![]() ![]() There's a lack of continuity in the film: was it perhaps cut down from a much longer running time? At one point, Miller is a wanted murderer with his face plastered on the front pages.Another actor might have been able to pull this off better. (I appreciate the irony of this statement given that this is the man who ran 32 marathons in 31 days for charity!) But Izzard is built for distance and not for speed, and some of the police chase scenes in the movie strain credibility to breaking point. Izzard becomes a 'man on the run', and doesn't seem credible at that.All of the great credibility and atmosphere it builds up in the first 30 minutes, it then squanders by diving off into sub-Hitchcock spy capers. For me, was a highly frustrating film.But it actually has another meaning entirely. I assumed it was intended solely to reflect the imminence of war. ![]() I like the clever title: "Six Minutes to Midnight".Most of Seager's CV has been TV work, so it must be delightful to be given the breadth of a cinema screen to capture landscapes like this. Chris Seager does the cinematography, and impressively so.The girls performing a ballet-like ritual on the beach with batons. The school badge (a genuine reproduction!) with its Union flag and Nazi Swastika insignia. What exactly is going on here? A frantic scrabbling in a bookcase. After a comic "Family Guy"-style set of production logos to kick off with (for a full one and a half minutes!!), the pre-title sequence is a superb scene-setter.In real-life, one of the pupils was the god-daughter of Heinrich Himmler and one - Bettina von Ribbentrop - was the daughter of the German foreign minister. Miss Rochol did indeed run the school, as a part of a plan to infiltrate British high-society with pro-Nazi sympathies ahead of an invasion. It's great that the school is all based on historical fact.It has elements of the 'good guy on the run' that struck parallels with "The 39 Steps" for me. This is a fascinating premise for a movie that will appeal to an older generation, along the lines of "They don't make them like this anymore".But in snooping into the activities going on there, he finds mystery and danger. When half-German English teacher Thomas Miller (Eddie Izzard) applies for a suddenly vacant position, he is taken on to share the teaching duties with Rocholl and Ilse (Carla Juri). Indeed, they are the offspring of prominent Nazis. But the 'finishing school' is unusual, in that all its teenage students are German. A private girl's school - the Augusta Victoria College in Bexhill-on-Sea - is run with loving care by the spinster Miss Rocholl (Judi Dench). In "Six Minutes to Midnight", it's the summer of 1939 (so we are in a parallel time-flow here with the events of "The Dig").
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