Cinema: Royal Fellowship

King and Country. Slowly and silently, with infinite care the camera examines the World War I memorial at London’s Hyde Park Corner. Searching out the details of the brave soldiers on the stone frieze, it leads to the words carved along one side: A ROYAL FELLOWSHIP—the camera turns the corner—OF DEATH. The scene shifts to a tangle of barbed wire, the detritus of trench warfare, the corpses of trees and, half-buried in the churned and muddy ground, the corpses of men. One of them slowly comes alive—he is a soldier lying, now, on his bunk, playing a mouth organ.

He is Hamp, a young cobbler from Islington, the only survivor of his World War I platoon. He is a prisoner in a dugout cell, waiting to be tried for desertion, while outside rumble the guns of the Passchendaele offensive. Picking his way past a detail that is digging out a flooded latrine comes the officer assigned to defend the deserter: correct, unsmiling Captain Hargreaves.

The ordeal of Hamp and of the officers who condemn him to death is the whole action of this painful, stirring film, which could easily have been nothing more than a sentimental antiwar movie about the little man and the big machine. But Director-Producer Joseph Losey, whose movie The Servant won eight British Film Academy nominations and four awards, has made King and Country a pity-and-terror-filled drama of death against life, and law against justice.

Much of the credit belongs to the actors—especially to 28-year-old Tom Courtenay (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner), who plays Hamp as an inarticulate, baffled, baited animal, hurting with foolish hope. But it is the style and shaping of the whole that gives the film its special authority: Director Losey’s use of a bunch of privates as a kind of action chorus to comment on the development of the drama; his staging of a symbolic game of drunken blindman’s buff in Hamp’s cell before he is executed; the awful detail of Hamp’s death, which underscores the movie’s ruthless dissection of Britain’s caste system.

The members of Hamp’s firing squad are his friends; some of them aim to miss, and when he falls, he is still alive. Captain Hargreaves (Dirk Bogarde) cradles the dying man’s head in his arm. “Isn’t it finished yet, Hamp?” he asks gently, and the barely audible answer is: “No, sir—I’m sorry.”