Monthly Film Bulletin called it “a well-nigh intolerable mess”. Wikipedia says the film’s reception was “generally positive” but I remember it as negative, exacerbated by the director’s refusal to screen it for the critics and a perception in conservative quarters that it cleaved to modish anti-war sentiments. It sparked in me an appetite for military history and big battle movies that persists to this day.
Tramautised yet thrilled by my first grown-up taste of things ending badly, I rushed out and read everything I could find about the Crimean war, including the screenplay’s source material, Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Reason Why. But oh no! For not only does Captain Nolan get hit by a piece of shrapnel before the charge has even properly begun – he is one of the reasons it all goes so horribly wrong! That heroic stance on the poster? It’s Nolan “screaming like a woman” (Lord Cardigan’s words) as he dies. I knew it would end in tears – I’d read Lord Tennyson’s poem – but confidently expected Nolan to emerge from the disaster, moustache slightly ruffled, to return to his beloved Clarissa.
It culminates, of course, in one of the most notorious military blunders in history. The film takes a satirical scalpel to Victorian sociopolitical and military structures, fleshed out by a Who’s Who of Great British Acting led by Trevor Howard, at the top of his game as Lord Cardigan, John Gielgud as Lord Raglan, and Vanessa Redgrave, four inches taller than Hemmings, as Nolan’s love interest. Over the next two and a half hours, these Punch-inspired animations recur at intervals to provide ironic state-of-the-nation commentary (and fill in scenes too expensive to shoot as live action). The animated credit sequence (by the brilliant Richard Williams) proceeds to show the English lion letting out a mighty roar (a parody of the MGM studio ident) and putting on a policeman’s helmet, ready to restore order to the world, followed by an animated digest of the Industrial Revolution, with the British empire at its hub.
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