dual personalities

I’ve been watching quite a few movies lately, and my choices have oscillated wildly between recent releases (e.g., Belfast, Prey, and Thirteen Lives) and classics like To Be or Not to Be (1942), Objective Burma (1945) and last night’s The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936). Few of these films were great but most were eminently watchable. The Charge of the Light Brigade was not. It had a great director (Michael Curtiz of the Adventures of Robin Hood fame) and a stellar cast, including Errol Flynn, Olivia DeHavilland, Patric Knowles, David Niven, Donald Crisp, Nigel Bruce and other stalwarts. But let me tell you, not even that cast could save this train wreck of a movie.

Recognizing the movie’s flaws, Curtiz includes a disclaimer admitting that it takes liberties with history. That should have warned me. Most of the movie – everything except the last fifteen minutes – takes place in India and involves the machinations of a perfidious local raja named Surat Khan, a love triangle involving Errol, Olivia and Patric, and several interminable sequences of cavalry maneuvers to loud martial music.

The idea that Olivia would prefer Patric to Errol is absurd, as indeed is the whole Indian plot. At the beginning Errol saves Surat Khan from a leopard, so that Khan owes him his life. A few months later, Khan attacks the British fort where Errol is stationed. British incompetence allows Khan to lure a major portion of the cavalry away from the fort which he duly attacks. Eventually, Errol meets Khan to negotiate terms and nobly rejects Khan’s offer of free passage out of the war zone. After Khan attacks again, and Errol and Olivia manage to escape (Patric being elsewhere), everyone else, including the post’s women and children, gets slaughtered. Errol returns with help only to find the carnage. He and his men vow revenge, forcing Khan to flee India and take refuge with – you guessed it – the Russians. After Errol faces the fact that his fiancée Olivia loves his brother Patric, and his unit is transferred to the Crimea, he falsifies their orders so they can charge the Russian position and kill Surat Khan who is there watching. Have you got all that?

Let’s just review our history for a minute. The charge of the Light Brigade occurred at the Battle of Balaclava in 1854. Due to Lord Lucan’s misunderstanding of Lord Raglan’s vague order, the Light Brigade attacked the Russian artillery position and got blown to bits. It was a disaster, but the media (remember Russell’s Dispatches from the Crimea?) put a good face on it, and then Alfred Lord Tennyson immortalized the action in poetry. What made it worthy of celebrating was that the men knew the order would get them all killed, but they obeyed anyway. There was no Surat Khan and no revenge story. Why anyone thought that muddling history in such a way would be a good idea remains a mystery.

I can’t help feeling that Curtiz started out making a movie about British India, but partway through decided that he needed some hook to get people into the theater, so he added a voiceover at the beginning and a bit at the end, and voilà, we get The Charge of the Light Brigade.

All of this goes to show that bad movies have always been made, and while The Charge of the Light Brigade is far, far from the bottom of the heap, I did hate myself a little for watching the whole thing. Watch something else this weekend!