Sword of Honour

This movie has all the qualities to be an entertaining and teaching film. There is a beautiful story of an honest and courageous man in a difficult and troubled world that revolves around. The actors and the sets, at certain moments, have some problems but the plot, the ideas, and the completeness of the life of man during the war, make us understand many useful things.

Once again a substantial literary work (3 novels) has been shoehorned into 200 minutes or so of television but this time without the gross omissions that usually occur in exercises of this kind. Partly this is because of the fair amount of action which takes up a lot of literary space but which can be economically depicted on the screen.

Evelyn Waugh had a pretty scrappy Second World War, but he used his illegally kept diary to good effect. His semi-autobiographical hero, Guy Crouchback goes into what he thinks is a God - ordained crusade against evil, only to discover that the war is the ideal environment for liars, cheats, cowards and phonies of all varieties. His egregious acquaintance Trimmer becomes a war hero by accident and is promoted to Colonel. The evil Corporal Ludovic who murders his C O gets commissioned while good men die everywhere. Every attempted noble act by Guy misfires, and only at the end does he finally achieve some nobility as the putative father of Trimmer's child.

Guy's position is not helped by the fact that his once and later wife Virginia (Megan Dodds) is a vain little tramp who uses men so obviously it's a wonder they are taken in. Guy's emotional IQ is so low he manages to fall for her twice. Well, perhaps the second time around he was after some nice redeeming suffering - he did have some insight - but in retrospect Virginia's demise seems a blessed relief.

Generally though, this was a decent effort. Highlights included the Crete and Croatian sequences and the great portrayals of Ludovic, Major Hound and Brigadier Ritchie-Hook the truly crazy brave military idiot, who was at least able to admit that he enjoyed all that killing'n stuff. Daniel Craig's Guy is also a very measured performance. He has a face on which one can read inner suffering like one reads a weather dial. It was also nice to see that perennial lightweight Leslie Phillips (of 'Carry On' fame) bringing some gravitas to the role of Guy's aristocratic father.

I haven't read the books in this case, but if the portrayal of Mrs Stitch, the society grand dame in the production is anything like that in the trilogy it's a wonder Lady Diana Cooper, who was still alive when they were published, didn't sue. Lady Diana is thought to be the real-life model for the character, who cheats on her absent husband with a young war hero, destroys Guy's mail and pulls strings to get him transferred back to England so he can't blow the gaff on what her 'hero' really did in Crete (desertion).

Anyway, I am now inspired to read the books, which on previous experience should be no hardship. Evelyn Waugh was an intriguing character who started out as an angry young literary man in the 1920s and finished up a reactionary old fart in the 1960s, his time long gone. Yet he was one of the greatest English literary stylists of the 20th century, equally adept at satire ('Decline and Fall', 'Scoop') and serious work ('Brideshead Revisited', Sword of Honour'). This production suitably honours his memory and isn't a bad bit of television in its own right.

This is a splendid effort by all concerned, especially given the time constraint of about 200 minutes. As well as men and women are still marching off to war to save Western civilization, the movie has a contemporary message. The brevity of the movie, given that it tells a story, originally told in three novels goes against it. So much plot and many characters have been left out seriously compromising Waugh's comic vision. Waugh's original novels contain very amusing dialogue and much of the novels are just dialogue, the writer creating character out of what people say. Although the script used snippets of Waugh's dialogue,there is lots and lots unused. However, the script writers and all the people involved in the production did a masterful job of salvaging something of Waugh's original story. The other major flaw is in the casting of Daniel Craig as Guy Crouchback. Craig does not have the aristocratic presence to play Guy. His features, stature,and movement suggest a working class hero; he is great for contemporary characters where class is not an issue. But Waugh's works are all about class and Daniel Craigdoes not look the part of an aristocrat. He would be fine as a Lawrencian hero, Birket in Women in Love, for example. The rest of the casting is more or less spot on with some splendid choices of actors for Guy's father, Virginia, Ivor Claire, Ritchie-Hook,and Trimmer and everybody else. The book is both so much more outrageously funny and profound about life than the movie. Read the book but enjoy the movie,too; the chaps who made the film have obviously put on a good show in difficult circumstances. I am now going to reread the book for the umpteenth time. The movie inspires that.

My only real gripe is about the Sten gun used by Crouchback during the Crete campaign...they werent issued yet....historically, it would have been a Thompson.

Just watched this with my better half on DVD. I had read the books before, she hadn't.

I was positively surprised that the writers did not change much of Waugh's novels for dramatic condensation; they just omitted lots of peripheral characters and events of minor meaning to the overall plot.

The main characters are well cast and the acting is excellent. In contrast to some other reviewers, I am convinced that Daniel Craig is the perfect fit for his appearing neutral in the crucial point of class. Guy does not represent a specific class in the novels either: He's too catholic and too old for being a "chap" among the officers, he is too introverted and serious to succeed in society, and too rich and educated and considering to be a role model for the ordinary men. No, he remains an outsider to all worlds - which gives him the best position for observing and documenting all the others.

My better half liked the acting and thought the film gave her two good evenings of entertainment. Yet she was confused with the abrupt changes of locations and times (I had no problems with that with all the background knowledge of the novels and the dozens of Wikipedia pages I consulted to understand the novel's story while reading it).

I can understand her: If you are not really into WWII (and even more: if you are non-British), you really get lost if those sandy rocks now represent mock Crete in Scotland, Egypt or real Crete and what the heck were the British doing in Greece anyway? I don't think it was a good choice to split the story in two parts, while the book is made of three. The story lacks a stringent climactic structure anyway (life seldomly follows the rules scriptwriters have set for entertaining plots), and stopping in the midst of volume 2 does not really make things better. Maybe a 3 or 4 part miniseries with a run-time of 7 or 8 hours total would have been more fitting with the Crete and Yugoslavia episodes deserving a full leg of attention.

What I missed was the mentioning of Stalin. In the novel, two of Stalin's moves are main triggers for Guy's decisions: The Hitler-Stalin-pact of '39 convinces Guy to go back to England, join the army and fight the forces of evil. Germany's invasion of the USSR in '41 causes Stalin to change sides which makes Guy doubt his cause. The co-operation of the Allies with Stalin's Soviet Untion forms the quintessence of his conviction of the overall senselessness of his efforts. I can see that it is hard to make this fit into a movie version, but not to mention it at all? I also missed Stalin's sword mentioned although it is the name-giver to Waugh's trilogy.

What became clear to me after watching it is that the material is still well suited for movie or series adaptations. So, Netflix, Amazon - anyone?