Trailer
Plot summary
Britain wants to knock out Germany's Ruhr dams and the heavy industry they feed, and an aeronautical engineer named Barnes Wallis believes a bomb that skips across the water can do it. Working at the Ministry of Aircraft Production and at Vickers, he settles on a weapon that clears the torpedo nets, then sinks against the dam wall, its backspin making the blast more destructive. The Ministry tells him there is no spare production capacity. Wallis takes the case to Sir Arthur Harris, who heads Bomber Command, and Harris carries it to the Prime Minister. A new Lancaster unit, 617 Squadron, is raised under Wing Commander Guy Gibson, who picks crews with experience of flying low. Wallis keeps testing while the crews train, and the bomb breaks apart when it strikes the water, forcing the release height down.
Cast
- Eric Messiteras Committee Member
Show all 20 cast
- Laidman Browneas Committee Member
- Anthony Shawas R.A.F. Officer At Trials
- Harold Siddonsas Group Signals Officer
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Dam Busters (1955)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Robert Shaw got the part of Flight Sergeant Pulford because director Michael Anderson, lunching with Michael Redgrave, was struck by how closely Shaw resembled the real Pulford, and Redgrave confirmed Shaw was an actor. It was Shaw's first major film role.
- ITV's 1999 broadcast cut every utterance of the name of Guy Gibson's dog, Nigger; ITV blamed London Weekend Television, which blamed a junior staff member for the unauthorised cuts. A censored repeat in June 2001 was condemned by Index on Censorship for introducing continuity errors.
- Just before the film's release, Guy Gibson's widow Eve Gibson took legal action to stop it, leaving Paul Brickhill and Robert Clark in months of wrangling with her until references to her husband's book Enemy Coast Ahead were included.
- Eric Coates avoided writing for the cinema and only agreed to provide an overture for the film after producers persuaded him it was of "national importance" and his publisher Chappell pressured him; a march he had just finished fitted the heroic subject. Leighton Lucas composed most of the soundtrack.
- The RAF supplied four real Avro Lancaster B.VII bombers, taken out of storage and stripped of their mid-upper gun turrets to mimic 617 Squadron's aircraft. They cost £130 an hour to run, a tenth of the film's costs.
- Before writing the script, screenwriter R. C. Sherriff went to Barnes Wallis's home with Paul Brickhill and production staff to watch Wallis demonstrate his original bouncing-bomb experiment, but Wallis, to his embarrassment, could not get it to work however many times he tried.
- Director Michael Anderson deliberately shot the film in black and white so that original footage of the bouncing-bomb trials could be cut into it, giving the picture the "gritty" documentary-style reality he wanted.
