![]() ![]() Duberly (Jill Bennett) come as well, getting in the way. Many wives and onlookers like nosy corps wife Mrs. The expeditionary force goes to the Crimea in a shockingly inept fleet packed with clerks and luxuries for the officers. A dinner-table trifle between them is blown up into the 'black bottle' scandal, which inflames the command to the point where normal military functions are impaired. Cardigan is a borderline madman who flogs and expels a sergeant for refusing to spy for him, and takes the simplest error as an affront to his ostentatious masculinity: he despises young Captain Nolan (David Hemmings) simply because he's seen action in India. Cardigan personally equips and 'owns' the Light Brigade, a corps of 700 beautiful young horsemen-officers who yearn for battle just like the little toy soldiers they resemble. He appoints himself expeditionary leader, while feuding, petty rivals Lord Lucan (Harry Andrews) and Lord Cardigan (Trevor Howard) are placed in field command positions - a terrible mistake, for neither can think past their own egos and status. The administrative head of the Army, the borderline-senile Lord Ragland (John Gielgud), keeps confusing the Russian enemy with the French to whom he lost his arm, thirty years before. Most have bought their commissions as well. Unfortunately, except for constant fighting in India, England's home officers haven't seen real action for decades, and there is a backlog of inexperienced noblemen seeking to make their careers before retirement. England has decided to 'rescue' Turkey from the depradations of Russia, and it is decided to send an expeditionary force to the Crimea. ![]() But The Charge of the Light Brigade itself is a beauty - two hours and eleven minutes of unrelieved rage, directed at the folly of war.ฤก854. For a big studio to set this art-house anti-war liberal loose with a huge budget, was an economic blunder reminiscent of the total military disaster in the movie. He found a home at United Artists but never repeated his boxoffice successes, giving UA instead melancholy think-pieces like Mademoiselle and awkward vehicles like Ned Kelly. English director Tony Richardson hit it big with the rousing Tom Jones, but was more at home with subversive social gauntlets like his influential Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. ![]()
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