Great Guns

Had never managed to watch Richard Attenborough’s OH! WHAT A LOVELY WAR — TV screenings in my youth made it look unwatchable due to panning and scanning or maybe I just didn’t have a big enough telly. It’s a very handsome film on a decent sized screen with a DVD, and I should think a 35mm viewing would be almost overwhelming in its beauty. The design and the cinematography are really top-notch, and it’s all on a colossal scale.

Richard Lester described it as “GENEVIEVE with guns,” because the overall effect is nostalgic and reassuring, whereas Joan Littlewood’s source play created a feeling of desperation. And I think that nails it — Attenborough is trying to fuse Littlewood’s Brechtian epic theatre with David Lean’s epic cinema. Politically, the two seem unlikely to fit together neatly. Certainly a defiant middlebrow like Attenborough seems a preposterous choice to attempt the deed: to his credit, the movie seeks to preserve the theatricality and the revue-style plotlessness, which would count as bold in any era other than the sixties, but this is a sixties movie. Tony Richardson or Joseph Losey might have brought the necessary whiff of Godardian agitation.I think part of the problem here is that the theatrical devices tend to be in the wrong place: a gorgeous wrought-iron palatial interior serves as a sort of Olympus for a bunch of theatrical luminaries cast as the key political and military leaders of the war. They move like trundling waxworks through this lambent, tented space, intoning lines from history in the most stilted way you could ask for, or that Dickie Attenborough could ask for.

Whereas the war scenes tend to look REAL, except everybody’s bloody singing and dancing. It genuinely gives the impression that some of this war was fun, in a musical comedy manner. And it doesn’t manage to make you feel any tension between our idea of war’s reality and this all-singing, all-dancing, all-mustard gas version. You don’t feel anything. There’s a bit of mud, but no other unpleasantness really: no blood, dysentery, maiming, mental illness, rats, frostbite, desertion or firing squads. Lots of gallows humour, poppies and white crosses.Some of this SHOULD work — you ought to be able to imply the slaughter and horror without overplaying your hand. Most of it shouldn’t work, has no chance of working, but one can admire the skill and splendour. I do admire it. But if that’s the main takeaway, then it’s not an antiwar movie at all.

(Attenborough’s all over the place: celebrating Gandhi and Biko but also Churchill and the battle of Arnhem. Vaguely liberal, I suppose, but the kind of cinema he aspires to has CONSERVATIVE written all the way through like Brighton Rock.) Really lovely titles. The movie is co-produced by writer Len Deighton, who also did ONLY WHEN I LARF which also had super, sort of similar titles. My theory is that Deighton’s Sunday supplement magazine cookery column experience put him in touch with great layout people who could transfer those skills to the movies…

OWALW guest-stars Bilbo Baggins, Gustav Von Aschenbach, Louis XIII, Henry IV, Richard III, Elizabeth I, General Allenby, Captain Scott (of the Antarctic), Lord Fortnum (of Alamein), Alice ‘Childie’ McNaught, Professor Minerva McGonagall, Professor Bernard Quatermass and Doctor B. N. Wallis, C.B.E., F.R.S.