Micky Burn’s Turned Towards the Sun (2012)

March 29, 2016 | By

TurnedTowardsTheSunJust posted is a review of Greg Oliver’s fascinating chronicle of Micky Burn, a WWII commando who participated in a daring raid on a dry dock in France, ramming an explosive-packed boat into the dock’s entrance to prevent the Nazis from maintaining their deadly battleship, the Tirplitz.

Turned Towards the Sun (Secret Weapon Films / MVD Visual) is less about war exploits than the man himself, filmed two years before his passing at the age of 97 in 2010. Burn’s health was frail, yet he continued to live in his home in beautiful Wales, reflecting on a life with incredible timing (twice meeting Adolf Hitler, and attending the 1935 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg), his bisexuality and affair with Cambridge spy Guy Burgess, building a secret radio station during his incarceration at Germany’s infamous Colditz Castle, and his love of poetry.

I’ve also ported over from the archives a review of the 2003 BBC docu-drama mini-series Cambridge Spies (Warner Home Video), which dramatized in four parts the history of the infamous privileged group who became Soviet spies.

Most people may never have heard of Burn, but aspects of the raid were dramatized in the fictional WWII movies Gift Horse (1952) and Attack on the Iron Coast (1968), the latter a highly mediocre drama almost exclusively held together by Lloyd Bridges’ strong performance.

Cheers,

 

 

Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com

Tags: , , , , , ,

Category: EDITOR'S BLOG

Comments are closed.