Fayestardust's weird little place on the internet

This week, we headed out to sea for The Battle of the River Plate (1956), and honestly, we did not expect to get so attached to a bunch of ships.

This telling of the first naval battle of WWII follows three British and New Zealand cruisers, taking on the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee off the coast of South America, and somehow the ships end up being more charming than half the humans in the credits.

The human thread running through it, though, is Captain Patrick Dove, a merchant captain taken prisoner aboard the Graf Spee, and his oddly warm rapport with its captain, Hans Langsdorff. We talk about the old-fashioned gentleman's-warfare feel of the whole thing, the diplomatic standoff in neutral Montevideo, and the scuttling that ends the film. It is a docudrama, but it is also highly entertaining, and historically accurate. And battleships, it turns out, are kinda cool.

From Here to Eternity won eight Academy Awards in 1954, including Best Picture. It stars Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr, Donna Reed, and Frank Sinatra, who wanted the role so badly that he paid for his own screen test and took a pay cut to appear in it. It's based on James Jones's debut novel, an 800-something page portrait of the American peacetime army in Hawaii in the months before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

Jones was stationed at Schofield Barracks during the attack, and much of what's in the book comes directly from his experience. The US Army, when the film was being made, had a few notes. They didn't want anyone to know that soldiers were beaten in the stockade. They didn't want a sex worker as a character. They didn't want Captain Holmes to be promoted despite being a terrible CO, which is exactly what happens in the book. The director said the Holmes ending looked like a recruitment film. 

We also talk about the women of wartime Hawaii, who were not just sitting around being army wives. The Women's Air Raid Defense ran radar tracking operations twenty-four hours a day. Pretty kickass.

This week, we brought in a guest. Tom recommended The Dirty Dozen to us, he has loved it since childhood. We had two and a half hours to either confirm his taste or destroy his confidence. Results were mixed. Kidding, Tom is in fact a ton of fun.

The film follows twelve military convicts sent on a near-impossible mission behind enemy lines before D-Day, promised a pardon if they survive. We all agreed Jefferson was the best character.

Along the way, get into Operation Jedburgh and the SOE teams who dropped into occupied France, the real-life Filthy 13 from the 101st Airborne who inspired the story, and the German radio broadcasts of Lord Haw-Haw that Allied civilians were secretly tuning in to for casualty information. It got surprisingly relevant to the present day.

We also spent a solid amount of time on Donald Sutherland, who is billed in the bottom six of this film and somehow ends up with more presence than half the top six. Robert Aldrich apparently pointed at him across the table and said "you with the big ears." The rest is history.

Look. We did not expect to spend a time watching a German tank story set inside a Tiger I tank and coming away from it genuinely delighted. And yet. Der Tiger (2025) is fun: a WWII film that uses the Eastern Front retreat of 1943 as the backdrop for something more surreal and eerie than the genre usually allows. Sam loved it immediately. Maartje, who does not love horror, loved it anyway.

The film follows Lieutenant Gerkens and his four-man Tiger tank crew on a special mission into no man’s land, and from the very first scene you get the distinct sense that something is deeply, deeply not right. The only people who speak to them seem a little too in on the joke. There’s a Latin mass playing on the radio that nobody explains, and there is a pomegranate. We have questions about the pomegranate.

Though WWII is not entirely important in this one, we also get into the Einsatzgruppen, the Battle of the Dnieper, tank candy (it’s methamphetamine, the Wehrmacht was on it, history is a nightmare), and the fascinating engineering fact that the Tiger I could technically be submerged underwater. Emphasis on technically. It took half an hour to prepare and was never used in actual combat, which tracks - track’s, see what we did there?

It’s not perfect. But this movie takes a genuine swing at something unusual, and for a war movie, that counts for a lot. Also, there’s no 20-minute sexual assault scene, which puts it ahead of Fury by default.

There is a quote in this episode, attributed to French politician Jacques Soustelle, that says: “Free France was African.” At the height of their involvement, two-thirds of the French Liberation Army were from French colonial territories. The first territorial base Charles de Gaulle had was Chad. And yet, at the liberation of Paris, the French army went out of their way to replace the North African soldiers who were supposed to march in, because they did not want the optics of Africans liberating the French capital.

Days of Glory (2006) is about the gap between what these men did and what France was prepared to attribute to them. It follows a fictional group of North African soldiers through Italy, Provence, and Alsace, and it thoughtfully shows the personal struggles and the institutional racism baked into the Free French forces. The ensemble acting is genuinely good. Our favourite was Corporal Abdelkader, the one guy in the film who keeps hoping it will all be worth it, right up until it very clearly is not.

We have some caveats. The pacing is uneven, the stakes of the wider war are never quite established, and the ending doesn’t land the way it should. The film was, however,  genuinely instrumental in changing French law. North African veterans had been receiving pensions frozen at post-independence amounts. By 2006, some were getting less than 20% of what French veterans were paid. Legislation was changed after the film’s release. That’s Cinema for you.

For our Mother's Day episode, we did what any self-respecting WWII podcast would do: we invited Sam's mom Rhonda onto the show to review a film about a woman who hid an escaped Russian POW in her grocery shop on the German-occupied island of Jersey. Very on theme. 

Another Mother's Son (2017) tells the true story of Louisa Gould, a widow, shopkeeper, community pillar, and apparently someone who treated the German occupation as more of an inconvenience than an existential threat.

We also spent a fair amount of time talking about the Channel Islands themselves, which are a not often covered corner of WWII history. They are Crown dependencies that belong to the British monarch but not to the United Kingdom; they are geographically closer to France than to England, and in 1940 Britain quietly decided not to defend them and then forgot to mention this to the Germans until after the Luftwaffe had already bombed the harbours. The islands ended up more heavily fortified than the beaches of Normandy.

Rhonda was, for the record, an excellent guest. Treat your moms well this weekend.

Empire of the Sun is one of those films that is technically about a child surviving a war, but also about not really feeling threatened by it after a while. Jim Graham, eleven years old, spoiled rotten, separated from his parents in occupied Shanghai, ends up in a Japanese internment camp, and he has more or less decided this is fine, actually. He speaks a bit of Japanese. He runs trades. He calls P-51 Mustangs Cadillacs of the sky. He is deeply irritating (Maartje is a little mean) and, when the moment comes that he admits he cannot remember his mother's face, we wanna cry.

Based on the book by J. G. Ballard. Sam already knows it’ll be in the top 10 WWII books read in 2026 and would like you to know the book is excellent.

Also, Ben Stiller is in this film, playing a soldier called Dainty, which is rather humorous.

Two and a half million Indians served in the British Indian Army during World War II. Yet, there were also those who joined the Indian National Army. This is not, it turns out, a fact that comes up very often in the Western WWII media we usually cover on this podcast. Funny that.

This week, we're talking about The Forgotten Army, a 2020 Hindi mini-series directed by Kabir Khan about the Indian National Army: the soldiers who broke away from the British Indian Army and allied themselves with Japan to fight for India's independence.

The series follows Lieutenant Sodhi across two timelines: the 1940s campaign through Singapore, Burma, and toward the Indian border, and a 1996 story in Myanmar where elderly Sodhi is very much still capable of taking a gun off a soldier and using it. There's a love story. There's a women's combat regiment. There's a theme song that gets played approximately 27 times.

This show has a vibe. The vibe is what it is. You have to accept the vibe.

Here is a war movie in which the director did not especially want to direct the war parts. Terrence Malick, a former philosophy professor and noted avoider of storyboards, made The Thin Red Line (1998) as an art film that happens to be set on Guadalcanal. The battle scenes are scored like tragedies, even when the Americans are winning. George Clooney shows up for approximately forty-five seconds with very long eyelashes.

We talk about James Jones, who fought at Guadalcanal, wrote the novel, and hated phoney war movies. We talk about Adrian Brody, who was promised a lead role and got two lines. We talk about Hans Zimmer composing six hours of music and losing the Oscar to Life is Beautiful.

A good episode. Episode 105, which means we are officially in our third year of podcasting, with no end in sight.

We wanted to love it. We really did. Watched the first episode of season one, the last episode of season two, and the last episode of season six, exactly as Steven Knight instructed us to do, in preparation for this film. Did the homework. Still hated it.

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is a film that takes a great anti-hero, sets him loose in the Second World War, with Nazis, counterfeit bank notes, and the Birmingham Blitz as a backdrop, yet somehow manages to make all of it feel like an afterthought.

The real historical operation at the centre of the plot is Operation Bernhard, the Nazi scheme to flood Britain with forged banknotes. The Birmingham Blitz killed over 2,000 people. John Beckett, the real fascist villain the film borrows, has an interesting biography. They had plenty to go on... and yet.

We also spend time on what the show always did well, and where this film just falls short: the moral ambiguity, you know, the gray, murky stuff, the female characters with purpose, the Birmingham that felt like a character. We talk about Ada. We talk about the music. We talk about Barry Keoghan and Stephen Graham being criminally underused.

If you’re a Peaky Blinders fan feeling a little disappointed, this one’s for you. And if you’ve never seen the show, skip the film. You won’t miss it.

There is a very specific kind of discomfort that comes from showing up to your friend’s WWII bike tour, thinking you’re about to learn about Nazi atrocities, and slowly realising that the bombing you’re standing in the middle of was carried out by the Allies. By your country. Possibly with involvement from your grandfather.

That is the situation Kristen Hayford found herself in when she joined Rotterdam historian Lisa Koolhoven on a tour about Lisa’s grandmother’s wartime experience. Kristen had even brought a photo of her grandfather, an American fighter pilot in the European Theatre, to show Lisa. The silence that followed was, apparently, a lot.

They turned that silence into a podcast called Beb & Bob | Collateral Damage. We turned it into Episode 103.

The film we reviewed, The Shadow in My Eye (2021), also on Netflix as The Bombardment, is about the RAF accidentally bombing a Catholic school in Copenhagen in March 1945 while trying to hit the Gestapo headquarters. 87 children died and the movie does not let you forget this for a single second.

We talk about the myth of the faultless liberator. We talk about what war movies, mostly American ones, consistently refuse to show. We talk about a nun with a gun, which remains unexplained. 

Nobody came out of this feeling great. We’d still recommend it.

This week on Rosie the Reviewer, we talk about The Pianist (2002), and honestly, it is one of those films that just sits on your chest a bit.

We discuss what makes it so effective, why following one man with almost no control over what is happening to him is so terrifying, and how much of the film’s emotional weight comes from Władysław Szpilman’s memoir. We also talk about Warsaw, the ghetto and both Uprisings.

And lastly, the complicated feelings raised by a film that is powerful for reasons that do not all belong to its director - if you do not want to watch this film because of him, do read the memoir, which is fantastic. Listen here, wherever you get your podcasts, or visit our website for more info, including three excellent related book recs. By the way, have you bought Rosie merch yet? We're on Teepublic, buy merch there.

What if the most powerful weapon against the Nazis… was admin?

This episode has everything:

reluctant heroes

chaotic bureaucracy

one man slowly realising he has to do something

and honestly more tension than you’d expect from paperwork

Also featuring: Nazis getting absolutely bamboozled by technicalities Diplomats arguing their way into saving lives A reminder that doing nothing is still a choice

Come scream about moral dilemmas and surprisingly emotional paperwork with us.

Hurray! Ep 100 is here. It's also Women's History Month. So we found a movie centred around women (there aren't too many of those).

This week on Rosie the Reviewer, we discuss So Proudly We Hail, a 1943 World War II film about American Army nurses during the Japanese invasion of the Philippines. 

The story follows a group of nurses working under increasingly desperate conditions as the war closes in around them. From jungle hospitals on Bataan to the underground tunnels of Corregidor, the film attempts to show how these women tried to keep doing their jobs while everything around them was falling apart.

Sam read a lot, so you're bound to learn something new this episode.

And obviously the stories have been amazing. I think we’ve grown into the history and education side of it. Yes. Movies are fun and inherently entertaining. But the history is what it’s all about.

Here’s to the next hundred.

What does freedom cost? According to Nr. 24, it costs sleep, certainty, and sometimes your countrymen.

We talk about Gunnar Sønsteby and his sabotage missions.

We both really like this one. Phenomenal acting. Tense all the way through.

More please.