Cinema: The Reason Why

“Theirs not to make reply,/Theirs not to reason why,/Theirs but to do and die.” It is necessary to remind oneself these days that Tennyson wrote those lines with a straight face. For the poet laureate, the gallant but futile attack at Balaclava was a testimony to human courage. Aided by the hindsight of history, Director Tony Richardson sees the event in another light. His film version of The Charge of the Light Brigade, based in part on Cecil Woodham-Smith’s brilliant study, The Reason Why, is a polemical attack on the futility of war and the fallout of greed, blunder and carnage that follows.

The event perfectly illustrates the point. Britain entered the Crimean War on the side of Turkey, largely to defend its own imperialistic interests against possible Russian expansion. Two of England’s leading generals, Lord Lucan and Lord Cardigan, were quarrelsome brothers-in-law. A purblind aristocrat, Lucan had not commanded troops for 17 years; “the melancholy truth” about Cardigan, as Woodham-Smith put it, “was that his glorious golden head had nothing in it.” At the front, battles with the Russians were hardly less bitter than the internecine wrangling between the two commanders. Finally, a stupid order was fatally misinterpreted. As thousands of Russian soldiers watched in disbelief, some 700 men of Hussars, Lancers and Dragoons —the Light Brigade—charged a massed front of several thousands. When the cordite smoke blew away, only 195 British soldiers were alive.

The story could have been transmuted into a film of coruscating irony. Instead, Richardson has chosen to subordinate the drama to an illustrated primer on sociology. With facile juxtapositions, he shuttles between the airless, reeking slums and the sunlit gardens of the Victorian aristocracy. The bloody flogging of a sergeant is contrasted with the gleaming comfort of an officers’ mess. Richardson sporadically punctuates the action with animated cartoons of the Russian bear and the British lion ruffling the feathers of the Turkish turkey. The animations, done in the style of period Punch cartoons, are wittily rendered by Richard Williams. But when they work, they vitiate the dramatic effect of the live actors. When they are only decorative, they are mere clutter.

Nor are they the only cinematic debris. For no good reason, The Charge of the Light Brigade includes a disconnected, listless affair between an officer (David Hemmings) and his best friend’s wife (Vanessa Redgrave). Scenarist Charles Wood (How I Won the War) overloads the script with totally unsubtle pacifist propaganda. “It will be a sad day,” intones Lord Raglan, Britain’s supreme commander in Crimea, “when England has officers who know what they’re doing . . . it smacks of murder.”

Still, the film is not without its incisive moments. Sir John Gielgud as Raglan, puttering about in senescence, flashes a glimmer of the haughty ineptitude that substituted for authority in the Blimpish days of Empire. In one robust, hilarious scene, reminiscent of Richardson’s Tom Jones, Cardigan (Trevor Howard) and his lady (Jill Bennett) rush to get undressed. She races ahead—then turns back to help him put of his girdle. And the charge itself is almost entirely successful. The rigid troops move forward like wind-up toy soldiers, under the hypnotic spell of unquestioned tradition. The firing begins; the hoofs and bodies and blood combine. Screams and guns seem to reach beyond the screen. The hysteria and terror are as palpable as dust; the slaughter is a testament to the inanity of blind obedience. By itself, the scene is confused and intense. It is harrowing, and it is magnificent. But it does not make a movie.