Friday night movie: The Dam Busters (1955)

Here’s tonight’s movie:

IMDB mean rating: [7.6/10]

IMDB median rating: [8/10]

Description:

The Dam Busters is a 1955 British Second World War war film starring Michael Redgrave and Richard Todd and directed by Michael Anderson. The film recreates the true story of Operation Chastise when in 1943 the RAF’s 617 Squadron attacked the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams in Germany with Wallis’s “bouncing bomb”. The film was based on the books The Dam Busters (1951) by Paul Brickhill and Enemy Coast Ahead (1946) by Guy Gibson.

The film falls into two parts. The first part involves Wallis struggling to develop a means of attacking Germany’s dams in the hope of crippling German heavy industry. Working for the Ministry of Aircraft Production, as well as doing his own job at Vickers, he works feverishly to make practical his theory of a bouncing bomb which would skip over the water to avoid protective torpedo nets. When it came into contact with the dam, it would sink before exploding, making it much more destructive.

WARNING: the Lancaster pilots have a dog for their mascot and the dog has a name that may be offensive to some viewers. (It’s the n-word). So, don’t watch the movie if you can’t handle that. But this is a World War 2 classic.

Map:

Ruhr dam raid map: click for larger image
Ruhr dam raid map: click for larger image

The Lancaster bomber:

AVRO Lancaster Heavy Bomber
AVRO Lancaster Heavy Bomber

AVRO Lancaster specifications:

General

  • Length: 69 ft. 5 in.
  • Wingspan: 102 ft.
  • Height: 19 ft. 7 in.
  • Wing Area: 1,300 sq. ft.
  • Empty Weight: 36,828 lbs.
  • Loaded Weight: 63,000 lbs.
  • Crew: 7

Performance

  • 4 × Rolls-Royce Merlin XX V12 engines, 1,280 hp each
  • Range: 3,000 miles
  • Max Speed: 280 mph
  • Ceiling: 23,500 ft.

Armament

  • Guns: 8 × .30 in (7.7 mm) machine guns
  • Bombs: 14,000 lbs. depending on range, 1 x 22,000-lb. Grand Slam bomb

It’s one of my favorite war movies about the best-regarded heavy bomber of the war, on either side. (The B-17 is a close second)

Happy Friday!

Related posts

2016 is the top conservative political documentary of all time

From liberal web site The Blaze.

Excerpt:

The Dinesh D‘Souza Obama documentary exploring the president’s alleged anti-colonialist roots has become a top 10 movie in America.

Movie theaters across the country reported their box office numbers on Monday. Those numbers spelled good news for “2016: Obama’s America.” How good? The movie is now the #7 film in the country, in front of highly-rated “Premium Rush” and “Hope Springs,” starring Meryl Streep.

But the news gets even better. According to Filmfans.com, the documentary is now “the highest-earning conservative political documentary ever.”

But wait, there’s more. According to the Washington Post, the film is also the sixth-most popular documentary of any kind:

This was the second-lowest-grossing weekend of the year, but the film’s $9.3 million seven-week haul is still enough to make it the most successful conservative political documentary of all time, as defined and ranked by Box Office Mojo. It’s also the sixth-highest-grossing all-around political documentary, ranking behind four Michael Moore films and “An Inconvenient Truth,” which starred Al Gore and glaciers.

A review of the movie”2016: Obama’s America” – a project of Indian-American Christian apologist Dinesh D’Souza.

Excerpt:

My wife and I went to see a showing of the film at the Regal theater in Winter Park Village. It was about three-quarters full. We didn’t go with a group but noticed that many in the audience came in groups of more than just a single couple. There were also examples of grandparents, parents and children. At the end of the film, the audience broke into loud and spontaneous applause. Was this only due to the film “playing to the choir”?

In part perhaps, but in the next few weeks I predict it will reach the audience we most need to reach -young voters -and are the most avid movie goers and the least likely to be reached by more traditional methods.

[…]Dinesh D’Souza is an engaging, attractive dark skinned immigrant from India whose life and career follows in parallel with Obama’s – born and married in the same years and able to judge American institutions and values from a third world perspective.

The film does not accept any of the more controversial attacks on Obama’s biography but seeks to explain how his own words and thoughts cited continually throughout the film from the President’s autobiography ‘Dreams From My Father’ are a thread running through his policies and are at the core of what motivates him and makes him intent on downsizing, disarming, and apologizing for America, abandoning out allies such as Great Britain, Israel and Poland, fawning and bowing before Muslim despots, and seeking to create a society where individual initiative, ambition and self-reliance are replaced by the collectivist goals that have failed all over the world.

[…]2016 examines Barack Obama’s relationship with his absent father who was an activist in the anti-colonial struggle against the British, and following independence became part of that elite clique who fostered a one party bureaucratic, socialist state in Kenya that crushed all local government and free initiative resulting in a downward spiral of economic stagnation and poverty shared by Obama’s half-brother in the slums of Nairobi.

[…]We follow the President’s life in where his mother remarries a local Indonesian man (also a Muslim, Lolo Soteiro),  who eventually becomes a successful businessman and in so doing, alienates Obama and his mother who believe they are betraying the socialist and collectivist legacy of Barack Obama Senior.

This psychological portrait is one that makes sense and can be understood and appreciated by many young people who are themselves the product of homes in which there is divorce and remarriage.

The President’s endorsement of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement extends to the world stage in which the antagonists are portrayed as the 99% – the occupied and the exploitative 1 % – the occupiers.

Obama emotionally sympathizes with all those he places in the category of the victims of the colonialist white European nations (the one-percenters), returning the bust of Churchill, the gift of the British government, praising Islam as a progressive force while denying its oppression of women, children, non-Muslim minorities, his  policies towards  third world nations such as Mexico and Brazil whom his policies have encouraged to develop their oil industries while retarding our own, secretly supporting Argentina in its attempt to seize the Falkland Islands from Britain by force, pressuring Israel (regarded too as “occupiers”) to retreat from defensible borders, total passivity in failing to support the millions of demonstrators in the street against the tyrannical regime of the mullahs in Iran, etc.

Most damning of all are the close associations of the President and his most important mentors ignored by the media and Senator John McCain’s campaign in 2004 – convicted terrorist Bill Ayers, the “Reverend Wright (God Damn America and its “Liberation Theology” church in Chicago) and long-time Communist party member Frank Marshall Davis.

This is a powerful film that will exert a profound influence. As the billboards and advertisements on television proclaim… Love Him or Hate Him, you need to see this film.

Does that sound good or what? There’s a lot of talk about how this election needs to be about grown up ideas. I think that these long form arguments elevate, rather than lower, the debate. We need to have adult conversations about who Obama is and what his policies are intended to achieve – what is his end game?

Trailer 1 of 3:

Trailer 2 of 3:

Trailer 3 of 3:

Here’s Dinesh explaining what his movie is about at CPAC 2012:

Keep in mind that Dinesh is a Christian apologist and has debated people like Christopher Hitchens. This is his newest project.

Go see it!

Armed bystander stops stabbing outside school

From ABC News. (H/T All American Blogger)

A woman is in critical condition after she was stabbed outside her child’s school Tuesday morning.

The attack happened around 10:00 a.m. Tuesday outside the Bonham Academy on St. Mary’s Street. Teresa Barron, 38, had just dropped off her child at the school when the child’s father showed up, and the two got into an argument. The child’s father, 38-year-old Roberto Barron allegedly then stabbed the woman several times in the upper body and neck area.

Police say a bystander who happened to be a concealed handgun license holder pulled his weapon and ordered Barron to drop the knife. Barron surrendered and was taken into custody by the bystander and a school district officer.

The woman was taken to San Antonio Military Medical Center.

Barron was arrested for aggravated assault, and is in jail on a $150,000 bond.

It’s a good thing it was outside the school, because I would think that defensive handgun use is prohibited inside the school, and the stabbing would not have been prevented there.