Why doesn't humility make good cinema?
- Grant McLachlan
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
A hundred veteran interviews across nine countries suggest New Zealand and Britain's self-effacing war traditions haven't earned Hollywood's respect — they've earned its silence, and that isn't only about modesty.
Charles Upham never sought recognition for anything he did in Crete and North Africa, and New Zealand has spent eighty years admiring him for exactly that reticence. What the country hasn't done is get his story onto a cinema screen — not once, despite more failed attempts than most New Zealanders would guess.
Compare that with the conveyor belt of American heroism that Hollywood has run for eighty years, and a question forms that is more uncomfortable than it first looks.
Is it really humility that keeps New Zealand and British war stories off the screen — or is something more structural at work in how the industry decides whose war gets told?
Contents
The ratio that gives the game away
The United States entered the First World War in 1917 and the Second World War when Japan and Germany forced its hand in December 1941. Its combat involvement in Europe ran from the D-Day landings in June 1944 to VE Day less than a year later, in May 1945. Britain and the Commonwealth, by contrast, fought both wars from their opening days to their last.
Weigh that against the screen record and the arithmetic looks backwards: American film and television has produced many multiples more titles about the war than Britain and the Commonwealth combined, despite fighting a shorter war on fewer fronts.
That isn't a complaint about quality. It's a question about why the nations who did the most fighting for the longest have told the fewest stories about it — and whether humility is really the reason, or just the excuse that lets everyone feel better about the imbalance.
New Zealand's hero the industry couldn't finish
Charles Upham remains one of only three people in history, and the only combat soldier, to be awarded the Victoria Cross twice — New Zealand's most decorated serviceman of the Second World War. No feature film has ever been finished about him.
It isn't for lack of trying: a screen adaptation stalled publicly when its director walked away and criticised the script for failing to explain Upham rather than simply restage his citations — the reticence and refusal to take credit that defined the man proving harder to dramatise than the battlefield acts themselves.
Sir Sam Neill, the New Zealand actor who died in Sydney in July, aged 78, spent a good part of his career asking a version of the same question about New Zealand cinema generally — most directly in his own documentary Cinema of Unease, on the country's long struggle to find and back its own stories.
Upham's file sits as an unfinished example of the pattern Neill spent decades pointing at.
What a hundred interviews turned up
Over several years I've interviewed more than a hundred veterans and their families across Australia, Britain, the United States, Canada, Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, France and Timor. A pattern showed up that I didn't expect.
Veterans who had told their story many times before — to reunions, to journalists, to their own units — had often smoothed and sharpened it, competing for attention in a crowded field of similar accounts. The ones who had never spoken publicly before, and who were often the last surviving members of their units, gave the most accurate, detailed and balanced versions of what actually happened.
The stories that had been told the most were often the least reliable.
The prisoner-of-war paper trail
The same pattern turns up in the archival record, not just in living memory.
At the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, I found that American prisoners represented only a quarter of the men held at my grandfather's camp but accounted for three-quarters of the formal complaints lodged about brutal treatment.
One veteran put the underlying trade-off to me bluntly: if the Americans weren't boasting about heroism, they were compensating by protesting their conditions in captivity.
Between silence and complaint, both are ways of demanding to be noticed — and only one of them photographs well.
The format Hollywood built for its own war
The modern template for prestige war television — Band of Brothers, The Pacific and Masters of the Air — was built specifically around the shape of America's war: a handful of units, a war that started late and ended early enough to fit ten hour-long episodes without losing the audience.
I adapted the same structure for my own research into Sparrow Force, but had to stretch it across the full 1939–1945 period the unit actually served, because the American ten-episode format assumes an American timeline.
Britain has since built its own version of the same machine. SAS Rogue Heroes has run three seasons across three theatres — North Africa, mainland Europe and, in its third season, the push into Germany — at six episodes each, and found an audience well beyond Britain doing it.
The American appetite for British-flavoured spy glamour has also produced Operation Mincemeat and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, both drawn from real wartime deception operations that British writers were willing to tell as entertainment rather than solemn commemoration.
The stories Britain let slip away
The Fifth Royal Tank Regiment — known to itself and everyone else as the Filthy Fifth — fought from Dunkirk through North Africa to the invasion of Germany, and the BBC's own account of that war, the two-part documentary Tankies: Tank Heroes of World War II, remains just that: a two-part documentary rather than the drama it could easily support.
The regiment fought across three distinct theatres — the same three-season, six-episode-per-theatre shape SAS Rogue Heroes has already proven works, and enough material for an eighteen-part series that nobody has yet commissioned.
One of the regiment's own sergeants, Jake Wardrop, kept a diary through the entire war and was killed in action in its final days — a fate that sits close to the plot America told instead, in Fury, about a US tank crew in the closing weeks of the same war.
Where Britain left a true story sitting in an archive, Hollywood built a feature film around a fictional one occupying the same ground.
Sometimes the taking is more direct than a shared setting.
HMS Bulldog captured the German submarine U-110 and its Enigma machine in 1941, months before the United States entered the war — a British feat later reassigned to an American crew in the 2000 film U-571.
The rewrite was direct enough that it reached the floor of the House of Commons, where Prime Minister Tony Blair called it an affront to the British sailors who died carrying out the real operation.
A story left untold at home is a story available to be retold, and reassigned, somewhere else.
Britain figured out how to travel
None of this requires a large slice of the American market to pay for itself.
A non-American production only needs to reach one or two per cent of American viewers to break even, and British broadcasters have built a genuine export business on exactly that math: BBC Studios' commercial arm turned over roughly £2.2 billion in the last financial year, a substantial share of it from selling British-made drama into the American market.
Too many Australian and New Zealand productions, by comparison, are built to satisfy a funding panel rather than a paying audience — chasing soft money instead of a broad audience that would actually watch.
To Britain's credit, the willingness to tell a story doesn't stop at its own.
Enemy at the Gates, a UK, US, German and French co-production built around the Battle of Stalingrad, and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, written and directed by the British filmmaker Mark Herman with BBC Films as a backer, both put British money and craft behind other nations' wartime suffering rather than reserving the industry only for British stories.
The generosity runs one way that the confidence doesn't.
The commemoration gap
Australia and the United States commemorate their wars the way they film them: publicly, with marching bands and open pride.
I’ve attended ANZAC parades in Australia, where veterans and relatives of veterans march in parades, wearing medals. I’ve been gifted commemorative unit clothing and memorabilia by American veterans. Canadians kept war diaries – many have been published.
New Zealand and Britain do it quietly.
I was once given an American flight jacket by a veteran as a gift. A British veteran, on seeing it, told me flatly never to wear it in public.
Whether a culture marches or stays silent on Anzac Day and Remembrance Sunday looks very like a rehearsal for whether it ever gets its story told on screen.
The Jewish community's role in Hollywood, and the industry's sustained commitment to portraying the Holocaust, shows what happens when a community insists its history be told rather than waiting to be asked.
The conversation we need
There is no shortage of story.
The Second World War remains the largest single event in modern history, and Britain has already shown that a British story, told with confidence, can find the largest English-speaking audience in the world. What's missing in New Zealand and Australia isn't material — Charlie Upham's file alone proves that — it's the willingness to tell it as if it deserves an audience, rather than hoping modesty will eventually be recognised on its own.
Britain worked out how to make its own stories travel. It's time New Zealand stopped waiting to be discovered and started telling Charlie Upham's story as if the world is owed it.
