Beneath Hill 60 was our first movie on day two of the Wisconsin Film Festival. I gave it four out of five – really enjoyed it, but I was expecting to find out a little more about the difficulties of digging a mine under German lines in the middle of a war, and did not at all expect to watch a war movie jammed full of war movie cliches with a love story on the side.

If there was a subtle message tucked away in the dialog, I missed it. I probably missed at least half of anything anybody said, maybe more when they were whispering, and they whispered nearly all the time while they were in the mines to avoid being heard by the Germans. I dearly love the Orpheum as a theater, but the acoustics in there suck. It didn’t help that most of the people in the movie were Australians, so between their accents and the low sound quality I had to guess at a lot of the dialog. I kept wanting to reach for a remote and turn on the subtitles.

We knew we would have to run to catch the next movie after Beneath Hill 60 so we chose seats near the exit, bolted out the side door the minute the credits started rolling and ran up State Street toward the campus as fast as we could go. There seemed to be quite a few people trotting up the street with us, apparently doing the same thing we were. I’m pretty sure we covered the distance from the Orpheum to the Chazen in under ten minutes and even managed to get to the theater a good five minutes before the show started. My Darling B thought we’d never make it.