spike milligan my part in hitler's downfall

Milligan, on whose own war diaries the film is based, knew that war wasn't all games. Not that the whole of the movie is funny. How did Spike and the Scot both end up dangling from the rope? Who knows? The point is that they did, and the next time they swing back into sight, they will be positioned differently. Similarly, when Spike and the Scot put in charge of their training are swinging back and forth on a rope, the fact that we only see half the swing heightens the comedy. I don't think watching someone take a punch to the genitals is funny, but watching the light come one and have the referee have been punched in the dark? That's funny. During the match, someone is at the light switch, and we then only see moments. He has been told his opponent is all but a dwarf. At one point, Spike ends up fighting in a boxing match because he's broken the boxer (I missed pretty much everyone's name but his, I'm afraid, so I'm not sure who played the boxer). One of the things this movie did best was knowing exactly how much to show. He's nowhere near as sure about this whole war thing as his superiors. In fact, he apologizes to the straw-filled dummy he is supposed to be using for bayonet practice. Spike is cheerfully insubordinate, and he is not terribly fond of the idea of having to go off and kill people, even if they are Germans. Most of the story is lighthearted after all, the movie is about what happened to him in training, not in the time he would later spend in North Africa and Italy. Young Spike-who was bipolar-is not the best fit for military discipline, and while this movie doesn't quite have a plot, it is a series of amusing vignettes about the controlled lunacy that is the British Army.

To be specific, he is in the bombardiers. Only on that fateful night, dodging the draft isn't clever anymore, and Spike ends up actually joining the army. One Terence 'Spike' Milligan (Jim Dale) has been dodging the draft so he can continue to play in a dance band. But that made fun of Abbott and Costello a lot more than it did the US military, and that's the difference. Abbott and Costello spent a lot of time in uniform. I mean, there have been American comedies on the subject, true. But maybe all that is why the British have more of a knack for making comedies which show the follies of war and the average soldier. If it hadn't, the UK would have been invaded long before we got into the war. I agree that it is the height of arrogance for Americans to go one about how they'd all be speaking German if not for us-leaving aside that English is in fact a Germanic language already, they're never thinking about Lend-Lease when they say it, and Lend-Lease had a lot more to do with British survival as an independent nation than the US Armed Forces did. I don't mean that they don't fight as hard as Americans. I think the British take their wars less seriously. And Featuring Spike Milligan as Spike Milligan's Father

Spike milligan my part in hitler's downfall