True Story
Added 5/14/2009
This film has always been rather special to me as when I was a 1977-1978 Audiology graduate student from Calif. @ Univ. Manchester in the north of England, I was one of the G.I. "extras" recruited in a Manchester "cattle-call" for real Americans (which in those days were a rarity in Manchester!) Our dept. secretary told me about it and needing a few extra quid, I got a G.I. haircut that first day I remember (back then neck length hair was the fashion, so at first it all was a bit of a shock). Myself and another few Americans (one whom I am still best friends with to this day)ended-up as being the "regular" extras and spent quite a bit of time in the film on location in both Yorkshire and London. People might be surprised to know that this whole film was shot on a budget of only $6 million (which was actually quite a max for the majority of British films in the 70's so I am told). Anyway, as an American having lived in England (as a student vs the film's soldier)I thought the movie was absolutely dead-on accurate and wonderfully filmed capturing both the American perspective and English perspective of the war period and how they intertwined. The most amazing & serendipity aspect of this movie (for me) was that a fellow graduate student S---- I had been dating back in Calif. and corresponding with while I was at Manchester, had asked me to look up her uncle who was a dentist in Liverpool, who was the brother of her deceased English Mom. (I had known S----sister J--years earlier in Jr High and knew their dad was an American from Arizona who had met and married an English girl during the war). Well it wasn't till I got back to Calif. in '78 after filming wrapped-up that summer that I got back together with S---- and she told me about a writer interviewing her Dad some time back about his war-time romance (not knowing that the story would be an eventual screenplay). I just thought my review would be of interest to those who enjoyed the film and wondered if this was a true war-time love story, it is! (although the names were obviously changed).
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That's so long ago
Added 4/18/2009
In 1979 the nostalgia about the second world war was slightly displaced but could easily be explained by the defeat in Vietnam in 1975 and all the films about the horror this war in Vietnam was. Let's compensate slightly and enjoy WW2 when the Yanks were welcomed (kind of) in Europe and expected to give a good spanking to the Germans, if not the Nazis, or vice versa. But there is no Kwai river in Europe. So let us make it sentimental and evoke the meeting of the Yanks with their distant British cousins in England getting ready for the second front and then the third. So the whole film is given some life with its being centered on the relation between one man from Arizona and one girl from the small city where the Yanks are camping. Possible and impossible passion at the same time, possible in the mind and impossible in the body because of the immense chasm between the two worlds, the two civilizations. It is a little pathetic, and yet probably true. A culture that says the girl of another man is sacred and a woman from another world has to be tamed and introduced with time and in time, not taken and used for a short while and forgotten when departure day arrives. You add to that the difficult relation between some white GIs and the black GIs, plus the impossibility for the other white GIs who are not openly hostile to the black GIs, hence who are not openly racist, to prevent or stop the racist provocation and then fight. Does it make a good film? It would have been good in the 50s. But four years after the defeat in Vietnam it is slightly too romantic and even simplistic to really erase the humiliation of 1975. The film 30 years later becomes slightly too sweet to be digestible. For having lived up to 1965 with GIs in my city and having seen their disruptive presence every Sunday along the embankments of the harbor, alcohol, prostitution, and a few other things of the type, I can testify it was probably a lot more drastic and sinister in England, in war time, waiting for the front, knowing that they may never come back from it. The film then appears idyllic, and in a way weak.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID
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Half a Great Film Anyway
Added 9/27/2008
For the first hour it brims with great scripting, editing, and camera work. By the end you find yourself wishing they'd just go AWOL and catch a ride back to the states. If you want to stay riveted to your seat you simply can't go wrong with Schlesinger's "Midnight Cowboy". Never could say much for most British film makers, but many of them have made really crackerjack films about us yanks!
0 out of 1 people found this helpful.
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Gem of a movie
Added 1/14/2008
I'm one of those people that believe this movie is a gem and really overlooked as a great war movie. Granted, the only time you see shooting is when they are training (with live ammo) for D-Day. But it's a great insight into what life was like not only for the American troops but also for the British citizens when hundreds of thousands soldiers suddenly arrived in Britain. Excellent characters just keep popping up, maybe for a scene or two, but you don't forget them (particularly the mourning father in the pub).
Great little love stories, too. Richard Geer gives an outstanding performance as a man who struggles -- does he really want to go full throttle with a girl when he may soon die in combat, and she's already lost her fiance to the War? William Devane also shines as the Army officer whose spends quite a bit of time with the very-married "donut dolly." The other performance that stands out is Rachel Roberts, who is so not happy to see her daughter cavorting with a Yank.
The final scenes are heartbreaking. The woman breaking through the MPs to hug her loved just one more time. Watching those Soldiers board the train, watched it again last week and still got choked up. Just like in real life, how many were truly saying goodbye?
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Yanks -- getting the facts right
Added 8/1/2007
I first watched this movie because we were going over to the towns where it was filmed in the UK. Once a year they have a "Yanks event". They have a convoy and everyone dresses up like the 1940's and they dance and recreate some of the scenes in the movie, like when the inn keeper empties the chamber pot out of the window.
The reason that I'm writing this is that the "nuclear power towers" that another reviewer complained about are not nuclear. They were cooling towers from the 1930's and have now been pulled down. They were actually there during the 40's and there was nothing nuclear about them. I know because I asked the local people who live there. Great movie!
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
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True Story
Added 5/14/2009
This film has always been rather special to me as when I was a 1977-1978 Audiology graduate student from Calif. @ Univ. Manchester in the north of England, I was one of the G.I. "extras" recruited in a Manchester "cattle-call" for real Americans (which in those days were a rarity in Manchester!) Our dept. secretary told me about it and needing a few extra quid, I got a G.I. haircut that first day I remember (back then neck length hair was the fashion, so at first it all was a bit of a shock). Myself and another few Americans (one whom I am still best friends with to this day)ended-up as being the "regular" extras and spent quite a bit of time in the film on location in both Yorkshire and London. People might be surprised to know that this whole film was shot on a budget of only $6 million (which was actually quite a max for the majority of British films in the 70's so I am told). Anyway, as an American having lived in England (as a student vs the film's soldier)I thought the movie was absolutely dead-on accurate and wonderfully filmed capturing both the American perspective and English perspective of the war period and how they intertwined. The most amazing & serendipity aspect of this movie (for me) was that a fellow graduate student S---- I had been dating back in Calif. and corresponding with while I was at Manchester, had asked me to look up her uncle who was a dentist in Liverpool, who was the brother of her deceased English Mom. (I had known S----sister J--years earlier in Jr High and knew their dad was an American from Arizona who had met and married an English girl during the war). Well it wasn't till I got back to Calif. in '78 after filming wrapped-up that summer that I got back together with S---- and she told me about a writer interviewing her Dad some time back about his war-time romance (not knowing that the story would be an eventual screenplay). I just thought my review would be of interest to those who enjoyed the film and wondered if this was a true war-time love story, it is! (although the names were obviously changed).
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
|
That's so long ago
Added 4/18/2009
In 1979 the nostalgia about the second world war was slightly displaced but could easily be explained by the defeat in Vietnam in 1975 and all the films about the horror this war in Vietnam was. Let's compensate slightly and enjoy WW2 when the Yanks were welcomed (kind of) in Europe and expected to give a good spanking to the Germans, if not the Nazis, or vice versa. But there is no Kwai river in Europe. So let us make it sentimental and evoke the meeting of the Yanks with their distant British cousins in England getting ready for the second front and then the third. So the whole film is given some life with its being centered on the relation between one man from Arizona and one girl from the small city where the Yanks are camping. Possible and impossible passion at the same time, possible in the mind and impossible in the body because of the immense chasm between the two worlds, the two civilizations. It is a little pathetic, and yet probably true. A culture that says the girl of another man is sacred and a woman from another world has to be tamed and introduced with time and in time, not taken and used for a short while and forgotten when departure day arrives. You add to that the difficult relation between some white GIs and the black GIs, plus the impossibility for the other white GIs who are not openly hostile to the black GIs, hence who are not openly racist, to prevent or stop the racist provocation and then fight. Does it make a good film? It would have been good in the 50s. But four years after the defeat in Vietnam it is slightly too romantic and even simplistic to really erase the humiliation of 1975. The film 30 years later becomes slightly too sweet to be digestible. For having lived up to 1965 with GIs in my city and having seen their disruptive presence every Sunday along the embankments of the harbor, alcohol, prostitution, and a few other things of the type, I can testify it was probably a lot more drastic and sinister in England, in war time, waiting for the front, knowing that they may never come back from it. The film then appears idyllic, and in a way weak.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
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Half a Great Film Anyway
Added 9/27/2008
For the first hour it brims with great scripting, editing, and camera work. By the end you find yourself wishing they'd just go AWOL and catch a ride back to the states. If you want to stay riveted to your seat you simply can't go wrong with Schlesinger's "Midnight Cowboy". Never could say much for most British film makers, but many of them have made really crackerjack films about us yanks!
0 out of 1 people found this helpful.
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