Blitz review – Steve McQueen’s rousing wartime adventure is surprisingly old-fashioned

London film festival
The director unexpectedly channels The Railway Children as Saoirse Ronan stars as the single mother whose son is evacuated, only to run away in a perilous bid to find her

Steve McQueen finds the key of C major for this well made and unashamedly old-fashioned wartime adventure, heartfelt and rousing and – yes – a bit trad overall, sometimes even channelling the spirit of Lionel Jeffries’s The Railway Children, although for me that’s no put-down.

This is a film about the blitz of 1940 which tries to restate the accepted imagery, the dramatic stock footage and familiar ideas but also absorb revisionist approaches – themselves increasingly accepted nowadays: it evokes the way that the British wartime authorities reverently invoked the loyalty of empire and Commonwealth but maintained a casually racist attitude to actual people of colour.

The cheerful obedience of the London East End working class was sentimentally taken for granted and yet they were not widely or promptly allowed to shelter in the underground stations and their safety was overlooked once down there. Then there is the grisly and commonplace history – not widely acknowledged until recently – of looting and corpse-robbing in the ruins. And for these macabre, neo-Dickensian scenes, Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke come very close to stealing the whole film; their gargoyle faces are like something from a nightmare-melodrama, and in another mood, another genre, another career-phase, McQueen might have given a freer rein and greater importance to these people’s inner world of evil and fear.

Saoirse Ronan gives a sympathetic and controlled performance in a role that does not allow for much nuance: she is Rita, a single mum of a biracial boy George (Elliott Heffernan) and living with her dad Gerald (Paul Weller) in Stepney, east London. She works in a munitions factory singled out for a roving BBC radio show which gives morale-boosting broadcasts allowing ordinary workers to sing on the air. Gutsy, nervous Rita tremblingly performs a number and does well but once she’s finished, a fellow worker grabs the mic and demands greater protection for the civilian population – to the pompous rage of the besuited chaps in charge.

A firefighter Jack (Harris Dickinson) is shyly sweet on Rita, though she is still encumbered by the memory of how her Grenadian partner was harassed by racists and deported. And, most unbearably of all, Rita has been persuaded to let George be evacuated to the countryside, but George boldly leaps off the train the first chance he gets and makes his way back to the city, on a desperate mission to be reunited with his mum and has adventures along the way – intercut with Rita’s own tense existence – including an encounter with a kindly Nigerian ARP warden Ife (Benjamin Clémentine) who sticks up for George. As for Rita, she finds help in shelters set up by socialist community organisers.

It’s a bit broad-brush sometimes, and I wondered about the liberties perhaps taken with what is realistic and plausible – although stranger-than-fiction things routinely happen in the chaos of war. But McQueen has evidently made a decision to embody a kind of Ealing or Children’s Film Foundation spirit – forthright, muscular, uncluttered and most important of all uncynical. His films are always watchable and he always keeps the storytelling wires taut: things that look easy but aren’t.

Rightly or not, I was looking for a more radical shock from this film or a more distinctive authorial challenge. Well, that isn’t the film McQueen wanted to make. Being unexpected is the artist’s prerogative.

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