Passchendaele, 1917. An ordinary private is battle weary. Dragged from the mud just as he thought he’d drown, the soldier is shocked and disorientated. Three years of brutal war weigh heavily upon him. He’s but a young man of 21 and he hasn’t seen his wife and child since he volunteered to serve his country. An idea enters his head to walk home to London from Belgium. A day later he is picked up by the military police and accused of desertion – a crime punishable by death.
Joseph Losey’s remarkable anti-war drama opens when Private Arthur Hamp (Tom Courtenay) awaits his court martial. Captain Charles Hargreaves (Dirk Bogarde) is assigned to defend him. From the first moment, and watched through the bleak black and white film footage (beautifully restored for this release) we uneasily know how this film will end. That doesn’t work against the intrigue and the drama of the piece, though. Far from it. Knowing what is coming creates an almost unbearable tension and holds up to scrutiny a class divide that came crashing down right after the end of the protracted and brutal conflict. The story is adapted from a play, and the limited settings and characters also places the drama under a microscope, ensuring that the atmosphere is claustrophobic.
‘King and Country’ is an incredible film. Sixty years after it was made, it retains the power to shock, to provoke, to anger and to move. Parts of the film are difficult to watch, and yet the story is utterly compelling. Real photographs of corpses – animal and human – rotting in trenches and spreadeagled in no man’s land vividly reinforce its anti-war message. No less significant is the unbridgeable gulf between the upper class officers and the working class privates. The distinction that carries to the heart of the film is brilliantly brought to life by Dirk Bogarde, with his clipped tones and grand speeches, and Tom Courtenay, with his East Riding accent and unrefined dialogue. The cleverest subversion of our expectations is to reveal how they are both insignificant pawns in High Command’s game.
Director Joseph Losey elicits incredible performances from his leading men. Fresh-faced Tom Courtenay was grabbing his moment in the spotlight. He had made a name for himself as the star of Tony Richardson’s kitchen sink drama ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’. He brings elements of the wide-eyed, innocent fantasist he played in John Schlesinger’s ‘Billy Liar’ into his role as Private Hamp. The following year, he would take on a substantial supporting part in David Lean’s epic of Russian literature ‘Doctor Zhivago’. In many ways, Private Hamp is the least showy of all of the characters he played during this especially rich vein of form in his early career. It is what Hamp stands for, representing the lives of so many young men of that generation, that makes the character so sympathetic. Courtenay breathes life into him, ensuring that we care about his fate and root for him throughout the film.
The movie marked Bogarde’s third collaboration with Joseph Losey. The pair had already made the undisputed British classic ‘The Servant’, and ‘Accident’, co-starring with Stanley Baker, would come a few years later. In many ways, Bogarde’s character goes on the biggest journey throughout the course of the film. At first, he is emotionally detached from Hamp and considers defending him to be merely a box-ticking formality. It’s only once he listens to the young man’s story that he realises Hamp is just as human as he is, with independent thoughts and feelings, even hopes and dreams for the future. The experience of defending the young private changes Hargreaves. The scene between Bogarde and Courtenay once the verdict is known is the most powerful moment in the film. It neatly presages Hargreaves’ loss of control and explosion of pent-up anger. That scene, played opposite Peter Copley, is clearly why Losey wanted Bogarde for the part. Nobody else could play a reserved and proper gentleman who suddenly loses his rag with the same conviction as Bogarde.
The supporting cast is excellent too. Barry Foster (‘Van der Valk’) is cool and sympathetic as Hamp’s lieutenant. Leo McKern (‘Rumpole of the Bailey’) gives something of a darkly comedic turn as company medic Captain O’Sullivan. He represents the grotesque casual disregard of the effect of trauma and shell shock on the mental health of soldiers.
As an anti-war film, and one that highlights the inequalities of British society in the first quarter of the Twentieth Century, ‘King and Country’ is highly successful. The superb performances by top British talent of the era are another major draw. Once ‘King and Country’ has been seen, especially the jaw-dropping climactic sequences, it can never be forgotten. I couldn’t stop thinking about it for a week after I’d seen it. Very few films have this level of emotional and intellectual impact.
Every aspect of production is impressive. The studio sets vividly evoke trench warfare. The rain is constantly beating down. Rats feast on the bloated corpses of horses. Boots squelch through mud. You can almost smell the squalor. Remarkably, all of it was created inside Shepperton Studios.
Extra features include a short contemporary interview with Dirk Bogarde in grainy black and white, and a longer, ten-minute new interview with Tom Courtenay, who reflects on his time making the film and working with Bogarde and Losey. The clean print of ‘King and Country’ looks incredible on Blu-ray. Running to not even an hour and a half, the one-act play is unrelenting in its pace, and Joseph Losey masterfully retains the tension throughout. It’s a classic movie that comments strongly on the atrocities of World War One, and on man’s inhumanity to man.
Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Tom Courtenay, Leo McKern, Barry Foster, Peter Copley, James Villiers Director: Joseph Losey Writer: Evan Jones, James Lansdale Hodson Certificate: 12 Duration: 87 mins Released by: Studiocanal Release date: 6th November 2023 Buy ‘King and Country’
