Review of Oh! What a Lovely War

This is a Richard Attenborough film.Too long,sledgehammering its point home,running off in all different directions,lots of his "luvvie" friends in small ("but very telling dear")parts,much given to patronising its audience with vaguely anti-Establishment statements and treating the working class like rather dim children in a Nativity Play. When Joan Littlewood produced "Oh what a lovely war" on the confines of the stage at Stratford East it was a far different animal.Broadening it out into a major movie did the play no favours at all.Perforce it lost its intimacy,its subtlety,its interaction with its audience and its immediacy.Mr Attenborough replaced those attributes with bombast,bathos and all the monotonous single-minded slogan shouting of the currently fashionable demonstrations against the Vietnam War. He propounds without question the ,to say the least,debatable "Lions led by Donkeys" concept of the British Army ,a comment attributed to various German High Command officers,but never actually admitted to by any of them.It's far more likely to have been an invention of some jingoistic Fleet Street editor looking for a headline, a "Gotcha!" for its day. It is conveniently forgotten that a very large number of those Donkeys also perished in the mud of Paschendale or on the Ypres salient or the blood - soaked fields of the Somme. It's sixth form anti-militarism now seems embarrassingly naive. The First World War,with its origins in the struggle between two greedy colonial powers,was the bloodiest conflict in history.An obscene number of young men of all countries slaughtered each other for four years before Germany-brought to the point of starvation and ignominy-surrendered and descended into a chaos that lasted until the rise of the Nazis.And so it goes,as Mr Vonnegut says. Nobody would dream of classifying it as a "Good Thing".It follows then that we do not need to have it screamed in our faces(complete with not very subtly interposed Music Hall songs) that it was a "Bad Thing". War is hell,Dickie dear,yes,we worked that out for ourselves thank you.