Gaspari: Hanover Street

Hanover Street presents a conflict between the primary male figures in the film. Halloran and Sellinger portray two different styles of strong masculine role models, but at the same time, one is portrayed as more heroic than the other in the film. Sellinger postulates Halloran is like a man skating on a lake who saves a boy who has fallen into the ice, and that he is like the man who wraps the child in his jacket. Halloran is praised and all Sellinger gets is a wet jacket. This description of these figure is somewhat accurate, as Halloran does seem to have a way with being in the right place at the right time. He saves his entire crew's life when he decides he hears something is wrong with the engine and decides not to take the bomber out on a run. Also, when Halloran's crew is killed by flak across in to German occupied France, he manages to survive and parachute out alongside the aid of someone who speaks French and German fluently.
        Sellinger is much different in most ways from Halloran and he is much more reserved and mature. However, Sellinger decides to fly into enemy territory for heroic reasons as well. Sellinger does not want any more untrained spies to be killed, but more importantly he does not want to live the life of a man who is only "pleasant". The issue does not lie in why the characters are heroic though, because both of these men are clearly good people in how we see them represented in the story. The comparison of how these characters both make heroic actions is fairly one sided though, as Harrison Ford's charm makes Halloran seem like a hyper-masculine war hero. Halloran is the American wildcard in this film, while Sellinger is the settled down, domesticated man, "the archetypal upper-crust British gentleman who discovers he would rather die than remain dull." (Pfeiffer) While Halloran and Sellinger are opposites, in the end Sellinger gets the girl, but only because Halloran in the end is truly heroic in that he loves Margaret so much that he feels he has to let her go.

     
  I think that the film does a good job of showing war and heroism but at the same time highlighting the romantic relations in the first half of the film. Peter Hyams creates an interesting piece here by making the audience think about how we see heroism and romance together in this film, and while there are some cheesy parts, I think that overall there is success in evoking emotional response from the characters romantic entanglement. I do think there are parts of this film that are very cheesy, but I think that many of the action scenes were exaggerated and unrealistic in a way that made the film more entertaining.