Soldier of Honor

I was unaware of this film adaptation of Waugh's trilogy until today's showing on British freeview TV, and missing the first half hour, also missed the chance to record it to DVD. Drat. Until I saw it. Very pretty production by Channel 4 TV and Talkback, made some 8 years back, before Daniel Craig became a superstar.

I've read and reread a lot of Waugh but believed Sword of Honour to be an inexplicably stolid, inaccessibly unreadable work, so big, so long, so dull. Brideshead was the beginning of the end, the trilogy was the end writ large.

Until I found the BBC radio adaptation from 1974, over 11 hours rather than this film's 4. After a few hours I began to see the early Waugh wrapped inside the less obviously satirical wrappings, his humour and gravity. The genius, in short.

They don't make them like Waugh any more, nor do they make the people; the 1974 recording was made in time to catch many authentic sounding voices from the era, and some very fine acting. A gem which I recommend to any Waugh fans.

This film seems to be, probably, a rather adroit shot at a script which condenses a huge tome to a few hours, but the vowels are comprehensive school, Craig is hopelessly wrong, and there are but a few flashes of sharp observation and very little wit. But the audio version is available on the internet, and of course the pictures are better.

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.

How a scintillating trilogy like this could be transformed into a lifeless parody of itself by filmmakers is a complete mystery. It is lugubrious, slow and mistakes slapstick for wit. Waugh would have been appalled by this work. He was a nasty man in private life--a friend of Randolph Churchill whose boorish behavior was legendary--but he had high literary standards. Daniel Craig, incidentally, does not do humor well. The first review on this site must have been written by the movie publicist. The actress who plays his first wife is as wooden as Craig himself -- zero chemistry there -- and there is a supporting cast who clearly didn't have their heart in any of this. A total waste of time, so don't bother. I hope I have made myself clear in padding this out to the full 10 lines required. Left to me, I would have kissed it off with a simple, "No, don't think so. Take your dog for a walk instead."

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.

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.