Joan Littlewood’s stage production Oh! What a Lovely War has long been a favourite with students and teachers. Long unavailable on home video, Richard Attenborough’s 1968 film adaptation in now out on as a special edition DVD. Michael Paris, Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of Central Lancashire, considers it in the context of other representations of war in the cinema and on television and discusses its standing as both drama and history.
About the author: Michael Paris is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of Central Lancashire. He has taught at Open University, Middlesex University and in adult education before coming to UCLan. He is a specialist in war and popular culture of C20. He was elected fellow of Royal Historical Society and The British Commission for Military History. His publications include: The Novels of World War Two: An Annotated Bibliography (1990)
Apart from a handful of openly celebratory films made in the early 1920s, British filmmakers have generally seemed unsure about how to represent the Great War – a triumph of perseverance and heroic struggle resulting in a decisive British victory – or a journey through hell for the soldiers who, led by incompetent generals, were sent into the mincing machine of the Western Front in a futile war of attrition. This ambiguity is clearly evident in the two most celebrated pre-1939 films about the war, Journey’s End (James Whale, 1930) and Tell England (Anthony Asquith, 1931), which can easily be read as either essays in patriotism, honour and the conventions of duty, or as a bitter indictment of the futility of the war. After 1939, the Great War virtually disappeared from the screen and other media, displaced by a second and obviously unambiguous conflict, until the 1960s when the approach of the fiftieth anniversary of 1914 sparked renewed interest among a new generation of historians, television producers and filmmakers.
The popular perception of the war in the 1960s was established by several best-selling historical studies that condemned the futility and waste and cast the generals, particularly Haig, as incompetent ‘donkeys’. These accounts were reinforced by the BBC’s popular television documentary series The Great War (1964), which drew an average audience of eight million viewers for each episode, and which for almost the first time enabled the public to actually see the full horror of the war through actuality footage. And at the end of that decade came Richard Attenborough’s Oh! What A Lovely War – a wonderfully entertaining but moving kaleidoscopic history of the war that seemed to synthesise current historical interpretations of the war.
Derived from Joan Littlewood’s stage show of the same name, the film was Attenborough’s debut as director and a more difficult first project would be hard to imagine. The film portrays the war as a seaside entertainment – a tacky review on Brighton Pier - ‘WORLD WAR ONE’, the advertising proclaims, ‘BATTLES, SONGS AND A FEW JOKES’. The sketches, interspersed with more conventionally filmed scenes in the trenches, convey a breathless impression of the war: the hysterically patriotic mood of 1914 when the war was expected to be romantic, exciting, and over by Christmas, and the incomparable Maggie Smith as a glamorous musical hall star enticing gullible young men to enlist with the promise of glory and sexual favours. But in the trenches, there is little adventure, just the awful realisation that war is not glorious but bloody and brutal.
... a wonderfully entertaining but moving kaleidoscopic history of the war
The representation of the Christmas truce of 1914 is particularly significant for it is here that the men of both sides realise they are comrades in suffering who had no desire for war. This leads them to question why they are fighting each other, and the first realisation that their real enemies might well be the self-righteous politicians who have sent them to the trenches to suffer and die, and the incompetent generals who blindly continue to believe that just one more push will win the war. There is nothing heroic here, just a bleak and terrifying reality. It is also one of the few films to deal with the causes of the war, which it cynically dismisses as a family squabble among the crowned head of Europe, into which the British government has been drawn through its own self-interest and imperial ambition – an entertaining but simplistic view.
http://youtu.be/CIEwKyxr2bU
What the film does do so well is powerfully evoke the world of the patiently enduring, uncomplaining Tommy, the pointlessness of their endless sacrifice, the shoddy way they were treated by those charged with their welfare, and the super-charged patriotism that sent them to suffer and to die. The generals, the donkeys of popular historiography, are unmercifully condemned – ruthless backstabbers, they jostle for position in the military hierarchy but once in command are hopelessly incompetent as they sacrifice yet another division or two.
Despite the fact that Oh! What A Lovely War was made nearly forty years ago, it still remains visually exciting – the seamless transition from the sketches on the pier to the more realistic episodes set in France are beautifully handled by Attenborough and his cinematographer Gerry Turpin. The cast, reading like a who’s who of British cinema, turn in some wonderful cameos, particular John Mills as a prissy Douglas Haig who, in the scenes dealing with the Somme, stands bemused before the scoreboard that records British casualties, completely incapable of understanding why his strategy has not prevailed. The film is rich in such moments – John Gielgud as the oily Count Berthold, Dirk Bogarde as a particularly obnoxious armchair patriot bemoaning the poor showing of his investments in Alsace, and giving up German wines as his contribution to the war effort.
Don’t look to Oh! What A Lovely War for historical accuracy, for despite quoting from the speeches and diaries of leading participants, it still makes many factual errors. It’s partial, biased and sometimes careless in its interpretation of the war, but it’s also a heart-felt expose of the brutality and futility of war – a message that is still highly relevant today.
Michael Paris
Other film and TV productions about WW1 currently available on DVD / Bu-ray include:
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) US. Universal. 125 minutes. Paths of Glory (1957) US. MGM. 84 minutes.
The Great War (1964) GB. BBC. 1105 minutes.
Gallipoli (1981) Aus. Paramount. 107 minutes.
Blackadder Goes Forth (1989) GB. 2 entertain. 374 minutes.