Culloden

Brilliant. Uncompromising. Brutal. Seminal docudrama. Docudrama makes it sound pedestrian. It isn't.

I remember watching Culloden years ago on BBC2. The remorseless cannon fire, the savage battle and the immediacy of the action struck a cord. I picked up a copy of John Prebble's Culloden a couple of years after, in a second hand bookshop. Obtaining the book wasn't an automatic response to having watched the BBC film. I brought it without having the film in mind. That is what good film making is. Not a quick fix. More an experience.

A highly recommended watch.

Enjoying a revival on the art-house circuit, this reconstruction of the famous last battle fought on British soil uses modern documentary-style reporting to convey immediacy. An effective and bloodthirsty film, it covers a landmark period of Scots-Anglo history, showing not only the senseless waste of human life, the total incompetence of the Bonnie Prince Charles as a military leader, but the barbaric excesses of both Scots and English, and the iniquity and the Scottish ‘clan' system. The period opened the way for the ‘clearances' where indigenous people were shipped off and the land used for (more profitable and less troublesome) sheep farming.

It really doesn't have anything very good to say about anyone, English or Scots, but this won't stop many English feeling it is racist and one-sided (just as the English critics as a whole were the only ones in the world to lambaste the magnificently spectacular but historically inaccurate, Braveheart). Watkins may well have had a political agenda – the film was likened to a social commentary on the American involvement in Vietnam (as the gutting of the Gaelic Highlands by the Noble Army was said to parallel the ‘pacification' of the Vietnamese by the U.S. Army). Culloden, however, is not only a key historical massacre but almost part of Scottish folklore. Arguing the details of the battle is still a not uncommon pub conversation, especially to the north and west of the country. My favourite version is by an elderly lady who lives near Culloden (just outside of Inverness) who ‘tells it like she was there'. The movie, although originally made for television, is also a landmark, and riveting stuff, but whether it can justifiably be used to further a pro-Scottish Independence agenda is much shakier, given that it happened a long time ago.

One of the best war films I've ever seen, as powerful as Paths of Glory and Apocalypse Now. Watkins' black-and-white "documentary" looks like it came out of a time warp. "They made a desert and called it peace". I wept. Issued by Time-Life, may be available at your local cult video shop.

This is one of the earliest examples of a "docu-drama" and one of the best. It's realism causes the viewer to feel true empathy for the participants---especially for the Scottish Jacobites.

While it's certainly true that the English and their Scottish allies were better equipped and had a more disciplined, unified command structure, the circumstances of the Highlanders weren't quite as dire as indicated. Many were indeed poor and malnourished, but generally not to the degree depicted in the film, where almost all are dressed in rags and covered in filth. It is also claimed that most didn't have firearms, yet the majority were armed with pistols or muskets of local or French manufacture. Their lack of discipline and cohesive command caused them to rely on the shock tactics that served them so well at the Battle of Prestonpens, and many dropped their muskets and charged after firing a volley. Interestingly, the English tally of captured weapons after the battle contained many more guns than swords. Swords; especially claymores; were expensive, and most of the poorer men without guns carried axes or pikes.

The contingent of French trained Scots and Irish, equipped and drilled in the same manner as the Redcoats, was larger than shown in the film. And the English forces contained significant numbers of both lowland and highland Scots. Although the English were well provided with artillery, most of their cannons were small three pounders used in urban street fighting or in the American woodlands where they were known as "grasshoppers". The standard light field gun was the six pounder. Despite these qualifications, the battle scenes are graphic and realistic.

Watkins makes it seem as if the Scots were true revolutionaries asserting their ethnic identity, when, in actual fact, Prince Charlie was simply a wannabe monarch seeking to restore the Stuarts, and probably as disdainful of the Highlanders as the Hanoverians were. The modern parallels he tries to draw simply aren't there.

Despite the above, this is a great movie that should be on every history buff and cinema enthusiast's list.

Peter Watkins film "Culloden" is outstanding for all the reasons other reviewers have described and strips away the romanticism about Bonnie Prince Charlie,which began with Queen Victoria and Prince Alberts enthusiasm for anything Scottish. We all know war is brutal, but up until 1964 had film and TV portrayed it as such ? "Culloden" seems to have been the first film to show brutality and atrocities taking place. War films were still about the brave and upstanding allies fighting the nasty axis powers. Other reviewers have commented on the parallels with the Vietnam war, but it must be remembered that "Culloden" was transmitted in December 1964 and the only American troops in Vietnam at the time were advisor's. The full scale American troop deployments to Vietnam did not materialise until April 1965. It is an interesting parallel, but the scenes of US troops burning Vietnamese villages on the nightly news was still months away. But in a sense Peter Watkins previewed this. Quite simply an outstanding film.