Think of England review – far-fetched tale of state-sponsored second world war porn turns deadly serious

Apocryphal plans to send an arousing morale booster to troops battling the Nazis make scant sense, and nor does the resulting movie

Some potentially interesting ideas here and a good cast … but the whole thing disintegrates into a very weird and ill-judged mess. It looks as if it might be a saucy romp, but is in fact doomily serious, like a stilted, stricken stage play. Sexual violence, PTSD and misogyny are among the issues that the film fails to address convincingly.

Writer-director Richard Hawkins (who scripted Paul Greengrass’s The Theory of Flight) imagines that during the second world war the British government commissioned porn films to be shown to troops as a morale-boost. This is supposedly based on an “urban myth” whose existence does not appear to be evident other than in online material relating to this film – although Britain’s Political Warfare Executive (PWE) is known to have dropped pornographic leaflets over Germany to damage enemy morale, crudely depicting wives cheating on absent soldier husbands, etc.

The scene is the remote Orkneys, where the Ministry of Information has assembled a ragtag group of undesirables from military and civilian life to create three versions of a porn film called Think of England for each of the services, involving three changes of costume: a soldier, sailor and airman, who each come home on leave to enjoy conjugal relief. John McCrea plays the thin-lipped Capt Clune whose job it is to get this distasteful task completed, and is struggling with sexual anxiety of his own; Ronni Ancona is the worldly hair and makeup expert Agnes; Natalie Quarry is Holly, the cabaret dancer who has to play the wife; and Jack Bandeira is Cpl Evans, a film actor in civvy street called “Tyrone Higgs”, who is to be the horny husband. Evans, though, is deeply violent and disturbed due to some awful trauma of which see brief flashback glimpses but – very lamely – isn’t fully explained until the silly, pseudo-historical titles over the closing credits. Ben Bela Böhm plays Max Meyer, the German Jewish émigré director who is in charge of shooting the whole thing.

The filming goes ahead, but Cpl Evans rushes out midway having caught a glimpse of someone skulking around outside, which creates an absurd parallel subplot that undermines the film’s plausibility still further. There is one good scene though. Director Max has to teach pouty, stroppy Holly how to address the camera in closeup scenes and how to manage dialogue. The film achieves an interesting intimacy in that moment: there is a real, grownup quality to it quite absent elsewhere. Sadly, the film otherwise becomes ridiculous and jarring.