Since I watched "Inn for Trouble" earlier this week YouTube has helpfully tossed a number of contemporary British films my way. For once, an algorithm is doing something right.
Today's is Rockets Galore from 1958. It's done in the style of "The Mouse that Roared" in that it's based on a comic novel about a small place, in this case the Scottish island of Todday, outsmarting the big guns (literally the British government, which wants to use Todday as a missile base). It's got the cast of eccentrics including a few who prattle on in idecipherable Gaelic.
It's a bit light on the comedy, I have to admit. Though it was fun to see as they panned through the island's inhabitants for reactions to a missile circling loudly over the island, the cutaways included a sheep dog, a sheep, and an incredibly wooly horse.
There is something fundamentally funny about watching a collection of rustic bumpkins pulling the wool over the bluebloods' eyes, however. Though making the crashed missile part of a bonfire seems ill advised.
I also love that it's filmed on location -- in this case on the island of Barra. These days, it would all be CGI. And I'm weary of that. Done right, CGI is wonderful. But in many, many cases it's done lazily because it's easier than doing the real thing.
Now they're dropping paratroopers on the clam-diggers.
There's some good anti-war conversation in the movie, coming from a nation only a decade removed from World War II and probably anxious to see the demilitarization, not re-militarization. Maybe that's where the humor -- and the hope -- comes through. And it's all resolved in a way that was probably clever back then, but old hat now: Conservation. I won't spoil the ending. Just go watch the movie.
There's that Cold War weariness, poked in the eyeballs.
But oops: I just spoiled the ending. Sorry.
But oops: I just spoiled the ending. Sorry.
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