C'est la folie

On Thursday, I watched the film The Charge of the Light Brigade, the 1968 version rather than the 1930s 'travesty of history'. The latter made a star of Errol Flynn, but the one I watched is very modish. Two-thirds of the movie is not even set in the Crimea, but England, concerned with social issues rather than the mad fling onto enemy guns that against all the odds triumphed before being driven back. There is the running joke of the newly cast statue of the Duke of Wellington being parked outside Lord Raglan's offices. This could be a reference either to Napoleon's jibe about Wellesley, that he was a "sepoy general", thus condemning the prejudice to Captain Nolan's service in India or to Wellington's insistence that the 'purchase system' whereby officers largely bought their way into high army positions should be maintained - a point of criticism by the film's producers.
Captain Nolan, the hothead largely responsible for sending the Light Brigade into the 'Valley of Death', is portrayed as a romantic, tragic hero, continually railing against the absurdities of the British military. He is played by David Hemmings, a very fashionable actor of the time, late of Blow Up and who, three decades later, was to play the Colosseum's toupee-wearing major-domo in Ridley Scott's Gladiator. Other notable performances are by Trevor Howard at the reprehensible Lord Cardigan (according to the film) and John Gielgud as Lord Raglan, the gentle reed of a theatre commander-in-chief who was apt to call his enemies, the Russians, French, the latter being his allies. Vanessa Redgrave is in another taboo-breaking film. She is the wife of Nolan's best friend, but the wives in this movie seem madly infatuated with their husbands while giving no thought at all to making them cuckolds. Maybe it is calculated absurdity, along with the coy message of the absurdity of war, but this romantic section is quite baffling.
The battle scenes are nowhere near as impressive as the slightly later Waterloo (a film which the aged Lord Raglan would have felt at home in), but then the makers of the Napoleonic epic could draw on most of a national army. This was a recording of a late showing, which had a sign interpreter in the corner. He periodically disappeared in long spells of cluttered dialogue, but infuriatingly, sometimes, when no-one was speaking, just stayed visible allegedly watching the action. Also, given that he did have a habit of vanishing, he always re-appeared in the same right-hand bottom corner, even if the source of dramatic action was happening there, such as an ailing French marshal keeling over. But it was a small handicap overall to overcome.

As for these protesting Tibetan protestors, they've jumped the gun and shot their bolt. They would have had a far greater impact had they done this during the Olympics themselves. Maybe they reasoned that Chinese forces would be on even higher alert during those two weeks in August and so their best chance of successfully making their point was now, but it's hard to see what they are going to achieve. The news agenda will have well moved on by August and they're not going to get independence anytime soon. Courageous, but futile. It was wishful thinking, even with the transnational protests to think anything might come of it.