Le Bataillon du ciel (1947)
Directed by Alexander Esway

Film Review

Given that France's own involvement in its liberation from the Nazis is now easily overlooked it is perhaps surprising that the first film to reference the Allied invasion of Normandy is a French film that celebrates this very fact. D-Day might have gone very differently if it hadn't been for the efforts of the French parachutists in the Special Air Service, who played a crucial role in impeding the German troops whilst the Allies made ready to seize France's northern extremity.  Le Bataillon du ciel faithfully records the heroic exploits of a parachute regiment that sustained a staggeringly high casualty rate on the eve of D-Day, and in doing so helps to set the record straight regarding France's participation in its liberation.

Le Bataillon du ciel was filmed immediately after the war but wasn't screened in France until the spring of 1947.  It was the most eagerly anticipated French film of the year and proved to be a phenomenal success.  With its audience in France of 8.6 million, it was the most successful French film ever made up until this time - although this appears modest compared with the 11.9 million that Darryl F. Zanuck's The Longest Day would attract in 1962.  Whilst it had nothing like the resources Zanuck was able to lavish on his overblown blockbuster, Le Bataillon du ciel is still a highly respectable war film, easily one of the best to have been made in France.

The film was directed by the Hungarian born director Alexander Esway, who had previously co-scripted another well-known war film, Tay Garnett's The Cross of Lorraine (1943). It's an unusually ambitious film for Esway, who is better known for his lowbrow comedies, including his popular Fernandel vehicles Hercule (1938) and Barnabé (1939).  Le Bataillon du ciel is by far the most impressive film that Esway directed, and this it owes at least in part to a doggedly realist screenplay by Joseph Kessel, who was involved in the events depicted in the film.  The film is also impressively cast, with two lead actors - Pierre Blanchar and René Lefèvre - who were actively involved in the French Resistance during the Occupation.  Bernard Borderie and Robert Darène both worked as assistants on this film, shortly before embarking on their own film directing careers.

Running to just over two and a half hours, the film divides neatly into two halves that were originally screened separately (presumably in an attempt to recoup the film's enormous production cost).  The first half, titled Ce ne sont pas des anges, focuses on the intense programme of training which the parachutists undertook in England ahead of their drop into Nazi-occupied Brittany.  Even though it is overlong and somewhat repetitive (the screenwriters clearly had their work cut out trying to stretch this out to 76 minutes), this first part of the film gives us time to become acquainted with the handful of favoured protagonists, so that the second half has greater impact and poignancy.  The monotonity of the training exercises is relieved by some unexpected humour (the highlight being a scene in which an embarrassed officer attempts to give the parachutists a sex education class in, of all places, a girls' school).  The mood may be lighter in this first part of the film but there is a hint of the horrors that lie ahead when a fatality occurs during a routine training exercise.

After this languorous, and mostly superfluous intro, the pace of the film picks up with a vengeance in its gripping second half, entitled Terre de France.  Once the parachutists have landed on home soil, there is scarcely a dull moment as they link up with the local Resistance and go on the offensive.  The action scenes are impressively staged and there is no shortage of nerve-wracking tension.  After the light-hearted prelude, the film's second half feels unremittingly bleak and it is shocking how grim it gets with its graphic depictions of firing squads, torture and general brutality.  Lacking the strained romanticism that tended to creep into most American war films of this era, Le Bataillon du ciel is blisteringly modern and honest in its portrayal of the barbarism of war, and it is only in its last few minutes that the abject bleakness is overturned with a respectful coda set in the aftermath of the Normandy landings.  Although the film does not dwell on it for long, we can hardly fail to be struck by the enormity of the sacrifice made by those steel-willed parachutists, without whom the liberation of France might have been a far longer and bloodier affair.

Film Synopsis

Spring, 1944: a decisive moment in the Second World War.  Colonel Rouvier, a respected soldier who lost an arm in combat in Tunisia, is put in charge of training a parachute regiment of the French Free Forces in England.  After a period of intensive training, the first wave of soldiers land in Brittany, their mission: to contain the enemy forces as the Allies proceed with their invasion of Normandy.  It is the 5th of June, the eve of the historic day on which the Liberation of France will begin...