Film post: Beneath Hill 60
Beneath Hill 60, a 2010 film based on the diary of Captain Oliver Woodward, commander of the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company. This film is essentially formula WWI - the tunnelling aspect would provide a novel element, if Birdsong hadn’t done it first. That said, it isn’t a bad film: well-written, well-acted, and with less than the usual dose of maudlin What’s-the-Point-of-it-All? meandering.
Cut for length, not spoilers.
The historical accuracy is probably quite good in Beneath Hill 60. The filmmakers worked from a primary source (Woodward’s diaries), and worked closely with the Australian War Memorial. The Australian tunnelling corps didn’t do the tunnelling or set the explosives at Hill 60; they took over the tunnels from a Canadian company. The film largely resists the temptation to make the Australians’ role bigger than it was.
The film is well done, leading up to the Battle of Hill 60 via a couple of other stages, and intercut with scenes of Woodward at home before the war. Later in the film, a German corporal, who is convinced, Cassandra-like, that something bad is about to happen at Hill 60, provides some will-they-find-it? dramatic tension. Most of the film is set in the tunnels, so watch it at night with the lights off, or you’ll miss all the action.
The attitudes portrayed are refreshingly low-key. There’s terror and stress, and We’re here because we’re here because we’re here resignation, and a sense that there’s a war to be fought and a reason to fight it. This is probably because it’s based on a contemporary source which is uncoloured by the later WWI collective narrative of unmitigated waste, horror, loss and pointlessness.
So Beneath Hill 60 is generally well-written, well-plotted and well acted. The only issue is that none of the characters go beyond being archetypes. Captain Woodward is that’s mates’ mate commander, similar to Martin Barrington in ANZACs, bunking with his men rather than in the officers’ dugout and who avoids the shellshocked officer type entirely by Aussie she’ll be right stoicism. The others are the scrappy non-com whose respect Woodward has to earn (through the act of bravery which earned the historical Woodward the MC); various god-help-me-I-was-only-19 privates; and the blustering, homicidally incompetent colonel. Oh, and the girl back home. Usually I am broadly in favour of token efforts to include women in WWI films, but this one is really very superfluous (and VERY young - 16 to Woodward’s late twenties).
The Rogues’ Gallery approach works better for ANZACs because it’s long and by the end of nine hours of Gallipoli, Pozieres, Ypres and the German Spring Offensive, you’re attached to the characters, archetypes and all. In Beneath Hill 60, which runs to two hours and change, it is more difficult to bond to characters whose only vulnerabilities are those mandated by their archetype. Even the couple of nightmare-fuel deaths in the tunnels are haunting, but not heartbreaking.
I liked this film because it didn’t go for the tropes which are quickly becoming my bugbears: preaching the Horror of War, and the Shellshocked Officer Who Must Stay With His Men. The characters let it down a bit - it would probably have been more compelling if the time dedicated to Woodward’s unnecessary (albeit historically accurate) love affair had instead been dedicated to more quiet-time behind the lines with the company, and more of a view of them as individuals with hopes and dreams, and lives back home.
