The blitz has since developed into an integral part of the British national psyche, invoked at times of crisis and providing a vague but reassuringly familiar setting for episodes of Doctor Who or sitcoms like Dad’s Army (1968-1977) and Goodnight Sweetheart (1993-1999). When John Boorman dramatised his childhood in the blitz for the 1987 film Hope and Glory, he wrote in an introduction to his screenplay, “How wonderful was the war… All our uncertainties of identity, dislocations, could be submerged in the common good, in opposing Evil – in full-blown, brass band, spine tingling, lump-in-throat patriotism.”
The legend surrounding this chapter of British history often obscures the enormity of what happened in those dark months from September 1940 to May 1941, when more than 40,000 people were killed and millions more made homeless in towns and cities across the UK. The period is now being brought back into sharp focus by Oscar-winning artist and film-maker Sir Steve McQueen. His new film, Blitz, follows nine-year-old George (Elliott Heffernan) on an odyssey through a bombed-out London to find his mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan). His journey offers an unvarnished and startling glimpse into both the horror and humanity of the blitz.
The reality of the ‘blitz spirit’
Historian Joshua Levine, author of The Secret History of the Blitz, worked as McQueen’s historical advisor on the film. “People like to simplify the past to come to terms with it,” he tells the . “The blitz served its purpose for the British nation at the time, it was co-opted as a propaganda instrument and for bringing the Americans on side, and an oversimplified story of the ‘blitz spirit’ took over. More recently, you had the reaction to that – ‘the blitz spirit was absolute nonsense, and people weren’t pulling together and it was shocking and everyone was misbehaving’ – and surely no one will be surprised that neither of those is wholly true. Sure, there’s an element of truth to both, but everything was much more nuanced, much more complicated, and so much more interesting.
“Steve McQueen is an artist, but he was really keen on getting it to feel right, and to look right. It’s quite a challenge to make a film look so extraordinary, at the same time as trying to keep it accurate, and he did.”
