Apparently Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, King Kong, The Frighteners, Bad Taste et al) is a huge fan of The Dam Busters, the iconic 1955 film about the development and deployment of the bouncing bomb, which in 1943 was used to destroy a key German dam. It’s not quite clear what his role in the impending remake will be but he seems to have at least his producer’s hat on, with Stephen Fry (V for Vendetta, Sherlock Holmes 2, Gosford Park) on screenplay duties.

As wonderful a film as the original is, it does have one unpleasant element of which I was not aware until hearing Fry discuss it with Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode on their Radio 5 film review show, namely the name of the dog of the RAF pilot who led the bombing raid, said name being used as a code name for the whole operation. That name, rather incredibly, is N*****. Interestingly enough, that name was retained for the 1955 film, though it has since been dubbed to Digger on all subsequent versions on TV, VHS and so forth.

Stephen Fry has quite rightly acknowledged:-

“There is no question that you can have a dog called the N-word. The dog’s name was a code word to show a dam had been breached. In the film you hear, ‘N-word, N-word, hurray’. That won’t happen now. So Digger seems OK.”

Quite why or how it was felt acceptable back in 1943, let alone when the original 1955 film version came out, I do not know and although aviation historian Jim Shortland has said of the intended change:

“It’s sacrificing historical accuracy for political correctness.”

I think we can all agree that sometimes historical accuracy cannot be treated as some absolute arbiter of acceptable content.

The film is to be partly filmed in New Zealand and no release date has been set yet.

Source: The Sun.