Cinema
Macho men
Peter Ackroyd
With the delights of Conan, The Barbarian and The Thing on offer within a hundred yards of the Odeon, I was surprised at the number of young men queuing, at one o'clock on a Friday after- noon, to see a film about terrorism. Since they all seemed to have short hair, and many of them were wearing the green com- bat jackets which are on sale in the larger retailers, I suppose it was the advertising campaign which allured them: 'The closest you'll ever get to the secrets of the legen- dary SAS.' You have seen them killing peo- ple on your television screens, the posters suggest, now find out exactly how they do it. For a force which is supposed to abjure publicity the SAS, with the possible excep- tion of the Chelsea Pensioners, have the most effective public relations in the history of the British army.
At the premiere on Thursday night, members of the CND demonstrated outside the cinema in protest against the treatment which their movement receives in this film. I can quite understand why. Who Dares Wins opens with some shots of what is meant to be a typical demonstration by the `peace movement' — young blacks and long-haired, bespectacled students hold up posters proclaiming the virtues of the Com- munist Party; a few punks with spiked hair, some appalling street theatre and various loonies in the shape of clergymen. And that was it: none of the ordinary suburban couples, the old people, the doctors and the lawyers who now comprise — or so we are told — the bulk of that movement. It was obviously in the interests of the film- makers to present so distorted a picture of it since the thesis of the film is that the peace movement has been infiltrated by terrorists, under the guise of a 'People's Lobby. They are funded by a mysterious Arab (a Palesti- nian, no doubt) and their plan is to assassinate a number of world statesmen if their demand — that a nuclear missile be aimed at Holy Loch — is not met. If I were a member of the CND, I would find it rather a distasteful picture also. At worst they are portrayed as a bunch of subver- sives, at best a group of well-intentioned ninnies who harbour undesirables.
There is worse to come. In order to com- bat the menace of the peace movement, the SAS are called in to exercise their own special skills. The SAS has not been until recently, I believe, a 'secret' regiment nor has it ever in 40 years degenerated into the fetish which it has now become for teenagers and for those of a violent frame of mind. 'We've been likened to a surgeon cutting out a cancer,' one of their officers explains, although I think that most of the audience would be happy just to lay their hands upon some scalpels. It is not a par- ticularly alarming development in itself in militaristic societies, like that of the Third Reich or Sparta, such fantasies are commonplace. It only becomes disturbing if the members of the force itself begin, to use an old-fashioned phrase, 'believing in their own publicity'.
I do not know whether any ex- or present members of the SAS helped in the making of this film — the military advisers are listed in the credits as 'anonymous' — but certainly the film itself does not attempt to penetrate beneath the fetishistic stereotype. In the first minutes of the film we enter one of their camps and there they all are tough, sardonic, beefy, very much like the `macho-man' image which contemporary homosexuals have fabricated for themselves. Perhaps the SAS copied it from them.
Lewis Collins plays the SAS man who, after a fake 'discharge' from the regiment, infiltrates the peace movement. Of course the leading woman terrorist of the group falls in love with him, but it was remarkably impercipient of her not to notice that non- chalant, laconic, eyes-on-the-horizon presence which has all the signs of an unredeemed killer. The plot itself is paper- thin throughout, however, and does not differ markedly from conventional enter- tainments of this sort: it is really used as a vehicle for scenes of the SAS in action. At their country base, they spend their whole time blowing up buildings or jumping onto mock railway carriages: perhapi they are training to take over British Rail. At the climax of the film, when the terrorists are blown into little pieces (cheers from the au- dience), all the soldiers seem to do is throw hand-grenades into empty rooms and then go in firing. By a strange act of extra- sensory perception I have just switched on the television to see Mr Tony Geraghty, an historian of the SAS, explaining that they do not operate in this manner at all. It is all rather puzzling. Who are these anonymous `military advisers' who have spread such false information?
Who Dares Wins could be dismissed as the cheap and vulgar film which it is if it were not that the message which is being pounded into all those short-haired youngsters is such a disquieting one. The country they see here is an undisciplined and dangerous place, where the only hope
`He's a real romantic.'
of safety and order lies in the brutal methods of a group of anonymous men; only the SAS, they are told, can defend the liberty which all the liberals bleat about. IP didn't know better, I would assume that the film was an attempt to discredit the 'new politics' of the populist anti-nuclear move- ment by suggesting that its adherents are implicitly helping 'the enemy' and that the values which they espouse are merely a cover for social chaos and terrorism. But of course if, and when, the populist movement gains wide support, there will be any number of glossy films extolling its virtues and vilifying the military representatives of the established order. Anything for a fast buck, I suppose, but Who Dares Wins is a particularly nasty example of its kind.
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