Whatever else it was, the Second World War cannot be regarded as a forgotten war, at least as far as Britain is concerned. The memory of the Second World War was kept vigorously alive in British popular culture in the twenty-five years after 1945, above all in the war film. Over 110 films about the Second World War were released in Britain between 1945 and 1970, and according to national surveys around half of them were top box office successes.Footnote ¹ However, women feature in barely any of the best-selling war films of the 1950s and 1960s. Selectivity is integral to representation, and filmmakers evidently chose to focus on men at war. This did not go unobserved. Many contemporary film reviewers approved of the absence. For example, a reviewer of Above Us the Waves in 1955 stated: “The women at home are mentioned but never appear. So much to the good.”Footnote ² To such reviewers, women had no place in the business of war, which they assumed to be about male soldiers fighting abroad. Recent historians, such as John Ramsden, observe the “insignificance of women” in the war films without offering explanations.Footnote ³ Feminist film historians have had more to say about it. Sue Aspinall states that women were told, not only in war films but in films of all types after the war, that they could not manage without men. Christine Geraghty notes that “women are generally relegated to the sidelines in fifties war films.” She argues that the “notion of a mature, modern woman” capable of taking an effective part in war presented filmmakers of the 1950s with considerable difficulties because of the “regressive mode in which cinema [was] operating” in the postwar period.Footnote ⁴

In films about the war released in Britain during the war years themselves, women were neither insignificant nor lacking in competence, maturity, and independence. They were central to a number of popular films about the effect of the war on civilians, including the American-made Mrs. Miniver (1942), as well as the British films Went the Day Well? (1942), Millions Like Us (1943), and The Gentle Sex (1943). Although such wartime feature films were independently produced by commercial companies, they were discreetly influenced by the government. Sue Harper writes that “the Ministry of Information was in a very powerful position vis-à-vis the film industry” by virtue of its role in authorizing essentials, from supplies of film to the release of actors and technicians from the Armed Forces, as well as through the “administrative and practical support” that it could offer to “compliant producers.”Footnote ⁵ The ministry encouraged filmmakers to emphasize four themes: victory required the active participation of civilians as well as fighting men, society was pulling together, social leveling resulted, and Britain as a nation was worth fighting for because it was more democratic and humane than the enemy.Footnote ⁶ On the whole, filmmakers followed this agenda. Wartime films about the war were thereby concerned with the home front as well as the battle front; they were also imbued with the notion of equality of sacrifice. Even films that focus on military events, such as the naval epic In Which We Serve (1942), attend to the effects of war on women and children at home as well as on the fighting forces. However, it is not the case that gender boundaries dissolved and that femininity and masculinity were reconfigured in wartime and immediately postwar films. Far from it, as a vigorous strand of feminist scholarship, which includes work by Antonia Lant, Harper, Janet Thumim, Christine Gledhill, and Geraghty, demonstrates.Footnote ⁷ Rather, the potentially destabilizing effects of wartime conditions and ideology on femininity and gender relations were major preoccupations of the makers of wartime war films.

This phenomenon receded as new films set in the Second World War grew in number from the late 1940s. Most of the thirty top box office successes in Britain in the 1950s were British productions, although six were American or Anglo-American; out of the twenty high-earning war films in the 1960s, five were American. The majority concentrated on warfare in its various forms: their main themes were military campaigns, as in The Cruel Sea (1953) and The Battle of Britain (1969); prisoner-of-war escapades, such as The Colditz Story (1955) and The Great Escape (1963); and stories of espionage and resistance, such as Ill Met by Moonlight (1957) and The Guns of Navarone (1961). In contrast to the war films of the 1940s, these films of the 1950s and 1960s largely ignored civilian experience on the home front. The three main narrative concerns of the British war films were, first, beleaguered but worthy British national identity engaged in winning a just war; second, social hierarchy in which military rank and social class coincide; and third, the restrained bonding in dangerous military settings of brave men who were not only disciplined but also capable of initiative and technical ingenuity. Recent historians have interpreted these preoccupations in three main ways. John Ramsden, citing several 1950s filmmakers and actors, explains the representation of national identity in terms of a desire to restore British prestige in general and that of the British Armed Forces in particular in a postwar world in which Britain was suffering from the economic competition of erstwhile allies and enemies and was losing its empire.Footnote ⁸ Neil Rattigan argues that the representation of an usually comfortable coincidence of class and rank is a reassertion of the conventional social order in response to the rising power of the working class during and after the war.Footnote ⁹ As for the all-male world that most of the films depict, Geraghty suggests that it provided opportunities in which to “reassert male competence and authority,” and Andy Medhurst argues that it emerged from a possibly unconscious desire to represent the military and ideological project of the Second World War as one propelled by love between men.Footnote ¹⁰

These films were not without internal contradictions, and their capacity to achieve their consolatory and conservative objectives varied. Furthermore, a strand of satire developed in the late 1950s and flourished in the 1960s, including, for example, the films Private's Progress (1956) and How I Won the War (1967). These satires questioned the conclusions of the majority of films that the dynamics of nation, class, and gender that they depicted worked to good effect in the military pursuit of wartime victory. Some of the Anglo-American and American war films that topped British box offices in the 1950s and 1960s also took a critical or dismissive approach to the British armed forces, for example, in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and The Great Escape (1963). But, important though they were, none of the satirical and critical developments of the late 1950s and 1960s did anything to bring women back to the center of the war film.

In the popular war films of the 1950s and 1960s, then, the Second World War is almost exclusively male. Female characters are completely absent from six of the most popular films of the 1950s and from one of those of the 1960s (The Great Escape), and in most of the rest women occupy more or less marginal roles that serve to enhance the masculinity of the enterprise. Women unequivocally take center stage in only four of the fifty most popular war films released in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, all British productions: Odette (1950), A Town Like Alice (1956), Carve Her Name with Pride (1958), and Conspiracy of Hearts (1960).Footnote ¹¹

This article is primarily concerned with representations of women and femininity in these four films. It explores the films’ negotiation of the attributes of the male-dominated war films: comforting versions of national identity, conservative representations of social class, and accounts of gender in which war encourages male bonding and enhances masculinity. It also asks whether the depiction of war was different in the films to which women were central and seeks to understand the films in terms of their contribution to the memory of the Second World War. It is thus premised on the idea that there is a link between widely circulated films and what is popularly remembered about the past. As Geoff Eley has argued, public discourses that worked to promote collective identification “were pervaded by the war's presence” in the 1950s and 1960s, and films occupied a prominent place within the “entertainment cultures” that “became a rich arena of such memory production.”Footnote ¹² However, the connection of films to collective memory has aroused controversy among historians. Skeptics emphasize that films do not simply reflect or express national popular memory in a straightforward way.Footnote ¹³ The relationship of films to memory is indeed complex, but a helpful starting point is offered by the French historian, Henry Rousso, who suggests that one may think of historical films as “vectors of memory” that carry interpretations of the national past to their audiences.Footnote ¹⁴ The popular war films made in Britain from 1945 to 1970 were particularly ostentatious vectors in that, even though they were released as feature films rather than documentaries, they narrated actual wartime events, used newsreel footage, portrayed real people, and were accompanied (usually on screen) by strong truth claims. Most told national stories and were explicitly commemorative. Nevertheless, these films were the products of competing commercial, artistic, and political influences that shaped their narratives, and they were made, increasingly, by international production teams.Footnote ¹⁵ The genres to which the films belonged had histories and exerted conformist pressures: both genres and casting invited intertextuality and referentiality.Footnote ¹⁶ Makers of “realist” films about historical events claimed to offer audiences authentic representations of the past and hence to be transmitting “memory,” but they still offered representation to their audiences.Footnote ¹⁷ Authenticity, however, constitutes the primary discourse through which such films circulated, both at the time and since.

As we have seen, the majority of war films of the 1950s and 1960s conveyed a particularly masculine, as well as national and hierarchical, memory of the war. But to have completely eclipsed femininity from war films would have contradicted “authenticity.” Even when women are absent or marginalized, femininity is not forgotten. Numerous films about military campaigns raise the question of whether fighting men should allow themselves to get involved in the “normal” heterosexual processes of courtship and marriage in wartime. The risks to their lives mean that men's roles as providers may be abruptly terminated by death in battle, a theme of The Way to the Stars (1945) and Malta Story (1953). And love and sex notoriously distract men from the greater goals of war, whether because women love them too much and seek to tie them down, as in the case of Douglas Bader's wife in Reach for the Sky (1958), or because they do not love them enough and undermine their morale through infidelity, as with Lieutenant Morell's wife in The Cruel Sea (1953) and Marine Ruddock's wife in The Cockleshell Heroes (1955). There was some change in this mode of representation in the 1960s. Thus, while Hilde Bergman waits and weeps in traditional ways for her brother Erik and her boyfriend Roy in 633 Squadron (1963), Section Officer Maggie Harvey (Susannah York), wife of Squadron Leader Colin Harvey (Christopher Plummer) presents a slightly different problem in Battle of Britain (1969). She is reluctant to get a posting near her husband in Scotland, so caught up is she in her work in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force in southern England, and by the time she has finally agreed, he has been badly burned in his fighter plane. She has been punished for her show of independence, a warning perhaps to liberation-minded women of the late 1960s.

More active, but still supporting, roles are given to women in two resistance and espionage films that straddle the decades. Maria and Zofia, in the film Battle of the V.1 (1958), which is based on a popular novel by Bernard Newman, are plucky members of the Polish underground who work with male resisters to get evidence of the V.1 rockets to British scientists. Zofia is killed by the Gestapo when she refuses to divulge information. Another Maria, in The Guns of Navarone (1961), based on an Alistair MacLean novel, shoots her erstwhile resistance comrade, Anna, when Anna's betrayal of the Allied commando team with which they are working is discovered. Zofia, the two Marias, and Anna are relatively minor characters. However, the few war films that focus on women elaborate the type of contribution that they make to the war effort.

The narratives of Odette, Carve Her Name with Pride, and Conspiracy of Hearts, are, like those of Battle of the V.1 and The Guns of Navarone, concerned with resistance and espionage in occupied countries. The women prisoners of the Japanese in A Town Like Alice also struggle against enemy occupation and domination. Ken Worpole's reflections on popular war literature of the 1950s help to explain the alignment of women with resistance. As he puts it: “In the resistance movement, many conventional social relations had to be subverted or circumvented. Thus women played a key role.” They are depicted alongside others “whose work conventionally commanded a low social status,” as well as radical, itinerant, or marginal people who were not usually associated with “patriotism, honour, courage.”Footnote ¹⁸ However, bringing the margins to the center is unlikely to reproduce the reassuring representations of nation, class, and gender characteristic of mainstream war narratives.

Why, then, did filmmakers choose to make even this small number of woman-centered war films? To do so, they had to break their established patterns at least somewhat. The producer and director of Odette, Herbert Wilcox, specialized in heroic historical and biographical pictures starring his wife Anna Neagle in glamorous roles, but previously the makers of Carve Her Name with Pride and A Town Like Alice had made popular mainstream war films centered on men, so their new films required a change of focus.Footnote ¹⁹ Betty Box, who made Conspiracy of Hearts, was the one woman producer in what Annette Kuhn has described as “a male-dominated and very macho profession,” and hence she might be expected to have had a preference for films about women.Footnote ²⁰ However, she did not normally make such films, or films about war, or indeed any sort of serious film. She is best known for comedies, such as Doctor in the House (1954) and its six highly successful sequels, which she made in tandem with Ralph Thomas with whom she also made Conspiracy of Hearts in 1960. Thomas had previously made a successful war film, but he described himself as a “journeyman picture-maker” who would turn his hand to anything.Footnote ²¹ Box stated publicly that she was interested in films only as entertainment, not as social messages. Yet she wrote in her autobiography that she wanted to make Conspiracy of Hearts “because I believed it had something worth saying,” referring specifically to refugees, Jewishness, and Nazism—though not to its focus on women.Footnote ²²

The conditions of the industry throw more light on the question. During the 1950s there was not only a decline in the overall size of the cinema audience but also a shift in its composition: men came to outnumber women.Footnote ²³ War films were particularly well liked by men of all ages, but “to do really well at the box office” films had to appeal to both genders.Footnote ²⁴ The promotion and marketing of the four women-and-war films was explicitly intended to reclaim the female audience. The press book for Odette advised cinema managers that “this true story of a woman's courage and sacrifice is packed with feminine appeal and is sure to attract really outstanding business” and suggested placing invitations to screenings of the film in pay packets at local factories.Footnote ²⁵ Promotion materials for A Town Like Alice suggested organizing a special preview for representatives of women's institutes, the Women's Voluntary Service, Soroptimists, the Inner Wheel, and other women's organizations, who would distribute leaflets and organize luncheon discussions.Footnote ²⁶ The trade press informed exhibitors that Conspiracy of Hearts had “terrific handkerchief appeal to women.”Footnote ²⁷

The promotion of the films to women also emphasized their role in commemoration, not, like most British war films, of the allied role in the Second World War in general but of wartime women in particular. The Rank Organisation told exhibitors of Carve Her Name with Pride to make their opening nights “a gala performance … to Honour the Women of the War.”Footnote ²⁸ One of the contemporary reviewers responded in kind: the film was a “celluloid monument” to its heroine, Violette Szabo, on which “her name was carved with pride.”Footnote ²⁹ Such marketing methods gave social and cultural recognition to women who had hitherto been left out of public commemoration. Distributors’ practice of targeting female audiences with commemorative films depicting the heroism of wartime women suggests that they were prepared to recuperate a memory of the war as a time of empowerment of women. Aside from box office returns, there is lamentably little evidence of audiences’ reception of 1950s films.Footnote ³⁰ However, at least one woman has recorded how, as a young viewer, she responded warmly to the message of empowerment. Angela Pope recalled seeing Carve Her Name with Pride when she was 10 years old and feeling that her life had been transformed: “I knew for sure that I’d be a resistance fighter, probably starting tomorrow.”Footnote ³¹ Indeed, the women in these films are as tough and independent as any of the women in the wartime homefront films, if not more so. However, all four postwar films also depict the disempowerment of women: in contrast to their counterparts in the wartime films, these women suffer personally and physically at the hands of the enemy.

The central women characters in Odette and Carve Her Name with Pride, Odette Sansom (Anna Neagle) and Violette Szabo (Virginia McKenna), respectively, are secret agents working for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the British wartime overseas espionage service, who are sent to France, captured, tortured, incarcerated in a concentration camp, and in Violette's case executed.Footnote ³² The filmmakers deployed “authenticity” vigorously. Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, wartime head of the French section of SOE, introduces Odette in person, with the words “I know … that this story is a true one.” And Carve Her Name with Pride was promoted as “a true story—but more exciting than any piece of fiction.” Both films were based on best-selling biographies: Odette: The Story of a British Agent by Jerrard Tickell (1949) and Carve Her Name with Pride: The Story of Violette Szabo by R. J. Minney (1956). Their directors were already well known for the “biopic.” Herbert Wilcox had made films about Nell Gwyn, Queen Victoria, Edith Cavell, and Amy Johnson in the 1930s and 1940s, before he turned his hand to Odette. Daniel Angel and Lewis Gilbert, who made Carve Her Name with Pride in 1958, had made Reach for the Sky, the life story of the amputee flying ace, Douglas Bader, in 1956.

The filmmakers placed Odette and Carve Her Name with Pride within the genre not only of the biopic but also of the romantic thriller, combining danger and desire. This genre is based on conventional gender relations, and to meet its requirements the filmmakers sought to normalize the femininity of Odette and Violette. They cast British actresses who were regarded as beautiful in the lead roles; they endowed the characters of Odette and Violette, who were both mothers of young children, with domesticity and maternalism; they stressed the role of romance in their motivations for their jobs as agents; and they told Anna Neagle and Virginia McKenna to temper the toughness they had to portray with “softer and more feminine moods.”Footnote ³³ However, even though some of the more extreme aspects of social subversion were thus played down or ignored in the films, tensions remain. National identity, social class, and the gender order are all unstable, not least because numerous untidy issues intrude from the biographies and are unresolved in the films.

The resourcefulness of both women in making contact with French resisters and evading the enemy is in itself remarkable compared with the dependence and passivity of women in most contemporary films, and in their confrontations with the enemy the women become heroic. Odette's circuit is infiltrated, and she and her commanding officer, Peter Churchill, with whom she has fallen in love, are caught. Under interrogation, her lies apparently secure relatively light treatment for Peter, while Odette is tortured and punished with solitary confinement at Ravensbruck concentration camp. If this does not actually impugn Peter's masculinity (since he evidently also suffers bravely), it creates a contrast with most war film heroes, whose courage is unrivalled by any woman’s. In Carve Her Name with Pride, Violette Szabo and a resistance colleague are surprised by a German army unit: they try to escape, but when she can run no further Violette turns her sten gun on the advancing Germans to enable her colleague to get away, until she is, finally, overcome and captured. Like Odette, Violette is tortured by the Gestapo and sent to Ravensbruck, where, unlike Odette, she is executed. By risking their lives for the national cause and for male colleagues, Odette and Violette reverse the wartime “gender contract” depicted in most war films of the 1950s and 1960s, in which men fight for home and nation and women support them but do not take active roles.

National identity as well as gender is disrupted. Odette's birth, overt Catholicism, and accent mark her as French in the film, and to be French in British popular culture of the 1940s and 1950s was to be both desirable and unreliable.Footnote ³⁴ All the same, Neagle's phoney French accent and her starring roles as a British patriot in Wilcox's other biopics help to counter the disturbing Frenchness of her character.Footnote ³⁵ As Sarah Street argues, “Neagle … maintained an overall core of Britishness” in all her films; indeed her role as a “national emblem” was central to her stardom and was associated with social class as well as patriotism. She frequently played the ordinary middle-class woman who was transformed by wartime circumstances into a heroine.Footnote ³⁶ Street's insights hold true for Neagle's role in Odette, but biographical pressures mean that socially and with respect to moral reliability matters are not entirely stable. Odette is apparently the respectable middle-class wife of a Briton, Mr. Sansom; however, there is only one veiled reference to this man in the film, and the narrative traces the development of Odette's romance in France with Peter Churchill, played by Trevor Howard. Odette's alibi may have distracted the audience from the impropriety of falling in love with another man while married: one scene shows her rehearsing her life story as Mme Metayer, the childless widow of an elderly husband who died before the war. In any case, the issue of how Odette might free herself to marry Peter after the war is not addressed in the film. Restraint in respect to married love affairs had been advocated in Brief Encounter, also starring Trevor Howard, as recently as 1945, and divorce was disadvantageous for women and still heavily stigmatized in the postwar period.Footnote ³⁷

In Carve Her Name with Pride, Violette is the daughter of a French mother and a British father; hence, while she enjoys a dual linguistic and cultural heritage, her nationality is British. However, early in the film narrative, she marries a Free French Officer following a whirlwind romance in the summer of 1940, and thus, according to the law at the time, she would have lost her British citizenship, although this alteration to her nationality is not mentioned in the film.Footnote ³⁸ Her French husband, Etienne, is presented through the stereotypes of gallantry, passion, and good looks, but his Hungarian surname, Szabo, unexplained in the film, accentuates his foreignness—and in wartime, Hungary was an enemy, even if, by 1958, it was regarded more sympathetically as a country struggling to free itself from the Soviet yoke. Socially, Violette is not quite respectable. As a working-class Cockney from Brixton, she is outside the Oxford- and Cambridge-educated elite from which male officers in the British secret services were usually recruited. At the same time, the actress Virginia McKenna's difficulties with Violette's Cockney accent counter this class bias. McKenna had played British Wren officers with cut-glass accents in two earlier 1950s war films.Footnote ³⁹ Lewis Gilbert, who directed the film, thought in retrospect that Violette should really have been played by an actress like Diana Dors, “who was much rougher.”Footnote ⁴⁰ However Dors's contemporary typecastng as a glamorous “bad girl” would have upset the alignment of class hierarchy and patriotism in Carve Her Name with Pride even further.

Violette Szabo was also extremely physically tough. Her biographers emphasize her daredevil persona and her prewar love of swimming, cycling, and acrobatics. Defying the concerns of her producer Daniel Angel, the actress McKenna undertook strenuous training in judo, parachute jumping, the use of a sten gun, and grenade throwing, so that she could enact a character who was bold, athletic, and willing to use force.Footnote ⁴¹ In the 1950s girls were expected to grow out of a “tomboy” stage by their late teens, and the taboo on women using firearms was still strong.Footnote ⁴² However, the promoters recognized the appeal of this dangerous femininity, and they used images of the armed McKenna to advertise the film.

The filmmakers made the most overt efforts to normalize both heroines in the register of romance. While Odette's romance with Peter Churchill was well evidenced, they had to work hard where Violette Szabo was concerned. Szabo was widowed in 1942, but her biography does not mention other romantic attachments. In the film, she is spurred on as an agent by her dead husband's love, expressed in a poem he wrote for her shortly after their marriage, in which an SOE officer later encrypts her secret code. The poem is a central romantic adornment in the film.Footnote ⁴³ It is spoken four times: by Etienne Szabo to Violette when he gives it to her, by Violette to the SOE coder, by Etienne in Violette's head when she is in the hands of the Gestapo, and by Violette at the end of the film after her little daughter has received her mother's posthumous George Cross from the king. However, the poem appears to have been a filmmaker's invention: Szabo's first biographer, R. J. Minney, makes no mention of it, and a contemporary film reviewer who had himself trained agents, Paul Dehn, stated in a review in the News Chronicle that it was not authentic.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the 1990s, Leo Marks, who had worked in the coding department of the SOE during the war, claimed authorship, but Violette's most recent biographer, Susan Ottaway, refutes the possibility that Violette was ever issued a code in this form.Footnote ⁴⁵ The question mark over the poem is important, not for simple truth-and-falsehood reasons but because it alerts us to what it was being used for in the film, namely, to explain what is otherwise enigmatic: the source of Violette's commitment, risk taking, and courage. Such characteristics might have been taken for granted in the case of a man, but for a woman, and the mother of a small child, 1950s filmmakers evidently felt the need to fill the explanatory void with a romantic, and feminine, answer. The poem, which became “one of the most popular love poems in the English language,” is, as one reviewer put it, the film's “theme tune.”Footnote ⁴⁶ This is almost literally the case: the composer William Alwyn, who set his own poems to music, worked closely with director Lewis Gilbert to integrate Violette's voice speaking the poem, images of Violette's daughter, and his own melancholy but heroic refrain at the end of the film.Footnote ⁴⁷ The poem as theme tune suggests the ultimate sacrifice in the romantic, familial, and patriotic registers, underlining the sacrifices of Etienne for Violette, Violette for Etienne, Violette for her daughter, and Violette for her country.

Although Odette and Carve Her Name with Pride conform in many respects to the demands of the romantic thriller, unusually powerful and independent women emerge in both films. The ambiguities are at their strongest in the scenes of torture inflicted on these women. These protracted scenes have numerous similarities, probably deliberately in that Odette Sansom (now Churchill) acted as an advisor to the makers of both films. Angel and Gilbert evidently used the hugely successful film of Odette as a recognizable model for Carve Her Name with Pride, at the same time emphasizing their film's place in the thriller genre by taking the “noir” effects of lighting contrasts further. In both films the torture takes place in elegant bourgeois interiors representing Gestapo headquarters at the Avenue Foch in Paris; both women are initially fully clothed but are later forcibly partially undressed; the manner of questioning is at first sympathetic and then increasingly punitive in the face of the refusal to talk; bright lights are shone into the women's eyes; the women repeat “I have nothing to say” and “I refuse to tell you anything”; both interrogators press a button on the table to summon a torturer, and we hear his footsteps crossing the room; in both films the women's gasps and screams indicate the infliction of pain.Footnote ⁴⁸ In Odette, the nature of the torture is made explicit: a red-hot poker is administered to Sansom's spine, and the audience learns that all her toenails have been removed. In Carve Her Name with Pride, something inexplicit but painful is done to Szabo, and in the following scene it is evident that she has, in addition, been kept awake for seventy-two hours in an overheated room. In both films the audience sees that the now semi-naked women have become increasingly limp and disheveled, but neither woman gives in, and both are eventually returned to their prison cells.

The most important point about these torture scenes has less to do with their content than with the fact that they were included in the films at all. First, such torture is sparingly depicted in the majority of war films shown in Britain, which means that audiences rarely saw men suffering in similar ways to Odette and Violette. Savage punishments for disobedience are inflicted on men, for example, the incarceration in “the oven” of Colonel Nicholson in Bridge on the River Kwai and the horrific “crucifixion” of Joe Harman in A Town Like Alice, and in numerous military adventure films men appear bearing the marks of beatings inflicted in an attempt to obtain information. Modern technology is shown to increase the difficulty of keeping silent for even the toughest man in The Guns of Navarone (1961), when the Germans use a “truth drug,” and in 633 Squadron (1963), when they inflict electric shocks.Footnote ⁴⁹ Such scenes establish the cruelty of the enemy and the fortitude of Allied men. But there are differences in the depiction of the torture of men and of women in these 1950s and 1960s war films: the pain and suffering inflicted on women to obtain information or confession are more closely scrutinized and involve more extreme abasement of the subject than in the case of men.Footnote ⁵⁰

Second, doubts have been raised publicly about the historical authenticity of the torture of both Odette and Violette. In the first edition of his official history of the Special Operations Executive in France, published in 1966, M. R. D. Foot was dismissive of the sufferings of the women agents. He stated that “the number who were ever seriously tortured is small.”Footnote ⁵¹ Although he acknowledged that Odette Sansom, “while under interrogation in Paris, was burned near the backbone with a red-hot poker” and cited the diameter of the scar on her back, he denied that her toenails were removed, attributing this story to her difficulties, after getting back to Britain, “in distinguishing fantasy and reality.” He also asserted that “the ghastly story of Violette Szabo's sufferings” was “completely fictitious.”Footnote ⁵² Foot's preference for diminishing the roles of the women agents runs throughout the book, and it may have been the result of prejudice against the use of women in military espionage work. (However, he was also disparaging about the role of Peter Churchill.) His allegations mattered because they suggested that these agents had not deserved the considerable military honors that they received.Footnote ⁵³ After a successful legal challenge by Churchill, Foot published an amended edition in 1968 in which he complimented the work of Sansom and Churchill in France, removed the insulting references to Odette's fantasies (and was now silent about her toenails), and left the question of torture open as far as Violette Szabo was concerned.Footnote ⁵⁴ On this point, Szabo's first biographer, R. J. Minney, states that she suffered “the most atrocious torture,” although he gives no details.Footnote ⁵⁵ What happened to Szabo remains enigmatic. Her second biographer, Ottaway, could find no evidence that she was tortured, and Pattinson, in her history of gender and passing in the SOE, also states that Szabo was not tortured.Footnote ⁵⁶

The important question in a discussion of the films as “vectors of memory” is why the torture, like the poem, was included at all. There are two possible explanations. One is that the torture underlines the status of the women as national heroines, and if it happened to Odette, as she said it did, it must have happened to Violette. It emphasizes the women's exceptional strength: not only have they undertaken dangerous clandestine work outside the protection of internationally agreed rules of war but when pain is inflicted on them they give away no military secrets. Although repeatedly reminded by their interrogators of their feminine concerns (for their children, their bodies, and their appearance), the women subordinate their femininity to their duty to their country and their colleagues. Work by both Christine Geraghty and Juliette Pattinson supports such an interpretation. Geraghty argues that Virginia McKenna's 1950s roles reveal the contradictions in contemporary discourses of the “new woman,” in which competence, femininity, sexuality, and motherhood were combined.Footnote ⁵⁷ For this new woman to display her competence in a war situation, her feminine attributes had to be displaced by the masculine qualities of “resolution, toughness and a stiff upper lip.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In the torture scenes in Carve Her Name with Pride, specifically, “the femininity that the film has valued” becomes “a source of temptation” that Violette must resist and reject, however painful this may be.Footnote ⁵⁹ Discussing the films in relation to the popular memory of the SOE, Juliette Pattinson argues that the “unflappable and psychologically strong” portrayals of Sansom and Szabo in the films “fashioned the public imagination and established them as iconic figures in Britain.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The capacity of the characters to achieve the “masculine” attributes of heroism identified by Geraghty, then, is central, according to Pattinson's argument, to “the public's perception of the SOE” and to the commemoration of these agents as women who were awarded the highest honors that the countries for which they worked could give them.Footnote ⁶¹ In short, the depiction of the two women standing up to torture is at the heart of the creation of a popular memory of them as powerful wartime women.

However, the other explanation of the inclusion of the torture scenes is the opposite of this one, and it relates to genre: Hitchcock's maxims for a successful thriller included injunctions to make villains successful, audiences suffer, and victims blond.Footnote ⁶² Odette and Violette, both cast as blonds although in life brunettes, are severely punished by convincing villains, and audiences are made to suffer with them.Footnote ⁶³ (Eight people fainted at the premiere of Odette in Stockholm.Footnote ⁶⁴) To be more specific, besuited men exercise mastery over the two women, thus converting female agency into victimhood; the women are initially fully clothed but are forced to become partially naked; they are initially composed but become abject. The intrusive proximity of the men's bodies and faces, the partial undress of the women, and the contrast between the men's unassailable power and the women's vulnerability suggest sexual abuse or even rape. The women remain mentally strong, but their physical humiliation is extreme: the scenes are sadistic, and the camera angles place the audience in the position of the voyeur.Footnote ⁶⁵ The climax of the portrayal of these women's roles in the Second World War comes about at the moments when their power is finally undermined. The torture scenes demonstrate that even these women are in fact little different from other women in terms of their positions in the gender hierarchy.

Humiliation and degradation, as well as heroism, also play a part in the two other popular war films of the 1950s and 1960s in which women take central roles. A Town Like Alice was released in 1956, before Carve Her Name with Pride. The same actress, McKenna, plays its central character. Its narrative concerns are different: it is about prisoners of war rather than armed resistance. It is based on the first half of the 1950 novel by Nevil Shute, in which he claimed to have fictionalized a “true story.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The film's truth claims are not as strong as those of Odette and Carve Her Name with Pride, although the authenticity of the historical context is asserted. The film opens with the statement: “The characters in this story are fictitious. The story itself is based on true fact.” Shute had heard the story in 1949 from a Dutch woman, Mrs. J. G. Geysel-Vonck, who had spent two and a half years of the war wandering Sumatra with a group of (initially) some eighty Dutch women and children, under Japanese guard.Footnote ⁶⁷ These origins in oral narration mean that, in contrast to the other two films, there is no biography or recorded history of the events described from which questions about the novelist's and the filmmakers’ selectivity might arise. The film is difficult to classify in terms of genre: it does not purport to tell the story of a “real life,” but it does focus on the life of one woman; it is not marketed as a romantic thriller, but it is both frightening and has romantic elements; and the audience suffers with the heroine, who is cast as a blonde although in the book she is a brunette.Footnote ⁶⁸ Geraghty argues that the film provides “a representation of a mature woman” across all four discursive dimensions (competence, femininity, sexuality, and maternalism). However, she continues, this maturity is not achieved in the “modern world” but in “the barbarism of the jungle” and amid “the gentle rhythms of a Malay village,” a contradiction that is symptomatic, according to Geraghty, of filmmakers’ difficulties with the new woman.Footnote ⁶⁹ This is a convincing reading of McKenna's role. The analysis here, however, centers not on the star but on the war; it pursues the film's treatment of the characteristic preoccupations of the war films of the period, national identity, social hierarchy, and gender.

Unlike Odette and Carve Her Name with Pride, whose central characters are, as secret agents, British military personnel, A Town Like Alice is concerned with civilians in wartime. However, even though Shute decided to depict the women as British instead of Dutch, these civilian women are not representatives of the British home front: the events take place in Japanese-occupied Malaya in the period 1942–45, a long way from the relative order of wartime Britain. Nevertheless, the film reprises some of the themes of solidarity and social leveling of the wartime home front films.

A Town Like Alice explores national identity and class through its women characters’ loss of social and specifically racial status. The plot focuses on Jean Paget (McKenna), an English secretary, one of a group of British women and children taken prisoner by the Japanese but forced to trek all over Malaya because no internment camp will admit them. Their Japanese guards take little responsibility for them: the women have to barter or beg for food in the villages they pass through. Within four months half of the group is dead from illness and starvation. These white women and children, with posh accents, are unambiguously members of the British colonial class whose government has been displaced by the invaders. The portrayal is not uncritical: the group includes a snob, a selfish hypochondriac, and a good-time-girl who leaves the group for the “comforts” of life as a Japanese captain's mistress. One (hostile) reviewer saw the film as “a realistic portrait of the British memsahib” that unwittingly explained “why the British were scorned and derided in Asia.”Footnote ⁷⁰ However, the snob drops her exclusivity, the hypochondriac learns to share, and all those who survive exhibit unusual and admirable powers of solidarity and endurance; only the good-time-girl (who disappears from the narrative) is unredeemed.

If Shute had relied on the original story, the film would have been a narrative about the Dutch in Sumatra rather than the British in Malaya, which would have robbed the novel and film of their potentially comforting contributions to national pride. This contribution, however, did not follow the formula of the mainstream war films of the 1950s and 1960s, which countered the putative wartime disturbance of the social hierarchy by reinscribing it in their accounts of the war. A Town Like Alice depicts, in contrast, an inexorable process of leveling. Most of the women try to maintain “standards” on the grueling march by wearing unsuitable Western clothing, but Jean, who becomes responsible for a baby when his mother dies, shows that the chances of survival are improved by “going native”: she accepts a sarong, a straw hat, and a sling for the baby from a kindly Malay woman and henceforth goes barefoot. Her physical condition is better than that of the other women even though, in the eyes of some of them, her social degradation is complete. Jean's first encounter with Joe Harman (Peter Finch), an Australian prisoner of war, whom the Japanese are using as a driver, confirms her apparent transformation. Believing her to be a native, he calls her “Mrs. Boong,” Australian slang for an Aboriginal woman. When he realizes that she is in fact European, a romance develops between them, affirming Jean's femininity in spite of her plight.

The film invites audiences to evaluate styles of masculinity and military hierarchy through contrasts between the white men, represented by the Australian prisoners of war, and their Japanese captors. Joe's masculinity is impaired by his status as a prisoner of armed captors, but his condition is less pitiful than that of the nomadic women. His work as a driver for the Japanese gives him relative freedom of movement and opportunities to demonstrate his resourcefulness, which is derived in part, stereotypically, from his prewar life in the Australian outback. Joe is thus in a position, just, to fulfill the “natural” masculine roles of protecting the women he encounters and courting one of them. Joe's humanity, daring and fortitude, and tall, rangy physique contrast with the small, dark, brutal, and uncaring enemy. Christine Twomey suggests that the popularity of the book and film in Australia (and of its remake and serialization on Australian television in the 1980s) reside in its “reversal of the emasculation that was sometimes perceived to accompany Australian men's defeat and imprisonment by the Japanese.”Footnote ⁷¹ It may indeed have done this for Australian men, but the absence of heroic British men from the story limited its contribution to the restoration of the self-esteem of British male prisoners in the Far East, a feature that may be explained by Shute's personal transference of allegiance from Britain, the country of his birth, to Australia, to which he emigrated in 1949.Footnote ⁷²

The assistance that Joe gives the women, however, is the occasion for the depiction of extreme Japanese brutality: it leads to his “crucifixion.” He is nailed by the hands to a giant tree, to hang suspended until he dies. The Japanese are, however, governed by an alien code of military honor, which involves granting Joe his last wish—to die on his feet—and hence leads, possibly inadvertently, to his survival, of which the women know nothing.Footnote ⁷³ The negative portrayal of the enemy is thus alleviated, as it is also by the compassion shown by one of the sergeants guarding the prisoners, which the women reciprocate when he is dying. This mutual understanding was stressed by some contemporary reviewers, who saw in it an important message for global peace; the Japanese government was nevertheless sensitive about the film, insisting that it be withdrawn from the Cannes Film Festival and hesitating over its release in Japan.Footnote ⁷⁴

A Town Like Alice is in a sense a prisoner-of-war film, but it is strikingly different from the other films of the 1950s and 1960s in this genre, which all, inevitably, feature men. The director of A Town Like Alice, Jack Lee, had previously directed the first big hit among these P.O.W. films, The Wooden Horse (1950), which established the prisoner-of-war escape genre, in which the central theme is the continuation of war under conditions of capture through resistance and escape. As Ken Worpole points out, the notion of “freedom” at the heart of the prisoner-of-war escape stories is highly individualistic.Footnote ⁷⁵ In contrast, Lee (following Shute) invests “freedom” with the opposite meaning in A Town Like Alice, where it signifies collective survival rather than individual escape. In any case, escape is a huge irrelevance since, with or without their guards, the women captives can barely stay alive. They need a regulatory system that will govern their treatment: in this they are more like refugees than prisoners of war. They eventually find one for themselves: when the remaining sergeant dies, far from any Japanese military base, Jean manages to persuade the headman of a village to let her and the remnants of the party stay, earning their keep in the rice fields. They all now wear Malay dress and so escape the notice of the Japanese. Thus the women of the British ruling colonial class, formerly spared manual labor by their black servants, become “native coolies”—“boongs”—and so survive.

The women's degradation arises from different causes from that of the women agents in Odette and Carve Her Name with Pride. Although it is inflicted on them by their male captors, it is not deliberately applied as a means to elicit information; rather, it is a consequence of the women's subjugation by the occupier, worsened by their position as unwanted prisoners. Women's agency is important in both cases. Odette's and Violette's achievements reside in their success performing male roles involving clandestine military activities, the maintenance of silence when captured, and courage in the face of probable death. In contrast, the displaced women in Malaya triumph by discovering qualities of endurance and resourcefulness; they learn new ways to live a “civilized” life that transgress the boundaries of nation, class, and race. Moreover, these survival techniques are not associated with masculinity. In fact, the women's ability to survive is enhanced once they are independent of male protectors, be they Japanese guards or Australian lovers, and can work for their living. However, A Town Like Alice implies that the wartime transformation of women was exceptional and unsustainable. The leveling effect is strictly temporary; although it echoes one of the narrative concerns of wartime home front films, no parallels are drawn with British society in wartime. After the war, Jean, restored to the West, uses an unexpected inheritance to pay for a well to be built in the village as a gesture of thanks. The film actually begins with this gift and then flashes back to Jean's wartime experiences, so the audience knows from the start that the colonial relationship will be restored, albeit in the register of humanitarian aid. The film also emphasizes, through the romantic quest of Jean and Joe for each other and their eventual reunion in the Australian town of Alice Springs (paralleling that of Odette Sansom and Peter Churchill in London), that the restoration of order after the chaos of war is not complete without marriage. It places the couple's postwar life securely in the “white” dominion of Australia, where the “boongs” are still subordinate, and well away from Malaya, which in the 1950s was very different from the harmonious society represented in the film by the villagers happily receiving Jean's postwar gift of the well. The British, deploying Gurkhas (Nepalese soldiers) on the ground and using the Royal Australian Air Force to drop bombs, chemical defoliants, and napalm from the air, were fighting communist insurgents in Malaya in the anticolonial and civil war that raged from 1948 to1958, culminating in independence from Britain. Footnote ⁷⁶

The only other popular war film of the 1950s and 1960s that focused on women, Conspiracy of Hearts, released in 1960, returns us to resistance in a European setting, this time in Italy. As in the case of the other three films, it operates within the discourse of authenticity. Although there are no explicit truth claims at the beginning of the film, the initial scenes position it historically: extracts from newsreels and a voice-over explain that it is 1943, the year of the end of Italian fascism and the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Italy; the Germans are turning on their former Axis ally; there are shootings and partisan attacks; children are being rounded up and transported. The documentary-style opening and the use of black-and-white film throughout contribute to its “authenticity.” However, the origins of the screenplay do not help to establish whether or not Conspiracy of Hearts was, in fact, based on historical events. It was written by Hollywood scriptwriter Adrian Scott, who was blacklisted by the Screenwriters’ Guild of America, having failed to satisfy the anticommunist House UnAmerican Activities Committee. Scott died in 1972 without explaining where the idea came from.Footnote ⁷⁷ Nevertheless, some of the actors and numerous reviewers stated that the story was “based on a series of true happenings.”Footnote ⁷⁸

The socially marginal people involved in this resistance story are nuns: their all-woman convent provides the space in which conventional social relations are subverted. The nuns hide Jewish children after Italian resistance workers have organized their escape from a nearby concentration camp, and they help to send them abroad to Jewish families. The Italian camp commandant turns a blind eye to the escapes, but when a German colonel takes over, he tightens security. The climax of the film comes when a new group of Jewish children rescued by the nuns refuses to eat or move because it is Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Hesitantly, the nuns create a “synagogue” for them in the crypt and find a rabbi among the partisans to conduct a service. But the German soldiers burst in, the rabbi fights courageously but is shot, and the nuns rush the children into a secret passage. The Germans try to extract information from the nuns about the partisans and the escape route, but the nuns refuse to disclose anything. The Germans condemn three of them to be executed and line them up in the courtyard, but at the last moment the firing squad of Italian soldiers aims into the air and then turns on and overpowers the Germans.

The depiction of wartime women in Conspiracy of Hearts unsettles the matrix of nation, class, and gender of the male-centered war films of the period. Nationality is confused as far as these women are concerned: Mother Katharine, the mother superior (Lilli Palmer), is said to be a German aristocrat, but as a princess and a nun she is uncontaminated by Nazism; the nationalities of Sisters Gerta and Mitya are unclear, but disturbance is reduced since the convent is evidently an international community and they are played by well-known British actresses (Yvonne Mitchell and Sylvia Syms). Nevertheless, the blurring of national identity is markedly different from the clear lines drawn in mainstream war films, and it echoes the ambiguities of Odette and Carve Her Name with Pride. Class is also not sharply drawn: the hierarchy of the religious organization is more important than the social hierarchy, and Mother Katharine makes it clear that, notwithstanding her own aristocratic origins, position in the order is won by wisdom and goodness. As feminist analyses of films about nuns point out, convents are places at one remove from masculine domination.Footnote ⁷⁹ In this film the convent gives women the space in which to discover themselves in the testing circumstances of war. Further, by virtue of her own position at its head, Mother Katharine is able to defy all the male authority figures that impinge upon the community (the Italian camp commandant, the German colonel, and even her own father confessor) in order to pursue what she believes to be right. The male military intrusion into the convent, the brutal unveiling of Sister Mitya when she refuses to divulge the children's hiding place, and the positioning of the three women in front of the firing squad shockingly violate the female space and the female body.

The nuns’ oscillation between assertiveness and vulnerability reiterates the combination of agency and victimization attributed to wartime women in the other three films. As in A Town Like Alice, the women grow as a result of their wartime experiences. Sister Gerta learns the value of humanity as against rigid adherence to rules and becomes a better nun. Sister Mitya comes to realize that her vocation is marriage rather than ordination and leaves to wed the Italian captain-turned-partisan, with the blessing of Mother Katharine. The independence from men of life in the order is offset by this reminder of the value of marriage that parallels both Odette and A Town Like Alice. Yet Conspiracy of Hearts differs from the other films in three crucial respects. First, the pain and suffering inflicted on the women are short-lived. Second, the film is optimistic: the Italians turn on the Germans and join the resistance, the children escape, and life at the convent can continue in traditional ways. Third, the real victims of the film are not women but Jews.

In the four films under discussion, the filmmakers’ decisions to use a different gender perspective from that of the other forty-six most popular war movies of the 1950s and 1960s did not only affect their accounts of national, social, and military order. These films also represented the Second World War differently. They acted as “vectors of memory,” not just for the part that some exceptional women played in wartime but also for major atrocities committed by the Nazis and the Japanese. The depiction of one type of victim, women, made space for others, the victims of concentration camps and of Japanese brutality, as well as for portrayals of the perpetrators. To use the language of postcolonial theory, the articulation of difference does not stop at one but constructs a number of “others” (women, Jews, Nazis, Japanese), who are simultaneously the objects of desire, derision, and detestation.Footnote ⁸⁰ Visions of victimization had no place in films about men's heroic military deeds: scenes of bulldozing corpses at Belsen, shown in the newsreels of 1945, were demeaning not only to the victims but also to the soldiers who had to do it; emaciated and starving men under the enemy heel were the antithesis of the kinds of heroes represented in the war films of the 1950s and 1960s.

The films in which women take center screen do not depict the Second World War as a war of spectacular battles but as one in which women and children stand up to and are the victims of hostile male military organizations. These films put the spotlight on the enemy. A Town Like Alice is remarkable for its role in spreading knowledge of the methods the Japanese used against civilians. There was some press coverage of the treatment of military prisoners of the Japanese during the 1950s, but this film, released in 1956, preceded Lord Edward Russell's controversial exposé of Japanese atrocities in his book The Knights of Bushido in 1958. The film was followed by the release of a small spate of films concerning the war in the Far East, notably, among the best-selling films, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and The Camp on Blood Island (1958).

Odette and Carve Her Name with Pride highlight the meaning of being a Nazi through the treatment of the women by the Gestapo during interrogation and in the concentration camp. Conspiracy of Hearts depicts the German commandant's commitment to the Nazi policy of exterminating the Jews. These films went against the grain of the 1950s, in which the political accommodation of Germany as an ally against the Soviet Union in the Cold War coincided with an official toning down of anti-German feeling and specifically of memories of Germany's Nazi past. Representations of the German enemy as honorable military opponents, equals in adversity, efficient and well-equipped but nevertheless defeated by the Allies, in, for example, The Desert Fox (1951), The Battle of the River Plate (1957), and Ice Cold in Alex (1958), became increasingly prevalent in an era of economic competition as well as political dependence. In other military campaign films, from The Cruel Sea (1953) to 633 Squadron (1963), the German enemy is barely characterized at all but is represented through the technology of weaponry. If Nazis are represented, it is frequently as a minority of monstrous fanatics ruling the otherwise helpless German people by dictatorial methods: such characterizations are often comic, not only in prisoner of war films such as The Colditz Story (1955) but also in military epics such as The Battle of Britain (1969). Most films avoided representations of the German people that suggested that they condoned systematic cruelty toward and slaughter of civilians on a mass scale.

It is thus striking that Odette and Carve Her Name with Pride include scenes of the Ravensbruck concentration camp. In both films, the camp scenes illustrate horrific Nazi methods of repression applied to female inmates who are evidently civilians: brutal guards make the women do arduous work and keep them in subhuman conditions. The images of overcrowded and chaotic confinement contrast with the orderly if Spartan camps depicted in prisoner-of-war escape films such as The Wooden Horse (1950) and The Great Escape (1963).Footnote ⁸¹ A contemporary reviewer, Isabel Quigly, took the view that the makers of Carve Her Name with Pride were mistaken to try to include the camp scenes on the grounds that such “horrors beyond art” were unsuitable material for entertainment. In any case, she argued, it was impossible to find extras sufficiently cadaverous to represent the emaciated inmates whose images had appeared in the “concentration camp documentaries” shown after the war.Footnote ⁸²

After the showing of the newsreels of the relief of Belsen and Dachau in 1945, to which Quigly refers, there was little exposure of concentration camp experience in Britain. The historian Tony Kushner explains that a documentary film about Belsen sponsored by the Ministry of Information and made by Sidney Bernstein in the summer of 1945 was not released because it was considered too “anti-German.”Footnote ⁸³ The British film Frieda (1947), which was not a top box office success, is unique in its use of newsreel footage of Belsen to expose Nazism as well as to explore the postwar possibility of a humane and democratic Germany, one differentiated from its past.Footnote ⁸⁴ But Frieda, like other discussions of Belsen in Britain, avoided the Jewishness of the camp. Kushner argues that the prevailing liberal view was that to emphasize Jewishness was to encourage anti-Semitism. More specifically, the 1945 Labour government did not want to help the Zionist cause at a time when the British had responsibility for Palestine and were fighting Zionist guerrillas seeking to found an Israeli state.Footnote ⁸⁵ In Odette and Carve Her Name with Pride, Ravensbruck is not depicted as a camp where Jews were held (there is an absence of visual as well as verbal references), although in other respects the depictions of this concentration camp in these two films constitute succinct statements sketched from the testimony heard at the war crimes trials of 1945–49 at Nuremberg and elsewhere.Footnote ⁸⁶ Such evidence was made available to the general public by Lord Edward Russell in the first of his two best-selling “atrocity” books, The Scourge of the Swastika, published between the two films, in 1954, and to more specialized audiences by Alain Resnais's short documentary film Nuit et Brouillard (Night and fog), shown in Britain in 1955. But even though Odette and Carve Her Name with Pride do not discuss the ethnic aspects of Nazi persecution, they yet establish an image of the death camps for British audiences, and, because of their story lines, they associate them (subliminally) with women.

Conspiracy of Hearts shows no more of the concentration camp than is necessary to indicate the children's escape, aided by the nuns. However, this film adds both ethnic and religious specificity to the representation of Nazi treatment of civilians. Released in 1960, it is the first best-selling British war film to show the Nazi persecution of people who are explicitly Jewish in terms of religious practice, culture, and background, although the Hollywood film Anne Frank's Diary, which is not in the list of top box office successes, foreshadowed it in 1959. Such themes did not reappear in films with mass circulation until the concept of “The Holocaust” was constructed and vigorously propagated from the 1970s, in part, as Peter Novick argues, in the interests of gaining international support for the state of Israel.Footnote ⁸⁷

Popular films of the 1950s and 1960s in Britain constructed and transmitted a memory of the Second World War that was overwhelmingly masculine. However, even though films did not focus on the domestic home front, complete amnesia about women's part in the Second World War did not prevail. Four of the fifty most popular war films focused on women. These films did not, though, contribute in obvious ways to the threefold project of the mainstream war films: boosting the national ego, restoring the traditional class hierarchy, and representing the war as the product of male bonding. The national identity of the female protagonists was ambiguous, their class position was uncertain and in one case undermined, and the women complicated gender relations by protecting or defying men, even if they loved some of them. The films’ narratives simultaneously celebrated female heroism and emphasized feminine vulnerability. The women were national heroines, but they shared an identity as victims of this war with millions who suffered persecution and displacement in Europe and across the globe. These films also lifted a lid, which mainstream films kept closed, on some, though by no means all, of the horrors of the Second World War.Footnote ⁸⁸ Although there were only four of them, and although films are by no means the only vectors of memory, placing women at the center of the war film challenged the popular memory of the Second World War.