"TARGET FOR TO-NIGHT"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 143, 20 March 1942, Page 14

"TARGET FOR TO-NIGHT"

{The review of the British documentary film "Target for To-night’" which appears below is contributed by "Mac". I, myself, was on holiday when the film was first released; but although some readers of this page will already have seen it, there will be many others who have not yet had a chance to do so, and who should therefore be specially interested in this notice about it.-G.M.]

TARGET for To-Night is in my view the best piece of war propaganda that has yet come out of Britain. I do not say that lightly. I remember,

for example, that Priestley’s Postscripts were propaganda, that the exhibition of war art recently noticed in The Listener was also propaganda. But Target for To-night does not tell us what the enemy has done-or what we will do. It shows us what the Bomber Command crews are doing. It is the propaganda of facts -of necessity more telling than the Propaganda of ideas, but there is more to it even than that. For here the Crown Film Unit is concerned with showing that Britain can give as well as "take it", and that is the real source df the film’s inspirational quality. And make no mistake, it is inspiring.

The story-material of Target for Tonight is by now commonplace enough, for the film simply describes the operations which end for us, with the bald BBC announcement that "Aircraft of Bomber Command attacked industrial targets in Western Germany last night. All our ’planes returned safely." Few who see the film will again hear such brief communiqués read with their old detachment. Though my acquaintance with German propaganda films is limited to stills published occasionally in magazines and Newspapers, or an occasional brief excerpt in a newsreel, I could not help contrasting the treatment of Target for To-night with what I knew of its enemy equivalents. Shockers like Sieg im Westen ("Victory in the West’), for example, seem to concentrate solely on showing the might of the Nazi warmachine as a machine. But Harry Watts has directed Target for To-night with such deftness that while he has placed proper emphasis on the organisation of war he has lifted the human element into the foreground and kept it there, as a démocratic propagandist should.

The story begins with the development of reconnaissance photographs showing a potential bomber-target, follows the photographs to headquarters and then follows the resultant operational orders back to a bomber station. A squadron of Wellingtons — "welltried hack bombers" as they were described in a cable message the other day -are detailed for the operation. Bombs are loaded-incendiaries for the leading plane, high-explosive and delayed action bombs of varying size for the otherspilots are briefed and given weather forecasts and navigational instructions. Wing-Commander P. C. Picard, who distinguished himself in the Channel engagement with the German battlecruisers, describes the job to his men, answers questions, finally sees them off. The heavy planes roll down the runways and each operator calls up his commander. "F-for-Freddy, calling Father, can we take off now, can we take off now?" F-for-Freddy takes off and the camera follows it eastward in the gathering darkness. Over the objective it dives through a barrage of flak that will give even the audience a headache, with the screen slashed by the glowing tracks of tracer shells and bullets. Back at the aerodrome the other planes clock in, but there is no news of F-for-Freddy, and fog blankets the landing-ground. The few minutes of actual film-time in which the ground officers are waiting for the lame duck, and the bomber’s crew are fighting to get their machine back, are among the most dramatic I have sat through in any war film, and the tension is not lessened by the knowledge that F-for-Freddy does not always come back to make a happy landing, and, to that extent, a happy ending. What I have told you of the story will not spoil the film in any way for youhistory in any case is not meant to be read once and then forgotten. It is not a long film, but it is worth going a long way to see and I suggest that you make it your target for some night or other.

MAC