A moving subplot

Categories: journal

Date: 31 August 2009 09:58:50

Yesterday evening, I watched a DVD of 633 Squadron. It's rated PG (Parental Guidance), although it struck me as quite different from other movies of that rating. We're pretty well used to watching PG movies with our children, but where the action is somehow within boundaries. There is an expectation that the good people won't suffer unduly. This film, however, attempts to portray wartime events, although in a fictionalised context.

The fate of one of the characters is especially tragic, but to some extent underplayed, thankfully. Flying Officer Bissell is the navigator of one of the Mosquito aircraft which feature in the film. We learn that he is an artist, crucially sketching a view of the target for those planning the raid which is central to the film's story. Then we see him getting married. He volunteers to accompany the film's central character on a dangerous mission. The aircraft sustains damage, and on its return crash lands, bursting into flames. Flying Officer Bissell has to be helped from the wreckage, and the last we see of him is in a stretcher being bundled into an ambulance.

Later, his wife briefly asks Wing Commander Grant (the central character) (I can't remember the exact words), "What use is a man, blind, with no face?"

I do know that considerable efforts were made to help badly burned airmen - a brief Google search led me to this page, describing the career of Sir Archibald mcIndoe. Perhaps there is even a family connection, as our daughter is undergoing a series of operations on her face, the surgeon employing techniques which may have been pioneered by Sir Archibald ...