Real-life account of miners recruited in the first world war to burrow beneath German lines is fascinating does well on a limited budget
‘Gentlemen, tonight we may not make history, but we’ll certainly change the bloody geography.”
British army colonel Hellfire Jack (Tom Goodman-Hill) gives sterling quotation (though it was apparently said in real life by a different officer) in this spirited film about the tunnelling and sabotage efforts at the battle of Messines in 1917. Despite his doubts, the operation finished in one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever, killing 10,000 Germans. A fairly new angle for cinema on the first world war (though also the subject of 2010’s Beneath Hill 60), JP Watts’s subterranean drama has an innately fascinating story, even if the underpinning is of unsound construction in places.
To his shame, pit-village miner William Hawkins (Sam Hazeldine) is turned away for conscription because of a “crackle” in his lungs. The stalemate on the western front means he gets his chance to do his bit when Hellfire Jack (based on real-life officer John Norton-Griffiths) proposes tunnelling underneath enemy lines – and that a crack squad of Yorkshire mole-men are the ones to do it. But with Field Marshal Haig (Douglas Reith) unconvinced and Jack’s immediate superior Fielding (Andrew Scarborough) actively hostile, Hawkins and his four fellow “clay-kickers” are sneerily welcomed as working-class no-marks when they arrive.