The War Game (1965)

A docudrama depicting a hypothetical nuclear attack on Britain.

Director:

Peter Watkins

Writer:

Peter Watkins

Stars:

Michael Aspel, Peter Graham, Dave Baldwin

Won 1 Oscar. Another 4 wins.

Cast

Complete credited cast:
Michael Aspel	...	Commentator
Peter Graham	...	Commentator

Storyline

The War Game is a fictional, worst-case-scenario docu-drama about nuclear war and its aftermath in and around a typical English city. Although it won an Oscar for Best Documentary, it is fiction. It was intended as an hour-long program to air on BBC 1, but it was deemed too intense and violent to broadcast. It went to theatrical distribution as a feature film instead. Low-budget and shot on location, it strives for and achieves convincing and unflinching realism.

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Plot Keywords:

nuclear attack | post thermonuclear war | banned film | semi documentary | world war three | 

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Taglines:

BBC TV's film about a nuclear attack on Britain directed by Peter Watkins

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Genres:

Drama | War

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Details

Country:

UK

Language:

English

Release Date:

7 February 1967 (USA)

Also Known As:

Krigsspel

Filming Locations:

Canterbury, Kent, England, UK

Company Credits

Production Co:

British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)

Technical Specs

Runtime:

48 min

Sound Mix:

Mono

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

Included among the "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", edited by Steven Schneider.

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Goofs

Light can be seen reflecting off a woman's "broken" teeth.

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Quotes

Soldier: They're not letting any photographers in there.
Interviewer: Yes yes I know, but just a minute, will you tell us what they're doing in there, please?
Soldier: They're simply burning the bodies. The buildings are full of them, there's just too many to bury. The buildings are full so all we can do is put them under eight steel girders and put a fire underneath, just like making a grill.

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Connections

Referenced in 28 Days Later... (2002)

User Reviews

a graphic, horrifying portrayal

The War Game is a British film that gives a graphic, horrifying portrayal of what would happen to the civilian population of Great Britain if the country were hit by nuclear bombs.

"The War Game" is a 47-minute film that was originally made for the British Broadcasting Corporation and then withheld from showing on the air because it was considered too grisly and gruesome for indiscriminate projection into homes.

Its fearful and forceful nature was reported in papers from all over London by reporters in the 60's, and its availability now on DVD is but a token of the talk and controversy its subsequent showing over the years in a few British theaters has caused.

The film was made by a young man, Peter Watkins, in hand-held-camera style and at a pace that endow its grim, on-the-spot enactments with the seeming truth of a documentary film. It gives us a minute-by-minute rundown of cumulating horrors in an area of Kent from the time the first off-course Soviet bomb explodes in the region until the better part of the landscape and population are laid waste.

While the horrors it shows, such as firestorms, the melting of children's eyes and the mercy shooting by police of rows of victims who are too badly burned to be helped, are based upon actual experiences in Hiroshima and in German cities in World War II, the monstrous piling up of these horrors in one picture seems a calculated showing of the worst.

And the fact that no immediate way to avoid this is suggested to the audience by the film makes it, for most, a sheer frustrating excitement of morbidity and dread.

Mr. Watkins was quoted in the media in the 60's as saying that he hoped that it would agitate people to demand the elimination of nuclear bombs. But one might guess it would serve that purpose only if shown in connection with some concrete and widespread campaign, as even today, we are confronted by nuclear annihilation. Otherwise it is no more than a powerful, isolated horror film of the past.