Well, isn’t this something special? While the previous movie – the seventh, for anyone counting – finally got two episodes mashed together that didn’t feel too wildly incongruous, this eighth movie knocks it out of the park. Not only do Somme, Early August 1916 and Germany, Mid-August 1916 go together like the proverbial horse and carriage, but they are both bangers in their own right, too. Really good stuff.
Somme, Early August 1916 opens with Indy leading a group of men and you think, “How did this happen? At the end of the last episode, he was just leaving for war…” and obviously, that was London, May 1916, so a little water is now under the bridge. Indy has risen in rank to be a corporal, and we learn of a recent engagement that has wiped out all of the unit’s officers, which has left Indy nominally in charge.
Absorbed into a French group of soldiers until they can get new officers, Indy’s unit is put under the command of Captain Moreau, who is introduced as a bit of a lad – his uniform is sloppy, and he makes references to several misdemeanours that he might be getting called upon by his CO to answer for.
It’s an interesting start to the character but, weirdly, it never comes into play again. Once he’s in command of Indy’s Belgians, he’s an all-business, by-the-book officer who takes no nonsense. I guess it shows a contrast that, when called upon to be serious he can rise to the occasion, but without any callbacks to him being a bit of a fun guy underneath – he just comes across as a good officer who wants to extract the best from his men – it seems a strange thing to introduce to the audience for no pay-off.
The fighting scenes are very good, showing the carnage and madness of trench warfare. At times the film quality changes dramatically and I think it’s due to clips from WW1 movies or newsreels (possibly even colourised), being inserted into the story. I’d like to know more about that aspect, actually, because it’s very noticeable at times but not unwelcome. The main takeaway I think anyone would get from the fighting scenes is just how much the machine gun ruled the battlefield, but other aspects of trench warfare – like Germany’s use of poison gas – are also covered. This really isn’t, “war as adventure”.
The seamless nature of moving into Germany, Mid-August 1916 comes when Indy is captured during a German counter-attack. En route to a prison camp, another of the Belgians encourages Indy to swap his Belgian uniform for a dead French officer’s uniform as he believes officers are better treated in captivity. Obviously there’s a risk to this as it’s impersonating an officer, and can probably be construed as spying, too. But Indy goes for the idea with little arm twisting and his companion dons a French uniform too. They also take on new identities from paperwork they find in their new uniforms.
This comes to bite Indy in the backside as, once at his prison camp, he gets involved almost immediately in a failed escape attempt. This cause the Germans to look into his background (“his” background being the background of the officer he’s impersonating), and it’s noted that he’s a major escape artist.
The Germans move Indy to a maximum security prison in a German castle. Here he meets Charles De Gaulle, who will go on to lead the Free French Forces against Nazi Germany in World War II and chair the Provisional Government of the French Republic from 1944 to 1946. But all of that’s a long way in the future – another example of the series having Indy meet people “before they were famous”.
The rest of the episode is largely about the two plotting another prison break, which eventually sees Indy escape and De Gaulle recaptured. Along the way there’s some levity and humour at times, making Germany, Mid-August 1916 a less grim story than the first part, but it’s still nothing like the WW2 prison camp comedy, Hogan’s Heroes, when we have the dead bodies of attempted escapees being dumped in front of Indy and his men, for example, as a warning to all those who harbour escape ambitions.
This is easily 9/10 material. Neither episode drops the ball in any way, and the episodes and storyline mesh seamlessly and coherently to create the Trenches of Hell movie. Indeed, if someone asked me to show them what the Young Indy series was all about, I’d likely reach for this disc first. It’s very good.