MovieChat Forums > Sword of Honour (2001) Discussion > flawed,upper class war fantasy

flawed,upper class war fantasy

posted 17 years ago by ib011f9545i
10 replies | jump to latest

I liked this,it loked great,had a big budget (for tv) and was well acted.
But the problem is the original story.

Waugh was an upper class writer whose outlook and experiences were not even typical for the elite group he came from.
So the story is a strange one,Crouchback is in a fictional regiment (Waugh was in the Marines I think).
Crouchback meets a strange colection of mad officers and Britain ends up supporting evil communists in a war meant to be for freedom.
The story takes a long time to get anywhere,there is a lot of drinking and some sex but little fighting,is this a fair view of the British war effort in World War 11?

At first the country was disorganised and out of date,but Britain mobilised for war better than almost any country in the period,the British army was not a bunch of upper class twits by 1942 onwards.

The idea of fighting alongside evil to destroy a greater evil was lost on Waugh.
Waugh's view of the way the allies were hoodwinked by the communists in their own side and by Stalin and Tito have been proved right since the book was written.
Waugh wrote the book after the war when he was depressed by the victory of the Labour government,Waugh hated modern Britain and his view that the war had not been worth fighting was not held by most people who had fought in the war.
In any case Waugh never actually did much fighting,many people of all classes did wonderful service during the war,but Waugh was not one of them.

Thinking about this programme and THE CAMOMILE LAWN I wish that someone would make a British world war 11 war drama which depicted the experiences of ordinary people,working class or even lower middle class,we keep seeing stuff with the sex mad upper classes in it.

There is a novel called WARRIORS OF THE WORKING WEEK which is about cockney tank crew after Normandy ,it was written by someone who was in the tank corp in World War 11 and would make a good film I think.
Can anyone think of a recent British war drama which showed non upper class people?

[–] blainefielding 17 years ago

Yikes buddy. Have you ever heard of "Hope and Glory" {1987} ??

Blaine in Seattle

[–] ib011f9545i 16 years ago

Of course I have heard of,and have enjoyed watching it on several occasions,but it is mainly set on the home front and from a child's point of view.
It is not about the armed forces and shows little fighting.

It is at least set among more ordinary people than SWORD OF HONOUR.

I still feel that productions like SWORD OF HONOUR misrepresent the social revolution that happened in Britain during world war 11.

It seems odd that films like THE WAY AHEAD or DUNKIRK show a more balanced view of the British army than more recent tv productions.

Can I plead again for someone to make a tv series of the JOHN LAWTON'S FREDDY TROY novels which are mainly set during world war 11.

[–] blainefielding 16 years ago

I guess from an American's point of view Britain was a war zone in WWII. The war here- and for Canadians too- was a distant reality, read about in the newspapers.

"Hope and Glory" is my favorite British war movie precisely because it does capture ordinary people caught up in the conflict- in a way Americans did not have to deal with.

The dichotomy here was brilliantly captured in "The Best Years of Our Lives" {1946}when three returning servicemen re-confront civilian life at home. Btw, the three are representative of the three classes- American style: an affluent banker, a middle class sailor and the lower class Fred Derry.

For combat, I would rank "A Bridge Too Far" as best. I believe it was an American production, but with a largely British cast about a British {Montgomery-inspired} operation. Excellent in that it avoided the triumphalism common to WWII movies in that it dealt with a failed operation. Of course it is filmed from the perspective of officers, and higher-ups at that.

I think few American war movies deal with the common soldier either. Clint Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers" may be an exception that proves the rule.

Blaine in Seattle

[–] deovuk 17 years ago

You mean like Dunkirk, Desert Rats, Dieppe, Longest Day.....

You fail to realise that the British army was made up of common men and upper class men. Some were idiots, some were very brave. Yes the ratio of idiots to clever aristocratic officers were considerable disproportionate at the begining of the war. Especially in the yeomanry and hussar regiments who still clung on to their cavalry expectations. I think that this film gives a good representation of all people in the war. Some wanted a quiet war, some were patriotic.
I remember reading that the Lovat Scouts who were based in the Faroe Islands, managed to fish the rivers out of salmon during their stay.
The Earl of Yarborough (CO of Nottingham Yeo?) tried to take his hounds with him to Egypt upon mobilisation. He got them as far as Marseille.
Likewise there were very brave men like Stirling, Fraser of Lovat (who wasn't in the scouts but the commandos), Bagnold, Fitzroy MacLean, who were all aristo's.

I thought this series was a good representation of war from a different side away from the action. After all not everyone was in Egypt, Italy, and France. Many were at home or in the rear echelons.

[–] 17 years ago

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[–] porturology 16 years ago

This adaption of the book was extremely disappointing for me. A major theme of the trilogy is the conflict of Guy trying to maintain an orthodox Catholic sense of morality while England and the world has become immoral and gone mad. Guy is already out of time and place when he joins the army to fight the common foes of fascism and communism - this facet of his character becomes more obvious during thr trilogy and leads to some of Waugh's most entertaining and farcical writting. None of this appears in the adaptation.

[–] ghbbrown 16 years ago

And that's why I generally prefer books to movie adaptations of books. There are kinds of subtlety that can be SHOWN but the movies that succeed in doing that stand on their own, following different origins and different development. I read the novels around 35 years ago: naturally, little detail remains in my memory, but I do have a recollection of something far more nuanced than this nonetheless fine bit of visual story telling.

[–] hugh1971 15 years ago

For a start, Waugh was not an 'upper class writer' and if you believe he was, you can't understand the social system he is writing about. He grew up in Golders Green, a north London suburb, and his father ran a publishing firm, so he was firmly in the middle class bracket.

His aspirations were towards the aristocracy, and it is his romantic view of them that colours all his writing. 'Sword' is about Waugh's disillusionment after finding the army wasn't the romantic, heroic body of men he thought it was. It's not meant to be a documentary. You might as well ask why there aren't more upper class characters in 'Eastenders'...

In any case, I've never felt Waugh has anything against the working classes - his real ire seems to be reserved for the 'temporary gentlemen' like Lt Hooper in Brideshead; what one character in Scott's 'Jewel in the Crown' described as 'the sort of chaps one meets in pubs on the Kingston bypass' - the social upstarts who he dislikes probably because they remind him of himself.

[–] 15 years ago

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[–] vimhawk 12 years ago

Yes, I suppose the thread title is probably a good description but frankly I would have had a problem trying to describe this, mainly because I have absolutely no idea what it was supposed to be... drama, black comedy, social comment? No idea. Of course those who have read the books would no better, but I speak as someone who is trying to form their opinion purely from what he's seeing. So I'm a bit confused.

I can say that I'm not sure I've ever seen something as relentlessly downbeat. Sure I get the idea of war is pointless, often stupid and confusing, and not always the best intentioned people succeed... but come on, this is so much the theme here as to be ridiculous. Even in an anti-establishment, anti-war or anti-something production there is occasionally a flash of something contrary to the main direction of the plot, but here there is nothing. Everything well intentioned that Crouchback attempts fails and every dodgy character out for their own ends or with some other bad intention succeeds.

So it's a shame. I'm sure a slightly rewritten version of this story would be very interesting. But no doubt that isn't the story that Waugh intended (and of course I accept on film it isn't exactly what was written either). I realise that there is a deeper message intended here, but I'm not clear exactly what that was because IMHO it didn't work. So overall a disappointment, made worse by the fact that it was nearly good.