By the summer of 1944, Britain and Londoners hoped the war was reaching its final stages. Then on 13 June Hitler unleashed his secret weapon, the V-1 bomb, unmanned and unpredictable. For eighty days they fell on southern England, causing 5,375 deaths and 15,258 serious injuries. Jennings was dispatched to mastermind a film report on a phenomenon that left the country panicked and exhausted. The cheerful camaraderie displayed in the earlier films is gone; but what remains, working at full power, is Jennings’ eye for the resonant detail and his ability to measure the country’s heartbeat. The beginning and end of the film uses commentary by the American broadcaster Edward R. Murrow; for the central chunk, the buzzing bombs, silence, and explosions tell us all we need to know.

Geoff Brown