven Seagal) boarding the plane while it is still in the air. Nagi plans to blow up the bomb-laden plane over the United States in a suicide mission. There is a desperate purpose behind the aerial boarding, which goes wrong and Travis falls to his doom, though the other squad members make it on the plane and eventually kill the hijackers. The surprising decision to dispense with Seagal at an early stage suggested that film producers were beginning to realize that a fantasy narrative dependent on a lone masculine action hero was looking rather tired. In their heyday in the 1980s, action movies with a terrorism theme had been a means of perpetuating the lone hero recalling earlier westerns and war movies involving actors such as John Wayne, Audie Murphy and Gary Cooper. By the late 1990s, such male and largely white action heroes had decreasing credibility in a world fascinated by both celebrities and female action heroes such as Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in the Alien franchise; Jamie Lee Curtis’s

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female cop in Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel (1990) and Angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft in Lara Croft Tomb Raider (2003) and Wanted (2008). Hollywood tended to solve the problem of terrorist motivations by falling back on the tried and tested trope of money and basic criminal intentions Most of the cinematic terrorists of the post–Cold War era of the 1990s are primarily motivated by money.14 The film Clear and Present Danger (1994) attempted to introduce some sort of political dimension by focusing on US counter-terrorism strategy in relation to drug trafficking. The film, directed by Philip Noyce, was based on a Tom Clancy novel and featured CIA operative Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford) chasing a Colombian drug cartel. The cartel resorts to terrorist methods once it comes under attack by an American special forces team sent to sabotage its operations. Ryan is appointed CIA deputy director and finds out about the covert war being waged against the drug lords, a war, it emerges, that has the support of the president (Donald Moffat) who considers the cartels a ‘clear and present danger’, a principle first enunciated by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendel Holmes in 1919 to define the circumstances in which there can be limits to First Amendment freedoms of speech, press or assembly. Clear and Present Danger added some complexity to the usual terrorist action subgenre while also warning that any policy of counter-terrorism, unless unchecked, could undermine the American constitution and threaten civil liberties. Jack Ryan is a hero whose capacity for seeking out the truth is never in any doubt, though he does not have sole claim to this position since the other obvious heroes are the US special forces team sent to Colombia under its mysterious CIA operative John Clark (William Dafoe). They blow up some of the cartels’ laboratories which leads to them retaliating by attacking a CIA team when it arrives in Bogota. In a scene reminiscent of urban insurgent war, the cartel guerrillas attack the CIA column driving into the city from the airport from roof tops. Only Ryan escapes and the massacre leads to a dramatic escalation when a US jet launches a laser-guided bomb to destroy the cartel’s compound, a scene that serves as a portent for later drone attacks. The fairy-tale action scenes are compounded by Ryan’s discovery of documentary proof linking the president’s National Security Advisor James Cutter (Harry Yulin) and the Deputy Director of Operations Bob Ritter (Henry Czerny) with the covert anti-drug war in Colombia, ensuring that they will eventually face, along with the president, a Congressional investigation. Constitutional niceties and the separation of powers, in this instance, ensure that right will win out given that it is the president and his henchmen who are the real ‘clear and present danger’. Clear and Present Danger failed to investigate the morality of the CIA’s ‘black ops’ as opposed to the ‘special ops’ led by Clark. One of the drug cartels in Colombia led by Ernesto Escobedo is effectively destroyed by the end of the movie, along with his henchman, the wily Colonel Felix Cortez, formerly of Cuban intelligence. It is Cortez who strikes a bargain with Cutter to assassinate Escobedo, take over control of the cartel and limit the supply of drugs entering the United States, so enabling the president to say he has ‘won’ the war on drugs. None of this comes off by the end of the movie, though how far Ryan wins is disputable too. Clear and Present Danger lacked the moral certainties of most previous action movies even if it was only vaguely driven by historical realism. The real Colombian

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drug lord Pablo Escobar, who at the height of his career, supplied some 80 per cent of the cocaine smuggled into the United States and was estimated to be worth $30 billion, died during the making of the movie in a shoot-out with Colombian security forces on 2 December 1993. A total of 25,000 people attended his funeral, suggesting that the drug cartel had considerable popular support in Colombia, a dimension the film does not explore. In 2015 the TV series Narcos finally started documenting Escobar’s rise and fall in a series released through Netflix, paying some attention to his obvious popularity in Colombia despite his war with the state. American counter-terrorism policy was starting to expand by the time Clear and Present Danger was released. The first bombing of the Twin Towers on 26 February 1993 was a wake-up call, though exactly how to respond remained a difficult question to answer. Over the next few years, the main agency authorized to handle domestic terrorist attacks was the FBI, though this led to considerable tensions between the FBI and CIA and rivalry with the State Department over who was to take the lead in responding terrorist threats. The splits also reflected differing outlooks towards the preservation of civil liberties.15 The FBI had its own internal divisions, exacerbated by the controversial figure of John O’Neill, the special agent in charge of counterterrorism until he was forced to leave in August 2001. O’Neill, who died in the 9/11 attack on the twin towers, had, by 1998, created an Al Qaeda desk in his division (some years in advance of Alec Station in the CIA). He was increasingly warning before his death of the possibility of a mass terrorist attack inside the United States. O’Neill’s position was not only undermined by hostile forces inside the FBI but by a recalcitrant CIA, wary of sharing intelligence information with a rival it viewed as an upstart in the field of foreign intelligence. The agency was fearful that any prosecutions that resulted from any intelligence it shared with the Bureau would compromise its relationship with foreign intelligence services. A report by the inspector general in 2005 found that some fifty to sixty people inside the agency knew that at least two of the 9/11 plane hijackers were inside the United States but never bothered to inform the FBI.16 This was an intelligence failing on a major scale that would only gradually emerge from revelations over the following few years and has not as yet formed the narrative of a Hollywood movie. Prior to 9/11, there were certainly hints of significant rifts inside the huge US intelligence community, which by 2007 employed over 100,000 people and had a budget of $50 billion, considerably more than what the US federal government spent on energy, scientific research or the prison system.17 For Hollywood, the FBI had been an arm of government usually deserving of praise; it had been Hoover’s G men, led by the incorruptible Eliot Ness, who had helped to bring the mobs into some sort of control in the 1930s, while the 1945 propaganda movie The House on 92nd Street recounted the FBI’s important role in hunting down Nazi agents in America during the Second World War. During the Cold War the FBI largely avoided being associated with foreign espionage. It focused on domestic issues, launching in 1956 its counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO) that, by 1960, had already investigated a staggering 430,000 individuals and political and civil groups. COINTELPRO would later be used to track and follow many involved in the anti-war coalition in the 1960s as well as the Black

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Panthers, though its activities here never made it to the cinema screen.18 The FBI’s generally heroic image was further sustained by The FBI Story (1959), the 118-episode television series The Untouchables from 1959 to 1963, while the 1987 movie The Untouchables in 1987, starring Kevin Costner as hard-nosed family man Eliot Ness, confirmed the Bureau as an apparently incorruptible agency.19 The FBI’s positive cinematic was maintained into the 1990s, with some luck given the way the Bureau handled the ‘siege’ at Waco, Texas, in 1993. Following the withdrawal of ATF agents, the FBI brought in Bradley Fighting Vehicles, later reinforced by tanks, leading to the death of seventy-six Branch Davidians including twenty children. This might have turned into a public relations disaster but, fortunately for the FBI, the events at Waco were dwarfed by the first bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. Compared to the FBI, the CIA had a far more negative image on screen, especially by the latter stages of the Cold War. It was not until 1995 that the Agency first employed Chase Brandon to organize its relationship with the movie industry, leading to more positive images in movies such as Enemy of the State (1998) and The Sum of All Fears (2002).20 Prior to this, the CIA was often portrayed negatively by Hollywood. The 1975 movie Three Days of the Condor had CIA operative Joe Turner (Robert Redford) on the run after it emerges he has threatened a rogue element inside the agency which has a plan for the USA to take over the oil fields in the Middle East. Turner evades CIA hitmen who behave like the mob and eventually survives to fight another day. In the years after Watergate, the Agency seemed the embodiment of corrupt secretive government working against the national interest, an image only later rectified by CIA hero Jack Ryan in movies such Patriot Games (1992), Clear and Present Danger (1994) and The Sum of All Fears (2002). The secrecy rendered its activities suspicious and part of a conspiracy, while the FBI, following the death of Hoover in 1975, seemed both visible and accessible, with operatives frequently working with clear FBI labels on brightly coloured orange garb. The contrasting screen imagery of the FBI and CIA was evident in The Siege in 1998 (dir. Edward Zwick), a film partly scripted by the writer and journalist Lawrence Wright and influenced by the rifts in the intelligence community following the first bombing of the Twin Towers in 1993. The FBI in the movie are headed by Anthony ‘Hub’ Hubbard (Denzel Washington), the third time a black actor was placed in a leading policing/intelligence role in American movies in the 1990s.21 The movie drew on events in both Afghanistan and the Middle East to construct a fictional jihadist terrorist leader in the form of an Iraqi Sheikh, Ahmed ban Talal, modelled broadly on bin Laden. It also referred to specific events such as the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as well as the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, news footage of which appears at the start of the movie. The title of the movie recalled the earlier film State of Siege by Costa Gavras depicting the draconian state response to the Tupamaros guerrillas in Uruguay. Of all the films released in the twenty years of so before the 9/11 attacks, The Siege was the most alarming in the way it suggested that counter-terrorism was a dangerous path down to a military or garrison state and the destruction of democratic liberties.

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The Siege was really just another action movie. It has Ahmed bin Talal kidnapped by a hands-on General Devereaux (Bruce Willis), prompting a series of jihadist counter attacks by suicide groups working underground in New York. Three armed men with explosives tied to their bodies hijack a bus in Brooklyn which they blow up when the media arrive to report the event. But the movie also has American soldiers marching in Brooklyn, apparently inspired by the French paras marching into Algiers in Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers.22 The film moved, though, beyond the simplistic format of the evil terrorist nemesis to an exploration of underground terrorist cells in New York that mount a series of attacks following the capture of the leading mastermind bin Talal, a sort of American variant of Osama bin Laden.23 The movie stands out as the one cautionary tale in the terrorism action movies made by Hollywood before 9/11. Even before the 9/11 attacks, it was evident there were growing problems with the action movie genre and signs of a backlash against ever more complex and ambivalent characters. This was exemplified by the fantasy action film Swordfish (2001) directed by Dominic Sena and starring John Travolta and Halle Berry. The movie had an unusual opening speech by the superspy Gabriel Shear (Travolta) who purports to be waging war against terrorism, but is little different to his supposed enemies. Gabriel complains of the lack of realism in the ‘American cinematic vision’. He praises the film Dog Day Afternoon, as ‘Arguably Pacino’s best work, short of Scarface and Godfather Part 1, of course’. The problem with the film was that ‘they didn’t push out the envelope. Now what if in Dog Day, Sonny REALLY wanted to get away with it? What if – now here’s the tricky part – what if he started killing hostages right away? No mercy, no quarter. “Meet our demands or the pretty blonde in the bellbottoms gets it in the back of the head.” Bam, splat! What, still no bus? Come on! How many innocent victims splattered across a window would it take to have the city reverse its policy on hostage situations? And this is 1976; there’s no CNN, there’s no CNBC, there’s no internet!’. The kneejerk tone of the film led critics to attack it as ‘dumb and incoherent’,24‘a nasty explosion down at the plot works’25 and ‘very silly’.26 But the film, from a rather more distant perspective, can be seen to mark a crossroads in the action adventure genre. There were several possible ways for film producers to sustain audience interest: increasingly graphic violence of the Tarantino kind; a mixture of action with dark comedy, leading to features such as Mr and Mrs Smith (2005) and The Tourist (2010); a third was greater awareness of civil liberties and legal dimensions of counter-terrorism measures, as in the case of The Siege (1998). A fourth possibility was increased historical realism, though this was not especially obvious in Hollywood at the end of the millennium.27 Hollywood’s confusion over the action genre was evident in one of the more popular films released in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, The Sum of All Fears, based on another Tom Clancy novel. The film was released in early 2002 despite being shot before 9/11. Grossing $193 million on a budget of $68 million, the film accorded with the post-9/11 mood, largely because it portrayed the ultimate nightmare terrorist attack in the form of an atomic bomb detonated in Baltimore, destroying most of the city even though the visiting president manages to escape. While the actual nuclear explosion is shocking to watch, this is, in the end, another fantasy action film. The chief nemesis is not a jihadist or Arab terrorist but a scheming Nazi in the form of Professor Dressler (Alan Bates)

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who plans a nuclear war between the United States and Russia to ensure an eventual Nazi victory. The fantastical nature of the terrorist plot certainly ensured the film’s success; at the initial press screening, the audience were reported to have sat in ‘riveted silence’. With the image of a mushroom cloud rising over Baltimore, the film was a stark reminder of the potential for mass terrorist attacks, though it failed to explore with any serious realism the likely outcome of any such attack. No one seems to suffer from the effects of radiation; the president’s rushed but successful escape from the stadium seems absurd; while there is little sense of the mass casualties that would ensue from such a device exploding over a major city.28 The movie at least avoided allegorical treatments of terrorism such as Steven Spielberg’s The War of the Worlds in 2005, where alien Martians attack New York aided by a dormant underground network and Cloverfield (dir. Matt Reeves) in 2008 where an alien monster attacks New York, brings down skyscrapers and defeats the US military.

Moving beyond Rambo: Special forces and the killing of bin Laden The action movie genre picked up within a few years of 9/11 and has become once more a major part of contemporary Hollywood film making. None of Hollywood’s action movies have quite been able to generate the sort of cinematic mythology surrounding Rambo in the 1980s. This myth, certainly in the first two of Stallone’s films Rambo: First Blood and Rambo: First Blood Part II, was important for transforming the status of veterans via a ‘stab in the back’ myth to explain the poor reception many vets received on returning to the United States. It proved a successful money-spinner for Hollywood while also appealing to feelings of public guilt over the poor treatment received by veterans when returning back from the conflict. Rambo was a military myth, in contrast to the science fiction myth forged at roughly the same time around the Star Wars movies of George Lucas. The first three of the Star Wars films – Star Wars (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983) – provided a major cinematic myth of American rediscovery following the trauma of defeat in Vietnam. As John Hellmann has suggested, the movies offered the ‘potential power … to energize Americans to move forward from that experience with a modified conception of their character and destiny’. The citizen soldiers led by Luke Skywalker, accompanied by the noble savage Wookie, are a reincarnation of the American revolutionary frontiersmen fighting imperial redcoats, transformed in Lucas’s movies into faceless, helmeted white drones under the control of the dark Nazitype figure of Darth Vader.29 The science fiction fantasy of Star Wars, aimed as it was at general family viewing, could never address the full implications of US military defeat, or the anger of many returning veterans. It was at best a fantasy of ultimate American values prevailing against dark faceless enemies. By contrast, the Rambo movies appealed to more specific masculine fantasies, evidenced by the way the movie myth ended up considerably different to the original Rambo: First Blood novel of Canadian-American writer David Morell (published in 1972).30

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Rambo is a complex young man of 19 trained in jungle warfare but finds he has no place in the insular society of the United States. The novel is a taught confrontation across the generations and between the military and the police as Rambo comes up against the figure of Wilfred Teasle, the police chief of the town of Madison, Kentucky. Rambo sticks in the throat of the angry and frustrated Teasle, a disappointed figure from an earlier generation of conventionally trained American warriors. Rambo with long hair and dirty clothes looks like a vagrant and a hippie and conflict quickly ensues as Teasle tries to run him out of town. Rambo is arrested and a fight ensues in the police station jail, where Rambo kills two cops before escaping, completely naked and with no weapons, out into the woods. Teasle gives chase but fails to realize he is really taking on a former Special Forces soldier now turned insurgent. Rambo secures the gain help from an illegal distiller and his son, who give him clothes and a rifle. After further killings and a dramatic escape out of a disused mine, Rambo gets back into Madison where he destroys half the town before his former Army colonel and father figure, Trautman, kills him after vainly pleading with him to give himself up. There is no suggestion here of a large masculine body, but a rather sad tale of a traumatized ex-soldier. Rambo is also more of a crack shot than a resourceful man of the frontier as he is portrayed in Rambo: First Blood.31 In the novel, he kills some of Teasle’s police officers rendering him close to being a lone terrorist rather than a victim of an indifferent or incompetent civilian establishment. In the film version, Rambo relies on a large knife as a weapon together with wits and resourcefulness, killing almost no one but causing huge destruction. Here were the key ingredients for a new screen myth of a primeval warrior engraining previous myths of self-reliant frontiersmen, battling an indifferent urban elite but engraining primordial values behind American national purpose.32 In such a context, Rambo becomes less a distinct character than an example of a mythical ‘chord’ that Robert Ray has argued forms the typical approach of Hollywood to cinematic myth creation, drawing as it does on ‘refracted, superimposed mirror images held together by the audience’s complicity in their formation and recognition’. Other examples of these kinds of chords are Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and serve as vital reminders of Hollywood’s capacity to bind together mythic impulses from different ideological standpoints, unlike other cinemas such as France in the era of the new wave.33 Rambo: First Blood certainly works as a test of manly endurance. We know Rambo has to break out of the police station as flashbacks on screen remind us that he has been captured and tortured by the Vietnamese, in a manner not so different to the three friends in The Deer Hunter. We also know that he will survive the endurance test of going down a disused mine to escape from the incompetent National Guard squad sent to kill or capture him. The only real surprise is perhaps the sheer scale of destruction as Rambo blows up large parts of downtown Madison. Along the way, we encounter a few things to remind us of Rambo’s experience with guerrilla warfare, such as the deadly NLF-style trap of sharpened stakes that impales one policeman (though not fatally), a device first encountered in The Green Berets (1968). Rambo is not, strictly speaking, a guerrilla but a Special Forces soldier, trained in counterinsurgency, though some of his techniques, such as traps with pointed

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spikes, emulate the NLF in Vietnam. This dimension is blurred in Rambo: First Blood but becomes clearer in the Rambo: First Blood Part II, where Rambo, once released from jail term, is sent on a mission back to Vietnam to locate American prisoners of war. Rambo’s mission derived from an urban myth that Vietnam was still holding American prisoners. Only 592 prisoners had actually returned to the United States after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973 during Operation Homecoming. This left 1,350 American prisoners of war who were still missing along with a further 1,200 reported as killed in action. Rambo: First Blood Part II, released in 1985, grew out of this myth and drew some of its audience impact in the United States from the continuing belief of many vets that Vietnam was deliberately concealing the truth about the prisoners it was still holding. Veteran organizations expressed exasperation over the slow pace of negotiations with the government of Vietnam and the absence of completely reliable information, not helped by the fact that there were no proper diplomatic relations at this time between the United States and Vietnam. This provided fertile ground for a right-wing conspiracy theory to develop suggesting a plot by the US government to conceal the truth. This time, the main culprits are less the police than civilian federal administrators who say one thing and do another while trying to control things by computerized technology.34 Parachuting into Vietnam, Rambo loses most of his equipment but establishes contact with a Vietnamese intelligence operative, the mixed-race woman Ca Bao (Julia Nickson). She leads Rambo to a camp where he finds some US prisoners and rescues one, taking him back to the location where a helicopter is due to pick him up. But the mission is aborted by Murdoch once he hears that Rambo has rescued a prisoner. Rambo and the prisoner are betrayed and left to be picked up by the advancing Vietnamese. He is tortured by a Russian interrogator, though Ca Bao helps Rambo escape. He destroys most of the camp and rescues the prisoners, seizes a helicopter and gets back successfully to Thailand. He angrily confronts Murdoch after shooting up the computer equipment in his office. He has unwittingly exposed a conspiracy in higher sections of government to prevent any serious action being taken to free the prisoners in Vietnam, and the film ends with him expressing his injured patriotic feelings to Trautman. The movie provides a strong contrast to the successful revelations of executive misdemeanour a few years earlier by two Washington Post journalists in All the President’s Men (1976).35 The two Rambo films in the 1980s were crucial to the transformation of the cinematic image of veterans, which had been almost uniformly negative during the 1970s. In Fiend with an Electronic Brain (1971), for instance, criminals plant an electronic device into the brain of a veteran to turn him into a zombie; while in Rolling Thunder (1977), a veteran uses his military skills to exact violent revenge on some criminals who have murdered his wife and family.36 Even The Deer Hunter shows veterans reacting in either a very passive way by clinging on to whatever values they have known from before their tour of duty or going down a road of self-destruction like Christopher Walken’s Nick. Rambo: First Blood Part II, however, did not relate to the actual historical war in Vietnam, and was more concerned with winning on screen what had been lost on the ground, epitomized by Rambo’s famous line to Trautman, ‘Do we get to win this time?’37

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Rambo: First Blood was by no means the first film to portray returning war veterans resorting to massive violence back in hometown America. Welcome Home Soldier Boys in 1971 (dir. Richard Compton) had four returning veterans setting out by car across the United States for California. After a series of humiliations, they end up in Hope, Texas, which they lay waste with an array of weaponry: the Texas governor declares a state of emergency and sends in troops who eventually shoot the four vets down, though not before they have shot down a helicopter with an RPG. The vets in the end failed and the film, too, unsurprisingly failed at the box office, since it could not garner any huge following for what really appears a madcap venture by four crazed gunmen lacking any of the superman appeal or revenge motive of the Rambo kind. The success of Rambo became inextricably linked to the screen presence of Sylvester Stallone; the advertising of the films was enormously successful in raising audience expectations by focusing simply on the name ‘Stallone’.38 The film hinges on the promise of delivering the goods by letting the audience know in advance that he will succeed against an evil enemy. Rambo: First Blood Part II established Rambo as a screen icon by the middle 1980s, making over $300 million at the box office on a film budget of $25.5 million; a huge increase over the $47 million earned in the United States ($125 million worldwide) for Rambo: First Blood. The movies certainly gave considerable life to action movies in the course of the 1980s and 1990s, despite being dismissed by some liberal critics such as British producer David Puttnam as a ‘despised genre’.39 There would be several emulations such as Chuck Norris’s Missing in Action (1984), though this was more of an anti-communist film than a stab-in-the-back movie, with the main enemy being the communist government of Vietnam rather than a weak Washington bureaucracy. Norris’s character Colonel Braddock escapes from a Vietnamese prison camp and accompanies a government team sent to Vietnam to investigate whether any more prisoners are being held. He goes out at night in Ho Chi Minh City to find the evidence before returning to Thailand to organize a mission to free the prisoners. Costing just $1.5 million to make, Missing in Action earned Cannon Group MGM, $6.5 million in the United States and a $22,812,411 worldwide. By the late 1990s, there was still no discernible alternative myth to the Rambo myth of a decade earlier. Conventional war movies did not accord with the modern experience of warfare and provided at best, as in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), moral precepts for the young on how to live on in a post-war world. One other possible form was the special forces combat movie, which had been glamorized in fictional terms in the 1980s in movies such as Delta Force but remained fictional given the actual experiences of US Special Forces in arenas such as Iran in 1979 (Operation Eagle Claw) and Somalia (Operation Restore Hope) in 1993, the latter reaching the screen in Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down in 2001. It was not until the successful killing of Osama bin Laden at Abbottabad in May 2011 that any serious possibility presented itself of a special forces cinematic myth, though, as we shall see later, this became complicated by the political controversy surrounding the CIA intelligence operation that revealed bin Laden’s whereabouts. The Rambo myth was more or less laid to rest as far as Hollywood was concerned with Katherine Bigelow’s movie The Hurt Locker (2009), though Stallone only actually

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retired in 2016 at the age of 69.40 Set in Iraq, The Hurt Locker usurps Rambo’s simplistic triumphalism by exposing the addictive and depersonalizing features of modern war The movie’s central character is Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), who heads a three-man bomb disposal squad in Baghdad during the height of insurgent attacks in 2006–2007. James has to disarm road bombs containing huge quantities of ordnance; he finds the challenge of this addictive, despite being dressed in a hot and heavy blast suit that almost reduces him to a robot. James finds sleeping in the blast suit’s helmet comforting, suggesting that his role has more or less taken over his unstable identity; he returns on leave but finds relations with his wife difficult and is locked into the adrenaline-fueled excitement of his job back in Iraq. James approaches his task in a gung-ho and improvisational manner, in this regard resembling at least some aspects of Rambo, for he is by no means an entirely orthodox military professional. The title of the film ‘Hurt Locker’ refers to the category of trauma known as ‘Shell Shock 2’ where the victim is in close proximity to the deafening noise of an explosion. The victim is enclosed by very loud noise that is also preceded by long periods of menacing silence. It is not surprising that one of James’s ways of coping with this is by listening to deafeningly loud heavy metal music, which also helps him construct an outer veneer of fragile masculinity. Out of this dark maelstrom into which James has wandered there are few warm features, though he displays some affection for an Iraqi boy selling fake DVDs and is distraught to find later that he has been tortured and killed. James displays an almost unlimited bravado in the way he tackles the bombs and is admiringly called a ‘wild man’ by his commanding officer. At heart, he is insecure and uncertain of his identity and hardly a conventional war hero, and accords more with previous Hollywood films portraying the pointless and addictive quality of war such as Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron (1977) where Sergeant Steiner (James Coburn) cannot wait to return to the Russian Front in 1943 even if this means leaving the arms of a beautiful nurse. The Hurt Locker suggested that modern unconventional warfare does not really sustain traditional heroic myths of individual prowess, but rather team work aided by robust intelligence and sophisticated military technology in which there is no room for a ‘wild man’ such as James. This would become evident a few years later with two films depicting the operation to kill Osama bin Laden, Seal Team Six and Zero Dark Thirty. In both movies the focus is less on the activities of one individual than a group of military professionals, aided by extensive intelligence and advanced military technology. We are a long way from the romantic frontier image of Rambo in the forest or jungle; the imagery continues many of the precepts of the special operation examined in the last chapter, centred on detailed intelligence, constant rehearsals, high motivation and tight planning to ensure a successful extraction. This was also a strategic rather than a tactical special operation, requiring authorization at the highest levels of government and a weighing up of the probabilities of success or failure. This was a narrative convention, interestingly, that had never been fully embraced by Hollywood. Many of the action movies involving special forces still had a star as the heroic team leader, such as Chuck Norris in Delta Force (1986) or Bruce Willis in Tears of the Sun (1993), while the long shadow cast by movies such as The Dirty Dozen and The Wild Bunch led the industry to highlight the anti-social and deviant nature

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of weaponized small group formations. They might be highly motivated men skilled in firearms and other weaponry but they were all also, very often, desperados out for loot or personal revenge. Hollywood tended to be less keen to release films of small highly trained teams under the tight and unquestioned control of their commanders, such as some of the post-war British special operations (exemplified especially well by the taut naval adventure Above Us the Waves in 1955) or even the highly motivated and cohesive Israeli team that attacked Entebbe in 1976. There was little scope in such movies to appeal to the usual conventions of the American war movie: hectic and fractured relationships with women, aggressive rifts between individuals in the team, doubts about the purpose of the mission and queries about the leadership capacities of the group’s commander (always resolved by the end of the movie). These problems have become clearer with the increasing pace of technological change in modern warfare that threatens to undermine traditional representation of special operations of the kind examined in the last chapter. Satellite and drone imagery ensure that almost all the group’s action can be viewed by their command and control in real time, including a special White House operations room set up to view the 2011 operation to kill bin Laden. This operation was notable for the apparent absence of drones and constant viewing of potential targets from the air, though the massive expansion of drone warfare has ensured that modern special operations have become increasingly absorbed into US counter-terrorism strategy, pivoted around an interlocking nexus of intelligence, electronic surveillance, the constant evaluation of teams of senior political decision-makers and, finally, the insertion of a Special Forces team if the target is deemed too high grade to be eliminated by a bomb or drone missile. Even the Special Forces teams take on many of the features of robots with their body armour; with the continuing growth in artificial intelligence they may even become proper robots in the course of the next few decades. For the moment at least, counter-terrorism still relies on the availability of highly trained and rehearsed SOF teams, ready to be inserted at short notice to assassinate or kidnap key targets as well secure access to vital electronic intelligence data. This role emerged in the two features released a year after the 2011 Abbottabad raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Seal Team Six (also called Code Name Geronimo) and Zero Dark Thirty. Both movies capitalized on the short-lived sense of triumphalism in the United States as a figure seen as ‘public enemy number one’ finally eliminated by the forces of law and order, almost on the lines of a G men hit on a 1930s mobster. The movies appeared before the well-researched 2013 documentary Manhunt (dir. John Woo) on the CIA operation to find bin Laden after his disappearance from Afghanistan at the end of 2001. They were released two years before the final appearance, at the end of 2014, of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, revealing a systematic failure by the CIA to reveal the full scale of its ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ that appeared to be in breach of the 2005 UN Convention Against Torture as well as considerable evidence to suggest that such torture usually failed to produce reliable intelligence.41 Seal Team Six and Zero Dark Thirty also came out at a controversial time politically in the United States, as doubts were raised on the effectiveness of counterterrorism strategy in the wake of decision of the Obama administration to begin a major troop drawdown from Iraq and Afghanistan.

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The movies approached the Abbottabad raid from considerably different standpoints. The first, Seal Team Six, was a TV movie directed by John Stockwell and first shown on the National Geographic Channel. It was released by Harvey Weinstein’s company Voltage Pictures and, as the title suggests, focused on the Special Forces team sent to kill bin Laden. This was essentially an action movie, though its small budget and time span of 90 minutes ensured that little could be covered in any detail and a number of narrative threads were left unpursued in a rambling script. The film starts not with the 9/11 attack but a Seal Team patrol walking through a narrow gulley in Afghanistan. The patrol encounters some civilians and is fired on from above; a firefight ensues and some guerrillas are killed before a woman explodes a bomb killing one of the team. The incident might have been lifted from any number of Afghan-related action movies; it acquaints us, though, with the squad’s leader Stunner (Cam Gigandet) who will go on to lead the team at Abbottabad. Stunner has to cope with more than just a Seal Team but a drunken wife back home who has been having an affair. He attempts to sort her out, though we never learn the outcome, only that he has to put this all out of his mind as he is tasked with the new mission in Pakistan. SEALs are, in this movie at least, men of the action hero type, who cannot allow domestic considerations to influence their performance in the field. This is a trope considerably different to some of the movies released on drone warfare in the last few years, especially Good Kill (2013) that accords with research evidence suggesting that the world of drone pilots is often a demoralizing and topsy-turvy one, involving nighttime hours, alcohol abuse and acute stress on home life.42 Seal Team Six is a laddish film with limited roles for women. Apart from Stunner’s wife the only other female role is the CIA ‘threat analyst’ Vivian (Kathleen Robertson), who features in the movie’s brief foray into the CIA intelligence operation to locate bin Laden. Vivian is hampered by a doubting CIA chief (William Fichtner) demanding ‘actionable intelligence’ and preferring to carry on discussion in the male toilet from which Vivian is conveniently excluded. The boss seems fairly positive that bin Laden was killed in 2007 and Vivian has the task of demonstrating the near certainty (she eventually settles on 95 per cent) that bin Laden is inside the Abbottabad compound. Her standpoint is aided by a team of undercover CIA agents driving around Peshawar attempting to track bin Laden’s courier al-Kuwaiti, leading to a car chase and a brush with the Pakistani police, who are told to stand off by a Pakistani intelligence agent conveniently arriving in the nick of time. Unsurprisingly, Seal Team Six had limited characterization, predictable tropes and a pedestrian narrative.43 The movie attempts to cling onto the action movie genre in which a SOF team actually get to win this time, even though audiences know the final outcome is never in any doubt. Much of the focus is on the assembling of the team and its insertion in state-of-the-art stealth Black Hawk helicopters. We at last get to see the faces of the men as they are on their way to Pakistan though for the rest of the time they are hidden behind helmets making them look drone-like. This is a mission in which little is left to chance and we are a long way from the autonomous special forces and SAS teams of the Second World War working their own way out of difficult situations. The raid goes ahead with tight precision which we see largely through ghostly POV shots of the SEAL’s night-vision goggles, though external to the

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compound one of the stealth helicopters crashes and has to be blown up. The local population wakes up and is held at bay; another Mogadishu-type situation is avoided and the team make their get-away. The film ends with the wrapped body of bin Laden sinking into the Arabian Sea. Perhaps with greater funding and a more imaginative script a better action movie of the Abbottabad raid might have been made. As it was, the producers ended up with a narrative that almost entirely overlooked the protracted decade-long CIA intelligence operation to identify the whereabouts of bin Laden. The commonly accepted narrative is that the CIA made an initial breakthrough in 2007 through bin Laden’s courier Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, whose real name was Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed (and a protégé of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed). Long thought to have died in 2001 after fleeing from the Battle of Tora Bora, he was credited with being alive in Pakistan and very possibly linked with bin Laden after the interrogation of the Guantanamo detainee Hassan Gul in 2004.44 Eventually the National Security Agency tracked Kuwaiti’s calls to Pakistan; but it was only in 2010 that a Pakistani ‘asset’ tracked him to Peshawar and later Abbottabad. Driving a white Suzuki jeep, he became easily identifiable, though much of the intelligence appears to have been of the Sigint rather than Humint, based on the tracking of cell phone conversations.45 Bigelow’s film weaves these details into a rather unorthodox narrative of a female CIA operator. It was work in which women often appear to excel, requiring as it does tenacity and persistence. Called the ‘sisterhood’ in John Woo’s Manhunt, the world of this group is vastly different to the glamorized movie myth of fearless intelligence agents such as James Bond or Jack Ryan. Theirs is a tedious enterprise performed by what Susan Hasler, one of the women involved, describes in her novel Intelligence as intelligence ‘alchemists’, implying that these are activities that are not properly scientific in the modern sense but medieval, ensuring that formally rational paths of investigation are dictated by intuition and the myth of an eventual magical breakthrough. The women had a low-status position in the Langley hierarchy; this is changing rapidly as women now make up nearly 50 per cent of all CIA operatives, even if few are as yet in senior positions. In the years following 9/11 the CIA established the group commonly known as Alec Station (it never amounted to more than two dozen operatives) focused exclusively on finding bin Laden. Much of the work involved the painstaking task of sifting through mountains of raw intelligence ‘slag’ in order to find the odd nugget hard intelligence ‘gold’, to use two more of Hasler’s fictional terms.46 Mistakes were often made, and by 2006 Alec Station was wound up and some of the women intelligence operatives put out into the field to liaise more closely with counterterrorism operations at the local level. This is the point at which Zero Dark Thirty starts as we encounter one of the women operatives known as Maya (Jessica Chastain) who assists in the interrogation of a jihadist detainee known as Ameer. We learn in the movie that the detainee is never going to be released and the torture includes sleep deprivation, waterboarding, beatings and closure in a wooden box, as well as being forced to crawl like a dog on a lead (an image that recalled the earlier scandal over torture at Abu Ghraib in Iraq in 2004). Criticized for being a form of ‘torture porn’, the scene is one of the most graphic in cinema since Godard’s Le Petit Soldat (1960) and Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966). More importantly, Zero Dark Thirty implies

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that torture of this kind can be a means of securing high-grade intelligence, even though Obama’s CIA director Leon Panetta later admitted that the real whereabouts of the courier al-Kuwaiti came from a detainee not held by the CIA.47 Maya shares the same obsession with conflict as Sergeant James in The Hurt Locker, and has no personal life outside the Agency. She proves more resilient than her colleague Dan, who quits as the continued use of torture takes its emotional toll. She has what seems to be a single-minded personal mission to hunt out bin Laden to secure some sort of justice for the victims of the 9/11 attacks, who are invisible and only heard as ghostly voices at the start of the film on a blank screen. But is this the real motivation? We never really get inside the mind-set driving Maya. The release in 2014 of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture suggests a considerably different picture. The person who most closely resembled Maya was reputedly very competent in following up leads and appears to have been more active in the enhanced interrogation of detainees than Maya who merely hands Dan a jug of water for waterboarding.48 Whatever the exact truth, Jessica Chastain’s Maya emerges as less a feminist icon than another Hollywood tough girl, who has abandoned the allures of motherhood and domesticity for a career in a largely masculine world. The tough girl is never usually that tough compared to male tough guys, and this is true of Maya.49 She is not an actual warrior of the G.I. Jane-type even if she is close to the warriors in the Seal Team who will go out to kill bin Laden. She helps brief them on the mission and is there when then they return with bin Laden’s body, which she checks with a triumphant expression. She only evinces real emotion when she boards a military plane to fly home; the lone passenger on board indicating her special status, though she can never be viewed as a serious hero in what is an unheroic form of war. Maya is a product of an era of the CIA when women had to fight hard to be taken seriously. As another operative from this period told Peter Bergen, most women at Langley ‘had to be the toughest SOBs in the universe to survive. And the rest of the women were treated as sexual toys’.50 In Zero Dark Thirty, Maya establishes a friendship with another woman CIA operative called Jessica, who in real life was Jennifer Matthews, a CIA operative who ended up based on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Matthews arranged to meet a potentially important intelligent lead, the Jordanian Humam al-Balawi, at the CIA Forward Operating Base at Camp Chapman in Khost on December 30, 2009. The meeting went disastrously wrong when Balawi blew himself up, killing Matthews together with six other CIA operatives and contractors. The meeting exemplified that misjudgement and lax security arrangements could have fatal consequences, though it led to a rapid escalation by the CIA of drone strikes in Pakistan.51 Zero Dark Thirty certainly confirmed the point made by some strategists that unconventional warfare cannot be linked exclusively to Special Forces since it depends on a range of other agencies, especially intelligence.52 However, there is also a sense that the movie is desperately attempting to retain as much of a human dimension to modern counter-terrorist warfare as possible, given that this warfare is defined by an ever more sophisticated and depersonalizing technology, rendering it ever more ‘post heroic’. The faces of the SEALs are shown in the helicopter flight to Abbottabad and

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they display at least some human qualities. Likewise, when the team actually enter the Abbottabad and reach bin Laden’s room, one SEAL actually calls out ‘Osama! Osama!’ before killing him. But the authenticity of this has been questioned as there was almost certainly too much noise for this to have occurred.53 We are offered a momentary glimpse of a screen monitoring the SEAL mission showing a Black Hawk from high above: this is clearly a drone, though at no point are drones formally acknowledged to have been used in either the ‘hunt’ for bin Laden or the actual mission to kill him. Some analysts have suggested that drones proved vital to the ultimate success of the Abbottabad operation, very possibly the elusive batwing RQ-170 used for eavesdropping on electronic conversations.54 But drone warfare is a difficult form of war to depict cinematically given its depersonalized qualities. It recalls much of the inhuman and alien imagery of ‘bad guys’ in sci-fi feature such as Star Wars and Battlestar Gallactica, except that the drones are now operated by Americans attacking human targets in peripheral third world states such as Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. Using drones threatens to undermine the idea that there was any human intelligence–driven ‘hunt’ for bin Laden, and Zero Dark Thirty marginalized the actual operation to kill bin Laden to little more than a final chapter, rendering this less an action movie than an intelligence thriller. Zero Dark Thirty was a remarkably positive film for the CIA, for all the scenes of torture. Tony Shaw and Tricia Jenkins have seen the movie, along with Argo (2012) as one of the most successful portrayals by Hollywood of the work of the CIA since the Agency went properly into the sphere of public relations in the late 1990s.55 The film grossed over $130 million at the box office and has clearly helped shape the public perception of the Abbottabad operation, though it ran into intense criticism for the way it handled the torture scenes. Senator John McCain and the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee Diane Feinstein attacked the film for endorsing the use of torture, and the liberal American writer Naomi Wolf charged Kathryn Bigelow with being a latter-day Leni Riefenstahl for the way she had made a film that glossed over human rights abuses and served as propaganda for the CIA.56 Steve Coll also suggested that the scenes involving stealth helicopters could only have been shot with the cooperation of the Department of Defense.57 As the criticism mounted, Mark Boal attempted to defend the film by asserting that it was ‘depicting slice of American history’ and ‘the essence of what happened honestly’.58 He shifted the focus from torture to the figure of Maya, whom he upheld as a heroic figure of cerebral intelligence: ‘Technology played a part’, he said in one interview, ‘and many people contributed, but at the end of the day it was thought’, going on to imply that there was ‘a little bit of Joan of Arc in Maya’.59 This hardly accorded with the previous idea of the film as a serious form of historical realism, especially as Maya is a composite figure within the CIA with only a slender relationship to the actual intelligence operation that discovered bin Laden’s compound. Zero Dark Thirty failed relatively poorly in the Oscars in 2012, winning just one Oscar for best sound editing and losing out to Argo, which had the advantage of embracing another America captivity myth. The film had clearly failed to create any convincing female intelligence hero, though there was a strong implication in Boal’s defence of the film that it was trying to elevate the very field of intelligence at a time

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when this too is likely to be transformed by advancing technology, not least in the area of spy drones. It is hard to see any credible Rambo figure emerging out of the world of intelligence onto cinema screens, though Zero Dark Thirty can at least be given some credit for heightening the role of women in intelligence agencies, a trope repeated in the film The Imitation Game (dir. Morten Tyldum) in 2014 about the work of Alan Turing and the intelligence analysts at Bletchley Park. The cult of intelligence and cerebral heroes doubtless has some appeal to educated film audiences in an era of anti-intellectual right-wing populism. It is hard to see it evolving into a cinematic myth of intelligence-based counter-terrorism. The problem is exemplified in the 2015 British thriller Eye in the Sky (dir. Gavin Hood), produced by the Canadian company Entertainment One. This has been one of the most penetrating features to date on the moral complexities of drone warfare, suggesting too that films made out of the controlling aegis of Hollywood can go farther in the interrogation of this kind of warfare. The film is set in varied locations in London, the United States and Kenya. A combined British and American counter-terrorist team are searching for an Al Shabaab terrorist group that has killed an undercover British/Kenyan agent in Nairobi. The British are led by determined Colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) operating out of the headquarters in Northwood in North London, while the American drone operators, seen sporadically from the outside, are in Utah. Many images of life at the local level in Nairobi are viewed from a Reaper drone. It is the British rather than the Americans who are leading this operation and intelligence suggests that another attack is being planned, comparable to the real attack in the Westgate Mall in Nairobi on 21 September 2013 resulting in seventy-one deaths. Colonel Powell becomes convinced that a suicide operation is now in preparation, especially after the movie switches into sci-fiction mode when an agent on the ground releases a tiny micro air vehicle (MAV) or insect drone that flies inside the house of the suspected terrorist group and films the plotters from the rafters. So far, no government, including the United States, has admitted to developing such a device, though it seems that prototypes of this sort of MAV mimicking an insect can be potentially used to collect intelligence in the form of film footage and DNA data from any humans it lands on. Given the rapid pace of technological development in drone warfare, what is currently still sci-fi might soon become reality in a few years, though there are some serious problems in developing such tiny vehicles which are liable to be blown in the wind, get caught in spider webs or end up being observed if they are not completely silent. Controlling such vehicles also seems difficult. Eye in the Sky portrays this as being relatively easy, with an undercover agent operating it from his laptop sitting on the ground. The MAV in the movie eventually runs out of battery life. Once again, it is hard to see how any such tiny drone can function for any length of time given the power needed to sustain it in flight. Powell, even more than Maya in Zero Dark Thirty, is able to operate with almost 100 per cent certainty that the target is an Al Shabaab cell when the MAV sees the group saying prayers and putting on explosive vests. Military intelligence, though, still works in a world of relative probabilities. Getting suitable authorization for the strike proves tedious and protracted, as civilian politicians constantly push decision-

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making upwards. Both the British Foreign Secretary, suffering from stomach trouble in Singapore, and the US Secretary of State, playing table tennis in China, are contacted before the final authorization is secured in a movie about the internationalization of military decision-making. There is a juxtaposition of point with counterpoint in this debate that, as M.L.R. Smith has noted, avoids caricaturing either side and does not paint the simplistic humanitarian in an automatically favourable light.60 Those espousing such views end up being portrayed just as cynical and self-interested as those they oppose, though this overlooks one serious dimension missing in the movie, the viewpoint of the terrorists themselves and the reasons for their radicalization. From a directorial angle, introducing this would doubtless complicate an already fairly unwieldy movie; but in a broader sense it might have been possible to contrast the white female jihadist with Helen Mirren’s Colonel Powell, serving perhaps as a form of terrorist doppelganger. The film concentrates on a major obstacle to the launch of the drone strike, a young Kenyan girl selling bread close to the target area. As with Drones and Good Kill, the issue now revolves around mathematical probabilities, though Powell bullies one of the analysts into producing data suggesting that the probability of collateral damage is under 40 per cent, a massaging of data to produce fake news. The strike is made, but a second strike is ordered to ensure the definite kill of the white British jihadi recruit to the Al Shabaab cell. The young girl selling bread also dies, though the full impact of this is lost in the political propaganda derived from pre-empting another terrorist strike on a friendly African state. Eye in the Sky mixes serious realism with some more fantastical sci-fi tropes to suggest how advancing surveillance and drone warfare progressively eliminates the protracted kind of intelligence gathering depicted in Zero Dark Thirty. But Mirren’s Colonel Powell has a number of important similarities with Chastain’s May in the sense that both women act as major galvanizers of rather inert and cautious male-dominated bureaucracies. Both are highly motivated to defend homeland and both are single-minded, too, in their determination to seek out a terrorist enemy, with neither displaying any doubt or uncertainty that this is an ethically justified form of warfare. Moreover, both Zero Dark Thirty and Eye in the Sky are burdened by the notion that modern military technology is in the process of transforming unconventional warfare as electronic intelligence progressively increases the level of certainty. But for the moment at last, major decisions still have to be made by those at the top of command structures, though this is a form of warfare in which there are few heroes of the traditional kind. Indeed, the most likely candidates for hero status in Eye in the Sky are really the groundbased intelligence operative Jama Farah (Barkhad Abdi), constantly evading capture by Al Shabaab and whose life story and motivations remain unexplored.

Summing up In this chapter I have suggested that one major cinematic myth to emerge from the American defeat in Vietnam was that of Rambo, a myth that helped define a series of action movies in the 1980s and 1990s. These movies were intensely masculine and

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formed a revitalized cinematic myth of the American homeland. The myth broadly dovetailed with the Star Wars franchise, centred on sci-fi fantasies centred on an apparently remote community, ‘a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away’ forced to defend itself against dark impersonal totalitarian forces. The community recalls James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales of the American west, with its own rather old-fashioned warrior hero in the form of Luke Skywalker, aided by the wise counsels of the Chingachagook figure Obi Wan Kenobi. Rambo, by contrast, is a lone angry warrior in modern-day America, seeking revenge and atonement for past maltreatment of US vets by a weak senior command and duplicitous Washington bureaucracy. He has no wise counsel to aid him in the original novel, though in the film series he listens to the advice of his father figure of a former commanding officer, Colonel Trautman. Both the Star Wars and Rambo myths helped revitalize the Hollywood action genre, though their temporary success raises questions about the durability of their mythic power. Craig Chalquist, drawing on the work of Ursula Leguin, has suggested that Star Wars borrowed traditional mythic themes and lacks the capacity to generate a truly authentic and transformative myth of its own. The Star Wars franchise might be an enormously and enduring form of popular entertainment, but is at best, Chalquist has argued, a sub-myth rather than a proper myth since it fails to lead to any serious rituals and ‘wisdom teachings’ capable of transforming the wider culture.61 The same point can clearly be made about the Rambo films that have proved successful at the box office without necessarily leaving behind any durable cinematic myth, beyond the image of the lone modern warrior ready to use decisive force. Chalquist’s argument is rather overstated. It is pivoted around an ethnographic idea of myths which define the makeup and identity of pre-industrial and agrarian societies, where stories of heroes are passed down by word of mouth and the symbolic power of myths is closely linked to religion. In a media-dominated society such traditional myths may at first sight not be easily sustained, though in many cases the same mythical stories get handed on but in constantly changing forms, as in the case of action movie heroes. The actual death of Rambo, like that of Mark Twain, may well prove, though, to be premature since, as an action sub-myth, it is one over which Hollywood seems destined to lose control. Plans are afoot in Bollywood for an Indian re-make of Rambo starring the movie star Tiger Shroff, while Chinese cinema also has its own version of Rambo in the form of ‘Wolf Warrior’ who is a kind of fusion of Rambo, John McClane from Die Hard and Jack Bauer in 24.62 These developments confirm the global reach of the Rambo movie series, though it is unclear how a distinctive Rambo character will be maintained as it becomes copied and emulated by other cinemas around the world. The decline of Rambo in Hollywood in the aftermath of the last Rambo movie in 2008 occurred at a time when another rebooting of the action genre was starting to take place. This renewal of the action genre occurred in a context of increasingly technological forms of warfare, the decline of counter-insurgency in the wake of the draw-down from Iraq and Afghanistan and the cultural transformation of many major American institutions traditionally involved in counter-terrorism, such as the CIA, leading to women becoming an increasingly important component of a work force that had previously been white and male.

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The counter-terrorism film thus seems set to emerge as another important subgenre of the action genre in Hollywood. It emerges at a time when public support for the ‘war on terror’ went into decline as the counter-insurgency being fought in Afghanistan and Iraq appeared to produce few clear political pay-offs, despite the high number of American casualties. In May 2013 President Obama redefined the policy as one that continued to seek to destroy terrorist networks, but was no longer an open-ended or destined to continue indefinitely.63 This was, in some respects, a move back towards the criminalization model dominant before the 9/11 attacks, occupying what Guelke has seen as an unstable middle position between accommodation, on the one hand, and suppression on the other.64 Most terrorism in the United States continues to be viewed, though, as externally driven. The new form of counter-terrorism action thriller, exemplified by Zero Dark Thirty and Eye in the Sky, is increasingly realist in orientation and based, very often, on actual events, though they are unlikely to be proper ‘journalism’ given that feature films usually require that documentary elements are kept to a minimum. Such films tend to made for relatively well-educated audiences, raising as they do ethical questions behind such issues as assassinations and drone strikes. They represent an extension into the action movie genre of a style of film making that has hitherto tended to be confined to the upper end of the science fiction genre, exemplified by ‘cerebral sci-fi movies’ that stretch back a long way to Solaris (1972), Blade Runner (1982) and Dune (1984); but exemplified more recently by films such as District 9 (2009), Inception (2010) and Interstellar (2014). These movies can be contrasted to more mainstream blockbusters such as Star Wars and The Matrix in that they seek, as Scott Thill has suggested, to interrogate ‘the blurred line between waking life and lucid dreaming’.65 It is difficult to predict, at this stage, where the cerebral action subgenre will go in contemporary Hollywood. Much will be shaped by the wider political climate in the United States that has become intensely polarized politically with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. This is unlikely to lead to a full culture war between Hollywood and the White House or the American right. However, the intense political divisions present film producers with educated audiences in at least parts of the United States such as the East and West Coast that is estranged politically from narratives suggesting any sort of benign presidency. At the same time, these audiences will, quite possibly, be more willing to accept the positive, if not democratic, credentials of institutions such as the FBA and CIA as crucial mechanisms to restrain presidential power.66 Given such receptive audiences, the cerebral action movie in the mould of Zero Dark Thirty and Eye in the Sky will, in all likelihood, become increasingly mainstream in Hollywood, though it is unlikely to take an especially liberal form. Such movies look set to engage with increasingly anxious tropes of robotic and drone warfare.67 We have here a dramatic contrast to the post-war phase of Hollywood war movies that celebrated ever more sophisticated technology as well as linking it to heroic male prowess (movies about the air force, for example, and the skill of its pilots, such as The Right Stuff and Top Gun). The cerebral action movie is unlikely to go as far as suggesting that this technology is actually breaking down, as in Apocalypse Now (1979), but rather to suggest that it to some degree fulfils prophecies of the Terminator series that robotic forms of war essentially deny human agency.

4

Italian Neorealism and Beyond

So far in this study I have been concerned with British and American cinematic depictions of unconventional war. Italy produced rather less films on this form of war, though several are interesting for their neorealist representations of insurgency, terrorism and partisan warfare. In this chapter, I will examine Italian cinematic representations of underground insurgency and terrorism. In the first section, I will look at Roberto Rossellini’s Roma citta Aperta (Rome Open City) (1945); Nanni Loy’s neglected film of the 1943 Naples insurrection Quattro giornate di Napoli (Four Days of Naples) in 1962; and Gillo Pontecorvo’s la Battaglia di algeri (The Battle of Algiers) (1966) and Queimada (Burn) (1969). In the second section, I will examine three films outside Italy influenced by neorealism and cinema verite: Costa Gavras’s State of Siege (1972), John Malkovich’s The Dancer Upstairs (2002) and Uli Edel’s The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008).

The Italian cinema of neorealism Neorealist film making emerged from the rubble of Mussolini’s fascist regime. Film producers and directors were driven onto the streets at the end of war as the Cinnecitta film studios outside Rome were closed and unusable. With limited budgets and institutional support, directors were forced to shoot on location.1 The first phase of neorealism lasted from the mid-1940s to mid-1950s, exemplified by such classics as Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D (1952) (dir. Vittorio De Sica), La Terre Trema (1948) (dir. Luschino Visconti) and Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1954). Thereafter, it began to lose impetus in the Italian commercial cinema market as audiences preferred romance and escapism. However, neorealism still retained considerable life well into the 1960s with several further films such as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s remarkable The Gospel According to St Matthew in 1964 and Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers in 1966. Neorealism had a considerable impact on film-making across Europe. It established the basic conventions of a new cinematic realism centred on the lives of ordinary people, improvised dialogue, the extensive use of amateur actors and quasidocumentary techniques. It would influence the French new wave and several other directors in Europe and the United States, such as the young Elia Kazan, British directors Ken Loach and Paul Greengrass and the Franco-Greek director Costa Gavras. Many neorealist directors hoped their movies would act as radical agents of social and

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cultural change, empowering working-class people to forge more positive identities, an outlook that did not go down especially well in Hollywood in the Cold War of the 1950s. By the 1960s, this sort of cinematic utopianism had markedly declined, though some directors adopted a neorealist style in arenas of political struggle such as colonial Algeria, authoritarian regimes in South America and terrorism in Western Europe. Roberto Rossellini was at the centre of the original neorealist wave in Italy. He cultivated a rather self-justifying myth that his classic film Rome Open City was part of new post-war realism in Italy, though it displayed some links to the fascist era as well an indebtedness to Hollywood, especially in the action scenes.2 Rossellini began the film before the Germans had left the city in 1944, and limited funds meant it proceeded in fits and starts. The film is centred on the Italian resistance to the German occupation of Rome from September 1943 to the liberation of the city on 4 June 1944. It covers the period when Rome was declared an ‘open city’ following the flight of the King Victor Emmanuel III and the Marshall Badoglio. The film was shot while memories of the occupation were still very fresh. Production was hampered by a lack of funding and a shortage of suitable film stock and the resulting film has a grainy black and white quality that, over the years, has been admired by many critics for its authentic documentary tone. To modern audiences the film might seem rather dated, given that any citizen journalist can, with care, shoot a competent documentary-type film with a hand-held camera. But Rome Open City was considered on its release to be an extraordinarily imaginative and revolutionary film. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times noted that the movie had the ‘wind-blown look of a film shot from actualities’ as well as a strong note of ‘anger’ that was not so much ‘shrill or hysterical’ but ‘the clarified anger of those who have known and dreaded the cruelty and depravity of men who are their foes’.3 Rome Open City, along with Rossellini’s Paisa the following year, was important for establishing many of the central features of neorealist war films after the war. These movies attempted to break with the narrative patterns of Anglo-American war films, focused on a central hero and single plot line. There is a sharp geographical demarcation in the film between the world of the SS and their Italian collaborators and the Italian partisans and their clerical allies. The world of the former is based on the German police headquarters, torture chamber and seedy night club. Here lurks the main nemesis of the film, the effeminate and psychopathic Gestapo officer and Police Commissioner of Rome, Bergmann (Harry Feist), based on the actual head of the Special Police Unit in Rome dealing with partisan resistance, ‘Doctor’ Pietro Koch. The other world portrayed in the film is that of the Italian resistance, located in the warren of apartment buildings and tenements of working-class Rome where people struggle to find enough food to eat during the harsh occupation. The film also makes an important foray out of this working-class world into the conservative catholic world of the cleric Don Pietro Pellegrini (played by the professional actor Aldo Fabrizi) who decides to ally himself with the largely communist-led resistance movement. Rossellini’s film helped sustain a widely held post-war myth of a Catholic–Communist alliance established during the German occupation, especially as Dom Pietro’s character was loosely based on the activities of a real Catholic priest in Rome, Dom Pietro Morosini, who was shot for helping the partisans.

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The first half of the film focuses on the lives of those in the resistance. It has the SS attempting to arrest the engineer Georgio Manfredi (Marcello Pagliero) in a rooming house, though he escapes over the roof tops. He arrives at the apartment of his friend Francesco, who works for a communist newspaper. Here he encounters Francesco’s pregnant girlfriend Pina (played by the comic actress Anna Magnani), who emerges as one of the movie’s heroes after she stirs up riots against shops enforcing a harsh system of food rationing.4 Pina’s son Marcello (Vito Annicchiarico) is also involved in the battle, and Rossellini shows a whole community in open resistance to the German occupation. In a compelling street scene, Anna runs towards a lorry used by the SS in a roundup of able-bodied men for forced labour. A German soldier shoots her down and her son Marcello sobs over her dead body: the shooting was based on the shooting of a pregnant woman in Rome, Teresa Gullace, on 3 March 1944, a working-class mother with five children.5 Film critics have often viewed Anna’s body as symbolizing what Gottlieb has termed ‘an incarnation of the potentially redeemable body of a mutilated nation’.6 Rossellini’s film also explores the sinister world of the German occupiers. This world, like that of the resistance, is anchored in an alliance with the Italian survivors of Mussolini’s former fascist regime and is carefully organized by Police Commissioner Bergmann. He has drawn up a counter-insurgency plan, called the ‘Schroeder Plan’, that divides Rome into fourteen sections. It has already been apparently successfully carried out, he claims, in other cities and involves using a dragnet to pull in all the ringleaders of the resistance. Its attractiveness lies in the way it involves the use of ‘minimum force’ to avoid urban insurrection. This appears to be the first time the term ‘minimum force’ was used in a feature film in relation to counter-insurgency operations. In practice, the SS in Rome did anything but practise ‘minimum force’ by the early months of 1944. Bergmann’s plan appears to work as the dragnet eventually secures the arrest of Manfredi, Dom Pellegrinii and an Austrian deserter for whom Pellegrini has been trying to obtain identity papers. They are picked in a dramatic police swoop in a Rome street that is a cinematic triumph as we watch the victims from behind as they walk down a street with a tram coming up of the left-hand side of the frame. Their arrest leads to a dark second part of the film involving the interrogation and torture of Manfredi, a scene that inspired Pontecorvo to use a similar torture scene in The Battle of Algiers. However, Rossellini’s purpose in shooting his torture scene was to celebrate the triumph of the human will as well as the moral impoverishment of the torturers. Pellegrini is forced to watch while Manfredi is tortured. But the cleric’s condemnation of the torturers is somewhat doubled-edged as he sees their actions as God’s punishment for men’s sins. ‘Are we sure we’ve lived in the ways of God?’ he asks of the by-now anguished torturers. ‘God have pity but we’ve much to be forgiven.’ The moral compass of the film is a strongly Catholic one. Dom Pellegrini is centred as the spiritual heart of the resistance as can be seen in some of the posters for the film where Manfredi is absent. Pellegrini is in the forefront of resistance to the dark profile of a German soldier alongside Anna, set somewhat in the background. The film raises questions over the sort of society Italy might become in the post-war period. The collapse of fascism exposed the various institutional props of the former

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regime, especially the Catholic Church, as well as the Italian matriarchal family. For communists, organized labour in the form of the trade union movement formed a new sort of prop for the urban working class adrift in the anonymity of Italian cities, though this is a dimension that Rossellini’s film does not explore. What it does examine is the rather complex relationship between the church and domestic matriarchy. The postwar neorealist film Bicycle Thieves shows the hero deprived of any support from the church, the police or organized labour as he attempts to retrieve his stolen bicycle. It is the matriarchal spirit in the form of a female fortune teller who provides any sort of emotional support in his plight, suggesting that matriarchy emerged in post-war Italy in opposition to both church and state.7 This is hinted at in the character of the pregnant but unmarried Pina in Rome Open City, whose heroic death in defence of mothers and children serves as a symbolic act of popular resistance at least equal in importance to anything achieved by the patriarchal political underground.8 The partisans of the resistance achieve relatively little beyond freeing Francesco from a prison truck. Rossellini’s indifference to the partisans’ activity is rather surprising given that they had begun to attack German troops in Rome from as early as December 1943. The attacks were linked to the city’s expected liberation from Allied Forces, rather belying Pina’s doubts in the film when she asks: ‘Do you think the Americans really exist?’ The Allied landing at Anzio in January 1944 led to a decline in the attacks over the next couple of months as hopes rise that there will be an early liberation of Rome; it was possible to hear the guns at Anzio from the streets of Central Rome. But this early liberation did not occur, as Mark Clark’s Fifth Army got bogged down in a bloody war of attrition through February into March. The lull in partisan attacks led to an escalation of arrests in Rome leading the partisans to launch a spectacular terrorist response. On 23 March 1944, sixteen partisans left a home-made IED filled with TNT in a rubbish cart on the Piazza di Spagna. The bomb was timed to blow up as an SS Police Regiment marched past and the resulting explosion killed thirty-five SS police. The seventy-four men of the Gestapo in Rome, under its commander Herbert Kappler, launched a brutal reprisal in the form of the notorious Ardeatine Massacre, an event overlooked in Rossellini’s film and one that would wait years to appear in Ten Italians for One German (dir. Filippo Walter Ratti) in 1962 and George Comatos’s rather betterknown English-language film Massacre in Rome in 1973, starring Richard Burton.9 The Ardeatine Massacre took place the day after the 23 March partisan attack and led to the murder and burial of some 335 victims in the Ardeatine caves outside Rome. Seventy-five of the victims were Jewish but the main body were a cross section of Italian society including doctors, lawyers, schoolteachers, students and teenage boys. The brutal and savage nature of the reprisal was perhaps one major reason why Rossellini felt unable to include it in his film. It might well have detracted from his efforts to portray the resistance in Rome in a heroic light and one that was not burdened by serious political divisions. The massacre’s exclusion from the film also meant that Rossellini did not need to deal with the ambiguous role of the Vatican in this dark period of Italian history. In contrast to the heroic role of the church in the resistance exemplified by Pellegrini, some historians have suggested that the Vatican, under the fascist-inclined and fanatically

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anti-communist Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, knew about the massacre in advance and did nothing to stop it, an event dramatized in Rolf Hochhuth’s controversial 1963 play The Deputy: A Christian Tragedy (it was later filmed by Costa Gavras as Amen in 2002).10 Desperate to defend the ‘open’ status of Rome, Pacelli failed to condemn the massacre and would be later condemned by the Italian partisans after the liberation in early June. His silence encouraged the German commander in Italy, General Herbert Kesselring, to use the massacre to widen divisions among the Italian opposition. The Committee of National Liberation (CLN) met soon after the disclosure of the Ardeatine Massacre and managed to maintain some semblance of unity despite the resignation of its president, Ivanhoe Bonomi, and the demands from the Christian Democrats for greater control of partisan operations. But the price of this unity was a political silence that matched that of the pope.11 From an historical angle, Rome Open City embodies a very selective interpretation of the period of the German occupation of Rome, though this is not so surprising given that Rossellini was looking at spiritual themes that transcend human history.12 Moreover, any faulty historical understanding of the recent past needs to be understood in the context of the film’s central objective, which was to destroy the mythomania that underpinned Mussolini’s fascist regime and to establish a countermyth of its own centred on images of rebirth and resurrection after the dark torment of the soul symbolised by the scenes in the torture chamber. The film was anchored in a project of radical cultural and political struggle at the end of the war in Italy that championed a more democratic notion of il popolo. It was based on a wide range of regional dialects and counter-posed the former fascist regime’s ideal of a popolo italiano rooted in a language of racial purity, violence, obedience and myths of national destiny.13 Rossellini widened this arena of struggle beyond Italy in his next film Paisa, released in 1946, a film that was far more of radical break with conventional film making than Rome Open City and supposedly stimulated the young Gillo Pontecorvo into film making.14 The film concentrates on six separate episodes marking the liberation of Italy that involved American troops as well as Italian partisans. It had a looser episodic structure than Roma Citta Aperta, though it met with a warm reception in both Italy and the United States since it caught some of the post-war mood as it explored various relationships between Italians and Americans. The six episodes act as separate short stories and mark a radical departure from the narrative structure of the conventional Hollywood war film. Rossellini used a documentary style in each of the episodes with a voice-over and the weaving of real film footage with fictional scenes. Each story focuses on different aspects of the American involvement in the war to liberate Italy, suggesting that he envisioned the film as part of a wider cultural and political dialogue between Italy and the United States in the post-war years. The word ‘paisa’ translates as ‘neighbour’ or ‘kin’ and this is the central theme of all six stories. The GIs in the film are portrayed as positively seeking to engage with Italians despite language difficulties. The British, by contrast, hardly appear at all, and when do, they appear aloof and indifferent to the problems confronting ordinary Italian people. Only two of the six episodes deal with partisan resistance to the Germans and their fascist allies; these are episode four, dealing with resistance in Florence, and the last episode, focused on partisan resistance in the flat reed beds of the Po Valley.

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Both episodes display a dramatic cinematography of military conflict. The Florence episode followed an American nurse, Harriet, through the rubble-strewn streets of Florence searching for her lover Lupo, who is a member of the partisans. Harriet is a fluent Italian speaker and there is no difficulty of communication. She encounters partisans at one point executing fascist prisoners and finally learns that Lupo has died of his wounds. During the episode Harriet becomes far more involved in the struggle going on in Italy than previous American character, suggesting an evolution in the mutual understanding of Italians and Americans.15 This progressive involvement goes a stage further in the final episode where one of the central characters organizing the partisans in the Po Estuary is an OSS operative, Dale, who also is fluent in Italian. Unlike the roving camera that wandered round the streets of Florence the camera here is restricted to appearing just above the level of the reeds as the partisans vainly seek to fight off an attack from German water-borne troops, a device that Bondanella has praised as being ‘one of the most intelligent uses of an outside location in all of neorealist cinema’.16 The partisans rescue two British pilots shot down by the Germans though they are all rounded up by the superior enemy forces. After being forced to listen to the boasts of the German commander about establishing a new racial order, the partisans are drowned the following day in the River Po with the sign ‘Partisan’ on them. Dale, attempting to intervene to prevent this, is also shot, though he hardly dies a hero since Rossellini has not intended there to be any hero or heroine to emerge from this episodic collection. This is a film where the viewer is intended, in a somewhat Brechtian manner, to emphasize less with individual characters than with the total situation of two separate cultures colliding during a time of war. The episode ends with the simple announcement, ‘This happened in the summer of 1944. At the beginning of the spring the war was over.’ Partisan warfare is depicted rather negatively; its ultimate success or failure proves really to be of less interest to the director than the relationship portrayed between the partisans and the Americans. There is within this format a strongly tragic element which Ruth Ben Ghiat has perceived to be a central theme within many neorealist films.17 However, this tendency to dismiss the importance of partisan resistance to the German occupation of Italy underlines the limitations of neorealist cinema in providing any sort of genuine historical guide to the Italian resistance. This, though, overlooks the successful popular insurrection in Naples from 28 September–1 October 1943 leading to the withdrawal of the German army from the city, the one successful example of an urban insurrection against Nazi rule during the Second World War. The second episode of Rossellini’s Paisa focused on Naples but chose to portray the relationship of an orphaned street urchin, or scugnazzo, Pasquale (played by an amateur young Italian actor Alfonsino Pasca) with a drunken black American GI called Joe (played by a professional American actor Dots Johnson). When Joe falls asleep, Pasquale takes his boots though Joe finds him the next day but lets him keep the boots when he discovers the squalid conditions in which the boy lives. The story verges on melodrama, though the boy is an example of the scugnazzi and their mythical role in the 1943 Naples insurrection. Partly due to the book Four Days in Naples published by an American journalist Aubrey Menem as well as the photographs

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of Frank Capra in Life magazine, it became a convention in the years after 1945 that the Naples insurrection was largely due to the scugnazzi rather than the adult men and women of the city. The myth effectively infantilized the Napoletani and contributed to the marginalization of the revolt in post-war Italian history, perhaps because, as Rose Maria Celeste has suggested, this was largely written from a northern Italian point of view and one suspicious of a popular revolt that had no central political leadership.18 The scugnazzi were certainly part of the popular insurrection against the Germans that broke out following several key incidents in late September 1943, including the burning of the University of Naples and its historical archives, the rounding up of ablebodied men to be shipped out of the city as forced labour and the shooting of any Italian soldiers or sailors who were found to have deserted. The uprising brought in the mass of Napoletani civilians who appeared, in some instances, to have attacked German troops with their bare hands. One participant, Curzio Malaparte, later noted that many bodies of dead German soldiers displayed ‘lacerated faces and throats mangled by human teeth; and the tooth marks could still be seen on the flesh’.19 Loy interviewed many of the Napoletani who had been involved in the insurrection and Quattro giornate is an important example of a neorealist war film paying considerable attention to historical detail. Quattro giornate di Napoli portrays a whole urban community in revolt, with a group of women at one point attacking the small numbers of German soldiers taking men to a holding area for forced labourers. Loy’s camera wanders around the narrow streets and alleyways of working-class Naples as people shout across to each other news about the round-up while, in a later scene, the boys in a Catholic reformatory rebel against their fascist head and head off to support the revolt. A street scene towards the end of the film shows the capture of a 105mm light field howitzer by former Italian soldiers, who fire at oncoming German tanks. A block away a young scugnazzo runs towards the same tank with a captured German grenade, though he is machine-gunned before he can throw it. The camera returns to those firing the howitzer; the scene ends with one tank catching fire and its crew attempting to flee. This is really the dramatic turning point of the film as the outnumbered Germans surrender. The end of the film shows them marching under a white flag out of the city. Nanni Loy’s film is a neglected example of a neorealist war film that compares more to Rome Open City than Paisa; it lacks the latter’s loose episodic structure and contains several key central characters who appear throughout the film. It also avoided using much documentary film footage and is shot mostly in the streets of Naples, together with some interior scenes and one dramatic scene in the sports stadium, where the insurrectionists fire down on the German soldiers holding the men being held for transportation. For all its cinematic realism, the film departed from the tradition of Italian neorealist films, refusing to put children onto any sort of moral pedestal for all its graphic depictions of the scugnazzi. It is a forerunner of films showing children fighting in war zones examined in Chapter 5. Even so, the film still failed to confront the full brutality of the insurrection. The scugnazzi were used as child soldiers and threw Molotov cocktails at the German troops – none of this was depicted in the film. Neither is the full destruction inflicted on the German armour by the anti-aircraft artillery that were used by skilled gunners

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from the Italian army and navy. These heavy weapons were far more destructive than the light howitzer shown in the Loy’s film and ended up destroying eight German tanks. A group of insurrectionists also attacked the German barracks at Cuoco in the city and forced the soldiers there to surrender; this was again not portrayed in the film.20 Overall, though, Loy’s depiction of the events in Naples marked a major advance on the previous efforts of Rossellini in the mid-1940s. It also helped pave the way for Pontecorvo’s depiction of the war in Algiers in the late 1950s. Four Days in Naples suggests a tradition of neorealist war films that is crucial towards understanding Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. This tradition proved to be a major impulse in shaping The Battle’s format as opposed to the radical spaghetti westerns which Austin Fletcher has suggested was the central genre of countercultural film making in Italy during the 1960s.21 When The Battle of Algiers was released in 1967 in the United States, Bosley Crowther compared the movie with Four Days in Naples, especially for its ‘melodramatic structure’ and staging techniques.22 Like Loy’s Naples, the city of Algiers in The Battle of Algiers is in a state of insurrection during the bitter seven-year war of 1954–1962. There might be doubts, though, over whether the title of the film really fits its subject matter since this was not a conventional urban ‘battle’ like Stalingrad or even Naples in 1943 but rather a terror war in an urban setting with some uncertainty over when it began or ended. Did it start in June 1956 with the execution by the French of two FLN leaders Ahmed Zabana and Abdelkader Ferradj provoking the FLN into some twenty-one attacks? Or perhaps it started with the French bombing of the Casbah on 10 August 1956 leaving seventy people dead? Or perhaps it really began when the French handed over power in the city to General Massu on 7 January 1957? No one seems clear about this just as no one is sure when this ‘battle’ ended, though the final bombing by the French of the safe house containing the last free FLN resistance leader in Algiers, Ali La Pointe, on 7 October 1957 seems as good a date as any.23 The confusion over dates indicates that this was a different kind of military conflict to a conventional war with set piece battles. The film is strongly shaped by a junior figure in the FLN hierarchy of command, Yacef Saadi, rather than Abbane Ramdane, who had assumed the leadership of the internal FLN in 1955. It was Ramdane, though, who decided on the strategy of urban terrorism in Algiers to expose the Algerian crisis to world attention when the UN was due to vote on the issue. Terrorism was also a powerful tactic to test the political will of the French to stay in Algeria as well as radicalizing the urban Algerian urban population as they experienced French military harassment and arrest, a logic that would be later emulated by the Provisional IRA during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.24 The film’s subject presented a huge challenge for any director. The generally cautious Pontecorvo decided to take it up to escape the conventional setting of many Italian post-war films, as well as injecting a more radical edge into neorealism, rather like Pasolini’s remarkable Marxist interpretation of Christ’s life in The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964), shot in a rural setting in southern Italy. Pontecorvo was an upperclass Marxist Italian film director without a huge body of work to his credit, though he had employed neorealist techniques in the film Kapo (1958) centred on a Jewish girl caught up in a round-up of Jews in France during the Second World War. Unlike

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Rossellini, Pontecorvo brought to his film making less a Christian-inspired humanism than a commitment to radical social revolution through class war. As a cinematic Marxist, he sought what he called the ‘dictatorship of truth’, meaning a level of evenhandedness in the depiction of the two rival forces at war in Algiers in 1957. The Battle of Algiers was a clever propaganda film that emerged from Pontecorvo’s attendance at Algeria independence celebrations.25 Franco Solinas wrote a new script that abandoned the Eurocentric perspective of an earlier script by Salah Baazi. The Algerians, in turn, agreed to fund half the film through a company called Casbah Films, though Pontecorvo also secured a degree of financial independence by securing the backing from the Italian producer Antonio Musu and some Italian theatrical associations.26 President Boumedienne also supported the project, though the film was banned in Algeria on its release for scenes at the end showing crowds apparently shouting for the ousted Ahmed Ben Bella.27 Like Rome Open City, The Battle of Algiers shows a city divided into the two separate worlds of the white colonial French settlers or pieds noirs with their apartments in the ‘European Quarter’, downtown shopping centre and military barracks that house the army that fights to maintain both French colonial rule and the ideal of ‘Algerie Francaise’. By contrast, the world of the Arabs fighting the French is confined largely to the Casbah in Algiers, a warren of narrow backstreets and dark interiors that had been first portrayed on screen, in an interesting early neorealist gangster film Pepe le Moko (1936) starring Jean Gabin, a film in which the young Saadi Yacef was an extra.28 The Battle of Algiers has two contrasting worlds of colonizer and colonized colliding as the leaders of the FLN in Algiers, led by its commander Yacef Saadi (playing himself in the film) plans a campaign of urban terrorism. The Battle of Algiers is less a recreation of urban insurgency but an escalating terror and counter-terror war fought out in the narrow streets of the Casbah and downtown Algiers. The film is shot in a grainy black and white that recreates some of the mood of post-war neorealism, though the setting is the brightly lit Mediterranean world of Algiers. Pontecorvo avoided using news footage but did employ amateur Algerian actors to play some of the characters, such as the illiterate gangster Ali La Pointe (played by the amateur actor Brahim Haggiag), who is arrested after hitting a young white colon youth and radicalized in jail as he sees a prisoner led out to be guillotined. La Pointe becomes one of the main organizers of the group of FLN terrorists, who start to attack the French by killing police officers. But he is never the main character of a film that is too decentred for one central narrative to emerge. Indeed, for periods La Pointe disappears to reappear dramatically near the end as he is trapped by the French in a hiding place behind the walls of a safe-house. He is blown up after refusing to give himself up. The Battle of Algiers employs Fanonist ideas in a rather more politically focused manner than the opportunistic clutch of radical spaghetti westerns in the 1960s. As the French analyst of insurgency and terrorism Gerard Chaliand critically observed, intellectuals in both the west and the third world became easily seduced during this time into seeing violence as a sort of therapy for the traumas inflicted by western colonialism; it was an outlook that did not develop a more strategic perspective linking anti-colonial movements to a revolutionary and modernizing ideology.29 The danger

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here was violence – and by implication terrorism – became a strategy that could polarize the nationalist struggle and undermine the efforts of those whom Fanon dismissed as ‘colonised intellectuals’ to engage in a dialogue with the colonial rulers.30 Fanon’s book The Wretched of the Earth was written in response to the existing pattern of controlled top-down decolonisation in the 1950s, that had led to nonviolent forms of decolonization in French North African colonies like Morocco and Tunisia as well as several other British and French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa.31 Fanonist-type justifications for violence intrude into The Battle of Algiers at several points. La Pointe shoots a prominent pimp in the Casbah who refuses to conform to the FLN’s new ruling on the closing of brothels and outlawing ambling and alcohol. The dark licentious world of the Casbah portrayed through the orientalist prism of Pepe le Moko is now being cleaned up to prepare the people for the popular struggle, despite the fact that some 100,000 Muslims were crammed in the Casbah into an area of just one square kilometre.32 Likewise, in another scene that has attracted the attention of several critics, some young Algerian women recruited by Yacef take off their veils to dress up as French women. This enables them to get past check points and enter the world of the European city area where they can place bombs in offices and coffee bars. Fanon stressed the symbolic importance of this change of dress in the essay ‘Algeria Unveiled’ in A Dying Colonialism published in 1959. Taking of the veil marked the abandonment of what he called the ‘protective mantle’ of the Casbah in the revolutionary struggle, enabling the women to go out into the ‘conqueror’s city’. By entering this European world to place bombs in cafes and offices Fanon claimed that the women were not ‘terrorists’ like the earlier nineteenth-century anarchists (who only had a ‘rendezvous with death’) since the bombers were part of something different for they had a ‘rendezvous with the life of the revolution’.33 The scene with Yacef ’s women is re-enacted in considerable detail and its historical veracity has won the praise, among others, of Alistaire Horne. The bombings were shown to be in response to a massive bomb placed by pieds noirs that blew up an entire apartment block at rue de Thebes, killing more than seventy Muslims. However, only two of the three initial bombs planted went off as the one placed in the Air France offices proved to be a dud. The film steps back from showing the full impact of the milk bar bombing on the corner of Place Bugeaud. This was popular with pied noir mothers and children, and several children lost limbs in the explosion. From a feminist point of view, the film also reveals severe deficiencies in its portrayal of the Arab women used by Yacef: they were all from bourgeois backgrounds, so the identity shift involved in removing the veil was not nearly so traumatic as among uneducated working-class Arab women. The milk bar bomber, Zora Drif, was typical of the group recruited by Yacef. She had studied law at the University of Algiers and was, arguably, at least as interesting as the illiterate Ali La Pointe since she had revolted angrily against the shallow lifestyle of the colons with endless parties and trips to the beach and cinema. Terrorist struggle, Drif maintained, involved being absorbed into the anonymity of the group, and it is interesting to compare her motives for engaging in it with later female terrorists such as Gudrun Ensslin of the RAK that I will examine later.34 However, there is no serious debate on the merits or demerits of this use of female bombers,

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and Pontecorvo decided to remove all the dialogue from the scene where the women put on European clothes and ends up signifying its revolutionary importance through Morricone’s musical score.35 The women in The Battle of Algiers have no independent voice. They also have an uncertain identity as they have to undergo a dress change to become significant players in the terrorist campaign, achieving at best what Norma Claire Moruzzi has termed a ‘multi-layered construction of feminine identity … premised upon a lack of absolute definition’.36 This uncertain identity was, in part, due to the problems Pontecorvo confronted when he attempted to recruit female actresses for the film; many refused to take on the parts given the strict social codes separating men from women in Algeria. Not surprisingly, he ended up with westernised women who had to play more conservative women confronting the issue of wearing western dress for the first time, a multiple change of identities worthy of a Shakespeare comedy.37 The issue of gender also extends to the way the film was shot. The grainy black and white effect recreated the mood of black and white documentaries and post-war Italian neorealism. It won many admirers following the film’s release in 1966, though it has now been pointed out that one of the effects of this was to heighten the masculinity of some of the male characters such as Ali La Pointe and Yacef Saadi (Figure 4.1). Both actors are depicted on occasions in high-contrast lighting known as chiaroscuro or ‘Rembrandt effect’, suggesting psychological depth and the role of the unconscious mind. In comparison, in the scene where the three women bombers prepare themselves by adopting western dress the approach is a largely conventional Hollywood take that would have fitted an actress like Marilyn Monroe (Figure 4.2). It compares poorly too to the character studies of the women guerrillas in Five Branded Women I examined in Chapter 2.38 Pontecorvo’s movie also contrasts quite dramatically with the Egyptian director Youssef Chahine’s less well-known Djamila, the Algerian, shot, like Rome Open City, on a shoe-string budget and released in 1958 at the height of Pan Arabism in the Middle East. Chahine’s film stands as an impassioned plea for Algerian independence less than a year after the conflict in Algiers, and is a remarkable movie about the FLN women bomber Djamila (played by the Egyptian actress Magda al-Sabahi). Djamila was arrested and tortured by the French before being put on trial, which Chahine portrays in a manner recalling pious images from Carl Dreyer’s 1928 silent classic The Passion of Joan of Arc.39 Unlike Pontecorvo’s women bombers, Djamila does not have to remove any veil since she is a middle-class woman studying at university. Indeed, her friend’s father is well acquainted with the local French commander Colonel Bigeard, who visits his house. Bigeard (played by the Egyptian actor Rushdy Abaza) is a composite figure of the French officer corps, though he is easily distinguishable by the fact that he has a patch over one eye like the real Bigeard. It is Djamila, significantly, who plays a major role in the bombing campaign in Algiers, taking over Saadi Yacef ’s role of instructing the women bombers in imagery that is, even now, almost unique in the cinema of urban terrorism. The escalating violence by both sides leads in The Battle of Algiers to the dramatic intrusion of the French paras into Algiers, based on the real decision to cede control in the city to the cream of the French military. By 1956 there were some 1,200 men in the ALN along with a further 4,500 armed members of the FLN against some

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Figure 4.1 The FLN underground activist Ali La Pointe engaged in a violent demonstration in The Battle of Algiers. By permission of Kevin Durst.

Figure 4.2 Three FLN women receiving instructions on the bombing campaign to be conducted in Algiers from The Battle of Algiers. By permission of Kevin Durst.

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1,000 policemen, who were mainly trained to combat ordinary criminals.40 As can be seen, the paras are led by ‘General Matthieu’, a composite character based in part on the character of General Massu, commander of the elite 10th Parachute Division. Pontecorvo’s depiction of the urbane General Matthieu – complete with dark glasses – marching at the head of his troops through the centre of Algiers to the relieved cheers of the pied noirs is one of the most dramatic of its kind in the cinema of war. He is in para uniform, and dominates the scene as he marches with unquestioned purpose towards the camera. This is a display of military power affirming the French right to rule Algeria; the fact that we cannot see his eyes suggests that he is a personal embodiment of French colonialism rather than a more familiar movie hero such as Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo. He also leads a column of soldiers suggesting that it is collective military power that is the full expression of French rule rather than an individual leader, despite the fact that French imperial myth had been frequently centred on the achievements of individual generals such as General Lattre de Tassigny (Figure 4.3). Like Bergmann in Rome Open City, Matthieu has a plan to sweep Algiers of its underground terrorist network based on the use of intelligence to penetrate the FLN’s hierarchical cell structure. Drawing a triangular pattern on a blackboard, Matthieu reveals himself as an expert in guerre revolutionnaire, learnt through bitter experience in the war against the Viet Minh in Indochina.

Figure 4.3 General Matthieu leading the French paras into Algiers from The Battle of Algiers © Moviestore collection Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo.

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The macho portrayal of the French paras is a masterly feature of the film, given the paras’ central mythic importance in French culture. The paras had emerged apparently triumphant from the debacle in Indochina and the defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. They provided an outlet for escapist fantasies that appeared to rival even those of Brigitte Bardot, forming the heart of the French military myth fictionalized by the journalist and novelist Jean Larteguy in the classic war novels The Centurions and The Praetorians – fictions that formed the narrative of the Hollywood movie Lost Command, released in the same year as The Battle of Algiers, and starring Anthony Quinn.41 The urbane Matthieu replicates in the film much of the aristocratic seigneurial authority of the French officer corps, derived as it was from the training and drill at St Cyr and the Ecole de Guerre. He contrasts markedly with the far seedier police chief Bergmann in Rome Open City and Bigeard in Djamila, who haunt night clubs and take great pleasure in torturing and manipulating their victims.42 The real influence on French counter-revolutionary warfare and psychological operations came less from Massu than from Yves Godard. It was Godard who was the most intellectually important of the colonels under Massu’s command forming, in effect, the third component of the character of Mathieu along with Massu and Bigeard. Godard, even more than Roger Trinquier, had been most responsible for the development of the paras’ counter-insurgency tactics, having been put in charge of the ‘dirty tricks’ battalion since 1948. It was also Godard who was most involved in understanding the structure of the FLN in Algiers in 1957 and penetrating its underground cells.43 Godard’s battalion had been instrumental, even before the paras’ takeover of Algiers, in seizing all the police records on the FLN underground and using these as the basis for an elaborate strategy of intelligence collection that proved decisive in smashing the FLN’s city-wide network.44 The strategy relied on informers with heads covered by blankets picking out known FLN cell members – a process not shown in The Battle of Algiers but depicted in the film Lost Command. Equally, one paratrooper was made responsible for one family under an ‘ilot’ system while another might be responsible for a whole house with several families. By such means, Massu built up networks of some 1,500 informants, though none of this was shown in The Battle of Algiers, which focused on torture.45 To a modern audience, tropes like the unveiling of the Arab women and the FLN’s hierarchical cell structure make The Battle of Algiers seem a rather dated movie, though, for student radicals in the west in the late 1960s it provided a sort of template for revolution. In the ‘Days of Rage’ organized by the SDS in the United States in late 1969, many tried to ululate in imitation of the Arab women in the Casbah and the underground cell structure of the FLN probably shaped some of the romantic hopes for revolution by the Weather Underground.46 Modern Jihadist insurgent movements, however, focus on the restoration of ‘traditional’ Arab dress for women as part of their subordination to new and often violent patriarchal structures, such as those of ISIL. So, too, modern jihadist insurgent movements are structured very differently. In a post 9/11 world of horizontally inclined movements with a regional, if not global, reach, these movements linked up through satellite phones and encrypted internet links. The hierarchical command structure of the FLN appears to be a throwback to an earlier era

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when colonial insurgent movements usually sought to emulate the European armies they were fighting against, often because many of the insurgent leaders in them had had previous military experience in these very armies.47 One central trope casts a long shadow over films dealing with insurgency. Torture is often used to extract intelligence, though it is not always shown to be effective. Rossellini’s Rome Open City had been ambivalent on the issue, since the torture of Manfredi had served, in the end, as symbolic of the agony and passion of the city of Rome under the German occupation. Information securing the actual capture of Manfredi did not come from any torture but his former girl-friend Marina informing on him, given that she is supplied by the Germans with money and clothes. A few years later, Chahine’s Djamila also graphically depicted the torturing of Djamila Bouhired, including the drowning of her younger brother in a barrel, though here too torture becomes a major issue in her resulting trial, where her brutal torture reinforces her role as a female martyr ready to die for the cause of Algerian independence. The Battle of Algiers avoids the torture of women, perhaps because Chahine’s film had been banned not only in France but also in Algeria after independence in 1962, mainly due to the way the film made clear that Djamila had been raped as well as tortured. Pontecorvo, though, sought to stress the political uses of torture beyond the mere humiliation of the victims. The film starts with the torture of a thin, wizened Arab prisoner (a real prisoner taken from jail during the making of the film). The information extracted from him enables Matthieu’s paras to surround the last remaining FLN stronghold in the Casbah containing Ali La Pointe. Torture is shown to be central to Matthieu’s strategy of urban counter-terrorism, and he even justifies its use at a press conference with a group of critical international journalists. The long-term effectiveness of torture in securing ultimate victory to the counterterrorist forces is still, though, ambivalent in The Battle of Algiers, given that the film has two endings.48 The first is the actual military victory of the paras in Algiers following the final bombing of La Pointe’s hideout. As Matthieu walks away with the senior French commander we are confronted by an element of dramatic irony as the commander remarks that the defeat of the FLN in the countryside should prove to be comparatively easy compared to the campaign in Algiers. We know, to the contrary, that this was not the case since the rural FLN insurgency was not broken. The Battle of Algiers never looks at this dimension of the FLN’s resistance, preferring to move to the second ending with the sudden upsurge of popular street protest in Algiers two years later in 1960. The film finishes with a voice-over telling us that this pattern of popular protest led to the eventual independence of Algeria in 1962. It is as if The Battle of Algiers was relying upon other films to tell the full story of the rural insurgency of the FLN and the final transfer of power in 1962. In the case of the former we have, significantly, the film Lost Command, released the same year as The Battle of Algiers which covered some of the war in Algiers as well as the rural insurgency. Equally, Lost Command is continually pervaded by a strong sense of the inevitability of French defeat without any focus on the actual transfer of power to the FLN in 1962. But, so far, no film has been able satisfactorily to deal with the political decision-making that led to Algerian independence, revealing perhaps the limits of the war film genre and its usual failure to involve military and political decision-making at high levels.

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The Battle of Algiers was, for its time, a radical and innovative film that certainly upset many French views of the Algerian War. The French government banned the film for years following threats to bomb cinemas in Paris due to show it in 1966.49 Over the years, the film has haunted discussion on cinematic depiction of war and terrorism, though for some critics the film’s championing of a secular and Marxist-inclined national liberation movement seems disconnected from the modern religiously inspired politics of North Africa and the Middle East.50 This discussion has migrated considerably from the era of the late 1960s and 1970s, when it was deemed essential viewing for all those interested in radical or underground cinema. In more recent years it has become respectable film for showing to military audiences. In 2003 there was a special viewing of the film in the Pentagon at the time of the invasion of Iraq. By this time, the central issue raised by the film was the effectiveness and usefulness of torture in securing human intelligence to defeat an underground insurgent or terrorist movement. The film’s screening did not lead to any revision of US counter-insurgency policies but their reinforcement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.51 Pontecorvo moved in his next film Queimada (also known as Burn) in 1969 into the terrain of colonial conquest and neo-colonialism. Compared to the historical narrative of The Battle of Algiers, Burn was an historical narrative centred on a Caribbean island, though it continued some of the former film’s Marxist and Fanonist political preoccupations. Pontecorvo focused on the abstract historical dynamics behind western imperialism involving issues of slavery, cheap labour and race. Such themes were hardly ones that leant themselves easily to commercial cinema. However, Pontecorvo found himself for the first time in his career involved with a Hollywood studio, United Artists (UA). This was not just a result of his soaring reputation derived from The Battle of Algiers but a belief by the executives of UA that the film would be like many profitable Italian spaghetti westerns. This studio’s support meant that Pontecorvo had more freedom and autonomy when making Queimada than he ever had with The Battle of Algiers, though this would expose the cultural rifts between Italian neorealist cinema and the action adventure genres of Hollywood, together with some unresolved attitudes on Pontecorvo’s part towards the issue of race and racism. The narrative for Queimada emerged from Pontecorvo’s reading about the life of the American adventurer William Walker (1824–1860) who became involved in the Central American state of Nicaragua in the 1850s and was briefly president of that country in 1856. Attempting to unite the countries of Central America, Walker ran up against the American business magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt after seizing some of Vanderbilt’s assets. Walker was overthrown in 1857 and captured by the British, who had him executed in Honduras in 1860.52 The story attracted Pontecorvo for the way it revealed both the ruthless self-interest behind western imperialism and its political opportunism. He changed both the character and the location of the story, which was now set on a fictional sugar-producing island in the Caribbean, while Walker was turned from being an American into a British figure, Sir William Walker, acting first on behalf of the British government and later commercial sugar interests. The shift went in reverse to many Hollywood film producers, who frequently turned British

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characters into American ones, but exemplified Pontecorvo’s belief that US and British imperialism largely ran in tandem with each other. The film was not easy to shoot as it became bogged down in conflicts between the actors and the director, as Pontecorvo tried to combine the star Marlon Brando with amateur local actors. Brando’s method acting was not one that a European auteur like Pontecorvo found easy to accept. There were growing rifts between a strong-willed and hard-to-control Brando and a doctrinaire Italian director, apparently unwilling to respect major acting talent. The problem was made worse by Pontecorvo’s choice of actor, Evaristo Marquez, to play the black rebel leader Jose Dolores. The amateur Marquez had ‘savage’ facial expressions that Pontecorvo rather liked for the film, even though he had no acting skills. Tensions further escalated when Brando discovered that the black actors were paid at a lower rate than whites and ate separately. Brando left the set and got as far as the airport before Pontecorvo backed down and agreed to treat everyone the same.53 This apocryphal story highlights some of the problems in Pontecorvo’s approach to film making. Even though he was often lauded on college campuses and radical film festivals, Queimada was a rather unexpected follow-up to The Battle of Algiers. Pontecorvo might well have chosen a more contemporary narrative to investigate both imperialism and the third world revolt against it, especially in the context of the radical cinema that was emerging in Cuba in the 1960s and early 1970s before its loss of momentum in the face of strict censorship. Such an opportunity was missed and Queimade became a largely art house film investigating western imperial interests, first fomenting an indigenous revolt against a decadent form of Portuguese colonial rule, and then descending into a counter-insurgency to quell an indigenous revolt. The narrative was a metaphor for the course of modern imperialism and the shift from oldstyle European colonial rule to more informal patterns of American imperial control in the western hemisphere. Walker acts as an agent provocateur when he first comes to the Portuguese island of Queimada in the 1830s, after an insurrection has been quelled and its leader publicly garrotted. Walker finds a new leader in the form of water porter, Dolores. He instigates a black slave insurrection though this does not lead to a Haitian-style revolution but the imposition of a new government led by the mixed-race figure Teddy Sanchez (played by the Italian actor Renato Salvatori, who darkened his face to play the part). Sanchez is a weak character and fails to secure any accommodation between black and white communities on the island. This is a colonial situation violently polarized, in Fanonist terms, on racial as well as class lines. But Dolores too is quickly marginalized after the overthrow of the Portuguese and the murder of the governor. He learns from Walker that he has only been trained as a military leader and not an administrative one. He is excluded from power and forced to return to the bush as a guerrilla leader. The final scenes of the film depict the British bombing and burning villages to flush out the guerrillas, though Walker is murdered before he can embark on a ship to leave the island. Queimada had a positive reception in the United States as well as Europe. Marlon Brando later looked favourably on the film for all his disagreements with Pontecorvo, seeing it as one of the movies in which he did some of his best acting.54 It is questionable

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how far this is true given that no characters really evolve as autonomous agents when they are in the grip of impersonal forces of capitalist accumulation. The film led to no serious follow-ups, though it is possible to see Richard Lester’s Cuba (1979) embracing some of the themes in Pontecorvo’s earlier epic. In this instance, the imperialist intruder is a British former mercenary Major Robert Davies (Sean Connery) who realizes that it is now too late to reverse the course of the revolution and finally leaves the island with his mission unfulfilled. For all its apparent success, Pontecorvo’s film ultimately stands somewhat alone and without the same kind of inspiring cinematic buttress as The Battle of Algiers. This can be, at least partly, explained by the way that the film failed to fall into any obvious generic category. Its Marxist narrative and dialogue hardly made it an obvious Hollywood blockbuster and it was clearly functioning on a far more elaborate level than most spaghetti westerns, even if the script was written by Franco Solinas. Likewise, the film failed to engage with wider cinematic movements such as the cinema emerging in post-revolutionary Cuba. It is probably unrealistic to have expected Pontecorvo to have done anything like this while making a film for United Artists. The American cultural boycott made even visiting the island difficult (unlike Pontecorvo’s close attachments with independent Algeria), while his autocratic auteurism set him apart from the mood among many Cuban film makers of the time, defined by Julio Garcia Espinosa in a seminal article ‘For an Imperfect cinema’ published in issue 66/67, 1969, of Cine Cubano (an article that has been rediscovered by young film makers and critics in Latin America). Here Espinosa championed a populist cinema from the ground up that was deeply critical of cinematic approaches that praised films in terms of the standards of high culture. ‘We can denounce imperialism,’ he continued, ‘but should do so as a way of proposing concrete battles.’55 By these standards, Queimada did not exactly fit into cinematic debate pivoted around the one country in Central and South America that had managed to forge a revolutionary break with American hegemony. Beyond the iconic music of Ennio Morricone, its rather stilted narrative and acting compares poorly with some of the Cuban films of the time, especially The Last Supper (1976), directed by Tomas Gutierrez Alea, depicting a slave revolt during Easter on a sugar plantation in Cuba at the end of the eighteenth century. The revolt breaks out after a drunken supper where one of the slaves engages in dialogue with the slave owner. The narrative is infused with a religious language pivoted around rival interpretations of Christian belief, especially the notion of the equality of all men. The film also shows how the slaves take the Christian message out of the hands of an apparently well-intentioned slave owner and transform it into a revolutionary message. It is popular interpretations of Christian belief that matter in this situation rather than the abstract Marxism of Queimada, one that might appeal to the Western New Left but had little to say to popular audiences at the local level in the Caribbean or South America. For all its use of colour, The Last Supper hearkened back to the earlier phases of post-war Italian neorealism, which was not especially surprising given that Alea had studied at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. Like other Cuban film makers of the era, he was concerned with the ways beliefs are maintained or broken at the popular level rather than assuming that ideologies work in accordance with a wider

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logic of capitalist accumulation. This Gramscian approach was one that largely passed Pontecorvo by, though one wonders what he might have done with a script writer not infused with such a Stalinist world view as Solinas. Equally, one is also left wondering why he never seriously attempted any serious follow-up by producing another film on the black revolution in Haiti, a revolution that still has not been treated in any major film feature (though it is referred to in The Last Supper). Overall, Pontecorvo’s two films have inspired numerous other directors such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, Paul Greengrass, Edward Zwick and Kathryn Bigelow. This influence is to some degree evident also in the work of the Franco-Greek director Costa Gavras, the German director Uli Edel and the American John Malkovich that I shall examine in the last section of this chapter.

Urban terrorism in the cinema of Costa Gavras, John Malkovich and Uli Edel Rossellini’s and Pontecorvo’s iconic films established some of the key determinants of a neorealist semi-documentary style of film making that continued to imprint itself on film making internationally, years after the neorealist wave had gone out of fashion in Italy. This was especially true for State of Siege (1972), directed by the Greek-French director Costa Gavras, set during the terror war waged by the Tupamaros guerrillas in Uruguay. In his previous film Z, Gavras had approaching the crisis in Greece in the early 1960s more as a despairing radical democrat than a Marxist revolutionary, with a strong sense that bourgeois democracy and the rule of law are only thin ideological and political façades vulnerable to being undermined by determined conspirators buttressed by powerful social groups. Much of Z focuses on the efforts of a resolutely neutral magistrate (Jean Louis Trintignant) to find out the full facts of a political assassination. This is eventually derailed by an underground right-wing conspiracy to undermine the constitution of the Greek state, leading to the military coup of 1967. State of Siege starts with similar crisis in 1969 in Uruguay as the police and the army attempt to smash the Tupamaros underground by mounting road blocks and searching long queues of motor vehicles. The Tupamaros terrorist underground (initially formed in 1963 among radical sugar plantation workers) is not yet destroyed. In a well-planned operation involving several cars, they kidnap an American official Philip Michael. During a prolonged interrogation, they force the cynically calculating Michael to admit that his work for USAID was really a cover for US military assistance to the Uruguayan state’s counter-insurgency. The film’s narrative was based on the real kidnapping of USAID worker Dan Mitrione, who was murdered after the government failed to accede to demands for the release of 150 political prisoners. The film suggests that the Uruguayan government is largely under the control and influence of the United States, though it fails to investigate the wider history of the Tupamaros, which is presented as a movement battling for democracy against a repressive state. Matthew Carr has criticized the film for presenting an appealing image of urban guerrilla warfare. The Tupamaros are shown, he has claimed, to be young and good looking compared to the ‘thuggish’ Uruguayan police; they also try to reason with

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Michael, only killing him after the negotiations with the government break down.56 While this criticism is to some degree true, it overlooks the way the Tupamaros interrogate their hostage wearing disguises, the features of apparently implacable urban terrorists, while Michael’s reasonable, if arrogant, defence of his actions as a US counter-insurgency specialist mirrors the ‘reasonableness’ of his guerrilla enemies. This is a war of two contrasting ideas of rational action, and the movie disturbs because it does not link terrorists with familiar stereotypes of the psychologically unhinged or fanatical. The film met with some hostility on its release in the United States and was refused a showing at the Kennedy Center.57 The Tupamaros were, by the late 1960s, activists largely drawn from the educated middle class; over 75 per cent of members had some form of higher education. Many of these well-educated young people were inspired by the speeches of Che Guevara to reject the more compliant and reformist strategy of the Uruguayan Communist Party. The movement was supported at a distance by some liberals, but much of its growth was helped by the government’s weak security forces, amounting to a mere 12,000 poorly trained men. As late as 1971, prison security was so ineffective that a Tupamaros team managed to break into Punta Carretas’s maximum security prison and free 106 captives.58 It was the terrorism of the Tupamaros that led to the militarization of the Uruguayan state. The Tupamaros had, by 1972, forced the other parties of the Left into a popular front, though they did remarkably badly in elections that year winning just 20 per cent of the popular vote. From then onwards, the civilian presidency of Juan Maria Bordaberry Arocena fell under the grip of the military. Within a year, he headed a civilian-military dictatorship that ruled the country until 1976. State of Siege fails to follow these historical trends on the scale of The Battle of Algiers, and is based on a snapshot of a single dramatic event. However, Mitrione’s kidnapping was hardly unusual since the Tupamaros specialized in this activity rather than waging an urban insurgency like the FLN in Algiers. State of Siege was one of a small number of films in the 1970s investigating US interference in South American politics, while also stressing a theme – prevalent in so many of Gavras’s films – of political and military resistance.59 Like the FLN in Algiers, the Tupamaros remain an amorphous underground urban movement with no identifiable heroic leader. But they also lacked international allies in the UN or the third word anxious to get rid of European colonialism. This was a frustrated and angry section of the young urban bourgeoisie rather than a working-class or peasant movement. Gavras does not eulogise the Tupamaros, though his style of cinema verite allows audiences to see beyond the usual demonic stereotyping of terrorists. In comparison, the 2002 crime thriller The Dancer Upstairs is ultimately disappointing as a film portraying the terror war waged by Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) guerrillas in Peru between 1980 and 1992. It sees the war through the eyes of a rather jaded policeman, Augustin Rejas (played by the Spanish actor Javier Bardem), working for the Peruvian National Directorate Against Terrorism (DIRCOTE). Rejas is leading a search for the hidden leader of the Sendero Luminoso guerrilla movement, the philosophy professor Abimael Guzman, popularly known as ‘President Gonzalo’ (probably from William

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Shakespeare’s The Tempest) but called in the film ‘President Ezequiel’. The film was the first movie ever scripted by the British journalist and novelist Nicholas Shakespeare, based on his own novel, as well as the first directed by American actor John Malkovich. The Dancer Upstairs was not the first movie to focus on Sendero Luminoso, since it came in the wake of two important Peruvian films, La Boca del Lobo (The Mouth of the Wolf) in 1988 and Marianne Eyde’s You Only Live Once (La vida es una sola) (1993). But Dancer was certainly the best-known film internationally, given that it had been directed by a leading Hollywood actor and scripted by an internationally renowned British novelist. This is of some significance when the novel’s depiction of Sendero Luminoso and its bizarre leader is considered, for the film has created a highly misleading image of an insurgency that claimed at least 30,000 (some say 70,000) lives. It is unlikely to be rectified at any early date, since critical film making has become increasingly difficult after the Lima government’s decision in the early 1990s to open cinema to foreign films; the indigenous Peruvian film industry has suffered severely from a wave of Hollywood imports that has undermined efforts by local film producers to make films reflecting the country’s complex identity. The centrality of The Dancer Upstairs in perceptions of the terrorist war in Peru is inextricably linked to wider patterns of global economic and political power in the cinema industry and this industry’s capacity to shape the memory of past events.60 The Sendero guerrilla war was of only momentary interest globally, falling as it did between the earlier phase of international terrorism in the 1970s centred on the Middle East and later terrorism from the late 1990s onwards centred around Al Qaeda and other radical Islamic movements. The fact that it took place for most of the period from 1980 to 1992 in remote Andean mountain regions, and among predominantly Quecha-speaking Indian communities, ensured that it remained of marginal interest to western audiences until the movement moved in the late 1980s into Lima, where it embarked on a campaign of bombings, kidnappings and assassination. In early 1992 the Peruvian state proclaimed a state of emergency and there was a draconian military crackdown before Guzman was finally captured in September that year in a middleclass suburb living above a dance studio. Guzman’s subsequent life imprisonment on an island succeeded in destroying much of the mythology surrounding a movement that looked to the Andean Indian peasantry as the base for a Maoist revolution. The terrorist war continued for a few more years before the army achieved some sort of stable balance in the countryside as a less land hungry peasantry grew increasingly tired of the war. The personality cult surrounding ‘President Gonzalo’ struck many observers as comical and eccentric, though this detracts attention from a firmly Marxist party desperate to return to the basics of Marxism-Leninism at a time when the Chinese regime of Deng Xiaoping had embarked on a ‘revisionist’ course. Sendero saw itself as a revolutionary ‘vanguard’ that would lead the population into a ‘people’s war’ to overthrow the Peruvian state. The ‘Gonzalo thought’ of the party was anchored in what Guzman cinematically and fancifully termed ‘a fistful of Marxists’ who would guide Peru into a future classless utopia.61 This became somewhat undermined by the discovery by the police of a video showing Guzman and a group of white revolutionary comrades dancing in a student-type party to the music of Zorba the Greek. The video

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seemed to expose the failure of the party to emerge as a movement that transcended Peru’s deep racial and ethnic divisions, though focusing on the central leadership tends to detract from what was occurring at the local level where Sendero cadres attempted to engage with the Indian peasantry. Focusing on the mysterious, if bland, character of Guzman in The Dancer Upstairs replicates many of the simplistic generalization of some western journalists of the Sendero phenomenon. Guzman became, in this type of narrative, another exotic form of terrorist, possibly a playboy behind the scenes, but with no obvious personality to write about, unlike fellow South American Che Guevara or well-known terrorist figures like Carlos or Andreas Baader. Shakespeare was intrigued over why a philosophy professor interested in Kant should embark on a such a career, and concluded that a man with such little character was unlikely to have been the main inspiration for Sendero, certainly compared to the anthropologist Efrain Morote Best, rector of the San Christobal Huamanga University in Ayacucho where Guzman taught. This conspiratorial approach towards understanding Sendero is typical of conventional ‘terrorology’. It is a sub-discipline of the social sciences that generally focuses on the leaderships of underground organizations and their capacity to mobilize and ‘brainwash’ gullible supporters, very often young women, rather than the operation of movement at the local level. In the Peruvian context, this outlook tended to be underpinned by an orientalist variant of anthropology that portrayed Andean Indian communities as largely passive and standing outside history.62 It was an image that Eyde attempted to confront in her largely unknown film You Only Live Once, which focuses on a single Andean village as it comes under intense pressures from a cadre of young Sendero students. They all wear western clothes and might almost be a Peruvian variant of the Uruguayan Tupamaros except that they have left the city for the mountains where they are attempting to mobilize Indian communities into a Maoist revolutionary force. One of the young Senderitas, Meche, goes into the classroom of the village school and exhorts the children not to listen to the lies taught them about Peru. The struggle is as much one about symbols as sun-worshipping cosmology; the Peruvian national flag is hauled down and the Maoist red flag hoisted up. Community leaders in the village are taken to the square where they are forced to swear allegiance not to the law of the nation but to the law of the party. However, when the army arrives it does not behave any differently and is equally disruptive. Children are taken out of class to possibly be tortured, though the army does create a civil defence group in the village under its own appointed leaders. This proves crucial to the course of the conflict, as the villagers, now armed, eventually drive the Senderistas away. These scenes exemplified the fact that some 3500 rondas campesinos had been created by the late 1980s in the main centres of Sendero activity in the Andes, ensuring that it was already in some decline some time before Guzman’s final capture in 1992.63 You Only Live Once also suggests an Indian people that was neither silent, passive nor superstitious, unlike The Dancer Upstairs. They argue and negotiate with the Senderistas, who, for all their brutality and crude dogma, stand as some sort of template for modernisation and education. This becomes evident in the sub-narrative concerning the young Indian girl Florinda who is seduced by one of the Senderistas,

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but breaks from the movement when she is forced to execute another village member. At the start of the film she stands as an apparently silent and ignorant Indian peasant girl in marked contrast to Meche; but over time she acquires a voice and stands up to her deceiving lover and the party, finally leaving the village through fear of army reprisals and Sendero revenge attacks. Eyde’s film was a brave feminist interpretation of the brutal guerrilla war in which both sides of the conflict enforce some form of patriarchal domination over women. By contrast, The Dancer Upstairs was based on a narrative infused with suburban melodrama that ensured Sendero terrorism could never be viewed as anything other than evil irrespective of the actions of the state. It was Malkovich who decided to proceed with a film version of Shakespeare’s novel. It is easy to speculate on the reasons for this, though the novel’s main character, the policeman Augustin Rejas, falls in love with a beautiful ballet dancer who is secretly harbouring the nation’s number one public enemy. This was clearly good material for a crime thriller without getting too involved in the society’s complex politics. The novel contained a theme that Malkovich had tangled with in previous movies, that of ambiguous identity and the willingness of individuals to accept other characters on trust. This was evident in Of Mice and Men (1992) where Malkovich played the backward itinerant farmhand Lennie who appears to his mate George Milton (Gary Sinise) to be just a harmless but hard-working man who would be useful on the farm George dreams of acquiring. Only as the story unravels does Lennie emerge as an unstable and dangerous figure capable of murder. The theme of ambiguous identity is clearly evident in The Dancer Upstairs, which Malkovich has defended as an entirely personal view of a political war since ‘films don’t do political science … Politics is mostly personal’.64 Rejas becomes drawn to Yolande as his marriage to a wife consumed with having her nose fixed and living a suburban middle-class lifestyle is clearly failing. He is also in the middle of a terror war and desperately trying to give his life some meaning; he was originally a lawyer but resigned to become a policeman in disgust at the corruption he encountered. He is no philosopher like ‘Ezequiel’ or South American existentialist policeman; it is evident that the one person with any meaning for him is his young daughter, a character type that can be compared to the Mossad operative Avner in Spielberg’s Munich. Only once does the film move out of Lima, as the narrative follows Rejas back to his family coffee plantation, nationalized years before by the military government. We briefly see some of the chaos of the rural guerrilla war, with some gruesome scenes such as a hanging burning body surrounded by chanting guerrillas. The peasants Rejas encounters are usually silent and superstitious, vaguely speculating as to the whereabouts of ‘Ezequeil’ who might, as one old lady states, be blowing like some sort of divinity on the wind. Returning to Lima is a return to surer ground and the film is interesting for its depiction of the relationship between the anti-terrorism police, the military and political ruling class. Rejas’s commanding officer General Merino is suitably cynical, reminiscing that the only two things that seem properly to function in Peru are Sendero and the women’s volleyball team. He is pushed to one side as the military carry out their threat to take over if Ezequiel is not caught; however, the movie avoids seriously confronting the ensuing state of siege, relying on a few scenes as the army takes away police property and swoops on a Sendero woman captured by the police.

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The main device used to portray the army take-over is the inter-textual reference to Gavras’s film State of Siege. The end of the film appears on a video captured by the police, revealing the Sendero movie clip of the Zorba dance. This cinematic has been praised by some critics and the reviewer of the New York Times saw it as a ‘homage and reference point’ in the film. But is this a fair way to judge it? On a modest budget of $4 million it clearly made sense to avoid too many expensive military scenes, though at the same time the reference to Uruguay results in South American terrorism and counter-terrorism being represented as being of the generic type Shakespeare simplistically calls ‘extremism’.65 This is manifestly absurd, given the specific nature of Spanish colonial rule in Peru and the failure to include Andean rural communities into a common society. The film fails to explore exactly what motivates many younger people to join it: the young teenage girls who assassinate a government minister outside his home appear largely middle class, comparable to those who supported the Tupamaros, but exactly why are they alienated from a lifestyle that so attracts Rejas’s wife? They are voiceless, and the one wounded girl Rejas eventually finds is shot before she can talk. For all its weaknesses, The Dancer Upstairs is quite innovative in the use of the trope of dance and ballet as a way of depicting modern terrorism. Terrorist movements can be likened to a form of debased popular theatre, in which the various players all have clear roles to perform, whether these be the shock and horror of victims of terror attacks; and predictable police and army crackdowns and ritualistic condemnations by political leaders, vowing that the terrorists will never win. Theatre from its early foundations has always had a fascination for the occult and the evil and this has been exemplified by some of the exotic features of the terrorist war in Peru.66 This was a war mounted by groups both inside and outside the society at the same time; fighting in the Andes as well as orchestrating attacks in Lima from a hidden headquarters. In Lima, the terrorism war took a highly theatrical form as dead dogs are slung from lamp posts with explosives; fireworks lit after terror attacks; while a bogus Sendero theatrical group invade a performance at a theatre to assassinate a government minister and his wife. The trope is extended to the dance studio where Yolande teaches Rejas’s daughter and harbours Ezequiel; while the state’s response after capturing him is to put him into an iron cage like an animal. The theatricality of terrorism has often been ignored by contemporary film producers and is more like to be found in horror movies such as the bizarre and brutally theatrical Hannibal Lector in Red Dragon (2001). A rather different set of images emerged in some of the films released in Germany on the Red Army Faction (RAF), otherwise known as the Baader Meinhof ‘Gang’. The movement was the first generation of underground terrorist movements to operate in West Germany in the early 1970s and was followed by second- and third-generation movements known as Revolutionary Cells (RK) that lasted into the late 1990s. The RK have largely escaped the attention of film makers; even the RK terrorists involved in the 1976 Entebbe plane hijacking of an Air France plane to Entebbe in 1976 as they tended to detract attention away from the demonic character of Idi Amin (see Chapter 7). The RAF cut a raw nerve in the German collective consciousness, given that most of the leaders, Andreas Baader excepted, came from respectable middle-class backgrounds. Their violent revolt against West German society threw up important

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questions about the nature of the society that was rebuilt in the years after 1945 under the aegis of Konrad Adenauer. Well into the late 1980s, over a decade after their death, a cycle of fifteen paintings by the artists Gerhard Richter collectively entitled 18 October 1977 (the date that Baader, Ensslin and others were found dead in their cells in Stammheim Prison) stirred up considerable controversy as the portraits of the dead terrorists (painted from photographs) continued to disturb in an era when the term ‘terrorist’ had become increasingly associated with new forms of global terror.67 The RAF originally emerged in the wake of the economic ‘miracle’ in post-war West Germany. This led critics on both the Right and Left to complain of an arid materialism that seemed to have reduced the society to a Wirtschaftswunder (department store society). Much of this hostility was linked to a deep hostility to the Americanization of post-war Germany and the supposed destruction of German moral values.68 By the late 1960s a vocal student counterculture had also emerged in many German inner cities as some young underclass took to living in various anarchist communes, the terrain for later RAF and RK terrorism. The communes attracted not only drifters but exiles from the affluent middle class such as the left-wing journalist Ulrike Meinhof. Even though the main phase of student revolt was over by 1970, the RAF began a spree of terrorist attacks before most of its leadership was arrested during 1972, suggesting that terrorism in this context was impelled by a desire to try and sustain by other means the brief radical upsurge of the late 1960s.69 In prison, the RAF leaders became iconic heroes to much of the German youth counterculture, leading to huge pressure being put on the government to ensure that the leaders were given a fair trial. The West German state was still quite fragile and many intellectuals questioned its democratic credentials. A new court house costing $4 million was built close to Stammheim prison, where the delayed trial of the RAF leaders finally commenced in March 1975. By this time, Baader, Ensslin and Meinhof had become well-known personalities throughout West Germany, though, globally, they never had quite the same notoriety as Carlos. This was a considerably different terrorist situation to that of Algeria, Uruguay or Peru The RAF’s campaign led to a mere thirty deaths during its short but dramatic existence, a tiny fraction of those in the Andes. The RAF leadership confirmed all too vividly the close links between terrorism and modern media, while the dramatic court trial of the RAF leaders raised important questions about why some individuals choose to go down a terrorist path, though this was not the theme of two of initial German films that vaguely attempted to explore 1970s terrorism. The first, The Third Generation (1979) directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ignored both the RAF and RK completely for a largely affluent and self-absorbed ‘third generation’ that is muddled, disorganized and very hedonistic. The second film was Margaretha von Trotta’s Marianne and Julianne (Die bleierne Zeit), also in 1979, which looks at two sisters modelled on Gudrun Ensslin and her sister Christiane. The narrative, though, avoids exploring Gudrun Ensslin’s life in any detail as the narrative is from Christiane’s point of view and we only see the consequences of Gudrun’s decisions rather than the reasons that led her to making them.70 A rather fuller cinematic exploration of Gudrun Ensslin’s character and background came with the 2011 film If Not US, Who? (dir. Andres Veiel). Here the focus is on Gudrun

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Ensslin’s family background and her relationship with her lover Bernhard Vesper before her radicalization in the late 1960s. Both Ensslin and Vesper had Nazi fathers and were broadly ‘Hitler’s children’ though it was their intense political relationship which ultimately ensured that Ensslin would become the most important political strategist in the RAF, politicizing Baader’s chaotic and hedonistic anarchism.71 Veieil’s film is interesting for its focus on Ensslin’s relationship with her sister, who continues to visit her when she is in prison and castigates her for her life choices, pointing out that her concern for the misery being endured by those in the third world might well have led to a more creative career by working for an NGO or overseas charity. Ensslin’s political hedonism and self-concern (she barges into her sister’s apartment to steal clothes without asking) is replicated by her sexual hedonism, noisily making love with Baader while a child-minder looks after her young child in the next room. At this personal level, there is little in Ensslin’s life history to confirm the theory that terrorists are all psychotic or psychopathic individuals.72 This might be true for some, but hardly amounts to a very strong explanation for how terrorist movements evolve in the way they do. Focusing on deviant and apparently abnormal individuals has appealed to many film makers, especially in Hollywood. But movements like the RAF can also be explained by the operation of a collective psychosis running through certain social groups isolated from mainstream society. This helps explain how individuals get caught up in underground movements as they instil tight codes of internal discipline and an authoritarian leadership, in the RAF’s case the charismatic and domineering, but highly erratic, Baader. Uli Edel’s film The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008) thus proves to be an important cinematic examination of the collective psychosis that can both galvanize and define a terrorist formation. The film is an ambitious quasi-documentary account of the RAF from its early beginnings to the collective suicide of its main leaders in Stammerheim prison in 1977. In some ways, the movie transfers to the German situation some of the neorealist tropes of The Battle of Algiers and Edel struggles to achieve some cinematic objectivity in the clashing forces of terrorism and counter-terrorism in German cities. Some critics still berated the movie for glamorizing terrorism and representing Baader and Ensslin as latter-day Bonny and Clyde gangsters, though the film also went to some lengths to show how the RAF leaders were part of a wider urban underground that was attracted to terrorism as a form of radical process of group definition. To this extent, the inclusion of the word ‘complex’ into the film’s title is important for suggesting that this was a terrorism anchored in generational disaffection from the dominant norms and values of West German society rather than through class or religious sectarianism. Edel’s film also plays considerable attention at the start to the political context in which the RAF emerged in the late 1960s: the charismatic appeal of the student leader Rudi Dutschke at a noisy student rally; the violent police response to the demonstration mounted against the visit of the Shah of Iran in 1967, including extraordinarily brutal scenes in which a pro-Shah hit team and the police attack demonstrators with clubs, while one demonstrator is shot dead; and the attempted assassination of Dutschke by a neo-Nazi student. These events served as an important tipping point, after which the extreme end of the student underground was prompted into terrorist action. They parallel, to some degree, radicalizing events in

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other situations such as Ali La Pointe’s experience in jail and the execution of a political prisoner or the summary executions of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin on the young Michael Collins. Covering such a long period was never going to be easy, though the RAF was at least familiar to European cinema audiences given that it was one of the better-known terrorist movements in post-war Europe. Unlike many films on terrorism, especially in Hollywood, The Baader Meinhof Complex draws out some of the cultural and political background to a movement that enjoyed considerable support among a younger German generation, especially women, alienated from the material affluence and patriarchy of post-war West Germany. The RAF organized by Baader, Ensslin and Meinhof was part of a series of interlocking anarchist groupings espousing world revolution, inspired by figures such as Che Guevara and Carlos Marighella in South America as well as the wider global youth counterculture centred on rock music, promiscuous sex and drug taking. But a sizeable number of recruits came from runaways from children’s homes and young criminal delinquents (like Baader himself) rather than politicized university students or the mainstream working class. This was less Guevara or Marighella than the idea of a ‘great refusal’ by an underground counterculture espoused by Herbert Marcuse, the philosopher in An Essay on Liberation in 1969. Nevertheless, few women ever gained major positions of prominence in the either the RAF or the RK and women generally remained ‘followers’ rather than leaders.73 The focus on a group of individuals has been considerably different to many terrorism films set in the Middle East, Northern Ireland or Palestine. The RAF was largely contrived by a group of embittered malcontents who saw it as a further stage in the rebellion of a younger generation against a ‘fascist police state’ constructed by their parents that had little to distinguish it, apparently, from the Nazi regime destroyed in 1945. Here the film investigates, if only partially, some of the backgrounds of its central characters: Ulrike Meinhof walking out of a secure bourgeois family and an unfaithful husband for the harder-edged experiences of anarchist communes; Gudrun Ensslin rebelling against her authoritarian father, though we fail to learn of her previous experiences while on a visit to the United States; while Andreas Baader, dramatically intrudes some way into the film, minus his real-life stammer, with a background that continues to remain a mystery. He is clearly the dominant figure in the group, even though he was one of the few not to have been to university. It is Baader’s controlling presence which is decisive in pulling together a disparate group of marginal people into a movement with claims to being an urban guerrilla insurgency. In June 1970, a group that included Baader, Meinhof and Ensslin along with lesser-known figures such as Manfred Grashof and his girlfriend Petra Schelm (a hair dresser) went to Jordan to be trained in guerrilla fighting by the PFLP. They never got on with the Palestinian guerrillas, who took exception, among other things, to nude sun bathing. Edel’s film brings out some major cultural divisions between the would-be German guerrillas and Palestinian freedom fighters. Baader resents being trained in desert warfare since the RAF was an urban insurgency – one wonders why he never bothered to check what sort of training that would be likely in the Jordanian desert. He fires off his AK57 as if he is one of Al Capone’s Chicago hitmen, suggesting that this is more a group of urban bandits than seriously disciplined guerrillas, The

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RAF group is eventually forced to leave, though at least some of the women have by then received training in how to use a pistol.74 The Baader Meinhof Complex is thus important for the way it penetrates the cult of the urban guerrilla. The film largely debunks the urban guerrilla mystique, as Christopher Hichens suggested.75 There is a sense that, in the end, these are fun revolutionaries and the spoilt children of an affluent society, who lack any real understanding of the issues confronting real guerrilla movements in the third world: Baader, at one point, even calling one Palestinian he encounters in Jordan ‘Ali Baba’. The Palestinians never viewed the RAF as real guerrillas at all, but as a ‘gang’, dismissing Baader as ‘a coward who is performing the whole revolt to cover up his cowardice’.76 Edel’s film exposes the existentialist mythology of ‘global revolution’ that was so pervasive in activists on the Left in Europe and the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and for capturing a moment that has now passed into history.

Summing up Neorealist traditions of film making had a major role in the early cinematic exploration of urban terrorism and guerrilla war. The films that we have examined in this chapter have mostly been in cities, whether this was the Rome of the Italian resistance of Rossellini’s Rome Open City, the Algiers of Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers or the Montevideo in Gavras’s State of Siege As a cinematic movement, neorealism in its initial phase focused more on working-class communities and the lives of the poor than military combat or guerrilla warfare. It proved, in post-war Italy, to be quite short-lived as popular taste turned to the more glamorous films by directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni or Federico Fellini. However, neorealism certainly lived on well in the 1960s as an art house cinematic form, and The Battle of Algiers was mainly viewed, in the first thirty or so years after its release, on university campuses or at film festivals, arguably only becoming mainstream quite recently after its release on DVD in 2009. The early spate of neorealist films established certainly a benchmark by which to judge many later films, though the message of The Battle of Algiers has now been largely lost on modern audiences. Christopher Cook has suggested that a ‘9/11 filter’ has ensured that the film’s message that an army can win a battle with terrorists but still lose the war has become less well understood compared to the more simplistic and triumphalist message of John Wayne’s The Green Berets.77 The argument overlooks the change of mood among the American public for US military involvement externally in urban counter-terrorism given the insurgency in Iraq post 2004, though some recent Hollywood movies such as The Hurt Locker suggest the ultimate hopelessness in trying to destroy urban terrorism. On another level, though, there are a huge range of audiences outside the United States who have viewed the film in multiple ways, ranging from idealistic exponents of the New Left in Europe who saw the movie as a rallying cry for an international fight against ‘imperialism’ to some actual terrorists themselves such as the Sri Lanka LTTE who saw the film as confirming the viability of their strategy of urban terrorism.

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In addition the film has been taught in military staff colleges around the world and confirmed for some military intellectuals, such as the Sri Lankan army officer ‘Thomas’ encountered by Bruce Hoffmann that the film rationalized a draconian strategy of counter-terrorism in order to ‘terrorize’ the terrorists, a mind-set that appears to have underpinned the eventual military defeat of the LTTE by the Sri Lankan army in 2009.78 The films discussed in this chapter all sought to create a quasi-documentary style, sometimes with voice-overs, and a gritty street-level cinematography that brought the audience face to face with conflicts in urban situations. Movements that, at one level, appeared to be ‘terrorist’ were also operating in a situation of conflict with states, armies and police forces that were operating with draconian violence, raising serious questions over whether terrorism as a strategy could ever really work, especially in the urban context. This was exemplified by Rosselini avoiding the issue of the IED bombing of the Germans leading to the bloody reprisal in the form of the Ardeantine Massacre. Likewise, the FLN’s terror campaign in Algiers failed in the short term, though the later upsurge of popular protest three years later in 1960 was pivotal to the country’s later independence. The RAF, on the other hand, were deluded and quixotic adventurers whose cause is doomed from the start as they lack any serious popular support from a West Germany working class content with rising living standards. Equally the urban struggle of the Tupamaros in Uruguay, as portrayed by Gavras, also faltered as it offered no easy solution to the country’s problems. Compared to these, the most bizarrely theatrical of terrorist movements was Sendero Luminoso in Peru, certainly in the Lima phase depicted in The Dancer Upstairs. But this film ignored the wider rural guerrilla war, rather like The Battle of Algiers, which was already under the army’s control sometime before Guzman’s eventual capture. Neorealist cinema and cinema verite thus tended to ask, rather than answer, many questions relating to urban terrorism and it would be later generation of film makers who would attempt to grapple with these in other arenas.

5

The Mercenary Subgenre and Counter-Insurgency

The late 1960s saw the emergence of a subgenre of films focusing on mercenaries and soldiers of fortune, often fighting in post-colonial terrains of disintegrating states and brutal racial and ethnic conflict. For cinema, mercenaries have often been latter-day anti-heroes given the generally negative image of fighting for money along with the thrill of adventure and killing. Some films attempt to disguise the differences between mercenaries and professional soldiers with uniforms and a clear chain of military command; in others, mercenaries driven by the lust for money, adventure and women have proved to have considerable appeal for many younger cinema-goers bored by mainstream war movies. Mercenary movies emerged in the wake of the rapid retreat from empire by Britain and France in the early 1960s. The subgenre developed out of themes familiar in some westerns, such as Richard Brooks’s The Professionals (1966), involving groups of men embarking on well-paid quests across dangerous and menacing frontiers. Cinema mercenaries are generally action and western heroes working through thin and largely predictable narratives, limited characterization and a dependency on high dramatic action to sustain audience interest, though some films also reflect anxieties in big business circles about the protection of precious investments in unstable post-colonial terrains. On occasions, thinness of character is compensated by an appeal to codes of moral conscience, serving as early templates for later action heroes such as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator. Screen mercenaries also have an excellent capacity to handle an amazing array of weaponry while acting, in some cases, as latter-day chivalrous knights when they rescue women (often nuns) in danger of rape or, worse, from brutal, dark-skinned ‘savages’. The movies perpetuated colonial stereotypes of Africans and other former subject peoples of empire into a post-imperial era, freezing them in adventure sagas in the tradition of Rider Haggard, but with rather more military precision and state-of-the-art fire-power. Mercenary movies in the English-speaking world of cinema also emerged out of declining audience interest in colonial war features, given the fact that most of the British empire had been relinquished by the late 1960s. There might still be a nostalgic imperial interest in a few spectacular movies such as Zulu (1964) and Khartoum (1966), but there was no militant or influential body in Britain to defend an imperial memory like the former colons in France.1 It was the white redoubts of Rhodesia and South Africa which provided a good deal of the impetus for the new clutch of mercenary films with narratives, in many cases, stemming from popular South African

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or Rhodesian novelists such as Wilbur Smith and Daniel Carney. The continuation of white settler rule (up to 1994 in the case of South Africa) ensured that there was a vital Southern African fillip to the cinematic mercenary subgenre. The ending of the settler colonies did not lead, though, to the demise of the mercenary subgenre. By the 1990s, it gained new angles and perspectives as film producers ranged into other war zones such as West Africa, where mercenaries tended to be transformed into warlords. In this chapter I will be examining a selection of films focusing on mercenaries and soldiers of fortune. The films I focus on in examining the genre’s evolution are: The Mercenaries or Dark of the Sun (1968), The Wild Geese (1978), The Dogs of War (1982), Blood Diamond (2006), Rambo (2006), Johnny Mad Dog (2008), Machine Gun Preacher (2013), Beasts of No Nation (2015) and The Siege of Jadotville (2016). I shall conclude by suggesting that the mercenary film subgenre is by no means exhausted and is likely to evolve into newer narratives, involving very likely increasingly hi-tech weaponry.

The emergence of the mercenary subgenre The mercenary subgenre properly became established in 1968 with The Mercenaries (later renamed Dark of the Sun), directed by Jack Cardiff. The film was based on a novel by Wilbur Smith and starred Rod Taylor, Peter Carsten, Jim Brown, Kenneth More and Yvette Mimieux. The film was considered by one critic to be ‘one of the most mercilessly brutal war films of the 1960s’, though it would soon be rivalled by Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch in 1969.2 The film is set in the Congo following the hasty departure in 1960 of Belgium, the former colonial power. In the south, the mineral-rich region of Katanga has seceded under its nominal leader Moise Tshombe, but closely controlled by the copper mining giant Union Miniere du Haut Katanga. The UN Security Council passed Resolution 169 of 24 November 1961 condemning the secession as illegal and the ‘the aid of external resources and manned by foreign mercenaries’.3 Mercenaries began to be viewed as soldiers of fortune in the pay of big business, though many of the new mercenary films attempted to create a different myth centred on the idea of ordinary soldiers being duped by Machiavellian business concerns only too ready to sell them out. The mercenary myth in the Congo was partly sustained by absence of any feature dealing with one of the most important rescue operations in Africa before the Israeli raid on Entebbe in 1976, namely the rescue of 1,800 largely white hostages in the Eastern Congo in November 1964. The hostages were taken by a group of left-leaning Simba rebels who revolted against the Congolese central government, now headed by Tshombe, in August 1964. The Simbas (often viewed in the western popular press as savage cannibals) were several thousand strong and seized control of the regional capital of Stanleyville. They emerged from an abortive revolutionary movement in the Congo in 1963–1964 following the return from China of Pierre Mulele, one of the coteries that had gathered around Lumumba at the time of independence. Mulele had received some training in guerrilla warfare from the Chinese and the Congolese analyst Georges Nzongola-Ntalala has seen his movement as the first real national liberation

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movement in sub-Saharan Africa fighting against neo-colonial rule. Emphasizing the need for strong discipline Mulele’s followers launched a guerrilla insurgency in early 1964, armed mainly with knives, shotguns and any other weapons that came to hand.4 The Mulelists succeeded in capturing most of Kwivu province and continued their insurgency until 1967; they had no real links with the Simbas who emerged from another left-leaning movement in the Congo called the Gizengists after their leader Antoine Gizenga. Like Mulele, Gizenga also went to China for guerrilla training and returned with a quasi-Maoist programme focused on the mobilization of the peasantry. Unlike the Mulelists, the Gizengist insurgents avoided any proper training and relied upon a rapid quick fix, including an immunization ritual involving drops of magic water called mai mulele that, it was believed, would turn bullets into water. Calling themselves Simbas (after the Swahili word for lion) the Gizengists had few modern weapons except for those they managed to capture, though the atrocities they committed terrorized the garrisons of many towns, causing them to flee before they arrived.5 Their rapid advance was not due solely to terrorism, though, but from the fragile structure of the Congolese post-colonial state that effectively disintegrated after independence. The Simbas took hostage the white residents in Stanleyville and its surrounding districts. These included some American missionaries as well as many Belgian and other European nationals. The seizure attracted worldwide publicity and was a forerunner of later hostage crises: though, in this instance, both the British and US governments decided to avoid sending in any of their own troops. Eventually one of the most complex multi-national rescue operations of the Cold War was mounted after the Johnson administration in Washington decided to bypass the United Nations by supplying five C130 planes to insert some 340 Belgian paratroopers in an operation known as Dragon Rouge on 24 November 1964. Most of the hostages were rescued along with 400 Congolese civilians, although a further 200 were massacred by the Simbas. Over the next few months into the latter part of 1965 a follow-up operation known as Dragon Noir occurred in the Eastern Congo that included a group of some 300 mercenaries known as No 5 Column, headed by a former British army officer, Major Mike Hoare.6 The operation has been generally hailed a remarkable military success as the Belgian paras had apparently, rather like the US cavalry, arrived in the nick of time to prevent a bloodbath in Stanleyville, though twenty-nine hostages were machinegunned by the Simbas in the centre of the city minutes before they landed. Critics of the operation argued that the operation was too little and too late; the initial para drop led the Simbas to disperse from Stanleyville into other localities such as Paulis and Kamina, where further massacres ensued.7 Nevertheless, for right-wing champions of mercenary warfare, this was perhaps the mercenaries’ finest hour. Hoare’s column (mostly South Africans) managed to rescue several hostages though their presence in the Congo precipitated the down-fall of Tshombe as post-colonial African leaders in the OAU reacted angrily to what they saw as a new form of white colonial involvement in African politics. Many of the mercenaries had little or no formal military training, even though many had been fighting in Katanga since the early 1960s. Operating in defiance of the

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UN did much to secure a bad press, and one analyst suggested that Tshombe might have been better off without them, relying instead on Belgian assistance to train a black Katangese army.8 Much of the mythology surrounding white mercenary soldiering in Africa was due to its close association with the downfall and murder of the Congo’s first radically inclined president, Patrice Lumumba. Some analysts have suggested that Belgian mercenaries were responsible for the crash of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold in 1961, though there has been little firm evidence linking them to this event.9 The mercenaries continued operating in the Congo even after Mobutu’s seizure of power in 1965 before an ill-advised revolt in 1967 led to them being expelled from the country. The same year the mercenary cause in Africa became even further weakened when different mercenary formations fought in the Nigerian civil war, in some cases on opposite sides like Italian condottieri of old. Given this murky background, film producers tended to avoid, as far as possible, the politics of mercenary warfare in favour of depicting mercenaries as action heroes, working for the most part in small bands rather like combat units in the Second World War and Korea. Certainly, no feature film was made on the Stanleyville rescue operation, perhaps because it was a controversial operation that did not involve any US military forces. The absence of any such film left the field open for films on mercenaries, though by the time Dark of the Sun mercenary involvement in the Congo had come to an end as interest shifted to the Nigerian civil war that broke out in 1967. Dark of the Sun centres on a train journey through a troubled frontier region, a trope familiar from the film North West Frontier (1959). The squad of mercenaries sent on the mission are tasked with not only rescuing hostages but also retrieving a cache of diamonds stored in a time-locked vault. This is a film as much about loot as rescuing anyone, with little space for romantic interludes either. The film over the years has become something of a minor cult classic, partly due to scenes of violence far more graphic than The Dirty Dozen. European mercenaries had acquired a notorious reputation by the time the film was released, and in Congo were often called ‘les afreux’ (the frightful) by the local people. Given that many were Rhodesian and South African, mercenaries became loathed by left-wing critics of European involvement in Africa and were sometimes labelled as ‘whores of war’ interested only in making money from other peoples’ conflicts, a factor that led the International Red Cross to strip them of prisoner of war status in 1978.10 The mercenaries had, though, a vocal defender in the form of the quixotic figure Mike Hoare, who had risen to the rank of captain during the Second World War in the London Irish Rifles and saw action in North Africa and Italy. Emigrating to Durban after the war, Hoare never settled back into civilian life as a chartered accountant. He went as a mercenary to Katanga in 1960–1961, before leading a unit called ‘5 Commando’ during the 1964 Simba revolt.11 In his memoirs, Hoare attempted to put a Sandhurst spit and polish aura onto the activities of the mercenaries under his command, retaining as far as possible the drill and discipline, if not the hierarchy, of the British army. This was perhaps because he realized his own limitations as a charismatic leader of a disparate group of marginal men bound together by the pursuit of money along with adventure and the thrill of killing.12 He tried to reshape the generally invidious mercenary image into something more politically acceptable, at least in right-wing circles in the west, by enhancing the

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mercenary narrative with Cold War language of men fighting communist penetration in Africa, although he was also keen to defend the white-ruled regimes in the South.13 Hoare’s narrative proved persuasive cinematically; he influenced not only Dark of the Sun but The Wild Geese ten years later. In the case of Dark of the Sun, the narrative collapsed into one storyline events from two separate periods of the Congo’s troubled post-colonial history: the recruitment by the secessionist mineral-rich state of Katanga under Moise Tshombe from late 1960 to 1963, and the additional campaign against the rebel Simbas in 1964. Jack Cardiff shot Dark of the Sun in 1967 in Jamaica after the film crew were expelled from the Congo and failed to find an alternative venue in Central Africa. The film starts with two mercenaries – Captain Bruce Curry (Rod Taylor) and Sergeant Ruffo (Jim Brown fresh from The Dirty Dozen) – arriving in the Congo, while white settlers are waiting to be airlifted out. Curry is drawn broadly on the character of Hoare. The two men talk their way past a UN border post carrying their weapons, although the post flies not a UN but a Swedish flag, the country of the UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, killed in a plane crash in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) in 1961 during efforts to mediate the end of the Katangese secession.14 The UN appears remarkably unsympathetic and hostile to the mercenaries’ relief expedition; their train is attacked by a UN plane and badly shot up. At the same time, though, the mercenary group appears to be a model of inter-racial harmony. In fact, UN soldiers were pulled out of the Congo on 30 June 1964 before the Simba rebellion broke out. The recruitment of mercenaries started in late August when some 100 white South Africans were flown to Kamina in Eastern Katanga province to help the Tshombe regime fight the rebels.15 The brief appearance of ‘President Mwamini Ubi’ of the Congo was clearly modelled on Tshombe as he explains to the mercenaries, in the company of a Monsieur Delage of the Belgian Mining Company, how much he needs the $50 million diamonds ‘to keep the Congo alive’, recalling Hoare’s account of Tshombe telling him, ‘We count on you. The Congo counts on you. You are our man of destiny.’16 Ubi allows the mercenaries to recruit a force of forty men from the Striker Blue Force of the 1st Battalion of the Congolese Army and promises to pay Curry $50,000 on his return. The venture goes disastrously wrong. The time-lock in the vault means that the train cannot move for several hours and is only just leaving when the Simbas arrive. Rescuing the European refugees was always secondary to finding the diamonds and Dark of the Sun is a remarkably amoral film for, if the diamonds had not been there, no one would have been really interested in rescuing the Europeans.17 The Simba rebels are also rather better organized than previous films focusing on ‘tribal’ rebels such as the Mau Mau in Simba. They are well equipped with mortars and wreak havoc on the departing train, cutting off its rear coaches from the engine and stranding most of the European refugees. A massacre ensues which the mercenaries are powerless to stop, though they later launch a commando-style raid to secure the diamonds. But by then all the European refugees have been raped and murdered. Even the raid goes wrong as a fuel truck blows up, ensuring the party is now short of fuel. Curry leaves the survivors and his remaining soldiers in the bush to get fuel but finds, on his return, that the German mercenary Captain Henlein (Pater Carsten), who sports a Nazi swastika, has

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raped one of those rescued, a Belgian woman Claire (Yvette Mimieux) and run off with the diamonds. Curry goes in pursuit, killing Henlein after a dramatic fight. What started as quite a political film descends into a story of romance and personal revenge while the Simbas disappear from the narrative.18 The ending is interesting for departing from Wilbur Smith’s narrative in the novel that has Curry, after ten days of trekking through the jungle, returning to the base camp with Claire (called Sharmaine in the novel) to fly out to Tanganyika with the diamonds.19 Cardiff clearly wanted a film ending that avoided any stress on the financial rewards of mercenary warfare, seeking instead a highly implausible moral justification. Curry now gives himself up to the one African mercenary in the group (the South African writer Bloke Modisane) for a court martial for murdering Henlein, though who exactly is to hold this court martial is left unclear. This was a combat movie that wanted to keep at least one foot in the mainstream war genre where proper chains of command apply and soldiers subject to a legal framework, a strategy that most critics found unconvincing.20 The film certainly shocked with its violent scenes of rape and murder of white settlers, though one critic rather pompously dismissed these as being the type ‘found in sleazy magazines that displayed pictures of beheaded execution victims in remote, lawless countries’.21 Jack Cardiff was a noted film cinematographer who had shot such notable films as Black Narcissus and The Vikings. Dabbling with violent scenes was becoming less risky in the 1960s as would become evident in the films of such directors as Robert Aldrich and Sam Peckinpah. But even by Peckinpah’s standards, Dark of the Sun is quite a violent film and it was banned in Sweden in 1970 despite cuts. Unsurprisingly, Quentin Tarantino later praised the movie, and even Martin Scorsese has confessed to finding the film among his ‘guilty pleasures’. It was increasingly difficult for movies to defend colonial rule, even of the most apparently benign kind. The German dramatization of Daniel Carney’s Rhodesian bush war thriller Whispering Death in 1976 is a rather interesting exception for the way it revealed itself as markedly out of kilter with the changing international mood on white colonial rule in Africa. The film capitalized on Dark of the Sun eight years before, and was really a Macaroni combat movie, though it was an exclusively West German production shot in Germany, the UK, South Africa, as well as Rhodesia in the last years of the Smith regime. Its plot had many of the features of a John Buchan adventure yarn, while its cast was a rather higher calibre than those of most Macaronis, for it included Christopher Lee as a convincing Rhodesian policeman or ‘Member in Charge’ along with Trevor Howard playing a gnarled Rhodesian plantation owner Dr Johannes, father of a beautiful daughter Sally (played by the Austrian actress and soft porn star Sybil Denning). Sally is engaged with the main protagonist of the story Terrick (James Faulkner) though she is raped and murdered by a ‘terrorist’ African gang led by a psychopathic albino known as ‘Whispering Death’ (played by the German actor Horst Frank). This is a revenge narrative and one film poster had the slogan ‘A woman ravaged a man revenged’, with the black characters significantly smaller and marginalized from the white characters. The plot that involves a dark and evil nemesis bears some resemblance to Buchan’s American-educated preacher Laputa in Prester John (first published in 1910).22 Whispering Death has also been well educated, apparently

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overseas at an ‘excellent’ university, although all it has done is to exacerbate a profound racial bitterness that contrasts with the apparently happy and placid life of the village Africans in the movie and is derived from his ambiguous identity as a white-skinned albino African. Terrick duly gives chase to the fleeing Whispering Death in true Buchan style over the rocky landscape of Matabeleland in white-ruled Rhodesia. He evades the efforts of the Member in Charge to capture him and this leads the government to send in a team of crack paras to finish the job. They are too late for Terrick kills Whispering Death, who mutters before he dies that killing him will ‘solve nothing’. Terrick is eventually cornered and shot as he too refuses to give himself up. Like many mercenary films Whispering Death is based on a shaky and dubious moral base given that it is premised on the idea that the central objective of the Rhodesian regime in the escalating bush war of the 1970s was to maintain at all costs the rule of law and to prevent any reprisals by whites that might be interpreted as racially motivated. Even if this might be on occasions true, the film fails to examine the wider political motivations for the bush war, which the Rhodesian regime proved eventually unable to win politically despite their superior military power.23 As with The Planters Wife a decade before, Whispering Death sees all African opposition though the lens of a ‘terrorism’ narrative, with Terrick at one point warning the ‘Member in Charge’ that they are faced with a new and more virulent form of terrorism that needed to be dealt with properly before it spread like some contagious disease. The film, interestingly, reveals a nervousness and crisis of belief in the entire colonizing project though this is overlain by the gravelly voice of Trevor Howard’s white settler Dr Johannes, committed to staying for the long term in a country he has helped to build up. In the end, the film failed to emulate the success on the international stage of Richard Burton’s Wild Geese in 1978. Burton’s film is centred on a largely British group of mercenaries fighting essentially another Second World War movie complete with para uniforms. They are for most of the film in a fictional African land and only at the end fly into Rhodesia on their escape out of a war-torn terrain. The nemesis of Wild Geese is also a duplicitous British mining magnate while Whispering Death, by contrast, has a psychopathic African leader crippled by a physical flaw of being an albino that apparently shapes his essentially evil character. For all its attempt to pose as a film that celebrates the rule of law, Whispering Death cannot escape the constraints of a primitive colonial racism that equates African political leaders with terrorism and evil and sees only ‘good’ Africans in menial and subordinate roles to whites. Dark of the Sun was followed a decade later by the rather less violent Wild Geese (1978). This film was the creation of producer Euan Lloyd, who later directed the SAS movie Who Dares Wins in 1982. Standing somewhat alone in the 1970s while the British film industry went into a state of decline, Lloyd was keen to bring out a film that would have some of the appeal of The Guns of Navarone. He saw an opportunity with The Wild Geese, given the cast included Richard Burton, Roger Moore and Richard Harris, and the film proved to be a commercial success.24 Shot in the Transvaal (N. Lloyd ignored the cultural boycott against filming in South Africa), the movie was released two years after the trial by the MPLA regime in Angola of thirteen white mercenaries caught while fighting for the rival FNLA movement, four of whom were executed for mass killings. The trial was a major marker in the shifting climate of global opinion on the

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morality of mercenary activities, though these would still continue on an increasingly commercialized basis. The Wild Geese drew on a thriller by the Rhodesian writer Daniel Carney, who also wrote The Whispering Death. The film exploited the opportunities to develop some of the themes of Dark of the Sun, with a group of mercenaries tasked to mount an operation to rescue an African politician, Julius Limbani, who has been kidnapped on a plane by a group of African generals in a fictional Central African country closely resembling the Congo. Limbani (played by South African actor Winston Ntshona) resembles Moises Tshombe who was dismissed as prime minister of the Congo in October 1965, kidnapped on a plane in 1968 and flown to Algiers, where he died from apparent heart failure in 1969. The kidnap was widely presumed to have been carried out by Francis Bodenan on behalf of French external intelligence (SDECE), though some analysts have suggested the kidnap was organized by the CIA to help consolidate Mobutu in power in the Congo.25 The link with Tshombe in The Wild Geese is evident from the start. His face appears in a montage of pictures in the opening credits while the character Limbani appears to be a reliable pro-western political leader. The copper magnate Stewart Matherson (Stewart Granger) wants Limbani rescued to secure a stable regime in the fictional African state, apparently under the influence of communist Cubans. But half way through the operation Matherson secures a new deal with the generals and abandons the mercenaries, forcing them to make their own way back to safety. They embark in some lorries that come under attack from a plane sent by the government of the African state (as in Dark of the Sun) but eventually secure, with the help of a missionary, a Dakota that is implausibly parked in the bush. After a gun battle with the enemy army, the survivors make it back to white-ruled Rhodesia, since no other African country is willing to take them in. The story is loosely based on a widely repeated urban myth that in 1968 a real Dakota full of mercenaries landed in Rhodesia, though there is no evidence that Tshombe himself was on board. Despite references in the film to ‘Simbas’ (one wounded mercenary is shot to avoid him falling into their hands) the enemy the mercenaries face is a uniformed army commanded by Cuban officers while the soldiers under their command wear Portuguese army–issued caps. This suggests that they are at least being assisted by FRELIMO fighters from Mozambique, which had gained independence from Portugal in 1975. The Wild Geese had no serious conception of politics, though one poster for the film shows the four mercenary leaders dominating a map of Africa. Issues of race are tackled through banal statements such as the hostage Jesse declaring, ‘If we have no future together, white man, we have no future.’ The film proved a success at the box office, but was rapidly overtaken by events in Rhodesia, where the bush war came to an end in 1979 with an agreement for the brief return of Britain as the colonial power, leading to elections in 1980 and the transfer of power to Robert Mugabe’s ZANUPF. By the late 1970s the film’s recalling of events in the Congo over a decade before seemed increasingly dated. The film was most notable for championing what might be termed a neo-colonial model of political control through a compliant African leader enjoying some degree of popular support, usually from an ethnic or tribal base. This

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was the case of Moise Tshombe in the original Katangese secession in 1960–1963 in the Congo and would be attempted for a period in the 1970s by the Smith regime in Rhodesia through its client, Bishop Abel Muzorewa. The 1965 coup of Mobutu helped consolidate the model of the patrimonial state in sub-Saharan Africa based on strong-man rule. This was increasingly viewed as a more effective means to maintain the borders of the state bequeathed by the departing colonial ruler, even though it ended up hollowing out both the state and the social infrastructure through massive corruption and elimination of most of the postcolonial governing elite.26 The Wild Geese pinpointed, albeit in a very simplistic form, some of these wider trends, especially in the way that Matherson secures a deal with the generals of the fictional state at the mercenaries’ expense, shutting out Limbani’s more ethnically based claim to power. The film proved to be a commercial success and was the fourteenth highest grossing film in 1978, though the collapse of the American distributor, Allied Artists, led to it having only a limited circulation in the United States. The film indicated that there were continued commercial opportunities in mercenary films that were later reflected in the Dogs of War in 1982. The film was based on a novel by the best-selling British author Frederick Forsyth, who had already had considerable success with the film version of The Day of the Jackal (1973). Forsyth had become acquainted with mercenaries when he reported the Nigerian civil war. A maverick news correspondent, Forsyth, like Graham Greene before him, appears to have been recruited by MI6 in the late 1960s, via a handler known only as ‘Ronnie’. He was not apparently paid anything, though it is likely that the information flow was to some degree two-way, helping Forsyth to embellish his novels with interesting technical details.27 The Dogs of War did not have the same level of tension as The Day of the Jackal, though what it lacked in fast-flowing and smooth prose it made up for with a narrative crammed with an amazing array of factual descriptions, including how to organize a coup d’état. Such packaging undoubtedly appealed to readers attracted to adventure yarns in the tradition of Rider Haggard and John Buchan. Like Buchan, Forsyth was good at explaining the background of his characters, though they were no longer wellconnected ‘clubland heroes’ like Richard Hannay, but lower-class characters who had made their own way up in the world, usually after spells of military service, tough periods in the bush or a stretch in prison. Forsyth’s men were more anti-heroes than heroes, and Forsyth did not seek the same sort of ‘dramatic value’ that Graham Greene saw in Buchan’s novels involving adventure in ‘unfamiliar surroundings happening to unadventurous men, members of Parliament and members of the Athenaeum, lawyers and barristers, businessmen and minor peers’.28 Such characters are notably absent from Forsyth’s novels, which usually follow men attracted to adventure in a rough post-colonial world where class ties and social background count for little, especially when it comes to trying to make a fortune in states where the European imperial writ no longer runs. Here the theme of mercenaries being used by rich western business interests has a rather broader canvas. We meet the central character of the story, Shannon (played by the American actor Christopher Walken), in a war-torn Central American country from which he manages to escape in the by-now all-too-familiar trope of the turboprop

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plane beset by explosions and shell fire. Shannon is the quintessential loner and outsider and is never likely to settle down in any sort of stable relationship. Walken’s performance was admired by some film critics. Vincent Canby in The New York Times considered the film demonstrated ‘the kind of intelligence and thought one doesn’t often find in a movie aimed at the action-adventure crowd’, though he thought this was ‘as much in what the film doesn’t do and say as in what is actually on screen’.29 At one point, Shannon pours out his dreams for another life to his girlfriend Jessie, whom he meets for a tawdry night at a motel. He wants to move west and settle with her, but she has heard all this before and he lacks conviction. Violence and mercenary warfare are in Shannon’s blood. We know from early on that this film is never likely to end with the pretence of settling back into middle-class respectability, exemplified by the final scene in The Wild Geese when Burton’s character, Colonel Alan Faulkner, comes back to play surrogate father to the son of the dead Captain Rafer Janders (Richard Harris) at his prep school in Kent. The Dogs of War is interesting for the way it probes what some feminists have seen as the ‘flight from commitment’ among some men in the wake of the slackening of constraints against deviancy in western cultures. The sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich has seen a significant shift in western culture away from an ethic of responsibility and ‘protective commitment’ to women towards one of ‘irresponsibility, self-indulgence and an isolated detachment from the claims of others’.30 In part, this shift was a response to the rise of feminism and a rejection by many women of the older style patterns of male ‘protective commitment’. The thesis is perhaps too generalized since it does not encapsulate all men and sets up a rather mythical golden age when, in fact, some men in the nineteenth century or earlier sought escape in mercenary-type activities such as piracy, privateering or joining the Foreign Legion. Nevertheless, many Hollywood and British war films during and after the war tended to assume that men in combat had girlfriends or wives to go back to, or would at least get married to once hostilities were over. In the film In Which We Serve (1942) for instance Able Seaman ‘Shorty’ Blake (John Mills) thinks, while he is in the water after his ship has been sunk, of how he first met his wife Freda. By contrast, Shannon has no commitment in The Dogs of War to anything beyond fighting, even if this appears to bring precious few rewards. He drives a hard bargain with a businessman, Endean, to engineer a coup in the country called Zangaro, but really the former Spanish colony of Equatorial Guinea. Shannon is paid $15,000 to go on a recce to the country, which is run by a corrupt and brutal dictator, General Kimba. Shannon’s cover as a birdwatcher is discovered and he is violently beaten up by the dictator’s thugs before being thrown out of the country. Shannon is offered $1 million by Endean as expenses to engineer a coup and he meets up with former mercenary colleagues near Liverpool Street Station. The plan involves a mercenary group from Britain and France sailing close to the shoreline of the beleaguered state and attacking it at night after picking up a squad of African mercenaries on the way. Timing is all for Endean, like Matherson in The Wild Geese, wants a new dictator installed who they will be able to control in the form of Kimba’s former colleague Colonel Bobi (played with dramatic gusto by George Harris) whose main objectives are money and women. The plan works on this occasion; the ship

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lands the mercenaries and, in a dramatic shootout, the barracks and presidential palace are captured. Shannon shoots Kimba; while Endean and Bobi duly arrive by helicopter to claim power but Shannon has decided to leave a more democratic leader in power: Dr Okoye (played by Winston Ntshona in his second mercenary film), whom he encountered as a prisoner in Kimba’s jail. Shannon simply shoots Bobi and walks out to drive off with his men and the body of the one white mercenary killed in the operation. Once again, a mercenary film has felt bound to take some sort of moral stand as with the ending of Dark of the Sun and the revenge shooting of Matherson in The Wild Geese. But, as in those films, this moral posturing lacks credibility because it fails to relate to Shannon’s slender character, which even Walken’s generally uncritical biographer Robert Schnakenberg called ‘little more than a nihilistic killing machine’.31 At another level, though, the film proved remarkably prophetic of a real attempted coup in 2004 to overthrow the dictatorial president Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasongo of Equatorial Guinea. As early as 1973 it appears that some people in Gibraltar were plotting a coup to overthrow the brutal dictator Francisco Macias Nguema in Equatorial Guinea and a boat called ‘The Albatross’ that was to be used to launch the coup attempt was intercepted by the Spanish authorities, apparently after a British tip-off. Several mercenaries, including a Scot called Ramsay Gay, were arrested in the Canary Islands. The Dogs of War was not a manual on how to launch a coup in a weak post-colonial African state, but the text was written after discussions with mercenaries involved in planning a real coup.32 Whatever the exact truth of the matter, the mythology of The Dogs of War appears to have lived on in circles of right-wing adventurers and soldiers of fortune, and to have shaped at least some aspects of the bizarre plot now known as ‘The Wonga Coup’ in 2004. This was an attempt by a group of mercenaries led by the ex-Etonian British army officer Simon Mann. The plan on this occasion involved going into Equatorial Guinea by air rather than by ship, a decision that turned out to be very foolish. Mann and his group of mercenaries were stopped and taken off a plane in Zimbabwe on 7 March 2004 with $100,000 worth of weapons and equipment. Even if they had been successful, the coup plotters failed to consider what would have been the response from Spain, which was about to insert thousands of marines into the former colony for training.33 Their incredible naivety suggests that it was not Forsyth’s novel alone which drove them onwards with the hare-brained plan, since Forsyth had stressed that the only way successfully to enter a small state like Equatorial Guinea was by boat, while his novel was set at a much earlier time in the history of post-colonial Africa. The state in Equatorial Guinea had now become considerably stronger due to large oil revenues that had been trickling into its coffers since the mid-1990s. Mann’s latter-day gentlemen adventurers were a throwback to an earlier time in Africa which had now gone for good. As it was, the coup plotters ended up being charged in Zimbabwe with attempting to plot a coup. Mann was eventually extradited in 2008 to Equatorial Guinea, where he was given a thirty-four-year prison sentence, later commuted on 2 November 2009. It is evident from research by Adam Roberts that the British government probably knew in advance of the coup plot though it failed to tell the government of Equatorial

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Guinea,34 a feature (unknown at the time of the shooting of the film) that is reflected rather well as the mercenaries are shadowed in London by an apparent British agent. Perhaps this was a case of truth attempting to copy fiction or, more likely, the film providing some form of rhetorical reference point through which public school chums could plot the bizarre coup that they thought would bring them quick and easy rewards. Their failure did not, by any means, signal the end of the mercenary film subgenre, which would continue to evolve in the light of changing patterns of political control in post-colonial Africa. The end of the Cold War in the early 1990s removed the need for rival superpowers to be in close control of pro-western or pro-Soviet regimes in sub-Saharan Africa. The reality of weak statehood became ever more apparent as some states effectively collapsed or broke down as ‘failed states’ in the 1990s. This was dramatically exemplified in the case of the former British colony of Sierra Leone which had started out on statehood in 1961 with a GDP roughly equivalent to that of Portugal’s. After a long period of dictatorship under Siaka Stevens the country was in an extremely fragile state by the 1990s. It represented easy pickings for warlords, eager to gain access to its natural resources, especially diamonds, which could in turn pay for weapons for them to continue their activities involving the kidnapping of children as sex slaves and child soldiers, and the terrorizing of the civilian population. The Revolutionary United Front (RUF), under its leader Foday Sankoh, was an especially dramatic example of this warlordism. The RUF was supported by Charles Taylor in the neighbouring state of Liberia and diamonds that were mined in Sierra Leone, often through slave labour, and then smuggled over the border into Liberia, where they were sold onto the world market. The issue became one of global humanitarian concern and the principal diamond monopoly, De Beers based in South Africa, came under growing international criticism for allegedly conniving in the trade in what were now termed ‘blood diamonds’. De Beers sought to distance itself as far as possible from these attacks by refusing to buy any diamonds from Liberia from 1985 onwards, but this face-saving device did not stop its share of the world diamond market falling from around 90 per cent in the 1980s to less than 40 per cent in 2012. De Beers remained an easy target for critics since it had formed a successful cartel early in the twentieth century and had been a prop to the apartheid regime in South Africa. The issue of blood diamonds in 1990s Sierra Leone could be linked with continuing structures of white or western imperial economic domination in Africa, even though the country concerned, Sierra Leone, had been independent for over three decades. The film Blood Diamond released in 2006 and directed by Edward Zwick highlighted the illegal trade in diamonds from Sierra Leone. The film is a good example of how a ‘mercenary’ movie still needed to engage in some form with humanitarian concerns to ensure acceptance before western film audiences; it also reflected the epic ambitions of its director, who had previously directed Glory and The Last Samurai and was now, it seems, seeking to do something similar by revealing some of the apparently tragic dimensions of contemporary African politics. The film significantly avoids any focus on white mercenary forays into the African interior. In fact, it does not even start with mercenaries but a terrifying raid by RUF militias on a Mende village and the kidnapping, murder or enslavement of its inhabitants. The main character we see at this stage is the Mende fisherman Vandy (played by Djimon Hounsou, well known for

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his performance in Gladiator) who is carted off to work as a slave digging for diamonds, while his son is taken off to be trained as a child soldier. Working in the diamond mine Vandy chances upon a huge 100-carat pink diamond which he manages to bury before being ‘rescued’ by advancing UN security forces (who appear in a rather more positive light than in Dark of the Sun). After learning of Vandy’s story the film then turns to the other central character, Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio). Archer describes himself as a ‘Rhodesian’ and speaks in a strong English-speaking South African accent. We learn that he had left Zimbabwe as a child after his parents were murdered by Mugabe’s ZANU-PF guerrillas. He went on to become a member of the notorious South African 32 Battalion which fought a violent war in Angola in the 1980s, so he has all the essential attributes of a mercenary. But he is less a soldier of fortune than an illegal diamond dealer and is caught trying to smuggle diamonds over the border into Liberia in the fleeces of some sheep. Archer is a loner like Shannon, though one who has a rather better knowledge on how to travel around Africa and negotiate with the locals. He can get out of tricky situations and speaks the Krio street patois that helps him cut deals with the violent juvenile militias. This still does not save him from being flung into jail after the attempted diamond heist and here he sees Vandy accused of hiding a large diamond. Archer decides to bring his former military contacts in South Africa into play. Selling a diamond hidden in a false tooth, he flies to South Africa to meet his former commander Colonel Coetzee (played by Arnold Vosloo) who lives on a heavily guarded farm in the Cape. Coetzee is a freelance mercenary with a private security firm like Executive Outcomes. A deal is secured and Coetzee commits himself to sending in a force to retrieve the diamond, which is the size of a small bird’s egg and clearly worth millions on the international market. The film shifts back to the disintegrating situation in Freetown, which comes under RUF attack. Like the Simba guerrillas in Dark of the Sun, the RUF militias are adept at using modern weaponry, both mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, and make short work of government troops, who surrender before being summarily shot. Archer manages to contact Vandy and they escape Freetown. The realism of these scenes owes much to general news footage that was taken in Sierra Leone in the late 1990s and the courageous film Cry Freedom made by the Sierra Leonean film maker Sorious Samura, graphically depicting the wanton killing by the RUF militias and the severed limbs of many civilians.35 Despite this use of local footage, the film contains many of the tropes familiar from earlier mercenary films; the night shots of the RUF on the rampage in Freetown recall Cardiff ’s shots of the Simbas running amok after capturing the train in Dark of the Sun. The ending, too, with an apparent change of heart by Archer on the run from his former South African mercenary colleagues recalls the decision to submit to a court martial by Currey, except that this time there is no going back for Archer who dies on a cliff-face. But he dies knowing that Vandy has managed to keep the diamond. There is a giant imbalance between the worlds of Archer and Vandy that is partly explored, though never satisfactorily resolved. Archer has access to money, connections and travel that enable him to move around the African continent in a manner denied,

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until the end, to Vandy, who is in the early part of the film literally enslaved. We never seriously get into Vandy’s world, which is presented to us as at the start as a tourist brochure’s idea of a harmonious African village based on fishing rudely shattered by the violent entry of the RUF rebels. What is Vandy’s access to education? How is he able, with apparently little difficulty, to enter London in a smart suit at the end of the film into the world of western aid agencies and humanitarian concerns in order to help the campaign against the western diamond conglomerate? In any case, the moral ballast of the film is provided from the third main character in the form of a white American journalist Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly) who is in Sierra Leone to find more evidence to confirm the existence of the trade in illegal diamonds. Archer and Maddy develop a relationship of a kind, though the action film genre of the film ensures that it can never be explored in depth for fear of side-tracking from the central narrative. Maddy can at least be said to have a far more interesting and assertive female character than those of previous mercenary films. Her commitment to justice and human rights via exposure of the goings on in Sierra Leone jars with the apparently nihilistic and self-interested Archer, whose response is to spell out the letters ‘TIA’ standing for ‘This is Africa’: meaning, in effect, that it is pointless to imagine anyone can secure any real change. Maddy, however, manages to secure an eventual change of heart in Archer, who dies on the cliff-face knowing, like Curry in Dark of the Sun, that his life now has some meaning. The juvenile rebels in the RUF are poorly portrayed in Blood Diamond. There was an opportunity here to move well beyond the well-entrenched stereotypes of barbaric tribal warriors waving their guns and wantonly killing and raping. It is hard to agree with James Berardinelli that the film was ‘uncompromising in the way it depicts the Sierra Leone conflict’. It compares poorly indeed to Johnny Mad Dog, directed by JeanStephane Sauvaire and released in 2008. This French-Liberian co-production focuses on a group of LURD child soldiers in neighbouring Liberia during the final phase of the civil war in the country in 2003. The film stands in marked contrast to Blood Diamond in the way it seeks to unravel the fragile identities of the group of juvenile warriors who kill their way across the Liberian countryside before entering the capital Monrovia shortly before the downfall of the regime of Charles Taylor. The script was based on a novel by the Congolese writer Emmanuel Dongala titled Johnny Chien Mechant and follows the fortunes of the child soldiers, whose ages range from around 10 to 15. The children have bizarre names such as ‘Small Devil’, ‘Jungle Rocket’ and ‘No Good Advice’. They are clearly drugged up to commit various atrocities and the film depicts cocaine powder being rubbed into open wounds. The group is led by the ‘Johnny Mad Dog’ who appears at the start of the film to have little self-doubt in what he is doing. But many of the group are simply children who do not even carry real guns but wooden ones (one such child is later killed by a sniper) and some dress up in clothes stolen from terrified civilians, in one case, a white wedding dress while another boy sports a pair of butterfly wings. This theme of cross-dressing is not one explored, though, in Dongala’s original novel. At one level, this was children simply wanting to dress up and play games in a world where the difference between reality and the fictional world has become blurred. Despite references to ‘liberation’ and ‘revolution’ in the broken patois of the group

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these are children whose world has been sizeably influenced by Hollywood. When one child asks Johnny Mad Dog what sort of a weapon he has taken possession of, he tells him that it is an Israeli Uzzi of the type used by Chuck Norris in Delta Force. Johnny Mad Dog then warns the group to be on the ready in case they encounter Chuck Norris or the Israelis on the streets of Monrovia. Behind this apparently pathetic statement lies, perhaps, a deeper truth that all war is to some extent the conflict of grown-up children and that the way we have now come to understand it is largely through film. It also accords with research by Paul Richards on dispossessed youth in the early 1990s in the Liberia–Sierra Leone border region for whom watching Rambo films helped in the creation of a new identity centred on a narrative of dispossession and living in the rainforest. This was a low-level form of insurgent conflict that shaded into gangsterism, where entry level for would-be participants was tragically low and the capacity to inflict damage on the social fabric extremely high.36 At another level, the film is a reflection about war and conflict as key agents in identity formation. The children have constructed various identities that are not unambiguously masculine, reflected especially in the wedding dress which one boy lovingly puts on at the start of the film. However, the film fails to provide a deeper explanation as to why the children construct their identities in the way they do, preferring to leave things at the level of suggestion.37 We do not get to learn anything especially complex from this film, though some feminist theorists have argued that cross-dressing has traditionally been a way of challenging conventional cultural norms, in turn demanding differing audience responses.38 In a state of social and political breakdown such as Liberia this reflects a wider search for new identities among an underclass of superfluous children who no longer fit into any clear social niche, though how they go about this remains largely unexplored. The dramatic tension in the film between Johnny Mad Dog and the young girl Laokole compares to that of Archer and Maddy: They first meet on a stairway as Johnny Mad Dog’s child soldiers are on the rampage and kill a boy carrying a basket of oranges. Laokole, while scared, stands above Johnny and stares down at him to the point that the boy leaves her alone. Laokole fails to find her younger brother and we must presume he has been either killed or kidnapped. She takes charge of an orphaned girl and emerges as the moral heart of film. She has tried unsuccessfully to save her father (in the novel it is her crippled mother) who refused to run away when the child soldiers came: the crippled father in one sense represents the paralysis of an older generation when challenged by its armed youth. Laokole makes her own way and eventually confronts Johnny after he has been disarmed: there is a strong sexual frisson between the two, and Laokole allows Johnny to come back with her to the room where she now lives. Here she takes out a rifle and beats the now-whining Johnny to the ground, suggesting some form of domestic feminine challenge to the unchecked power of the boy soldiers. This is a film of a degraded form of insurgent movement that is fighting battles over status and economic deprivation. The central issue is really about access to education: the gun the children wield gives them some power over an adult world of education that has been denied to them. Blood Diamond was a pointer to the growing decline of the mercenary subgenre in the years after 9/11. There had perhaps always been a rather parochial element to the subgenre, largely set in the years after the

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Congo Crisis of the early 1960s in remote places far from the major terrains of conflict in the Cold War. Vincent Canby, for instance, thought that run-down Zangaro in The Dogs of War ‘wouldn’t even be important enough to engage the interests of Graham Greene’s most deprived characters’.39 By 2008, mercenaries seemed to be part of a form of war fast disappearing in the increasingly globalized world of insurgency and counter-insurgency. While Blood Diamond and Rambo suggested that there were still some possibilities left in the subgenre, it was going to prove increasingly hard to retrieve any form of heroism from the actions of individual mercenaries. Hollywood, nevertheless, attempted something on these lines with the film Machine Gun Preacher, directed by Marc Forster, in 2011. The film is based on the character of ex-biker Sam Childers (played by Gerald Butler) who told his own life story in the book Another Man’s War (2009). From a tough working-class childhood in Minnesota Childers married a night club stripper Lynn, who converted to Christianity at the fundamentalist Assembly of God Church. Childers eventually converted too and, in 1998, went to South Sudan where he encountered people fleeing from the militias of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Together with his wife he founded a children’s village in South Sudan for war orphans called the Shekinah Fellowship Children’s Village or the ‘Angels of East Africa’. This was a latter-day form of missionary work among the victims of the breakdown in post-colonial African states. Childers has claimed that the Shekinah Village has successfully housed and educated over 300 war orphans, though sceptics have suggested they are malnourished and unhappy. Fourteen local African leaders have written to Childers to complain that he has ‘dishonoured’ the original agreement under which they gave him 40 acres of land to build up the village. One of the leaders, Festo Fidi Akim, urged Childers not to return and asked that ‘someone with a good heart, someone who is humane … take over’. Government inspectors who have visited the village also confirm that Childers is rarely there and many of the children are in a poor with the village lacking many basic supplies like proper beds, medicines and food. Childers, though, has said that this is partly due to corruption.40 Whatever the truth about the village, Childers has certainly been an unconventional type of missionary, armed not only with a prayer book but modern weaponry he knows how to use from a violent criminal (rather than military) past. He came from violent biker world though the first part of the film shows him discovering God and attempting to put his life on a more stable footing. We also learn that when Childers was not in jail he was a builder and he uses the skills to start building something worthwhile in his life. He does not become estranged from his wife despite regular trips to Africa that lead him to become known among the local rednecks as an ‘African Rambo’. The racist rednecks despise his efforts to help black Africans, suggesting that Hollywood continued to have some interest in the Rambo myth after Stallone’s retirement. Here, the film parts company from Johnny Mad Dog for it fails to tell us much about the children that Childers professes to be trying to save. Childers encountered the children almost by accident in South Sudan when he was taken there by a friend, Deng, of the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army to witness the horrors perpetrated by the LRA. It also interestingly parts from the Rambo films too, certainly Rambo III. Childers has some Rambo-like features as he takes up a cause that is apparently

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just, though the comparison is not exact: the screen Rambo in Rambo III was initially very reluctant to get involved in the Burmese conflict and already had his life in order working in a Thai village on the border. Childers, by contrast, wanders into the Sudan in search of a mission to give his life some form of purpose. He wanders into a society broken by complicated clan and ethnic conflicts that he sees only from afar and through a superficial moral glaze. The movie fails to get inside the mind of a man who appears as half psychopath and half crusader and it glosses over the reasons for the Sudanese conflict into which Childers has chosen to immerse himself. It bears some comparison though to the biopic of Jean Paul Vann in Bright Shining Lie by contrasting the claustrophobic domestic interiors of Childers’s home in the United States with the open vistas of Africa.41 For Childers, Africa is a terrain where he can lawfully practise as much violence as he likes and for an apparently good cause, though we never get to learn what his enemies in the bush are fighting for or the reasons for the conflict.42 Only at the end does Childers finally come to experience doubts about his mission following the death of his friend Donnie. He does not reach this apparently through any liberal political conversion. Like Rambo, the film shows humanitarian liberals to be weak and ineffective in this type of brutal post-colonial setting. A female doctor challenges Childers at one point and accuses him of being a mercenary, though she is later brutally treated rather like the American missionaries. It is the will of the stronger that is apparently likely to prevail in this harsh terrain, though Machine Gun Preacher also suggests that, in the end, it is not worth putting American lives on the line to save the victims of murderous regimes and militias in the developing world. More recently, the 2015 film Beasts of No Nation has continued the cinematic exploration of warlordism in West Africa in a rather less stylized manner than previous movies. Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, an American director who had directed the 2009 movie Sin Hombre concerning a Honduran girl attempting to immigrate to the United States, Beasts follows the fortunes of an African boy forced to become a child soldier after rebels attack his village. The film script was based on a novel with the same title written by Uzodinma Iweale, and is more successful than Johnny Mad Dog in penetrating the culture of warlordism in West Africa involving the psychological control of juveniles through the use of hallucinogenic drugs to create a murderous fighting machine. The film won shown in the Special Presentation Section of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, but the stark realism of this fictionalized documentary put a lot of film-goers off and led to poor box-office returns It grossed a mere $90,000 on an outlay of $6 million, though the film is now available on Netflix. The camera follows the central character Agu (Abraham Attah), a young boy living in a West African village with his parents. The village is already in a buffer zone policed by ECOMOG forces, though this fails to prevent the swift descent into anarchy once the rebels arrive. Agu’s mother manages to leave the village in an overcrowded car but his father is murdered. Agu flees to the bush but is soon captured by a group of child soldiers of a rebel group known as the NDF. He is taken to the commandant (played with considerable poise by Idris Elba, previously notable for his performance as Nelson Mandela in the 2013 film Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom) who takes on the role of father to many of the orphaned children. The commandant promises to look after Agu,

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though still rapes him one night. Agu’s close friend among the child soldiers, a silent boy called Strika, also eventually dies from a gun-shot wound. The authority of the commandant proves to be quite fragile once he goes to meet the Supreme Commander, who informs him he is not being promoted, as expected, but removed from his command. The commandant leaves with his warrior band, but once back in the forest it is clear he has no real means of supporting and feeding them. Morale declines as the ammunition runs out and the boys desert, leaving the commandant on his own and a pathetic wreck. Agu and many of the other boys fall into the hands of ECOMOG and the film ends with him in a missionary school attempting to re-educate traumatized child soldiers and bring them back into society. It is Idris Elba’s chilling performance as the commandant that really ensures the continuing relevance of this powerful movie. He first appears as a leader in full command and completely certain of the purpose of his warrior band: not only can they take what they like, he promises, including any number of women from ‘enemy’ villages, but he justifies this in a debased language of national liberation ideology. He feels certain by the time that he meets the Supreme Commander that he has acted loyally and effectively and is shocked by the way that his hopes for promotion are rebuffed. While an effective leader of child soldiers, he emerges as naïve when it comes to understanding the wider pattern of power politics in this fragmented West African state. His warrior band has been used by senior figures inside the NDF for wider political purposes that remain unexplained. Side-lined, the commandant’s fall from grace is swift and decisive, though the film fails to examine what exactly motivated him in the first place. Indeed, the only character with any background in this film is Agu, necessarily so at one level, though it is questionable how much new is really learnt about child soldiers and the pattern of their recruitment. The movie certainly succeeds in depicting the fragile nature of warlord authority, which is constantly liable to being undermined by the loss of support from his band of followers, or being arbitrarily removed by those above him in a heavily contested power structure.43 Mercenaries too might be upstaged or sold out by duplicitous magnates and business tycoons employing them, though they are usually less beholden to the African troops they are fighting alongside. Beasts of No Nation certainly succeeds in debunking the racist imagery of brutal and ‘savage’ African insurgents in mercenary films stretching back to the Dark of the Sun. Another film that moves away from this sort of imagery is The Siege of Jadotville (2016), directed by Richie Smyth and shot in Ireland and South Africa. The film reenters the thorny terrain of post-colonial Congo, this time from the perspective of the Irish contingent to the UN peacekeeping force sent to the Congo in 1961 to try and reintegrate the country and end the Katangese secession. The film script was based on the 2005 book by Declan Power titled The Siege of Jadotville: The Irish Army’s Forgotten War recounting the story of the 158 men of ‘A’ Company, 35th Battalion (UN Service) of the Irish army led by its commander, Pat Quinlan (played by Jamie Dornan). The Company found itself airbrushed from history following their surrender after a fiveday siege by the Katangese Gendarmerie, commanded by the French veteran and warhero-turned mercenary Major Roger Faulques, at Jadotville (now Likasi) in Katanga in September 1961.

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The action scenes of the film look like a modern version of Zulu, as the Irish troops find themselves surrounded and rushed at by hordes of Tshombe’s African troops, aided by small numbers of white mercenaries. But, unlike Rorkes Drift, this is a modern, rather than unconventional, war as the Irish are shot at by a Mystere jet along with mortars and small arms fire before they themselves start to run out of ammunition.44 They manage to inflict quite high casualties on their opponents (an estimated 300 killed), including a dramatic sniper shot at a white-suited figure directing the rebels, working for the Belgian mining interests propping up Tshombe’s regime. While some of the Irish are wounded, none in the event is actually killed and one is left asking why the incident disappeared in the way it did from public memory in Ireland, beyond the obvious answer that concepts of traditional military honour still prevailed in Ireland in the early 1960s, rooted in a brief tradition stretching back to the 1916 Easter Rising and the war of independence of 1919–1921, ensuring that the idea of surrender became equated, by some at least, with the apparent ‘sell out’ at the time of the December 1921 Treaty. Smyth has also suggested that the airbrushing was the result of wider forces at play in the complicated politics of the Congo. Ireland had only joined the UN as recently as 1955 and was anxious to try and display its credentials as a neutral country in the Cold War. Jadotville rather dented this project, especially as it was the only time that Irish troops found themselves operating alone. The film portrays the Irish as well led and motivated, but side-lined by a UN leadership geared to wider diplomatic manoeuvring by its egotistical Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold and his special representative in the Congo, the Irish academic and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien (unconvincingly played by Mark Strong). The UN plan was to first negotiate with Tshombe and, if this proved unsuccessful, to arrest him as a last resort in a police action.45 The Irish were only lightly armed and soon found themselves hard-pressed to match the weaponry of their opponents; whose numbers have been variously estimated between 500 and 4,000–5,000. A Swedish contingent was sent to try and reinforce them but failed to get through and the Irish had little choice but to surrender given their ammunition was running low. The film fails to deal with the brutal treatment of the Irish before they were finally able to go home to a frosty reception. The film is inaccurate on some points. The assassination of Lumumba at the start is shown as a bullet to the head in a jail cell, whereas in reality he was executed by a firing squad overseen by Belgian officers. Likewise, while the mercenaries supplied to Tshombe (curiously referred to as ‘General’ Tshombe) were led by the urbane Roger Faulkes, many were Rhodesians and South Africans. The Soviet Union is referred to at one point as the ‘Soviet Republic’ while the film hints at a conspiracy to assassinate Dag Hammarskjold when a jet appears behind his plane flying to Ndola to meet Tshombe. In practice, no evidence was found at the crash site to confirm that the plane was shot down, and it crashed anyway at night as it came in to land.46 The trope refers to a wider diplomatic struggle while the Jadotville siege was going on as Hammarskjold frantically tried to obtain delivery of a few jets promised to him from the Ethiopian government. The jets were held up by the reluctance of the British colonial government in Uganda (this was a year before the country’s independence) to give flight clearance.47 As a result, the Irish were shot at from the air by the Fouga jet

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which had complete freedom of the skies, an image considerably different to the UN plane in Dark of the Sun. The Siege of Jadotville still manages to weave the siege at the local level with a wider pattern of global events, as the Congo became locked into Cold War superpower rivalry. Quinlan learns from a widow living in the area that Jadotville has the world’s largest uranium mine, radiation from which killed her husband. It is evident that it is not just Belgian mining interests that are stake in the conflict, and Tshombe appears as a figure working for wider western interests. The UN is portrayed in a note at the end of the film as largely resolving the Katanga issue once Tshombe was driven out of the province by UN forces in 1963, though it failed to point out that he returned as prime minister the following year. Eventually, too, a US-backed military regime came to power with the 1965 military coup in Kinshasa that led to the long period of kleptocratic rule by General Mobutu.

Summing up Mercenaries are unlikely to disappear from the cinema screen, certainly in the immediate future. With origins in macho action narratives in films like Dark of the Sun and Wild Geese, they function, strictly speaking, as cinematic anti-heroes, even if they never seriously rival truly demonic characters such as Hannibal Lector. The anti-hero is shaped as much as the hero by the memory of past heroism, and anti-heroes often engage in a vain quest to regain the heroism of a past now denied to them.48 We can see this in the desperate efforts of film producers and director to clothe their mercenary anti-heroes with some sort of moral gloss, despite this being thin and unconvincing. Some mercenaries will certainly continue as staple antiheroes in action movies, while there are some signs that mercenaries will even find a home in fantasy movies, evidenced by the 2009 epic Avatar (written, produced and directed by James Cameron). In this instance, a private security company has not just taken over the running of a war but the defence of mining operations in an entire planet. Set in the mid-twentieth century, the narrative has humans escaping an overpopulated and dying earth to colonize the distant planet Pandora, the moon of an unnamed gas giant. The mining operations threaten the existence of the Na’vi, a 10-foot-tall blue-skinned humanoid species indigenous to the planet and worshippers of the goddess Eywa. The film breaks from the conventional masculine mould of most mercenary features by starkly contrasting the feminine world of the Na’vi with the crudely masculine world of the colonial intruders, essentially modern American militarism writ large in the form of the Resources Development Administration (RDA). This concern runs the planet rather like an updated British East India Company or British South Africa Company in the days of empire. The RDA wants to protect its operations from constant Na’vi attacks; its giant soil movers return with arrows in their wheels recalling Indian resistance to loggers in the Amazon jungle. The security force is a mercenary one recruited from the military back on earth and led by a Hartmanntype character, Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang). The Colonel hires Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic ex-Marine, to replace his dead brother so that he can

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become an ‘avatar’ or one of the Na’vi-human hybrids who are operated by genetically matched humans. Jake comes to sympathize with the Na’vi after falling in love with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), the daughter of the leader of the Omaticaya clan. He forms a guerrilla army to resist the RDA’s operations once it is obvious that the RDA has no serious interest in understanding Na’vi culture, despite their use of an anthropologist Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), who realizes she is there only to gather military intelligence, Grace changes sides to join the guerrillas and the resulting war takes a suitably fantastic and naturalistic form, with aerial attacks by large birds and resistance in the forest by Na’vi and animals, recalling similar images in The Return of the King (2003). The enemy, by contrast, is a mechanical one equipped with huge earth movers and robotic craft resembling macho Marines. A more politically engaged approach might perhaps have involved a revolt from within the US military against their own masters, an idea that never reached the final film script.49 However the film is interesting in the way it explores both sides in an insurgent–counter-insurgent war. We start with the central character Jake, but, as an ‘avatar’, he moves from the world of humans and Na’vi and back again. Here, at least in the realm of fantasy, Hollywood finally gets to explore both insurgency and counterinsurgency in the same movie, though anything so balanced in mainstream features continues to present serious political and commercial problems for the industry.

6

France’s Bitter Retreat from Empire

French cinema has had more difficulties than many other countries in bringing to screen films portraying insurgent warfare, counter-insurgency and terrorism. War films have never had the same sort of popular appeal in France as they have in AngloAmerican cinema, despite deep-rooted myths of Napoleonic and imperial greatness. It has sometimes been suggested that the war genre sits uneasily with French film producers and directors, who often appear to be more concerned with human and personal relations on the small scale. Even now, there has been no major French film dealing with aerial combat, submarine warfare or the military and political decisionmaking behind the collapse in 1940, the debacle in Indochina in the early 1950s or the crisis of the Fourth Republic in 1958 leading to Algerian independence in 1962. This chapter will look at these issues in three parts. Part one will examine the importance of an early period of cinema up to the early 1960s centred on three key films: Alain Resnais’s Muriel (1963), Pierre Schoendoerffer’s La 317 Section (1963) and Jean Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat (also released in 1963) and Lost Command (1966). Next, in part two I will examine the emergence of a more gauchiste cinema that attempted to examine the Algerian war in three films Avoir Vingt ans dans les aures (1972), R.A.S (1973) and La Question (1977). In the third part, I will look at the renewal of the memory of colonial wars in the four films Dien Bien Phu (1992), Mon Colonel (2006), Hors la Loi (2010) and Forces Speciales (2011).

The early period From the era of silent cinema, the war genre was a difficult subject for French film producers given the way the French memory of war was so heavily shaped by the massive carnage of the First World War. One of the earliest French war films was the 1928 anti-war movie Verdun Visions of History (Verdun visions d’histoire), directed by Leon Poirier. The film explored the havoc wrought by war not only on the men fighting in it but on the civilian population as well. It stands alongside Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) as one of the great anti-war films of the inter-war years and helped set the tone of much subsequent French film making. Over the next thirty-odd years there was the added shame of defeat and capitulation in 1940 followed by the humiliations in and defeat in Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu. Then came the withdrawal from Algeria in 1962 following a seven-year war in which the French

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army remained militarily undefeated but bitter, compounded by the arrival in France of many former pieds noirs and a terrorist campaign mounted by the right-wing OAS. It was only in the early 1960s that, officially at least, France finally recognized the concept of ‘decolonization’ as it reluctantly abandoned the idea of ‘Algerie Francaise’. The French republican left, in particular, gave up its commitment to the idea that Algerian Muslims could be assimilated into French culture, though the actual meaning of ‘decolonization’ would continue to be debated by intellectuals on the left and right, ranging from exponents of national liberation and social revolution, such as Sartre, De Beauvoir and Fanon; champions of an Algerian ‘nation’ such as the PCF and the ‘national liberalism’ of Raymond Aron, who saw Algerian independence as part of ‘wave of history’, a view similar to the Whiggish idea of a benign ‘transfer of power’ in British official circles in the 1950s and early 1960s.1 In Britain, post-war decolonization did not lead to the same sort of debate on national identity, which was postponed until at least the Thatcher years of the 1980s and, arguably, until more recent debates on union with the Scottish independence referendum of 2014 and the Brexit referendum of 2016. In France, by contrast, decolonization impacted on debates surrounding national identity in the Fifth Republic forged by De Gaulle in 1958. Under the mantle of withdrawing from Algeria, the French government began a process of redefining French identity to exclude ‘Muslims’, marginalizing in the process the imperial doctrine of a nominally colourblind assimilation but also failing to confront head-on the long tradition of republican racism.2 For French film producers, releasing any films on the Algerian War risked not only raising painful memories of a bitter and brutal conflict but also intruding into a sensitive debate on what modern French identity actually meant. This double restriction ensured that French cinema never generated anything like a distinctive mythology of colonial war like the United States and Britain. Relatively few films in the 1960s and 1970s attempted to engage with Algeria, and, even when they did, they preferred to fall back on oblique references, often to escape a draconian policy of film censorship. Two films stand out from the nouvelle vague (new wave) that did address the Algerian issue, though both from a distance: Alain Resnais’ Muriel ou le Temps d’un retour (1963) and Jean Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat, released in 1960 but first shown in France in 1963. Before we turn to these films, it is important to note that the historical memory of colonial rule and withdrawal from Indochina and Vietnam are by no means the same, given that France had different relationships with the two colonial territories. Vietnam was a colonie d’exploitation where a small class of French colonial administrators, mining interests and commercial planters took advantage of a cheap work force to produce huge quantities of rice, tea and coffee as well as raw materials such as rubber, coal, zinc and tin. Algeria, on the other hand, had a rather different sort of relationship with the French metropole since – along with plantations and the exploitation of cheap Algerian labour – it had a population of one million white colons or pieds noirs who saw Algeria as ‘Algerie Francaise’ and part of metropolitan France. While both colonies experienced intense forms of racial discrimination, the level of racism in Indochina was partly attenuated by the small size of the white French colonial

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presence and widespread sexual relationships between French men and Vietnamese women. In Algeria, on the other hand, a pattern of racial segregation emerged that displayed some of the features of the apartheid model in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. Both wars were underpinned by a powerful colonial myth stretching back several generations to the original colonial conquests in the nineteenth century, but fortified by the revival of French imperial elf confidence in the aftermath of the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris.3 The exhibition stimulated considerable interest in the French colonial empire that would continue until well after the Second World War, leaving French society remarkably unprepared for the era of post-war decolonization.4 The myth was exemplified by the 1935 film Princesse Tam Tam, which dramatically stressed the propinquity of the French presence in North Africa with the cultural movements in metropolitan France. The film starts with a French novelist suffering writers’ block seeking inspiration in Tunisia. Here he encounters a local girl Alwina (played by the black American singer and actress Josephine Baker) whom he teaches the manners and customs of the ‘civilized’ west. He reinvents her as ‘Princess Tam Tam’ from Africa and brings her back to polite bourgeois Parisian society. In a glitzy party hosted by an Indian Maharajah, the princess regresses to type by dancing an oriental dance; she is feted by other party-goers, though the Maharaja comments that ‘some windows face to the West and others to the East’. Infused with cinematic orientalism, Princesse Tam Tam exemplified pre-war French cinema’s tendency towards ambivalent narratives revealing a declining faith in a hierarchy of cultures. Moving beyond the supposed boundaries of cultural identity, the films created a space for transgression from bourgeois morality, themes perpetuated in recent movies such as Indochine (1992) and The Lover (1992) that depict sexual relationships across the racial and cultural divide of pre-war colonial Vietnam.5 Such narratives of wilful cultural transgression provided an alternative myth of empire that later veered towards an imperial nostalgia that avoided confronting directly the political complexities of decolonization. This would prove easier in the case of Indochina than Algeria. In Indochina, the defeat at Dien Bien Phu ensured a dramatic and final closure to the seventy-year period of French colonial occupation that had started in the 1880s; although still painful, the withdrawal, following the Geneva Accords of 1954, provided a welcome relief. Many military strategists and political leaders had come to view the war as increasingly unwinnable against well-disciplined Viet Minh guerrillas operating with relative impunity in vast jungle terrains and with apparently limitless weapons and supplies from China following the communist revolution in 1949. The finality of the French departure from a colony lacking any extensive settler population ensured that the later memory of it would eventually be refracted through a rather nostalgic gaze, different in kind to the brutal and chaotic departure from Algeria. This nostalgia has thus tended to blur the intensity and bitterness of the Indochinese conflict. By the 1990s, France was able to open diplomatic avenues to a modern Vietnam confident about its own identity. The Vietnamese government later supported the 1992 war film Dien Bien Phu, directed by the right-wing director Pierre Schoendoerffer.

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Algeria was a different matter. The war from 1954 to 1962 challenged the very core of the French colonial idea of mission civilisatrice which had been forged by successive generations of empire builders since the early nineteenth century. The French imperial ethic tended to be more self-consciously ideological compared to the more empirical approach of British colonial rulers, reflecting the fact that its nineteenth-century imperial soldier-administrators such as Bugeaud and Lyautey were far less beholden to the diktats of central government or even of interested economic parties. They liked to talk of the need for building a new culture in a manner that would have shocked the far more money-oriented Randlords in South Africa whose horizons never moved much beyond the making of profits.6 As A.P. Thornton has observed, the French imperial ethic remained quite closely linked to Jacobin principles of revolutionary universalism even if this did lead, in some cases, to the creation of colonial Jacobins only too ready to use such concepts against their colonial masters.7 Jacobin ideas of fraternity, however, could all too easily slip into a form of cultural civil war. This would be the case in Algeria where a war was eventually fought between ‘intimate enemies’ – the title of a 2007 film on Algeria directed by Florent Siri. The latter stages of the Algerian conflict proved to be especially bitter, bringing down the Fourth French Republic in 1958. The French military used extensive torture in its counter-insurgency, which some military analysts rationalized as part of an ideologically driven counter-insurgency against FLN guerrillas they described as guerre revolutionnaire. The logic of this type of war undermined the moral compass of the French colonial cause.8 It produced an intensely ideological, racial and political polarization that ensured, before final independence, an attempted military putsch in Algiers in 1961 by a group of disaffected French generals, an upsurge of terrorism by the underground right-wing OAS in both Algeria and metropolitan France and the departure of virtually the entire pied noir population. It was not even clear what exactly the war was about since the French government refused to accept, until 1999, that this was even a ‘real’ war given that the conflict took place in a region it saw as part of metropolitan France. The official title for the war was operations de maintain de l’ordre – operations in the maintenance of public order – a term not markedly different to the British notion of ‘emergencies’ in Malaya and Kenya. This term represented a refusal to accept that this was any sort of ‘war’ in the proper sense of the term and so markedly differed from the era of initial colonial intrusion into Algeria in the years after 1834 when the operations against indigenous guerrillas had been broadly seen as an example of une petite guerre or ‘small war’. The French memory of war became increasingly politicized in the course of the 1960s on ethnic and generational grounds. The historical recollection of the conflict became intertwined with wider battles for status and recognition in metropolitan France by Muslim and North African ethnic minorities in a manner rather different to Britain and the United States. The memory of Britain’s ‘colonial emergencies’, for instance, never linked up particularly closely with issues concerning Afro-Caribbean and South Asian ethnic minorities in post-war Britain, perhaps because relatively few came from Malaya and Kenya.9 By contrast, the memory of the Algerian War remained an explosive issue with the younger North African population confined, in many cases, to bleak outer suburbs of French cities called banlieues blighted by high unemployment and racial discrimination.

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The Algerian War was a sensitive subject for French cinema to tackle, even though over 1.5 million French soldiers had served in it and some 27,500 died there. Benjamin Stora has suggested that the Algerian War became effectively amputated from French historical consciousness ensuring that the issues surrounding it largely festered outside public memory. Neither in France nor Algeria has it been possible to move to the stage of formally commemorating the conflict, or even erecting statues and naming streets recalling the war and those involved in it. It will be hard to find a rue Ben Bella in any French town or city while there are, equally, no roads named after Albert Camus or Jean Paul Sartre in Algeria, though there is, interestingly, in the heart of Algiers close to the university a place Maurice Audin named after a white communist activist murdered by French paras during the Battle of Algiers in 1957.10 Nevertheless, in terms of cinema, it is not true that French film producers entirely neglected France’s colonial wars since over fifty French feature films were released by the early 1990s dealing with Algeria in one form or another.11 Algeria remained buried in the French folk memory in a complicated and highly contested form. For the radical French director Bernard Tavernier, the Algerian War was a ‘guerre sans nom’, the title of a documentary he released in 1991. This uncertainty reflected a wider French military problem with both its colonial wars in Indochina and Vietnam. In neither instance was it able to fight a counter-insurgency war around any credible myth that bore a close relationship with the original mission civilisatrice that had underpinned nineteenth-century French imperial expansion. In Indochina, the French return to its former colony of Vietnam at the end of the Second World War was hampered by the destruction of much of the former colonial administrative infrastructure following the outright Japanese annexation of March 1945. The resulting military counter-insurgency against Viet Minh guerrillas proved to be remarkably narrowly based, mainly involving a series of alliance with indigenous tribal minorities that ensured that the French military lacked any real support among the Vietnamese peasantry as it attempted to blockade enemy areas with a strategy of quadrillage de l’auto defense.12 None of this proved effective against a resolute enemy impelled by an ideology of Vietnamese nationalism combined with a programme of peasant-based social revolution replicating the Maoist revolution in China. The same sort of problems emerged in the case of Algeria, though here French counter-insurgency against the FLN was at least impelled by a myth of ‘Algerie Francaise’ and the idea that a colony the other side of the Mediterranean was both part of metropolitan France and a lost ‘Latin Africa’ now being reclaimed by the industrious colons as heirs to earlier Greek and Roman conquests in the Mediterranean.13 This mythology became one that the French government found increasingly hard to sustain in the context of wider Cold War ideological conflict over the rights of subject peoples. Following the crisis of 1958, and the emergence of Charles de Gaulle as President of the new Fifth Republic, there was a significant shift in the government’s propaganda line in its ideological war with the FLN. Government propaganda films such as Visages d’Algerie and The Falling Veil, a film aimed at American audiences, attempted to define the traditional conception of mission civilisatrice to uplift an ‘undeveloped’ Algeria. This was partly an extension south of the Mediterranean of a modernization project known as the trentes glorieuses underway in metropolitan France.

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Spanning the thirty or so years from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s this involved the massive reconstruction of many French cities, the building of vast numbers of apartment blocks and major new industrial plants. It contained a dynamic that, by the late 1950s, led to a growing recognition by the French state on the need to relinquish its hold on Algeria and decolonize it as part of a continuous pattern of modernization. To explain this, it found itself heavily dependent on the use of film and cinema in a strategy to cover the retreat from Algeria that Matthew Connelly has described as a ‘glowing vision … like celluloid wrapping around another, classified version of independent Algeria’.14 It was a vision that, in the end, failed to stem the drift of the Algerian War into a civilizational conflict in which extremists on both sides goaded on their followers into ever more stark and bloody excesses. However, as an apparent political programme, it secured a pis aller for the Gaullist regime in Paris to extricate itself from the Algerian conflict.15 The culturally shallow nature of the modernizing vision was also one that would be wide open to being pilloried by the new arts-based cinema of the early 1960s. In 1963 the director Alain Resnais released his third feature film, Muriel ou le Temps d’un retour (Muriel or The Sign of a Return). The film followed Hiroshima mon amour in 1959 and L’Annee derniere a Marianbad in 1961 and was set in the town of Boulogne, almost at the northernmost point of France and, by extension, as far north in France as it is possible to get from Algeria in the south. The story takes place over fifteen days in September–October 1962, some six months after the signing of the Treaty of Evian and the French departure from Algeria. The film centres on the arrival of the middle-aged Alphonse and his young lover Francoise to stay with Helene, an antiques dealer working out of her apartment. Helene lives with her stepson Bernard, who has returned from military service in Algeria apparently traumatized after his involvement in the torture and probable murder of a victim known only as Muriel, a character who never appears in the movie. Helene, on the other hand, is a gambling addict and mistress of Roland de Smoke, a property developer partly responsible for the extensive rebuilding going on in Boulogne, a town which appears during the film as a silent character its own right and defined by the juxtaposition of new apartment blocks going up alongside older decaying buildings from the past. This is a film that avoids any serious engagement with the recent historical past in favour of the fractured nature of modernity and memory.16 Such memories surface during the movie in a discontinuous manner paralleled by the discordant musical score by Hans Werner Henze and some 800 static camera takes, twice the number for an average movie of this length. The memories contrast and battle against each other in an apparently vain effort to establish significance: Helene has been sometime in the past the lover of Alphonse, who has formerly run a bar in Algeria. A pattern of miscommunication, it emerges, prevented them getting married, while Bernard’s memories of Algeria remain largely bottled up in a young man who finds social relationships difficult and eventually abandons his fiancée Marie-Do. In one scene, we learn something of Bernard’s former activities in Algeria through a short movie to which he gives a running commentary. The film is apparent evidence of Muriel’s torture, a terrifying memory of the past that has now become an obsession with Bernard, who is a casualty of war in the sense that he is wracked by guilt but powerless

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to know what to do about it. Resnais had been a signatory in 1960 of the Manifesto of 121, in which a group of French intellectuals organized by Jean Paul Sartre protest the French government’s counter-insurgency in Algeria. Muriel was not, though, an overtly political film and the theme of torture was dealt with obliquely. It thus escaped being banned, unlike Jean Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat that was completed in 1960 but only released in 1963, a year after Algerian independence. Le Petit Soldat has been, until relatively recently, one of the more neglected films of Godard’s early period, despite the fact that it was begun before the more iconic Breathless (1960). It marks a rather tentative turn by Godard into political film making in the face of charges from left-wing critics that the films of the nouvelle vague were only really concerned with individual bourgeois fulfilment and existential self-assertion. The movie centres on a French deserter, Bruno Forrestier (Michel Subor), who has fled to Geneva to escape fighting in Algeria. Bruno works as a photojournalist, while being drawn into a shadowy French counter-terrorist operation, apparently financed by an ex-Poujadist and former Vichy collaborator. The organization orders him to kill a leading figure of the exile FLN, oddly named Palivoda, to prove he is not a double agent. By the time he attempts the assassination, Bruno has met and fallen in love with a beautiful Russian woman Veronica Dreyer (played by Anna Karina). Veronica is also rather enigmatic, with little to say for most of the film and spending much of the time combing her hair in front of a mirror and smiling as Bruno takes photographs of her. She starts a rather torrid affair with Bruno and late in the film discloses that she is an active supporter of the FLN, seeing them as an organization with ideals, unlike the French, whom she considers are destined to lose the Algerian War. There is little to like about Bruno, who is part Jimmy Porter complaining of the lack of real causes to fight for in the modern world and part rich playboy, standing in as a kind of mirror for Godard himself at this early stage in his career. He rather implausibly declares himself to be a ‘secret agent’, but there is a feeling that this is just an attempt to clutch at some sort of identity. He never lacks money and it is not really clear, until close to the end of the movie, what he really believes in, eventually confessing to Veronica that he is ‘proud to be French’ while Arabs are generally ‘lazy’ and he hates the Mediterranean world and the fiction of Albert Camus. He is broadly right wing and a supporter of the lost cause of Algerie Francaise, though not fanatically so. He understands only too well the penalties for being found out in the world of intelligence and counter-intelligence, which appears to be little more than an elaborate game, though one whose precepts are well expressed when one of the French antiterrorist agents, Jacques, reads from Jean Cocteau’s novel Thomas the Imposter. Thomas vainly attempts to pretend to be dead before finally dying at the end of the novel: ‘For him’, Cocteau wrote, ‘fact and fiction were one and the same. William Thomas was dead’. Le Petit Soldat can thus be seen as a movie that, somewhat unwittingly, looks forward to the contemporary era of ‘fake news’ and uncertain or unprovable facts. There is never any real certainty about the central character’s real aims in the movie, though it is clear that Bruno is half-hearted in his efforts attempts to kill Palivoda in a moving car, with the attempt descending into black comedy as various vehicles keep getting in the way. Bruno then attempts to flee with Veronica to Brazil, but is captured

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and tortured by the FLN. Here he at last displays some serious professionalism as an intelligence agent, enduring both electric shocks and water boarding before managing to escape from his captors by jumping out of a window. By now, though, the French intelligence agents have discovered Veronica’s links to the FLN and she is captured and tortured to death, an event that occurs off-screen. The final denouement of the film is narrated by Bruno in a down-beat matter-of-fact manner, recalling the similarly bleak ending to Rossellini’s Paisa. What is perhaps most memorable about the film, and which saves it from the obscurity of some of Godard’s other early films, is the brutal torture scene in which Subor underwent real water boarding before the camera, a trope that would take decades to be repeated in cinema with Kathryn Bigelow’s rather more stylized torture scenes in Zero Dark Thirty in 2012. The FLN torturers place photographs of other victims before Bruno, warning him that the same thing can happen to him unless he talks; a little later, a narrator with Bruno’s voice narrates that as a cloth over his head becomes saturated with water he is unable to breathe. The very starkness of the scene puts Le Petit Soldat into a rather different category to other post-war movies that attempted to deal with torture: Rome Open City in 1945, Chahine’s Djamila in 1958 and Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers in 1966, which all dramatize such brutal events with considerable emotion and even melodrama, either with protesting speeches such as that of Don Pietro Pelegrini in Rome Open City or Morricone’s iconic organ score in Algiers. Interestingly, none of the scenes in Le Petit Soldat have any direct Algerian context and even the FLN agents closely resemble their French opponents, a trope that reinforces a narrative stressing how torture was a weapon used by both sides in the Algerian conflict (a trope incidentally that was sufficient to secure the film’s banning by the French government). The apparent remoteness of the film from real events in Algeria led the film to be rather neglected by critics, who remained preoccupied with the apparently more obvious successes of the French new wave such as Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour or Francois Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. For a later generation, the very bleakness of the torture scene ensures the film’s enduring importance, confirming at least some of the precepts of cinema verite that was so ably demonstrated by the movie’s cinematographer Raoul Coutard. As Roger Ebert has pointed out, Bruno has no real cause to defend when he undergoes torture and the film reflects the moral confusion felt by many people in the face of the bitter brutality of the Algerian war that, like the United States a few years later in Vietnam, tore French society apart.17 Despite its evident limitations in not actually probing the real war in Algeria, Le Petit Soldat remains a major film interrogating the pitiless consequences of insurgent war on ordinary civilian life, though its improvisational style avoided the obvious artifices and stock formulae of Hollywood cinema. Nevertheless, the film emerges as an unconventional political thriller that both confirmed and amplified one of the central themes of Godard’s film making, namely that love and betrayal are two sides of the same coin.18 Confronting the Algerian conflict head-on, like later films on the Vietnam War, proved hard for French film makers, though Hollywood itself released in 1966 one major feature film, Lost Command, that included scenes from both the Vietnamese and Algerian Wars. It is questionable whether the achievements of French cinema

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should be judged by a Hollywood standard; Philip Dine has suggested that the French films that have been released on Algeria (as well as Indochina) should be judged on their own terms and assessed in relation to ‘geopolitical and institutional challenges presented by decolonization’.19 Neither the United States nor Britain confronted a nearbreakdown of their political systems like France, so it is not altogether surprising that the French cinematic treatment of these issues emerged rather differently. Moreover, French cinema’s treatment of colonial wars was shaped by a range of cultural factors. France had a highly self-conscious intelligentsia that had exerted considerable influence over social and political debate since the era of the Popular Front in a manner that was rather different to the Anglo-Saxon world. By the middle 1950s, the French intelligentsia had become polarized ideologically over Algeria at a time when intellectuals could exert considerable influence over film making.20 Behind these debates of the intelligentsia lay differing ideas about France and its identity and purpose. Naomi Greene has outlined four main periods for this debate and the way it shaped much French cinema. The first emerged in several films from the 1930s to 1950s directed by auteurs such as Jean Renoir, Marcel Carne and Rene Clair. They celebrated the lives of ordinary working-class men and women (often played by actors such as Jean Gabin, Fernandel and Arletty) in an urban setting centred on streets, hotels, bars and cafes. This period of French movie making would be later viewed as a ‘golden age’ of films that defined the essential ‘Frenchness’ of popular life in France and become, by extension, a yardstick by which to judge what had been lost in the era of post-war modernization. It was mostly a white cinema with little space for other ethnic groups; thus, Josefa, early in Jean Renoir’s early neorealist masterpiece Toni (1935), is warned by her uncle to beware of ‘Arabs’ while even the iconic gangster movie Pepe le Moko is essentially a French gangster film in an exotic oriental location where the Arab characters, while often portrayed sympathetically, serve essentially as background props for Gabin’s doomed character. This was also a cinema that contributed to the construction of post-war French identity as it moved away from life in small towns and working-class city suburbs to a wider exploration of cultural life centred on families, relationships, affairs, marital breakdowns and the upbringing of children. This identity was again largely white that excluded the Arab underclass living in banlieues or run-down inner-city apartments, a theme that has only recently attracted some French film makers such as Michael Nanneke in his iconic thriller Hidden (Cache) in 2006, exploring the dark past of Francophone relations with the Arab world including the massacre of Arabs in Paris on 17 October 1961 at the hands of the police led by Maurice Papon. Greene’s second theme is one of national grandeur that has been traditionally linked to the French right. At first sight, it might be assumed that this was closely linked to the cult of Napoleon that had flourished during the nineteenth century, though the portrayal of this on screen was by no means as simple as one might suppose. Decades before the birth of French cinema the Napoleonic legend had been dealt a serious blow with the defeat and abdication of Napoleon III after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. It was further weakened by the disasters of the First World War, though it still shaped Abel Gance’s iconic silent film Napoleon in 1927 where Napoleon is depicted as a Carlylean great man of destiny.21

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This idea of French grandeur linked to the figure of Napoleon would haunt some films in the post-war years: Gance’s 1960 film Austerlitz, for instance, began with Napoleon’s crowning as emperor of France in 1804 before his famous military victory the following year. But the Napoleonic legend did not sit especially well with the De Gaulle’s own project to serve as saviour and protector of France. The very idea of French national and imperial grandeur also seemed increasingly outmoded to a younger generation of film-goers in the 1960s, though Pierre Schoendoerffer tried later to revive it in his various war films. By the late 1960s, Greene has suggested, a third period emerged in wake of the evenements in Paris in May 1968. This led to the construction of a self-consciously gauchiste French cinema looking at issues from a Marxian and anti-war perspective. This leftist impulse would shape and influence several films in the 1970s, but begin to run out of steam by the 1980s as the Cold War between the superpowers wound down. A fourth period that began to emerge by the early 1990s centred on a return to the earlier politics of memory, leading in some instance to a new nostalgia for the French colonial past including its colonial wars after 1945.22 Of these four periods, only the third and fourth phases of gauchiste cinema of the 1970s and a renewed engagement with a politics of memory offered any real space for tackling themes relating to France’s colonial wars. The third phase led to releases such as Rene Vautier’s Avoir Vingt ans dans les aures in 1972, Yves Boisset’s R.A.S the following year and Laurent Heynemann’s La Question (1977). This era of cinema burnt out in the 1980s and the fourth phase became evident by the time of the release of Indochine in 1992 and Schoendoerffer’s Die Bien Phu. But events in Algeria in the early 1990s ended up delaying the emergence of a serious attempt by French cinema to break the amnesia over the Algerian War. In 1992, a bitter civil war broke out between the secular supporters of the Algerian state and radical Islamist insurgents organized around the Front Islamique du Salut, or FIS. The war occurred after a military coup in January 1992 pre-empted the Islamist-aligned FIS from attaining power following its victory in a relatively free election. The movement went underground and started waging an insurgency that was carried to a more murderous level by the Groupe Islamique Arme (GIA), whose terrorist activities spread to metropolitan France. This was a war about the identity of a nation involving the widespread torture and killing of civilians by both sides. It delayed any attempt to recall the history of the seven-year war in the 1950s. The conflict fizzled out by the end of the decade and the French government opened up the archives on the war in 2002, which prompted a new historical debate on the use of torture in the war in the 1950s. It was, though, a figure from the political right, Pierre Schoendoerffer with La 317e Section, who got in first with an actual feature film. This came after several documentaries on France’s colonial wars from a school of radical film makers known as ‘parallel cinema’ who employed similar devices to the nouvelle vague, with amateur actors, impromptu scenes requiring only slender scripts. Acting in contrast to the politically silent mainstream, directors such as Pierre Clement and Rene Vautier made several documentaries in the late 1950s and early 1960s which ended up being shown in secret after they were formally banned. Vautier’s 1956 film Algerie en flames was a good example of this sort of film, being shown mainly to trade union and left cinema

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club audiences.23 Its grainy black and white narrative of the war being waged by ALN guerrillas included a sequence involving the sabotage of a train; it had a rather retro quality reminiscent of heroic images of the French resistance in the early 1940s. The documentary viewed the war from an external, sympathetic perspective and failed to get inside the mind-set of the FLN leadership and its supporters. This was really a film aimed at disillusioned appeles (recruits) returning from the war rather than any wider international audience. It is thus possible to see the 1965 film La 317e Section (317 Platoon) as partly a response to the radical documentaries that had been released over the previous decade. Unlike Clement and Vautier, Schoendoerffer had a military background. Born in Alsace in 1928 he became a war cameraman in 1947 in the French Alpine 13e Bataillon de Chasseurs Alpins (the 13th Alpine Hunters Battalion) before moving as a corporal to Saigon in 1951. Here he developed his filming skills under the wing of Sergeant-Chief Jean Peraud of the Service Presse Information, producing in 1952 a 9-minute documentary, First Indochina War. Schoendoerffer scripted and directed La 317e Section based on a novel he had published with the same title in 1963. He would later go on to become a leading director of French war films, crowning his career with the 1992 film Dien Bien Phu. By 1954 Schoendoerffer had volunteered to be parachuted into Dien Bien Phu with the 5e BPVN (Vietnamese Parachute Battalion) where he ended up a prisoner of the Viet Minh. Before his capture, he destroyed most of the film he had shot of the fiftyseven-day siege, excepting six 1-minute reels later used by the communist film maker Roman Karmen in the Soviet propaganda film Vietnam in 1955. He then went through the re-education programme that French prisoners were made to endure at the hands of the Viet Minh before being released on 1 September 1954. His experience served in good stead when he came to film the Viet Minh in later features. He continued as a war correspondent and photographer in North Africa and South Vietnam before being asked in 1958 to direct an adventure move La Passe du Diable, a film shot in Afghanistan. He directed a few more feature films such as Ramuntcho, where the hero also ends up a prisoner of war in Indochina, before finally releasing La 317e Section in 1965. Schoendoerffer had been inspired from his early years by stories of epic adventures as well as Hollywood adventure yarns, and we can see signs of this in La 317e Section. However, what makes the movie so important is the way that Schoendoerffer also drew on his experiences as a war photographer to follow the fortunes of a small group of French officers commanding a platoon of forty-one Laotian soldiers on their way to safety from a remote outpost on the border with Laos. They are one of the Groupes Mobiles that operated in remote locations and performed similar sort of operations comparable to those of the Chindits in Burma in the Second World War. By the early 1950s, they were engaged in counter-insurgency involving small numbers of French officers commanding Thai or Lao mountain tribes, a form of war that would be continued by the Americans in the early 1960s with the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG).24 La 317e Section is set in early May 1954 when the French army is facing imminent defeat at Dien Bien Phu. This is no static narrative about a siege but one of movement

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as the Section makes its way through the jungle, engaging superior units of the Viet Minh and suffering casualties and loss. Schoendoerffer took his cast to Cambodia to shoot the film over a month in the rain forest, after being granted permission by the state’s ruler King Sihanouk. He used many low-level shots as he follows the soldiers around in the manner almost of a documentary. This is a Francophone neorealism, inspired by Rossellini, Visconti and Renoir but with less emphasis on cultural or class struggle, reflecting perhaps the rather more ad hoc and situational approach of la nouvelle vague. Early in the film the camera stands behind the Section as they wait to ambush some Viet Minh guerrillas in the distance crossing a river. They fire and hit several targets but it soon becomes clear that they are up against a superior enemy, who swiftly mounts a counter-attack by rushing to outflank them. The Section hastily retreats through the jungle. This is not evidently a group of soldiers with much training in jungle warfare and they appear to be driven mainly by a desire for revenge. 317 Section is led by a young officer sous lieutenant Torrens (Jacques Perrin) who has only arrived two weeks previously and is unfamiliar with either the terrain or the enemy. His face reveals doubt and lack of self-belief as he orders his men to leave the post in a column: they set off in pouring rain, leaving cooking utensils behind as well as a small squealing pig. The sounds of soldiers on the move mingle with those of the sounds of the jungle which is no dark mysterious interior like that portrayed in The Planters Wife but simply a difficult terrain needing to be navigated. Torrens listens to some of the advice from his adjutant Willsdorf (Bruno Cremer), a cynical former Wehrmacht soldier who has been in Indochina for several years. But he also discusses plans with the rest of his team and clearly cares for them. Eventually, Torrens abandons the Laotian villagers the French army has been protecting to their fate. They are not indigenous Vietnamese and we can see this as the visible collapse of a military strategy that had evolved in the years after the Second World War and would lead, after the partition of Vietnam, to many fleeing to Thailand. Away from the post, the Section comes across the bodies of some villagers who have been tied up before being murdered, apparently as a warning to others. This is a story of group survival in which there cannot be any heroes in the conventional military sense. La 317 Section was a generic film that established many of the basic themes of the modern French war movie.25 Certainly, Schoendoerffer emerged from no identifiable school of group of French film directors in the post-war period despite the association of some of those working with him, such as his nouvelle vague cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who had shot Godard’s Breathless in 1960). La 317e Section owed little to post-war French cinema, which, as we have seen, was extremely sparse in the way it dealt with war and certainly avoided low-level neorealist depictions of soldiers in combat. There was little, in fact, for Schoendoerffer to refer to when he embarked on the movie, with the notable exception of the little-known film L’Escadron blanc (The White Squadron). Directed by Rene Chanas in 1949, this grainy black and white film was a typical colonial film of the era with predictable orientalist imagery. It was also shot on location and several scenes have the camera tracking the French camel corps crossing the desert in pursuit of some bandits. This was more of a bottom-up movie with a remarkable neorealist sense of place and atmosphere compared to David Lean’s polished and sanitized imagery of the desert in Lawrence of Arabia.26

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Schoendoerffer adopted a similar approach as he tracked the 317e Section in its flight through the Vietnamese jungle. He was in effect searching for a cinematic authenticity he saw as largely lacking in French films of the era. This was also a historically driven realism since just as the events in L’Escadron blanc had been based on a real chase across the desert in 1928, so the events in 317e Section occurred at a critical historical conjuncture of peace negotiations taking place in Geneva and the conflict at Dien Bien Phu. The film Lost Command, by contrast, was an important American version of the Algerian War, serving as a kind of Hollywood response to The Battle of Algiers. The film was directed by Mark Robson and distributed by Columbia Pictures. It was released the same year as The Battle of Algiers and ended up being banned for ten years in France, longer even than its Italian-Algerian rival. The film’s title changed more than once during production: originally it was From Indo China to the Gates of Algiers, then it became Not for Honor and Glory before finally becoming Lost Command, though in France it was called Les Centurions. The film was influenced by a Francophone understanding of the war even if it lacked the neorealism of Pontecorvo. For some critics, the movie was little more than another routine war feature coming from a director known for successful war movies such as the Korean War movie The Bridges of Toko Ri in 1955, and Von Ryan’s Express ten years later. However, for all its melodrama and stereotyping of the Arab characters, Lost Command contains themes that might well have been developed by French film makers in a more permissive cultural climate than the one that existed in France in the post-Evian 1960s. For all its Hollywood gloss, the film is strongly Francophile. Though the script was written by the American screen writer Nelson Gidding, the narrative was based on the novels Les Centurions and The Praetorians by the former French paratrooper Jean Larteguy. Apart from Quinn and George Segal, many of the actors were also French, including Alain Delon, Michele Morgan and Maurice Ronet along with the Italian actress Claudia Cardinale implausibly playing a middle-class Muslim girl. The film goes some way to recreate the mood among the French army in a situation of defeat and humiliation. The film starts with the paratroopers beleaguered in the final days of the siege of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The commander of the garrison, Lt Col Pierre-Noel Raspeguy (Quinn), calls for reinforcements but these turn out to be a single plane load of paratroopers under the command of Major De Clairefons. The paras land disastrously in front of Viet Minh fire and Clairefons is killed along with many of his squad. Raspeguy’s men attempt to fight on but are soon overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of advancing Viet Minh and surrender. The line of French prisoners is bullied and abused by the Viet Minh rather like Americans at the hands of the Japanese in the Second World War, though they are not beaten and randomly executed. Indeed, the Viet Minh look rather incompetent as Raspeguy steals the key from a jeep and the Viet Minh frantically try to locate it. These scenes gloss over the full scale of the French defeat: a total of 11,721 French soldiers were taken prisoner while hundreds died of disease before the arrival of the Red Cross, who took out 858 of the most incapacitated. This was not another ‘Bataan Death March’ after the Japanese conquest of the Philippines in 1942 and Raspeguy’s men are eager to return to the military and reform the regiment.

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Lost Command operates on a far wider scale than The Battle of Algiers. Starting with the Vietnam sequence it moves to Paris before shifting to Algeria, where Raspeguy’s Regiment is involved in rural counter-insurgency among Algerian mountains and villages as well as in Algiers itself. The Paris scenes reveal something of the growing desperation of the senior French military command at the situation in Algeria, while in Algeria Raspeguy hardly acts under any sort of ideological influence of guerre revolutionnaire intellectuals. The nearest to a military intellectual in the movie is Alain Delon’s character of Esclavier who is described as the regiment’s ‘historian’. It is Esclavier who eventually loses faith in the war and walks out at the end in civilian dress, while Raspeguy stays on to be promoted to general for his apparent success in combatting the FLN insurgency. The film has a largely stereotyped image of FLN insurgents. It fails to get inside the FLN insurgency like The Battle of Algiers, though the Algerian para Mahidi (Segal) changes sides following the murder of his brother by the French. At points, the film is little more than a revenge narrative and we learn nothing about the radicalization of Algerians at the popular level. The insurgents in the rural scenes mostly conform to traditional cinematic stereotypes of tribesmen firing down on the French from mountain ridges, though they do end up in later scenes with bazookas and heavy machine guns captured from the French. Raspeguy is no simple saviour of the colons like the urbane General Matthieu in The Battle of Algiers. He has a difficult relationship with a local mayor who demands he split his force into small squads to protect individual farms. Raspeguy refuses and instead purloins the mayor’s helicopter to use in support of his men operating in the mountains. The resulting battle scenes involve the requisitioning by the paras of a Red Cross helicopter against the insurgents, reflecting by the centrality of helicopters in US ‘air power’ and counter-insurgency doctrine in the middle 1960s when the film was made. But the French lack helicopter gunships in Algeria and Raspeguy fires at the guerrillas with a hand-held machine gun, in a scene reminiscent of the First World War. The helicopters prove valuable assets though in later combat scenes when they are used to surprise the guerrillas from the rear. Lost Command is interesting for its focus on rural counter-insurgency as opposed to the largely urban terrorism and counter-terrorism of The Battle of Algiers. The narrative centres on a small group of paras drawn from Larteguy’s novels; Esclavier gets involved with Mhidi’s sister Aicha (Cardinale) even though she is a secret supporter of the FLN. The film wanders into Algiers with the Paras and shows their efforts to crush the urban insurgency centred on the Casbah. These scenes seem a desperate Hollywood attempt to emulate The Battle of Algiers and are interesting for showing the use of hooded informers to pick out members of the underground network. Such methods conflict, apparently, with the paras’ ideas of military honour and the hood is (implausibly) removed, leading the informer to be threatened with death. The torture scenes are not as harrowing as those in Pontecorvo’s movie, though they were sufficiently controversial to ensure the film’s banning. Aside from the torture scenes, there is also a growing loss of belief by the paras themselves, a theme never confronted by Pontecorvo but one Schoendoerffer would later attempt to challenge.

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It is the paras’ supposed ‘historian’ Captain Phillipe Esclavier who sees the counter-insurgency operation as ultimately futile, even as Raspeguy trains his team in unorthodox methods of warfare. Esclavier recognizes that the war that cannot be won when most Algerians seek independence; he eventually resigns from the regiment and walks out in civilian clothes as local Arab boys paint ‘Independence’ on the walls. The film challenges the image of a strongly cohesive 10e Para Regiment in The Battle of Algiers that many members of the French military found easy to embrace, despite the film’s searing attack on the way France fought the war in Algeria.

Gauchiste treatments The student revolt in Paris in May 1968 was as an important cultural turning point in France that would have a considerable impact on cinema over the following decade. It led to a revitalization of Marxist discourse on the French intellectual left, now often called the ‘new left’, as well as providing a moral and ideological impetus behind radical film making in Europe that led to films such as Pontecorvo’s Burn in 1969 and Costa Gavras’s Z in 1969 and State of Siege in 1972.27 Not all the films from the French left followed the precepts of the new left. Low budgets and a focus on ideological conflict hampered many films, ensuring that they would be directed at small and largely student and underground audiences. This was especially true of Avoir Vingt ans dans les aures directed by Rene Vautier in 1972. This 97-minute film followed a group of Breton military recruits fighting the FLN in the Aures Mountains in 1961, one year before the final the war: at one point, we hear the sounds but never see an invisible helicopter in a generally sparse film. The film was widely attacked by conservative critics for its apparent approval of military desertion though it managed to escape being banned since it avoided dealing in any real detail with the still-sensitive theme torture, even though at one point a woman is the victim of multiple rapes. Vautier himself had served in the French resistance in the Second World War and had run into problems with his film making as early 1950 when his documentary Afrique 50 was confiscated by the police for its critical view of the way that Africans were treated in French colonial territories. In Vingt Ans, Vautier is concerned with the way that the military can break the spirit and independence of a group of men and turn them into an effective fighting and killing. The Bretons have an image in France of rebellious independence vaguely comparable to the Irish in English culture. Their distinct culture is played up by the musical score that irritated some film critics, but certainly helped achieve a remarkable tonal quality for a film with limited funding. The film was released before serious public debate on torture took off in France, although the issue had been rumbling in anti-war circles since the late 1950s when two books were published on the issue. The first, La Question, was by a communist journalist Henri Alleg, narrating his own torture at the hands of French paras during the Battle of Algiers in 1957; the second was L’Affaire Audin (1958) by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, which formed the basis of the 2010 documentary film Maurice Audin – la disparition (dir. Francois Demerliac) recounting the arrest and disappearance of a young mathematics instructor at the University of

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Algiers, Maurice Audin. Despite censorship both books gained a wide readership among the French intellectual left though ‘l’affaire Audin’ failed to achieve anything like the same status as the Dreyfus scandal earlier in the century, even though Audin’s body was never recovered and it was widely suspected that he had been accidently murdered while under interrogation. The end of the Algerian War led the French government to issue a decree giving an amnesty to all those who had been involved in ‘deeds committed within the framework of operations of the maintenance of order directed against the Algerian insurrection’. A long-running enquiry being conducted into Audin’s disappearance came to an end with the magistrate conducting dismissing all charges of homicide. No one was apparently responsible for Audin’s death, even though he was in many respects untypical of the many thousands who had similarly died during the seven-year war: he was white and well educated while his well-connected wife had been able to pursue an investigation that many others had been loath to do, either through a simple lack of resources or fear of the consequences.28 There the matter rested until something resembling a proper historical narrative of the Algerian War was brought to the screen by two documentary film makers – Yves Couriere and Philippe Monnier – in a two-and-a-half-hour film La Guerre d’Algerie in 1972. This was remarkable documentary for the way it assembled a huge range of film footage narrating the story of the Algerian War from its start in 1954 to its dramatic climax in 1961–1962 and detailing atrocities on both sides and even a scene where Algerians are gunned down by French troops in full view of the camera. For some critics, the documentary was little more than a photo album as it failed to explain the reasons for the war in any depth or why the French government decided eventually to withdraw.29 Nevertheless, La Guerre d’Algerie contributed to the gradual re-emergence of Algeria in French political memory. Laurent Heynemann’s film La Question, released in 1977, dramatized the events surrounding the arrest and disappearance of Maurice Audin and that were recounted in Henri Alleg’s book with the same title. The film creates a very different image of the French Paras familiar to audiences from La Bataille d’Alger and Lost Command. Even Pontecorvo’s neorealist treatment of the 10e Para Regiment in the Battle of Algiers had shown torture as a harrowing, but apparently logical, strategy in the counterinsurgency war against the underground urban network of the FLN. By contrast, Heynemann’s film shows the paras to be brutal and apparently wanton killers in a film that is largely set in a series of domestic interiors, prison cells and offices. The film tracks the disappearance of Audin and films his apparent murder at the hands of the paras, who have been allowed to use torture without any form of external check or control. The narrative hardly added anything new to the narrative that was already familiar to readers of Alleg’s book but it did much to pour scorn on the idea of French military honour as the paras appear as little more than sordid gangsters desperate to cover their tracks once they realize the implications of the murder. The film thus exposed the brutality and terror at the heart of what has sometimes been called the ‘French school’ of counter-insurgency.30 The French military underwent far more politicization compared to their British and American counterparts, and some French COIN theorists became advocates of an ideologically inspired form of

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warfare known as guerre revolutionnaire. Some of the exponents of this form of war had been exposed as officers to communist indoctrination as prisoners of the Viet Minh in Indochina in the late 1940s, though the concept of ‘revolutionary war’ continued to meet resistance from many senior French military commanders.31 The theory was first introduced into military debate by Colonel Charles Lacheroy, an intelligence officer with Catholic and conservative views who saw France as at the centre of a Cold War battle with international communism. Along with politically oriented officers such a Roger Trinquier, David Galula and Marcel Bigeard, Lacheroy expounded the precepts of guerre revolutionnaire at a time when a considerable section of the French officer class, along with many political decision-makers in Paris, were becoming increasingly demoralized given the failure to make progress in Algeria. There were growing fears indeed that France faced the prospect in Algeria of another humiliation on the scale of Indochina. As a concept guerre revolutionnaire provided some sort of intellectual coherence to the counter-insurgency thinking that was going on inside the French army in the five or more years after the Suez debacle in 1956. However, it never amounted to a credible long-term strategy since it was developed far too late to have much serious impact at the local level, where the war had been largely lost among the broad bulk of the Algerian population. The disastrous ‘Phillipeville massacres’ in August 1955 were, in many ways, a turning point in the war since they led the colonial government to declare a state of emergency. In the late 1950s, the French army found itself fighting an uphill battle to win back the central body of Arab opinion from the FLN that looked increasingly victorious in both its command of majority Arab opinion in Algeria and wide international support in bodies such as the UN. Douglas Porch has argued that the real effect of guerre revolutionnaire was an ‘over-militarisation’ of French strategy that prevented French political leaders from negotiating with the moderate nationalist movements in Algeria such as the Mouvement National Algerien of Messali Hadj, who continued to clash with the FLN not only in Algeria but among the Algerian population in metropolitan France.32 This ‘over-militarisation’ certainly brought some short-term successes in the late 1950s: The Constantine Plan, for instance, led to fences being erected along the borders with Tunisia and Libya to prevent the infiltration of guerrillas, while the Challe Plan in 1959 led to a renewed French military offensive against the ALN using mobile units called Commandos de chassee that recalled the Groupe Mobiles used in Indochina. The units infiltrated FLN ‘liberated zones’ and led to ambushes against FLN insurgents backed up by artillery, air power and the dropping of napalm in a manner that would become all too familiar in Vietnam in the next decade. This strategy certainly produced high casualties among the ALN, though it failed to prevent De Gaulle in 1961 from opening negotiations on independence with the FLN. In the wake of the French departure from Algeria the theory of guerre revolutionnaire appeared to retreat into the shadows: in the decade of the 1960s it gained scant response from the wider intellectual community beyond the right-wing German philosopher Carl Schmitt, who defended the French theorists for the way they espoused what he termed ‘partisan warfare’, a form of war that he argued was increasingly displacing the industrial wars of the first half of the twentieth century. ‘Partisan warfare’, Schmitt

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wrote in an influential essay in 1975, was a form of war that displaced the ‘technical military consciousness’ of the nineteenth century. It still led, though, to modern French ‘partisans’ such as General Raoul Salan, resorting to the same sort of terrorist actions as the FLN, creating what Schmitt termed a ‘landscape of treason’ that resulted in the 1961 military putsch.33 Schmitt was a lone voice in the middle 1970s, though his writing has been seen by some as prophetic of later ideas on ‘new war’ that emerged in the years after 9/11 and debates on emerging ‘global insurgency’. The French withdrawal from Algeria confirmed for some strategists that guerre revolutionnaire was marginal to France’s political interests beyond the lone example of colonial counter-insurgency surfacing briefly in the massacre on 17 October 1961 in Paris of several hundred Algerians by the police under the former Vichyite police chief Maurice Papon, who had also been prefect of the Constanois Department in Algeria. The police remained the main instrument of the French state’s strategy of maintaining control and public order, especially via the paramilitary CRS. It would be this, rather than the military as such, which would be used in the May 1968 student riots, though it seems that De Gaulle’s disappearance to Germany was to secure the support of the French army on the Rhine should anything resembling a serious threat to state authority have occurred. Further afield, the doctrine of guerre revolutionnaire was exported to military academies in South and Central America where they helped to shape violent counter-insurgencies against left-wing groups in states such as Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Paraguay – connections later revealed by the documentary film maker Marie Monique Robin in her documentary Les Escadrons de la Mort (The Squadrons of Death) in 2006. French theory indeed became part of a much wider military debate in parts of the developing world before the more recent emergence of US and British COIN thinking that emerged in the wake of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The renewal of a politics of memory By the early 1990s there were signs of a renewed interest by French film makers in the colonial past. There was a strongly nostalgic tinge to some of the resulting films such as Indochine (1992), directed by Regis Wargnier, set around a French colonial plantation in inter-war Vietnam. The movie was likened by some critics to a French version of Gone with the Wind or at least some comparable British films such as A Passage to India and White Mischief though it largely failed to engage in any depth with the reasons for the growth of the Viet Minh. The revival of such colonial nostalgia was, at one level, a rather belated bid to reshape French popular memory at a time when more radical interpretations of the wars of liberation post 1945 were still largely unknown among French cinema audiences. Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers was released into French cinemas in only November 2004. It had never been formally banned but cinema owners had been inhibited from showing the film due to the threat of riots or sabotage of cinemas. Even when it was released, the film tended to be widely ignored by a largely indifferent public who refused to allow the film to shape their memory of

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the war. Right-wing directors and producers were unacknowledged victors in what Stora calls French ‘memory wars’ that had been rumbling on since the 1960s.34 Indochine acted like the sudden release of gas in an overheated pressure cooker as it encouraged a series of films over the next few years that began to confront the French colonial past. In this last section, I shall examine some of these films, starting with Pierre Schoendoerffer’s Dien Bien Phu (1992), followed by the controversial Outside the Law directed by Rachid Bouchareb in 2010 and finally a film set in Afghanistan Special Forces, directed by Stephane Rybojad that was released in 2011. As I have already pointed out, Pierre Schoendoerffer had been making a series of films since the 1960s dealing with the French colonial past in one form or another. These films culminated in what he saw as his magnum opus of Dien Bien Phu in 1992. He had always seen his films as vehicles to reassert French pride in its former empire as well as establishing a cinematic response to the cinema of the left in movies such as La Question and Battle of Algiers. With Dien Bien Phu he was able at last to engage with one of the most sensitive moments in French post-war history with a battle that ended once and for all the French colonial presence in Indo China.35 The film appeared the same year as Regis Wargnier’s Indochine and appeared to be a somewhat belated example of imperial nostalgia. However, the fact that it appeared at all was due to a political shift by the government in Hanoi government that actively cooperated in the shooting of the film. The Vietnamese film industry had already begun to experience a considerable relaxation of government controls following the shift in Vietnam to a market economy in 1986. The collapse of the Soviet Union five years later in 1991 removed another major prop for the country’s nominally communist ruling regime, which by the early 1990s began seeking closer western economic contacts. Dien Bien Phu was made as part of a set of diplomatic feelers put out by the Vietnamese government to its former colonial ruler, probably as part of a wider game plane which would in the end secure an opening to the United States and other major western economies.36 Dien Bien Phu was thus made at a time when older mythologies about wars of national liberation were beginning to be rethought to relate to an era of globalization in which Vietnam, with a low wage but disciplined workforce, sought a secure niche in a variety of export markets such as coffee, tea and tourism. Considerable negotiations went into the making of the film, which shocked some Vietnamese film critics by the lengths to which it went towards rescuing French military honour. Eventually, a Vietnamese film was released in 2004, on the fiftieth anniversary of the battle, Ky uc Dien Bien Phu (dir. Do Minh Tuan) emphasizing the moral integrity of the Vietnamese cause and depicting the French as fighting a futile war. The battle at Dien Bien Phu between 13 March and 7 May ended in a decisive Vietnamese victory over a demoralized French army that found itself encircled despite superior American weaponry. The battle field was on the far north-west of northern Vietnam close to the border with Laos. It occurred after the French high command under General Henri Navarre decided to construct a military base there to interdict supplies to Viet Minh guerrillas from communist China; this proved a catastrophic mistake as the French garrison ended up being surrounded by Viet Minh forces controlling the surrounding hills and able to use artillery to fire down on the beleaguered French outpost after large numbers of peasants transported heavy guns up

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steep slopes, in many cases with bicycles. Battle casualties were not especially huge; the French dead ranged between 1,571 and 2,293, with a further 5,000–6,000 wounded, though the Vietnamese death toll was over 4,000 with a further 9,100 wounded. But this was a decisive demonstration that the French army was no longer able to control a key part of northern Vietnam and confirmed for many that now was the time for a French exit from the colony. The defeat came while the French government was in negotiations at Geneva over the future of its Indochinese colonies. The battle was a good example of the Clausewitzean dictum that war is an extension of politics in the sense that it helped increase the leverage of the Vietnamese negotiators, though they could still not prevent the Chinese, under Chou en Lai, insisting at Geneva on the partition of the country at a time when they feared a return of US forces to the Asian mainland and even the possible use of nuclear weapons. France finally withdrew from Vietnam, leaving a country divided between a communist north centred on the Hanoi and a pro-American south that would soon come under the tight control of the anti-communist regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. Dien Bien Phu lacks any historical perspective and is, for the most part, a conventional military narrative told largely from French point of view and visiting American journalist, providing an opportunity to suggest some parallels with the later US war in Vietnam. It was a marked departure from La 317 Section films for this was not a film apparently about guerrilla war but a spectacular conventional battlefield defeat that hastened the end of the French empire. It is hard to find an equivalent film in British and American cinema; there has been no major feature on the fall of Singapore, the 1942 retreat in Burma or the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, though General MacArthur’s departure from the islands was depicted as a heroic flight in the 1977 biopic MacArthur (dir. Joseph Sargent) starring Gregory Peck. Hollywood’s interest in major battles, beyond those of the Civil War, was mostly to celebrate American military victories or at least extraordinary endurance in movies such as Guadalcanal Diary (1943) and The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), or sometimes the pointlessness of war, as in Porkchop Hill (1959). The disaster at Arnhem eventually came to the screen in A Bridge Too Far (1977), but once again this was not depicted as all that major a defeat for the advancing Allies, though it was clearly a different story for the Dutch. Military disasters that have become feature films have often tended to be set conveniently well back in the past, and to be part of wars that were won by Britain anyway, such as the brutal exposure of military incompetence in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968) and Zulu Dawn (1979). Dien Bien Phu was thus an important war film for its acknowledgement of a major French historical defeat, though one that told a story largely divorced from the wider guerrilla war that had been escalating in Vietnam since the late 1940s. The film marked a serious, if perhaps belated, development of the French cinema of war, and has, to some degree, succeeded in generating a new French cinematic myth of war suited to a post–Cold War climate of closer understanding with a former colony. Like Rossellini’s Roma Citta Aperta and Pontecorvo’s La Bataille D’Alger, the film operates at three distinct levels: firstly, the Hanoi opera house at the start of the film where a rehearsal is in progress for a concert (eventually performed in the middle of the film) where a new musical work, specially commissioned for the film and written by Georges Delerue,

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is to be performed later that day; secondly, the streets of Hanoi over which moves an inquisitive French-speaking American journalist Howard Simpson (Donald Pleasance) who attends the concert in the evening; and, finally, the actual battle field of Dien Bien Phu itself, far away in the north-west of the collapsing colony, where the beleaguered garrison is being desperately replenished by air drops of arms, equipment and fresh men by America-supplied Dakotas that come under constant artillery bombardment from Giap’s forces on the surrounding hills. The opening of the movie in the Hanoi opera house signifies Schoendoerffer’s commitment to the idea of a mission civilisatrice at the heart of the French colonizing project. The orchestra performs against a large backdrop based on Delacroix’s painting of the 1848 revolution ‘Liberty Leading the People’. But is the half-naked goddess of liberty leading a French revolution or one by the Vietnamese against French colonial rule? The orchestra is Vietnamese as is the conductor; only the solo violinist, Beatrice Vergnes, is French (played by the French actress Ludmila Mikael). Delerue’s work is a lament for the passing of French colonial rule as well as a plea for a cultural dialogue – or what the French critic and novelist Lucien Bodard has termed a ‘symphony’ – between France and Vietnam as two apparently interlocking cultural entities.37 The film frequently cuts to Howard Simpson’s travels around Hanoi where he picks up news reports of the battle from French military men as well as an Agence France Presse correspondent and a Vietnamese nationalist news editor (played by the Vietnamese actor Long Nguyen-Khac). Simpson manages to send out the news to the San Francisco Chronicle via a Hong Kong–based news agency to evade the French military censorship. The nearest Simpson ever gets to the actual war is to stand by one of the Dakotas as the paras pass by to fly off to the war zone. He is better versed in the underworld of Hanoi’s newspapers existing alongside seedy opium dens and gambling houses where he picks up all the gossip that is apparently going. It is not altogether clear whether Schoendoerffer was nostalgic for this lost world that would soon be shut down by the new Communist government or whether he simply wanted to tell the story based on his own experiences as a reporter and war cameraman. Dien Bien Phu divided French film critics and prompted an intense debate on how to remember France’s colonial wars. Some saw the film as being really two separate films since the apparent links between the world of Hanoi and the actual battle at Dien Bien Phu appeared unconvincing. Others criticized the film’s lack of any strategic context and the lack of focus on the senior high command. The French soldiers fighting the battle seemed completely at the mercy of decisions made on high that were left unexplained. Likewise, the Vietnamese enemy remained faceless until the later stages of the battle as waves of Vietnamese troops assaulted the French redoubts. Nevertheless, the film was interesting for the ingenious way images of a collapsing colonial society in Hanoi were spliced with battle scenes where the Viet Minh guerrillas only emerge with any sort of human identity in brief final scenes when they overrun the French. Nevertheless, Schoendoerffer went further than most Hollywood directors in showing a catastrophic French military defeat, even if it is alleviated by some sense of honour among the French soldiers. For Hollywood to have released any sort of equivalent film would have meant producing a film, for instance, that focused on the retreating South Vietnamese Army in 1975 in the face of the rapid advance of the NVA

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together with the mounting chaos and panic in Saigon itself as refugees desperately attempted to get on helicopters taking off from the roof of the US embassy. This remains an arena covered only by documentaries such as Rory Kennedy’s film Last Days in Vietnam in 2014 along with a few brief scenes on the Tet Offensive in the 1998 TV movie A Bright Shining Lie (dir. Terry George). In contrast to the nostalgic but honourable tone of Dien Bien Phu came a film in 2006 Mon Colonel (dir. Laurent Herbiet). The film was based on a novel of the same title by Francois Zamponi and was scripted by Costa Gavras and Jean Claude Grumberg. The movie moved away from the by-now familiar terrain of a squadron or platoon of soldiers stranded somewhere in the Aures and confronting the almost inevitable problems of fighting an immoral war in which it is increasingly impossible to believe. Mon Colonel adopted a rather different angle which made it unique to French – or for that matter any other – cinema, namely the theme of guerre revolutionnaire and the way this intensely ideological form of warfare helped shape the mind-set of senior French officers during the Algerian War. Mon Colonel starts with the shooting of the elderly Colonel Duplan at his home by an unknown gunman. The police investigation leads nowhere and the army are put in charge, leading to a young female officer Galois being put onto the case. She starts to receive sheets of a photocopied hand-written memoir apparently written by a young Lieutenant Guy Rossi, who served under Duplan in Algeria. As she starts to read the account we are plunged from the world of colour of the present back into the black and white world of colonial Algeria of the middle 1950s where we follow Rossi’s progressive disillusionment with Duplan. This is a film that attempts to show a dialectic between modern France and its colonial past, though it does not entirely succeed since the world of the present lacks characters with a clear vision or ideal of where they are heading compared to their colonial forebears. This is not some Francophone version of The French Lieutenant’s Woman which poses a lively contrast between the Anglo-American world of the 1970s and Victorian England. The world of the present in Mon Colonel is static; and the audience can do little more than share the apparent shock and disgust of Galois, a dutiful young officer, as she sits reading more and more of the narrative as it unfolds from the sheets of the memoir arriving in the mail. Despite these limitations, the black and white narrative unpacks the delusional world of Duplan. He is a figure drawn from some of the real figures in French counterinsurgency in Algeria such as Bigeard and Aussaresses. He is widely read in both the ideology and strategy of irregular warfare, though one of Rossi’s leftist friends at one point describes his ideas as a combination of ‘bad Marxism and Catholic fanaticism’. Even the walls of Duplan’s office are marked by Mao’s oft-quoted nostrum that guerrillas swim like fish in the sea of the population, though Duplan likes to see himself as a latter day colonial builder in the tradition of Bugeaud. He takes Rossi to a meeting with an Algerian caid (judge) amid the Roman ruins of Djemila (standing as the apparent embodiment of the myth of Latin Algeria), along with a group of pieds noirs out for a picnic. Here he makes a speech about the need for Algeria to have a new civilizing mission after that of the Romans and later Christians at the time of St Augustine, though the message is clearly not understood by those present.

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Rossi becomes in time disillusioned with Duplan’s empty rhetoric that fails to disguise a brutal war where atrocities are committed by both sides and the moral base for French rule has collapsed. There is a sense of inevitable retribution from the angry Rossi for the failings of his former commanding officer. Mon Colonel was released in 2006 at a time of a resurgence of interest in the Algerian War. The same year, Algerian director Rachid Boucharbe’s Days of Glory (titled Indigenes in France) was released dealing with the neglected topic of Algerian soldiers who had fought in the French army in the Second World War while four years later Des Hommes et des Dieux (Of Gods and Men) (dir. Xavier Beauvois) tackled the tragic story of a group of monks in the Tibhinine monastery in the Atlas Mountains who refused to leave despite being in a GIA stronghold during the brutal Algerian civil war in the early 1990s. All three films were directed at French-speaking audiences. By this time, French cinema was undergoing a major transformation as it became increasingly open and receptive to Hollywood-inspired action movies. Dien Bien Phu, particularly, represented a major shift in French war movies that opened this cinema up to more American-inspired narratives. Ennemi Intime (2007) (Intimate Enemies) was another example of this new type of film, displaying a strong indebtedness to Hollywood as both a war film and a western as well as Gillo Pontecorvo and neorealism. The film was directed by Florent Emilio Siri, who had begun his career in 1998 with a short film Une minute de silence before later directing Bruce Willis’s action thriller Hostage in 2005. Born in Lorraine in 1965 Siri had no direct experience of French colonial war like Schoendoerffer and preferred to focus on the psychological damage incurred by counter-insurgent warfare. The movie starts with an aerial view of the harsh and rugged landscape of Kabylia in Algeria, a landscape that almost seems to overwhelm the combatants as well as determine the direction of a pitiless war. It is easy to make mistakes in this sort of terrain, and the first action sequence involves a French squad perched high on a cliff side firing down on what they think is the enemy below, only to discover that they have accidentally killed a popular officer, Colonel Constantin. He is replaced by the young Lieutenant Terrien (Benoit Magimel) who comes into the war with an idealism viewed as naïve by the cynical Sergeant Dougnac (Albert Dupontel). The trope of playing off the naivety of the young recruit against the older experienced but hardened veteran has a long history in American war films and westerns; it recalls the young Lt Garnett DeBuin in Ulzana’s Raid (1972), who realizes the true horrors of Indian warfare under the guiding hand of Burt Lancaster’s gnarled Indian tracker McIntosh. Like DeBuin, Terrien had volunteered to fight in this war, seeing it as a better alternative to being confined to a desk job in Algiers. But he is soon commanded to lead a ‘search and destroy’ mission into a zone interdite where French troops have the right to shoot on sight. The team searches for an FLN or ‘Fellagha’ leader who was a former French soldier who, like Ben Mhidi in Lost Command, had fought in Indochina but now changed sides. The patrol enters a village suspected of aiding the FLN, even though it is the home village of their own Arab tracker: when they return later they find the population has been massacred as a warning to other villages in the area not to collaborate with the French. Terrien manages to rescue a boy trapped down a well and promises to look

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after him rather like John Wayne’s Colonel Kirby in The Green Berets. He also tries to make a stand against the army’s use of torture to extract intelligence, arguing with an intelligence officer Barthoud (Marc Barbe) that it is pointless to descend to the same level of ‘barbarism’ as the enemy. But Barthoud is later found murdered and mutilated and the French in turn burn a village and murder many of its inhabitants. This is a film, then, that depicts the spiralling descent of the Algerian war into massacre and counter-massacre. Even the hardened Dougnac takes to drink as the system of command appears to break down, with a drunken soldier vainly trying to blow the bugle with the tricolour. Terrien’s squad attempts to track down the ‘Fellaghas’ under Slimane, but they end up being pinned down in a firefight with ALN guerrillas and, like in an American war movie, call for air support and the dropping of napalm. Unlike Apocalypse Now, though, the film tracks the French squad wandering among the burnt-out and blackened bodies of the Fellagha guerrillas they had been fighting minutes before. The film serves as a retort to to Kilgore’s loving the smell of napalm in the morning, as it depicts the terrible effects on the human body; a French soldier, at one point, finds a wallet beside one blackened body containing a photograph of the guerrilla with his family. Unlike many American war films, this is an enemy with a human face. Some of the ‘Fellaghas’ like Slimane have served in the French army and they are ‘intimate’ in the sense that they share many of the values of French culture. Intimate Enemies also attempts, like The Battle of Algiers, to be even-handed in its portrayal of atrocities by both sides in Algeria as well as depicting an inevitable French military defeat, though the FLN remain voiceless in the film. The French lose the war through their inability to win the trust of the population and there is a sense, by the end, that Terrien’s own death is inevitable too as he is cut down by rifle fire. The French moral defeat is symbolized by ‘Fellaghas’ appearing with the young boy Slimane had earlier found down a well. But this is a film where the FLN are never able to voice exactly what they are fighting for and the film’s efforts to appear impartial remain flawed.38 Intimate Enemies at least does not glorify the Algerian War and lacks the nostalgia of Dien Bien Phu. It is impossible to retain any sense of ‘la gloire de la guerre’ in such a psychologically brutalising conflict. The leading French characters are tragic rather than noble characters, as they become lost in a conflict they cannot control. It is often hard to know who is really friend and enemy. Rachid Bouchareb’s Hors la Loi (Outside the Law) was a rather more serious attempt at being depicting the Algerian conflict. The film was shown at Cannes Film Festival in 2010 and led to angry demonstrations by former colons and right-wing protesters claiming it was a gross distortion of the war.39 The film indicated just how difficult it still is to put onto screen a reasonably accurate portrayal of the events of the 1940s to 1960s, even after Bouchareb’s earlier film Days of Glory (2006), focusing on the plight of Algerian veterans who had fought for France in the Second World War. This movie at least led to a change in the law so that the veterans could at last receive war pensions like their French counterparts. Hors la Loi went some way towards underplaying the scale of the conflict in Algeria and metropolitan France from the mid-1940s up to independence in 1962. The film was as much an action and gangster movie than a conventional war film, centred as it was on three brothers Said (Jamel Debbouze), Messaoud (Roschdy Zem)

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and Abdelkader (Sami Bouajila). As boys, the brothers witness their parents’ removal from their ancestral land in the mid-1920s in the Setif region of Algeria by a white landowner. The film fast-forwards to 1945 to depict, for the first time in a major feature film, the Setif massacre on 8 May 1945, an event often forgotten or underplayed in the narrative of the Algerian War. What started as a demonstration by local Algerians quickly descends into a blood bath as police, soldiers and white settlers blindly shoot ordinary civilians in a massacre estimated to have killed at least 15,000 Arabs, though some put this as high as 45,000. Bouchareb’s film tends to understate the event; only a few hundred bodies are lined up after the shooting in the central area of the town, while large numbers of Arabs march in a column out of the town to an unknown destination. The massacre appears to have occurred over a day, though in fact it happened over several weeks as the French army returned to the area to exact a brutal and bloody reprisal at the end of the Second World War for apparent Arab collaboration with the Germans. This prompts the film’s revenge narrative as one the younger of the three brothers, Said, uses the confusion of the massacre to kill a pro-French caid (Islamic law maker), who had legitimized the expropriation of Said’s parents’ land twenty years before. Themes of revenge and counter-revenge continue as the film moves to the bleak urban setting of 1950s metropolitan France and the banlieues, where many Algerian immigrants come to live seeking work, in this case at a Citroen car factory. Said gets involved in a life of crime as he moves up the social scale by opening a boxing club and a night club pertinently called ‘The Casbah’. His brother Abdelkader goes to jail and gets involved in politics, rather like Ali La Pointe, after seeing another prisoner guillotined; his brother Messaoud (Roschdy Zem) disappears to join the French army fighting in Indochina only to reappear later. The interconnected narratives of the three brothers lead to an epic recounting of the experience of Algerians in the twilight stage of French colonialism. Unlike Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers the film does not impose any obvious moralism on the script, The three go down different career paths available to young Algerian men at this time, though even living in France can mean involvement in Algerian politics and the bitter rivalry between the FLN and Massali Hadj’s Mouvement National Algerien. The rivalry seems pointless, given how Algerian communities in France are kept under constant police surveillance; and the film starkly brings to the screen for the first time the massacre of Algerians in Paris on 17 October 1961, when the Prefect of Police Maurice Papon, a Vichyite with a record of repression in Algeria, ordered a severe crackdown on an FLN demonstration, leading to the arrest of at least 11,000 people from the Maghreb and over 200 deaths, many of whom drowned after having their feet bound and being thrown into the Seine. Hors la Loi uses tropes familiar from The Battle of Algiers but has a considerably different moral compass. Fanonist ideas of violence to cleanse a society of colonialism are depicted as ultimately counter-productive, since they breed a destructive fanaticism on both aides, evidenced by the terrorist-type warfare within the Algerian community in France as well as the terrorism exerted by the French police and military against Algerians, whether at Setif in 1945 or in Paris in 1961.40 The film has an obvious message for a newer generation of angry Muslims in France at the present time, while also feeding into wider debates about the rationality of violent responses that emerged

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in underground white and black radical movements in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s. To conclude this chapter, I will examine one film that exemplifies the tendency among some French film makers to emulate the model of the Hollywood action movie. Forces Speciales (Special Forces) in 2011, directed by Stephane Rybojad.41 Forces Speciales was a rather belated attempt to establish a Francophone myth of special operations rivalling those of US and British special forces. Shot in France, Djibouti and Tajikistan, the film had a large budget of $10 million and received support from French naval Special Forces, who also helped to supervise the action scenes. The film wanders into the adventurous terrain of the Khyber Pass as it focuses on a small French force of naval commandos sent to rescue a female journalist, Elsa Casanova (Diane Kruger). She had written a critical article about an Afghan warlord Zaief (Raz Degan), whom she calls the ‘butcher of Kabul’; despite warnings, she returns to Zaief with a friend Salemani (Greg Fromentin), though Salemani gets murdered while Elsa is taken hostage. The French commandos are now inserted to rescue the beleaguered journalist who has, so far, appeared to be little more than a stereotypical irrational female bringing on needless disaster. Elsa, however, displays courage and resourcefulness during the dramatic flight of the Special Forces team, who become cut off from their base after their radio is destroyed, a familiar war movie trope. The party flees across a dramatic rocky landscape pursued by Zaief ’s fanatical followers. Zaief is no noble savage but a psychopathic killer who has terrorized his followers as much as his victims. He is a character familiar to cinema audiences from Hollywood terrorism films, though he lacks the evil cunning of Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber in Die Hard (1988) or David Suchet’s Nagi Hassan in Executive Decision (1996). Zaief wantonly kills both his enemies and his followers if they stand in his way and is inevitably doomed to some sort of comeuppance. His men track down the French Commandos to a village where they have been given traditional Afghan hospitality. A shoot-out ensues in which Hassan takes Elsa hostage before he is killed by one of the commandos, Kovax (Djimon Housou – familiar from the film Gladiator). Elsa and two surviving marines – Kovax and a wounded marine Tic Tac – flee over the mountains, though it is now nature rather than human enemies they confront in the form of an avalanche, which breaks Kovax’s leg. Elsa continues alone to be eventually rescued in a desert area she attempts to cross. She is able to spot the two surviving commandos on the mountain side in a dramatic helicopter rescue. Despite its spectacular cinematography, Special Forces grossed only $1.3 million worldwide. The problems lay in the fact that cinema audiences were only too familiar by the time of the film’s release with the rocky and stark Afghan landscape from several previous Afghan movies, including Rambo III, while the thin narrative and predictable action scenes hardly sustained interest, given the movie lacked major stars. The film confirmed that entries by European film producers into the arena of action movies is a risky business; it was not helped either by the film’s limited release in the United States on its first weekend that led it to gross a mere $10,000. The film was viewed as too ‘foreign’ by many action movie-enthusiasts while it lacked an intelligent enough plot line to satisfy a more critical cinema audience, especially

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in the way it avoided any historical and strategic context of western involvement in Afghanistan. If it had done the latter, Zaif might have been developed into a rather more complex character than the stereotypical thuggish warlord of the movie, and it might also have led to an examination of the important role of warlords in Afghan society and politics, one that is not likely to disappear at any early date given the collapse of civil society.42

Summing up French cinema turned to themes of insurgency, counter-insurgency and terrorism rather belatedly compared to other cinematic cultures such as the United States, Britain and Italy. This was rather paradoxical, given that France had fought such bitter colonial wars in Vietnam and Algeria. However, at a deeper level, the paradox can begin to be explained when the issue of painful public memories of war are acknowledged. The French memory of colonial wars bears some comparison to the American memory of the US defeat in Vietnam; both exemplify the point that war cinema is often a difficult public terrain in which entire careers can be put at stake if a film is released which offends certain basic moral boundaries of what the cinema-going public chooses to see as the ‘proper’ memory of war. Such memories, of course, are always contested ones, but the recollections of wars fought in the recent past usually end up as part of a public memory of war, especially when these are sustained by war veterans and their supporting organizations. The veterans of the two countries were different in both their composition and behaviour. Like US veterans from Vietnam, French soldiers in Vietnam and Algeria were largely draftees fighting against indifference, if not active hostility, from their home society, though in the French case the veterans were supported by a large and vocal minority of ex-Algerian colons as well as politicians and intellectuals on the Right. The screen myth forged around Sylvester Stallone’s character of Rambo was a cinematic success in the 1980s and early 1990s because it played on the deep-seated resentment felt by many vets who had returned to face social ostracism, if not active hostility, by the US public who had not fought in the war. The vets did not really challenge the idea that the war was an unjust one, only that it had not been fought properly due to inept political leaders and senior commanders unfamiliar with the war being fought at the local level. The Rambo myth gained much of its impetus from the idea that, at least on screen, the United States could get to win the war that its military had in fact lost due to a stab in the back. French veterans, by contrast, never came to be defined around a Francophone version of Rambo, though a few films briefly dealt with traumatized war vets. The French veterans were defined differently to their American counterparts because they were fighting not just to retrieve some sort of honour from one lost war but two – Vietnam and Algeria – and even three when the defeat of 1940 is included. They were fighting to retrieve some sort of honour for an army that had apparently failed for over twenty years to defend French interests as well as considerable shame by the widespread use of torture in the counter-insurgency war fought in Algeria.

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The very sensitivity of the French veterans to public slights on their honour made it difficult for French cinema producers to release any major feature film dealing with the France’s conduct of its colonial wars, a genre that was never very prominent in French cinema. The threat by veteran organizations in 1966 to bomb cinema showing Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers pinpointed only too clearly the issues at stake and the high risk of any serious feature film that dealt with the issues honestly being banned by a highly sensitive French government. Even the French war in Vietnam in the years between 1945 and 1954 became off limits with Algeria, a country many French film producers preferred to bury as a subject that was not really fit to show for at least a generation. One of the few films released to show French forces fighting an insurgency was Pierre Schoendoerffer’s La 317e Section in 1965, remained a neglected and isolated minor masterpiece. It was also not surprising that when French film producers did start to deal with its colonial wars in the 1990s they would begin with Vietnam. Pierre Schoendoerffer’s 1992 film Dien Bien Phu stands as a major French war feature that grapples with the issue of military defeat in a manner that has been largely avoided by American and British cinema. The film uneasily juxtaposed battle scenes reminiscent of an action movie with scenes of the collapsing colonial society in Hanoi and proved to be a landmark in French war cinema. Several subsequent releases such as L’Ennemi Intime and Hors la Loi suggest a growing interest in the Algerian war, while the action movie Forces Speciales hints at a possible Francophone genre of action thrillers.

7

Israel and Reframing Siege Warfare into Counter-Terrorism

From the time of its foundations in May 1948 Israel was always a media event. Robert Capa, on contract with Life magazine in the United States, photographed the inaugural ceremony where David Ben Gurion proclaimed the new state’s existence. Capa, as much as anyone, helped entrench a mythology regarding Israel and Zionism that has endured into the present. Andrew L. Mendelson and C. Zoe Smith have seen this mythology containing three dominant narrative strands: firstly, that Israel is an upholder of western values against uncivilised Arabs; secondly, that Israel is the location for a highly masculine narrative of tough Jewish pioneers and an idealized image of native-born sabras reconstructing Jewish identity very different to the weak stereotypes of ghetto Jews in Europe; and, thirdly, building up Israel involves establishing close connections with the land on which Jewish settlers have a right to settle based on an historical myth of return.1 This mythology behind modern Zionism has shaped some of Hollywood’s cinematic representations of the state and its people, at least in the early years. In this chapter, I will explore the evolution of a cinematic Zionist subgenre from the late 1940s and early 1950s that has continued into recent films such as Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2005). I will concentrate on how these films represent unconventional war and counter-terrorism in three parts: the first part will look at the initial phase of movies into the middle 1960s when film making in Hollywood on Israel temporarily halted following the release of Cast a Giant Shadow (1966); the second part examines the rise of Palestinian terrorism and Israeli counter-terrorism in the 1970s, leading to the emergence of several Hollywood action movies with Palestinian terrorist nemeses; while the third part will examine two films that explore the morality of Mossad counter-terrorism operations, The Little Drummer Girl and Munich. The chapter will conclude by arguing that Israel’s ambiguous position as a western-orientated state in the Middle East has given vent to a debate about the purpose and moral framework of counter-terrorism that acted as a precursor for later films on war and terrorism in the Middle East.

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Exodus and the first phase of the Hollywood Zionist subgenre Hollywood’s interest in Israel was initially based on a small number of films from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, most notably Sword in the Desert (1949), Exodus (1962), Judith (1966) and Cast a Giant Shadow (1966) These films reveal an outlook broadly supportive of Israel as well as a general wariness over getting too closely involved in the politics of a state whose future did not seem all that assured. There was, after all, no close military alliance between the United States and Israel for the first two decades of its existence. The United States began to support Israel only in the 1967 June war, though even then relations were not that close, evidenced by Israel fighters severely damaging a US navy spy ship the USS Liberty in the Mediterranean, killing thirty-four servicemen and intelligence analysts (the event was hushed up, unlike the publicity surrounding the North Korean seizure of the USS Pueblo the following year).2 It was in the 1970s that the United States established closer relationships with Israel, leading to a pre-emptive doctrine of counter-terrorism that, arguably, later influenced the Bush administration’s concept of ‘war on terror’ in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Well before this, Hollywood’s first phase of involvement with Israel had come, somewhat abruptly, to an end with Judith and Cast a Giant Shadow in 1966. The movie subgenre had been momentarily important, but had always been dwarfed by Hollywood’s preoccupation in the 1950s with hugely expensive biblical epics such as The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben Hur (1959). Both these movies had the non-Jewish actor Charlton Heston supplying a new image of Jewish masculinity that overrode the wasted and defeated image of Jews surviving the horrors of German concentration camps. They helped to create a revitalized image of resolute Jewish resistance to imperialist oppressors, whether these be the Egypt of the Pharaohs or the Ancient Romans.3 The movies served as moral templates for the Zionist struggle against the British colonial administration in Palestine in the 1940s as well as hostile Arab neighbours in the Middle East. Some later films such as Exodus and Judith piggybacked on the sword and sandal and biblical epic movie genres, though they largely recycled themes from westerns and war movies to fit a situation where a new European-type colonial settler state and people battle for survival in a desert setting. Hollywood’s wariness with these themes might seem, at first sight, rather surprising given the way that a good majority of the film studios had been established by Jewish men who had emigrated from Eastern Europe and Russia. Starting quite modestly in fashion and retail these men had been drawn to cinema in the early twentieth century at a time when it presented no serious social barriers to Jews. But, in building up a huge cinematic empire in Hollywood, the Jewish movie moguls were never that keen to assert their ethnic origins. They had mostly escaped from the pogroms of Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century where the Zionist dream of escape by settling in Palestine had come out third behind the other two options of emigration to the United States or staying and getting involved in revolutionary politics, usually of a Marxist kind. Making a commercial success of cinema also meant that championing the American dream, an idea that Hollywood cinema did much to invent. If there was any sort of collective mission by the Jewish moguls in Tinseltown, it was social acceptance and assimilation into the mainstream at a time when American nativism and anti-Semitism were all too evident.4

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There were also political dangers in being too closely aligned in the post-war years with the Zionist cause. The creation of Israel in 1948 was not due simply to the power of the Zionist lobby in Washington but a narrow window of opportunity in the United Nations in the late 1940s, at a time when there was a huge fund of guilt in relation to the holocaust in Europe in the early 1940s and Stalin saw some payoffs in championing a state he believed would be a socialist threat to the position of Britain in the Middle East.5 The Israeli state also emerged during rising anti-communist hysteria in Hollywood, accompanied, on occasions, by vicious displays of anti-Semitism. There were few obvious payoffs in being seen to be too close to the Zionist project, which many on the Right in the United States associated with communism. Moreover, the Zionist cause and the struggle for Israeli independence had involved a bitter insurgent war against Britain, the holder of League of Nations Mandate in Palestine after the First World War. Given that Britain was a close American ally in the Cold War, there were problems in releasing too many films portraying Britain in a negative light; the same could hardly be said, though, for the Arabs where the subgenre initiated a pattern of vilification on screen that spread into later action movies in the 1970s and 1980s. The difficult beginnings of the Israeli state ensured that the Hollywood movies with an Israeli or Palestinian background usually lacked the sense of forward movement evident in many of Hollywood’s westerns and war movies. While it was possible to recycle some of these tropes, Hollywood’s movies could never quite emulate the mood of American victory culture in the post-war years. The establishment of Israel was obviously due to military victory in the first war of 1948–1949; but the movies failed to generate a warrior myth comparable to the American myth of war forged in the wake of Pearl Harbor. Lacking defence in depth and with a small and encircled population that could never tolerate huge battle casualties, Israel was a terrain in which the wars it fought were ones for ethnic survival, a safe haven for refugees from the holocaust in Europe and the breeding of a new indigenous population of sabras. There was no sense here of manifest destiny over the vast open spaces of the American west, for the impulse behind the state came not from an expanding frontier but a contracting one, as the survivors of ancient Jewish communities across Europe fled for safety, on ships like the Exodus, to a territorial enclave promising some form of sanctuary. But Israel also emerged as a state at the end of the colonial era, and its efforts to claim the moral high ground of anti-colonial liberation were challenged almost from the start by a Zionist ethic of progressive ethnic colonization.6 In the 1950s and 1960s this colonizing project was far less visible than it has become in more recent years, and was overlain by the huge fund of sympathy and guilt in the United States and Europe over the mass murder of Jews in the Third Reich, evidence for which became starkly clear at the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Throughout its history, therefore, cinematic narratives of Israeli warfare, whether from Hollywood or in Israel itself, have very often been ones involving siege warfare. In some cases openly so, as in the film Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (1955) focusing on four Israeli soldiers defending a hill during the 1948 war and Beaufort (2007) centred on an Israeli contingent occupying a crusader fortress in Southern Lebanon. These siege narratives are unlike liberationist narratives of Roma Open City or The Battle of Algiers, where defeat of the enemy ensures the end of states of siege, whether this be Rome under German occupation or the Algiers Casbah. The attainment of Israeli national

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independence did not end the country’s encirclement and siege status, which arguably continues into the present despite the western media preoccupation with ongoing wars in Iraq and Syria. Certainly, some directors attempted in some features such as Exodus to link the death of the main protagonists with the birth of the new country, on lines comparable to Anna Magnani’s Pina or Brahim Haggiag’s Ali La Pointe, but there would always be serious doubts over how convincing this really was.7 Moreover, no movies have ever celebrated the successes of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) like many American war movies such as Guadalcanal Diary or The Sands of Iwo Jima. The first prime minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion, hoped that a united IDF would emerge in the first Arab–Israeli war of 1948 and incorporate disparate Jewish militias such as Haganah, Palmach, the Stern Gang and the Irgun into one united national military. He called on the American Colonel Micky Marcus to try and achieve this, as the film Cast a Giant Shadow later depicts. But the project proved hard to implement as the Irgun resisted incorporation. Matters came to a head with the landing of the Irgun ship Altalena on 20 June 1948; the Irgun refused to hand over the ship to the Israeli army and a firefight ensued in which two Israeli soldiers and six Irgun gunmen were killed. The ship sailed south to Tel Aviv, where a further firefight occurred the following day as the Irgun leadership, including Menachem Begin, refused to compromise. The Israeli army raked the ship with machine-gun fire and the ship was set ablaze. Forty Irgun gunmen were killed, though the rest were rescued and went off to fight in Jerusalem.8 With this sort of background, it was by no means easy to forge any sort of distinctive IDF myth and Hollywood’s movies tended to rely on alternative tropes. If this was a citizens’ war, it was anchored in heavily armed kibbutzim fighting siege warfare against large but apparently incompetent Arab armies. Alongside this were female characters, such as the American nurse Kitty (played by Eva Marie Saint) in Exodus or the bitter former wife of a Nazi commander Judith (played by Sophia Loren) in the film Judith, who both undergo a change of outlook and identity as they come to accept the purpose of the Zionist project. This conversion trope is considerably different to most conventional westerns, certainly in the 1940s, in which narratives are played out within a moral framework of close family ties, such as those of Wyatt Earp and his brothers in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946), or of frontier individualism extending, on occasions, to assertive women such as Marlene Diedrich’s Frenchy in Destry Rides Again (1939) or Jennifer Jones’s feisty Pearl Chavez in Duel in the Sun (1946). Women in the Zionist subgenre remain far more constricted, with their role dictated by the central imperative of breeding a new society rather than pursuing wealth and adventure. The identity issue applied rather less to men, as became clear in the first film of the subgenre Sword in the Desert. The movie was directed by George Sherman, best known for a series of low-budget westerns for Republic Pictures. The film centres on a hardbitten American captain of a freighter, Mike Dillon (Dana Andrews), who is, in modern parlance, a people smuggler illegally landing a group of Jewish refugees into Palestine for a fee of $8,000. Like Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine in Casablanca, he is a reluctant hero who eventually undergoes a change of heart and ends up fighting for the Zionist cause, suggesting that while women in the Zionist subgenre need to undergo a full

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conversion to the Zionism to become the breeders of the new Israeli nation, while for men the issue is more one of moral engagement with a self-evidently righteous cause. Sword in the Desert stands apart from the conventional British army image familiar from many Second World War features, as well as later cinematic images of a focused and determined military fighting in colonial ‘emergencies’ in Malaya and Kenya. The British retain many human qualities as they hunt for Jewish refugees and leaders of the Zionist resistance; but they are viewed from outside in and are involved in operations normally associated with the German Wehrmacht as they speed around in trucks full of armed soldiers. They also listen in to Jewish radio signals like the war-time Gestapo, though they do not torture any prisoners. They ultimately lack the same determination of the war-time Germans since this is 1947 and the British mandate in Palestine will soon end. They try, as best they can, to enforce government policy on restricting Jewish immigration to maintain good relations with surrounding Arab states, though they are not all that competent. At one point, a Jewish resistance leader disguised as a British officer manages to persuade a British officer to release into his hands some of the top Jewish prisoners; there is a sense that the British lack true military resolve compared to the Jewish insurgents, even if they are mostly paras. As the Christmas of 1947 approaches the men sing Christmas carols, while the Jewish insurgents plan an attack to rescue the prisoners. The insurgents, after all, are embroiled in a bitter struggle for a homeland and a moral cause, exemplified by the suffering faces of the refugees in Sherman’s boat. Despite the narrative of British weakness and the inevitable end of the mandate, Sword of the Desert tried to make more of the Zionist cause by linking it to wider anti-imperial movements. The movie was written by George Bunker, who had been a correspondent in London in the 1920s for the New York World before turning to movie scripts such as the controversial pro-Soviet Mission to Moscow in 1943. His experience in Britain made him familiar with the Irish war of 1919–1921 and Sword of the Desert includes an Irish nationalist, McCarthy (Liam Redmond), who rationalizes, if only comically, the violent actions of the Jewish resistance. He sympathizes with the rights of subject peoples, asking Sherman, when he demands payment, ‘What do you use for a heart captain?’ He also supplies an Irish blarney to cover the more doubtful actions of the Zionist terrorists by describing them as ‘a fine healthy breed of simple dishonest men.’ When he is eventually killed in the final shoot-out with the British he dies saying ‘they’ finally ‘got’ him after thirty years of struggle. McCarthy’s inclusion ensured that the film did not have to probe too deeply into the agenda of the Jewish insurgents, though it had a positive image of female Jewish fighters such as the aptly named Sabra (Marte Torren). It established a kind of false complexity by focusing on three separate groups: insurgents, the British and the two outsiders Sherman and McCarthy. During the movie, Sherman acquires a heart and becomes an active sympathizer like McCarthy, though he lacks any overtly antiimperial purpose. The triadic formula ensures that the film avoids dealing with Arabs, who remain largely invisible in the movie. Indeed, the only two speaking ‘Arabic’ characters are Jewish insurgents, who have dressed in Arab dress and speak Arabic to get past a British checkpoint. The film’s anti-imperial claims end up being highly spurious, though the inclusion of an Irish nationalist undoubtedly contributed to the widespread irritation with the movie in Britain.

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Sword in the Desert established many of the tropes that would be become familiar in Otto Preminger’s Exodus in 1962, which also focused on the creation of the Israeli state in 1948. The film was based on a novel by the Jewish American writer Leon Uris, who had worked as a war correspondent in Palestine in 1956. The novel Exodus was published in 1958 and became the most successful American novel since Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, remaining for eight months at the top of the New York Times best-seller list. Given this huge American interest, it was not surprising that Hollywood proved keen to film the novel, and a script was commissioned by the head of MGM, Dore Schary, before Uris’s novel was even published. This script was abandoned, probably because of fears of offending British opinion in the 1950s, and was rediscovered by Preminger in the office of his brother Ingo, who was Uris’s literary agent. Preminger secured the approval the new head of MGM Joseph Vogel (who had earlier fired Schary) to make the film, which proved a major hit.9 The delay in making the film is easy to understand, given how Palestine became such a sensitive international issue in the post-war period. Jewish hardliners in the British-mandated territory launched a guerrilla war in October 1945 against the British colonial administration. The insurgents were angered by the refusal of the British government to increase the numbers of Jewish refugees entering Palestine from 18,000 a year, as well as the delay in implanting the 1939 British White Paper setting out plans for the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab spheres. The insurgency enjoyed widespread support among the Jewish community – the Yishuv – and met with a strong British military response. Casualty rates on both sides rose in 1946 as units of the underground Irgun attacked various British installations. The Chief of the British Imperial General Staff, Field Marshall Viscount Montgomery, instigated a military crackdown leading to large numbers of arrests of the Jewish elite and the military arm of Haganah known as Palmach. This led to the reprisal bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in July 1946, killing ninety-two soldiers, policemen and members of the British administration: an event that has come to be viewed as seminal in the emergence of post-war terrorism.10 The crisis in civil–military relations in Palestine led to the appointment of Colonel William Nicol Gray to take charge of the Palestine Police Force. Gray had led 45 Royal Marine Commando in the Normandy landings in 1944 and favoured the establishment of commando-like units among the Palestine Police. He called in a former Chindit, Colonel Bernard Fergusson, to run the unit which began to become operational in early 1947, though later in the year the Attlee government in London abandoned the issue by handing it over to the United Nations: The following May a vote in the UN General Assembly favoured the creation of an Independent Israeli state. This was the background to the film Exodus, though Preminger toned down some of the more overtly anti-British themes in Uris’s novel. Both the novel and film version of Exodus owed their success to the way they Americanized the Zionist narrative, creating for American Jews a mythical, if rather sentimental, revolutionary ancestry comparable to other ethnic groups such as Irish Americans.11 This Americanization is confirmed by the casting of several key roles in the movie to mainstream American actors such as Paul Newman, Lee J. Cobb and Eva Marie Saint who had appeared in several successful films in the previous decade.12 There was also a strong performance from the British

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actor Ralph Richardson as the sympathetic Jewish High Commissioner in Cyprus. The movie contained anti-imperial themes as it portrayed a ‘colonial war’ from the viewpoint of the Zionist insurgents, who are depicted as generally humane figures. Exodus stands out, even now, as one of the few films ever released by Hollywood that seriously attempts to get inside the culture and mind-set of a guerrilla insurgency rather than filming insurgent warfare from the external perspective of counter-terrorism or counter-insurgency forces. The film was based on the name of a real ship called The Exodus containing 4,500 Jewish refugees that was prevented by the British government for several months in 1946 from sailing from Cyprus to Palestine. This blockade is eventually lifted and the ship sails triumphantly to Palestine, although when it reached the port of Haifa, it was sent back to Hamburg. The ship’s biblical name provided a religious framework for an essentially nationalist Zionist narrative focused on the final months of the British colonial rule in Palestine. The film’s Zionism was partly offset by early scenes shot from the viewpoint of a non-Jewish American widow, Kitty Fremont (Eva Marie Saint), who aimlessly travels as a tourist across Cyprus. She gets sucked into the Zionist struggle after volunteering to work as a nurse in the Karaolos internment camp on Cyprus. Later she sails on The Exodus to Palestine with the Haganah activist Ari Ben Canaan, with whom she has fallen in love. Kitty’s character provides the film with a semi-documentary quality while she also acts as an intermediary between the British administration in Cyprus and the leaders of the Haganah resistance. Kitty is at first the voice of American common sense as she doubts the capacity of the Jews to create an independent homeland, suggesting to Ben Canaan that this will lead to 50 million Arabs defeating the Jews and throwing them into the sea. The film here confirms an entrenched Zionist myth (still widely believed) that the Jewish forces in 1948 were massively outnumbered by the Arabs, when in practice the combined Haganah and Irgun forces amounted to some 74,000 men and women (the IDF alone comprised 35,000), dwarfing the ill-prepared and poorly trained Arab forces, whose estimated numbers range from 19,000 men to 25,000 men.13 Kitty’s role disappears in the latter part of Exodus as the film turns to the insurgency in Palestine and the split between supporters of a more accommodating approach and those in favour of terrorism. The division in Jewish opinion is symbolized by the two characters of Ben Canaan’s father, Barak (Lee J Cobb), who works for the Jewish Agency and is committed to creating a Jewish state by political and diplomatic means, and the young Jewish radical Dov Landau (Saul Minao), who sails on the ‘Exodus’ to Palestine and eventually joins the Irgun. Dov is made to endure a harrowing interrogation by its leader Akiva (played by the Jewish American actor David Opatoshu), who is the brother of Barak. Akiva breaks down Dov’s account of his time in Auschwitz and it emerges that he survived there because he worked for the Sonderkommando clearing up the dead bodies from the gas ovens. Dov was also raped in the camp and is desperate to atone for his past shame by turning to terrorism to kill as many of the occupying British as possible. Akiva accepts this and gets Dov to swear an oath to the Irgun and we can see him as representing, in a somewhat professorial guise, some of the character of the real Irgun leader Menachem Begin, whom Opatoshu would eventually portray

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in the 1977 film Raid on Entebbe. The atonement for the shame of collaborating with the Germans also provides a moral gloss on any resulting terrorist activities. The moral heart of Exodus does not lie in the Irgun terrorist campaign but Newman’s character Ari, who occupies a middle position between Cobb’s accommodating figure of Barak and Dov, the embittered terrorist. Ari has a biblically inspired faith in the creation of Israel and wins over Kitty to his cause; she becomes his lover and accomplice by the end of the movie. Ari is also an example of the Americanized Jew who stands in marked contrast to the Yiddish Eastern European Jewry epitomized by Barak, who lives a monastic-like existence in a simple room as he plots the Irgun’s activities and has no romantic attachments with women. In a taut exchange, Ari remonstrates with Barak’s methods and it is evident that, as far as fighting the British is concerned, Ari is mainly interested in Gandhian non-violent resistance, exemplified by The Exodus ferrying Jews to Palestine to gain international attention and a favourable vote in the UN General Assembly. Using Newman to play the character of Ari was brilliant casting by Preminger. He was, by this time, a major star and his Ari is a Hollywood macho symbol of the ‘New Jew’ as opposed to the Jew of the diaspora.14 Ari disconnects Jewish American identity from its former orientalist Eastern European moorings while at the same time integrating the narrative of Exodus into the experience of modern American Jews. By marrying the blond Presbyterian Kitty, Ari secures a close link with the United States as the Zionist campaign reaches its climax with the 1948 war of Independence. Newman, as a Democrat, also epitomized, in the early 1960s, the widespread support for the Zionist cause among liberal opinion in the United States and he provided a strong character for American Jews to look up to at a time when American WASP society still exhibited quite widespread anti-Semitic prejudice. This was a film, then, that tried to distance itself from the Irgun’s insurgency after 1946 without completely attacking its overall aims. Dov’s brutal experiences in Auschwitz, after all, ensured that any doubts about the insurgency’s aims would be tempered by massive emotional sympathy for the holocaust. Preminger’s film consolidated a post-war myth concerning both Zionism and the creation of the state of Israel, a myth that would endure for at least the next two decades. It eventually began to be questioned by an increasingly belligerent Israeli policy towards Palestinian insurgency in the 1980s, as well as the emergence of alternative Zionist narratives challenging the image of passive, silent and completely traumatized Jewish refugees from Europe. Books such as Nechama Tec’s Defiance (1993) and Rich Cohen’s The Avengers (2000) pointed to the resistance by Jewish partisans in the forests of Poland and Belorussia during the Second World War. The implication of this was that Zionist military action was not forged solely in Palestine but began in Europe as the creed of Jewish assimilation into European culture fell apart in the face of the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis and their Eastern European allies. Tec’s account eventually formed the basis of Edward Zwick’s somewhat glamorized film Defiance (2008) focusing on Jewish partisans, led by the Bielski brothers, fighting back in Belorussia and forming their own forest kibbutz. Even if this version was deeply flawed, it showed just how inadequate the narrative of Exodus was with its implication that those Jews not traumatized by the holocaust had, in some way, collaborated with the Nazis like Dov.15

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Those who had resorted to more militant means of resistance were usually assumed to have been almost entirely liquidated, like those in the 1944 Warsaw ghetto uprising, an event that eventually gained extensive coverage in films such as Marvin Chomsky’s TV series Holocaust (1978), Jon Avnet’s Uprising (2001), Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002) and the more recent Polish film Warsaw 44 (dir. an Komasa). Exodus was released a little over a decade after the Zionist insurgency in Palestine and memories of it were still fresh in both the Britain and the Middle East. The leader of the Irgun, Menachem Begin, had already published his accounts of the campaign in his autobiography The Revolt in 1952. Exodus was not a simple ‘insurgent’ or ‘terrorism’ movie, given that the first half of the film is preoccupied with Jewish refugees in Cyprus. It is the only the second half of the film that portrays the Irgun’s terrorism campaign, including the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946. The last combat scene is also more like a Second World War raid as it focuses on the gun battle of 4 May 1947 between Jewish insurgents and British prison guards of the prison at Acre, leading to the freeing of twenty-seven Jewish prisoners (twenty of them from the Irgun). By the last part of the film, the insurgency has morphed into a battle between Jews and Arabs, though it is the latter who are now terrorists following the murder of the young Jewish girl Karen Hansen as well as the moderate Arab figure Taha, found hanging with a star of David carved on his chest. The 1948 Arab–Israeli war is the theme of Hollywood’s second Zionist film in the 1960s, Cast a Giant Shadow, released in 1966. The film, directed by Melville Shavelson, had an all-star cast including Kirk Douglas, Yul Brynner, Frank Sinatra and John Wayne and is interesting for the way that conservative sections of Hollywood were prepared to come out openly in support of the Zionist cause behind Israel before the 1967 June War. The narrative was based on a fictionalized version of the real-life American military officer Colonel ‘Mickey’ Marcus (Kirk Douglas), who is persuaded to command units of the nascent IDF in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The film shifts the focus away from the period of Jewish insurgency before 1948 to what is often viewed as the Israeli war for national survival after the proclamation of the state of Israel on 14 May 1948. One of the main instigators of the movie was John Wayne, who was persuaded by Shavelson to take it on, perhaps because he saw it as containing a narrative not too different to his own movie The Alamo in 1960.16 Wayne was drawn to the film at a time when audiences for traditional westerns were going into marked decline (though the big-budget epic How The West Was Won in 1962 still managed to gross over $50 million at the box office). Wayne was seeking greater independence as a film producer in the face of considerable scorn by some Hollywood moguls such as Darryl F. Zanuck.17 By going off on his own, Wayne ended up projecting some of the entrenched myths of the western into non-American cultural arenas, though modern audiences no longer took them anything like so seriously as twenty years before. Wayne helped to produce two films exemplifying this externalization of the epic western myth in the form of Cast a Giant Shadow in 1966 and The Green Berets two years later. Cast a Giant Shadow failed at the box office (unlike The Green Berets), though the film is interesting for the way it reveals the limits of Hollywood willingness to identify with Israel. The film was never followed up by any further movie and was centred on

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the character of Marcus who was mistakenly killed, on 10 June 1948, shortly before the end of the first Arab–Israeli war. The film had the same sort of nuanced tone as Exodus, though the focus moved beyond the era of Jewish terrorism against the British presence in Palestine towards the creation of a new national Israeli army. The film has a thinly fictionalized character David Ben Gurion in the form of Jacob Zion (Luther Adler) while Yul Brynner plays the Israeli military commander Asher, broadly based on the real character of Moshe Dayan, who commanded the Jerusalem front in the 1948 war before later becoming chief of staff of the IDF and Defence Minister during the 1967 June War. The film’s narrative centres on how a Jewish American military expert is persuaded to become the first Israeli general (or Aluf) so that he can weld the disparate Jewish military formations into an army. The real Micky Marcus helped push groups such as the Haganah, The Potlach and the Stern Gang into one military force, though this is a citizen army that still lacked any real hierarchy of command at the time of his death. Citizen armies are usually defensive in nature, and motivated by some central cause or principle that all can believe in, in this case Zionism and Israeli sovereign independence.18 Such citizen armies very often evolve into a more conventional military formation with a hierarchical structure of command, as would occurred with the IDF in the two decades after 1948. Cast a Giant Shadow, like Exodus, focuses on the construction of Jewish identity. Kirk Douglas’s own rather ambivalent identity as an American Jew resembled at points that of Marcus.19 Douglas had been familiar with making films in Israel since the early 1950s when he made The Juggler in 1952 on location in northern Israel and got to know both Ben Gurion and Moshe Dayan.20 Douglas’s Marcus is unlike Paul Newman’s Ari, whose Jewish identity is clear right from the start. Shavelson’s script is eager to point to the tepid support for Israel among many American Jews, and Marcus only fully identifies with the Zionist cause relatively late in the movie when it is pointed out that he at last is using the word ‘we.’ In practice, Marcus did not need to be persuaded to take on the job since he volunteered for it once no other person could be found. Though Jewish, he was not at first glance the obvious candidate since he had little actual battlefield experience. He had graduated from West Point in 1924 but had gone into legal work in the 1930s as Assistant US Attorney in New York. In the Second World War, he commanded a Ranger Combat Training School in Hawaii, teaching techniques of unarmed defence in the event of Japanese infiltration. This was followed by work in the US delegation to various war-time conferences before he finally managed to parachute into Normandy on D-Day as part of the 101st Airborne Division. He was recalled after a week and was in Germany at the war supervising displaced persons and visiting concentration camps. Marcus was as much a military bureaucrat as a figure with extensive combat skills, though he was familiar with the theoretical and strategic aspects of unconventional war. This was probably what Ben Gurion was looking for when he invited Marcus to become the ashuf of the new Israeli Defence Force. Marcus designed a new command structure that drew on his experience at the Ranger Combat School in Hawaii. He identified the weakest points in Israeli defence in the form of the scattered settlements in the Negev as well as the Jewish quarter in Jerusalem, where the main force to contend with was

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the British-trained Arab Legion commanded by Lieutenant General John Bagot Glubb – better known as Glubb Pasha. Here Cast a Giant Shadow remains quite true to the facts as it shows a Jewish attack on a fortress defended by the Legion being beaten off. The only way left to secure supplies and support for the Jewish position in Jerusalem, surrounded by Arab fighters commanded by Abd-el Qadir al-Husseini, is to build a road through the mountains, one that became known as the ‘Burma Road’ evoking memories of the Second World War. Completing the road ensures the continuation of a Jewish presence in Jerusalem, though the film fails to point out that the city remained divided into Israeli and Arab sectors until the 1967 June War. Cast a Giant Shadow attempted to milk US military expertise and link this with the emerging Israeli Defence Force. Indeed, the IDF emerges as a kind of ideal model for US military offshoot among people friendly to the United States in the post-war world, the sort of model attempted in other arenas such as South Vietnam but never properly fulfilled. Marcus, after all, starts off as a military ‘advisor’ before becoming more emotionally involved after he takes a Jewish woman as his mistress in the form of Magda Simon (Senta Berger). The film has a sub-text concerning the outcomes that can be expected from military training of friendly populations by western states. The scenes showing the Jewish attack on the Arab Legion are an interesting inversion of what we normally come to expect from desert movies: it is the Arabs who are defending a fortress against the Jewish attackers rather than the French Foreign Legion. They are well disciplined and orderly, each wearing the same pink keffiyeh. They beat back the Jewish attack and we can put this down to the good training they have received from their British military advisors. But the simple military prowess of the Legion cannot overcome the wiliness of the Jewish fighters inspired by Marcus. They build the Burma Road to go around the Arab Legion and ultimately secure the Jerusalem position (though the Arab position in the city by this time had already been considerably weakened by the death of al Husseini on April 8). In effect, Marcus’s training in unconventional warfare appears to win out over more conventional British methods. Marcus’s training of the IDF is not covered in detail in the movie. Indeed, the myth the film creates is that the IDF emerges almost as a replica of the conventional US military, even though there are hints of Marcus’s own insubordination from his commanding officer General Mike Randolph (John Wayne). But this insubordination is shown to be minor and, on occasions, highly beneficial such as his arranging a relief mission for a Nazi concentration camp that has been liberated by American troops. Though technically a case of insubordination his actions win the admiration of Wayne’s General Randolph. Seen more broadly, the film supports the hierarchical model of the US military and avoids any overt or close flirtation with unconventional warfare methods. In some respects, it was rather convenient that Marcus was killed just before the UN-orchestrated armistice ending the 1948 War. The film avoids covering the conflict in any detail such the massacre of 250 villagers in the village of Deir Yassin, west of Jerusalem on the 9th of April by the Stern Gang, still operating as a distinct military entity despite Marcus’s efforts to create a unified IDF. Likewise, the film’s portrayal of the war as largely conventional means that it avoids having to deal with ethnic

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cleansing; Arab villages in Upper Galilee that were occupied by Jewish fighters in early April were blown up to ensure their inhabitants would not return.21 Moreover, the IDF did not emerge over the next few decades as a completely conventional army, though it would certainly fight in three successive conventional conflicts in 1956, 1967 and 1973. Alongside these conflicts, considerable emphasis was placed in IDF doctrine on unconventional warfare involving raiding and sabotage, exemplified by the creation in the 1950s of Unit 101 under Ariel Sharon that responded to Palestinian border crossings by blowing up in retaliation Palestinian villages thought to be harbouring infiltrators. The murky and controversial military history of Israel post-1948 was an area that Hollywood decided to avoid. Exodus and Cast a Giant Shadow failed to lead to a distinct subgenre of war movies focused on the conflict in Palestine, and between Israel and its Arab neighbours. In part, this was due to the reluctance of most producers in Hollywood to film any more of Israel’s wars. John Wayne was willing to support Shavelson in making Cast a Giant Shadow since he was able to take one of the starring roles, even though he appears only for 15 minutes. But there were limits to which he was prepared to go in financially backing the film, given that he had nearly bankrupted himself making The Alamo. As he told the producer Mary St John, ‘I’ll be dammed if I’m going to give free rein to a Jewish true believer making the movie of his life-time with my money.’22 Wayne’s caution exemplified an outlook in Hollywood that did not change even after Israel’s victory in the June War in 1967. There was a declining interest in war films in the aftermath of Wayne’s The Green Berets in 1968, and any film on the Israeli army had no real guarantee of box office success. The problem was amplified by the continuing absence of a distinctive Israeli military myth, even if the brief manoeuvre war of June 1967 was, in some ways, a throwback to some of the battles of the Second World War. But neither the 1967 nor 1973 wars ended up significantly increasing Israeli security as the added defence in depth derived from the acquisition of new territory around Israel’s former borders on the West Bank, Golan Heights and Sinai became squandered with the building of further Jewish settlements. Neither war led to any major screen feature, though in 2017 a Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) triumphalist film was released on the fiftieth anniversary of the June 1967 war entitled In Our Hands: The Battle for Jerusalem celebrating the IDF 55th Paratroop Brigade’s capture of Jerusalem, inspired, it appears, by divine guidance.23 The absence, until now at least, of any major film on either the 1967 or 1973 wars provided some space for Israeli cinema to play with anti-war tropes, though none from a seriously radical political perspective. Unburdened by any major war myth, a few Israeli producers and directors have released films that explore the exhausting, tedious and chaotic nature of war. One early example of this was the film Cup Final in 1991 (dir. Eran Rilkis) which followed the evolving relationship between a captured Israeli soldier, called simply ‘Cohen’, and a group of PLO guerrillas in Lebanon at the time of the Israeli invasion in 1982. The soldier and the guerrillas find that they share a love of football (the World Cup is taking place in Barcelona and Cohen had tickets to go before he was called up) and the Palestinians are represented in strongly humanistic terms. The Israeli soldier is even implausibly dressed up in a suit to attend an Arab

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wedding, although there is a constant sense in this film that the Palestinian cause is doomed to fail in the face of massive Israeli military assets. This might be an antiwar film at a simplistic level but never seriously challenges the centrality of the IDF’s projection of Israeli military power. By contrast, the 2000 drama Kippur (dir. Amos Gitai) finally addressed the 1973 War, though not from the standpoint of the conventional war movie genre. Far from emphasizing the war of manoeuvre involving huge tank battles and the use of air power, the movie focuses on two men who drive to the Syrian front in the north in a small Fiat. They fail to reach their unit and end up in a medical unit. They desperately attempt to retrieve wounded men from clinging mud while their helicopter eventually gets damaged by an enemy missile. The two men recover but have been considerably traumatized by the brutal experience of war, even if it is one they never openly question. Two further films dealt with the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and its aftermath. Beaufort (2007), directed by Joseph Cedar, focused on the last period of the eighteenyear Israeli occupation of Beaufort Castle in Southern Lebanon. In a ponderous and old-fashioned narrative, the movie depicting the lead-up to the withdrawal in 2000 from the fortress in the face of escalating attacks by Hezbollah and the collapse of the main Israeli ally, the proxy militia known as the South Lebanese Army (SLA). Once more this is siege warfare, but with none of the sense of optimism of the four soldiers on Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer. As with some other Israeli films, the morale of the soldiers is low and the commander, Lieutenant Liraz ‘Erez’ Librati (Oshri Cohen), undergoes a crisis of self-belief. The lack of reality of the whole occupation is brilliantly recreated in the filmset (on the Golan Heights) where the long underground tunnels the men occupy resemble more a space station than a military bunker. The science fiction quality to the film is compounded by an invisible enemy apparently capable of launching ever more sophisticated rockets, while the arrival of a young bomb disposal expert, Lieutenant Ziv Faran (Ohad Knoller), to defuse a road-side bomb also leads to disaster. The silent and morose Faran has none of the Wildman streak of Sergeant First Class William James in The Hurt Locker. He is blown up and killed by a bomb that might apparently have been blown up anyway, since it is on a road only the IDF uses. Beaufort exposes the irrationality of military decision-making as well as the tendency, observable in some other films such as Eye in the Sky, for civilian political leaders to procrastinate when making crucial decisions involving military assets. A few extra, but clearly inadequate, concrete blocks are installed to try and protect the installation after the start of the rocket attacks. In addition, while most of the men are evacuated before the final withdrawal, the last twelve men find themselves having to spend an unexpected further night in the compound before the withdrawal is hastily completed in the rain and the installation blown up. Beaufort was less critical of the IDF and its battle-hardened, if jaundiced, recruits than the political decision-makers who put their lives needlessly at risk. At the same time, it exhibited no interest in the enemy the soldiers were facing, though this was a conflict where direct contact with the enemy was largely absent unlike earlier conflicts. The other film dealing with the incursion into Lebanon was the movie Lebanon (2009) directed by Samuel Maoz, focused on the chaos and disintegration of war from the vantage point of an Israeli tank crew. The film was the first Israeli film to win the

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Leone d’Oro at the Venice film festival and reveals poor judgement and, on occasions, lack of proper military training. The tank’s gunner, it emerges, has never fired a tank cannon before and an Israeli soldier is accidentally killed in a confused situation as the tanks enters Lebanese territory. As conditions inside the tank deteriorate, the morale of the men plummets and the crew descend into bitter quarrels. The anti-war themes of these films emerged in some Israel features, less in terms of a triumphalist myth, but of a citizens’ army doing its duty and mobilizing to protect Israeli society in times of crisis. The IDF has no major function in holding Israeli society together, given the centrality of the various interpretations of Zionist ideology, though in the 1960s and 1970s individual military leaders such as Moshe Dayan and later Ariel Sharon exerted considerable charismatic influence on domestic Israeli politics. But militarism never became a major state myth in Israel and the army became subordinated to a strategic doctrine of counter-terrorism during the 1970s and 1980s following the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt. The doctrine emphasized the need for mobilizing intelligence assets, counter-terrorist hit squads and well-targeted special operations by commando units to capture or eliminate Palestinian political leaders. By the late 1970s, Israeli political leaders saw considerable payoffs in promoting the strategy internationally not only to justify Israeli policy towards its Palestinian enemies but also to link it to a wider ideological Cold War battle pivoting a beleaguered west defending itself against various forms of international terrorist attacks covertly organized by the Soviet Union. Promoting such an idea helped create myths about international terrorism and vigilant counter-terrorist responses that dovetailed with the increasingly popular genre of Hollywood action movies, though it did little in the end to reverse the tide of international opinion against Israeli policy.

Counter-terrorism and the action genre The late 1970s were a significant watershed in Israeli politics, leading to an ideological reformulation of its dominant myth of existence. The 1973 war confirmed that future inter-state wars would be far too debilitating for the society to endure. The loss of precious manpower necessitated some form of peace with at least some of the surrounding Arab states, starting with Egypt, whose army had performed remarkably well in the early part of the 1973 War. The diplomatic tilt occurred during a period of major change in Arab and Palestinian politics, leading to the emergence of violent insurgent and terrorist movements. Before the late 1960s Israel saw itself as being at war with ‘Arab’ neighbours, leaving the Palestinian Arabs with little or no identity of their own since they were usually referred to as ‘Israeli Arabs’ or ‘Arab refugees.’24 The notion of a distinctly Palestinian identity emerged during the 1960s, in the wake of the original founding of the nationalist movement Fatah 1959. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) was formed in 1964, though widely viewed in its early years as a body created by Arab leaders to control the Palestinian population. This changed when it fell under the control of Yasser Arafat in 1969, who would dominate the organization for the next thirty-five years until his death in 2004.

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The Palestinian political struggle was accompanied by bitter factional rivalries, manipulated by a range of external actors, including the Soviet Union, the USA, Syria, Libya, Iraq and Israel. Fatah’s incursion into the West Bank eventually resulted in the expulsion of the entire Palestinian exile population from the Hashemite kingdom, leading to the emergence of the terrorist movement Black September, allied to the PLO. Alongside this was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, led by the Marxist George Habash. The PFLP, far more than the PLO, championed national liberation on a Chinese and Vietnamese guerrilla model, though in practice resorted to terrorist attacks and assassination. In 1970, the PFLP—External Operations attacked Lod airport in Israel in 1970 killing twenty-six people, though the actual gunmen involved were members of the Japanese Red Army with which the movement was allied. The 1970s and 1980s were decades of growing international terrorism as a variety of governments provided terrorist movements with funding, training and support. The movements made use of growing global air travel to hijack planes, gain rapid global media attention, smuggle explosives and weaponry and use hostages to bargain for the release of prisoners. One spectacular incident was in September 1972 at the Munich Olympic Games when a group of Black September militants took Israeli athletes hostages, though at the time the hijack was viewed as one of a series of cases of international terrorism that had successfully garnered global publicity. The government of Golda Meir in Jerusalem refused, as always, to negotiate but offered the West German government assistance in the form of a counter-terrorist squad, though this was turned down. The West German government then bungled its own attempted rescue operation, leaving eleven athletes and five Black September terrorists dead (the three who survived were later released following another plane hijack). It is questionable how far the attack was a real turning point in the evolution of Israeli counter-terrorism strategy, with the launching of Operation Wrath of God and the despatch of hit squads being sent across Europe to kill Palestinian terrorist leaders. The Munich raid had certainly revealed an extensive undercover Palestinian network in Europe, though this was already known to Mossad. The operation was secret and Israel did not seek to gain any propaganda from it, and some analysts and commentators have tended to see it as merely another round in an ongoing struggle of Palestinian and Israeli terror squads that had been rumbling on since the late 1960s. The rightwing journalist Christopher Dobson, for instance, suggested in one early study of Black September that the real turning point came with the Israeli commando raid on Beirut on 10 April 1973 which not only killed three top Fatah leaders but produced an extensive set of files on operatives working inside Israel.25 Operation Wrath of God did not appear on screen for over a decade after it occurred, unlike the speedy release of the movies on the raid on Entebbe. This does not mean that the Munich ‘massacre’ was unimportant, but it became the centre of a later screen myth relating more to the situation in the early 1980s than a decade before. Losing a group of male athletes to a group of Palestinian terrorists was a psychological blow to the Israeli government, but the full details of the hostages’ ordeal would not be revealed for over twenty years. Some were tortured, while the weightlifter Yossef Romano was left to bleed to death before being castrated.26

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The failure of the West German government to deal resolutely with the situation shocked the Israeli government and Mossad. It confirmed what happens in a situation where a state appears to lack any coherent counter-terrorism strategy. It also revealed just how isolated Israel was when responding to Palestinian terror attacks, though it is hard to believe that the leaders of Mossad were not already aware of this. The head of Mossad at the time, Zvi Zanir, minuted (in a recently declassified document) that the Germans ‘didn’t take even a minimal risk to try to save people, neither theirs not ours’.27 Following the Munich killings, the West German government expelled over a hundred Fatah supporters among the 37,000 Arab community residing in Germany (many went to East Germany) as well as disbanding the General Union of Palestinian Students and General Union of Palestinian Workers. This was a propaganda blow to the PLO and Fatah, which had been founded at the University of Stuttgart in the 1950s.28 But the global imagery of the Munich hostage-taking was as much horror as terror. The photos taken of the siege of the Athletes’ flats showed a faceless Palestinian terrorist peering over a balcony shrouded in a hood. This was a horror narrative rather than one that could immediately be made into an action thriller, given that there was no immediate way of striking back. Even before the Munich massacre and the launching of Operation Wrath of God, Mossad had been sending hit squads across Europe and the Middle East in a violent strategy of counter-terrorism.29 Over the next few years, the squads killed several senior Palestinian political leaders, a fact which had considerable impact on the operating ability of Black September, the PLO and the PFLP.30 Hollywood ignored the Munich massacre and would continue to do so for decades. The disastrous outcome conflicted with its currently popular genre of disaster movies such as Towering Inferno (1974) and the Dirty Harry crime series with Clint Eastwood. It would not be until Steven Spielberg’s Munich in 2005 that it finally released a feature dealing with the Olympics massacre and the Mossad response. Before then, the global reputation of Israeli counter-terrorism rested on the commando raid on Entebbe in 1976 to rescue hostages taken by two members of the German terrorist group known as the Revolutionary Cells (RZ) who had teamed up with two members of a faction that had broken from the PFLP to demand the release of fifty-three Palestinians being held prisoner by the Israelis. The raid seemed to have been planned with cinema in mind. Here were good guys being held by bad guys who had not only hijacked a plane but taken it to a country run by a murderous African dictator. The hijacking leads to some prolonged debate and dithering by the government before, eventually, a tough task force of well-trained special forces is sent off across a huge distance that would have been unimaginable in the Second World War or even the 1950s. The raid is almost completely successful, though one heroic commander gets tragically killed while 102 of the 106 hostages (most of whom were Israeli Jews along with the French crew) are brought back to an ecstatic welcome by their relatives and loved ones. The Entebbe raid lasted a mere 99 minutes but has led, over the years, to at least five feature films, three of them blockbusters: Victory at Entebbe in 1976, starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas; the made-for-TV Raid on Entebbe in 1977, starring Charles Bronson and Peter Finch; and Operation Thunderbolt in 1977, the one domestic Israeli film on the raid that starred Klaus Kinski as one of the German terrorist anti-

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heroes with suitably manic features. None have really explored with any seriousness the political background to the original hijacking or even its wider political significance. The raid’s success led to a major boost in Israel’s standing and Jonathan Freedland is correct when he suggests that ‘it would come to seem the high watermark in global attitudes to the country’.31 For exponents of hard-line counter-terrorism, the raid served as a textbook example of how to negotiate with terrorists.32 The mystique surrounding it has disguised a deeper lesson to be learnt, by both policy makers and strategists alike, when it comes to formulating a successful policy of counter-terrorism. This is that pure counter-terrorism on its own does not work very well since it commands relatively little public support or understanding – something the Bush administration had still not learnt with its later ‘war on terror’ after 2001. Successful counter-terrorism, in other words, needs to be allied to, or capitalize on, a widely understood public or national narrative. For the Israelis, this was relatively easy to formulate in relation to a narrative of national survival, though even this became questioned in the wake of the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Globally, the strategy was far harder to formulate and would end up being rather half-heartedly linked to a late Cold War ideology of anti-communism. For the moment, things could ride high in the case of the Entebbe Raid since the appeal of the raid lay not just in an action-style narrative of military daring-do but also the humiliation of the figure of President Idi Amin Dada of Uganda, who epitomized, for audiences in the west at least, all that had apparently gone wrong in the decolonization of sub-Saharan Africa since the late 1950s. Amin came to power in a coup in 1971 that overthrew the corrupt and increasingly anti-western regime of Milton Obote. He was a former soldier in the King’s African Rifles where he had become sergeant major or effendi, the highest rank open to a black African in the British army. The coup has often been portrayed as a British undercover operation in retaliation to Obote’s increasingly left-leaning rhetoric, though another less well-known feature was Israeli assistance to Amin’s main ethnic base of support, the An-ya who straddled the border between Uganda and Sudan. Israel was interested in removing the anti-Israeli Obote from power as well as supporting a rebel movement in the south of Sudan to divert the attention of the anti-Zionist government in Khartoum. Indeed, the head of the Israeli military mission in Uganda, Colonel Bar-Lev, assisted Amin in organizing the 1971 coup that brought him to power.33 Despite this support, Amin drew away from the Israelis over the next few years, as his narrowly-based military regime wrought havoc on the Ugandan population, massacring hundreds of thousands in a reign of terror. Amin was prone to bouts of anti-British sentiment and, in August 1972, expelled the Asian minority, while also projecting such an exaggerated image of an African dictator in full military uniform complete with rows of medals. He became a gift to cartoonists and a caricature in his own right, rooted in caricatures of the devil, the gargoyle and the buffoon that Johnson, in a classic early study of European racism, suggesting that much of the racist metaphorical imagery of black-skinned peoples since the sixteenth century.34 While not always exploited with malice, the caricatures could be used for a range of purposes. In Amin’s case, this was the devilish buffoon who was also a mass murderer.

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Amin’s persona would emerge as a striking nemesis in many of the movies made about the Entebbe raid, marginalizing to some degree the German-Palestinian terrorist group that had pulled off the hijack in the first place. By the time that the AngloKenyan-Nigerian film The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin (dir. Sharad Patel) was made in 1980 the raid is shown in only a few brief scenes, the director very probably assuming this was all too familiar with cinema audiences from the previous action movies. Perhaps the one interesting addition in this movie was the portrait of Amin as coward; when he hears the raid at Entebbe, he is in bed with two white women and hides in a cupboard. The Amin caricature ensured that the resulting action movies would not need to explore the terrorist hijackers with any seriousness, as attention could focus on Amin and his inept army. The films were rushed out to satisfy audience cravings before memories faded but were generally mediocre. The one interesting film on the raid was only released thirty years after it occurred in the form of The Last King of Scotland (2006). This movie looks at the raid from the standpoint of Idi Amin, played with considerable verve by Forrest Whitaker. Amin cynically addresses the hostages, telling those who are not Israelis that they will be able to fly home. He has cut some sort of deal with the terrorists, while also attempting to milk the issue as political propaganda for his own beleaguered regime.35 The cinematic payoff from the Entebbe raid helped drive forward an ideological reformulation of the Israeli national purpose. The one Israeli commando killed in the raid was Jonatan Netanyahu, who commanded the Sayeret Matkal. His brother Benjamin (‘Bibi’) had also been familiar with the politically risky nature of special operations. He was a team leader of Sayeret in the late 1960s after the 1967 War and took part in Operation Inferno in March 1968 against a Palestinian guerrilla base in Jordan, leading to the so-called Battle of Karameh. The fifteen-hour engagement against the PLO turned into a full-scale military engagement with the Jordanian army and proved costly both politically and militarily. Not only did the UN Security Council vote for Resolution 248 condemning Israel for violating the ceasefire agreed the previous year, but the IDF suffered between twenty-eight and thirty-two killed and over sixty-nine wounded. Netanyahu learnt several major lessons from both Operation Inferno and Operation Thunderbolt in Entebbe. It was evident that Israel needed to create a more positive international environment if it was to create a successful strategic doctrine of national defence. Special operations on their own would be unlikely to do this, though spectacular and successful ones, like that at Entebbe, might briefly win global admiration. It was necessary to use special forces as part of a more complex doctrine of counter-terrorism capable of generating support from the political right in the west, concerned as always with the continued spread of communism. Over the next few years Netanyahu was adept at forging contacts with neo-conservatives in the United States such as Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who were critical of the apparent lack of moral resolve displayed by many western governments in tackling terrorist movements. Netanyahu also learnt the skills of political consultancy after working for the Boston Consultancy Group. He returned to Israel in 1978 and founded the Yonatan

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Netanyahu Anti-Terrorist Institute, otherwise known as the Jonathan Institute, named after his brother Jonatan killed at Entebbe. The Institute held two major international conferences in 1979 and 1984 to refine the doctrine of counter-terrorism as well as gain the intellectual support of a wide body of terrorism experts in Britain and the United States such as Robert Moss, Brian Crozier, Richard Pipes, Ray Cline, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Bernard Lewis.36 The conferences were important for modernizing the language of the Likud government in Israel away from the fiery combative and quasi-biblical tone of Menachem Begin towards a business-like discourse better suited to American political debate. The long-term aims were not just to ‘understand’ modern terrorism but to follow through on the vision of Likud’s political founder, Ze’ev Vladimir Jabotinsky, and remove any last ‘glimmer of hope’ among the Arab opposition that the Israeli presence in the Palestine could be removed.37 The idea that terrorism was an absolute moral evil did not gain universal acceptance even among conservative terrorism analysts. Some of the strongest support claiming to be scholarly came from the American author Claire Sterling, who attempted in two books, The Terror Network (1981) and The Time of the Assassins (1984), to link international terrorism to Soviet grand designs in the Cold War. Widely dismissed as another conspiracy theory, Sterling’s work certainly buttressed the Israeli doctrine of counter-terrorism by linking it to a wider Cold War ideology of the ‘free world’ struggling against global communist terrorism. Few serious intelligence analysts – or even many terrorism analysts – saw international terrorism as a Soviet-promoted challenge to the west, even in the early years of the Reagan administration.38 International terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s functioned within a complicated myriad of networks exploited, on occasions, by extrovert freelancers such as the Venezuelan terrorist Carlos, who broke from the PFLP and hired himself out to the East German Stasi or the Romanian Secret Service; while the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal created a renegade terrorist group known as the Abu Nidal Organization that changed sides from the Iraqis to the Syrians, once they found him a useful agent to attack Jordan in reprisal for the Jordanian king’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood against the Syrian Baathists.39 There was little evidence for the Soviet Union using terrorism as part of a coherent strategy to undermine the west when it was bogged down in a war during the 1980s against Mujahideen insurgents in Afghanistan. For all its Cold War rhetoric, the Reagan administration did not see pressuring the Soviet Union leading to unconditional support for allies such as Israel. With mounting bloodshed from the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Reagan telephoned Prime Minister Begin to condemn what he called a ‘holocaust’.40 The Israeli invasion, called Operation Peace for Galilee, was one of the most ambitious ‘counter-terrorism’ operations operated by any western state before 9/11. It lasted for the following three years and was commanded by Ariel Sharon, who later became Israeli prime minister. It led to the expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon, though at mounting cost to Israeli forces. The long-term goal was to fortify Israeli security through the establishment of a military alliance with a Maronite Christian government in Lebanon, freeing the Likud government in Israel to fulfil its dream of incorporating the West Bank into Greater of ‘Eretz’ Israel as Samara and Judaea. The campaign initially worked as the Palestinians were forced to move to Tripoli in

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June 1982 and a pro-Israeli government was installed in Beirut under Bachir Gemayal. However, hopes of a peace treaty like the one with Egypt in 1979 were shattered by Gemayal’s assassination in September 1982; while Israel’s image became considerably tarnished by evidence of its complicity in the massacres of Palestinians by Phalangist militias in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. In Israel, popular disillusion with the war grew and by 1985 the IDF had withdrawn from most of the country, leaving a Maronite-controlled Free Lebanon State in the south. The 1980s were thus a watershed for Israeli politics. The 1982 invasion of Lebanon certainly marginalized the PLO, for the moment at least, though in 1987 a popular Palestinian uprising – or Intifada – broke out lasting until 1993. This was followed by a second Intifada between 2000 and 2005 following the failure of the 1994 Oslo Peace Accords, signed between Israel and the PLO. Israel found itself under growing international criticism and threats of various forms of boycott, reminiscent of the earlier campaign against South African apartheid. Counter-terrorism as both a strategy and doctrine has not, in the end, been a particularly successful means to increase the Israeli state’s international legitimacy, though at the tactical level it has improved policing and intelligence gathering in several western states. Cinematically, things became increasingly militarized by the time of Chuck Norris’s action movie Delta Force in 1986, the first of a spate of Golan-Globus productions made in Israel, which would also include action movies such as Invasion USA and Bloodsport. The movie was important for linking themes from the Entebbe action movies to the wider terrorism subgenre emerging in Hollywood.41 It was the first film to portray the failed Operation Eagle Claw in Iran in 1979. The disastrous operation supplies the basic theme of US unpreparedness and incapacity to defend itself against international terrorism, though – unlike Bloody Sunday – SOF in the form of the Delta Force can now be deployed at short notice to rescue a plane that has mostly American passengers on board. The first half of the film tracks the fate of an airliner hijacked by two fanatical members of an Arab terrorist organization called the World Revolutionary Front. The film makes occasional use of some well-known actors such as Shirley Winters, George Kennedy and Martin Balsam as some of the passengers suffering at the hands of the terrorists, in a manner now familiar from the Entebbe films a few years previously. But the passengers are dispensed with in the second half of the film, which descends into a scene of fantasy violence as the Deltas, led by their star fighter Major Scott McCoy (Chuck Norris), eliminate all their enemies with minimal casualties. McCoy even despatches some of the Arabs by firing rockets from a motorbike: a device that has never been operational (though in 2014 the Pentagon’s Defence Advanced Research Agency was reportedly planning a ‘stealth’ motorbike for use by special forces over difficult terrains, though still without rockets).42 The fantasy violence raises questions about the motivations behind the film. It clearly provided laddish entertainment, while also helping to solidify the image of terrorists and hijackers (especially Arab ones) as militarily incompetent and easily outwitted by superior American technology. It was a trope that helped to bind the morality of the struggle against international terrorism in Israel with the United States, though this would not be true of all the films of the era, even those released by the

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Cannon Group. For instance, the 1984 suspense thriller The Ambassador (dir. J. Lee Thompson) has the American ambassador to Israel (Robert Mitchum) attempting to establish a dialogue between Israeli and Palestinian students. But the meeting he organizes is attacked by Arab terrorists who machine-gun most of the students; despite this, the film still managed to end on an optimistic note as thousands of students gather outside his house holding torches and calling for peace. By the 1990s, the terrorism genre in Hollywood had largely moved on from the Israeli focus that had surfaced in some 1980s films such as Delta Force. The demise of Cannon Films in the early 1990s (following a series of failure including the $10 million Captain America in 1992) weakened the links between Israeli film producers and the Hollywood mainstream.43 Israeli tropes in cinematic counter-terrorism largely disappeared by the 1990s as a new spate of action movies were released by Hollywood, some of which began to question some of the basic assumptions of the genre. It was in this context that two major feature films were released that attempted to engage with the morality of terrorism and counter-terrorism, The Little Drummer Girl (1984) and, ten years later, Munich (2005).

Exploring the morality of Israeli counter-terrorism: The Little Drummer Girl and Vengeance as cinematic texts Israeli counter-terrorism remained poorly understood in western societies well into the 1980s. The 1982 invasion of Lebanon formed the immediate background for a major espionage novel, The Little Drummer Girl (1983), by the British espionage novelist John Le Carre (David Cornwell). Le Carre had been publishing spy novels for years, such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), The Looking Glass War (1965), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) and Smiley’s People (1979). By the early 1980s he was anxious to move away from the exploits of his most popular hero George Smiley, whose character had been largely stolen from him by Alec Guinness and was, for some readers on the Left, hopelessly nostalgic and old school.44 Le Carre began looking further afield for espionage narratives that were no longer bogged down in Cold War intelligence rivalries between East and West. He turned to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, seeing this as an opportunity to include a female character modelled on his sister Charlotte, who had been involved in radical theatre and left-wing politics. The Little Drummer Girl is one of the most important of Le Carre’s works. Despite its complicated plot, the book became an instant best-seller in the United States, selling 59,000 copies in a single day and 400,000 over its total print run.45 In a story about the breaking down and reinvention of an identity in pursuit of a military objective, the novel prophetically looks beyond the Cold War. The novel can be compared in some ways to Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon with its portrayal of ruthless state operatives manipulating their victims, but less in terms of the ideological ‘brainwashing’ of the Cold War (exemplified by The Manchurian Candidate) but identity reconstruction in a manner relatively new to the espionage novel, and one that the conservative American writer William F. Buckley considered ‘raise(d) him (le Carre) out of the espionage league’.46

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British intelligence and the Cold War spy games with the KGB are absent in The Little Drummer Girl which focuses instead on an operation by a Mossad team, led by the mercurial Kurtz, a name that links the narrative (like Apocalypse Now) to Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. The team reconstructs the identity of a left-leaning English actress Charlie so that she can become a convincing plant into an underground Palestinian terror network led by a top terrorist called Khalil. Mossad has already captured Khalil’s brother Salim, who they torture and eventually murder, leaving his body to be blown up in a car, along with his Dutch lover, on the Munich Autobahn. One of Kurtz’s operatives is known as Joseph (real name Gadi Becker) and shows another link with Conrad. Joseph forms a relationship with Charlie so she can be drawn into a Mossad-inspired plan for the reconstruction of her identity. The purpose behind this is to make Charlie think of herself as the lover of Salim, whom she knows by the invented name of Michel. She is eventually sent back under cover to contact Salim (not knowing he has been murdered) while being watched closely by Joseph and Mossad. Khalil establishes contact with her and she becomes his mistress. Mossad is finally able to track Khalil down to a hotel bedroom, where Joseph bursts in to shoot him while in bed with Charlie. Charlie has a nervous breakdown and Mossad pays for her recuperation in a sanatorium in Israel; her acting career, though, is at an end after acting in a far more demanding and violent real-life drama. This far-fetched narrative raised serious ethical questions about counter-terrorism operations as well as going a long way towards transforming the image of Mossad. The novel pinpointed a new pattern of post–Cold War espionage in which ideology was of decreasing importance in comparison to the wilful state manipulation of identities. Mossad has no interest in Charlie’s political views, indeed, her left-wing attachment to the Palestinian cause is an advantage since it enhances her credibility as a Mossad mole. Kurtz is a latter-day Kurtz from The Heart of Darkness as he plunges nihilist depths in search for what he describes as a ‘durable basis of morality’ – strong enough at least to support Mossad’s immediate plan. It is the weakness of Charlie’s political attachments that Kurtz sees as a major asset, since ‘the nearer she was to drowning … the greater would be her pleasure at coming aboard’.47 The cynicism of the narrative reflected Le Carre’s growing disenchantment with intelligence organizations by the 1980s. Their close links to state power, he considered, was leading to an internal moral rot and, by 2003, he became a prominent critic of the Blair government’s support for the invasion of Iraq based on fraudulent intelligence information in a ‘dodgy dossier’ purporting to show Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Twenty years before this, The Little Drummer Girl suggested that the Israeli state already had in place an elaborate apparatus for campaigns of disinformation, exemplified in a scene, excluded from the film version of the novel, between Kurtz and a leading figure in British MI6, the ex-Palestine policeman Pickard. Pickard is the near-perfect embodiment of the ‘self-made anti-terrorist’ given that he was ‘part soldier, part copper, part villain’ and ‘belonged to the fabled generation of his trade’.48 He has none of the gentility of the older generation of spy hunters such as George Smiley for he ‘had the senior policeman’s fastidious bad grammar and the borrowed good manners of a gentleman, and both were returnable without notice any time he damn well felt like it’.49 Counter-terrorism involves some rough straight-

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talking, very different to the polite niceties of clubland. Pickard sees through Kurtz’s ruse, including forged photographs, to put MI6 off the scent of the murder of Salim and his Dutch terrorist girlfriend on the Munich Autobahn. Kurtz suggests that the man in the car was called ‘Mesterbein’ who had explosives supplied by ‘contacts’ in Istanbul. Pickard is not taken in. ‘The trick is normally done with dead meat’, he pointedly tells Kurtz: You find a nice corpse, you dress him up and leave him somewhere where the enemy will stumble on him. ‘Hello’ says the enemy, ‘what’s this? A dead body carrying a briefcase? Let’s look inside.’ They look, and they find a little message. ‘Hello’ they say, ‘he must have been a courier! Let’s read the message and fall into the trap’. So they do. And we all get medals. ‘Disinformation’ we used to call it, designed to misguide the enemy’s eye, and very nice too’. Picton’s sarcasm was as awesome as his wrath. ‘But that’s too simple for you and Misha. Being a bunch of over-educated fanatics, you’ve gone one further. ‘No dead meat for us, oh no! We’ll use live meat. Arab meat. Dutch meat.’ So you did. And you blew it up in a nice Mercedes motorcar. Theirs. What I don’t know, of course – and I never will, because you and Misha will deny the whole thing on your deathbeds, won’t you? – is where you have planted the disinformation. But planted it you have, and now they’ve bitten.50

The Little Drummer Girl disturbed many critics in Europe and the United States. It promoted accusations of anti-Semitism, though these were eclipsed by growing evidence to suggest that sympathy for the Palestinians was no longer confined to farleft figures such as Vanessa Redgrave (who served in some ways as a model for Charlie) or even firmly pro-Arab voices as Edward Said but to the sections of mainstream opinion.51 The novel also cut a raw nerve inside Israel as well as Zionist apologists internationally, for the way it portrayed Israeli campaigns against international terrorism as part of a sophisticated strategy of disinformation in a world growing increasingly hostile to the Zionist cause. The behaviour of Mossad has now veered so far in the direction of state terrorism that its actions were little different to those of its Palestinian terrorist enemy. Interestingly, even the former supporter of Haganah, Kurtz, is left angry and betrayed at the end, as it emerges that one of his objectives behind the campaign to assassinate Khalil was to prevent the invasion of Lebanon. This takes place anyway, leading to the massacres in the refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila and the impact on Kurtz is immense: ‘His body seemed to shrink to half its size; his Slav eyes lost all their sparkle, he looked his age, whatever that was.’52 Joseph is angered at the apparent betrayal and is left asking ‘a most offensive question, something he claimed to have culled from the writings of Arthur Koestler, and evidently adapted to his own preoccupation. “What are we to become, I wonder?” he said. “A Jewish homeland or an ugly little Spartan state?”’53 Mossad counter-terrorism is too serious to be a matter of mere moral anguish. It raises fundamental questions about the future direction of the Israeli state, given the new military adventurism that led Israeli forces all the way to Beirut.

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The Little Drummer Girl portrayed an Israeli state cut adrift from the moral anchorage it had claimed to have in the years after its founding. It reframed the morality of Israeli counter-terrorist strategy in terms of reason of state rather than a code of morality convincing to the wider world. Mossad operates outside any clear ethical framework and pursues a nihilist counter-terrorism strategy dependent on the body count of enemy terrorists taken out. This was a dimension that tended to be underplayed by the makers of the film version, released in 1984. The film The Little Drummer Girl was directed by George Roy Hill and cast the American actress Diane Keaton as Charlie while Klaus Kinski played Kurtz. Changing Charlie into an American actress was rather confusing and Keaton was out of her depth in a complicated role clearly better suited to a British actress, though perhaps Meryl Streep might have managed the part.54 Keaton fails to engage with the genuine passion that Charlie has for the Palestine cause, appearing as a weak and disorganized woman with no serious beliefs and eventually collapsing into a nervous breakdown. We see little in the movie of the Charlie’s identity reconstruction at the hands of Kurtz’s operatives, who appear as an efficient group whose mission is never seriously examined. However, this contained far more realism than Spielberg’s more ethically tortured Munich, which I shall examine shortly, since there is no evidence to suggest that Mossad agents have ever really questioned the job of assassinating Israel’s political enemies. The Little Drummer Girl never attempts any real even-handedness. Certainly, the Israelis and Palestinians play the same kind of game with murder and counter-murder; both test Charlie’s resolve by making her see an enemy agent tortured or even shot in the case of the Palestinian treatment of an Israeli. Khalil displays evil qualities compared to either Kurtz or Joseph; his face is, on occasions, lit menacingly from below and he appears to have little or no moral compass. The film falls back on well-tried stereotypes of villainous Arabs to sustain a narrative in which the Israelis are battling a fanatical terrorist enemy, considerably different from the narrative in Le Carre’s novel. There is no reference to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon or of Joseph’s view of the country as a ‘Spartan state’. The only reconciliation that occurs at the end is not one between Israel and its Palestinian enemies but of Joseph and Charlie as he followed her down a street after she has apparently left her acting career for good. There might be some sort of mending, it seems, at the personal if not the political level. The Little Drummer Girl is more pessimistic than Neil Jordan’s film Michael Collins on the question of whether the cycle of terrorism and counter-terrorism can be eventually ended. A similar outlook pervaded Stephen Spielberg’s Munich in 2005, based on Operation Wrath of God. This film drew on the best-selling book Vengeance published in 1984 by the Canadian writer George Jonas, a book that Spielberg, in his introduction to the DVD version of the film, curiously describes as an ‘historical novel’. Jonas was not an Israeli but a Hungarian Jew who had fled to Canada in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. He was a well-known literary figure in Canada and was a strong exponent of the idea that terrorism was a form of malignant disease.55 Vengeance led to the rather pedestrian Canadian feature Sword of Gideon in 1986 before Spielberg’s Munich in 2005. The book has never been out of print and remains, for many, the dominant authoritative account. Much of its appeal derives from its style, which, while purporting to be a non-fictional account of a real Mossad operation, is written as a thriller.

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Vengeance has real events embellished by the voice of an all-knowing narrator. The book functions at three levels: firstly, it recounts the story of a Mossad squad sent to kill Palestinian leaders known from various intelligence sources to be involved in terrorist attacks, especially the one at Munich. The story flags up the successes of the squad as well as their failures leading to deaths of several members of the Mossad team. Secondly, the book examines the strategic logic of Israeli counter-terrorism and its functioning in what it perceives (drawing on the work of Claire Sterling) to be the continuing Cold War super power rivalry and the control from afar of international terrorist organizations by the Soviet KGB. Thirdly, the book engages in an ethical debate over the morality of the Israeli state and its continuing right to exist, given that memories of the holocaust are now fading and Israel is increasingly being perceived by various sectors of opinion in the west as an oppressive and quasi-colonial state. The book can also be read as a form of response to The Little Drummer Girl, though there is no evidence to suggest that this was the author’s main intention, especially as the research on it appears to go back to before Le Carre’s novel was published in 1983. All three levels of Vengeance are organized through the central character of Avner Kauffmann, a former body guard of Golda Meir, who takes on some of the features of a fantasy character in the narrative. There is no independent evidence to verify that Avner ever existed in the way he is presented in the book, though his character has been linked to a Mossad operative Mike Harari. The narrative is written from Avner’s point of view, but one reported by an invisible third person narrator with insight into Avner’s own thoughts, rather like a novel with an all-knowing narrator. Avner leads a small team of small hand-picked specialist operators, familiar from spec ops and action movies. There are no direct quotations from any of the interviews that Jonas supposedly had with Avner, and the reader might question the authenticity of some of the recollections. Avner’s team, if it ever really existed, was never as isolated as Vengeance suggests and was part of a series of teams working for several years, off and on, after the Munich attacks. The book is a clever work of political propaganda disguised as truth with the guiding framework being that all terrorism is morally wrong while acknowledging ‘counter-terrorism also involves bloodshed’.56 Spielberg’s Munich is a political thriller centred on a squad of Mossad assassins moving around Europe in search of Palestinian targets. It was scripted by American playwrights and scriptwriters Tony Kushner and Eric R. Roth and was shaped as much by the events of 9/11 as those of three decades before. The film was released the same year as Spielberg’s metaphorical treatment of 9/11 in War of the Worlds (2005) and twelve years after Schindler’s List (1993), documenting the destruction of the Jewish ghetto at Auschwitz and the rescue of Jews by a German industrialist horrified by the immorality of the Nazi genocide. The three films collectively reveal a major Hollywood director attuned, at least in part, to the complex and multifaceted nature of modern terrorism operating at both state and sub-state levels. If it is the operation of the state institutions of espionage that are in a process of moral rot in the novels of Le Carre, it is the more abstract process of ‘terrorism’ that has the same nihilistic quality in Spielberg’s filmography, undermining as it does the ethical values of terrorists and victims alike. Only stalwart and morally resolute individuals (rather like Gary Cooper in High Noon) can stand up to affirm conventional moral

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values in the face of a confused or indifferent community: Oscar Schindler, for instance, in Schindler’s List or Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) in War of the Worlds, battling not only Martians but a wayward and rebellious son so that he can maintain family cohesion in a world shattered by divorce and alien invasion. Avner in Munich also struggles to reconcile his work as an underground Mossad agent with his role as husband and father to a baby daughter. The only time he breaks down while working in the Mossad undercover squad is when he hears the voice of his little daughter over the phone. At the end of the movie, he rejects overtures to return to Israel to embark on another Mossad operation and opts to stay in New York and work out some sort of life there, disappearing across a New York skyline with the twin towers in the background. Family and domestic obligations largely come first in Spielberg’s movies, shaped, to some degree, by his upbringing as an Orthodox Jew in the 1950s in Phoenix, Arizona. Avner has some of the mediating features of Ari in Exodus. He maintains the cohesion of the Mossad squad and stands between the hard-line South African Steve (Daniel Craig), whose only interest is to fight to protect Jews, and the more conciliatory figure of Carl (Ciaran Hinds), whose trust in human nature leads to him losing his life as he falls for a beautiful Dutch female contract killer in the pay of the Palestinians. Avner lacks Ari’s visionary quality and is so closely attached to the Israeli state that his wife Daphna (played by Ayelet Zurer) taunts him that ‘Israel is your mother’. The approach at least partially acknowledged that state organizations were as capable of descending to similar morally depraved levels as sub-state terrorist movements. Munich was another personal venture by Spielberg, though one that still ends up viewing the Palestinians from an external perspective, just as the Nazis and their atrocities in Schindler’s List are mostly viewed from a distance as mass murderers with no personalities or characters, and the Martians in War of the Worlds remain faceless aliens.57 Munich fails to explore why the Palestinian terrorists felt it necessary in the first place to attack Israel by killing its athletics team, though this is at least a movie that rises above a conventional action feature with its effort to portray the apparent humanity of several of the Palestinian victims of Mossad. One is a man of considerable learning and has translated The Arabian Nights into Italian; another, Dr Mahmoud Hamshari, is well off, married and bringing up a little girl learning to play the piano; but even here the moral dilemma is very questionable for are we to assume that the killing of men with education and culture is in some way particularly reprehensible? Does this imply that the targeted killing of men without these attributes is somehow more ethical? Munich was a bold venture that perhaps only a director with the stature of Spielberg could have got away with in Hollywood. Stephen Prince has seen the film as ‘the most sophisticated moral examination of terrorism and the response of a democratic society to it that Hollywood has produced’58 and the fact that it did appear to be even-handed has ensured that the film has gained positive reviews by film critics on both sides of the Atlantic, Frank Kermode even suggesting that the film is ‘balanced to the point of tedium’.59 Munich, however, is far from being balanced in the sense of, say, Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, a film that Spielberg has admired.60 It is not evident that Spielberg even intended any serious balance, given that he saw the film as a ‘prayer for peace’ in the

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context of the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror.’ This did little to dissuade Zionist critics from attacking an apparent moral equivalence between ‘terrorists’ and the counter-terrorism of the Mossad squad sent to kill them.61 The Israeli consul general in Los Angeles described the movie as ‘superficial’, ‘pretentious’ and ‘problematic’ and, for some on both the Right and the Left, it appeared that Spielberg had lost his way in an issue that raised radically diverse moral and political views.62 The movie is a cross between a gangster narrative centred on revenge and a special operations feature. But, unlike Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, this is in colour not black and white and there is a sense that the methods employed by the Mossad team are questionable in terms of their effectiveness and morality, even if the goal of preserving an Israeli state is never in question. The mother figure Golda Meir, prime minister of Israel at the time of the Olympics disaster, defines the moral basis of the Mossad operation. In one crucial early scene, she is presented in a side angle shot that positions the audience as detached observers while she works through, in the company of senior advisors including the head of Mossad and two generals, the logic of retaliatory action against an enemy ‘sworn to destroy us’. There can be no suggestion of a diplomatic response against an ‘uncivilised’ enemy, though the prime minister confesses, ‘I don’t know who these maniacs are and where they come from’ – an absurd remark suggesting that Mossad has no proper intelligence on the Palestinians. ‘They’re not recognisable’, she continues, and then after a reflective pause goes on: ‘You tell me what law protects people like that? (silence) Today I’m hearing with new ears. Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.’ Spielberg’s Golda Meir displays an outlook not so different to Kurtz’s ‘durable basis of morality’ in The Little Drummer Girl. However, the central imperative here is revenge rather than a strategy combining counter-terrorism operations with diplomatic dialogue. The revenge motif comes as much from gangster cinema as the cinema of war. It had been defined by the masterly figure of the enforcer in twentieth-century pulp fiction who displays a cool and ruthless professionalism in the enforcement of his boss’s will, exemplified by Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and Luca Brassi in The Godfather. The enforcer rarely has any moral doubts about the morality of what he does and is committed to the upholding of gangland codes of honour in a corrupt society where no one outside the immediate family can be really trusted.63 Golda Meir is, to this extent, a somewhat elderly godmother figure in the film, leaving her attendants to sort out the basics of the operation as she goes upstairs …. It is the constant emphasis on the moral parameters of Mossad’s enforcement operation that makes Spielberg’s movie unconvincing. Released four years after 9/11, the film is as much about the supposed morality of American counter-terrorism operations as those of Israel. Spielberg defended the film in his introduction as one aimed at stimulating debate – though exactly on what lines remains vague. A 2006 Channel Four documentary ‘Munich: Mossad’s Revenge’ suggested, from interviews with two unidentified Mossad agents, that there was no real moral agonising over the operation and targeted assassinations have continued into the years of the second intifada after September 2000. The operation Avner was supposedly involved in did not end because of doubts over its effectiveness, but because of the disastrous Lillehammer operation in Norway in November 1973, aimed at killing Ali Hassan Salameh, chief of

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operations of Black September and the supposed mastermind of the Munich Olympics operation. The Mossad squad in Lillehammer failed to kill Salameh and instead killed a Moroccan waiter. Six of the team of fifteen were captured and convicted of complicity to commit murder, an event that was a major blow to the intelligence agency’s prestige.64 In Spielberg’s Munich, Salameh is shown escaping from two attacks; the first is stopped by the intervention of CIA agents in London while a second attack on a compound in Spain goes wrong when the two attackers are discovered by a boy guard. Only at the end of the film are we informed that Salameh was eventually killed in January 1979, after five previous attempts, in a cab bomb in Beirut supposedly aided by a British woman working for Mossad called Erika Chambers (otherwise known as Agent Penelope). Chambers’s career, interestingly, had vague parallels with Le Carre’s fictional Charlie and indicates that Mossad continued its operations well after Wrath of God ended. With hindsight, Operation Wrath of God remained largely invisible until the publication of George Jonas’s book because it involved activities that did not command unconditional support from western governments. This attitude changed with the advent of the Reagan administration in Washington and a new climate of US approval for Israeli policy, though the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 necessitated a more coherent propaganda response to the western criticism of Israeli excesses. Erecting a myth of counter-terrorism operation defined by clear moral concerns a decade before provided a form of ethical cover for Mossad and ensured that it would not end up on screen as another variant of the nefarious CIA and its activities around the globe. How far can the issues thrown up by the film versions of The Little Drummer Girl and Munich be viewed as moral templates for later films dealing with counter-terrorism? Film producers in the years after 2005 began to focus on counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism operations by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Attacks by terrorist movements, purporting to be acting in accordance with strict interpretations of Islam such as Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab, Al Nusra and later Islamic State, led to a growing interest in the idea of a ‘global jihad.’ This has led to several films being released focusing on the complexities of modern counter-terrorism, involving the acquisition of good intelligence, targeted assassinations by special forces teams as well as drone and air strikes. In many the role of the CIA has been central, with some films looking at the characters of Agency personnel as well as rivalries with other agencies of the central state such as the State Department, the FBI and the NSA. This was a cinematic landscape, though, where film producers and directors found themselves dealing with a more complex security apparatus than the relatively cohesive and monolithic Israeli state, with its benign image of Golda Meir serving coffee in her home to military and intelligence advisors.

Epilogue

‘The Age of heroics is over’, remarked Jean Larteguy’s military intellectual Boisfeuras, held captive by the Viet Minh, in the novel The Centurions. ‘At least the age of cinema heroics. The new armies will have neither regimental standards nor military bands. They will have to be first and foremost efficient.’1 Larteguy’s novel first appeared in 1960, at a time when the wave of post-1945 Hollywood war features had yet to run its course. It presciently suggested that a new kind of cinema would be needed to deal with the kind of unconventional warfare. As I have sought to show in this book, such a cinema has only partially emerged within the wider war genre. The Second World War, in particular, continues to fascinate film producers on both sides of the Atlantic, exemplified by movies such as Fury and Dunkirk.2 If cinema has been mainly concerned with spectacle and an uncertain realism, it is not surprising that unconventional warfare continues to be marginalized or ignored in many war features. This form of war did not, after all, form the central imperative behind what Eric Hobsbawm has termed the short twentieth century of 1914–1991 based on inter-state war and social revolution.3 Only in the instance of the Chinese peasant revolution in the 1930ss and 1940s under Mao Zedong might a more compelling cinematic narrative have been constructed around peasant-based revolutionary ‘peoples war’, though, as we have seen, this was almost completely ignored by Hollywood and western film makers alike.4 The lurch by China into the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and the eventual reaction a decade later in the form of rapid capitalist modernization under Deng Xiaoping have probably ensured that any faithful Chinese cinematic depiction of Mao’s guerrilla remains unlikely in the immediate future, though a variety of melodramas have been released in China, such as Death and Glory in Changde (2010) and The Flowers of War (2011) depicting the suffering and destruction following the Japanese invasion in the late 1930s. Two global wars and the balance of nuclear terror in the Cold War ensured that guerrilla insurgencies and terrorism remained of marginal interest to film producers until the 1970s. War movies dominated cinema in the post-war era, with narratives centred on conventional war between nation states and heroic actions by individuals or combat units. By the 1960s some shifts were beginning to occur in the war genre, as a new generation of film-goers grew used to espionage thrillers, mercenary and action features, the latter often with terrorist nemeses. These movies reflected changing audience tastes for increasingly violent films that no longer cringed before conventional military hierarchies; some also began to deal

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with newer patterns of global conflict centred on weak post-colonial states and a breakdown in conventional norms of warfare. They focused on mercenaries and warlords in dark post-colonial settings, exemplified by such films as Blood Diamond and Beasts of No Nation. The filmography of unconventional war that emerged in American and European cinema in the six decades following the Second World War certainly offer some glimpses into conflicts involving insurgents, terrorists and special forces. All too often, they were driven by a desire to attract a mass audience with fantastical plot lines, melodramatic narratives and spectacular special effects at the expense of serious cinematic realism. Collectively, these devices distanced film audiences from the realities of unconventional war. Some of the difficulties encountered by those fighting this form of war could occasionally intrude into some mainstream combat films: for instance, the isolation of combat patrols in dangerous and menacing terrains (Merrill’s Marauders); an invisible enemy that looms out of jungles to launch sudden and menacing attacks (The Planters Wife, The 317th Platoon, The Green Berets); or problems of maintaining order and cohesion among small units riven by rivalries and jealousies (The Cockleshell Heroes, Bitter Victory, The Guns of Navarone). Such films viewed guerrilla war either from a top-down counter-insurgent perspective or through a ‘spec ops’ narrative in which specialized detachments conduct guerrilla-type operations behind enemy lines to confuse or divert enemy forces from conventional battle fronts. There were few movies that succeeded in penetrating the world of the rural insurgent fighting in post-1945 wars of national liberation, which remained for the most part an exotic mystery for cinema audiences. A few films certainly attempted to break through some of the cinematic fog surrounding unconventional war, but they have been usually set in an urban, rather than a rural, terrain: Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers for the FLN’s campaign of terrorism in Algiers in 1957; Costa Gavras’s State of Siege exploring a kidnapping by the Tupamaros in Uruguay; John Malkovich’s The Dancer Upstairs focusing on the capture of Abimael Guzman in Peru in 1992 and Uli Edel’s The Baader Meinhof Complex for the quixotic terrorist campaign by the RAF in West Germany in the early 1970s. These movies were quasi-documentary features influenced in varying degrees by neorealism and cinema verite. They often depicted relentless terrorist and counter-terrorist war, and have collectively established a set of cinematic standards. One exception to these urban-based terrorism movies was Stephen Soderbergh’s long biopic Che But, even here, little attention is paid to the dynamic between guerrilla insurgents and counter-insurgents, and the movie preferred to focus on the character of Che largely to the exclusion of wider political forces. The film reflects the constraints on filming rural guerrilla war, despite this form of war being of major importance in generating major social and political change in various parts of the developing world since the Second World War. As we have seen in this study, the films released on some of these rural insurgencies, such as The Planters Wife and Simba set in the colonial ‘emergencies’ in Malaya and Kenya, were portrayed from a colonial and British army perspective in which there is no serious attention to the nature of the guerrilla structure of command, its recruitment, training and political indoctrination or strategy and tactics.

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This cinematic black hole becomes even more astonishing when the post-1945 guerrilla war in Vietnam is considered, leading to the departure of France from Vietnam in 1954 and the later involvement of the United States. By the 1960s, the North Vietnamese had abandoned guerrilla war as the pivot of their strategic offensive against the South, though a guerrilla insurgency would continue to be fought there by the NLF (Vietcong). No serious film has so far been made attempting to tell the story of Vo Nguyen Giap and Ho Chi Minh and the insurgency against the French in the decade after the Second World War, or later the Americans in the 1960s and early 1970s. A few features were released on the French phase of this war such as Pierre Schoendoerffer’s 1965 film La 317e Section, focused on a small group of soldiers struggling to move to safety through an enemy-controlled jungle terrain in a remote part of North West Vietnam. The movie was one of the most important to be released on the guerrilla war in Indochina, though it remained isolated for years as interest focused on later American films on the Vietnam War or on urban terrorist campaigns. La 317e Section only found a new audience in the wake of Schoendoerffer’s widely publicized 1992 melodrama Dien Bien Phu, made with assistance from the Vietnamese government. Overall, the Vietnam War has been massively misrepresented by cinema, given the large number of Hollywood releases portraying it, whether on the battlefield, in cities such as Saigon or its domestic impact back in the United States. Many of these films were concerned with themes and issues internal to the United States rather than wider linkages with the Vietnamese, the NLF or NVA. Most were premised on a mythical view of the war which reached its apogee in Hollywood myth of unconventional war in the form of the lone warrior John Rambo, a myth which went on to shape a considerable number of action features until 9/11. It is possible that some of these lacunae in film making will be rectified in the future as narratives set in any number of rural insurgencies in South America, Africa, the Middle East or South East Asia eventually reach the cinema screen, even in low-budget features. There have already been some sporadic attempts to create new cinematic guerrilla heroes to add to the small number forged by mainstream cinema in the west such as T.E. Lawrence and Che Guevara. For instance, the leader of the Berber insurgency in the Rif Mountains of North Africa in the 1920s, Mohammed Abd elKrim (1882–1963), inspired, at least at a distance, a range of movies involving desert Arab rebels such as Sergeant Klems (1971). Some were romantic melodramas, involving the kidnapping of a white woman by a local Arab warrior before being rescued by a morally superior western hero. Others, such as the 1998 film Legionnaire (dir. Peter Macdonald and starring Jean Claude van Damme), depicted highly competent Arab guerrillas fighting against French colonial forces, who become disoriented by a desert landscape in which they do not belong.5 None of these films led to a distinctive screen narrative of Arab or Berber guerrilla warfare centred around the leadership of Abd el-Krim. He remains a marginal figure in the history of anti-colonial revolt, and fails to provide any sort of inspiring heroic guerrilla myth, mainly because he became filtered through an embedded cultural and political ideology of screen orientalism in Hollywood and European cinema. The same set of factors applies to the neglected film Lion of the Desert (1981) starring Anthony Quinn as the Libyan tribal leader Omar Mukhtar, who led a Bedouin

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revolt against Italian colonial rule in the 1920s until he was defeated by Mussolini’s military supremo General Graziani, and publicly hanged in 1931. Directed by the Syrian American producer and director Moustapha Al Akkad, Lion of the Desert is a remarkable portrayal of Arab guerrilla warfare and Italian counter-insurgency, involving tanks, infantry columns and artillery against Mukhtar’s guerrillas, who fight a desperate defensive war using cavalry and ambushes on desert terrains and mountain roads. Mukhtar’s film, generously supported by the Libyan regime of Omar Qaddafi, shows a relentless conflict in which huge numbers of civilians are taken off to bleak concentration camps in the desert. For all his romantic heroism, there is a sense that Mukhtar’s cause is irreparably doomed, with no possibility that wider international opinion against colonialism can secure eventual victory. This is signally unlike the FLN’s military defeat in Algiers in 1957, leading to French withdrawal from Algeria five years later, graphically depicted at the end of The Battle of Algiers. The movie suggested that the links between orientalist Arab imagery and fear of terror was a loose one, and had by no means the cohesion of the earlier Cold War fear of communist global expansion. The fear, when it surfaced, was still largely localized and for the most part outside the United States. This was exemplified by the narrative of a beleaguered US Special Forces squad on a snatch mission in Mogadishu in 1993. Ridley Scott’s film Black Hawk Down (2001) marked a return to an earlier period of adventure movies as the Americans fight a desperate rearguard action against faceless Somali mobs in a modern-day recreation of Zulu, helped by the lethal gunnery of Apache helicopters. This negative imagery towards Arabs would be repeated in a more virulent form in the neo-conservative movie Rules of Engagement (dir. William Franklin) in 2000 where US Marines defending the US embassy in Yemen come under attack by an evil-looking Arab crowd, including a young girl. Here the negative imagery dovetailed with a distrust of establishment forces such as an unreliable and duplicitous ambassador and a National Security Advisor anxious to make an example of the Marines. He destroys a video tape that would have exonerated the Marines after they fired on the crowd in self-defence, though he eventually receives his comeuppance. In this instance, crude orientalist representations of Arabs were impelled by a wider conspiracy theory premised on the idea that established institutions such as the Department of State are prone to letting down those serving in the US military. The events of 9/11 marked a watershed in cinema history. Film makers were now forced to confront not just evil Arabs or other species of malevolent secular terrorist but Islamic international terrorism, though some previous films such as Edward Zwick’s The Siege in 1998 had already begun to use this trope. Moreover, Hollywood had, for years, been engaging with terrorism in various forms, though from the time of the early Cold War this had been fear more than terror as many films focused on subversion, whether from Communist enemy agents (The Woman on Pier 13, I Married a Communist) or aliens from outer space (Invasion of the Body Snatchers). ‘Terrorism’ tropes in cinema evolved as a more systematized, and on occasions more politicized, form of fear by the 1970s in the context of a progressive demise of the idea that the United States could in some way stand aloof from the wider patterns of global politics.6 From the 1970s onwards, terrorism became an increasingly important trope in many action movies, while the terrorist movements such as the PIRA in Northern Ireland

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and Baader Meinhof Red Army Faction and the anarchist Revolutionary Cells (RZ) in Germany raised the prospect of terrorism spreading outwards across Europe and even to the United States, where there was an indigenous tradition of terrorism in movements such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Weathermen, the Black Panthers and the Symbionese Liberation Army. The decade of the 1970s also saw the rise of international terrorism centred on the Middle East leading to dramatic aircraft hijackings. These led to a series of action movies, including several on the Entebbe raid by Israeli commandos in 1976, freeing the passengers of an Air France jet hijacked by a small group of PFLP and RZ terrorists. Terrorism had long roots in cinema stretching back to the silent era, though it was normally linked to crime features rather than war movies. As I suggested in Chapter 3, Hollywood avoided a distinctive ‘terrorism’ subgenre, given how many narratives involving terrorism were viewed as politically controversial or simply very complicated. Indeed, films involving terrorists and terrorist movements can be complex and difficult to bring to the screen. The French director Olivier Assayas, who directed the TV series Carlos, even confessed that he did not think that the majority of the audience for the series would understand as much as 20 per cent of the complex narrative. For this reason, terrorism narratives often became simplified and subsumed within crime narratives, where terrorists often end up depicted as gangsters. It has been generally unusual for film producers, certainly in the west, to represent terrorist activities from the vantage point of the terrorists themselves. There have been some exceptions to this, such as some war-time special operations movies involving terrorist type activities such as sabotage or assassination, though even here several films, as I showed in Chapter 2, were careful to show senior commanders displaying considerable opposition to ‘dirty’ forms of war with no obvious strategic payoffs. In addition, a few Hollywood films also depicted quite positively Zionist terrorist activities against the British army in Palestine before the establishment of Israel in 1948. Films such as Sword in the Desert and Exodus were unusual for representing terrorists from inside out rather than outside in, and reflected a considerable, if not unlimited, fund of support for Israel in some quarters of Hollywood, though no new films of this kind were released after 1966, and no Hollywood features, significantly, were released on the 1967 or 1973 Arab–Israeli Wars. Hollywood’s engagement with ‘Islamic’ international terrorism remains problematical. It underwent a significant transformation, in the aftermath of 9/11, from counter-terrorism to counter-insurgency narratives in films set in Iraq and Afghanistan until the troop draw-down in 2011. The COIN films recalled some of the features in Vietnam War movies, including themes involving specialized military personnel: in Vietnam, The Green Berets, while in Iraq bomb disposal as well as a foray into the desert with the British SAS in Hurt Locker (2000); or military sniping in American Sniper (2014). Similarly, the Vietnam narrative of soldiers poorly commanded and allowed to run amuck depicted in Platoon (1986) become recreated in the poorly commanded Marines brutalizing and killing civilians after an IED attack in Battle of Haditha (2007). This is not to suggest that the Iraq and Afghanistan counter-insurgencies were exact replicas of Vietnam, though the memory of that war hung over several of the

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COIN movies released. But just as the Vietnam War has left such an imperfect and partial series of cinematic images, so too have the later US military interventions. Once again, we know little of the ‘terrorist’ enemies that the US soldiers and special forces engage with: they lack any clear identity as people and we know little of their command structure, though Battle of Haditha allowed some glimpse into former soldiers of Saddam Hussein’s army driven into an urban insurgent resistance and allied to radical mullahs in the mosques. But this did little to transform the overall cinematic stereotype of invisible and menacing terrorist enemies. The study of the feature films depicting terrorism in this book thus suggests only a partial and modest move forward since 1970s stereotypes of unhinged and frequently psychopathic crazies. One significant cinematic exploration of the human dimensions of terrorism was Uli Edel’s The Baader Meinhof Complex, with its focus on some of its troubling central characters such as Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof and the desperado Andreas Baader. The movie avoided depoliticizing terrorism like many Hollywood releases, though this was undoubtedly aided by the fact that the movement had been defeated some years before the film’s release, suggesting that the cinematic agenda for the humanization of terrorist characters is still quite limited and centred on individuals and organizations that no longer pose any significant challenge to the state. By this yardstick, it is easy to see why so many terrorist figures in the Middle East and elsewhere remain anonymous and depersonalized in most features. Bringing insurgent and terrorist campaigns to an end through negotiation has also remained off limits for most film makers, exemplified by the failure to represent the negotiations that ended the wars in Vietnam or Algeria. There is still no film to complete the story of the Battle of Algiers, revealing the political process by why De Gaulle eventually came to make the historic decision to withdraw from Algeria. There are also no films on the protracted negotiations in Paris before the US withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973, though some of the participants of the latter, including Henry Kissinger, are still alive. Few film producers, it needs to be acknowledged, have made films centred around diplomatic conferences. The pedestrian 1994 feature When Lions Roared (dir. Joseph Sargent), focusing at one point on the big three at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 is one notable exception. The fact that this film was made at all suggests that the conference needs to be of major global significance and widely enough known to have any sort of chance of box-office success. The continuing depersonalization by film makers of terrorists is thus of major significance at a time of growing fears in the west towards jihadist insurgent movements. Some military analysts have suggested that many of these movements have, since the late 1990s, put terrorist activity (or ‘propaganda of the deed’) at the centre of their strategic thinking.7 Terrorist acts such as bombings and shootings certainly command instant global publicity and ensure continuing attention among audiences across the Islamic world and beyond, where new jihadist recruits can be found. Terrorism has become transformed over the last two to three decades from being a relatively isolated form of urban insurgent warfare waged by isolated underground cells into a series of globally networked cells and underground communities hidden away in inner cities or banlieues. Some terror experts have suggested that this newer pattern of terrorism is nothing less than a ‘global jihad’, a controversial image that tends to fuel populist calls

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in various western states for strict controls on both refugees and immigrants from the Islamic world.8 The new globally networked terrorism is also increasingly anchored in the movement of peoples, especially the mass migration out of warzones such as those in Syria, Libya, Eritrea and Afghanistan. Some have called this ‘leaderless jihad’ and it lacks any clear set of anti-heroes like previous movements such as Al Qaeda and figures such as Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri (who have never featured in any major movie). These newer movements are as depersonalized as those in the anarchist Revolutionary Cells (RZ) in West Germany, emerging from anonymity to spread havoc and mayhem in mass killings such as the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris on 7 January 2015 or the truck attack in Nice on 14 July 2016. These modern terrorist attacks are mostly remembered by video footage taken at the time by amateur film makers with cell phones. They enter the filmography of the public imagination, but lack any coherent narrative beyond what eventually emerges of the individuals found to be responsible for them. These are often young men – and some women – who have often grown up in the west before becoming radicalized through friends, social media or the mosque. They receive some form of guerrilla training, sometimes in guerrilla camps in Afghanistan or the Middle East, though some attacks have been by self-starters or ‘lone wolves’ with little or no links to any wider jihadist network. Relatively film makers have, so far, released features that turn some of these life histories into compelling thriller-type narratives, with a few relying on TV rather than mainstream cinema. Personalizing terrorists and terrorist movements can be viewed as a positive political as well as cultural act, since terrorist movements often rely on anonymity to enhance the strategy of mass disorientation. One way of unravelling the humanity of terrorists is via dark comedy, exemplified by the 2010 British movie Four Lions (dir. Chris Morris) that lampooned four incompetent would-be British jihadist recruits. But satire only goes so far in such a highly charged political situation. Another angle is the fictionalized documentary exemplified by the 2004 TV film The Hamburg Cell (dir. Antonia Bird) dramatizing the members of the cell that planned the 9/11 attacks. Here the Jihadist Ziad Sharre is a confused and two-timing husband while Mohamed Atta is revealed as a puritanical autocrat consumed with hate. A more recent example of this approach has been the four-part 2017 television drama The State (dir. Peter Kosminsky) that has gone a considerable way towards trying to understand the sorts of people recruited by ISIS/Daesh in Syria and Iraq. Initially shown on British television, the series has gone worldwide on the National Geographic Channel and serves as an interesting example of what Kosminsky has called a ‘cautionary tale’, designed not only for security agencies and counter-terrorism experts but for ordinary young people at risk of being radicalized by social media. While some of the characters were drawn to ISIS through fairly detailed knowledge of Islam, others were clearly looking for excitement and escape from routine suburban lives. Indeed, one of the most frightening features of terrorism that emerges from these dramatizations is the mundane lives of most of those involved, replicating, to some degree, the boredom of many soldiers before momentary periods of highly charged battlefield conflict. As we have seen in this book, Hollywood has largely resisted pressure to depict terrorists as essentially ordinary people; not only does this threaten

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to undermine potentially exciting action or crime features, but it deprives film makers of the possibility of presenting evil nemeses needing to be destroyed in popular action movies. Hollywood fantasies have thus often stood in the way of personalizing those involved in terrorism, and helped perpetuate a stereotypical imagery of demonic devil with whom there can never be any serious negotiation. Film makers from other traditions, such as Ireland, have, by contrast, moved some way beyond this fantastical imagery of terrorism, though this has done little to avert a paranoia among sections of the American public and the 2016 presidential election campaign of Donald Trump. Fantastical terrorism is also replicated by the cinema of counter-terrorism, centred on drone warfare. This is one of the most important dimensions of unconventional war to filter into some new cinematic tropes, as the United States and other states have deployed growing numbers of Unaccompanied Aerial Combat Vehicles (UACVs) – otherwise known as drones – in the war against terrorist and jihadist insurgents.9 While these started off in the genre of science fiction movies, they have begun to form an increasing part in war narratives, as we saw in Chapter 4. Features such as Drone and Eye in the Sky suggest that drone attacks will become increasingly central to future counter-terrorism operations, linked to the deployment of special forcers teams on the ground engaged in raiding, assassination and intelligence gathering. This will not quite be the ‘war of the machines’ envisaged in the Terminator films of the 1980s, but certainly a radical departure from battlefield conflicts of the twentieth century. Overall, it has been Hollywood that has proved the more durable cinema when it comes to representing UW in feature films. The post-war cinemas of Britain and Italy were certainly of major importance for developing several tropes of insurgency and counter-insurgency, with Italian neorealism serving as an important terrain for the realistic portrayal of urban street war and partisan resistance in a grainy semidocumentary black and white style. Rome Open City, Paisa and The Battle of Algiers serve as major masterpieces of street-level neorealism that influenced numerous directors over the years. Likewise, the somewhat belated emergence of French cinema from the 1970s also provided a political engagement with counter-insurgency, picking up on the intense political and moral debate over the use of torture that started even while the Algerian War was still being fought. By the late 1990s, these cinemas, for a variety of different reasons, had largely run out of steam. The cinematic focus in recent years has largely centred on Hollywood, with a few films such as Zero Dark Thirty indicating that the former ‘age of heroics’ may be coming to an end. Hollywood’s domination, though, is by no means total as the British-Canadian production of Eye in the Sky suggests. Even some of Hollywood’s major action heroes such as Rambo have also become internationalized as they are emulated in Bollywood and Chinese cinema. As I suggested in Chapter 3, we may now be entering a period of the Hollywood high-end ‘cerebral’ action feature aimed at thinking audiences globally anxious to discuss and examine the precepts of unconventional warfare, the viability of torture in the extraction of ‘high level’ intelligence and the effectiveness of counter-terrorism operations. To this extent the cinema of unconventional warfare is of vital importance for military and strategic analysts, political pundits as well as film analysts.

Notes Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17

John J. Michalczuk, Costa-Gavras: The Political Fiction Film. Brule (WI) and Cable (WI): Alliance Art Pub, 1976. Major Robert M. Cassidy, ‘Why Great Powers Fight Small Wars Badly,’ Military Review, September–October, 2000, 41–52. David Maxwell, ‘Do We Really Understand Unconventional Warfare?’ Small Wars Journal, 23 October 2014. www.smallwarsjournal.com. Accessed 9 December 2017. Ibid. John Arquilla, Insurgents, Raiders and Bandits: How Masters of Irregular Warfare Have Shaped Our Modern World. Chicago: Iran R Dee, 2011. Sam Fuller, A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking. New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2002, 166. Orson Welles once remarked that some films, like those of John Ford, create myths while others, such as his own, apparently just examine how myth making influences human consciousness. Irving Singer, Cinematic Mythmaking. Cambridge (MA) and London: The MIT Press, 2010. Warren L. Susman, ‘ “Personality” and Twentieth Century Culture’ in John Higham and Paul K. Conkin (eds), New Directions in American Intellectual History. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979, 224. For the importance of film in the understanding of recent German history see Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film. Cambridge (MA) and London: Harvard University Press, 1989. Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth. Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2005, 132–135. I have borrowed the term from William H. McNeill, ‘The Care and Repair of Public Myth,’ Foreign Affairs, 61, 1 (Fall 1982), 1–13. Robert A. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1995, 59–60. Trevor B. McCrisken and Andrew Pepper, American History and Contemporary Hollywood Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005, 2. Bernard F. Dick, The Star Spangled Screen: The American World War II Film. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996, 260. Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres. New York: Random House 1981. Lawrence H. Suid, Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2002, 64–78; Jeanine Basinger, The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre. Middletown (CT): Wesleyan University Press, 2003. Basinger, The World War II Combat Film, 7–8. Kathryn McMahon, ‘History, Realism and the Limits of Exclusion,’ Journal of Popular Film and Television, 22, 1 (Spring 1994), 13.

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18 How non-western film audiences view these films is of course another vast and fascinating area. The anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker wrote a study of Hollywood in the late 1940s and noted that when South Sea islanders in the Pacific watched American films they tended to classify them into just two types: ‘kiss, kiss’ and ‘bang, bang’. Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood: The Dream Factory. Boston: Little Brown and Co, 1950, 14. 19 Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture. London: Basic Books, 1995. 20 Andrew Pulver, ‘Why Are We So Obsessed with Films about the Second World War?’ The Guardian, 17 July 2014. 21 Michael Hammond, ‘Some Smothering Dreams: The Combat Film in Contemporary Hollywood’ in Steve Neale (ed.), Genre and Contemporary Hollywood. London: BFI Pub, 2002, 65–66. 22 Christopher Coker, ‘Post-Modern War’, RUSI Journal, 143, 3 (June 1998), 7–14. See also Mary Kaldor, New Wars Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era. London: Polity Press, 2012, a book that has led to extensive debate. 23 Lucy Hughes Hallett in a recent book has suggested that heroism in the modern world ‘inspires terrorists and those who combat them’ and ‘shapes the rhetoric of our election campaigns’. ‘It also’, she suggests, ‘helps determine the choices made by democratic voters and it eases dictators’ ascent to power’. Significantly she excludes military heroism like Achilles, El Cid and Francis Drake that she describes in her study. Lucy Hughes Hallett, Heroes. New York: Alfred P. Knopf, 2004, 13. 24 Pascal Vennesson, ‘War without the Peoples’ in Hew Strachan and Sybille Scheipers (eds), The Changing Character of War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 241–253. Peoples’ wars continue at a lower level in some regions. For a recent survey see Thomas A. Marks and Paul B. Rich (eds), ‘Special Issue: Peoples Wars: Variants and Responses’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 28, 3 (June 2017). 25 Max Boot, ‘The Guerrilla Myth,’ Wall Street Journal, 18 January 2015; see also the same author’s Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present. New York: Norton, 2013; J. Bowyer Bell, The Myth of the Guerrilla. New York: Knopf, 1971. 26 See for example Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America. New York: Athenaeum, 1992; Stanley Corkin, Cowboys and the Cold War: The Western and U.S. History. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. 27 Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits. London: Abacus, 2004, 158. 28 David Gates, The Spanish Ulcer: A History of the Peninsula War. London: Pimlico, 2002; Charles Esdaile, The Peninsula War: A New History. London: Penguin, 2003. 29 Terry George’s 1998 film on the American counter-insurgency specialist John Paul Vann, A Bright Shining Lie, shows Vann not being taken seriously by fellow officers in the early 1960s when he announces he wants to go to South Vietnam. See also Oscar Salemink, ‘Pois and Maquis: The Invention and Appropriation of Vietnam’s Montagnards from Sabateur to the CIA’ in George W. Stocking (ed.), Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 30 The term ‘concentration camp’ in fact came from Cuba where the Spanish army created ‘reconcentrados’ to contain the Cuban civilians they captured in a violent counter-insurgency war in the 1890s. 31 The South African War was forgotten by the British film industry because it risked provoking old Boer-British animosities that had been apparently overlain by the

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36

37

38

39 40 41

42

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establishment of Union in 1910. No British feature films were made on guerrilla fighters such as Louis Botha, Jan Smuts and Deneys Reitz, despite the latter’s popular account of the war in Commando in 1929. It was Nazi Germany which released one of the few films made on the war in the form of the war-time propaganda film Ohm Kruger (Uncle Kruger) in 1941 starring the German movie star Emil Jannings. The film was banned by the post-war German government but can now be seen on YouTube. Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2003. Christopher Thorne, The War Eastern War: States and Societies, 1942–45. London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1986, 181n. Chalmers Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937–1945. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962. James F. Byrnes, Secretary of State from 1945 to 1947, described Asia as a ‘great smouldering fire’ that confronted ‘civilisation’ with ‘the task of bringing a huge mass of humanity, the majority of people on this earth, from the Middle Ages into the era of atomic energy’. James F. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, London: Heinemann, 1948, 204. Jerry Israel, ‘ “Mao’s Mr America”: Edgar Snow’s Images of China’, Pacific Historical Review, 47, 1 (February 1978), 110. Snow did not reject the idea that American values had no place in a future China, but considered that they should be employed behind a less corrupt movement than the KMT, whose leader he called a ‘megalomaniac’, a comment that ensured he was banned from returning to China in 1945. According to the Maoist sympathiser Agnes Smedley, Carlson visited Chu De in 1937 before the Second World War as a Captain in the US Marine Corps. He was impressed by an army that appeared to be ‘freeing and protecting the poor and the oppressed’. Agnes Smedley, The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chuh Teh. New York and London: Monthly Review, 1956, 367–368. Adam Weinstein, ‘Colonel Evans Fordyce Carlson: Our Most Patriotic Communist?’ Pacific Standard, 2 July 2015; Michael D. Hull, ‘Evans Carlson Forms Carlson’s Raiders’, Warfare History Network, 27 July 2015. www.warfafrehistorynetwork.com. Accessed 4 August 2017. Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977, 262–263. M.J. Heale, American Anticommunism: Combatting the Enemy from Within, 1830– 1970. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990, 154. See for details Scott Ladermann, ‘Hollywood’s Vietnam: 1920–1964: Scripting Intervention, Spotlighting Injustice’, Pacific Historical Review, 78, 4 (2009), 580, 578–607. An analysis of his diaries and correspondence reveals a restless and deviant touristturned-revolutionary idealist, who never took any serious interests in the peoples and cultures of contemporary South America, let alone those of Central Africa. Paul B. Rich, ‘People’s War Antithesis: Che Guevara and the Mythology of Focismo’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 28, 3 (2017), 451–487. New York Times, 30 May 1969. The head of Fox Studios, Richard D. Zanuck, was puzzled by Che’s appeal to many of the younger generation who no longer seemed interested in films Fox was producing such as Doctor Dolittle (1967). Robert Cashill, ‘Che’ Cineaste, XL, 2 (2015). See for instance Simon Red-Henry, Fidel and Che: A Revolutionary Friendship. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2009.

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46 Aaron Baker, Steven Soderbergh. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011, 87. 47 See in particular Michael Casey, Che’s Afterlife. New York: Vintage Books, 2009. 48 For Che’s discussion with Nasser see Mohammed Heikal, The Cairo Documents. New York: Doubleday, 1973. 49 Bard O’Neill, From Revolution to Apocalypse: Insurgency & Terrorism. Dulles (VA): Potomac Books, 2005, 33. 50 The historiography of modern terrorism is now huge. Though tighter regulation on access to explosives such as the British government’s 1882 Explosives Act more or less ended the IRA’s dynamite war. Carr Infernal Machine, 71. 51 Anthony Shaw, Cinematic Terror. London: Bloomsbury 2015, 15. 52 O’Neill, Insurgency and Terrorism, 34. 53 Frederick J. Hacker, Crusaders, Criminals and Crazies: Terror and Terrorism in Our Times. New York: Norton, 1976, 294. 54 Peter R. Neumann and M.L.R Smith, The Strategy of Terrorism: How It works and Why It Fails. London: Routledge, 2008, 94–95 and passim. 55 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. London: Allen and Unwin, 1951, 466. 56 Matthew Carr, Infernal Machine: An Alternative History of Terrorism. London: Hurst, 2011, 73–74. 57 Paul B Rich, Thriller Cinema and Irish Terrorism. London Routledge (forthcoming). 58 Carr, Infernal Machine, 89. 59 Albert Parry, Terrorism: From Robespierre to the Weather Underground. New York: Dover Publication, 1976, 35. For anarchist terrorism in Europe see Alex Butterworth, The World That Never Was. London: Vintage Books, 2011. This was the era in which some authors tried to link terrorism with totalitarianism of either the Nazi or Soviet kind links, such as Jillian Becker’s portrait of the Baader-Meinhof ‘gang’ as a group of wilful children of Nazi parentage toying with terrorism as a perverse game. Gillian Becker, Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. London: Michael Joseph, 1977. 60 Carr, Infernal Machine, 265–269. 61 Audrey Kurth Cronin, How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns. Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press, 2009. 62 Roger Griffin, Terrorists Creed: Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 16–17. 63 Elaine Martin, ‘The Global Phenomenon of Humanising Terrorism in Literature and Culture’, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, Purdue University Press. Htto.11dx.doc.org/107771/1481–4379.1–23. Accessed 1 October 2016. 64 Alexander George, ‘The Discipline of Terrorology’ in Alexander George (ed.), Western State Terrorism. London: Polity Press, 1991, 76–93. 65 Stephen Prince, Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009, 72–73.

Chapter 1 1

2

Prosser Gifford and W. Roger Louis, The Transfer of Power in Africa. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982; John Darwin, Britain and Decolonisation: The Retreat from Empire in the Postwar World. Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press, 1988. For a comparison of Algeria and Rhodesia see Martin Thomas, Fight or Flight: Britain, France and Their Roads from Empire. Oxford: University Press, 2014, 316–347.

Notes 3 4

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6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13

14 15

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17 18 19 20

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Susan Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, The Media and Colonial Counter-Insurgency, 1944–1960. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1995. Ibid., 50–63. Sinfield suggests that the United States was viewed by some British novelists in terms of images of corruption and juvenile delinquency. Alan Sinfield, Postwar Britain, London: Basil Blackwell, 1989, 136. This would be amplified in cinema by films such as The Wild Ones (1953), The Blackboard Jungle (1955) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). I.C Jarvie, ‘Fanning the Flames: Anti-American Reaction to Operation Burma (1945)’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 1, 2 (1981), 131–132; Ian Jarvie, ‘The Burma Campaign on Film: “Objective Burma” ’ (1945), ‘The Stillwell Road’ (1945) and ‘Burma Victory’ (1945), Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 8, 1 (1988), 55–69. Susan Hayward, ‘Framing National Cinema’ in Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie (eds), Cinema & Nation. London and New York: Routledge, 2012, 99–100. John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Radio. London and New York: Routledge, 1982, 205. Some critics saw High Treason as the closest any British film got to McCarthyism on film. Tony Shaw, British Cinema and the Cold War. London: I.B Tauris, 2001, 40–45. Susan Carruthers, ‘Two Faces of 1950s Terrorism: The Film Presentation of Mau and the Malayan Emergency’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 6, 1 (Spring 1995); Winning Hearts and Minds: The British Government, The Media and Colonial CounterInsurgency, 1944–1960. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1995. Alastair Mackenzie, ‘Rebirth of the SAS: The Malayan “Emergency” ’, History Reader, 9 February 2012. Parick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988, 40–43. Freddie Spencer Chapman, The Jungle Is Neutral. London: Chatto and Windus, 1949, 125–126. See for example John Chynoweth, Hunting Terrorists in the Jungle. Stroud: Tempus, 2004, 34. The title of Chynoweth’s book though suggests that for some at least in the army counter-insurgency in Malaya was rather like being on a hunt. Shaw, British Cinema and the Cold War, 54. Richard Stubbs, ‘The Malayan Emergency and the Development and the Development of the Malayan State’ in Paul B Rich and Richard Stubbs (eds), The Counter-Insurgent State: Guerrilla Warfare and State Building in the Twentieth Century. Houndmills: The Macmillan Press, 1997, 50–69. Larry E. Cable., Conflict of Myths: The Development of American Counterinsurgency Doctrine and the Vietnam War. New York and London: New York University Press, 1986, 92. Harper and Porter, see Chapter Five, 44. Jonathan Block and Patrick Fitzgerald, British Intelligence and Covert Action. London: Brandon, 1983, 144–145. Charles Townshend, Britain’s Civil Wars: Counterinsurgency in the Twentieth Century. London: Faber and Faber, 1986, 200–201. Caroline Elkins, ‘Terrorising Mau Mau: Britain’s Gulag in Kenya’, History Today, February 2005, 45. The colonial administration in Kenya struggled to present the torture of Mau Mau suspects as actions that fell inside the law. David M. Anderson, ‘British Abuse and Torture in Kenya’s Counter-Insurgency, 1952–1960’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 23, 4–5 (October–December 2012), 700–719.

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21 Carruthers, ‘Two Faces of 1950s Terrorism’, 30–31. 22 New York Times, 22 October 1956. 23 Barbara W. Tuchman, Sand against Wind: Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–45. London: Macmillan, 1981, 349. 24 Ibid., 417. 25 James Russell Ullman, Windom’s Way. London: The Companion Book Club, 1954, 35. 26 Ibid., 72. Damien Lewis, Churchill’s Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes on WWII. London: Quercus, 2014. 27 Ian Hall, ‘The Revolt against the West: Decolonisation and Its Repercussions in British International Thought, 1945–75’, The International History Review, 33, 1 (March 2011), 43–64. 28 Shaw, British Cinema and the Cold War, 55. 29 New York Times, 3 September 1964. 30 Peter Moss, Distant Archipelagos: Memories of Malaya. London: Universe, 2004, 233. 31 Simon Robbins, ‘The British Counter-Insurgency in Cyprus’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 23, 4–5 (October–December 2012), 720–743. 32 Ian Bennett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies: Modern Guerrillas and Their Operations since 1750. London: Routledge, 2001, 195–196. 33 The issue became publicized by John Paul Vann after he served as adviser to Colonel Huyn Van Cao of the ARVN IV Corps, a narrative that reached the screen in the film A Bright Shining Lie (1998). 34 For details on the CIA’s involvement with the Nungs going back to the 1950s see Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. New York: Dell, 1980, 106–107; Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, 179. 35 The French concentrated on the Tai peoples who lived along the rail from Laos into Vietnam, though their efforts to mobilize the tribe in opposition to the Viet Minh occurred too late to alter the tide of the war. Bernard Fall, Street without Joy. Mechanicsburg (PA): Stackpole Press, 1989 (1st edn 1961), 267–268. 36 Oscar Salemink, ‘Pois and Maquis: The Invention and Appropriation of Vietnam’s Montagnards from Sabateur to the CIA’ in George W. Stocking (ed.), Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 270. 37 Ibid., 273. 38 Rebecca Onion, ‘The Snake-Eaters and the Yards’, Slate, 27 November 2013. 39 In the case of neighbouring Laos, the CIA harnessed the Meo people who were similar in many ways to the Montagnards. It was intended to use the Meos to harass the NVA coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail as well as defending the air force beacons placed on mountain tops to help incoming US planes. Of an estimated 250,000 Meos in 1962 only a few thousand escaped to Thailand in 1975. Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, 178. Patrick M. Hughes, Memoirs of Religion, Traditions and Legends: Indigenous People under Siege in Cambodia. CreateSpace Ind. Pub., 2012. 40 Howard Sochurfk, ‘American Special Forces in Action in Viet Nam’, National Geographic, January 1965. 41 Frontier Vietnam Montagnard Tribes Defend South Vietnam, documentary film, nd (1963?). www.youtube.com/watch?vc59Bd9tjb27u 42 Robin Moore, The Green Berets. New York and London: St Martin’s Press, 1969 (1st edn 1965), 405.

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43 Ibid., xv–xvi. 44 Ibid., 263. 45 Randy Roberts and James S. Olson, John Wayne American. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995, 539–540. 46 Daniel C. Hallin, The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1992, 156. The Montagnards did not return the compliments though. When John Wayne travelled to Pleiku in the Central Highlands in June 1966 while on a tour of South Vietnam he attended a screening of the John Ford film Fort Apache. The Montagnards in the audience cheered whenever the Indians attacked the whites even though they had no understanding of American frontier history. Roberts and Olson, John Wayne American, 542. 47 Cited in ibid., 156. 48 Lawrence H. Suid, ‘The Making of The Green Berets’, Journal of Popular Film, VI, 2 (1977), 112; Guts and Glory, esp. 247–256. 49 Bernard F. Dick, The Star Spangled Screen: The American World War II Film. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1985, 252. 50 Suid, Guts and Glory. 51 Ibid., 114–115. 52 Ibid., 116–117.

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William H. McRaven, Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare: Theory and Practice. New York: Presidio Press, 1996. Surprise by itself though does not always mean even relative superiority, especially if the enemy is extremely well defended and able to respond quickly to sudden attack. Cited in Max Hastings, The Korean War. London: Pan Books, 1987, 299–300. The near-sacred nature of this myth was exposed in 2015 when a remake by Universal Pictures of the original Dad’s Army feature film asserted that Britain was ‘on the brink of defeat’: a statement that ‘outraged’ many cinema-goers. ‘Don’s Panic! We weren’t losing the war in 1944: Outrage After Dad’s Army film voiceover declares Britain was “on the brink of defeat”,’ Mail on Sunday 20 December 2015. See also Jeffrey Richards, Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad’s Army. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997, 351–366. Nicholas Rankin, Churchill’s Wizards: The British Genius for Deception, 1914–1945. London: Faber and Faber 2008, 386–391. David French, ‘Colonel Blimp and the British Army: British Divisional Commanders in the War against Germany, 1939–1945’, English Historical Review, CXI (November 1996), 1182–1201. Hugh Purcell, The Last English Revolutionary: A Biography of Tom Wintringham. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2012 (1st edn 2004). Freddie Spencer Chapman, fighting the Japanese in Malaya, found the weapon clumsy and awkward given that it had various knobs and swivels that easily caught on the dense vegetation. Chapman, The Jungle Is Neutral, 55. Max Hastings also tells the story of a four-man British patrol in Korea in the early 1950s fated with having all their Sten guns jamming as they met a Chinese patrol. Max Hastings, The Korean War. London: Pan Books 1988, 364.

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Notes The name ‘Commando’ was initially rejected and instead it was proposed that the force should be called ‘Special Service Battalions’ or ‘Special Service Brigade’ – this was later scotched when it was realized that it would be end being shortened to ‘SS’. Nicholas Rankin, Ian Fleming’s Commandos: The Story of 30 Assault Unit in WWII. London: Faber and Faber 2011, 119–120. One raid on the Channel Islands led to an attack on a base left empty when the German soldiers were out watching a film while other raiders ended up on the wrong island. Rankin, Ian Fleming’s Commandos, 106–107. Jamie Doward, ‘Unknown Heroes Who Faced Death behind Nazi Lines Keep Their Secrets’, The Observer, 23 August 2015. Cited in Lorna Almonds-Windmill, Gentleman Jim: The Wartime Story of the Founder of the SAS and Special Forces. Barnsley: Pen & Swords Books, 2011, 101. John Newsinger, ‘Who Dares…’, History Today, 48, 12 (December 1998), 40. Larry E. Cable, Conflict of Myths: The Development of American Counterinsurgency Doctrine and the Vietnam War. New York and London: New York University Press, 1986, 77. Although the former Director of the SAS Peter de la Billiere has claimed that the SAS played a major role in the Malayan emergency, its performance was marginal given that the counter-insurgency was heavily based on resettlement of the population and the creation of what John Newsinger has termed a ‘veritable police state’. John Newsinger, ‘Who Dares…’ History Today, 48, 12 (December 1998), 40. The film is discussed in Rankin, Ian Fleming’s Commandos, 392–393. Gavin Mortimer, The SBS in World War II: An Illustrated History. Oxford: Osprey Pub, 2013, 16–17. James Owen, Commando: Winning World War II behind Enemy Lines. London: Little Brown, 2012, 210. C.E. Lucas Phillips, Cockleshell Heroes. London: Heinemann, 1956 (Repr. Pan Books 2000). Mountbatten had even approved, against his better judgement, sending the commander of the Royal Navy’s boom patrol detachment, Major H.G. Hasler, on the raid even though it was judged so risky that few or none of the raiders was expected to return. Philip Ziegler, Mountbatten: The Official Biography. London: Collins, 1985, 167–168. Ian Christie (ed.), Powell, Pressburger and Others. London: BFI, 1978; Nanette Aldred, ‘A Canterbury Tale: Powell and Pressburger’s Film Fantasies of Britain’ in David Meller (ed.), A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain, 1935–55. London: Lund Humphries for the Barbican Gallery, 1987, 117–124. Both men wanted to work with John Davis and Earl St John, who offered a sevenyear contract. They turned this down and completed only one film for Rank. Nathalie Morris, ‘Ill Met by Moonlight (1957)’, www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/500329. Accessed 19 August 2015. Patrick Leigh Fermor, ‘Afterward’ in W. Stanley Moss, Ill Met by Moonlight. London: Cassell, 2014, 177. Ibid., 175. For details see Ben Macintyre, SAS Rogue Heroes. London: Penguin Random House, 2016. Quayle seemed particularly obsessed by appearances, writing in his autobiography ‘My friends (in Albania) were in bad shape. All but one had grown long bears, only

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Jim Crane was clean-shaven. Through all their ordeals he had kept a soldier’s pride in his appearance’. Anthony Quayle, A Time to Speak. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1990, 297. See also Roderick Bailey, The Wildest Province: SOE in the Land of the Eagle. London: Jonathan Cape, 2008, 206–218. Marina Eleftheriadou, ‘Z and Other Cinematic Tales from the 30-year Greek Civil War’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 26, 4 (August 2015), 618–619. “One critic wrote that ‘This was not the kind of film being made in the United States in 1960 and is still not.“ ‘Five Branded Women’, www.threemoviebuffs.com. Accessed 19 August 2017. Gabriel Miller, The Films of Martin Ritt: Fanfare for the Common Man. Oxford (MI): University of Mississippi Press, 2000. He also made the disastrous big budget flop The Molly Maguires in 1970, dealing with anarchist sabotage in the coal mining communities of nineteenth-century Pennsylvania. Clarisse Loughrey, ‘Jeanne Moreau: The Cinema Icon Who Defined French Cool’, The Independent, 31 July 2017. For Stuart see Charlton Ogburn, The Marauders. London: Quality Book Club, 1959 (1st edn 1956), 201. Suid, Guts and Glory, 425. Lisa Dombrowski, If you Die I’ll Kill You: The Films of Samuel Fuller. Middletown (CO): Wesleyan University Press, 2008, 144–145. New York Times, 14 June 1962. Ogburn, The Marauders, 104. Fuller, A Third Face, 376. McRaven, Spec Ops, 158. Giles Milton, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. London: John Murray, 2017, 148–149. Marvin was everyone’s idea of the tough, hard-boiled soldier hero. The actor Ian Holm has suggested that Marvin portrayed the ‘man of violence who looked capable of raw brutality’ making even John Wayne look ‘artificial and glossy’. Ian Holm, Acting My Life: An Autobiography. London: Bantam Press, 2004, 121. The New York Times, June 16, 1967. Radio Times, 29 January 2006. Callum MacDonald, The Killing of Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich. London: Macmillan, 1989, 78. Ibid., 125. Ibid., 190. Forrest Bryant Johnson, Hour of Redemption: The Heroic Saga of America’s Most Daring POW Rescue. New York: Warner, 2002, 95. The only real purpose was to release fellow prisoners from the Japanese, a ‘personal commitment’ hat McRaven has noted rather stands at odds with the ethos of contemporary professional forces. McRaven, Spec Ops, 282–283. The Princesa atrocity was not even an effective way to dispose of the prisoners, involving as it did the use of precious aviation fuel. It also failed to kill all the prisoners since eleven managed to escape to another island to tell the tale. The US high command in the Pacific was concerned that the atrocity might be repeated with the possible backlash from domestic public opinion in the United States if it was discovered that no efforts had been made at rescue. For details of the Princesa atrocity see Hampton Sides, Ghost Soldiers: The Astonishing Story of One of Wartime’s Greatest Escapes. London: Abacus, 2005, 7–17.

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49 James Plath, ‘The Great Raid – DVD Review’, Movie Metropolis, 22 September 2006. http://moviemet.com/review/great=raid-dvd-review-0. Accessed 16 October 2014. Some estimates of Japanese casualties from the Filipino mop-up are as high as 2,000, twice those of the main raid. Robert Lapham and Bernard Norling, Laphams Raiders: Guerrillas in the Philippines 1942–1945. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996, 181. 50 The screenplay by Carlo Bernard and Doug Miro used The Great Raid on Cabanatuan by William B. Breuer and Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides. 51 Roger Ebert, ‘Review of The Great Raid’, 11 August 2005. www.rogerebert.com. Accessed 9 August 2017. 52 Rankin, Ian Fleming’s Commandos. London: Faber and Faber, 2011, 321. 53 Larry Cable, Conflict of Myths: The Development of American Counterinsurgency Doctrine and the Vietnam War. New York and London: New York University Press, 1986, 141. 54 It can be argued though that one of the first films to give a positive representation in counter-insurgency operations was The Green Berets in 1968. 55 Andrew J. Birtle, US Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1942–1976. Washington DC: Center of Military History, US Army, 2006, 479. 56 Peter Bergen, Manhunt: From 9/11 to Abbottabad – The Ten-Year Search for Osama bin Laden. London: Vintage Books, 2013, 51–52. 57 Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars, London: Penguin Books, 2013, 102–103. 58 It has been claimed the SAS squad was tasked with destroying Iraqi Scud missiles. The operation was one of several SAS missions into Iraq, though the only one to feature in several popular books as well as the documentary One That Got Away by Paul Greengrass. The film was widely viewed as one of the most successful special forces ventures in the 1990s, contrasting dramatically with the ill-fated US special forces venture into Mogadishu in 1993. See General Sir Peter de la Billiere, Storm Command: A Personal Account of the Gulf War. London: HarperCollins, 1993, 224–225, 235–249. Andy McNab, Bravo Two Zero. London: Corgi, 2013.

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A.O. Scott, ‘Pinned under the Weight of Skyscrapers and History in “World Trade Center” ’, The New York Times, 9 August 2006. Such as the CIA unit known as Alec Station established in 1995 to understand the functioning and leadership of AQ. The Unit was absorbed into more general counterterrorism operations a decade later as it was realized that AQ did not function like a traditional hierarchical terrorist organization but on a more horizontal and decentralized basis Mark Mazzetti, ‘C.I.A. Closes Unit Focused on Capture on of bin Laden’, New York Times, 4 July 2006. Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, 353. Maltby suggests that Jimmy Cagney’s White Heat (1949) provided an early example of this kind of hectic action movie form. See for example Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema. London and New York: Routledge, 1993, 93–94 and passim. For DeMille see Anton Karl Kozlovic, ‘Cecille B DeMille: Hollywood Macho Man and the Theme of Masculinity within His Biblical (and Other) Cinema’, Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality, 2, 2 (June 2008), 116–138.

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Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity. New York: Vintage Books, 2005, 42. Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1815. London: Pimlico, 2003, 362–363. In the Dirty Harry film, The Enforcer, there is a brief terrorism theme when Callahan encounters Bobby Maxwell of the ‘People’s Revolutionary Strike Force’. The group steals clothes to disguise themselves for a crime spree and even acquire M72 LAW rockets and M16 rifles. Their motives though are more monetary than political. Callahan eventually tracks them down to Alcatraz and eliminates them in a gun battle. Paul B. Rich, ‘Hollywood and Cinematic Representations of Far-Right Domestic Terrorism in the US’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 26 March 2018. Council of Foreign Relations, International Institutions and Global Governance Program, U.S. Opinion on Terrorism, September 04, 2009, www.cfr.org. Accessed 30 November 2017. Stephen Prince, Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009, 34. See the remarks of James Gow, War and War Crimes. London: Hurst, 2013, 116. Though the idea of catastrophic aerial terror attacks has a long history in popular fiction it stretches back to novels like Doom of the Great City in 1893 when anarchists attack London in an airship. See Matthew Carr, The Infernal Machine: An Alternative History of Terrorism. London: Hurst, 2011, 67. The trope was still evident in Stephen Spielberg’s Munich in 2005 when a group of apparently naïve American athletes assist the Palestinian hijackers at the start of the film in scaling the iron gate into the compound housing the Israeli athletics team. Though Riegler has suggested that several became more political in the wake of the 1993 attacks. Thomas Riegler, ‘Through the Lenses of Hollywood: Depictions of Terrorism in American Movies’, Perspectives on Terrorism, 4, 2 (2010). www.terrorism. org. Accessed 19 June 2017. A problem recognized by Paul Hirst even before 9/11 in War and Power in the 21st Century. London: Polity, 2001, 97. Lawrence Wright, The Terror Years. London: Constable, 2016, 205. Ibid., 200–210. Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States. N.p.: Ebury Press, 2012, 235. Tricia Jenkins, ‘Get Smart: A look at the General Relationship between Hollywood and the CIA,’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 29, 2 (2009), 229. It was not until 2011 that the movie J. Edgar (with Leonardo Di Caprio starring as the FBI’s first director J. Edgar Hoover) that a rather darker screen narrative finally began to emerge of the FBI’s first director J. Edgar Hoover. In the film, Hoover is depicted as a highly political lawman. Even before the establishment of the FBI, he discredits the marriage of the anarchist Emma Goldman to secure her deportation for radical conspiracy, even though she was an American citizen. Jenkins, ‘Get Smart’, 230. Washington followed James Earl Jones as Admiral James Greer in Clear and Present Danger and Sydney Poitier as FBI deputy director Carter Preston in The Jackal. Prince, Firestorm, 56. The film script was influenced heavily by the work of the journalist Patrick Wright, who published The Looming Tower: Al Qaida and the Road to 9/11 in 2007, winning a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

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24 Stephen Holden, ‘A Feverish Thriller That Leaves No Car Unturned’, New York Times, 8 June 2001. 25 Roger Ebert, Review of ‘Swordfish’, 8 June 2001, www.rogerebert.com Accessed 3 November 2016. 26 Philip French, ‘Swordfish Is a Very Funny Word but a Very Silly Film’, The Guardian, 29 July 2001. 27 See, for example, Michael Hammond, ‘Some Smothering Dreams: The Combat Film in Contemporary Hollywood’ in Steve Neale (ed.), Genre and Contemporary Hollywood. London: BFI Publishing, 2002, 74. 28 Stephen Holden, ‘Terrorism That’s All Too Real’, The New York Times, 31 March 2002. 29 John Hellmann, American Myth and Legacy of Vietnam. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, 212–214. 30 David Morell, First Blood. Bicester (OX): Headline Publishing Group, 2006 (1st edn 1972). 31 Ray Mears is a bush craft expert who has made a number of programmes for British TV on bush craft techniques and survival in the wilderness. 32 The film did not convince all critics and Janet Maslin in the New York Times thought Rambo ‘almost a Boy Scout, and a phenomenal Boy Scout at that’, Janet Maslin, ‘First Blood (1982)’, New York Times, 22 October 1982. 33 Robert B. Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985, 324–325. 34 John Hellmann, ‘Rambo’s Vietnam and Kennedy’s New Frontier’, in Michael Anderegg (ed.), Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television. Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1991, 141. 35 Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema. London: Routledge, 1993, 107. 36 For a more general discussion see Harvey R. Greenberg, ‘Dangerous Recuperation: Red Dawn, Rambo and the New Decaturism’, Journal of Popular Film & Television, 15, 2 (Summer 1987), 60–70. 37 Harry W. Haines, ‘ “They Were Called and They Went”: The Political Rehabilitation of the Vietnam Veteran’, in Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud (eds), From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 88. 38 Gregory A Waller, ‘Rambo: Getting to Win This Time’ in From Hanoi to Hollywood, 119–120. 39 David Puttnam, The Story so Far. London: Sphere Books, 1988, 320. 40 Ramin Setoodeh, ‘Sylvester Stallone Is Retiring from Playing Rambo’, Variety, 5 January 2016. 41 ‘The Senate Committee’s Report on the C.I.A’s Use of Torture’, New York Times, 9 December 2014; Senate Select Committee on Intelligence – Amnesty International. www.amnestyusa.org. 42 I have examined this issue at greater length in Paul B. Rich, ‘Cinema, Drone Warfare and the Framing of Counter-Terrorism’, Defence & Security Analysis, 34, 2 (2018). 43 Peter Bradshaw called the film ‘cack-handed and boring’. Peter Bradshaw, ‘Code Name: Geronimo – The Hunt for Osama in Laden – Review’, The Guardian, 12 December 2012. 44 Peter Bergen, Manhunt. From 9/11 to Abbottabad – The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden. London: Vintage, 2013, 100.

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45 Ibid., 122–123. 46 Prince, Firestorm, 17–18. For the CIA’s analysts’ efforts to process huge quantities of data see the revealing novel by Susan Hasler, Intelligence: A Novel of the CIA. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2010. 47 Alex von Tunzelmann, ‘Zero Dark Thirty’s Torture Scenes Are Controversial and Historically Dubious’, The Guardian, 25 January 2013. 48 Richard Spencer, ‘Revealed: The True Story of “Maya”: The CIA Analyst Who Hunted Down bin Laden’. The Daily Telegraph, 20 December 2014. 49 See especially Sherrie A. Inness, Tough Girls: Women Warriors and Wonder Women in Popular Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. 50 Bergen, Manhunt. From 9/11 to Abbottabad, 78. 51 One unnamed person interviewed by Steve Coll who was a participant in White House discussions, the CIA ‘really went to war’ after the attack as the White House ‘stood back’. Steve Coll, ‘The Unblinking Stare: The Drone War in Pakistan’, The New Yorker, 24 November 2014. 52 David Maxwell ‘Unconventional Warfare Does Not Belong to Special Forces’, War on the Rocks, 2 August 2013, www.warontherocks.com. Accessed 9 December 2017. 53 Paul Kendall, ‘Zero Dark Thirty: Fact v Fiction’, Daily Telegraph, 23 January 2015; Ben Khentish, ‘Former US Navy Seal Robert O’Neill Describes the Moment He “Shot Dead bin Laden” ’, The Independent, 30 April 2017. 54 Craig Whitlock and Barton Gellman, ‘To Hunt Osama bin Laden, Satellites Watched Over Abbottabad, Pakistan, and Navy Seals’, Washington Post, 29 August 2103; Kelsey D. Atherton, ‘New Details Emerge on the Surveillance Technology Used to Hunt bin Laden’, Popular Science, 30 August 2013, www.popsci.com. Accessed 30 November 2017. 55 Tony Shaw and Tricia Jenkins, ‘From Zero to Hero: The CIA and Hollywood Today’, The Cinema Journal, 56, 2 (Winter 2017), 91–113. 56 Naomi Wolf, ‘A letter to Kathryn Bigelow on Zero Dark Thirty’s Apology for Torture’, The Guardian, 4 January 2013. 57 Steve Coll, ‘“Disturbing” & “Misleading”’, The New York Review of Books, 7 February 2013. 58 ‘ “Zero Dark Thirty” writer Mark Boal on the Film’s Torture Controversy’, Airtalk, 12 February 2013, www.scpr.org. Accessed 5 December 2017. 59 Irin Carmon, ‘ “Zero Dark Thirty” Goes Feminist’, Salon, 2 January 2013. 60 M.L.R Smith, ‘Game of Drones: Reviewing “Eye in the Sky”,’ warontherocks.com. Accessed 18 July 2017. 61 Craig Chalquist, ‘ “Star Wars”: Modern Myth or Tantalizing Submyth?’ Huffpost, 12 March 2103, www.huffpost.com. Accessed 8 December 2017, see also Ursula K. Leguin, The Language of the Night. London and New York: Berkley Pub, 1985. 62 Patrick Brzeski, ‘Cannes: Indian “Rambo” Remake Finds It Answer to Stallone (Exclusive)’, The Hollywood Reporter, 18 May 2017; Tom Phillips, ‘China Finds Its Own Top Gun and Rambo in Wave of Patriotic Movies’, The Guardian, 23 September 2017. 63 CBS News, 25 May 2013. 64 Adrian Guelke, ‘Redefining the Global War on Terror?’, n.p, www.lse.ac.uk. Accessed 2 November 2016. 65 Scott Thill, ‘Cerebral Sci-Fi Films That Wipe Our Minds’, 5 July 2010, wired.com. Accessed 9 December 2017. 66 Rory Carroll, ‘Trump v Hollywood? Don’t Expect to See the Culture War Play Out’, The Guardian, 13 January 2017.

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67 In the case of the 2014 film Live Die Repeat or Edge of Tomorrow we have soldiers fighting a war against invading aliens kitted out with robotic-type body armour, partRobotcop and part-Avatar mercenaries. The movie is a sci-fiction action thriller with its central hero Major William Cage (Tom Cruise) gaining increasingly important intel on the enemy by constantly reliving past events.

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Mark Shiel, Italian Neorealism. London and New York: Wallflower, 2006, 11–12. Mira Liehm, Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1984, 43–46; Peter Brunette, Roberto Rossellini. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, 44. New York Times, 26 February 1946. Robbie Collin described her as ‘the fiery embodiment of Rome’s indomitable working-class spirit’, Robbie Collin, ‘Rome Open City Review’, The Daily Telegraph, 6 March 2014. Robert Katz, The Battle for Rome. New York and London: Simon and Schuster, 2004, 183. Sidney Gottlieb, Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 94. Parker Tyler, Sex Psyche Etcetera in the Film. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971, 49. The role of women in the Italian underground in Rome would not be portrayed in Anglo-American films until the release of the film Massacre in Rome in 1973 when the real-life Anna is shown working alongside her lover. The massacre is overlooked in the film The Red and the Black starring Gregory Peck which focuses on the moral struggle between the Catholic prelate, Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty (played by Peck) and Kappler. Katz, The Battle for Rome, 241; John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1999, 320–321. Katz, The Battle for Rome, 263. Brunette, Roberto Rossellini, 49. Sidney Gottlieb, ‘Introduction’ in Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City, 20–21. Brunette, Roberto Rossellini, 75. Peter Bondanella, The Films of Roberto Rossellini. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 77. Ibid., 66. Inga M. Pierson, ‘Towards a Poetics of Neorealism: Tragedy in the Italian Cinema, 1942–1948’. PhD Diss. New York University, 2008. Rose Maria Celeste, ‘Beyond a Myth: The Truth about the Quattro Giornate di Napoli’, Pforzheimer Honours College Thesis, Paper 9, 2005. Curzio Malaparte, The Skin. New York: New York Review Books, 2013 (2nd edn 1949), 45. Katz, The Battle for Rome, 67. Austin Fisher, Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014. New York Times, 21 September 1967.

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23 Martin Evans, ‘The Battle of Algiers: Historical Truth and Filmic Representation’, Open Democracy, 18 December 2012, www. opendemocracy.net/martin-evans/battleof-elgiers-historical-truth. Accessed 17 December 2014. 24 Ibid. See also Martha Crenshaw, ‘The Effectiveness of Terrorism in the Algerian War’ in Martha Crenshaw (ed.) Terrorism in Context. University Park (PA): University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995, 473–513. 25 Carlo Celli, Gillo Pontecorvo. Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2005, 50. 26 Ibid., 51. 27 Walid Benkhaled, ‘Genesis of a Film: The Battle of Algiers’, Opendemocracy, 20 December 2012. www.opendemocracy.net/walid-benkhaled/genesis-of-a-film-ofalgiers. Accessed 17 December 2014. 28 Pepe le Moko depicted an anxious and guilt-ridden gangster ultimately betrayed by an Arab police inspector as well as the dark-skinned woman Inez, reinforcing orientalist images of the untrustworthy and duplicitous east. Janice Morgan, ‘In the Labyrinth: Masculine Subjectivity, Expatriation and Colonialism in Pepe le Moko’ in Matthew Bernstein and Carolyn Studlar (eds.), Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film. New Brunswick (NJ): Rutgers University Press, 1997, 253–167. The writer and future director Sam Fuller, arriving in Algeria with the American army in 1943, found the Casbah a shattering experience since it ‘destroyed, once and for all, my exotic movie fantasies. The place was nothing more than a squalid quarter in a big, bustling city’. Fuller, A Third Face, 124. 29 Gerard Chaliand, Revolution in the Third World. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977, 70. 30 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969 (1st edn 1961). 31 John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, 1830–1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 32 Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962. Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books, 1979, 184. 33 Frantz Fanon, ‘Algeria Unveiled’ in A Dying Colonialism. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 43. 34 Horne, A Savage War of Peace, 185; Haider Eid and Khaled Ghazel, ‘Footprints of Fanon in Gillo Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers” and Sembene Ousmane’s Xala’, English in Africa, 35, 2 (October 2008), 151–161. 35 Joan Mellen, ‘An Interview with Gillo Pontecorvo’, Film Quarterly, 26, 1 (Autumn 1972), 2–10. 36 Norma Claire Moruzzi, ‘Veiled Agents; Feminine Agency and Masquerade in The Battle of Algiers’ in Sue Fisher and Kathy Davis (eds), Negotiating at the Margins: The Gendered Discourses of Power and Resistance. New Brunswick (NJ): Rutgers University Press, 1993, 272. 37 Benkhaled, ‘Genesis of a Film’. 38 Mani Sharpe, ‘Gender, Myth, Nationalism: Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers’, Open Democracy, 18 December 2012, www.opendemocracy.net/mani-sharpe/gendermyth-nationalism-gillo-pontecorvo. Accessed 17 December 2014. 39 Ibrahim Fawal, Youssef Chahine. London: BFI Publishing, 2001, 84. 40 Roger Trinquier, Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency. Westport: Praeger, 2006 (1 edn 1964), 11. 41 Philip Dine, Images of the Algerian War: French Fiction and Film, 1954–1992. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, 24–25.

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42 The best embodiment in the Algerian conflict was not Massu but Colonel Marcel Bigeard, who, as Dine has suggested, ‘rose from the ranks to become perhaps the most romantic figure of the Algerian war’. It was Bigeard’s third Para regiment (3e R.P.E) which was allotted the Casbah after Massu split Algiers into four separate sections on a quadrillage pattern ibid. 44. 43 Horne, A Savage War of Peace, 189–190. 44 Ibid., 190. 45 Edgar O’Balance, The Algerian Insurrection, 1954–1962. London: Faber and Faber 1967, 80. 46 Bill Ayres, Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001, 178 and passim. 47 John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization. London: John Wiley, 2007, 111–112. 48 Celli, Gillo Pontecorvo, 49–67. 49 ‘The Battle of Algiers: Neo Realist Revolution’, Cinetropolis, 4. http//cinetropolis.net/ the-battle-of-algiers-neo-realist-revolution. Accessed 4 August 2014. The New York Times critic Stuart Klawans suggested as recently as 2004 that the film was banned in France until 1971. Stuart Klawans, ‘FILM: Lessons of the Pentagon’s Favourite Film’, New York Times, 4 January 2004. 50 Liehm, Passion and Defiance, 215. Ron Briley, ‘Terrorism on Screen: Lessons from the Battle of Algiers’, Perspectives in History, October 2010, www.historians.org/ publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/october. Accessed 4 August 2014. 51 New York Times, 7 September 2003. See also Joseph Masco, ‘Counterinsurgency, The Spook and Blowback’ in John D Kelly et al. (eds), Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010, 193–206. 52 Celli, Gillo Pontecorvo, 70–71. 53 Marlon Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me. London: Century, 1994, 324–325. 54 Ibid., 320. Brando gave up the opportunity to star in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to play the part of Walker in Queimada, one of the few occasions when a film dependent on European finance and direction represented a better prospect than a mainstream Hollywood movie. 55 Julio Garcia Espinosa, ‘For an Imperfect cinema’, www.ejumcut.org. Accessed 19 July 2017. See also Timothy Barnard, ‘Form and History in Cuban Film’ in John King et al. (eds), Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic Encounters in the Americas. London: BFI Pub, 1993, 231–240; John King, Magic Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America. London: Verso, 1990, 149–153 56 Carr, Infernal Machine, 148. See also Robin Morgan, The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism. New York and London: Pocket Books, 1989, 64. 57 Michael R. Mille, ‘State of Siege Undesirable’, The Cornell Daily Sun, 89, 2 (18 April 1972), www.cdsun.library.cornell.edu. Accessed 18 August 2017. 58 Albert Parry, Terrorism: From Robespierre to the Weather Underground. London: Dover, 1976, 276–277. 59 Maya Jaggi, ‘French Resistance: Costa Gavras’, The Guardian, 4 April 2009. 60 Some newspapers have tended to interpret events surrounding the trials of Sendero activists through the prism of the movie. Elisabeth Davies, ‘Peru’s “Dancer Upstairs” Gets 20 Years for Helping Rebel’, The Independent, 5 October 2005.

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61 Orin Starn, ‘Maoism in the Andes: The Communist Party of Peru Shining Path and the Refusal of History’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 27 (1995), 408. 62 Orin Starn, ‘Missing the Revolution: Anthropologists and the War in Peru’, Cultural Anthropology, 6, 1 (1991). 63 Orin Starn, ‘Villagers at Arms: War and Counterrevolution in Central-South Andes’ in Steve J. Stern (ed.), Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980–1995. Durham (NC): Duke University Press, 1998, 225. 64 Robin Hauck, ‘Politics and Personality’, Interview Film Review, 29 April 2003, tech. mit.edu. Accessed 18 August 2017. 65 ‘Shakespeare, Nicholas: The Dancer Upstairs’, 3 July 2003, www.urbancinephile.com. au. Accessed 18 August 2017. 66 Robert Lima, Stages of Evil: Occultism in Western Drama. Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 2005; Dark Prisms: Occultism in Spanish Drama. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2009. 67 Alex Danchev, ‘The Artist and the Terrorist, or the Paintable and the Unpaintable: Gerhard Richter and the Baader-Meinhof Group’ in On Art and War and Terror, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011, 8–27. 68 Harold James, A German Identity, 1770–1990. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990, 192–193. 69 Carrv Infernal Machine, 169. 70 Ellen Setter, ‘The Political Is Personal: Margarethe von Trotta’s Marianne and Julianne’ in Charlotte Brunsdon (ed.), Films for Women. London: BFI Publishing, 1987, 114–115. 71 See the film review by Philip French, ‘If Not Us Who? Review’, The Guardian, 3 March 2012. The term ‘Hitler’s Children’ comes from the book on the RAF by Becker, Hitler’s Children. 72 A view hardly supported by research on terrorist movements globally. For a summary see Richard English, Terrorism: How to Respond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 28–31. 73 Robin Morgan, Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism. New York and London: Pocket Books, 1989, 208. 74 Becker, Hitler’s Children, 179. 75 Christopher Hitchens, ‘Once upon a Time in Germany’, Vanity Fair, 17 August 2009. 76 Cited in Becker, Hitler’s Children, 180. 77 Christopher R. Cook, ‘The Cinematic Lessons of Terrorism: The 9/11 Filter and the Dangers of Decontextualization of Violence in The Battle of Algiers and The Green Berets’, www.researchgate.net. Accessed 12 July 2017. 78 Bruce Hoffmann, ‘A Nasty Business’, The Atlantic, January 2002.

Chapter 5 1

Mercenaries played a shadowy role in British covert action after formal decolonization, though the growing importance of the CIA in areas such as sub-Saharan Africa in the 1960s appears to have increased the costs of this beyond the budget of British MI6. Jonathan Bloch and Patrick Fitzgerald, British Intelligence and Covert Action. Dingle (County Kerry): Brandon/Mount Eagle Pub, 1983, 143. Lawrence Devlin, Chief of Station in the Congo in the early 1960s, recalled that ‘Washington

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Notes insisted on no covert relationship with the mercenaries, but since our objective was to prevent the rebels from taking control of the country, I could not realistically ignore the men selected by Tshombe to carry out the mission’. Lawrence Devlin, Chief of Station, Congo. New York: Public Affairs, 2007, 228. Howard Hughes, ‘Rough Diamond: The Dark Side of War in Dark of the Sun’, Cinema Retro, 8, 22 (2012), 37. Anthony Mockler, Mercenaries. London: Macdonald 1969. Georges Nzongola-Ntalala, The Congo: From Leopold to Kabila. London and New York: Zed Books, 2007, 128–129. Ibid., 132. For details of the operation see Major Thomas P. Odom, Dragon Operations: Hostage Rescues in the Congo, 1964–1965. Leavenworth Paper No 14: Fort Leavenworth (KAN), US Army Command and General Staff College, 1988. Ian Colvin, The Rise and Fall of Moise Tshombe. London: Leslie Frewin, 1968, 195. See also Howard Epstein, Revolt in the Congo 1960–1964. New York: Facts on File Inc, 1965, 165. S.J.G Clarke, The Congo Mercenary Johannesburg: South African Institute of International Affairs, 1968, 83. For an examination of this idea see Susan Williams, Who Killed Hammarskjold: The UN, the Cold War and White Supremacy in Africa. London: Hurst and Co, 2011; Paul B. Rich, ‘The Death of Dag Hammarskjold, The Congolese Civil War and Decolonisation in Africa, 1960–1965’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 23, 2 (May 2013), 352–375. Tony Geraghty, Who Dares Wins. London: Fontana 1981, 109; Burchett and Roebuck, The Whores of War. Hoare’e early exploits in the Congo are recorded in Mike Hoare, The Road to Kalamata. London: Leo Cooper, 1989. Mike Hoare, Congo Mercenary. London: Paladin Press, 2008 (1st edn 1967), 50. ‘Colonel Mike Hoare’, in Soldiers of Fortune: Mercenary Wars, www.mercenary-wars. net/biography/mike-hoare.html. Accessed 19 September 2104. Ibid., 61–62. The reasons for the crash continue to interest historians. Howard M. Epstein, Revolt in the Congo. New York: Facts on File Inc, 1965, 156–160. Hoare, Congo Mercenary, 32. Glenn Erickson, ‘Dark of the Sun’, DVD Savant Review, 27 July 2011. www.dvdtalk. com/dvdsavant/s3608dark.html. Accessed 18 January 2012. This was exemplified by the 1969 spaghetti war movie The Seven Red Berets (Sette baschi rossi) involving a party of mercenaries retreating through a war-torn Congo. The movie had a far less optimistic ending; as in Dark of the Sun the party embarks on a train but comes under attack once more from the Simbas with all the mercenaries being killed and Claire spared because she is found protecting a black child. Interestingly the Simba leader who spares Clare is not the savage General Moses that led the earlier massacre but a communist with a red star on his khaki military cap. This would have been too much for MGM to stomach by the early 1970s. ‘Think nothing of it’, Curry says to the pilot of the plane taking them to Nairobi. ‘- all in a day’s work’. Wilbur Smith, The Mercenaries. London: Pan Books 1965, 264. The New York Times, 4 July 1968. Glenn Erickson, ‘Dark of the Sun’, DVDTalk, 27 July 2011. www.dvdtak.com/ dvdsavant/s3608dark.html. Accessed 18 January 2012.

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22 It has been suggested Laputa is more Milton than Rider Haggard with the need for a religious regeneration of the tribal people in South Africa. See David Daniell, ‘Buchan and the Popular Literature of Imperialism’ in Bart Moore-Gilbert (ed.), Literature and Imperialism. Roehampton: Roehampton Institute of Education, 1983, 131. 23 Michael Evans, ‘The Wretched of the Empire: Politics, Ideology and Counterinsurgency in Rhodesia, 1965–80’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 18, 2 (June 2007), 195–192. 24 James Blackford, ‘Lloyd, Euan’, www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/1418957/index. html. Accessed 17 September 2014. 25 John Hooper, ‘CIA Methods Exposed in Kidnap Enquiry’, The Guardian, 1 July 2005. 26 Daniel C. Bach, ‘Patrimonialism and Neo-Patrimonialism: Comparative Trajectories and Readings’, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 49, 3 (2011), 275–294. 27 For details see Frederick Forsyth, The Outsider. London: Transworld Publisher, 2013. Alison Flood, ‘Frederick Forsyth: I was an MI6 Agent’, The Guardian, 2 September 2015. 28 Graham Greene, ‘The Last Buchan’ in The Lost Childhood and Other Essays. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1951, 119. 29 Vincent Canby, ‘ “Dogs of War’: Forsyth’s Mercenaries’, New York Times, 13 February 1981. 30 Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. New York: Anchor Books, 1983, 169. 31 Robert Schnakakenberg, Christopher Walken: The Man, The Movies, The Legend. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2008, 86. Perhaps at another level, though, the marginal character of Shannon that Walken plays reflected his own sense of marginality as a method actor trained through the New York City Studio. ‘I am a foreigner in my own country’, he is quoted as saying, ‘because I come from another country, the country of show business.’ 32 ‘Frederick Forsyth’, Soldiers of Fortune: Mercenary Wars. www.mercenary-wars.net/ biography/frederick-forsyth.html. Accessed 29 September 2016. 33 Dominick Donald, ‘Could Coup-coup Land’, The Guardian, 12 August 2006. 34 Adam Roberts, The Wonga Coup. London: Profile Books, 2006. 35 Rebecca Murray, ‘Director Edward Zwick Discusses “Blood Diamond”’ www.movies. about.com/od/blooddiamond/a/bloodez112806. Accessed 8 October 2014. 36 Paul Richards, ‘Rebellion in Liberia and Sierra Leone: A Crisis of Youth?’ in Oliver Furley (ed.), Conflict in Africa. London: I.B Tauris, 1981, 134–164; Paul Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest: War, Youth & Resources in Sierra Leone. London: Heinemann, 1996, Vol. 91, 103, 106. 37 Parker Mott, ‘Review Johnny Mad Dog’, 3 February 2011. www.thefinaltake.com/ johnny-mad-dog-boyz–n-the-war-hood. Accessed 15 October 2014. 38 Elisabeth Wilson, ‘Deviancy, Dress and Desire’ in Sue Fisher and Kathy Davis (eds), Negotiating at the Margins (New Brunswick (NJ): Rutgers University Press, 1993), 57. 39 Canby, ‘“Dogs of War”: Forsyth’s Mercenaries’. 40 Mark Moring, ‘ “Machine Gun Preacher” Under Heavy Fire’, Christianity Today, 22 September 2011. www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011.septemberweb-only./ machinegunpreacher.html. Accessed 29 September 2014. 41 Thomas Dawson, ‘Machine Gun Preacher’, Sight and Sound, January 2012. 42 Catherine Shoard, ‘Machine Gun Preacher – Review’, The Guardian, 13 September 2011.

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43 Laura Freeman, ‘The African Warlord Revisited’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 26, 5 (October 2015), 795. 44 A comparison made by Donald Clarke, ‘Siege of Jadotville: Suave, Brave Acting By Jamie Dornan’, The Irish Times, 19 September 2016. 45 Conor Cruise O’Brien, Memoir: My Life and Themes. London: Profile Books, 1998, 223. 46 For a modern reworking of the conspiracy theory developed to explain Hammarskjold’s death see Susan Williams, Who Killed Hammarskjold? The US, the Cold War and White Supremacy in Africa. London: Hurst, 2011; Paul B Rich, ‘The Death of Dag Hammarskjold, the Congolese Civil War and decolonisation in Africa, 1960–65’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 23, 2 (May 2012), 352–375. 47 Rajeshwar Dayal, Mission for Hammarskjold: The Congo Crisis. London: Oxford University Press, 1976, 274. 48 Victor Blombart, In Praise of Antiheroes: Figures and Themes in Modern European Literature, 1830–1980. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999, 5–6. 49 David Cromwell, ‘Hollywood Weaponised Dream Factory: Interview with Matthew Alford, author of Reel Power’, Media Lens, 23 October 2010. http://dissidentvoice. org/2010/10/hollywood-weaponised-dream-factory. Accessed 21 January 2015.

Chapter 6 1

Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonisation: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France. New York: Cornell University Press, 2006, esp. 55–81. 2 Ibid., 272. 3 Martin Evans, ‘Projecting a Greater France’, History Today, 50, 2 (February 2000), 19–25. 4 Anthony Clayton, The Wars of French Decolonisation. London and New York: Longman, 1994, 1. 5 Charles O’Brien, ‘The “Cinema Colonial” of 1930s France: Film Narratives as Spatial Practice’ in Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studler (eds), Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film. New Brunswick (NJ): Rutgers University Press, 1997, 207–225. 6 Barnet Singer and John Langdon, Cultured Force: Makers and Defenders of the French Colonial Empire. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. 7 A.P. Thornton, Imperialism in the Twentieth Century. London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press, 1980, 39–40. Thornton pointed out that the ‘doctrine of civilisation’ was always rather short of doctrinaires since those who espoused it mostly came from non-colonial backgrounds. A.P. Thornton, Doctrines of Imperialism. London: John Wiley and Sons, 1965, 187. See also Michael W. Doyle, Empires. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986, 319. 8 Lou Dimarco, ‘Losing the Moral Compass: Torture and Guerre Revolutionnaire in the Algerian War,’ Parameters, Summer 2006, 63–76. 9 See for example George Marshall and W.H. Morris Jones (eds). Decolonisation and After: The British and French Experience. London: Routledge, 1980; Martin Thomas, Fight or Flight: Britain, France and Their Roads from Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 10 Economist, 17 February 2011. 11 Dine, Images of the Algerian War, 215.

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12 Douglas Porch, Counterinsurgency: Exposing New Myths of the New Way of War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 164–165. 13 This idea was developed in a series of novels by the colon writer Luis Bertrand at the end of the nineteenth century. The supposed link back to the earlier classical period was an attempt to provide some sort of ethical justification for the brutal conquest and land grab by the colons over the previous half century. See Andrew Hussey, The French Intifada: The Long War between France and the Arabs. London: Granta, 2014, 121–125. 14 Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 219. 15 Ibid., 285. 16 Dine, Images of the Algerian War, 227. 17 Roger Ebert, ‘Le Petit Soldat’, 1 January 1960, www.rogerebert.com. Accessed 6 October 2017. 18 See the remarks of Drew Hunt, ‘Le Petit Soldat’, Slant, 4 March 2013, www. slantmagazine.com. Accessed 6 October 2017. 19 Dine, Images of the Algerian War, 216. 20 Few intellectual groupings went as far as completely identifying with the Arab cause. The magazine Conscience Algeriennes, established in 1950, was a notable exception by having two Arabs on its editorial committee and championing the active involvement of Algerians in any ‘solution’ to the Algerian issue. – a position well in advance of the French Communist Party. Out of these debates of the 1950s emerged the ideology of the ‘third world’ which would have considerable impact on radical debates in the following two decades. See Marc Ferro, Colonization: A Global History. London and New York: Routledge, 1997, 179–181. 21 However Robert Gildea has seen the film championing the idea of a united Europe. See Gildea, The Past in French History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994, 107. 22 Naomi Greene, Landscapes of Loss: The National Past in French Cinema. Princeton: Princeton University Press, esp. 3–23. 23 Dine, Images of the Algerian War, 219. 24 Fall, Street without Joy, 253–256. 25 Benedicte Cheron, Pierre Schoendoerffer. Paris: CNRD Editions, 2012, 61. 26 Ibid., 72. 27 See Gavras’s exposition of his ideas on film making see ‘Costa Gavras on Filmmaking’, Current, 2 June 2015. www.criterion.com. Accessed 17 January 2018. 28 John Talbott, ‘The Strange Death of Maurice Audin’, VQR, Spring 1976. 29 Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, ‘French Cinema and the Algerian War: Fifty Years Later’, Cineaste, Winter 2007, 44. 30 Peter Paret, French Revolutionary Warfare from Vietnam to Algeria. London: Pall Mall Press, 1964; Beatrice Heuser, ‘The Cultural Revolution in Counter-Insurgency’, The Journal of Strategic Studies, 30, 1 (February 2007), 153–156. 31 Fall, Street without Joy, 370. 32 Douglas Porch, ‘French Imperial Warfare1945-1962’ in Daniel Marston and Carter Malkasian (eds), Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare. New York: Osprey Publishing, 2008, 88–100. 33 Carl Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan. New York: Telos Press, 2007 (1st edn 1975), 72–73. Paret, French Revolutionary Warfare from Vietnam to Algeria, 123.

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34 Benjamin Stora, ‘Still Fighting: The ‘Battle of Algiers, Censorship and the “Memory Wars”’, Interventions, 9, 3 (2007), 365–370. 35 Hugo Frey, Nationalism and the Cinema in France. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014, 147–148. 36 Sally Totnam, How Hollywood Projects Foreign Policy. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. See also Joseph Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Succeed in World Politics. New York: Public Affairs, 2004. 37 Cheron, Pierre Schoendoerffer, 188. 38 Jeff Robson, ‘Intimate Enemies’, 29 June 2008. www.eyeforfilm.org. Accessed 16 August 2017. 39 ‘France-Algeria war Film Sparks Cannes Protests’, Al Arabiya News, 21 May 2010. 40 See the review of the film by Kirk Honeycutt, ‘Outside the Law’, Hollywood Reporter, 14 October 2010. www.hollywoodreporter.com. 41 Though its thin plot line led the Hollywood Reporter to dismiss it as ‘frenetic and ultimately mind-numbing as a Call of Duty video game’. Hollywood Reporter, 14 October 2012. 42 Antonio Giustozzi, Empires of Mud: War and Warlords in Afghanistan. London: Hurst, 2012. Paret, French Revolutionary Warfare from Vietnam to Algeria, 123.

Chapter 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

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12 13

Andrew L/ Mendelson and C. Zoe Smith, ‘Vision of a New State: Israel as Mythologised by Robert Capa’, Journalism Studies, 7, 2, 2006, 587–202. Al Jazeera, ‘The Day Israel Attacked America’, 30 October 2014. www.aljazeera.com. Accessed 19 October 2016 David E. Kaufman, Jewhooing the Sixties: American Celebrity and Jewish Identity, Lebanon (NH): University Press of New England, 2012, 72. Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. New York: Anchor Books, 1988, esp. 1–7. Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews. New York: Harper and Row, 1987, 525–526. Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Land of Israel. London: Verso, 2012, 257. Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema, London: I.B Tauris, 2010, 55. Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History. London: Black Swan, 1998, 211–213. Otto Friedrich, City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s. New York: Harper and Row, 1986, 172–173. Though its symbolic effectiveness was boosted by a chronically undermanned Palestine Police Force that proved increasingly ineffective in tracking down Jewish terrorists, due to internal politicization and faulty intelligence analysis See for instance Bruce Hoffmann, ‘The Palestine Police Force and the gathering of counterterrorism intelligence, 1939–1947,’ Small Wars and Insurgencies, 24, 4 October 2013, 609–647. Leslie A. Fiedler, Waiting for the End: The American Literary Scene from Hemingway to Baldwin. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964, 73; Bradley Burston, ‘The “Exodus Effect”: The Monumental Fictional Israel the Remade American Jewry,’ Haaretz, November 9 2012. Cobb and Saint had studied at the Actors Studio in New York and appeared in Elia Kazan’s movie On The Waterfront in 1954 with Marlon Brando. Karl Sabbagh, Britain in Palestine. Croydon: Skyscraper Pub, 2012, 104; Eugene Rogan, The Arabs: A History. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2009, 334.

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14 For details see Nurith Gertz and Yael Munk, ‘Israeli Cinema Engaging the Conflict’ in Josef Gugler (ed.) Film in the Middle East and North Africa. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011, 155–164. 15 The film was booed in some Polish cinemas for the film’s simplification of events. The Bielskis certainly helped to save some 1,200 Jews, though many Poles believe that the Jewish Partisans helped Russian partisans attack the village of Naliboki leading to 128 people being killed. Kate Connolly, ‘Jewish resistance film sparks Polish anger,’ The Guardian 5 March 2009. 16 Randy Roberts and James S. Olson, John Wayne: American, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995, 524–525. 17 Ibid., 492–493. 18 Jock Haswell, Citizen Armies. London: Haswell for the History Book Club, 1975, 241. 19 None of the women Douglas married were Jewish, though his marriage to his first wife Diana Douglas in 1943 was through a rabbi, whose strictures on bringing up his children as Jewish Douglas decided to ignore. Kirk Douglas, The Ragman’s Son. London: Pan Books, 1988, 108. 20 Ibid, 207–208. 21 Sabbagh, Britain in Palestine, 100. 22 Roberts and Olson, John Wayne, 525. 23 CBN’s spokesman Michael Conrad explained that the Six Day War was the fulfilment of Christ’s prophecy in Luke 21:24 that ‘And they will fall by the edge of the sword, and be led away captive into all nations.’ The Jerusalem Post 17, May 2017. 24 Rogan, The Arabs, 430–431. 25 Christopher Dobson, Black September. London: Robert Hale, 1974, 127–132. 26 Sam Borden, ‘Long-Hidden Details Reveal Cruelty of 1972 Munich Attackers’, New York Times, 1 December 2015. 27 Isabel Kershner, ‘From Israel’s Archives, Papers on the Munich Killings’, New York Times, 7 September 2012. 28 Dobson, Black September, 140–141. 29 Patrick Seale, Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire. New York: Random House, 1992, 47. 30 Though significantly not Abu Nidal, perhaps because the movement proved so successful in murdering Palestinian moderates. 31 Jonathan Freedland, ‘ “We Thought this would be the End of Us”: The Raid on Entebbe, 40 Years on’, The Guardian, 25 June 2016. 32 See for example Larry Getlen, ‘The Hostage Rescue that Convinced the West Not to Negotiate with Terrorists’, New York Post, 28 November 2015. 33 Jonathan Bloch and Patrick Fitzgerald, British Intelligence and Covert Action. Dingle (Kerry): Brandon/Mount Eagle Pub, 1983, 162 and passim. 34 Lemuel A Johnson, The Devil, The Gargoyle and the Buffoon: The Negro as Metaphor in Western Literature. Port Washington and London: National University Publications, 1971. 35 Jesse Bernstein, ‘A Plea for a Good Entebbe Movie’, Tablet, 30 June 2016. 36 Thomas Riegler, ‘ “Terrorology”: Who analyses and comments on the terrorist threat?’, www.inter-disciplinary.net. Accessed 19 December 2016. 37 Colin Shindler, Israel, Likud and the Zionist Dream. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1995, 215. 38 Those involved in prosecuting Palestinian terrorists captured by the police tended to see the Soviet Union as being at best peripherally involved in sustaining what one Italian magistrate told Loretta Napoleoni a ‘chain of terrorist Do-it Yourselfs across

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45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60

61 62 63 64

Notes the Middle East’ that the Palestinian were left to manage. Loretta Napoleoni, Terror Inc: Tracing the Money Behind Global Terrorism. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2004, 72. Michael Burleigh, Blood Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism. London: Harper Perennial 2008, 187. Ibid., 186. Prince, Firestorm briefly refers to the film in 32–33. Matthew Gault, ‘ “Here’s What Commandos” “Stealth” Motorbike Will Look Like: A Killer Dirt Bike Even Chuck Norris Would Ride”, 7 January 2015. warisboring.com. Accessed 25 October 2016. Ryan Lambe, ‘The Rise and Fall of Cannon Films’, 20 September 2013. www.denofgeek.com. Accessed 30 September 2016. Geoffrey Hempsted, ‘George Smiley and Post-Imperial Nostalgia’ in Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity: Volume 111. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1989, 232–240. Adam Sisman, John Le Carre: The Biography. London: Bloomsbury 2015, 432. William F. Buckley, ‘Terror and a New Woman’, New York Times, 13 March 1983. John Le Carre, The Little Drummer Girl. London: Pan Books, 1983, 177. Le Carre, The Little Drummer Girl, 351. Ibid., 350. Ibid., 367. John L. Cobbs, Understanding John Le Carre. Columbia (SC): University of South Carolina Press, 1997, 154. Le Carre, The Little Drummer Girl, 516. Ibid., 517. Hall overlooked Streep for Keaton who impressed him with her performance in Annie Hall in 1977 (for which she won an Oscar) and Reds with Warren Beatty in 1981. Sisman, John Le Carre, 436. One obvious choice, with hindsight, was Vanessa Redgrave’s daughter Natasha Richardson: but in 1984 she had not yet starred in a leading role in any major feature film (it would eventually be Ken Russell’s 1986 film Gothic as Mary Shelley). George Jonas, Reflections on Islam. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2007. 63. Ibid., xix. Prince, Firestorm, 91. Ibid., 95. Frank Kermode, ‘Review of Munch’, YouTube, 20 August 2010. www.youtube.com. Accessed 20 November 2016. As a young man of twenty Spielberg bought Pontecorvo’s 1966 Lion d’Or trophy for the movie when he put it up for action (he later returned it to the director at the Venice Film Festival in 1993). Frey, Nationalism and the Cinema in France, 141. Andrew Gumbel, ‘Israel Attacks Spielberg over “Munich”, His Movie on 1972 Olympics Massacre’, The Independent, 24 December 2005. Gary Younge, ‘Israeli Consul Attacks Spielberg’s Munich as “Problematic”’, The Guardian, 12 December 2005. John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery and Romance. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976, 67–69. Ewen MacAskill and Ian Black, ‘Munich: Mossad Beaks Cover’, The Guardian, 26 January 2006.

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Epilogue 1 2 3 4

5

6

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Jean Larteguy, The Centurions. London: Penguin, 2015 (1st edn 1960), 10. For some critics the movie supplies a sort of moral template for post-Brexit Britain. Steve Rose, ‘The Great Retreat’, The Guardian, 21 July 2017. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991. London: Abacus, 1995. For an exploration of this link between Hollywood and the KMT see Karen J. Leong, The China Mystique: Pearl S Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong and the Transformation of American Orientalism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005. Mevliyar Er and Paul B. Rich, ‘Abd el-Krim’s Guerrilla War against Spain and France in North Africa: An Adventure Setting for Screen Melodramas’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 26, 4 (2015), 597–615. See David L. Altheide, ‘Fear, Terrorism and Popular Culture’ in Jeff Birkenstein et al. (eds), Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture and the ‘War on Terror’. New York: Continuum, 2010, 11–20. Neville Bolt, The Violent Image: Insurgent Propaganda and the New Revolutionaries. London: Hurst, 2012, 162. See for instance John Mackinlay, The Insurgent Archipelago. London: Hurst, 2009. Paul B. Rich, ‘Cinema, Drone Warfare and the Framing of Counter-Terrorism’, Defence & Security Analysis, 34, 2 (2018).

Select Filmography (Name of film, year of release, director and distributor)

Anthropoid (2016), dir. Sean Ellis. Bleecker Street. Attack on the Iron Coast (1967), dir. Paul Wendkos. United Artists. Avatar (2009), dir. James Cameron. Twentieth Century Fox. Avoir Vingt ans dans les aures (To be Twenty in the Aures) (1972), dir. Rene Vautres. Unite de production cinematographie Bretagne. Beasts of No Nation (2015), dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga. Bleecker Street and Netflix. Beaufort (2007), dir. Joseph Cedar. United King Films and Kino International. Bitter Victory (1957), dir. Nicholas Ray. Columbia Pictures. Blood Diamond (2006), dir. Edward Zwick. Warner Bros. Carlos (2010), dir. Olivier Assayas. Netflix. Cast a Giant Shadow (1966), dir. Melville Shavelson. United Artists. Clear and Present Danger (1994), dir. Phillip Noyce. Paramount Pictures. Dark of the Sun (The Mercenaries) (1968), dir. Jack Cardiff. MGM. Delta Force (1986), dir. Menahem Cohen. Cannon Films. Dien Bien Phu (1992), dir. Pierre Schoendoerffer. Amlf (Agence mediterraneene de location de films). Drones (2013), dir. Rick Rosenthal. Signature Entertainment. Executive Decision (1996), dir. Stuart Baird. Warner Bros. Eye in the Sky (2015), dir. Gavin Hood. Entertainment One. Exodus (1960), dir. Otto Preminger. United Artists. Five Branded Women (1960), dir. Martin Ritt. Paramount Pictures. Four Days of Naples (Quatro giornate di Napoli) (1962), dir. Nanni Loy. MGM in US and Titanus in Italy. Good Kill (2014), dir. Andrew Niccol. Arrow Films. If Not Us, Who (2011), dir. Andres Veiel. Zero One Film. Ill Met by Moonlight (1957), dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Rank Organisation. Indochine (1992), dir. Regis Wargnier. Bac Films. Djamila, (1958), dir. Youseff Chahine. Magda Films. Johnny Mad Dog (2008), dir. Jean-Stephane Sauvaire. Netflix. Judith (1966), dir. Daniel Mann. Paramount Pictures. Katherine (1975), dir. Jeremy Kagan. ABC. Kippur (2000), dir. Amos Gitai. Kino International. The 317th Platoon (La 317e Section), dir. Pierre Schoendoerffer. Cine Classic. La Question (1977), dir. Laurent Heynemann. Little Bear, Rush Distribution and Z Productions. Lebanon (2009), dir. Samuel Maoz. Sony Pictures Classics (US) and Metrodome Distribution (UK). Le Crabe-Tambour (1977), dir. Pierre Schoendoerffer. Amlf.

Select Filmography

241

Machine Gun Preacher (2011), dir. Marc Forster. Relativity Media (US) and Lionsgate (overseas). Merrills Marauders (1962), dir. Sam Fuller. Warner Bros. Munich (2005), dir. Steven Spielberg. Universal Pictures (US) and Dreamworks (international). Muriel ou le Temps d’un retour (1963), dir. Alain Resnais. Restored version released in 2004 by Argos Films. Operation Daybreak (1975), dir. Lewis Gilbert. Warner Bros. Paisan (Paisa) (1946), dir. Roberto Rossellini. Arthur Mayer & Joseph Bursky/MGM. Panther (1995), dir. Mario van Peebles. Gramercy Pictures. Pathfinders in the Company of Strangers (2011), dir. Curt A Sindelar. Inception Media Group. Princesse Tam Tam (1935), dir. Edmond T. Greville. DI CI MO. Rambo: First Blood (1982), dir. Ted Kotcheff. Orion Pictures. Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), dir. George P. Cosmatos. Tristar Pictures. Rambo III (2008), dir. Peter MacDonald. Tristar Pictures. Rambo IV (2008), dir. Sylvester Stallone. Lionsgate/The Weinstein Company. Red Dawn (1985), dir. John Milius. MGM/UA Entertainment Company. Rome Open City (Roma Citta Aperta) (1945), dir. Roberto Rossellini. Minerva Film SPA (Italy) and Joseph Burstyn and Arthur Mayer. Sea of Sand (1958), dir. Guy Green. Rank Organisation. Simba (1955), dir. Brian Desmond Hurst. Rank Organisation. Special Forces (Forces Speciales) (2011), dir. Stephane Rybojad. StudioCanal. State of Siege (1972), dir. Costa Gavras. Sword in the Desert (1949), dir. George Sherman. Universal Pictures. Swordfish (2001), dir. Dominic Sena. Warner Bros. The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008), dir. Uli Edel. Constantin Film Verleih (Germany) and Metropolitan Film Export (France). The Battle of Algiers (1966), dir. Gillo Pontecorvo. Rizzoli, Rialto Pictures. The Cockleshell Heroes (1955), dir. Jose Ferrer. Columbia Pictures. The Dancer Upstairs (2002), dir. John Malkovich. Fox Searchlight Pictures. The Dirty Dozen (1967), dir. Robert Aldrich. MGM. The Dogs of War (1980), dir. John Irvin. United Artists and MGM for DVD post 2001. The Gift Horse (1952), dir. Compton Bennett. IFD (UK). The Green Berets (1968), dir. John Wayne. Warner Bros-Severn Arts. The Guns of Navarone (1961), dir. J. Lee Thompson. Columbia Pictures. The Last Supper (1976), dir. Tomas Gutierrez Alea. ICAIC (Instituto Cubano del Arte y la Industria Cinematograficos). The Little Drummer Girl (1984), dir. George Roy Hill. Warner Bros. The Planters Wife (1952), dir. Ken Annakin. General Film Distributors (UK) and United Artists (USA). The Seven Red Berets (Sette baschi rossi) (1969), dir. Mario Siciliano. Methuen Films. The Siege (1998), dir. Edward Zwick. 20th Century Fox. The Siege of Jadotville (2016), dir. Richie Smyth. Netflix. The Wild Geese (1978), dir. Andrew V. McLagen. Richmond Film Productions. They Who Dare (1964), dir. Lewis Milestone. British Lion Film Corporation. 25th Hour (2002), dir. Spike Lee. Buena Vista Pictures. United 93 (2006), dir. Paul Greengrass. Universal Pictures (US) and United International Pictures (international).

242

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Went the Day Well (1942), dir. Alberto Cavalcanti. Ealing Studios. Whispering Death (Night of the Askari) (1976), dir. Jurgen Goslar. Troma Entertainment. Windom’s Way (1957), dir. Ronald Neame. Rank. You Only Live Once (La Vida es Una Sola) (1993), dir. Marianne Eyde. Kusi Films. Z (1969), dir. Costa Gavras. Cinema V (US). Zero Dark Thirty (2012), dir. Kathryn Bigelow, Columbia Pictures (US) and Universal Pictures (international).

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Index Abbottabad raid (2011). See Bin Laden, Osama Abu Nidal 197 action film genre 8, 67, 78, 84, 97, 178, 199, 207 cerebral action movies 97 Al-Husseini, Abd el-Qadir 189 Al Qaeda 119 Al-Sabahi, Magda 109. See also Jamila The Algerian Al Shabaab 94–5 Alea, Tomas Gutierrez 116 Alec Station. See Central Intelligence Agency Algeria 9, 100, 116, 152–3. See also Battle of Algiers; Casbah, Algiers; FLN French colonial society 172 French departure 153, 156, 210–12 French “mission civilisatrice” 154–5, 172, 234 n.7, 235 n.13 Algerian War 9, 24–5, 107, 151–2, 155, 160, 165–6, 173–4, 177–8, 212, 214 Challe Plan (1959) 167 Constantine Plan 167 end (1962) 151, 166, 168 French counter-insurgency 172 Algerie en flames (1956) 160 Alleg, Henri 165. See also Question, La Allied Artists 137 ALN. See Army de Liberation National Ambassador, The (1984) 199 American dream, cinematic images 77, 180 Amin Dada, President Idi 122, 195–6 Anthropoid (2016) 69–70 Anzio, Allied landing (1944) 102 Apocalypse Now (1979) ix, 97, 175, 200 Arab-Israeli War (1948) 182, 187–8 Arab-Israeli War (June 1967) 187, 189 Arab Israeli War (1973) 192 Arab Legion 188 Arafat, Yasser 192

Ardeantine massacre (23 March 1944) 102, 127 Arendt, Hannah 18 Argo (2012) 93 Armstrong, Karen 3 Army of National Liberation (ALN) 109, 174 Aron, Raymond 152 assassination, cinematic themes 22 Assayas, Olivier 211 ATF. See Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Atta, Mohammed 212 Attack on the Iron Coast (1968) 64 Audin, Maurice 166 Avatar (2009) 148 Avoir vingt ans dans les aures (To Be Twenty Years in the Aures) (1972) 151, 160, 165 Baader, Andreas 120, 122–3, 125, 212 Baader-Meinhof “Gang” ix, 19, 122–5, 210, 218 n.59 Baader Meinhof Complex (2008) 124–5, 208, 212. See also RAF Baker, Josephine 153 Barden, Javier 118 Battle of Algiers (1957) 155, 165. See also Algeria Battle of Algiers, The (1966) 1, 20–1, 62, 83, 91, 99, 101, 106–7, 109, 114, 118, 124, 127, 158, 163–6, 168–70, 175, 178, 181, 204, 208, 210, 212, 214. See also Pontecorvo, Gillo Battle of Haditha (2007) 211–12 Beasts of No Nation (2015) 8, 24, 130, 145, 208 Beaufort (2007) 181, 191 Begin, Menachem 182, 185, 187, 197 Ben Gurion, David 179, 182, 188 Benes, Edouard 67–8 Berardinelli, James 144 Bertolucci, Bernardo 117

Index Bicycle Thieves (1948) 100, 102 Bielski Brothers 186, 237 n.15. See also Partisans, Jewish (Eastern Europe) Bigeard, Colonel Marcel 109, 112, 172, 230 n.42 Bigelow, Katherine 80, 87, 91, 93, 117 Bin Laden, Osama 83, 90, 213 Abbottabad assassination (2011) 87–93 Bitter Victory (1957) 57–8, 208 Black Hawk Down (2002) 73, 87, 210 Black September 78, 193–4, 206 Black Sunday (1977) 22, 75–7, 198 Blood Diamond (2006) 130, 140–1, 143–4, 208 Boer War. See South African War (18991902) Bogarde, Dirk 34–5, 41, 48, 54–6 Bogart, Humphrey 182 Bombs Over Burma (1942) 12 Bondanella, Peter 104 Bouchareb, Rachid 169, 173–5 Brando, Marlon 115, 230 n.54 Bravo Two Zero (1999) 73 Bright Shining Lie, A (1998) 172 Bronson, Charles 65–6 Brown, Jim 65, 130, 133 Brunner, Yul 187–8 Buchan, John 134, 137 Buck, Pearl 10 Buckley, William F. 199 Bunker, George 183 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) 82 Burma 23, 26, 30, 36, 45, 63, 161, 170 Kachin minority 30, 36–7, 45, 63 Burn. See Queimada (1969) Burton, Richard 6, 54, 57, 66, 102, 135, 138 Cabanantuan prison camp, raid (1945) 70–1 Cameron, James 148 Canby, Vincent 138, 143 Cannon Films. See Golan-Globus Films Capa, Robert 179 Capra, Frank 105 captivity narratives 76 Cardiff, Jack 130, 133–4, 141 Cardinale, Claudia 163 Carlos (Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez) 120, 197

255

Carlos (2010) 211 Carney, Daniel 130, 134, 136 Carr, Matthew 18, 117 Carter, President Jimmy 78 Casbah, Algiers 107–8, 113, 164, 181, 230 n.42. See also Algeria bombing (1957) 106 as FLN stronghold 113 Cast a Giant Shadow (1966) 179–80, 182, 187, 189 Castro, Fidel 13–14, 19 Cedar, Joseph 191 Celeste, Rose Maria 105 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 42–4, 75, 80–1, 87, 89–90, 92, 96–7, 206, 227 n.51 Alec Station 91, 224 n.2 Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture by 89, 92 Women 92, 96 Chahine, Youssef 113, 158. See also Djamila (1958) Chaliand, Gerard 107 Chalquist, Craig 96 Chapman, Freddie Spencer 30, 32, 38–9 Chastain, Jessica 92 Che (1969) 13–15 Che (2008) 15–16, 24, 208. See also Soderbergh, Steven child soldiers 144, 146 Childers, Sam 142, 144–5 Chin Peng 31 China ix, 9–13, 31, 130, 153, 155, 207 “loss” of China fear in US 13 Chindits 23, 63, 161 Chou-en-Lai 170 Clark, General Mark 102 Clear and Present Danger (1996) 77, 80, 82 Cloverfield (2008) 84 Cobb, Lee J. 184–6 Cockleshell Heroes, The (1955) 55–6, 64, 208 COIN. See counter-insurgency Colbert, Claudette 31 Cold War 8, 13, 23, 26–7, 35, 40, 64, 100, 131, 148, 155, 160, 181, 192, 195, 197, 199, 207, 210 “brainwashing” 199 end 140 intelligence rivalries 200

256 post-cold war movies 80, 170 super power rivalry 203 Coll, Steve 93 Columbia Pictures 163 Commandos British 7, 53, 66–7 French 176 Congo 136, 146 mercenaries 130 UN peacekeepers 133, 146 US/Belgian rescue mission (1964) 131 Connery, Sean 116 Cook, Christopher 126 Cooper, Gary 9 Coppola, Francis Ford 72 Costner, Kevin 82 counter-insurgency 2–3, 5, 28, 41–2, 96, 101, 112, 155, 161. See also Israel, strategic doctrine British doctrine 53 cinematic image 185 French theorists 166 US doctrine 164 Counter–terrorism cinematic images 97, 185, 199–201, 211 Israeli doctrine 203 strategic debate surrounding 179, 195 US operations 206 Coutard, Raoul 158, 162 Cronin, Audrey 19–20 Crowther, Bosley 39, 65, 100, 106 Cruise, Tom 204 Cuba 116 Cuba (1979) 116 Cup Final (1991) 190 Cyprus 25–6, 185 Dads Army (TV comedy series) 50, 221 n.3 Dafoe, William 80 Dancer Upstairs, The (2002) 20, 99, 118, 120, 127, 208 Dark of the Sun (Indigenes) (1968) 23–4, 130, 132–4, 136, 141, 146, 148 Darkness at Noon 199 Davis, John 27 Dayan, Moshe 188, 192 Days of Glory (2006) 173, 175 De Beers, diamond monopoly 140

Index De Gaulle, General Charles 152, 155, 168, 212 as saviour of France 160 Decolonisation 5, 25–6, 152–3, 156, 159 Deer Hunter, The (1978) 86 Defiance (2008) 186 Deir Yassin massacre (1948) 189 Delon, Alain 164 Delta Force 75 Delta Force (1986) 73, 75, 79, 88, 143, 198–9. See also Norris, Chuck Di Caprio, Leonardo 141 Dick, Bernard F. 4 Die Hard (1988) 96, 176 Dien Bien Phu (1992) 151, 153, 160–1, 169–71, 173, 175, 178, 209 French cinematic myth of war 170 Dien Bien Phu Battle (1954) 112, 151, 153, 161, 163, 169–70 Casualties 163 Dine, Philip 159 Dirty Dozen, The (1967) 23, 65–6, 88, 132–3 Dirty Harry ( film series) 79, 194 Disaster movies 77 Djamila the Algerian (1958) 113, 158 Dobson, Christopher 193 Dogs of War, The (1982) 23, 130, 137–9, 144 Dongala, Emanuel 142 Douglas, Kirk 187, 194 Drif, Zora 108 Drone warfare cinematic depiction 93 Drone (2017) 214 Dutschke, Rudi 124 Eastwood, Clint 3, 77 Flags of Our Fathers 3 Ebert, Roger 71 ECOMOG (Economic Community of West African States) 145–6 Edel, Uli 117, 124, 208, 212 Edge of Darkness (1943) 54, 64 Ehrenreich, Barbara 138 Elba, Idris 145–6 Elliot, Denholm 54–5 Ennemi Intime (2007). See Intimate Enemies Ensslin, Christiane 123, 125 Ensslin, Gudrun 108, 123–4, 212

Index Entebbe Raid (1976) 49, 66, 76, 78, 89, 122, 130, 194–6, 211 EOKA 20, 41 Escadrons de la Mort, Les (The Squadrons of Death) (2006) 168 Escobar, Pablo 81 Executive Decision (1996) 22, 75, 77, 79, 176 Exodus (1960) 20, 48, 180, 182, 184–7, 204, 211 Eyde, Marianne 119, 121 Eye in the Sky (2015) 94–5, 97, 191, 214 Fanon, Frantz 108, 152 A Dying Colonialism 108 Fanonist ideas 107–8, 175 The Wretched of the Earth 108 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 123 Fatah 193 Faulkes, Colonel Roger 146–7 FBI. See Federal Bureau of Investigation Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 75, 81, 97, 206 Al Qaeda Desk 81 COINTELPRO 81 John O’Neill 81 Waco Siege (1993) 82 Feinstein, Senator Dianne 93 Fermor, Patrick Leigh 56–7 Five Branded Women (1960) 61, 109 Fleming, Ian 72 Fletcher, Austin 106 FLN (Algeria). See Front de Liberation Forces Speciales (2011). See Special Forces Ford, Harrison 80 Ford, John 33 Foreign Legion, French 189 Forsyth, Frederick 137 Four Days in Naples (1962) 99, 105–6 Four Lions (2012) 212 Franklin, William 210 Freedland, Jonathan 195 Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) of Algeria 154–5, 157–8, 161, 164–8, 173, 175, 210. See also Algeria; Battle of Algiers and “liberated zones”167 Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) 160 Fukanaga, Cary Joji 145 Fuller, Sam 3, 7, 46, 62–4, 229 n.28

257

Gabin, Jean 107, 159 Gavras, Costa 1, 21, 82, 99, 117–18, 122, 125, 127, 165, 172, 208. See also State of Siege Gemayel, Bachir 198 Genres, film 5–6 subgenres 5, 22–3 war genre 5–8, 191 Ghiat, Ruth Ben 104 GIA. See Groupe Islamique Arme Giap, Vo Nguyen 10, 13 Gidding, Nelson 163 Gift Horse, The (1952) 64 Gilbert, Lewis 38 Gitai, Amos 191 Gizenga, Antoine 131 Glubb, Lieut. General John Bagot (Glubb Pasha) 189 Godard, Jean Luc 58, 91, 151–2, 157, 162 Godard, Yves 112 Golan-Globus Films 198–9 Good Kill (2013) 90, 95 Great Raid, The (2005) 64, 70 Green Berets, The (1968) 13, 26, 45–7, 85, 126, 174, 187, 190, 208, 211. See also Wayne, John Green Berets (U.S.) 9, 42, 44–5 Greene, Graham 137, 144 Greene, Naomi 159–60 Greengrass, Paul 78, 99, 117 Griffith, D.W. 16–17 Voice of the Violin (1909) 17 Grivas, General 41 Groupe Islamique Arme (GIA) 160, 173 Guerre d’Algerie, La (1972) 166 guerre revolutionnaire concept 111, 167–8, 172 Guerrilla warfare 9, 23–4 cinematic myths 9, 209 Malaya 28 Guevara, Ernesto Che 10, 13–16, 118, 120, 125, 209, 217 n.42, 217 n.44 Gul, Hassan 91 Gulf War One 6 Gung Ho (1943) 11 Guns of Navarone, The (1962) 23, 41, 60–1, 67, 135, 208 Guzman, Abimael 19, 118–20, 208. See also Sendero Luminoso capture of (1992) 120, 127 and “Gonzalo thought” 119

258 Hacker, Frederick J. 17 Hadj, Messali 167 Haganah 20, 182, 185, 188, 201 Haggard, Rider 137 Hamburg Cell, The (2004) 213 Hammarskjöld, Dag 132–3, 147 Harkins, General Paul 42–3 Harris, Richard 135, 138 Hasler, Susan 91 Hathaway, Henry 66 Hawkins, Jack 28, 31 Herbiet, Laurent 172 Heroism, military 8 Heston, Charlton 180 Heydrich, Reinhard assassination (1942) 51, 67–70 Heynemann, Laurent 166 Hezbollah 191 Hidden (Cache) 2006 159 High Bright Sun, The (1964) 20, 26, 41 Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (1955) 181, 191 Hinds, Ciaran 204 Hoare, Mike 131–3. See also Congo; mercenaries Hobsbawm, Eric 207 Ho Chi Minh 10, 13 Hoffmann, Bruce 127 Holden, William 39, 54 Hollywood 3, 6, 9–10, 13, 19, 22–4, 26–7, 46, 54, 62, 64–5, 69–70, 72–3, 77, 81, 87–8, 93–4, 96–7, 100, 103, 114, 124, 138, 144, 149, 158, 163–4, 170–1, 180, 184, 204, 207, 209–11, 213 action movies 192, 199 Blacklist 61 domestic US terrorism 77 fantasies 214 film standards 159 Jewish movie moguls 180 post-nine/eleven 77 studio system 5 Zionist film subgenre 179–81, 184–5, 187, 190 Home Guard 50, 53. See also Dads Army Hoover, J. Edgar 81, 225 n.19 horror films 16 Hors la Loi (2010). See Outside the Law Hounsou, Djimon 140, 176

Index House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) 13 Howard, Trevor 54–5, 64, 134–5 Howe, James Wong 62 HUAC. See House Un-American Activities Committee Hunt for Bin Laden, The (2012) 73 Hurst, Brian Desmond 33 Hurt Locker, The (2009) 87–8, 92, 126, 191, 211 IDF. See Israeli Defence Force Idi Amin Dada, President 195 If Not Us Who? (2011) 123 Ill Met By Moonlight (1957) 38, 56–7, 60, 72 In Our Hands: The Battle for Jerusalem (2017) 190 Indochine (1992) 168–9 Intifada first (1987) 198 second (2000) 205 Intimate Enemies (2007) 173–5, 178 Intrigue (1947) 12 Irgun 20, 182, 184–5, 187 Israel cinematic imagery of siege warfare 181–2 counter-terrorism doctrine 179–80, 192, 194, 196, 198, 203 foundation (1948) 179, 181, 186–7 invasion of Lebanon (1982) 195, 197, 206 june 1967 War 180 mythology 179 peace treaty with Egypt (1979) 192 war myth 190 Israeli Defence Force (IDF) 182, 187–91, 196, 198 Jabotinsky, Vladimir Ze’ev 197 James Bond films 72. See also Fleming, Ian Jamila, The Algerian (1958) 109, 113, 158 Johnny Mad Dog (2008) 8, 24, 130, 141, 144–5 Johnson, Chalmers 11 Jonas, George 202, 206 Jonathan Institute 197 Jordan, Neil 21 Judith (1966) 180

Index jungle cinematic imagery 29 justice, James Robertson 54, 61 Kachins. See Burma Kai-Shek, Chiang 10, 12 Karameh Battle (1968) 196 Karina, Anna 157 Katanga 130, 132–3, 148 Kazan, Elia 99 Kenya 25–6, 58, 94, 154, 183, 208 Kermode, Frank 204 King David Hotel bombing (1946) 184, 187 Kinski, Klaus 194, 202 Kippur (2000) 191 Koestler, Arthur 199, 201 Korean War 2, 6, 132, 163 Krim, Abd el- 209 Kuomintang (KMT) 10, 63–4 Ky uc Dien Bien Phu (2004) 169 Lacheroy, Colonel Charles 167 Lancaster, Burt 173, 194 Lang, Fritz 67 La Pointe, Ali 106–9, 113, 125, 175, 182. See also Battle of Algiers, The (1966) Larteguy, Jean 112, 163–4, 207 Last Days in Vietnam (2014) 172 Last King of Scotland, The (2006) 196 Last Supper, The (1976) 116–17 Lawrence, T. E 9 Lawrence of Arabia (1962) 162, 209 Lean, David 162 Lebanon (2009) 191 Le Carre, John (David Cornwall) 199–200, 202–3, 206 Lee, Christopher 134 Lee, Spike 117 Legionnaire (1998) 209 L’Escadron blanc (The White Squadron) (1949) 162–3 Liberia 142–3 child soldiers 142 Lidice, destruction of (1942) 68 Likud 196 Lillehammer Operation (1973) 205–6. See also Operation Wrath of God Lion of the Desert (1981) 209–10 Little Drummer Girl, The (1984) 179, 199–202, 205–6

259

Lloyd, Euan 135 Loach, Ken 99 Local Defence Volunteers. See Home Guard Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) 2, 22, 52–3, 58–60 Lords Resistance Army (LRA) 144 Lost Command (1966) 112–13, 151, 158, 163–4, 166, 173 banning in France 164 Loy, Nani 99, 105–6 LRA. See Lords Resistance Army LRDG. See Long Range Desert Group Lucas, George 84 Lumumba, Patrice 130, 132. See also Congo; Dark of the Sun LURD (Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy) 142 McCain, Senator John 93 Machine Gun Preacher (2013) 130, 144 McKenna, Virginia 35, 52 McMahon, Kathryn 6 Magnani, Anna 101, 182 Malaya (Malaysia) 9, 19, 25–6, 29–30, 32, 36, 42, 48, 53, 58, 154, 183 insurgency 28, 31–2, 38, 40–1, 208 Malayan Communist Party (MCP) 29–30 Malayan Peoples Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) 29–30, 38 Malkovich, John 20, 117, 119, 121, 208 Mandela, Nelson, 20, 145 Manhunt (2013) 89, 91 Mann, Simon 139. See also Dogs of War, The Mao Zedong 10–13, 172 theory of “protracted war” 9 Maoz, Samuel 191 Marcus, Colonel Micky 182, 187–9 Marcuse, Herbert 125 Marighella, Carlos 125 Marines (US) 7, 210 Marshall, General George 12 Marvin, Lee 65 Massu, General Jacques 106, 111–12 Matthews, Jennifer murder (2009) 92 Mau Mau insurgency (1955) 33–4, 133. See also Kenya; Simba Maxwell, David 2

260

Index

Mei-Ling, Soong 11–12 Meinhof, Ulrike 123, 125, 212 Meir, Golda 193, 203, 205–6 Menem, Audrey 104 Meos. See Montagnards mercenaries 5, 13, 129–32, 140, 144, 147–8, 231 n.1 cinematic antiheroes 148 film subgenre 24, 129–30, 137, 140, 143, 207 myths 132 Mercenaries, The (1968). See Dark of the Sun Merrill, General Frank 62 Merrills Marauders 53 Merrills Marauders (1962) 23, 62, 64, 208 MGM 184 Michael Collins (1996) 21 Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) 94 Milestone, Lewis 54–5 Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG) 42, 161 Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MCV) 42–3, 46 Mills, John 6, 138 Mimieux, Yvette 130 Mirren, Helen 94–5 Missing in Action (1984) 87 Mitchum, Robert 199 Mitrione, Dan, kidnapping (1969) 117 Mobutu, General Joseph 137, 148 Modisane, Bloke 134 Mogadishu, US raid (1993) 73, 210 Mon Colonel (2006) 151, 172–3 Montagnards (Meos and Degars) 9, 42–4, 46, 221 n.46 revolt (1964) 43 Montgomery, Field Marshall Bernard 184 Moore, Robin 44–6 Moore, Roger 135 More, Kenneth 130 Moreau, Jeanne 62 Morrel, David 84 Morricone, Ennio 109, 116, 158 Moruzzi, Norma Claire 109 Mossad 24, 78, 121, 193–4, 200–1, 204–5 Mouvement National Algerien (MLF) 175. See also Hadj, Messali Moynihan, Daniel Patrick 196 Mugabe, Robert 137, 141

Mukhtar, Omar 209–10 Mulele, Pierre 130 Mulelists 131 Munich (2005) 121, 179, 194, 199, 202–4, 206 Munich: Mossad’s Revenge (2006) 205 Munich Olympics, massacre at (1972) 193–4, 203, 205 Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (1963) 151–2, 156. See also Resnais, Alain Murphy, Cillian 69–70 myths, cinematic ix, 3–4, 96, 215 n.7. See also; mercenaries; Rambo, cinematic myth guerrilla 9 military 3, 8 Naples insurrection (1943) 104, 106 Napoleonic legend 159–60 in French cinema 160 National Liberation Front (Algeria) 106, 112–13, 118, 127, 210 National Liberation Front (Vietnam) 9, 85, 209 National liberation mythology 169 National Security Agency (NSA) 91, 206 Navarre, General Henri 169 neorealism cinema ix, 99, 103–5, 127, 173, 214 Netanyahu, Benyamin 196 Netanyahu, Yonatan 196 new left 165 Newman, Paul 184, 186, 188 new wave, French 152 Nine-Eleven Attacks (2001) 17, 75, 78, 81, 83, 91–2, 143, 180, 205, 209–10 “nine-eleven filter” 126 Nolan, Christopher 7 Norris, Chuck 19, 73, 76, 79, 87–8, 143, 198 North Vietnamese Army (NVA) 9, 43, 46, 171, 209 Ntshona, Winston 136, 139 Obama, President 97 Objective Burma (1945) 23, 26 Obote, Milton President 195 O’Brien, Conor Cruise 147 Office of Strategic Services (US) 63, 65–6

Index O’Neill, John 81 Opatoshu, David 184–5 Operation Anthropoid (December 1941May 1942) 67, 69 Operation Daybreak (1975) 68–9 Operation Desert Storm (1991) 73 Operation Dragon Noir (1964) 131 Operation Dragon Rouge (1964) 131 Operation Eagle Claw (1979) 72, 87, 198 Operation Frankton (1942) 55 Operation Homecoming (1973) 86 Operation Inferno (1968) 196 Operation Peace for Galilee (1982) 197 Operation Restore Hope (1993) 87 Operation Thunderbolt (1976) 196. See also Entebbe Raid Operation Wrath of God 78, 193–4, 202, 206 Oslo Peace Accords (1994) 198 OSS. See Office of Strategic Services Outside the Law (2010) 151, 169, 175, 178 Paisa (1946) 100, 103–4, 158, 214 Palestine 48, 185–6, 211 British government White Paper (1939) 184 British mandate 20, 180, 183–4 police 184, 236 n.10 Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) 192, 194, 196 Palmach 182, 184 Panetta, Leon 92 Papon, Maurice 168, 175 Pappas, Irene 60 Partisan warfare theory 167–8. See also Carl Schmitt Partisans Italian (World War) II 103–4 Jewish (Eastern Europe) 186 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 99, 106 Patel, Sharad 196 Patriot Games (1992) 82 Peck, Gregory 54, 60–1. See also Chindits Peckinpah, Sam 88, 130, 134 Pentagon (US Department of Defense) 198 Pepe le Moko (1936) 107–8, 159, 229 n.28 Petit Soldat, Le (1963) 91, 151–2, 157 Pius XII, Pope (Eugenio Pacelli) 103

261

Planters Wife, The (1952) 26, 28, 31–2, 34–6, 135, 162, 208 Pontecorvo, Gillo 1, 20–1, 62, 83, 91, 99, 101, 103, 106–7, 114–17, 125, 158, 163–4, 166, 168, 173, 178, 204, 208. See also Battle of Algiers, The (1966); Burn (1969) Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) 192–4, 197, 211 Porch, Douglas 167 Powell, Michael 56 Preminger, Otto 20, 183–4, 186 Pressburger, Emeric 56, 67 Prince, Stephen 77–8, 204 Princesse Tam Tam (1935) 153 Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) 12 Puttnam, David 87 Quattro giornate di Napoli (1962). See Four Days in Naples Quayle, Anthony 58, 60–1 Queimada (Burn) (1969) 11, 114–16, 165 Question, La (1977) 151, 165–6, 169 Quinn, Anthony 60, 163 RAF (Red Army Faction). See Baader Meinhof “Gang” Raft, George 12 Raid on Entebbe (1977) 186 Raid on Rommel (1971) 66 Rambo (2006) 130, 144 Rambo First Blood (1982); 7, 76, 84–6 Rambo, First Blood II (1985) 76, 84, 86–7 Rambo III (1988) 37, 76, 144, 176 Rambo character 88, 94, 96, 111, 145, 177, 214 Bollywood remake 97 cinematic myth 75–6, 87, 95, 143–4, 177, 209 decline in Hollywood 96 novel (1972) 84–5 “stab in the back” myth 84 Ramdane, Abbane 106 Rangers (US) 2, 66, 70–1, 75. See also Great Raid, The (2005) attack in Mogadishu (1993)73 Combat School, Hawaii 188 Rank Organisation 27–8, 32–3, 38, 60

262

Index

Rankin, Ian 72 R.A.S. (1973) 151, 160 Ray, Robert 85 Reagan, President Ronald 76, 79, 197 Red Army Faction (RAF) 19, 24, 108, 122, 208, 211 Renner, Jeremy 88 Renoir, Jean 159, 162 Resnais, Alain 151, 156, 158 Revolutionary Cells (RK) 122, 194, 211–12 Revolutionary United Front (RUF), rebels 140–2 Rhodesia 134–7, 153 bush war 136. See also Zimbabwe Richards, Paul 143 Richardson, Ralph 185 Richter, Gerhard 123 Rickman, Alan 79, 176 Rilkis, Eran 190 Rise and Fall of Idi Amin, The (1980) 195 Ritt, Martin 61–2 Roberts, Adam 139 Robin, Marie Monique 168 Robson, Mark 163 Rome Open City (1945) 99–100, 102–3, 107, 111–13, 125, 158, 170, 181, 214. See also Rossellini, Roberto Rosenstone, Robert 4 Rossellini, Roberto 54, 99–103, 107, 113, 117, 125, 127, 158, 162 RUF. See Revolutionary United Front Rules of Engagement (2000) 210 Ryan, Jack, movie character 80, 91 Rybojad, Stephane 169, 176 Saadi, Yacef 106–9. See also National Liberation Front (Algeria); Battle of Algiers, The (1966) Said, Edward 201 St John, Earl 32–3 Sainte, Eva Marie 184–5 Salameh, Ali Hassan 205–6 Salan, General Raoul 168 Salavas, Telly 65 Sartre, Jean Paul 152, 155 SAS. See Special Air Service Sauvaire, Jean-Stephane 142 Sayeret Matkal 196 Schary, Dore 184 Schmitt, Carl 167–8

Schoendoerffer, Pierre 10, 151, 153, 160–4, 169, 171, 178 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 19, 60, 121 Scorsese, Martin 134 Scott, Randolph 11, 210 Scott, Ridley 73, 87 Scugnazzi 104–5. See also Naples insurrection Sea of Sand (1958) 59–60 Seagal, Steven 19, 79 Seagrave, Gordon 37 Seals (US Navy) 75, 90, 92–3 Seal Team Six (2002) 23, 90 Seal Team Six (2012) 73, 77, 88 Second World War 1–2, 5–8, 18, 22–3, 26, 30, 37, 42, 50–1, 67, 69, 132, 135, 155, 162, 165, 173–5, 183, 186–7, 189–90, 194, 208 Algerian veterans 174 Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) 50, 68 Segal, George 163 Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) insurgent movement 19, 118–21, 127 Sergeant Klems (1971) 209 Setif Massacre (1945) 175 7th Dawn, The (1964) 26, 28, 38–40 Shakespeare, Nicholas 119 Sharon, General Ariel 190, 192, 197 Shaw, Anthony 16, 38, 93 Siege, The (1998) 21–2, 82–3, 210 Siege of Jadotville, The (2016) 130, 146, 148 Sierra Leone 140, 141, 143 Simba (1955) 26, 28, 33–5, 133, 208 Simba rebels ( Congo) 130–1, 133, 141 Sinatra, Frank 187 Siri, Florent 154 Smiley, George, character 199–200 Smith, M.L.R. 95 Smith, Wilbur 130, 134 Smyth, Richie 146 Snipes, Wesley 79 Snow, Edgar 11, 217 n.36 Soderbergh, Steven 15–16, 24, 208 SOE. See Special Operations Executive SOF. See Special Operations Forces Solinas, Franco 107, 116–17 Somalia 23 South African War (1899-1902) 9–10 Special Air Service (SAS) 2, 40, 49, 51, 55, 66, 90, 211, 224 n.58

Index Special Boat Service (SBS) 53 Special Forces (2011) (Forces Speciales) 151, 169, 176, 178 special forces 8, 89, 92 cinematic image of 73 French naval 176 US 73, 85 special operations 5, 9, 22, 24, 49–52, 61 movie subgenre 211 Special Operations Executive (SOE) 52, 54, 61, 65, 67–8, 75 Special Operations Forces (SOF) 75, 90, 198 Spielberg, Steven 7, 84, 87, 121, 179, 202, 205, 238 n.60 Munich (2005) 121, 179, 194, 202–4, 206 Saving Private Ryan (1998) 7, 87, 205 Schindlers List (1993) 203–5 War of the Worlds (2005) 84, 203–4 Sri Lanka, guerrilla war 124–5 Stallone, Sylvester 76, 111, 177 Stanleyville, rescue operation (1964) 132 Star Wars films 84, 93, 96 State of Siege (1988) 1, 21, 77, 82, 117–18, 122, 125, 165, 208. See also Gavras, Costa Sterling. Claire 197, 203 Stern Gang 182, 188–9 Stillwell, General Joseph 63 Stirling, Colonel David 51–3 Stone, Oliver 117 Stora, Benjamin 169 Student revolt (Paris, May 1968) (Les evenements) 160, 165 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) 112 Suchet, David 79, 176 Sum of All Fears, The (2002) 75, 77, 82–3 Sword in the Desert (1949) 180, 182–3, 211 Sword of Gideon (1986) 202 Swordfish (2001) 77, 83 Tarantino, Quentin 83 Tavernier, Bernard 155 Taylor, Charles 140, 142 Taylor, Rod 130 Tears of the Sun (1993) 88 Templer, General Sir Gerald 31 Terminator, film series 129

263

Terrorism 9, 16–18, 20, 24 and cinema 16–21 cinematic myths 192 military tactics 16–17 movie subgenre 77–8, 211, 213–14 “terrorology”19, 120 theatre 22 “total” terror 18 They Raid By Night (1942) 53 They Who Dare (1954) 23, 38, 55–6 Third Generation, The (1979) 123 Thompson, J. Lee 58, 60 Three Days of the Condor (1975) 82 317e Section, La (1963) 151, 161, 170, 178, 208–9 Toni (1935) 159 torture Abu Ghraib (2004) 91 Algerian War 160, 165, 177 cinematic theme 91–2, 101, 113, 164 Senate Intelligence Committee Report on CIA torture 89, 92 UN Convention against Torture (2005) 89 US use in Vietnam 174 Towering Inferno, The (1974) 77, 194 Travolta, John 83 Trinquier, Robert 112 Trintignant, Jean Louis 117 Trump, Donald 97 Tshombe, Moise 130–3, 136–7, 147–8, 232 n.1 Tupamaros guerrillas (Uruguay) 82, 117–18, 120, 127 Ulzana’s Raid (1972) 173 Unconventional Warfare ix, 1–3, 9, 22–4, 61, 88, 208 cinematic depiction 8–9, 214 United Artists 28, 114, 116 United Nations cinematic portrayal 133, 148 forces in Congo 132–3, 148 UN Security Council Resolution 169 (1961) 130 United 93 (2006) 78 Uris, Leon 184. See also Exodus (1960) Vann, John Paul 145 Vautier, Rene 160, 165

264 Veiel, Andres 123 Vengeance (1984) 202–3. See also Jonas, George Victory culture, US movies 181 Vietnam colonial society 153, 168 French departure 170 Geneva negotiations (1954) 170 partition 162, 170 US War ix, 5, 26, 42, 45–6, 63, 69, 72, 85–6, 95, 158, 167, 170, 177, 209, 211–12 Vogel, Joseph 184 Von Trotta, Margareta 123

Index Westerns, cinematic myth 187 Whispering Death (1976) 134–6 Whitaker, Forest 196 Wild Geese, The (1978) 130, 133, 135–6, 138, 148 Willis, Bruce 19, 60, 79, 83, 88, 173 Windoms Way (1957) 26, 28, 36, 39, 48 Wingate, Orde 23, 43, 62 Wolf, Naomi 93 Wong, Anna Mae 11–12 Wonga Coup. See Mann, Simon Woo, John 89, 91 World War II. See Second World War You Only Live Once (1993) 119–20

Waco, siege (1993) 82 Walken, Christopher 86, 138–9, 233 n.31 Walker, William 114–15 “war on terror” 195, 205 Wargnier, Regis 168–9 Washington, Denzil 82 Wayne, John 13, 46–7, 59, 76, 126, 174, 187, 189–90, 221 n.46 Weather Underground (USA) 112 Weaver, Sigourney 149 Welcome Home Soldier Boys (1971) 87 Went the Day Well (1942) 50, 53–4

Z (1969) 117, 165 Zabotinsky, Ze’ev Vladimir 197 Zero Dark Thirty (2002) 23, 73, 77, 88–9, 91–5, 97, 214 Zimbabwe 139. See also Rhodesia Zionism 183 film subgenre 179, 182 myth 179–80, 185 Zionist lobby in US 181, 186 Zwick, Edward 82, 140, 186, 210