Abstract
This chapter looks at a lineage of comedic war films, starting before Suez but then demonstrating how the connection between war and comedy changed throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In particular, the chapter shows how satire and comedic irony emerge in film and television works as critical tools, despite already being established in the literary tradition around war at least since World War I. In addition to surveying comic and ironic trends across genres, it compares two films written by Charles Wood, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968) and How I Won the War (1967), and looks at how these films combine Wood’s penchant for comic irony with varied modernist techniques stressed by the directors (Tony Richardson and Richard Lester, respectively).
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Notes
- 1.
Durgnat is quoted in Geraghty.
- 2.
The film is based on an unproduced screenplay called The Bull Boys, by R. F. Delderfeld, and is also something of a postwar reimagining of Carol Reed’s The Way Ahead (1944). Thanks to the anonymous reviewer for pointing these out.
- 3.
This conceit is also found in the film Monuments Men (2014, George Clooney), based around the exploits of a unit of soldiers charged with recovering pilfered artworks, though the reasons for their recovery of cultural patrimony differ.
- 4.
Note the tenuous connection to a “British way of life!”
- 5.
More specifically, this seems to mimic (and later deflate) Leni Riefenstahl’s use of myth-making tableaux vivants. See Peucker (2004, 281–285).
- 6.
A US review of On the Fiddle by Howard Thompson discusses the film’s use of Sean Connery, who made this movie just before shooting Dr. No (1962, Terence Young). See Thompson (1965, n.p).
- 7.
The term “permissive” was used, often in the pejorative, by cultural commentators who described Britain’s changing attitudes to youth, multiculturalism, sexual rights, and the content of works of art. For a general sense of how the word describes the social world of the time, see Pugh (2012, 297–310).
- 8.
Simon Sheridan notes that this was the only film that Roy Boulting was ever ashamed of making. See Sheridan (2001, 101).
- 9.
For an account of the British invasion in cinema as experienced by American youth, see Hanke (1989, 212–219).
- 10.
The convoluted history of the film (it was initially a kind of adaptation of The Reason Why, but was later rewritten by Charles Wood for legal reasons, even though the rights to access to that material were secured), which lead to an end to Tony Richardson and playwright John Osborne’s friendship, is partially recounted in Heilpern (2007, 344–348), and Connelly (2003, 22–25). The earliest film version of these events that I have been able to find is Balaclava (1928, Maurice Elvey).
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Flanagan, K.M. (2019). Comic and Satirical Alternatives to the “Pleasure Culture of War”. In: War Representation in British Cinema and Television. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30203-0_3
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