TWO MEN WENT TO WAR 2002This World War Two film with a light comic touch is based on a true story. It is 1942 and two soldiers, Kenneth Cranham and Leo Bill are afraid the war will pass them by without getting into the action. Cranham is a WW One veteran now charged with training recruits to march etc. He has just been told he is too old for active service. Leo Bill is a trainee dentist in the Army Dental Corp. He knows he will never get near the actual combat. Cranham decides to prove the Army wrong. He comes up with a scheme to go to France and destroy the German battle cruiser, Scharhornst, in Breast harbour. Private Bill meets Cranham when the two accidentally blow-up an ammunition bunker. The explosion is blamed on a passing German bomber. Cranham's plans change went the Scharnhorst escapes up the channel back to Germany.Cranham grabs up Bill one night as well as several pistols and a rucksack full of grenades. They are going to invade France and do what damage they can. Before they set off, Cranham mails Bill's and his own pay-book to Winston Churchill. He includes a letter explaining what they intend to do. Now they leave camp and head to the coast. Stealing a small fishing boat, they set sail for France. After nearly being ran down by a passing ship in a fog bank, they hit land on France. At first, the pair believe they might have got lost in the fog, and circled back to England. They quickly find out they have reached France and just barely escape a German patrol. The pair now begin their campaign against the Third Reich, by cutting various telephone lines etc. They then accidentally cause the destruction of a German train by fiddling with the levers at a rail switching booth. Next the pair stumble onto a German radar station. They use the rest of their grenades to cause as much damage as possible before escaping on a German motorcycle.Needless to say, our intrepid pair return to their small boat, and set sail for England. They however have the bad luck to run out of fuel and then hit a floating mine. Rescued by a UK Air-Sea rescue launch, they are returned to England.Of course nobody believes their tale and they are soon up on desertion charges. The only thing that saves them, is that the letter finally made it through to Churchill's office. Plus that there had been a Commando raid on the same German Radar station that same night. The whole film is played out with a slight comic tone which works rather well. The film is not a world beater by any means. It could have done with a shorter runtime and a tighter story. It did however kill an evening in front of the television, as well as supply a few laughs.

What superb movie. The tale of two English dentists, who, before D-day, decide to invade France on their own. The result is one of the most enjoyable war-movies I have ever seen. It starts of quite slow, but the pacing suits the story. There are no big build-ups leading to massive machine-gun fights with lots of dead Germans and gore. Rather, you are kept in suspense to whether their comical blunders will bear any results or whether they will manage not to kill themselves by mistake in the process. It had myself and most of my family laughing within the first couple of minutes, and we never really stopped till the end. Bravo! I hope to see more movies like this.

I have to say, I wasn't very interested in seeing this until the end as it just didn't entertain me at the beginning but I hung in with it and noticed that over the coarse of the film, the relationship between a young, naive private and a grumpy old sergeant, both dentists bored with their perspective lot in the army who decide it's time to contribute to the war effort, began to solidify.If even half of their adventures are true then they were two truly amazing men who pulled off quite a feat. This is one of those films that is more human interest than anything but it holds your attention as it progresses by some of the situations they find themselves in and the wonderful way it's brought to conclusion.

Richard at the Flicks makes a number of interesting points. However I would like to comment on two of them.The harbour scenes were shot in Charlestown in Cornwall just a few miles from where the two dentists actually sailed. While making the film the elders of the village pointed out that although harbour lights should not be shone at night, their village kept them on during most of the war. There reasoning was that no one had ever bombed them and nobody would. That part of Cornwall was not bombed and was out of way of most German flight paths.Also from a purely technical point of view if there had been no lighting in that scene the audience would not have been able to see anything.When King & Cuthbertson actually landed in France there was no enemy along that particular stretch of the coast. This was well documented in newspapers at the time. For the Germans to patrol every bit of Northern France would have taken hundred's of thousands of men, men who could not be spared. The crossing at Cherbourg was long and few at the time thought this would be an area that soldiers would land. (On their return to their boat they did encounter a German officer, as can be seen on the deleted scenes on the DVD).Also it was 1942. Up to that point the war had not been going well for the British and an invasion of France at that time was not considered feasible both by the Germans and by the British. The Germans were convinced that it was only a matter of time before Britain fell. The British they thought were no threat to the mighty German Army.