"THE BLOCKHOUSE" (1973)

Starring

Peter Sellers

Charles Aznavour

Jeremy Kemp

Nicholas Jones

Peter Vaughan

Directed by Clive Rees

93 minutes

Once again, I am faced with a Sellers film that I’ll be finding difficult to review. This time it’s not so much to do with my personal rating of the film – it’s good, but not fantastic – but more to do with the fact that this is an extremely serious and depressing 93 minutes, and as such I’m on uncertain ground when it comes to writing about it. I generally rate films on how much I enjoy them, as, by and large, most of the films I watch are comedies, or, failing that, adventure romps of the "Star Wars" or "Jason and the Argonauts" variety. "The Blockhouse" is neither of these things. Therefore, do I look at it as a piece of cinema in and of itself, or on how much it affected me on an emotional level? With larger, more epic and multi-layered dramas such as "Nicholas and Alexandra" or "Lolita" I can point to a variety of aspects and talk about them, but here, in a bleak tale that was actually filmed underground, I am, like its characters, stumbling in the dark.

The screenplay is based on a book that was further based on a real event. On D Day, June 1944, seven German soldiers were looting a warehouse when the entrance was accidentally blown up by bombing from their own side, trapping them underground, where they stayed for six years, the bunker becoming a tomb for five of them. Eventually the remaining two were discovered, but, following the rescue, one died within ten minutes and the other after thirty-six hours had passed. Both were blind and insane, having spent four of those six years in complete darkness once the supply of candles had run out. In "The Blockhouse", the characters are changed to seven allied prisoners doing manual labour for some German military forces, who are then trapped in a deep underground bunker, but the remaining parts of the story remain the same. As the film chillingly tells us at the very beginning , "This is a true story about seven men… only two will survive." And imagine spending four years of your life in complete darkness, with only a single voice to keep you company. "The Blockhouse" forces us to contemplate such a scenario, more horrific than any number of monster movies and slasher thrillers.

So what on Earth is Peter Sellers doing here, you may ask. Isn’t he supposed to be a comedian or something? Well, to be honest, I wondered myself. This isn’t at all a slight against his performance, which is sublime as always, but he is certainly a big name actor amongst, arguably, six (relatively) unknowns. Despite getting top billing, he doesn’t even really have a larger role than the others – all of the central seven characters get about the same amount of screentime, besides Peter Vaughan’s character who is the first to die, about halfway through the running time – though despite this he probably has more lines to say than any of the others. However, as one of less than a handful of totally serious dramatic roles that Peter Sellers undertook, it should be respected and appreciated as such. His character of Rouquet is a quiet schoolteacher, who very early on works out the situation methodically, studying the melting candles to determine a system to measure the passing of time.

"They last about five hours each. Since we have been in this room we have burned exactly twelve… My pulse rate is normally seventy-two beats per minute. If you multiply that by sixty it will give you four thousand three hundred and twenty beats per hour. We had been down here about twenty-four hours before we came into this room. That makes three days in all, exactly. It seems a pretty reliable way of keeping time, provided we have candles and my heart doesn’t stop."

Light comic lines pepper his performance – his instructing of how to play dominoes is a rare moment of calm happiness surrounded by a lot of misery – but they remain lines that you smile at, no more. There are certainly no laughs to be had anywhere in this film, due to its very nature; it is another of those stories about survival, and so focuses on raw emotion and spirit. With nothing to do, the men look to any form of escapism that they can – Rouquet reads and writes poetry on the walls, there is a chess set with pieces carved out of spare candles, and at one point a character even finds a bicycle that they take it in turns with to use as a form of competition and exercise. Two characters develop a homosexual relationship just as a means of comfort, though one will eventually be the death of the other. Generally, however, everybody just gets plain inebriated due to the well-stocked wine cellar that the blockhouse has, the bunker being a shelter for German officers. Many characters spend the film drunk, resulting in a scene in which they sing hymns to each other, which after a while turn into songs and dancing, and then into fighting. Violence remarkably doesn’t rear its head all that often here; it’s not a "Lord of the Flies" sort of story. Generally the men just try to live out each day as comfortably as possible.

The acting all round is very good, with Peter Vaughan, more known to many of us as Genial Harry Grout in "Porridge", being particularly notable as the supervisor who wants to keep a semblance of order and segregates himself from the others to that end, eventually letting insanity consume him. It’s also courtesy of his character that we get a use of the f word, which I found quite surprising given that the DVD is a 12 certificate for a 1970s film. "The Waltz of the Toreadors", a Sellers feature made about eight years earlier, was given a 15 for the DVD despite the film having no sex, nudity, violence or swearing whatsoever, bar one use of the word "bitch" in an aggressive context. Intriguing.

The direction is quite interesting as well, and has been a source of both praise and criticism for those few who have seen it. Apart from some opening scenes set in the outside daylight, much of the film is set in the bunker itself, in semi-darkness, the characters lit by candlelight. This gives the film a very oppressive atmosphere and, combined with the lack of incidental music, really makes you feel as if you’re there, with the characters. Some critics have complained that the actors as a result are "hardly visible" and that it becomes a series of shadows bumping into each other. This is greatly exaggerated, and indeed only one scene, at the very end, is shot in absolute darkness. Things take an odd turn early on in some of the initial scenes of the cave-in, where rapid cuts make it unclear precisely what is going on, but in general I think the direction should be applauded. Another typical criticism is that the sound quality is terrible, rendering much of the dialogue "inaudible". Perhaps it was cleaned up for DVD (which I doubt, considering the unknown company to which release of the DVD was assigned), but I found no problems with the audio at all. Most of the lines were clear, aside from some occasional mumbling, though this could be put down easily to the state of the characters at the time. There’s no hissing either, so all in all the film gets a good presentation on the DVD.

"The Blockhouse" is an unknown film; never cinematically released, hardly anybody has ever seen it. This is a shame as, though not without faults – the narrative is a bit loose with stretches in which nothing really seems to happen, the drunken singing scene in particular – it is overall a rather good little drama, that is due for a major re-evaluation, and it’s telling that of those who have seen it many regard it quite highly. Since it has been recently been released on DVD in both the US and the UK, perhaps more people will come to see it and to appreciate it, to view what is basically a brand new Sellers performance if nothing else.

Score out of Ten