After the critical mauling the opening episode of SS-GB suffered last week, I was determined to be more positive this week. So let us begin by saying that Sam Riley, as Superintendent Douglas Archer, aka the coolest cop in the Metropolitan Police, declaims his words as if he’s playing Julius Caesar at the National Theatre. OK, no he doesn’t – he’s as incomprehensible as ever, and there are at least half a dozen lines I don’t get at all.
Kate Bosworth, playing the improbably glamorous American journalist Barbara Barga, is just as bad, and the two would be better off using sign language as they hurtle steamily from a black-tie party in a grand country house back to La Barga’s rented flat. Still, jolly nice to look at the two of them in the bed (or rather sofa) scene that inevitably follows. Riley is very fetching in his obligatory 1940s vest, and it is a useful tip that he keeps his watch on while making love.
The party itself is more to the point in driving the plot forward. It is hosted by art dealer Sydney Garin, who on the surface is making a tidy profit selling looted artworks from museums in Nazi-occupied countries to private buyers. But no one is quite what they seem in SS-GB, and Garin is almost certainly on the side of the angels. We know this because he has invited Archer, who is rarely out of a dinner jacket, along to meet three bigwigs who seem (I am taking nothing for granted) to be key figures in the British resistance to Nazi rule.
One of them is the former cabinet secretary, who you might think the Germans would have under lock and key. But then German rule is an altogether slapdash affair. Huth, the oddly likable SS man (surely that can’t have been intended), and his men break into the on-the-run Sylvia’s flat after receiving a tip-off. While they are admiring pictures some pleasingly “decadent” artist has painted of the naked Sylvia, Archer is helping her escape through a door on the upper floor. She and Archer even have a heated conversation, which the Germans (perhaps suffering the audibility problems faced by the rest of us) fail to hear. It is a potent scene – at last some real drama – but in the end rather ludicrous. It would have packed more punch if she had been shot. Or perhaps if she had shot Archer.
But then SS-GB is strangely violence-free so far – perhaps it is verboten on a Sunday evening, when even a dystopian counterfactual must be made palatable. Admittedly, one of Archer’s colleagues, the youthfully enthusiastic Jimmy Dunn, is murdered and his mutilated body found in the bombed-out house in which Archer used to live. Huth says the perpetrators were the resistance and it was a message to Archer: help us or you are next. But we never see the murder – from the state of his body and the crucifixion-like pose it mimics, an especially brutal one – just as we never get much real inkling of the Archer-Barga sex. It’s all highly stylised and as a result oddly uninvolving. Somehow you feel Quentin Tarantino might have handled it differently.
When Huth makes Archer look at Dunn’s body, Archer finally flips and punches the SS officer. Huth, a peculiar cove, takes this surprisingly well. “So at last a flicker of emotion,” he says. “I thought I would never see it.” It seems he didn’t think much of Riley’s understated performance in the first episode either. Huth, who wants to use Archer as a conduit to the resistance, warns him against double-dealing. “These are dangerous people,” he says. “Don’t try to play both ends against the middle. Just remember: the axe never mourns the tree it fells.” An axiom that sounds like a direct translation from the German. I really am warming to Huth. General Kellermann, the officer overseeing the Met who wears tweed and insists on riding the King’s horses, is fun too, though I suspect he may be heading for a fall.
Amid all the personal dramas, we started to get a sense of the bigger picture. Archer tells another SS man – I am losing track of which officer does what – that the supposed antique dealer in Shepherd Market was murdered by the resistance because he was a British atomic scientist who was working for the Germans. Ignore my suggestion last week that the resistance were developing a killer disease that would infect Leighton Buzzard and all occupied points to the south. The prize is actually an atomic bomb that the Germans want to get their hands on to secure their Reich for 1,000 years.
Huth tells Archer that, with the bomb, the Reich will have a glorious future, and Britain too: “Your people will be fully employed. This country will be transformed.” He even lists all the German companies that will move in. It sounds like a political broadcast on behalf of the EU, and is likely to confirm the Daily Telegraph’s view that there is a Brexit subtext to SS-GB. Time to throw off the German yoke and reassert ourselves as freeborn Britons.
Where this prototype bomb is and how Britain has managed to get it before Germany and the US are moot points. One of the conundrums the show has thrown up – even Archer mentions it – is that the Germans are hopelessly inefficient, with the army and the SS more intent on battling each other than rooting out the resistance, yet they still managed to defeat the UK in fairly short order. This may of course be because the upper echelons of British society all went to Oxford, played rugby together, and now spend most of their time going to parties in dinner jackets and playing cards. Someone in the UK c1940 definitely took their eye off the ball.
In this episode we also hear something of the big players in the war. We see a newsreel that tells us of rumours Churchill has been executed; the king is thought to have been moved from the Tower of London, possibly because he is ill; and Barga tells Archer one of the resistance bigwigs he meets at the party has made three trips to the US to visit President Roosevelt (how is that possible under the noses of the Nazis?) to encourage American participation in the war. There are great events being played out just beyond our gaze. We even see SS chief Heinrich Himmler, who is paying a visit to London, talking to Huth in an aircraft hangar that has been converted into a German base. Archer is there too, and looks suitably astonished to be so close to one of the architects of Nazism.
Himmler never speaks – he just gets into a car and is whisked away. We barely even see his face – we just know who it is from the cropped hair, the little round glasses and the fact that the really big Nazi cheeses never do a proper Sieg Heil; they just wave their hand in a floppy way while their underlings strain to make the perfect salute. Seeing him from a distance and realising that what we have in SS-GB is a drama of relatively minor figures caught in a net that is forever tightening around them – the emotionless, dumbstruck Archer looks like a little boy lost most of the time – made me realise who should have adapted Len Deighton’s novel. Tom Stoppard would have been perfect. This is a world war two version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, with the great court drama happening just offstage while we are preoccupied with the bit players. Stoppard as screenwriter; Tarantino as director. Now we are getting somewhere.
What did you think? Could you hear what Archer was saying? Did you feel there was any chemistry between Riley and Bosworth, or did their budding relationship generate all the heat of a two-ringed gas fire in an icy wartime flat? And how are you enjoying the Huth-Kellermann comic double act? A bit close to ‘Allo ‘Allo! for comfort? Let me know your thoughts below.
