Who Dares Wins – A Retrospective
“I watched in awe at what these SAS men did, and truly I felt very proud. Terrorism worries me greatly, so here was an opportunity for me to say what I’ve felt for a very long time.” Euan Lloyd, producer of The Wild Geese, The Sea Wolves, and…
WHO DARES WINS aka THE FINAL OPTION
May 5, 1980… For six days, Arab separatists have held hostages at the Iranian Embassy in London. When negotiations fail, and the terrorists execute their first hostage, hurling the body into the street like so much refuse, Prime Minister Thatcher authorizes the use of force, and dispatches the Special Air Service to rescue the remaining hostages. The SAS is a covert Special Forces unit, largely inactive since the Second World War, and little heard of by the general public – that is about to change. Television news broadcasts images of the black-masked SAS men rappelling from the roof, breaching the embassy with explosive charges, and storming the building. In the sixteen-minute raid that follows, the terrorists are killed (one arrest is made) and all but one of the hostages is rescued. Having accomplished their mission, the SAS men ghost back into the gunsmoke, gone as suddenly as they came. For patriotic Brits, it is a moment of national pride, and a vital morale boost for a country in apparent terminal decline throughout the 70s. For Mrs. Thatcher, it is a clear statement of intent, that at long last Great Britain has a leader with balls.
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Among the witnesses to the Iranian Embassy Siege was ‘gentleman producer’ Euan Lloyd, a right-of-centre conservative unfairly maligned by liberal critics as some rabid right-winger due to his action/adventure movies The Wild Geese and The Sea Wolves. Inspired by what he had seen, Lloyd immediately copyrighted the regimental motto of the SAS as the title of his next motion picture…
WHO DARES WINS
For his leading man, Lloyd chose one of the stars of British TV’s smash-hit series The Professionals, about crack anti-terrorist unit C15. (Director Ian Sharp was also poached from that show.) Lewis Collins was a real-life action man: A private in the Territorial Parachute Regiment, he passed the entrance exam for the Territorial SAS but was rejected due to his celebrity status; jujitsu black belt; pilot; parachutist; motorcyclist; marksman; ex-hairdresser; and perhaps the greatest James Bond we never had. Indeed, Collins auditioned in 1982 to replace the increasingly creaky Roger Moore as Bond, but was rejected by producer Cubby Broccoli as being ‘too aggressive.’ Much as I’m a fan of Timothy Dalton’s portrayal, on the evidence of Who Dares Wins, Collins would have made an exceptional Bond, and it is to the series’ detriment that he never got his chance.
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SYNOPSIS
SAS Captain Peter Skellen (Lewis Collins) is tasked with infiltrating The People’s Lobby, a terrorist cell hidden within the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament movement, whom authorities (including The Equalizer himself, Edward Woodward) learn are plotting a major action with foreign funding.
Skellen begins his mission by donning gentlemanly blazer and slacks and visiting a Commie pub, sticking out like a sore thumb as he mingles with the scruffy unwashed Lefties. There he effortlessly seduces the female leader of the People’s Lobby, Frankie Leith (Judy Davis, a casting coup for a movie like this).
Claiming to be an embittered ex-SAS serviceman, Skellen is hired by Frankie as a specialist advisor to the P.L. (Skellen is presumably quite the cocksman, for Frankie lowers her guard completely after one roll in the sheets, even moving him into her apartment.) Between bedding Frankie, Skellen gathers intelligence on the group, attempting to uncover their plot before it is put into action.
Frankie’s comrades, suspicious of Skellen, shadow the SAS man and discover he is happily married with newborn child (which of course has not prevented Skellen from shacking up with Frankie; as Sean Bean says in Goldeneye: “For England, James.”). Uncertain of his loyalties, Frankie orders the fanatical Ingrid Pitt (the kind of character whom today Ruby Rose would play) to hold captive Skellen’s family while the SAS man is forced to prove his allegiance by participating in the terrorist action.
The night of a gala dinner at the US Ambassador’s country residence, the terrorists masquerade as a military band (shades of Billy & the Bail Jumpers from Under Siege) and take hostages including the US Secretary of State (Richard Widmark). Their demands? Nuke a naval base at a Southern Scottish loch where US nukes are housed. The terrorists believe the incalculable devastation and loss of human life will horrify the West into nuclear disarmament. I’ve heard of fighting fire with fire, but this is ridiculous…
With time running out before their demands are met and the terrorists begin executing hostages, the authorities call in the Special Air Service. In a thrilling final scene, the SAS storm the residence, while Skellen, after learning his family is safe, disarms his captors and rejoins his unit to lead the assault, hunting the terrorists down, and terminating the bastards with extreme prejudice.
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1982’s Who Dares Wins remains a rousing Boy’s Own military adventure: part Brit-grit espionage thriller, part Die Hard-style siege, with an undeniably kickass climax. Both a product of its time, especially in terms of fashion and culture, and slightly ahead of its time, released before the wave of gung-ho American action movies that ruled the 1980s box office, with the idea of a terrorist cell infiltrating a social justice movement for their own ends feeling especially prescient today.
Lefty critics, predictably enough, panned the movie as hawkish right-wing propaganda… perhaps with good reason; one man who did enjoy Who Dares Wins was President Ronald Reagan, for whom a special White House screening was arranged, with Reagan’s former Secretary of State Alexander Haig praising the movie as “a realistic portrayal of the world in which live.”
Sadly, the movie underperformed at the box office, forcing producer Lloyd to shelve plans for a proposed trilogy of Skellen missions, the second of which was to be set around the Falklands conflict; a lost opportunity, especially since Lewis Collins would never be Bond; the Skellen movies might have worked as a gritty riposte to the 80s Bond movies, much as the Bourne movies did in the 00s. The image of Collins leading the SAS charge through the Ambassador’s residence, set to Roy (Get Carter) Budd’s wah-wah action funk, remains perhaps the most ruggedly masculine in British cinema, and a hint of what might have been.
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