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Small-Brown-Dog — Spectre - the movie
Published: 2019-05-10 19:34:09 +0000 UTC; Views: 2488; Favourites: 67; Downloads: 0
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I have a thing for old films and old things in general I suppose which is OK I guess because I am rapidly becoming an old thing myself but anyway….
Another thing about me and films is that when it comes to true stories I like the truth and not some embellished artistic take on what happened with added bullshit and downright lies. So with that said I ought to really hate the First of the Few, the film the above poster is based on.
It has a charm that comes from the period, the humour, the black & white and that fact that it was first conceived in 1940. Mainly though it is the interplay between Howard and Niven which I think is marvellous. There are cringe worthy moments of British stiff upper lip and corniness some of which is down to the zero acting abilities of the actual RAF pilots in the early and late stages of the film – yes that really is Brian Kingscombe, Tony Bartley and many more and the Character “Bunny” is Wing commander Christopher Frederick Currant.
There is some nice actual footage included - the S4 is just incredible especially when you think of the year it first flew. But for those in know there are planet sized liberties taken with the truth - constantly. There is of course a propaganda element lurking also of course and it was released in America retitled “Spitfire” in 1943 however in my AU it there was no such thing as a Spitfire as Mitchell designed the Spectre.
Around about the time that the film was released in the USA, the DC3 Leslie Howard was in flying from Lisbon to the UK was intercepted and shot down by a Luftwaffe aircraft said to be a BF.110 but I am sure I read somewhere it was a JU88 or maybe it was the other way round.
I obviously stole the cast images from the original poster but everything else is Small brown Dog built with Modo/PS and was a bit of fun to do whilst I have some time out from 3D.
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Comments: 58
Do you mean Rennie or Rathbone instead of either Niven or Howard ... why!?
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Either one, or have one of the other pair included in the lineup. Michael was already familiar to the British audience before he made his American appearance in 'The Day the Earth Stood Still'. And Sir Basil always had that commanding attention when he was on the screen.
So either Michael or Sir Basil with David and Howard would have intensified the the action on the silver screen.
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Naw, the balance of lead characters was just right, it would have been just to top heavy for the plot.
Rennie perhaps in some role but could not have been a substitute for either Howard or Niven. Basil on the other hand would not have been suitable in my opinion.
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Enjoyed Niven and Howard in the life story of R.G. Mitchell. But as you said, the others might have overburdened the film.
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Just to throw a contradiction into the mix though.....
Having read extesively about Mitchel I can say that Howards depiction was not that accurate but then the film is about as far from the truth as the moon is from where I am sitting
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A lot of those so-called biopics are, at times, way off course from the truth. Such as with George Patton. Here they have such a dynamic actor as George C. Scott in the title roll, and he was nowhere even close to the actual person.
Leslie Howard was a very good actor, and his son was just as good when he did the TV version of Sherlock Holmes.
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To be fair to it the movie was a propaganda tool firstly designed to gather more sympathy from the USA before you guys got your invitaion but it didn't get out to you until 43'
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By then our main focus was Japan in the Pacific Ocean. If the Axis agreement hadn't been made, we and Australia would have been fighting alone in that wide ocean, while the U.S. only provided the material for Britain to fight on. Along with the Canadians and whatever Americans that crossed the border to get into that fight.
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I think any attack on Oz would have brought the UK into conflict with the Japanese pact or no pact and some force would have been despatched if only naval. Besides, plenty of UK pacific interests in the Pacific were under threat/overrun by Japan.
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Like Hong Kong, Singapore, Burma and the threat to India. But Nippon struck at the U.S. primarily for our denying them oil and scrap metal to run their military industry. So it was always thought of as America's War, even though Roosevelt was keeping his eye on Europe and what was the threat there.
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Indeed.
If I had ever had to have to been in that war then there are places I would definately not have wanted to be and topping the list is fighting the Japanese island by island especially towards the end - Iwo Jima comes to mind.
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I've read that there had been a discussion of using armored bulldozers and just piled the sand and coral up around the base of the mountain to cover the entrances, and left it as is, so the Japanese garrison would slowly starve to death.
The worse place to be would have been the low level bombing of Ploesti, Romania's oil refineries. Those B-24s made a 2,300 mile round trip to do it, and out of 163 planes that made it there, about half were shot down. But they put a crimp on Hitler's oil supply. And there were two later missions on those places.
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I doubt that the Ploesti raid was as bad as Hamburg and the raids beyond that including the fire storm raids on Japanese cities from a civilian point of view andhe trauma of night after night of it.
Not that I would take anything aaway from that raid. That B24 had a hell of a flight radius and is never given aenough credit for helping overcome the Atlantic struggle - another place I would not have like to have been espicially in the early part of the war.
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The Liberator (the British name) could fly farther and carry more of a bomb load than the Flying Fortress. The Boeing was the glamor child of the war, like the Lancaster. But the B-24 did a lot more during the war; even the Navy had their version called the PB4Y Privateer that was used for night patrols against Japanese shipping.
Even though it was liken to a 'pregnant cow, or flying furniture van', it could carry the load down the road better than the B-17.
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I think its fair to say that the Privateer was a specifically produced variant of the B24 and quite substantial in modification for a set role.
Any glamour attached the the Lancaster is secondary to its performance record. 14000- 22000lb loads were amazing. Even the the B24 was down to just 5000lb on long range missions and half that on ultra long range but that ultra long range was amazing as was its ceiling.
The B17 always gets some stick in these sort of discussions but I think I would have wanted to go to war in B17 rather than a B24. The B24 might get the load down the road better (not quite sure what you mean by that) but the B17 will get you home if there is any chance at all even on one engine or... so I read last night in James Holland book "Big Week" but I'm not sure about him as a historian.
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The PB4Y had a single vertical stabilizer, an added ten feet to the fuselage, and the waist gun positions used the blister kind found on the PBY Catalina. And I think it had an extra dorsal turret. As it was designed to operate under 10,000 ft., the turbochargers were left off.
Boeing built touch aircraft; the B-17 the direct offspring of the Model 247 twin-engine passenger plane. And the widest part of the plane was just behind the flight deck at 6 feet! Not much room for running around it, dodging flak, cannon and machine gun rounds. Seen pictures of the horrific damage done to them, and they returned their crews to safety.
The term 'getting the load down the road' is in reference to a trucking company near where I live, and that was their logo.
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I have seen pictures of waist gunners in like a sea of spent cartridges.
At the Brookland museum before it was revamped you were able to climb into a Wellington fuselage. Man, that was cramped and the there is not much room in lanc either especially coming forward as you have climb over the main spar.
Imagine 6-7 hour missions in these narrow vulnerable machines day or night with mainly just thin gauge aluminium between you and the great outdoors with people intent on killing you for a good deal of the way.
On a separate note, I have to be at Biggin Hill airfield tomorrow at 12:00 as I have a flight in a converted two seat Spitfire
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I salute those who lay their lives on the line in such flimsy aircraft. And when flying at 30,000 to 35,000 ft. in electrically heated flight suits, you have to go to the bathroom up there! And when you suffer wounds from either machine gun, cannon or flak, it makes you wish you had stayed on the ground instead. Shock in a cold thin atmosphere puts you closer to the Maker.
Hope your time in Biggins Hill was a good one. And if you should see Daniel Wales there, say 'Hi!' for me! Have fun, SBD!
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Thanks prof but you are not lacking yourself either .
Some of your imaginations blow me away.
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IMHO, those british things look more like manned V1 rockets than fighter planes!
Anyway super work!
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There is a whole new tech thing going on with my aircraft thats why they seem odd.
I didn't want to just repeat what everybody else is doing with vintage aircraft as its near enough been done already so I invented some tech based on some rather shaky early 20th century ideas and went from there
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Yeah... I know what you are doing and I love your images.
Your british fighters just reminded me of the german 'kamikaze' program, that was never launched... the Fi 103 (Reichenberg-Gerät).
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Funny you should mention that as I have been having a look at Fi 103 recently with some ideas forming with regards to pulse jets.
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Inspirations travel through mystical roads...
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and sometimes through small brown dogs heads that probably have other things it should be thinking about
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We all are guilty in this case...
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Try this with Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Nicely written and composed
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It may be a wait, but you don't disappoint.
Funny how we can be nostalgic about such a brutal, brutal war and yet we are.
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I have often thought that myself.
At times it has created conflict within.
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I wouldn't worry about. As His Story, it's great drama. But no one in his right mind would to those times to return.
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Agreed. Something of the period that strikes home is that Leslie Howards girlfriend died of pneumonia at 32 ...32!!!
That would be almost unheard of today at that age with our meds.
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You think of all the film stars of the era that didn't make it into their sixties. And yet here in the states we having an out break of measles because people have forgotten how bad things can be and haven't immunized.
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Yes, that is crazy as the facts of immunisation speak for themselves with only a cursory glance.
Interesting contradiction in my life though, my Mother was dead against it and most medicines. I obviously don't share her views but I do wonder what my life could have been as she was offered the Thalidomide drug. I was her third child and she was always quite bad with morning sickness.
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Thalidomide. Now there is a horror out of the past. Every time I hear that line in Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire", I think of the photographs.
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I have not heard that in ages.
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I always liked Leslie Howard in the few movies I had seen him in. I never knew for years what had happened to him. From time to time I will see and old movie or just wonder, "what ever happened to_______________?"
I will do a search and find out.
I also loved David Niven and another actor who lived to be a ripe old age. William Powell. I thought they were both such handsome men, when I was young. I still think they were.
robertmatzen.files.wordpress.c…
Great poster!
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Hey Lea - thanks and keep the flags flying for them old movies
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Every chance I get!
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I could actually see this being a thing with your alt-physics.
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You wait until I remake the Dambusters - you might not be that happy about that
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To see the Dambusters with modern CGI effects? Well, one can only dream.
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I was under the impression that it was going to/is happening but being politically correct over Gibsons dog's name
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Yeah, and Lord of the Rings didn't have any black people among the heroes.
But on the other hand, I remember the Indiana Jones TV show and the episode where young Indiana runs into a Lt. Patton in Mexico. Later in the show Patton reports to General "Black Jack" Pershing, commander of the segregated 10th cavalry division and all the soldiers in the background were white.
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Well we will be in for a whole host of remakes with gender changing, race swapping leads apparently.... won't that be fun
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The PC bastards have already wrecked one my favorites in a live-action movie version. The irony is that it wound up a piece of white-washing.
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That made me lol and scared the dog
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Promise me you won't be stupidly PC, like changing the name of Gibson's Labrador from Nigger!
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