![]() ![]() And The Charge of the Light Brigade focuses on the forming of the soon to be doomed cavalry, their training, and their eventual excursion to Turkey to face off against the Russians simply because England felt the need to go to war for appearance’s sake. The titular charge of Britain’s light cavalry brigade during the Crimean war remains one of history’s most famous tactical military errors that resulted in the annihilation of virtually the entire brigade as they charged head-long into oncoming artillery fire (and anyone who’s ever played Empire: Total War knows that’s a dumb idea). And with 1968’s The Charge of the Light Brigade, the first hour of this satire of the snobbery and incompetence of the British aristocracy had me bored nearly to tears and it wasn’t until the doomed heroes went off to fight the Crimean war that the movie began to find its bearings and the right mix of character and spectacle. It’s not an easy task and focusing too much on action or “plot spectacle” makes characters seem paper-thin and boring whereas a deficiency in action means the audience is going to fall asleep. I thought I knew the argument about the disaster that was due to military incompetence and snobbery and the charge itself had no appeal.As someone who’s written one full-length screenplay (though I haven’t sold it yet) and that has also written about 30 pages or so of several other screenplays that I haven’t actually finished, I understand quite acutely the challenge of balancing attention-grabbing pacing with solid character development. One of the reasons I didn’t go looking for the film in 1968 was because I had read the Cecil Woodham-Smith popular history which the script draws on. If it appeared on TV many times in the 1980s, the ‘Scope print would have been ‘panned and scanned’ and virtually unwatchable. The film was released in 70mm as well as 35mm as befitted an ‘epic’ in 1968. Alexander Walker in his ‘Hollywood England’ book suggests that United Artists invested $6.5 million, so was it really a ‘British production’? Whatever, it was still a lot of money. I’m not sure about inflation at that point but some of Rank’s failures in the late 1940s were probably close to that figure when adjusted. IMDb gives an estimated budget of $8 million or around £3.4 million. I was surprised by your ‘most expensive British production’ statement. I didn’t go to see this in the cinema in 1968 and it has never held me on the small screen so I can’t make any comment on the narrative as a whole but some of your points do warrant a response I think. Making historical films may be the preserve of the wealthy, but The Charge of the Light brigade takes a steely-eyed view of the yawning gap between the upper and lower classes. ![]() The battle-scenes are also striking in that the use of special effects to create large armies had yet to be invented back in 1968 the action involves large groups of extras, and somehow their plainness is more suggestive of the drabness of failure than the more vivid tableaux which might created today.Ī tv staple back in the 80’s, Richardson’s film was somewhat ahead of the curve in terms of providing a personal slant on an historical event it’s certainly got some attitude, and a revisionist perspective that was something of a breath of fresh air in the wake of some rather stuffy British military films. It’s clear where the cheques were cashed there’s an all-star cast including David Hemmings, John Gielgud, Trevor Howard and Vanessa Redgrave, plus notable cameo roles for Uk comedy legend Peter Bowles and even Donald Wolfit in a walk-on giving us a glimpse of his famous Macbeth. The jocular, jingoistic mood changes once the action moves oversees, although it was apparently the result of budget restrictions that Richard Williams was pressed into service to create animated bridges to inform the action using political cartoons of the time, Williams creates wonderfully vibrant images that say much about the vainglorious mind-set of the time. The script, written by John Osborne and Charles Wood, plays fast and loose with the history of the ill-fated British cavalry charge, but it does relate to real incidents, like the infamous black bottle affair. Made at a time when the Vietnam war was raging, this version of The Charge of the Light Brigade is a politically astute look at failure and blame, and deserves better than a rather musty reputation suggests. Having won an Oscar for his previous period piece Tom Jones, expectations were high for Tony Richardson’s take on the famous British military catastrophe so much so that it was the most expensive British film ever made when released in 1968. ![]()
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