Word: woodham
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This last idea is the 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...
...straight face. For the poet laureate, the gallant but futile attack at Balaclava was a testimony to human courage. Aided by the hindsight of history, Director Tony Richardson sees the event in another light. His film version of The Charge of the Light Brigade, based in part on Cecil Woodham-Smith's brilliant study, The Reason Why, is a polemical attack on the futility of war and the fallout of greed, blunder and carnage that follows...
...side of Turkey, largely to defend its own imperialistic interests against possible Russian expansion. Two of England's leading generals, Lord Lucan and Lord Cardigan, were quarrelsome brothers-in-law. A purblind aristocrat, Lucan had not commanded troops for 17 years; "the melancholy truth" about Cardigan, as Woodham-Smith put it, "was that his glorious golden head had nothing in it." At the front, battles with the Russians were hardly less bitter than the internecine wrangling between the two commanders. Finally, a stupid order was fatally misinterpreted. As thousands of Russian soldiers watched in disbelief, some...
...regret that your commentator on "Richardson's Folly," or whatever the new celluloid crucifixion of the Light Brigade [Aug. 4] is to be entitled, is ignorant of the history of the brigade and its gallant-but monotonously misrepresented-charge. Let him remember that the "military caste system" Miss Woodham-Smith so coldly indicts produced, along with all the other "rank incompetents," such commanders as Marlborough, Wolfe, Wellington-and, indeed, Washington...
Described by the producer as "a cross between Tom Jones and Goldfinger," the new picture is a bitter, debunking black epic. It is based on Historian Cecil Woodham-Smith's book The Reason Why, a cold indictment of the military caste system that produced such rank incompetents as Lord Raglan (played by Gielgud), the general who gave the fateful order. At the time, he was so confused that he thought he was fighting the French. Another fact that the film exploits is the bravery-and arrogance-of Lord Cardigan (Howard), the general who led the charge. He penetrated...