Word: hampe
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...sober, analytic-minded pro fessionals who today dominate the na tion's philosophy departments, William Ernest Hocking would hardly be con sidered a philosopher at all. A courtly old man who puttered about his 650-acre hilltop farm near New Hamp shire's White Mountains, carrying bird seed in his pockets, Hocking customari ly listed his occupation on income tax forms as "writer-farmer." Unfashionably, he dealt with the grand intellec tual themes that have traditionally pre occupied those who love wisdom: God, the nature of man, the meaning of life. Indeed, when he died last week...
...Hamp, a young cobbler from Islington, the only survivor of his World War I platoon. He is a prisoner in a dugout cell, waiting to be tried for desertion, while outside rumble the guns of the Passchendaele offensive. Picking his way past a detail that is digging out a flooded latrine comes the officer assigned to defend the deserter: correct, unsmiling Captain Hargreaves...
...ordeal of Hamp and of the officers who condemn him to death is the whole action of this painful, stirring film, which could easily have been nothing more than a sentimental antiwar movie about the little man and the big machine. But Director-Producer Joseph Losey, whose movie The Servant won eight British Film Academy nominations and four awards, has made King and Country a pity-and-terror-filled drama of death against life, and law against justice...
Much of the credit belongs to the actors-especially to 28-year-old Tom Courtenay (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner), who plays Hamp as an inarticulate, baffled, baited animal, hurting with foolish hope. But it is the style and shaping of the whole that gives the film its special authority: Director Losey's use of a bunch of privates as a kind of action chorus to comment on the development of the drama; his staging of a symbolic game of drunken blindman's buff in Hamp's cell before he is executed; the awful detail...
...members of Hamp's firing squad are his friends; some of them aim to miss, and when he falls, he is still alive. Captain Hargreaves (Dirk Bogarde) cradles the dying man's head in his arm. "Isn't it finished yet, Hamp?" he asks gently, and the barely audible answer is: "No, sir-I'm sorry...