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Wishfulness
During WWII, British Intelligence identified a fatal flaw in the enemy's thinking: the German spymasters were prone to what the Brits called "wishfulness." When an agent offered his services, or when a piece of possible positive information came to light, the Germans would tend to get so excited about how good it would be if the agent were genuine or the information were true, that they could pretty soon find themselves believing in it without proper evidence. As an amusing result of this, all of Germany's spies in Britain were either double agents working for us and feeding the Germans misinformation, or entirely fictional agents invented by British intelligence. Eventually, we had so many fictional agents sending bogus intel to the Nazis that we had to form a special subcommittee to catch or kill off a few of them in the interests of realism. We were also able to bamboozle the Boche with some fake documents in a briefcase chained to a corpse floating in the sea. Like Fox Mulder in later years, the Germans wanted to believe.
But we were guilty of wishfulness on a much larger scale. Entire campaigns were launched based on the exciting hope of success rather than on a realistic assessment of the risk of failure. Watching THEIRS IS THE GLORY got me curious about the Battle of Arnhem so I picked up Arnhem 1944 The Airborne Battle by Martin Middlebrook from the library. It's a substantial, impressive work which tries hard to be fair to everybody (it also confirms that Dickie Attenborough's A BRIDGE TOO FAR is pretty accurate in its account, unusually for these kind of epics). Middlebrook points out the benefits a victory at Arnhem would have brought — a much earlier end to the war, quicker liberation for Holland and the shutting down of Germany's rocket attacks on London, and an Anglo-American conquest of Germany that would have put us in a much stronger bargaining position at Yalta: Germany might not have been split down the middle, the East enduring decades of communist rule. Someone remarked that Germany's biggest disaster in the war was winning the Battle of Arnhem.
But this is wishfulness. British military command discovered that Arnhem was heavily defended with tanks, but as this info was discovered awkwardly late in the planning stage of the attack, it was simply suppressed. Thousands of men were air-dropped to pretty much certain death. The plan was a very fragile one. The RAF didn't want to fly too close to enemy defences so they dropped the infantry miles from their targets, sacrificing the element fo surprise which was the main advantage of an airborne attack. Here's a quote from Brigadier 'Shan' Hackett which is hilarious in its analysis of the tragic absurdity of the plan.
The airborne movement was very naive. It was very good on getting airborne troops to battle, but they were very innocent when it came to fighting the Germans when we arrived. They used to make a beautiful airborne plan and then add the fighting-the-Germans bit afterwards. We brigade commanders were at one of the divisional commander's conferences […] where this lovely plan was being presented. The Polish commander, Sosabowski, said in his lovely deep voice, 'But the Germans, General, the Germans!'
(Sosabowski is played, incompetently, by Gene Hackman, in the Attenborough film, probably the only time I've seen Hackman be bad. He seems to have thought he could do a Polish accent without research, by effort of will alone, or else he just has a tin ear for accents.)
Anyway, I think filmmakers can fall prey to wishfulness too. Wanting something to be true doesn't make it true, and the marvelous rewards available if a thing comes off does not make it any more likely that it WILL come off.
Art Linson recounts preparing an action-comedy in the nineties, and finding none of the appropriate leading men available. Willem Dafoe was suggested. An up-and-coming young star. But Linson wasn't convinced he was a light comedian. He asked his wife one night, "Do you think Willem Dafoe could make you laugh?" She replied, "I don't know, but I saw him smile once and I had nightmares for a week."
But with nobody obviously bankable and better suited to be found, Linson talked himself into it. And had to burn the negative. The whole film was abandoned, and I think they managed to somehow claim the insurance, or else there was a fortuitous accident and they used it as an excuse. There you go.
When w e made CRY FOR BOBO, ace producer Nigel Smith (far right) and I packed the script with every gag we could think of. We wanted to win the commission, so we wanted it to sound as impressive as possible. But the film had to be under ten minutes long. We used lots of formatting tricks to pack a lot of content into less than ten pages — the theory is that one page = a minute of screen time, but if you have a disproportionate amount of action to dialogue, and if you pack the prose tighter than a Dashiell Hammett shopping list in shorthand, that all gets thrown out of whack.
Having won the commission, we should have then pruned the script a bit, but we fell in love with our own material and then tried to shoot all of it. I had to drop a banana skin and plank gag, but nearly everything else got shot — and the first cut was fourteen minutes long without credits. That's half again as long as it needed to be.
Working with Nigel, the late, great Bert Eeles as editor, and resourceful assistant editor Anna Mehta, we somehow managed to hack the thing down, preserving the best jokes, keeping the story coherent, and stopping the pace getting so hectic it would just irritate everyone, but it wasn't easy. We had convinced ourselves that we could make it ten minutes long just by playing everything fast. Wishfulness. It'll get you in a lot of trouble. Fortunately, we didn't have German tanks shooting at us on this one.
The best bit in Richard Attenborough and William Goldman's A BRIDGE TOO FAR involves Frank Grimes, a young intelligence officer who breaks the news to Dirk Borgarde's General Browning that there are a bunch of German tanks at Arnhem which could scupper the whole plan. Browning, in reality, refused to alter the plan and did not inform his superiors, his peers or his men about the tanks. Goldman had the job of writing dialogue which would explain Browning's reasoning, or unreasoning if you prefer. I think he did a great job.
"I doubt they're fully serviceable."
"Then why would the Germans conceal them, sir?"
"Normal routine."
Browning realises this is weak. "We've had dozens of aerial photographs taken and these are the only ones that show tanks!"
Ye-es. But they DO SHOW TANKS.
"Do you seriously expect us to call off the biggest operation mounted since D-Day… because of three photographs?"
PHOTOGRAPHS OF TANKS.
An effective scene which utilises a human attribute insufficiently exploited by modern movies — our ability to get infuriated by idiocy. I think it's very tempting to suspect that modern movies don't try this because they don't respect the audience enough to credit them with that reaction.
This entry was posted on June 3, 2015 at 8:38 am and is filed under FILM, Politics with tags A Bridge too Far, Arnhem 1944 The Airborne Battle, Art Linson, Cry For Bobo, Dirk Bogarde, Frank Grimes, Gene Hackman, Martin Middlebrook, Theirs is the Glory, Wiliam Goldman, Willem Dafoe.	You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
2 Responses to "Wishfulness"
henryholland666 Says:
I don't think it's lack of respect for the audience, but because being "infuriated by idiocy" fatigue has set in. Thanks to things like *shudder* Twitter *shudder* 5,000 people can register their outrage with 10 seconds of mouse clicking. Big deal.
Sorry, I'm not going to pretend to be "outraged" that some D-level "celebrity" said something stupid in an interview or that a politician was a craven, pandering tool to some potential voters or that an athlete turns out not to be the reincarnation of an Enlightenment polymath.
What always cracks me up is to see a headline like "Thousands of Twitter users outraged by [fill in outrage-du-jour here]!!!!!". On a planet of 7 billion + people, a few thousand amounts to a hill of beans in this world.
dcairns Says:
I should probably specified "official stupidity." When a figure in authority makes a disastrous decision, like the mayor in Jaws or Browning in A Bridge Too Far, you have a strong dramatic decision with catastrophic consequences, plus a kind of injustice — the right course of action is rejected for stupid or unworthy reasons. Injustice is something that can really make an audience emote, since nearly everyone has some inherent idea of fairness.