Steve McQueen’s spirited Blitz is clumsy but admirable
Much of the film plays as a series of well-known wartime moments – as seen by Cockney panto characters
Thursday, 31st October 2024 — By Dan Carrier
Saoirse Ronan and Elliott Heffernan in Blitz
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BLITZ
Directed by Steve McQueen
Certificate: 12a
☆☆☆☆
THIS feels like a glossy version of the classic series How We Used To Live, a London-at-war story that has seen Steve McQueen pick a series of well known Blitz tales and shoehorn them into one long adventure.
Readers may recall we ran the story recently of the Paramount Ballroom in Tottenham Court Road – a dancehall that in the 1930s and 1940s did not have a “colour bar”. It was a welcoming venue where black people could dance without being hassled, and where your skin didn’t mean you couldn’t dance with a partner who looked different. The Paramount not only makes an appearance, but is a key plot driver.
McQueen writes-in famous incidents: the call for more public shelters and the tubes to be opened, the crush at Bethnal Green, the flooding of Balham station, the tragedy of the Cafe De Paris bomb that killed the singer Snake Hips Johnson, the looters who stole the dead’s jewels.
Rita (Saorise Ronan) is the heartbroken munitions worker. Her nine-year-old son George (Elliott Heffernan) lives with her and her father Gerald (Paul Weller) in Stepney. We learn his dad has been deported to Grenada after being the victim of a racist assault.
Grandpa is the piano playing old gent, who loves his daughter and his grandson. After a particularly bad raid, Gramps urges her to send George away.
George is evacuated but decides on route he can’t leave his mum, so hops the train and we follow his Oliver Twist-like adventures as he tries to find his way back to Stepney, meeting a series of characters on the way, flirting with disaster, and exploring London at war.
We get skits on the good Socialists of the East End, as illustrated by a Jewish character who is kind, funny, and great at organising his neighbours. Rita finds solace there, while George is helped by a kindly Nigerian fire warden.
Blitz is an uneven watch. Much plays as a series of well-known greatest hits of Blitz moments, as seen by Cockney panto characters. But if you remember this isn’t Ken Loachian realism – despite the feeling McQueen is aiming for that – it works. The idea of using the plot to make salient political points might be clumsy in action, but is admirable.
