Out of print for more than 30 years, now available for the first time as an eBook, this is the controversial story of John Wooden's first 25 years and first 8 NCAA Championships as UCLA Head Basketball Coach. This is the only book that gives a true picture of the character of John Wooden and the influence of his assistant, Jerry Norman, whose contributions Wooden  ignored and tried to bury.

Compiled with more than 40 hours of interviews with Coach Wooden, learn about the man behind the coach. The players tell their stories in their own words.

Click the book to read the first chapter and for ordering information. Also available on Kindle.

by Tony Medley

120 minutes.

R.

While this is based on “recently declassified files of the British War Department and inspired by true events,” it is pure, violent, gory Hollywood hokum. Director Guy Ritchie has used every hackneyed cliché put in all those old WWII “B” movies that came out of the Hollywood factories, and adds a few more.

The writing credits (Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson and Arash Amel & Guy Ritchie) give a clue that you are in for a long sit. Whenever there are this many credits, it means that they had problems and had to bring in other writers to help with a weak script. Then when you sit through massacre after massacre with people mowing down hundreds of people with automatic weapons, you know that the script is weak. No good script? Easy solution, just have a lot of violence, cold blooded killings, and lots of them.

The idea is that there’s an Italian ship in Africa that the Germans have been using to refuel, rearm, and replenish the carbon dioxide filters for the entire U-boat fleet. Get rid of it and the Germans will no longer have U-Boats in the Atlantic, at least that’s what I got from the setup.

So the Brits get a “Dirty Dozen” type of crew of bad guys to get rid of the ship. In fact, though, while this might have put a crimp in their U Boat warfare, after this feat was accomplished in 1941, the German U-Boat warfare continued. More than 3,500 merchant ships and 175 military ships were sunk in the Atlantic during WWII. It was not until 1943 that the Allies gained the upper hand. But I guess this might have been a turning point.

If this is the bunkum I think it is, Ritchie does a disservice to the brave people who actually accomplished what became an audacious feat. My opinion is that this film goes way beyond its “based on” premise. The six protagonists (one of whom is Alan Richson, who does a good job as Reacher in the streaming series) are shown killing hundreds of Germans, many in hand-to-hand fighting, which, from what I’ve been able to determine, did not happen. Naturally, they all survive without a scratch, despite all the thousands of bullets.

The movie starts with graphic mayhem, and it continues throughout. The heroes are all devil-may-care, Errol Flynn types who face danger with a smile, a laugh, and often a bon mot, but it’s a long way from the way war really is. The actual exploit, concocted by Ian Fleming and which laid the foundation for the British SAS and Black Ops operations, was apparently nothing like this. The sad part of this film is that what really happened is probably a much better story than what Ritchie invented to put on the screen.