DVD Review: Foyle’s War – Complete Series 8

Starring: Michael Kitchen, Honeysuckle Weeks Rating: 8/10 This eighth (and apparently last) season of Foyle’s season War finds the series continuing to move smoothly into the post-war era and a Le Carré-ish world of cloak and dagger. As ever, the show brews up a nice balance between intrigue and history lesson.

High Castle, the first of the three new episodes, concerns itself with a shady American oilman with connections to the Nazis, with a sub-thread to do with the situation of women suddenly being excluded from the workplace to make way for returning menfolk. It’s a satisfying, glossily produced mystery, and things get even better with the next episode, Trespass. This looks at the predicament of Jews after the war, with Zionists agitating for a Jewish state on the one hand and, on the other, a charismatic Mosley-like figure stirring hatred in the streets. It’s brave stuff, sensitively written by show creator Anthony Horowitz, an example of the series at the best.

So, too, is the final episode, Elise. After the redoubtable Miss Pierce gets shot, Foyle is drawn into the murky world of WWII’s SOE and the plight of its female agents. As well as exploring one of the spy world’s greatest conundrums, it paints a picture of a country still feeling the toll of war in various ways.

Eight seasons in, Honeysuckle Weeks continues to chew her dialogue and the plots creak every now and then as they try to find her something to do, but other than that, Foyles War seems to be in fine fettle in this latest outing. As for Michael Kitchen, he’s not called upon to do much more than display his usual array of owlish tics and mannerisms, but he remains a compellingly watchable embodiment of decency and common sense. A shame, then, that the series has been axed, but at least it’s going out on a high. There are two hours’ worth of extras, including chats with the ebullient Horowitz which cast a light on the historical background of the stories, and some nicely made behind the scenes featurettes with lots of talk about the period’s four-wheeled stars. All of which adds a lot of value to the box set.

DVD Review: Generation War

Starring: Volker Bruch, Tom Schilling
Director: Philipp Kadelbach
Rating: 10/10

If you didn’t see this cracking German-made three-parter when it was shown on BBC2, you can now catch up with it on DVD or Blu-ray. Spanning the years 1941 to 1945, it concerns five young Berliners caught up in the turmoil of WWII. Two of them (Wilhelm and Charlotte) are fresh-faced Fascists eager to serve the Fatherland on the Eastern Front, but Wilhelm’s sensitive younger brother Friedhelm is a disgruntled observer of all this mass triumphalism, while glamour girl Greta has a Jewish boyfriend, Viktor, and listens to racially impure American jazz. But it doesn’t matter whether they’re pro or anti the war effort. There are some nasty surprises in store for all of them.

The broad shape of their learning curve can readily be imagined (Hitler – very bad; Russian winters – also very bad; peasant shacks – don’t burn them down unless you want their occupants to take up arms against you), but it’s individualized through story arcs laced with dramatic ironies. So Greta becomes the mistress of a high-ranking Nazi. Wilhelm’s enthusiasm for the cause is dampened by having to do the Reich’s dirty work, while Friedhelm, who has always thought that the war is pointless, discovers that he has a knack for survival on the battlefield. Viktor finds himself among Polish partisans who are just as cruelly antisemitic as the Nazis, and Charlotte (a nurse) is assigned to a field hospital where they play loud music to pacify the patients (or perhaps to drown out the screaming) because there isn’t enough morphine to go round.

Each of the feature-length episodes is packed full of what feel like vivid and authentic snapshots of the madness of war – a suicidal Friedhelm lighting a cigarette at night to draw enemy fire and then getting beaten up for it afterwards by his unit, while Wilhelm skulks nearby; clearing a forest of landmines by marching a group of peasants into it at gunpoint. And there throughout, giving the show its narrative spine, is the situation on the Eastern Front, at first hopeful as the German forces march on Moscow, making huge territorial gains, and then increasingly desperate as they are pushed further and further back by an enemy that seems to proliferate like an army of angry green ants. Shot with handheld cameras that lurch in the actors’ faces, these scenes of street-by- street fighting through towns reduced to rubble have the same jittery excitement as those in Saving Private Ryan, but with an extra dimension of moral jeopardy and soul-sapping savageness.

Director Philipp Kadelbach and his production team do wonders with a budget that was presumably only a fraction of what Spielberg had to play with. The show makes no excuses for the characters, who, it suggests, opened up a Pandora’s box of evils that still plague the world today. All of the performances are beautifully nuanced, but you have to single out the actors playing the two brothers. As Wilhelm and Friedhelm, Volker Bruch (potential future Bond baddie?) and Tom Schilling (a Teutonic James McAvoy) could hardly be bettered for hollow-cheeked charisma and haunted attractiveness. Compelling and totally convincing, Generation War is a massive achievement up there with the very best of recent German cinema and TV.