8-12-08, 10:48 am

One of the most remarkable television series released, in the British tradition, in five numbered series had its last episodes broadcast last month on PBS stations. Little has been written about this series, Foyle’s War, a well-acted powerfully written and directed, and beautifully photographed historical series which uses mystery to make often brilliant statements about both British society and the issues of World War II.

Foyle’s War follows a British police inspector, Christopher Foyle (Michael Kitchen), in Hastings on the English coast, as he investigates crimes from the days before the failures at Dunkirk in 1940 to the German surrender in 1945. Foyle is the quintessential decent Englishman, understated and unflappable. He is also committed to seeking justice, wherever it leads him. In that sense he is a bit like the American private eye whom Dashiell Hammett created in the 1920s, fighting for justice in a corrupt system where those with wealth and power are sometimes allies of and sometimes indistinguishable from the criminals.

A widower with a son in the RAF, and a perky female driver, Sam (played by Honeysuckle Weeks), Foyle encounters both petty criminals and big ones, corrupt aristocrats, fascists, and those who profit from fascism as he investigates crimes. He also meets decent, courageous people and many who have been wounded emotionally by the blitz and the war. The crime stories are often cleverly plotted mysteries. But they interact with powerful portrayals of both the British social system and fascism (which has rarely ever been portrayed in US films) along with the brutality and complexity of war itself as it affects the British people.

Let me present a number of major examples. In episode two of series 1, “The White Feather,” a Member of Parliament and British fascist leader visits a resort hotel owned by one of his supporters, a cruel imperious woman. His friends and supporters are largely upper class people, singing songs like “Why are there so many Jews in London” and waiting for the Nazi invasion as their day to create a British Vichy.

In the complex plot, the women is murdered by her own husband, who despises her and hopes that the German invasion will cover up the killing. The British fascist is eventually caught by Foyle in a plot to provide information leaked by a sympathizer in the Foreign Office that would help the Germans win the war.

Here the fascists talk in 1940 the way Patrick Buchanan talks about 1940 today. Their class arrogance and contempt for people” beneath their station” is skillfully portrayed. As is their ability to offer scapegoats to people confused and demoralized by the war.

Also, the decency of working class volunteers who manned the ships that saved lives at Dunkirk is portrayed powerfully in this episode. There are interesting side characters. One is a young working-class woman who becomes a saboteur for the fascist group because the resort owner tells her if she doesn’t, the resort owners will tell the Germans that she had Jewish grandparents when they invade. Another is an older Jewish Englishmen who comes to the resort with plans to kill the fascist leader because his nephew had been brutally beaten and maimed by the leader’s street thugs. They help viewers to understand this dangerous time and place in history.

Who the appeasers were in class and ideological terms and their relationships inside the British ruling class are portrayed with subtlety and intelligence in a way unseen in US media or in other British media. The fascist leader is loosely based on Sir Oswald Moseley, the knighted aristocrat who led British Blackshirts through the streets in the 1930s and whom Churchill threw in prison in 1940 as a message to both Hitler and the old Chamberlain appeasers who were waiting in the wings, ready to collaborate with the Nazis.

In an episode from Series 2, titled “Fifty Ships,” an American businessman and supporter of aid to Britain is shown to have acquired his wealth by stealing scientific work from an Englishmen when they were both students in Britain after World War I. The Englishmen, whose life has largely been ruined, confronts him, demanding money for his son (who has joined a group of criminals looting bombed out houses while they act as volunteer fireman in the hope of getting money for his education). The American murders the Englishman to preserve his reputation and goes free, although the gangs of looters are caught. The only witness against the American, it turns out, is a German spy who had been dropped onto the beach when the killing took place. Nothing really is simple, although Foyle warns the American that the war will eventually end and he will come after him.

In another episode, Foyle’s son, an RAF pilot, is arrested because of his previous membership in the Communist Party of Great Britain, in order to protect a senior officer engaged in radar work whose rape of a woman had led to her suicide. Through the series the British class system rears its ugly head, impeding the war effort while trying to profit from it.

Class prejudices, sexism, anti-Semitism, are portrayed in context as both sinister and “normal” to the masters of British class society. Some working class people are criminals, petty profiteers, servants of big gangsters. Most are decent and moral, the antithesis of both the open fascists and the British establishment figures in the series.

In one episode, for example, a Spanish aristocrat (a representative of Franco’s “neutral” regime) who gets working-class youth to commit acts of sabotage for him. They get caught and have their lives ruined and he, to Foyle’s chagrin, gets off scott free. The working class youth are petty criminals without the protection that the big ones have in society, even in the midst of a World War.

In the most remarkable episode for me in political terms, “War Games,” a big British businessman, has made a secret deal with the Nazis in Switzerland that will insure his food processing industry great profits and of course help the Nazis win the war. His son, who sees fascism and the corporate power as one in the same (he calls Hitler “the greatest businessman of all”) murders a number of people to cover up the deal, before Foyle, with the help of an anti-Nazi émigré, catches him. The war games are being carried out by the home guard by on the businessman’s great estate. Eventually, he is caught by an artifact that the Nazis had given him as a gift, which can be shown to have come from a murdered Jewish family.

The relationship of capitalism to fascism is shown in this episode about as well as in any fiction film that I have seen. The businessman father is ready and willing to work with the Nazis on the principle that his corporation will win out whoever wins the war (many American firms had relationships which they sought to protect with German firms during the war for similar reasons). The son is an ardent fascist who sees the coming German victory as putting him and men like him in leadership of the “new England.” Once more, Foyle has to fight against a British establishment that protects its big capitalists and even hopes to use the businessman father as something of a double agent.

In the last three episodes of Series 5 which ends the whole series, there are portrayals of an émigré Catholic priest who is a Nazi agent and murderer (an interesting turn on conventional spy stories), and a Polish Jewish psychiatrist who ends up murdering a non Nazi German prisoner of war who escapes from custody in a field, after he has discovered that his wife was murdered in a concentration camp which the British have liberated. Germans are not evil or Nazis per se. And there are British fascists, upper class protectors of guilty secrets and war profiteers. Everything is complicated in regard to specific character portrayals and interactions, as in real life, but the fact that the series delineates class relations enables viewers to both understand and learn about the war, British society during the war, and class society in general.

In the last episode, as the war ends, an American officer hounds a British man he believes responsible for the deaths of many Americans in a pre-D-Day training exercise (the incident is based on a real disaster although the rest is fiction), while a wealthy philandering resort owner with ambitions to become a Conservative member of Parliament murders a doctor whom he erroneously believes will expose the fact that he dodged the draft by paying someone to impersonate him and fail his physical. Foyle catches the would be Tory MP in the end, and he faces a hangman rather than a career in Parliament for his crimes. Although this might sound a bit pedantic, I would say that these events occur weeks before the British Labor would win its greatest victory in its history on the slogan of a “Socialist Britain,” which meant that the Tory would have lost the election anyway even if he had gotten away with murder.

Finally, let me comment upon the episode which was my personal favorite and one of special interest to all our readers, “A War of Nerves” the last episode of Series 3, where a Communist was portrayed very differently than anything that I had seen in US media (where sometimes Communists are shown as decent people who are victims of McCarthyism, but that is about it.)

In this episode, Foyle is asked by his snobbish uniformed police commander to put a Communist intellectual under surveillance and eventually arrest him. Foyle sees this as nonsense and a waste of time, since the intellectual is only exercising his right to speak and organize.

The intellectual, who is generally portrayed positively, is a journalist and leader of a Peoples Convention movement to defend the rights of workers. He, in line with the Communist position at the time, sees the war as a war for the ruling class, not against fascism, but one that will strengthen fascism. He regards the Soviet Union as the only trustworthy anti-fascist nation, the position at the time of Communists and many others through the world.

Foyle’s police commander, who plants evidence against the Communist intellectual, tells him that “the Communists are as much our enemies as the Nazis,” a premature expression of later Cold War ideology, but his real hostility to the Communist journalist is that his daughter, an artist, is living with the journalist, supporting his views and activities, and traveling with traveling with him as his wife. The British Daily Worker is even mentioned in passing in a way that is not negative or hostile. Although the Communist intellectual’s views are not endorsed, he is taken seriously by Foyle and more importantly by the workers. He is not a Soviet agent seeking to disrupt the British war effort and the workers are not his dupes, the views that the police commander has and which would be the standard plot of a cold war drama.

The real enemies in this episode are the factory owners whom the Communist intellectual on trade union grounds and Foyle when he eventually discovers their criminality fight. Their illegal activities, rooted in greed and profiteering, lead to murder and their own destruction. They are the ones undermining the war effort.

There is even a tongue in cheek ending to this episode in which the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union leads to the comment “we are all now on the same side” as the Communist journalist and the Police Commander’s daughter go off together. But it is clear that this is a turning point in the war

Not all the episodes are outstanding (I was somewhat disappointed in the episodes of Series 4) but the majority of them are. Without being heavy handed or doctrinaire, they look at social relationships and a social system through the prism of war. They examine its heroic and its very seamy side. The tell us a great deal about what fascism is as ideology and institutional power in the past, which can help us comprehend its dangers in the present

Created by Anthony Horovitz (who also writes many of the episodes), Foyle’s War deserves to be rerun often and also purchased on DVD. It would make great summer viewing on any laptop.

Perhaps one day we may see a series on the American home front, not necessarily a crime series, dealing with fictionalized versions of figures like Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Father Coughlin Cardinal Spellman, war profiteers and black marketers and courageous anti-fascists like Congressmen VitoMarcantonio, Paul Robeson and many others. And of course working class people of the kind who appear in the novels of our fellow editor, Phil Bonosky.

--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.