Pun Salad

An earnest 1955 WW2 movie, based on actual events. I think I got it because there's a Star Wars connection: George Lucas ripped off adapted a lot of the dam-busting scenes for the death star-blowup scenes in his movie.

Sorry, I guess that's a spoiler for both movies.

It's the story of an innovative idea to take down some dams above the Ruhr Valley: they provide power for the Axis factories below, and (bonus) you'd also get some damage to the Nazi war machine by simple flooding. Unfortunately, conventional straight-down bombing won't work: adequate-sized bombs are too heavy to be carried by available bombers. And the dams are guarded from torpedos by netting. So an ingenious doctor who's in on the problem proposes to skip mines (like stones in a pond) over the water surface, hitting the dams in their most vulnerable spots with relatively lightweight explosives.

Problem: this movie is very earnest, and (hence) super boring. 1.75 hours, and it seems much, much longer. Dudes, get to the exploding part!

Robert Shaw is in it!

There's a pre-movie disclaimer/warning about one bit of language in the movie. An unfortunate dog bears an unfortunate name (as in real life), and … well, it's a word I've never used in this blog (I checked), and I don't plan to start now. (The closest I've come was in 2009, when I referred to "sniggering MSNBC hacks".)

You can read about the actual operation at Wikipedia.