Michael Kitchen, The French Drop (aired 2004)
Evils that befall the world are not nearly so often caused by bad men as they are by good men who are silent when an opinion must be voiced —
Dear Friends and readers,
Our second of a proposed 4 blogs on Foyle’s War: two years have passed since the first season was aired, and 10 months in the series or war chronology since the series began (May 1940). Eight episodes have gone by and with our ninth (February 1941), a new tone sets in, darker, more tired, and Foyle becomes more involved with a Secret Intelligence Agency whose ways of dealing with war are potentially deadly for all involved, and Hilda Pierce (Ellie Haddington) not only returns for the second time, she has a large role in the stories.
Hilda Pierce and James Wintringham (Samuel West) conferring, spy-like, apart …
This first disk of the third set (or season) has a half-hour film on how they worked hard to show us a spitfire shot to the ground, a man pulled out while on fire, and as he is dragged away, the plane explode. It took several stunt men, strongly controlled fire but there, somehow the plane is not blown up. We learn how few spitfires are left and also how proud the people are to be working with them as the left-overs of how Britain managed to keep Hitler from invading. The Companion book by Rod Green (described in my previous blog) has much information on other particulars of this episode. Horowitz tells of how his scripts are really done justice to, partly because the director is his wife. We watch two different scenes, one of Foyle and his son, the other of Sam and the son bidding adieu – done a couple of times. This material also comes from later episodes in the third set, Enemy Fire set in a hospital where they are caring for badly burnt and later when Andrew has become PTSD and also exhausted and wants to stop the spitfire business because he knows he will lose his life and does get to leave. My sense in watching this is that the third season reached a real height in the series because everyone working together for a valued set of stories.
A comparison of the first two with these second two seasons shows the stories growing darker, more pessimistic, mostly because the ways of winning the war are making the people behave in atrocious (increasingly amoral and immoral) ways. Actors on behalf of the military (with some exceptions) especially are losing their sense of what values they are fighting for. The stories show the first signs of shifting from detective to spy stories (which often show a slide into nationalism, superfluous violence, and fascism).
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Season 3, Episode 1: The French Drop, February 1941. Each time we begin with a strong dramatic incident: here it is a young man, seemingly French, dropped into enemy territory (Germany) so as to spy, blown up immediately. Usual paratext of intriguing music and turning away face.
Again Foyle is trying to be transferred from policing (absurd to be catching murderers) and goes to Sir Giles Messenger (Ronald Pickup) for help. It seems it may be possible; as Sam drives him away, she protests she and Milner need him. Messenger angry at Col James Wintringham (Samuel West) about this loss of life Winringham’s agency sustaining – the implication is the agency is incompetence – and wants to take from Wintringham’s unit the (mysterious) war work sent him at Hill House, where he and a special executive operations woman, Hilda Pierce (Ellie Haddington who first appeared in War Games), have a team. Meanwhile in a bookshop their son, William Messenger seems to have blown himself up. Boy’s mother grief-stricken. Chasing down this son’s background, they find he was estranged from Sir Giles, living seedy lodgings with a caricature of a landlady who supplies a suicide note and watch –- he died because of a thwarted love affair (ah yes). They meet the girl – all melancholy – story she tells is inconsistent, Milner discovers. Trail leads them back to Hill House where nearby Sam’s uncle, Aubrey Stewart, a vicar lives and works. Foyle not only gains entry into the Hill House, but Wintringham invites him to stay: Wintringham seems to be showing off. Sam lives nearby, maybe with uncle.
Paul Milner (Anthony Howell), becoming more desperate having to deal with cynical black market crooks, tells Samantha (Sam) Stewart (Honeysuckle Weekes) he is thinking of transferring
and now Sam supplies the lighter, more affecionate-heart hopeful notes by way of her relationship with a local vicar, her uncle Aubrey Stewart (Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch)
Foyle uncovers absurd and ridiculous sabotage training, as well as attitudes countenancing murder, teaching them how to endure (and perform) torture. Interesting group of men (Raymond Coulthard among them), one an ex-criminal Foyle had put in prison we see trying to sniper shoot Foyle. Colorful characters everywhere, intelligent witty dialogue. It emerges the vicar has seen an unnamed bald man who is connected to bombing murder; Sam spots this bald man and follows him, and finds he and other go to a phone booth where phone not working. Eventually she discovers it’s a place to leave notes which uncover the truth of the bombing. Another young man died recently and was buried (air raid?). Bombing going on, including glimpses of delayed action bombs, people with gas masks.
Foyle discovers that the landlady is Wintringham’s secretary; the whole story of Messenger made up: he was homosexual (in the closet). It was he who was dumped in Germany and died (with which the program began). The body found in the bombing was the recently dead young man’s corpse replanted there –- no corpse in the tomb. There’s a moleat Hill House telling Giles Messenger about what’s happening: he pretends to be French. Foyle re-arrests the sniper-happy ex-criminal (after he has tried to kill both Foyle and Sam by ruining the wheel of her car). Foyle could tell Sir Giles the truth about his son –- he might be more proud of him, but Hilda Pierce convinces Foyle not to tell so that these operations he himself disapproves of morally can go on as they aide the war effort. He loses his chance at joining naval security because Messenger takes out frustration on him.
I’ve unraveled the experience of the plot – it’s more interesting in the criss-cross way things emerge. There is a depiction of the culture of this more rural area and these young men.
In the hospital staff put on funny skits where they make fun of themselves
Episode 2: Enemy Fire, February 1941. This is a wonderful episode. Much that happens is sad and several threads (characters’ ultimate fates) remain very much unresolved, but all that just made it richer because we also saw how many of the characters meant so well and are good and doing good insofar as they can. It’s an uplifting episode — as if we needed this at this point.
The story is centered on a hospital for burnt people, severely wounded that way, and as it begins we see a very fancy castle-like structure, Digby Manor, is requisitioned and the Sir Michael (Michael Wood) who owns the castle, has been put into a cottage (big building really) on his own estate. We see him adjusting with difficulty and his housekeeper, Mrs Roecastle (Alexandra Moen). All this is based on real strides made in medicine at the time which were experimentally and humanely used in such hospitals. Bill Paterson plays the dedicated original doctor-surgeon Patrick Jamieson. We see saved men wretchedly deformed.
Andrew Foyle’s (Julian Ovenden)’s very great upset as he finds he was nearly severely burnt because of a man’s seeming carelessness
A wife-beating thug, Gordon Drake, works at the airfield nearby and is lazy and doesn’t do all the safety measures you must to keep the man in the spitfires alive enough to keep the Germans on the other side of the channel. We see Andrew Foyle berate him and his great anger because he is in danger — could be badly burnt. Drake visits a young wife who is bored with her surgeon husband, Dr Wren (whom we learn saved Paul Milner); the wife attracted to this lout. It’s apparent she is not the only woman –- this kind of thing has more than a tinge of misogyny. We are back to the pattern of the first series: vile men (at the heart of fascism and evil) and good men with such potential being hurt. A strange man tells Wren about these visits; his name is Preston and he also tells Foyle and Milner.
The hospital is being sabotaged – it’s thought by Sir Michael at a distance – perhaps paying Drake, perhaps the housekeeper.
What happens is Andrew is not given the next mission(his superior officer sees that he is exhausted) and Andrew’s friend, Greville Woods, goes, and (has been built up for) the spitfire blows up and he is almost burnt to death because Drake again did not make sure the glass to open the cockpit worked –- Drake also probably make the plane go on fire, meaning to burn Andrew to death. Greville taken to the hospital (after the spectacular stunt we are told about on one of the features) and his girlfriend needs to be shamed into seeing him and staying with him. He turns out not to be blinded.
Entertainments are put on and a couple of nights later one is done – music hall stuff which is thematically relevant and piquant – we and Foyle see Wren sneak out for a few moments.
Next we learn Drake is dead; his wife relieved but she did not do it. Wren blamed even though his wife and Milner think he couldn’t murder someone. Turns out Wren did hit Drake’s head hard but it was Preston who came by and drowned the man in a nearby street fountain. Preston turns out to be Mrs Drake’s brother, Pip, trying to protect her.
Foyle has also figured out who did the sabotage: the housekeeper; he gets her to confess by accusing Sir Michael – who then tells Foyle how bitterly he feels about himself since when he was exhausted (like Andrew) he shot himself in the leg. His batman, Drake’s father saw, in later years told his son and now Gordon Drake was blackmailing Sir Michael, demanding hush money.
It’s an episode about mental disability as well as physical. Mental for which the men are not blamed and yet the episode maintains Sir Michael has been a hollow man. The parallel here is Foyle’s son who cannot any longer bear risking his life in a spitfire and watching others die
The real ending is penultimate and then the last; Andrew has fled to Sam’s house, and Sam is hiding him there over night; when the commanding officer comes to tell Foyle his son is in danger of deserting, Sam (offstage) confesses to Foyle where Andrew is. Foyle retrieves Andrew, takes him to a pub and Andrew resolves to return. There are other scenes between them – over chess for example.
Closing touching adieus between Andrew and his father and then Andrew and Sam. Quietly acted. Beautifully. We see the spitfire with Andrew in it flying off. The commanding officer transferred him. There is deep feeling over this spitfire for it was such planes with men giving up their lives that helped prevent Hitler invading England.
Episode 3: They fought in the fields, April 1941. I had to watch this twice and the second time very slowly, and now I don’t know why I found it so hard to understand. There are two parallel stories going on, and they are intertwined. In the one Germans are coming over-head in airplanes bombing people. This way of conducting war is primary today (witness Ukraine). Soldiers murdering civilians, destroying their worlds. The episode as usual begins with a sort of “hook:” a man lands and dies. As we go through this story we discover that nearby is a place for interrogating spies, they are taken there, and it’s run by a Major Cornwall (James Wilby) who resents any interference and will not cooperate with Foyle — whom Cornwall insults
Nearby there is a farm or farms on which are working Land Army girls, Rose Henshall and Joan Dillon — very dirty hard work for little pay, but important for Britain to feed itself. There another death occurs, a murder of what seemed to me an old man, the farmer, Hugh Jackson. Of course it’s called suicide but soon it’s clear it’s a murder (this is another repeated motif in the series). The episode reminded me of the previous (Enemy Fire) where it’s the human interest of the story and situation (there bad burns, a hospital opened to deal with these) that holds us, not so much about corrupt people making money off the war.
The girls very hard at work — we do see they get ample food
I found it somewhat problematic. It opens with land-girls understandably resentful of the more middle class Foyle, Milner and Sam — I am supposed to believe they and the farmer’s son, Tom (Joe Armstrong) are won over by the goodness of Sam and generosity of Foyle. Lifelong marginalization (especially one of the girls committed some crime) doesn’t go away like that. How the farmer very old now became the lover of the other girl who is now pregnant didn’t persuade me and I was even less persuaded by how happy she is at the end to live on that farm with the farmer’s son and his bride (the other girl).
In the background is Hugh Jackson’s wife who was tired of Jackson and tried to run off — but he murdered her first and put her in a grave he drinks liquor over every night. Jackson was killed because he saw some of the shenanigan’s the Germans were up to as they tried to kill their own pilots who were imprisoned and could tell about German radar.
The murdered wife has her parallel in Barbara Hicks, a woman there to investigate wood (?), who is also bitter when Foyle first met her — she hates men because of bad experience but is also supposed won over by Foyle’s goodness. It’s too quick again, but there are some touching scenes where they refer delicately to their different pasts — and Foyle’s loss of his wife (one of the episodes begins with his annual visit to her grave).
They are so courteous to one another ….
Suddenly too Major Cornwall is sorry; he had meant well, it seems, his interrogation techniques do not include torture but also don’t protect his prisoners from one another. The Germans as a culture or group are represented as not paying fair essentially. So some unusual hostile nationalism, not surprising were we to regard these characters as in 1941 February. Well done, good performances, but it does not hold together because of this desire for an upbeat ending and rewards for the land-girls as well romance for Foyle.
Episode 4: A War of Nerves, June 1941. This one does not strain for anything — no need — it goes into the terrible increased and ever more complicated ways of bombing, the use of delayed bombs especially. And it returns to central characters cheating and making money off the war. June 1941 — the Blitz eased, but the delayed bombing tactic has spread; at the end of the episode we hear that Germany has invaded Russia and that (a coming slaughter we know) is cause to feel hope as the English gov’t is now allied with Russia. At the same time other places are starting to fall like Crete. The comment (hope) it’ll be over by next Christmas by Sam is made ironic by Foyle
Peter Capaldi unfairly treated
Two threads: one interesting, a kind of back-handed defense of communism, socialism, workers — Foyle is told he must investigate Raymond Carter (Peter Capaldi), a communist and socialist leader, find out things about him so the gov’t can arrest him. Foyle quickly finds nothing and does nothing. By the end of the hour we discover Foyle’s superior, Commissioner Rose (Colin Redgrave) ordering this is not only deeply anti-labor but angry because his daughter is planning to marry the the man — he can’t stand the idea.
The stronger thorough content is about a pair of men running a factory where they embezzle gov’t money by pretending their work force is much bigger than it is. They treat their workers badly and we see an attempt at (an illegal it’s pointed out) strike. Into this come the squad of bomb disposers, with the truth emphasized how little trained such people were, how dangerous and nerve-wracking the task. One of them “loses” it in a bar and starts a fight with his gun; he turns out to be moral, in fact balks at keeping the huge amount of money they find stashed near where a delayed bomb landed. His girlfriend is a welder in a factory whom Sam befriends. And we have another more thuggish crook and his wife who is also a welder.
The best parts are this attention to what life was like during the war …. and Foyle as moral center with Sam as the good heart center ….
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To read about Season 4, Episodes 1-4, see comments, Episode 1, Invasion, April 1942; Episode 2, Bad Blood, August 1942; Episode 3, Bleak Midwinter, December 1942; and Episode 4, Casualties of War, March 1943.
A passing moment from The Bleak Midwinter
Of great interest in all these disks, starting with the 2nd through the fourth are the various features telling the literal ways the film-makers made the episodes, about the costumes, the attitudes of mind of the people acting, the historical background. There is also much written information to click on.
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
Episode 1: The Invasion April 1942
Horowitz has the courage to present us with the real conflicts between Brit and Americans as the Americans came to England. As the story opens a farmer, David Barnett, is actually shooting a group of Americans who have come to take over his farmland in order to turn it into an airfield in which to operate a base to bomb the Germans. We see a barmaid, Susan Davis, is become the lover of one of these Americans, James Taylor; she wants him to marry her. She gets pregnant and tells Taylor. He is a boy and can think only how his parents would have a fit. Paul Milner’s friend, Will Grayson, another of these connections with people who helped save his life, home on leave, goes to pub And dies in a fire that night. Milner is suspicious about that fire – not an accident. We meet Susan’s father and mother, very fond of her, especially the mother (I recognized the actress), but clearly do not know anything about the character or goals of their daughter as the women especially wants her to marry a local boy, Ben Barnet (son of that farmer).
The American general tries to make friends with Foyle, invites him to give a talk, but it is not appreciated – -really ugly comments are made by one side about the other and vice versa. The two older men go fishing. A dance is held to try to bring the two different peoples together. Before the dance Sam had reacted very negatively to the aggressive forcefulness of an American soldier – this is presented as American manners. She sees it as rude. But she receives a heart-breaking Dear John letter from Andrew and decides to go. At this dance Susan Davis is found strangled. So two dead people.
Foyle must investigate in spite of the American commander trying to stop him and saying what does it matter – we’ve seen this before. We have had some clue scene: for example that Susan is operating a still of deadly whiskey with her boss, O’Connor’s acquiescence. But he wants to stop and she won’t and she threatens him. This liquor is deadly we are told; she is ambitious she says and needs more money. She has taken the stockings as a present given her by Taylor. I don’t feel this is misogynous – it’s not that she’s a female but she is another of these vile people we meet from show to show.
After much intrigue and lying – by Barnet that he murdered the girl because he thinks his son, Ben did, after Ben came home and Barnet egged him on to punish Susan somehow. Will Grayson died of that terrible liquor which blinded him and so he couldn’t open the door of his room and escape the fire. At the end Foyle is apologizing to Sam for being hostile to her going to the dance – it was none of his business. She had been driven to tell him Andrew broke it up. We see Milner try to hurt O’Connor with the acid drink so upset is her for his friend. It emerges it was O’Connor who strangled Susan by mistake in a rage because he did want to stop distilling the liquor after Grayson died.
Last scene the American genera apologizes to Foyle and they go off in the car to have a brandy together.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foyle's_War_(series_4)#%22Invasion%22
Episode 2, Bad Blood, August 1942. This is the most striking and direct attack on the way the British were prosecuting the way in perhaps the whole 8 series. There is a secret project to produce poisonous gas and to inject poison to kill people – anthrax – in the area where Hastings is located, and when the incompetent people get a group of animals very sick and it spreads to the people in the area, all the leader wants to do is cover it up. He could care less who dies.
As usual there are several threads unspooling simultaneously. We see the experimenters with the killing of the sheep first. We see a blind man who is part of This team. Then a soldier seemingly rescued From drowning. The murder incident preceded by a quarrel in a pub between the murder victim, Tom Jenkins and the man accused of murdering him, Martin Ashford.
Sam is being aggressively courted by the young American soldier we met at the end of season 3. He wants her to marry him and come to California.
The clinch is the appearance of a character we’ve not met before, but Milner has, Edith Ashford (the actress central to He Knew He Was Right as I recall) who comes to ask Milner to help exonerate her brother whom she insists could not have killed Jenkins. She tells her story to Foyle who first is sceptical, but as he and Milner begin to investigate there are curious contradictions. Why does no one care about Jenkins A vet’s son, Cartwright is also concerned to say Martin Ashford couldn’t have done it. When Foyle and Milner come to Fox Hall farm around which the events swirl (Elsie Jenkins worked there?) they discover the farmer’s cows have been stolen. Elsie goes very sick with very bad sores on her arm. Sam becomes ill – when waiting outside the farm she is cut by barbed wire while near a goat. The murder weapon is a vet’s knife.
Edith is a nurse in the hospital where Elsie is taken. She is at first lying about Jenkins and Elsie as Cartwright is lying about Jenkins too. All are covering up for him, unwilling to say what a monster Jenkins was – because he corresponds to an aggressive male type, a war hero. A subtheme is the way Martin Ashford is despised as a quaker who is a conscientious objector . That’s why he was working on Fox Hall farm. A friend, Styles, also Quaker is being chased because he knows about these experiments and refused to have anything to do with them. The scientist group is out to kill him lest he tell others
After all everyone is lying. Jenkins is no war hero, but an abusive husband and far from rescuing Cartwright at sea, shoot him to rescue himself. Elsie was having an affair with Martin Ashford. Cartwright killed Jenkins with the knife he found in his father, a vet’s office. The center is this unit of people developing an N-Bomb to devastate the Germans in retaliation for their bombing. Foyle’s concern for Sam drives him to find them and the blind man, is Mr Higgins a lead scientist who blinded himself while experimenting. In the end Edith and Milner come together again. Sam rejects the marriage proposal of the young Americans soldier. She’d rather work for Foyle.
All based on a real attempt to develop such horrific destructive bombs. Somehow watching the series now that this war is going on in Ukraine and reading about the atrocities the Russians are committing, has made its themes come out more vitally
The anthrax experiment happened and even today the island on which it occurred may have leftovers of this deadly substance – kills people 95% of the time even with treatment. The incident of near drowning is based on a real naval group attacked by a German convoy – spies, betrayal and atrocities are involved here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foyle's_War_(series_4)#%22Bad_Blood%22
Episode 3: Bleak Midwinter, December 1942 – the title comes from a line in a well-known Christmas Carol
This is the episode that combines a turkey that has to be held in the office for evidence for a court case (episode opens with Foyle catching a racketeer in food), with the tale of a munitions factory where women have been conscripted (that is forced) to work on creating explosives and filling shells with gas components. Long hard underpaid dangerous work; one of them, Grace Phillips, is killed by what seems an accident from tiredness not long after the hour begins; we discover gradually she was deliberately blown up by Harry Osborne, her partner who fed her a poison to make her sleep on the job. Harry is the series first psychopath: he is edging to kill people, imagining himself another Cagney (whom he imitates when Foyle mentions American gangster movies to him); he imagines he can make big money selling raw materials from the factory which he had pressured the now dead Grace to bring home. He kills his work partner at a slight altercation too. This is a scene where Sam is involved; quite by chance her and Foyle’s car needs fixing next to the shop this man and the partner work in. Osborne tries to bomb Foyle out of existence at the end of the episode.
A third thread concerns Paul Milner, now involved romantically with Edith Ashford (from previous hour); his wife suddenly returns to him and is as obnoxious as she was before she left. Now she demands he take her in as his wife; she is there because a girl she worked with in a hair salon wrote her about the girl killed by the bomb. Milner’s wife is aggressive and chases the psychopathic man down and he murders her carelessly – the way he murders others. One of the constables in the office who wants Milner’s job deliberately manufactures evidence against Milner – but he is foiled by Foyle.
It is supposed Christmas time and at the end the turkey mentioned now and is again is available to take away to an evacuation home for children. The judge agreed to accept a photo. Sam can take it away and join in the feast. During the episode many of the characters turn up to Grace’s funeral, including the two bosses at the factory, one of which stole a check sent to Grace’s mother who has been dead for 18 months. That’s why she doesn’t show up to the funeral. At the funeral Osborne makes an emotional speech. At the end of the episode a church bell is heard and is taken as a sign of coming victory and the end of the war. The bells and funeral lend poetic notes to a grim episode.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foyle's_War_(series_4)#%22Bleak_Midwinter%22
Episode 4: Casualties of War March 1943
This fourth and last of the fourth season (after which there was a hiatus of a year) is interestingly named. Casual and its family of words, including casualties used to mean by accident, and without thought; since civilian have become not accidents of war but deliberate targets, the term has come to mean civilians killed. It used to mean deaths you cannot help, and that is what Foyle’s superiors want him to regard the murders and deaths in this hour. He refuses to so regard them – to overlook the murder of a displaced depressed schoolmaster, Michael Richards, become alcoholic and an addicted self-destructive gambler; to say the sabotage of the Spanish administrator I the grand house who bullied two boys not old enough to know better in the full meaning of the term (and are going to jail for 2 years because they have no one to protect them) – and resigns. He won’t disregard these casualties he is urged are not worth very much …
It seems a secret scientific lab is inventing a bouncing bomb which can penetrate German defenses and hit military targets. There is a woman on the team, Evie Richards, who they deny are working on it, and a Danish man become her love who lure Michael Richards to the lab and the Danish shoots Richards in the head. Yes they get away with it – there’s a scene where they exult – Paul Milner sees that from afar.
The historical matter includes the spread of exploitative gambling, traumatized people from bombs. Foyle’s goddaughter, Lydia, comes to his house for she has nowhere else to go: she made a bad mistake, married a man her parents didn’t approve of, he deserted her, and her boy is now unwilling to speak since he was in a bombed school where most die. No sentimentalization: the boy is willful and when he gets to speak unpleasant. Sam spends a lot of the episode kindly caring for him which gets her almost blown up – for a third time the character reminds Foyle. The point is show that the nuns are awful; they look upon Lydia as a criminal and Foyle’s supervisor who told him to ignore the gambling and sabotage thinks he can wind Foyle back to duty by tearing up a warrant for her arrest. At the close Foyle has decided to take the two of them in.
[…] (looking at patterns especially), and then building on what we find, I’ll write another similar blog for the 3rd and 4th. The episodes move month by month until we get to season five where we fast forward a whole year. […]
A significant episode from season 6: during the episode people refer to this bomb dropped on Hiroshima and say they are not sure what it is all about.
5/19/2022
6:2 Killing Time, June 1945
Of course now that I’ve not got the Anglo-Indian novels course to keep me busy, and have finished what I think is a final draft of “Barsetshires in Pictures,” I went right back to Foyle’s war, and, as luck would have it, this is the story about racism in the series. I was that moved, I kept coming near tears.
US and UK soldiers said to be killing time while they waited either to be disbanded when the war truly over – or sent back to the US It’s also a possibly killing time – time when characters are killed.
The story concerns Mandy Davis (Charlotte Riley) who unwed has given birth to a mulatto child whose father we learn is Gabe Kelley, a black American (Obi Abili). She lives in the boarding house owned by Adam Wainright (Max Brown) who has hired Sam (Honeysuckle Weekes) to be cook, housekeeper and whatever else is needed. Many is desperately unhappy, and hasn’t enough money to buy milk for the child, much less pay rent regularly. We see how cruel her mother Mrs Dean (Gillian Bedford) is to her. She had been going out with Tommy Duggan, a boxer (Sam Spruell), who a conscientious objector, had been sent to farm in Scotland, and who when he returns find himself spurned by everyone but one friend-boss, a manager of boxers who gives him a place to stay for free for now, and who had dreamed of marrying Mandy. Tommy is deeply hurt in several ways all at once.
Sam befriends Mandy, loves the baby great-heartedly, and offers to go with Mandy to a local dance, Ludy will come. To the dance Gabe comes with three black friends, and at first they are badly ostracized but slowly as he asks Mandy to dance and she agrees, the British at least return to the dance floor. We see how the two love one another and long to be a family with their baby.
Meanwhile the murder & violence mystery story is proceeding. Twice we see a rich businessman stopped, fooled by a woman and then robbed by her and an accomplice male – in the wood One of them is on the town council which has been pressured by the local American army captain, Wesker (Adam Jones) to practice segregation in the town. Foyle votes against this: isn’t protection and better lives what we fought for? But he is over-ruled. We see the harsh ways the white American army men treat the black, but there is a especially mean bully, Sergeant Calhoun (John Sharion) who incites others against Gabe hating him for going out with a white girl, who he also terrifies with horrifying stories of lynching and torture black men who so much as look at a white girl are subject to in the states. Many talks with Sam asking why should the color of Gabe’s skin matter. She is fearful for him.
Well, Foyle finds Gabe lying on the ground that night having been beaten by the whites, they form a congenial acquaintance. Then Gabe goes to Captain or Colonel Wesker to request permission to marry Mandy, and at first refusing, Wesker seems to agree.
Foyle still goes fishing (he had shown some of his tackle to Gabe who appeared to understand what he was seeing). Foyle brings fish to Sam, who says he must come to dinner. He arrives, meets Lucy, and a Mr Hains, a man with one arm who is bitter about the war; also sees Many and Gabe openly a pair. This partly happens as Adam had tried to tell Many she must leave since she’s not paying, she had begged him to stay, and Sam protested this, so to make up for bad behavior, Adam is hosting the dinner beyond the fish.
Then one night Calhoun offers to pay Tommy for boxing. The episode had begun with a violent scene of boxing where a white and black man are in the ring; at first the white is winning, but then the black begins to win and beats the white; but as he is about to be given the prize, Calhoun jumped into the ring and gave the win to the white Well, the black men come in (oddly allowed by Calhoun) and soon they white guys are beating the blacks, and Gabe flees to the wood, and when he returns is told Many has been murdered. This is the story he tells Foyle, for Foyle has been called in earlier to view the body, and hear Wesker say obviously Kelly did it, and behave as if Foyle has no jurisdiction; Foyle insisted he has and begins to investigate. At one point Calhoun gets into Gabe’s cell and threatens to kill Gabe’s baby daughter; next thing Foyle is told Gabe confessed, and Gabe will not retract. There’s a scene where Wesker shows how bitter he is – he wishes the war would have gone on for at home he is nobody and here he was respected.
Sam has taken the baby to Mrs Dean who will not take her granddaughter I – her name is Catherine. She goes to Tommy who insists the baby has nothing to do with him either. Meanwhile the social services have come to demand the baby – this happens in Caryl Philips’s novel, Crossing the River: a child of a black man and white woman is taken from her after he is forced back to the US without her.
Tommy has been feeling very bad: he was a genuine conscientious objector because of the fate of his parents after WW1; he was willing to marry Mandy if she’d give up the baby. Foyle watches him very angry at Calhoun for refusing to pay the fee he agreed to.
There’s a scene where Adam and Sam think if they were a couple, they could take Catherine in – but they are not
So the key here is that there is payroll robbery the night Mandy was killed – the same night of the boxing match. Foyle has figured out Mr Hains is a Mr Cole, and Lucy his wife, and they are doing the robberies. The new DC not very useful but he does see the prosthetic arm being used as a bat and takes it to Foyle and the serial number reveals it’s owned by a Mr Cole – who is Hains, as Foyle surmises, because he gave wrong answers when Foyle asked him about D-day. Cole was not there he was at Alamein. Through Cole, Foyle learns that it was Calhoun who threatened them into robbing the payroll, then through Calhoun (once he is accused of the murder) that the plot to have a payroll robbery as a distraction was thought up by Wesley who was having Mandy over that night to get her to bed with him in return for really allowing her a Visa to the states. Wesley gets angry at Mandy for refusing to go back to bed, she says she overheard the plot, and he strangled her.
The last scene of the murder-violent robbery mysteries is Foyle walking up to Wesker playing basketball and accusing him of the murder from all the evidence and affadavits he now has. Wesker admits it – as do just about all the criminals in the Foyle series.
We switch to a scene where Gabe is being urged by his black friends to get into the truck to be shipped home. He stands there and drives up Foyle and Sam with the baby. Sam gives the baby Catherine into his arms and says he will return to bring her back to the US. The orphanage people are there to take Catherine back, but Tommy turns up and says he will take care of Catherine – with the older man who has given him space and the man’s wife – until such time as Gabe returns. He is actually a good-hearted man, and the Coles not bad people.
I came near tears in several of the scenes with Gabe, and I worried intensely for Many and him.
I feel I was that moved because of all the horrible racism I’ve seen in the US since Trump became POTUS, last week the Buffalo slaughter was just so painful to read about
Apparently there was segregation forced on some towns during WW2 by the American white army men; there were outbreaks of racial violence in the UK after the US army arrived; conscientious objectors were vilified by ordinary people.
Horowitz didn’t write this one; David Kane did. Horowitz also didn’t direct; David Richards did.
Foyle spot on as ever – 13 years ago.
Ellen
[…] I spent this afternoon watching two episodes of Foyle’s War with a friend: “Broken Souls” (S5, Ep 2), about the excruciating emotional pain and damage done to people by the war as they come home from that war and attempt to adjust to what has happened during the years gone and as they learn to have to live with the memories of beloved people killed, often in horrific ways; and “Killing Time” (S6, Ep 2), the fierce unrelenting and open racism of US white people in the army towards their fellow black people fighting equally in the war but discriminated against by humiliating and ostracizing practices towards them, threats, beating, excluding them, as well as how in Britain done more discreetly, equal refusals to accept black people as equal human beings. These are just two of six extraordinary exposures and intelligent dramatizations of social problems in society then and now as exacerbated by the violence and cruelty of often senseless and hate-filled war behavior all around everyone. This is a different slant than the previous four seasons where the emphasis was more criminal behavior occasioned or allowed by war behavior, often on the British side (see my blog on Seasons 1 & 2, May to Oct 1940; and on Seasons 3 & 4, February 1941 to March 1943). […]
[…] come time for me to write my last blog for now on this magnificent series (see the lst 2 seasons; Seasons 3 & 4; and Seasons 5 & 6). In real time this wonderful project of summarizing, understanding and […]