Word: crimea
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...uncontroversial theme of Tony Richardson's new film, The Charge of the Light Brigade. Like the book on which it is based (Cecil Woodham-Smith's The Reason Why), the film begins by depicting a stratified and deluded English society, and then moves swiftly on to the Crimea, where the stratification and the delusion find their ultimate projection in an insane battle on an unearthly field...
...disconnected, listless affair between an officer (David Hemmings) and his best friend's wife (Vanessa Redgrave). Scenarist Charles Wood (How I Won the War) overloads the script with totally unsubtle pacifist propaganda. "It will be a sad day," intones Lord Raglan, Britain's supreme commander in Crimea, "when England has officers who know what they're doing . . . it smacks of murder...
...that constant striving for purity that fed his artistic and spiritual life. While carousing in the Caucasus, he wrote Story of My Childhood-which was instantly accepted for publication and drew praise from Turgenev and Dostoevsky. Later, in the Crimea, Tolstoy served bravely as an artillery officer and wrote Sevastopol Sketches, which, in their fidelity to the sweep and detail of battle, rank as some of the best war correspondence of all time. The very flaws and inconsistencies that he displayed during those years would, as Troyat notes, "later enable him to embrace the attitudes of each of his characters...
Since Tennyson first immortalized their suicidal attack, The Charge of the Light Brigade has been the inspiration for four blood-and-thunder films. Now Director Tony Richardson is trotting out a fifth version. Unable to shoot at Balaclava, actual site of the 1854 battle in the Crimea (it is now a Russian missile base), he set up his cameras in a suitably barren valley in Turkey, 30 miles from Ankara. There, for the past two months, he has led his all-star cast -David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Trevor Howard, Lawrence Harvey and John Gielgud-through mishap and mayhem. With...
...foie gras and aged black Chinese eggs. For hors d'oeuvres there were salted jasmine flowers, candied silkworms, toasted grasshoppers and grilled African honeybee. The wines were Moët & Chandon champagne ('59 and '61) and reds and whites from the Crimea...