Dad's Army: The Movie (3 Stars)

This is a television spin-off of the BBC comedy series that ran for 84 episodes from 1968 to 1977. It was made im 1971 and retells the events of the first episode, in which the Walmington-on-Sea home guard was founded.

For those who don't know it: the series was about the home guard in an English coastal town. A group of men who were too old for military service signed up as volunteer soldiers to provide the first line of defence against a German invasion. The men were bumblingly incompetent, but somehow they survived from week to week.

It was a beautiful television series. It was so typically British. When the series started it was barely 20 years since the end of the war, so the British still had a strong sense of pride in their victory. Only the British -- or more specifically, only the English -- were capable of poking fun at themselves in such a sensitive subject.

The film has a bigger budget than the television episodes, but somehow it doesn't work. The film isn't as funny to me as the television series. Somehow the magic is missing.