The Road To Dunkirk's Not Paved With Anything in 'World on Fire'
Several short scenes begin this episode of World on Fire: Lois singing, Harry and his soldiers walking down the road, and Nancy announcing from Berlin that Belgium has fallen. The series hops around a lot, and while this can sometimes be irritating or confusing, sequences like this pack a punch. This week, we see Dunkirk from several characters’ points of view, but you won’t see the familiar sweeping scenes of the beach crowded with lines of soldiers or massive amounts of CGI to create a spectacle. It’s always the close-ups, as it were, that create the drama and make us care about what happens to them.
Harry: “These boys are with me. I am the officer in charge and they are coming with us.”
Lois has continued her singing career despite her advanced pregnancy, and she and pianist Connie arrive at an RAF base for a gig (I am reasonably sure that a pregnant woman would not have been allowed to perform). Even Connie can’t get Lois to share her plans for what she’ll do when the baby is born. But at the moment, Connie is more worried about her husband Eddie (Ansu Kabia), the trumpeter in Albert Fallou’s jazz band in Paris, and since France is about to fall, she has reason to be concerned. But we see him briefly on the road to the coast, trading jokes with enlisted men of color.
