Think of England review – far-fetched tale of state-sponsored second world war porn turns deadly serious
Apocryphal plans to send an arousing morale booster to troops battling the Nazis make scant sense, and nor does the resulting movieSome potentially interesting ideas here and a good cast...
By Peter Bradshaw · The Guardian Culture
Apocryphal plans to send an arousing morale booster to troops battling the Nazis make scant sense, and nor does the resulting movie Some potentially interesting ideas here and a good cast … but the whole thing disintegrates into a very weird and ill-judged mess. It looks as if it might be a saucy romp, but is in fact doomily serious, like a stilted, stricken stage play. Sexual violence, PTSD and misogyny are among the issues that the film fails to address convincingly. Writer-director Richard Hawkins (who scripted Paul Greengrass’s The Theory of Flight ) imagines that during the second world war the British government commissioned porn films to be shown to troops as a morale-boost. This is supposedly based on an “urban myth” whose existence does not appear to be evident other than in online material relating to this film – although Britain’s Political Warfare Executive (PWE) is known to have dropped pornographic leaflets over Germany to damage enemy morale, crudely depicting wives cheating on absent soldier husbands, etc. Continue reading...