The Return of the Soldier

With the advent of the IMDb, this overlooked movie can now find an interested audience. Why? Because users here who do a search on two-time Academy Award winner Glenda Jackson can find 'The Return of The Soldier' among her credits. So can those checking out Oscar winner Julie Christie. Fans of Ann-Margret can give the title a click, as will those looking into the career of the great Alan Bates. Not to mention the added bonus of a movie with supporting heavyweights Ian Holm and Frank Finlay. Any movie with so many notables in it is rewarded by the IMDb, given all the cross-referencing that goes on here. So, why isn't this movie out on DVD? Don't the Producers realize the Internet Movie Database is a marketing gift for such a film? And 'The Return of The Soldier' is definitely a gem waiting to be discovered. Get with it, people.

This is one of the most beautiful, and heartbreaking, films that I have ever seen. The story of a shell-shocked soldier who, in order to escape the horrors of the war in which he has been involved (WW I) retreats to some inner world of the past. He loses all sense of reality, and becomes entrenched in a time before his marriage, the loss of his child, and the pressures of adulthood. Played by the magnificent and tragically departed Alan Bates, the title character Captain Chris Baldry, takes refuge in a love that existed twenty years before, when he was a young man with his life in front of him. The object of his affection, Glenda Jackson, is now a middle aged woman, but he sees her with the eyes of love, and she is for him the youthful beauty with whom he fell in love decades ago. His wife, a brittle and uncaring Julie Christie, wants him to regain his sense of the present, because she misses her social status. His first love does not initially believe that he should be roused back to consciousness, because she wants him to remain in a happy, albeit unrealistic state. His cousin (played by an unusually good Ann-Margret), a woman who has loved him in secret since the days of their shared childhood, is in a middle place between the two, wanting him back, and yet appreciating the fact that his unawareness and his psychological trip backward in time is bringing him a sort of peace.

Ultimately, the women join forces and realize, with the help of a psychiatrist, that the man they love must be roused from his reverie. The final scene, in which he is brought face to face with reality, is wrenching and difficult, and Sir Alan is able to show with the straightening of his shoulders and the stiffness of his gait that he has returned, sadly, to the present. It is an unspeakably sad performance, of great beauty.

I was reminded, when watching this film, of another film which focused almost entirely on character as opposed to action: "Charly" a film based on the book "Flowers for Algernon" In that movie, which garnered an Academy Award as Best Actor for Cliff Robertson, depicted how an individual who has been moved into a different reality (a retarded man becomes, for a short while, intellectually gifted)can capture a few moments of happiness, which must be sacrificed when he returns to his prior state.

Similarly, the film 'Awakenings' with Robert De Niro tells the story of a man who languished in a coma for many years, and was allowed, through the use of an experimental drug, a few weeks of happiness, a few brief moments to experience life, before the veil of unconsciousness was once again drawn over him when the drugs stopped working.

These stories of people who find happiness in small, short snippets of time, are incredibly moving, and underscore the brevity of life, and the importance of living each moment to its fullest extent.

The Return of the Soldier is truly a tour de force, very sad, very beautiful, and incredibly well-acted. I would strongly recommend it to admirers of Alan Bates, and all those who want to be deeply engaged by a film.

Everything about this film is brilliant, and it is one of the finest films to come out of England in the 1980s. Alan Bates, Glenda Jackson, and Julie Christie, all give some of the most glowing and inspired performances of their entire careers. The film is based upon a haunting novel by Rebecca West (undoubtedly based on real situations she had encountered when she was young), with an excellent script by Hugh Whitemore. The film's evocative atmosphere is immensely powerful, aided greatly by the excellent musical score by Richard Rodney Bennett, which brings out the flavour of the film as salt, garlic and rosemary bring out the flavour of roast lamb. The editing is particularly good, by Laurence Méry-Clark. Ian Holm, Frank Finlay, and Jeremy Kemp are all very good in their supporting roles, which are relatively small. A surprise is Ann-Margret as Cousin Jenny, a major role. For a good-time American girl involved with the Rat Pack in Las Vegas, to play a repressed English spinster of 1918 to perfection was no mean achievement, and shows she was a real actress. Such versatility, and it is a pity she did not do more of that. The direction by Alan Bridges is exquisitely sensitive and nearly perfect. His other major achievements were directing THE HIRELING (1973, see my review), and THE SHOOTING PARTY (1985). He ceased working as long ago as 1990. He was a truly inspired director, most of whose output was of quality television which is not available to see today. This tragic tale concerns an English soldier, Captain Baldry (Alan Bates), who has returned from the First War with shell shock. He cannot remember the last twenty years of his life. Such cases did occur, and all this is not just made up. Julie Christie (who in real life is a sweetie) plays the horribly snobbish, vain, unfeeling wife of Bates who takes personal offence that he cannot remember her and does not find her attractive. She has little concern for his welfare or mental heath but keeps trying to force herself and his former life back on him, inviting neighbours to dinner the night after he returns home, with the opposite results to what she intended, of course. Her insensitivity to others is exceeded only by her self love. Bates under-plays his role, which makes it all the more effective. He cannot believe the vacuity of his former existence, and after asking Christie to tell him what their life together had been like and what they used to do all day, he says pathetically: 'Is that all?' They live in a grand house in the country and are exceedingly rich, with their house full of servants. All he can think of is his first great love, when he was twenty, a girl named Margaret (Glenda Jackson). She is found and meets him again after twenty years. She is married, as he is, and we eventually learn that each has a lost a child of the same age in the same year. In a wonderful and poignant scene with Cousin Jenny, Jackson says mournfully of the two lost children: 'It's as if each had only half a life.' Jackson is still in love with Bates and had never ceased to be. They lost touch because of circumstances when young, and now their love has come back. Bates keeps telling her he loves her, and acts like a boy of twenty again when he is with her. Christie seethes with rage but can do nothing, as all her attempts to insult Jackson are water off a duck's back, and merely drive her herself further into irrelevance. Cousin Jenny is wholly in sympathy with Bates but is exposed as hopelessly ineffectual. She lives a wan existence in the huge household, as a family retainer with no future of her own. The subtlety with which all this is enacted and portrayed is what could be called 'the best of English tact'. Every touch is delicate, countless nuances are allowed to drift in the enchanted air of the isolated domain of the great house. Everyone dresses for dinner, and having to put on white tie every evening to come down to dine with one's wife and cousin is shown for the empty ritual it is, accepted, however, as part of a tradition which cannot be openly questioned. After all, in that long-vanished society, formality was the badge of belonging, and if you did not wear your white tie to private dinners with your own wife at home you were no longer 'one of us'. With his recent memory erased, Bates comes perilously close to experiencing exclusion from polite society because he cannot remember anyone and, through his innocence acquired courtesy of an enemy shell against his head, dares to question what he never dared to examine before. As his psychiatrist Ian Holm says, bringing someone like that back to 'normality' might merely mean bringing him back to unhappiness. Without having read the original novel, I can sense beneath the surface of this story a savage attack on the manners and mores of the privileged elite of the time. Presumably Rebecca West was not the girlfriend of socialist H. G. Wells for nothing, and they would have shared an agenda of attacking the root of privilege. Here this is done with immense but devastating subtlety through what in the end becomes a fable thrown like one of the German bombs against the fortress of the elite, as epitomised by the odious character of the voraciously selfish and spoilt Julie Christie. By contrast, Jackson leads a relatively impoverished life in Wealdstone (a location viciously mocked by Christie), married to a boring man, wrapped up in her baking and housework. Appallingly dressed, Christie calls her 'the dowd'. But Bates loves her madly, and ignores Christie. This film will remain a genuine and enduring classic.

Before she went into politics or public service, Glenda Jackson was one of Britain's finest film actresses. This film displays her talent despite having a supporting role in a stellar cast that includes Julie Christie as Kitty, the wife of a British Royal Captain who has lost his memory of the last 20 years, and Jenny played by American Ann-Margret in an almost unrecognizable role as the doting sister. Alan Bates plays the captain who suffers from memory loss triggered by the shell shock during World War I. Sir Ian Holm has a smaller role as the doctor treating him. You see familiar faces like Sheila Keith, Patsy Byrne, and Frank Finlay. You can't help but watch Glenda play a dowdy housewife and the first true love of the Captain but they came from different classes. It's not the greatest movie but it's good to see Glenda's amazing talent. She is still a fantastic actress, comedy or drama. She makes Margaret Grey into a likable character and you see why a regal captain fell in love with her.

This is superb - the acting wonderful, sets, clothes, music - but most of all the story itself.

I am amazed there aren't more reviews of this movie - certainly one of the best of the 1980s.

It's also a wonderful movie to see in tandem with the great "Random Harvest" which has much the same opening crisis

-- a middle aged, unknown English W.W.I officer is in a hospital toward the close of the war, suffering from shell shock and complete amnesia without any idea of his name, origin, or anywhere he belongs - he proves to be a very wealthy established man - when he "recovers", he will not remember the years before the war --

But there the movies' resemblances end.

My warmest thanks to all who participated in the movie - particularly the actors Ian Holm, Alan Bates, Ann Margret (what a great and surprising casting choice), Glenda Jackson, Julie Christie.

This one stays with you forever.