VIDEO: MARK STEYN AND PJTV ALUMNUS LIONEL CHETWYND DISCUSS DIEPPE 75 YEARS ON.
Three-quarters of a century ago – August 19th 1942 – the Allies staged what became known as “the Dieppe Raid”, a daring assault on the French port of Dieppe, then held by the Germans. It was a predominantly Canadian operation: the 2nd Infantry Division provided 5,000 troops, supported by the Royal Navy and RAF, a thousand UK commandos and about 50 US Army Rangers. It was a necessary operation, but also an all but foredoomed one. In the end, of the 6,086 men put ashore at Dieppe, 3,623 were killed or wounded or carted off to German PoW camps.
The bravery of those young Canadian men cannot be overstated. In this reprise of The Mark Steyn Weekend Show from earlier this year, I talk to the screenwriter, producer and director Lionel Chetwynd – born in Hackney, raised in Montreal, but long resident in Hollywood. We discuss politics and popular culture, but the great weight of the conversation is about the Dieppe Raid, with which Lionel has a personal and regimental connection, and about what happened when he pitched a tale of wartime sacrifice with a dash of Ian Fleming to Hollywood studio execs.
Click over to watch the hour-long video. Chetwynd, co-hosted the excellent Poliwood series on PJTV with Roger Simon, and directed the 2004 History Channel movie Ike: Countdown to D-Day, starring Tom Selleck in the titular role. Chetwynd tells Steyn the story he once told the late Cathy Seipp about trying to get a movie about Dieppe produced:
Many years later, when Chetwynd was a successful Hollywood writer specializing in historical dramas, he told the Dieppe story during a Malibu dinner party–as a sort of tribute to the men who died there so people could sit around debating politics at Malibu dinner parties. One of the guests was a network head who asked Chetwynd to come in and pitch the story.
“So I went in,” Chetwynd told me, “and someone there said, ‘So these bloodthirsty generals sent these men to a certain death?’
“And I said, ‘Well, they weren’t bloodthirsty; they wept. But how else were we to know how Hitler could be toppled from Europe?’ And she said, ‘Well, who’s the enemy?’ I said, ‘Hitler. The Nazis.’ And she said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. I mean, who’s the real enemy?’”
“It was the first time I realized,” Chetwynd continued, “that for many people evil such as Nazism can only be understood as a cipher for evil within ourselves. They’ve become so persuaded of the essential ugliness of our society and its military, that to tell a war story is to tell the story of evil people.”
If you wonder why Hollywood product has sunk so low, and how much Hollywood hates middle America, that quote speaks volumes about its nihilistic and often ahistoric worldview. As Glenn noted at the time, the trailer for the anti-War on Terror 2007 box office dud Lions for Lambs, directed by Robert Redford, and starring Redford, Tom Cruise, and Meryl Streep, has Redford angrily saying into the camera, “The problem with this war isn’t the people who started it – the problem is with us…”