Blondi's War

Directed by Lee Dilley

2023

Sid Lee Films & New Tropic Pictures

Blondi’s War opens with sound of airplanes as we are introduced to a short and shocking tale set during the first few days of the breakout of World War 2.

A young boy (Alex Eggleston as Arthur) is innocently playing with a dog (“Blondi”) and his toy plane in the September 1939. The addition of era-specific 30s music really helps set a great time and place and soon the boy returns to his home.

Here, he joins his family at the dining table where his father (a stern but powerful performance from Adam Horvath) is decked out in an RAF uniform and his mother (a sensitive Katie Lawson) prepares tea. The boy’s father is clearly trying to keep his son on the straight and narrow, insisting he grow up a man by “sitting up straight” and washing his hands.

But as the trio listen to the radio, the music is suddenly interrupted by a message from 10 Downing Street. And we hear news delivered by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain that Britain is now at war with Germany after Adolf Hitler failed to respond to demands to leave Poland.

The family have immediate concerns but with air raids sirens beginning, mum tells her son to go to the basement and we see shots of the family reminding him of gas mask drills both at home and at school.

Technical wise, Frank Hammond’s cinematography captures the homely feel of a close family and some well-composed low-angled shots show us bombers and fighters as they careen across the sky. And with trails of smoke from their engines, Lee Wignall’s visual effects are small but very effective. Here we begin to see the reality of “our boys” heading off to fight the Germans as the father continues to ask his son to “be strong” – connoting the issuing of orders to the boy like a military officer.

A letter soon arrives about evacuating – and yes, it was that soon in which the government started to evacuate children, mothers with infants and the infirm. In fact, the first wave came the day Germany invaded Poland – two days before the declaration of war. And within three days 1.5 million evacuees were sent to rural locations considered to be safe.

Further (real) news comes as it’s assumed pets are sadly also to be put down but away from his parents, Arthur lets his dog runaway, perhaps giving his furry friend a chance at survival. My one tiny reservation about this excellent short was the use of the name Blondi as the boy’s dog. Blondi was the actual name of Hitler’s own dog. I can see an attempt to metaphorically/symbolically link the two but thought it created unnecessary confusion when the other aspects were all so well done.

However, the engaging story continues as the father and mother take a final dance (anyone having seen Avengers: Endgame may shed another tear), and they soon find out about what Arthur has done. Here I got a sense of some pride amongst the disappointment about Arthur’s empathic actions to save even just one life, even an animal's.

A warning though that the end coda is an absolute tear-jerking gut punch which I won’t spoil here. Suffice to say, that with the background of Vera Lynn’s war song "It's a Lovely Day Tomorrow" playing, we find out a little-known, and horrendous, statistic about war-time pets. As a dog owner myself, this was very hard to take.

Yet Blondi’s positive attributes are many. It has a trio of first-rate performances with the cast imparting a lot of emotion and depth during a relatively short 12-minute runtime. Its real power comes from its hard-hitting themes that still resonate today and illuminating a mostly unknown fact about World War 2. And although clearly well-researched and with a great sense of the time, it’s the heartfelt moments and the emotion created by the directorial choices that make Blondi’s War a really outstanding short film.

★★★★★

5/5

Michael Sales