The World War II experience, as depicted by Hollywood since the 1940s, logically has focused on the involvement of U.S. troops; during subsequent decades, our expanding impression of the Allied struggle against Nazi forces — on the large and small screen — has been augmented by equally absorbing and informative films from our British cousins.
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| Marinus (Gijs Blom), who betrayed his Dutch comrades by joining the German invaders, finds his beliefs shaken after a telling conversation with a disillusioned Nazi officer. |
No surprise, then, that it has fallen to Dutch filmmakers to properly depict how the Allied/Nazi clash impacted a considerable portion of the Netherlands.
Director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s impressively ambitious De slag om de Schelde — re-titled The Forgotten Battle, for its Stateside release — is the second most expensive Dutch film ever made, and the money certainly is visible on the screen. This is riveting, old-style, war-era filmmaking, with hundreds of extras populating production designer Hubert Pouille’s jaw-droppingly expansive sets and locations.
The overall tone? Quite grim.
The story is set primarily in German-occupied Zeeland, the westernmost province of the Netherlands, following the June 1944 Normandy landings and subsequent incremental advance against Nazi forces. As cleverly illustrated by the interactive map that prologues this film, the Allies’ goal is to open a shipping route to Antwerp, in Belgium, to act as an essential supply channel.
As summer passes into autumn, the extremely complex script — credited to van Heijningen, Paula van der Oest, Jesse Maiman, Pauline van Mantgem and Reinier Smit — follows subsequent events through the eyes of three disparate (fictitious) characters.
Marinus van Staveren (Gijs Blom), a turncoat Dutch volunteer who joined the Wehrmacht in the naïve belief that Germany would improve conditions in his country, is introduced during a furious battle against Russian forces on the Eastern front. Marinus later wakens in a hospital, more or less intact, and comes to the attention of a disillusioned SS lieutenant, who — after having lost both his legs — has learned just how unscrupulous the Nazi concept of “fair” actually is.
“If you tell a lie big enough, and repeat it often enough,” the lieutenant laments, quoting Joseph Goebbels, “eventually people will come to believe it.”
(Boy, doesn’t that sound familiar?)
The lieutenant still has some juice with his superiors, and — in an unexpected act of benevolence — manages to get Marinus transferred away from the front.
