Sink the Bismarck

Sink the Bismarck! is a 1960 black-and-white CinemaScope British war film based on the 1959 book The Last Nine Days of the Bismarck by C. S. Forester. It stars Kenneth More and Dana Wynter and was directed by Lewis Gilbert. To date, it is the only film made that deals directly with the operations, chase and sinking of the battleship Bismarck by the Royal Navy during the Second World War. Although war films were common in the 1960s, Sink the Bismarck! was seen as something of an anomaly, with much of its time devoted to the "unsung back-room planners as much as on the combatants themselves". Its historical accuracy, in particular, met with much praise despite a number of inconsistencies.
Sink the Bismarck! was the inspiration for Johnny Horton's popular 1960 song, "Sink the Bismarck". The film had its Royal World Premiere in the presence of the Duke of Edinburgh at the Odeon Leicester Square on 11 February 1960.
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== Links to Peel ==
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Peel wasn't a great cinema-goer, but he did enjoy watching old films on television. It seems that he saw Sink the Bismarck! on TVAccording to the BBC Genome website, it was broadcast on BBC1 on 31st May 1970., as he refers to it in his Disc & Music Echo column of 6 June 1970: "On TV the Hood has just sunk with all hands and Kenneth More is looking quite worried about it all...". Perhaps a few of his readers would have picked up on the reference, as More was one of the leading post-World War Two British movie stars and appeared in many films of the 1950s and early '60s which were later shown on TV, including a number of noted war films like this one.
== External Links ==
*Wikipedia
*IMDb
*AllMovie
== Footnotes ==
Category:Films