William Morris (Mark Burn) is already a member. Louis Nolan (David Hemmings), a recently returned cavalry expert, who joins Cardigan’s regiment because his friend Capt. This attitude puts him on a collision course with Capt. Cardigan has total contempt for the experienced, professionalised veterans who have served in India who comprise the only front-line troops in the British Army who have seen battle in the long, placid peace after the Napoleonic wars. Cardigan’s officers loll about indolently waiting for something to happen fresh recruits are not so metaphorically beaten into shape to look good on parade. The film commences a year or so before the Crimean War begins. Richardson’s scabrous portrait of high imperial-era England is riddled with incompetent hereditary scions in important jobs and a general social philosophy that expects rich men to slap good-looking clothes on poor, roughly treated men to be used as cannon fodder, thereby making everything fine. The screenplay, the first draft of which was written by playwright John Osborne but finally only credited to Charles Wood, commences with Cardigan, played by Trevor Howard in a splendid performance mixing blockheaded arrogance and swaggering masculinity, surveying his smartly dressed troops, a voiceover privileging us to his personal beliefs about what makes a good soldier: “If they can’t fornicate, they can’t fight, and if they don’t fight, I’ll flog their backs raw!” ![]() At the same time, the hoary history offered a wealth of contemporary relevance in attacking whipped-up militaristic fervour, easily finding echoes of Vietnam and the Cold War in looking back to the last time Russia and the West squared off over the issue of some third party’s problems. In doing so, The Charge of the Light Brigade tries to recapture a bittersweet flavour in looking back at a summit era in British history, from a time when awareness of the finish of the imperial era and the changing social paradigm was provoking many new questions. ![]() Charge moves blithely from coal-black satire of the British upper classes and militarism, to a lush romanticism, to a brand of raw, tactile realism. Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade is very much a modish work of the late ’60s, balancing, like many of its contemporaries, unusual, almost clashing stylistic and intellectual impulses reflecting a war within the texture and assumptions of the film itself, rendering it a distinctively dialectic work. If Curtiz’s film offers lies that are hard not to love, Richardson’s tried to tell truths hard to stomach at any time. Nonetheless, a lot of his work is today undervalued, and the most undervalued of all is his brilliant revisionist take on the infamous assault by Lord Cardigan’s cavalry on the Balaclava Heights on October 25, 1854. Like many of the other talents spawned by the British film industry in the era, his career was defined by an early continent of excellence and decades of variable output afterwards. After a roaring start in films with Look Back in Anger (1959), The Entertainer (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961), and Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), Richardson had finally gained Oscar laurels for his 1963 reinvention of the historical movie, Tom Jones ironically, it was only then that his career began to falter. ![]() More than 30 years later, the mood of the moviegoing public seemed to be incredibly different, so the second film to be called The Charge of the Light Brigade, helmed by Tony Richardson, was a radical departure. It’s hugely entertaining, and it’s also complete and utter bunk, one of the ultimate examples of Hollywood’s romanticised version of British imperial history. The first is the Michael Curtiz-directed, Errol Flynn-starring 1936 film, recasting the charge as a revenge mission aimed more at a nefarious Pakistani khan allied to the Russians than at the tsar’s armies themselves. There are two films sharing the title of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s famous encomium to English heroism in the face of impossible odds.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |