The Charge of the Light Brigade

IT MAY actually be true that men and societies reveal themselves most clearly in time of war. The murderers of Lidice would have been hard to detect in the streets of pre-1939 Berlin. Our own seemingly limitless capacity for killing Asians tells us something of what we are actually seeing when we travel across this country. And in the incredible debacle of the Light Brigade at remote Sebastopol, the inhumanity of mid-Victorian England was sharply illuminated.

This last idea is the uncontroversial theme of Tony Richardson's new film, The Charge of the Light Brigade. Like the book on which it is based (Cecil Woodham-Smith's The Reason Why), the film begins by depicting a stratified and deluded English society, and then moves swiftly on to the Crimea, where the stratification and the delusion find their ultimate projection in an insane battle on an unearthly field.

The England to which Richardson devotes the first half of the film is a frightful place. All of the outdoor scenes in England were shot in cloudy weather, and through the grey obscurity emerge ghastly relics of an earlier, pre-industrial age. Richardson presents a society where the past oppresses the present. Near the beginning of the film, we are shown a huge equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington being drawn through the misty streets of London like a pagan idol. They've had it made, and now they don't know where to put it, someone explains. The statue later comes to rest outside the window of the senile Lord Raglan (John Gielgud), who complains that "it is very much in my light; I wish they'd take it away." But the shadow of Wellington and his age fell upon all of English society, and above all, upon England's pride and joy, the army--which Raglan will soon lead to war in atavistic pursuit of the glory of Waterloo.

THE BRITISH army which Richardson depicts is one where command is based on wealth rather than merit, and army life is ruled by absurd traditions and savage discipline. This is the army of which Lord Cardigan (Trevor Howard), the man who was to lead the charge of the Light Brigade, is the symbol: the film's Cardigan is a cantakerous old fool who purchased his command, and squandered it with the evil courage of a suicide-victim.

But like most of the characters of the film, Cardigan doesn't come off. Along with his establishment colleagues in government and the army, Howard's Cardigan is a walking caricature, not a man. He blusters and fumbles, he forgets the simplest things, and he carries unreasoning insistence on detail and perfection to an impossible excess. Of course, the film is being billed as a kind of epic-satire, and this kind of excess is the staple of satire. But to satirize history is absurd. A historical film can only try to depict and explain; satire is meant to correct, and history cannot be corrected. For this reason Richardson is at his worst when he attempts to satirize the Victorian establishment, and unfortunately, he attempts this rather often.

The one truly interesting figure in the movie is that of Cardigan's able young antagonist, the dashing Captain Nolan (David Hemmings). Nolan is, on the surface, the hero of the saga: he earned his commission by fighting in India rather than by paying in London, he disapproves of flogging, he falls in love, and he is a skilled horseman and soldier. But in a film where most of the other characters exhibit a That-Was-the-Week-That-Was simplicity, Nolan is a very ambiguous figure. For while he lacks Cardigan's fanatical obsession with form and privilege, Nolan is a cruel and chilling man. He is the first professional soldier.

NOLAN will later shoot two infantrymen--one English and one Russian--who try to strip corpses amid the gory chaos of Balaclava. The calm manner with which he draws his revolver and kills the two men is utterly anomalous in the excitement and emotionalism of the battle and the setting: Nolan acts with the cool detachment of a German SS officer. And when he himself is killed by a piece of shrapnel at the beginning of the Charge, he emits a high-pitched shriek which becomes disembodied--suddenly the contorted face on the screen is no longer producing the sound, for the shriek is that of a modern artillery shell.

This prophetic conception of Nolan could have provided a fascinating ambiguity in the Charge of the Light Brigade. For the futuristic coldness of Nolan reveals his incompetent and neurotic superiors in a new, more humane light. Soldiers who fight wars as though they were on parade will produce horrendous disasters, but through it all they retain a certain character, and, one feels, the potential for charity. As Nolan unknowingly predicts before leaving England, the campaign in the Crimea would mark not only the last of the gallant wars, but the first of the modern ones. When the Charge is over, the viewer does not feel he will miss the gallantry, but we know already how much worse modernity will prove to be.

BUT THE FILM does not pursue this ambiguity faithfully: Nolan's professionalism is allowed to lapse into bursts of more conventional anger and passion. This is a concession to history, since the real Captain Nolan seems to have been as tempermental and irrational as his superiors, a fact which was largely responsible for the fatal Charge itself. But it is a concession which obscures the most interesting action of the story, which is the frightfully painful transition from the age of chivalry to that of total war--from Waterloo to Verdun.

Ultimately the real concern of this movie is not to tell us what the Charge of the Light Brigade meant, but simply to show us how it looked. And this, for all the cast of thousands and the vast expanses of eerie, treeless Turkish landscape, is something which Richardson doesn't really succeed in doing. Individual sequences are sometimes breathtaking--Nolan delivering the order to charge from the heights, the Brigade advancing down the valley at a slow trot, the final torrential surge of the survivors through the Russian cannon. But hovering above the whole elaborately-conceived spectacle is its museum-like quality: the generals watching the action from the heights above the valley are clearly aware that they are witnessing not the Light Brigade charging, but the Charge of the Light Brigade. Therefore the whole Crimean climax of the film is unreal, as any portrayal of history must be when the actors are depicted as being aware of history. The film is curiously unsubstantial: its action could only have been unconvincing, and more importantly, the meaning of it all never really becomes clear.