At the movies

"The Battle of the River Plate" was helmed by the great director Michael Powell but is far from great film. It is a mildly entertaining and fairly accurate retelling of the destruction of the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee.
The fast, powerful German battleship was stationed in the South Atlantic just before the Germans went to war with Britain and France. Within days of the war's beginning it had racked up nine kills of lightly armed merchant vessels.
The British moved quickly to counterattack which they did with three small cruisers, the Exeter, Achilles and Ajax. Although outgunned by the Graf Spee, the trio of British ships attacked and inflicted heavy damage on the German battleship.
However, the British vessels were even more ravaged.
After the battle, the Graf Spee put in to the port of Montevideo, Uruguay, a neutral country but one that favored the British.
British naval intelligence did a superb job of planting false information about a large fleet assembling off the coast to await the Graf Spee, which was forced by international law to move out of the safe harbor in a short time.
Convinced the Brits had been heavily reinforced and unwilling to see his crew slaughtered, the German commander had his ship scuttled.
Today, parts of it can still be seen in its watery grave off the coast of Uruguay.
The movie gets the main facts right but doesn't go much beyond that level. The performances are solid but no one really stands out. Peter Finch is properly grim but little else, as Capt. Langsdorf, the German commander.
That is a very young, very skinny Christopher Lee as a bar owner in Montevideo and yes he looks just like a young Nic Cage.
The battle scenes are particularly disappointing, cheap and repetitive.
A nice bit of detail is the presentation of the carnival-like atmosphere many local people took during the standoff. A crowd of 20,000 looked on as the Graf Spee was destroyed by its own captain and crew.
Also known as "Pursuit of the Graf Spee," this is a watchable but disappointing movie.
It's available at Netflix.