“What is War?”
After watching Colditz, I felt a need to watch more Second World War drama, and so found myself watching Manhunt and going on quite an unexpected journey. Set in Occupied France, we follow the attempts of three characters – Vincent, Jimmy and Nina, as they attempt to cross France to get to England to deliver important information about the resistance to the British. This after a brutal opening in which an entire meeting of a French Resistance group are butchered by the Germans, with only Nina surviving. It takes a while to get going, the first five or six episodes are fairly similar, with the trio trekking cross country and avoiding all and sundry. Nina (Cyd Hayman) isn’t an immediately likeable character, as she seems to break into tears at the slightest provocation and doesn’t offer anything like as much as Vincent and Jimmy. As it progresses, and she is shown to be willing to suffer to get what she needs, she becomes a character of such heart and soul that she turns Vincent’s head. Throughout Peter Barkworth as Vincent is compelling as a Resistance leader, while Jimmy (Alfred Lynch) shows that beneath his chirpy British upper class exterior he is really very tough. However, it’s only when Robert Hardy, as Abwehr Officer Sergeant Gratz, and Philip Madoc, as SS Officer Lutzig, become regulars of equal billing that it really takes off.
Hardy plays a master interrogator training in the art of gaining information through means other than torture. He works his way in the mind of his subject, getting to know them and, in what at first seems to be a classic case of Stockholm syndrome, Nina moves in with him after an episode set in a single room in which Hardy moves from gentle to maniacal in a stunning performance. Right till the final episode you are never quite sure which side Gratz is on, as he clearly loves Nina and opposes the SS, and Lutzig in particular, but at the same time wishes to help the German war effort.
“War is Love”
A series that forces you to think about right and wrong, not just on a personal level but on a nationalistic level too. What would you do to either help your country win the war or, alternatively, what would you do to stop the opposition winning? Occupied France was a fascinating place, with collaboration taking place on all different kind of levels, and often this would take place merely as a means to survive. To oppose the Nazis openly would mean near certain death, so opposition could be the slightest, smallest thing – not necessarily to defeat the Nazis, but to slow them down, to distract them when they would have been better served elsewhere. This is seen frequently, not least in the figure of a senior French politician, who saves Vincent from execution and pretends to use the ‘good cop’ routine to get information out of him, when in fact the whole time he is playing Lutzig.
Often it is clear that this series was produced on a limited budget, with many episodes reminiscent of a stage play, with just one or two sets and three or four characters interacting. This could be a problem, but the writing is so good, and the performances so compelling, that it doesn’t matter. The exception to the rule is episode 22 in which Vincent and Jimmy, along with two other resistance members played by Brian Cox and George Sewell, infiltrate a Germans arms factory to steal an important piece of metal. For 50 minutes everything is played with looks, as there is not a single word of dialogue. It’s something that can only be done once you know the characters inside out, and since we do this becomes one of the most incredible pieces of visual storytelling that I’ve seen. It is a scintillating piece of drama with some excellent actions sequences (‘Action by HAVOC’, naturally, this was 1970 after all) which leaves you with a tingling spine.
“No, War is Hate”
As the series moves towards it’s conclusion, with Vincent, Jimmy and Nina trapped in Bordeaux with the important piece of metal, we step away from them to spend an entire episode in the company of Gratz and Lutzig, as Lutzig interrogates the master interrogator in a fascinating reversal of the Gratz-Nina episode. Gratz knows what Lutzig is doing, and Lutzig knows that Gratz knows what he is doing, and so the Mexican stand-off is so compelling that when Lutzig’s superior enters and takes Gratz off to be tortured the episode moves onto an altogether different level. Lutzig, and Gratz himself, oppose torture, but it seems that Gratz succumbs and offers to find Nina. In fact, in a multi-layered game of bluff, he is offering Nina and her two friends a way out of France. The last three episodes are so tremendous that I won’t go into detail, it’s worth watching without foreknowledge.
A tremendous series with a great theme tune (Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, as about a dramatic piece of music as you can get) with not a dud performance (see guest spots by Ian McCullough and an extremely youthful Geoffrey Whitehead) and characters that you care about in situations that most of us can’t comprehend. By the end it poses the highly moral question of “What is war?” The two answers that arise show the fundamental difference between the two sides in this conflict. The British response is that war is love, while that of the Germans, and of Gratz, is that war is hate. Jimmy’s highest concern once safely back in Britain is neither – it is simply to grow back his moustache that he was forced to remove in Episode 1. War is Love or War is Hate? The truth, I suppose, lies somewhere in the middle.
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