Made in 1965 for BBC television and subsequently banned as being too horrific to screen, (it was released to cinemas and won an Oscar in the Best Documentary category, although, of course, it isn't a documentary), Peter Watkins' masterpiece is just as effective today as it was forty years ago. What Watkins chose to do was to make a fictionalized film, (though using all the facts at hand), in the style of a documentary about Britain just before, during and after a nuclear attack and it all looks remarkably real.

There are no central characters, no-one to identify with, nothing, in fact, to make us think that this is anything other than what it appears to be, namely a Public Information film on the aftermath of 'the Bomb'. The Cold War may have ended and warfare, in general, may have taken a different turn but this extraordinarily powerful, terrifying and ultimately moving film should, nevertheless, serve as a reminder of what could still lie ahead of us. Mandatory viewing.

The War Game is a British film that gives a graphic, horrifying portrayal of what would happen to the civilian population of Great Britain if the country were hit by nuclear bombs.

"The War Game" is a 47-minute film that was originally made for the British Broadcasting Corporation and then withheld from showing on the air because it was considered too grisly and gruesome for indiscriminate projection into homes.

Its fearful and forceful nature was reported in papers from all over London by reporters in the 60's, and its availability now on DVD is but a token of the talk and controversy its subsequent showing over the years in a few British theaters has caused.

The film was made by a young man, Peter Watkins, in hand-held-camera style and at a pace that endow its grim, on-the-spot enactments with the seeming truth of a documentary film. It gives us a minute-by-minute rundown of cumulating horrors in an area of Kent from the time the first off-course Soviet bomb explodes in the region until the better part of the landscape and population are laid waste.

While the horrors it shows, such as firestorms, the melting of children's eyes and the mercy shooting by police of rows of victims who are too badly burned to be helped, are based upon actual experiences in Hiroshima and in German cities in World War II, the monstrous piling up of these horrors in one picture seems a calculated showing of the worst.

And the fact that no immediate way to avoid this is suggested to the audience by the film makes it, for most, a sheer frustrating excitement of morbidity and dread.

Mr. Watkins was quoted in the media in the 60's as saying that he hoped that it would agitate people to demand the elimination of nuclear bombs. But one might guess it would serve that purpose only if shown in connection with some concrete and widespread campaign, as even today, we are confronted by nuclear annihilation. Otherwise it is no more than a powerful, isolated horror film of the past.

The War Game........ I saw this movie in a limited engagement in Toronto at an underground theater when it was first shown here. For the time the film was very " in your face " and I recall people coming from the small theater with shocked looks on their faces, one couple I recall the man was being sick at the curb, others seemed to have just blank stares on their faces.

It was a very impacting movie, very much ahead of its time and no where could have Hollywood or any other film makers here or in the US could have come close to making. It was an very intense for the subject and it was the ending that did it to everyone there who saw it. For 46 minutes of black & white film it had impact that I have not seen since in any of the much vaunted films over the last 40 odd years or so. If you do get a chance to see it do so, and try to see it in the temper of the times that it was produced in..........Enjoy

inquist4