Six Minutes to Midnight

This is a really interesting story and until this, I didn't realize that Nazis were sending their daughters to English boarding school with the original intention of having them integrate into the upper social circles of British society (and the movie didn't make that clear, I had to look that up online).

So there's so much potential here, but for a spy movie, it feel surprisingly NOT all that suspenseful. The setting was great and there was nothing wrong with the performances, the story just lacked something and I feel like this should have been more of an edge of your seat story. A decent WWII drama.

In "Six Minutes to Midnight", it's the summer of 1939 (so we are in a parallel time-flow here with the events of "The Dig"). A private girl's school - the Augusta Victoria College in Bexhill-on-Sea - is run with loving care by the spinster Miss Rocholl (Judi Dench). But the 'finishing school' is unusual, in that all its teenage students are German. Indeed, they are the offspring of prominent Nazis.

When half-German English teacher Thomas Miller (Eddie Izzard) applies for a suddenly vacant position, he is taken on to share the teaching duties with Rocholl and Ilse (Carla Juri). But in snooping into the activities going on there, he finds mystery and danger.

Positives:

• This is a fascinating premise for a movie that will appeal to an older generation, along the lines of "They don't make them like this anymore". It has elements of the 'good guy on the run' that struck parallels with "The 39 Steps" for me.

• It's great that the school is all based on historical fact. Miss Rochol did indeed run the school, as a part of a plan to infiltrate British high-society with pro-Nazi sympathies ahead of an invasion. In real-life, one of the pupils was the god-daughter of Heinrich Himmler and one - Bettina von Ribbentrop - was the daughter of the German foreign minister.

• After a comic "Family Guy"-style set of production logos to kick off with (for a full one and a half minutes!!), the pre-title sequence is a superb scene-setter. What exactly is going on here? A frantic scrabbling in a bookcase. A pier-end disappearance. The school badge (a genuine reproduction!) with its Union flag and Nazi Swastika insignia. The girls performing a ballet-like ritual on the beach with batons. (This looks to be a cracker, I thought).

• Judi Dench. Superb as always.

• Chris Seager does the cinematography, and impressively so. Most of Seager's CV has been TV work, so it must be delightful to be given the breadth of a cinema screen to capture landscapes like this.

• I like the clever title: "Six Minutes to Midnight". I assumed it was intended solely to reflect the imminence of war. But it actually has another meaning entirely.

Negatives:

• For me, was a highly frustrating film. All of the great credibility and atmosphere it builds up in the first 30 minutes, it then squanders by diving off into sub-Hitchcock spy capers.

• Izzard becomes a 'man on the run', and doesn't seem credible at that. (I appreciate the irony of this statement given that this is the man who ran 32 marathons in 31 days for charity!) But Izzard is built for distance and not for speed, and some of the police chase scenes in the movie strain credibility to breaking point. Another actor might have been able to pull this off better.

• There's a lack of continuity in the film: was it perhaps cut down from a much longer running time? At one point, Miller is a wanted murderer with his face plastered on the front pages. The next, kindly bus driver Charlie (Jim Broadbent) is unaccountably aiding him and Rochol seems to have assumed his innocence in later scenes.

• Various spy caper clichés are mined to extreme - including those old classics 'swerve to avoid bullets'; 'gun shot but different gun'; and 'shot guy seems to live forever'. And there are double-agent 'twists' occurring that are utterly predictable.

• A very specific continuity irritation for me was in an 'aircraft landing' scene. Markers are separated by nine paces (I went back and counted them!) yet a view from a plane shows them a 'runway-width' apart. This might have escaped scrutiny were it shown just once. But no... we have ground shot; air shot; ground shot; air shot..... repeatedly!

Summary thoughts: This was one of the cinema trailers that most appealed to me over a year ago, in those heady days in the sunlit-uplands of life before Covid-19. It's a movie that showed a great deal of promise, since the history is fascinating. And there is probably a really great TV serial in here: showing the 'alternate history' consequences of these high-society German girls penetrating British society and steering the war in a different direction (screenplay idea (C) RJ Mann!) But the potential is squandered with a non-credible spy caper bolted onto the side.

So with "Six Minutes to Midnight", Downton-director Andy Goddard has made a perfectly watchable 'rainy Sunday afternoon' film, that I enjoyed in part for its 'old-school' quirkiness. But it's frustrating that all the promise couldn't be transitioned into a more satisfying movie.

(For the full graphical review, please check out One Mann's Movies on the web or Facebook. Thanks).

Creditable performances, a good plot and just enough Hitler Youth to make you want to see their plans undone.

The film was set in 1939, and played out like a spy drama from that era.

I was with it the whole way and the dramatic final scenes kept me interested.

Glad I saw it.

Some other comments here are probably accurate but I thought it an entertaining yarn. Worth watching.

My Review - Six Minutes to Midnight

My Rating 7/10 Six Minutes to Midnight is a 2020 British war drama film directed by Andy Goddard from a screenplay by Goddard, Celyn Jones and Eddie Izzard, starring Izzard, Judi Dench, Carla Juri, James D'Arcy and Jim Broadbent.

I enjoyed Six Minutes to Midnight mainly for Judi Dench's performance and the effective music score by Marc Streitenfeld .

Eddie Izzard and Celyn Jones wrote the story set in a boarding school for German girls just before the commencement of The Second World War .The story is loosely inspired by the real-life Augusta Victoria College, located in the also real-life coastal town Bexhill-on-Sea (county of Sussex, south-east to England).

The establishment is under surveillance by the British secret service, and the film follows the attempts by a British agent (masquerading as a school teacher) to uncover a plot to repatriate the pupils and discover what happened to his predecessor, who has disappeared.

I thought the female cast held this film together especially Judi Dench casting as Miss Rocholl the Principle of the boarding school and Carla Juri as the Head Teacher Ilse plus all of the 20 young girl students were well cast special mention of Maria Dragus cast as Astrid the Class Leader.

I was less impressed by the male cast including Eddie Izzard who is cast as Thomas Miller the Agent posing as a school teacher . No spoilers but I would have preferred Actors of the caliber of Ben Whishaw or Benedict Cumberbatch in this important role. James D'arcy as Captain Drey I thought was almost melodramatically comedic at times in his performance.

I kept thinking this is a story Alfred Hitchcock would have Directed far better and very differently to Andy Goddard .

Judi Dench now 86 years old and very vision impaired amazes me with her aptitude for remembering lines and even more for her dedication to any part she plays . There's a scene where she realises what's happening and not a word is spoken but all is conveyed in her facial reactions.

Six Minutes to Midnight for me had a great beginning and conclusion but got a little off track somewhere in the middle but it's well worth a look.