WORLD War II week rumbles towards its conclusion with Sink The Bismarck! (World, 9.30pm). The white flag will have been waving in many households since ATV World fired the first shots on Monday and Tuesday in the form of that most epic of epics, The Longest Day.
Sink The Bismarck! is rather shorter at a mere 97 minutes, but no worse off for it. It also lacks the stellar cast flaunted by so many of its brethren, but Kenneth More is in there and he's good, so what do we care? And as long as trivia is the order of the day, it is worth mentioning that the screenplay is by Edmund North, who also wrote the screenplay for Patton, which was on World on Wednesday evening. Programmers have finally found a use for all their World War II surplus. If the 50th anniversary of D-Day had not arrived ATV's vaults might have cracked under the pressure. There will be more space in there now for storing programmes which cannot be shown for fear of offending China.
The film, made in 1960, starts with actual newsreel footage of the Bismarck being launched in Hamburg to the cheers of Nazi chiefs in 1938. Flash ahead to 1941 and the War Room of the British Admiralty where More, still stunned by the death of his wife in an air raid, is charged with conducting the campaign to blow the German battleship out of the water. Dana Wynter, A Wren (the British equivalent of a Wave, which is the American equivalent of I don't know what), is at his side.
No sooner does More take over the job than word gets out that the Bismarck has left her hiding place and is sailing full steam ahead for the battle zone. Thus begins a game of cat and mouse for which More is armed with a small fleet and in which the Bismarck gets off to a good start by sinking the Hood and crippling The Prince Of Wales.
Director Lewis Gilbert combined World War II footage with some flawless miniature work by men like Howard Lydecker and Bill Harrington. The overall effect is stunningly convincing, culminating in a huge sea battle.
THE other notable thing about Sink The Bismarck! is that historians value it for its accuracy as much as film buffs do for its excellence. The Wind And The Lion (Pearl, 9.30pm) is equally as stirring, but grossly inaccurate and jingoistic to a fault. It looks at the dawn of US interventionism and features Brian Keith as a Teddy Roosevelt determined to establish his Presidential identity.
