Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1525 in DVD
• Released on: 2006-10-30
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: PAL, Widescreen, Colour, Subtitled
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 138 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
It's a product of its Vietnam era just as surely as Robert Altman's M*A*S*H, and like that film Oh! What a Lovely War is ostensibly about a different war. Based on a celebrated anti-war stage piece produced by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop, the film chronicles the various madnesses of the First World War. Along with vignettes involving the members of the fictional Smith family, the movie lands its punches with a two-pronged attack: by using the songs of the war, mostly patriotic; and by using the real-life words of various figures from WWI. You can see how this would have fit a stylised stage show; in the more literal, realistic realm of film, it mostly comes across as heavy-handed pretentiousness. Richard Attenborough, who would later explore the lives of Gandhi and Chaplin, first made his way to the director's chair here, and he enlisted a staggering who's who of his fellow British actors for roles in the large ensemble: Olivier, Gielgud, and Richardson among them. John Mills plays the most bull-headed of the generals, blithely measuring out yards of territory gained by the thousands of casualties involved. The songs are a historically fascinating lot, mostly given an ironic or sinister treatment in this incarnation, as jolly patriotic tunes that mask the utter carnage at the front. Among the high points is Maggie Smith singing (well, declaiming) an ode to recruitment, promising war as a grand adventure. The blending of arch content with Attenborough's realistic staging of trench warfare just doesn't take, but what does hit home are the actual quotes and the statistics of killing; World War I set a bloody standard for sheer, blind slaughter. --Robert Horton

Synopsis
Richard Attenborough's directorial debut OH! WHAT A LOVELY WAR is a riotous, thought-provoking satire on the follies of war, based on the stage musical of the same name. Set during World War I, the story revolves around the Smith family, whose five sons enlist in the army only to end up as cannon fodder. Told through the words and music of soldiers' marching songs, the harsh reality of war is offset by a distinctly irreverent British humour. And who said war had to be depressing?

Customer Reviews

You'll never see a better war film
I'm bemused by the tendency to assert that this film is a veiled Vietnam film, "ostensibly" about another war, as this Amazon review puts it. It IS about another war, one that was far more important to the nation where it was written and filmed, and in which the father of writer and director Charles Chilton was killed. Anyway, I watched it as a First World War film, and that is how it has always seemed to me: it comments on all other wars, implicitly, of course.

It's silly to compare or measure this against most other war films, because it is so unlike any other, but it stands out as a dramatic, cinematic, narrative gem. A serious musical about the horrors of war: sounds as likely as a serious musical about living in Nazi Germany. Oh, wait...someone did that too. Cabaret must owe quite a bit to this film, not least in the "tomorrow belongs to me" scene, although they wrote their songs from scratch for Cabaret.

The songs here are real, some the official versions from popular music hall, and some the unofficial versions sung by the troops, with considerably darker lyrics (though they omitted the rudest of the unofficial lyrics). The humour is black and dry as a tomb, and you don't quite know whether to laugh or wince in a lot of places (just do both). But the real beauty of the film is in the settings, which are sparse, only partly realistic, and sometimes subject to extraordinary changes. The most impressive are slow 360 degree pans, during which everything changes behind the camera's back, so that when you get back the character you started with, they are in a completely different situation. These and other rapid scene shifts are part of whole film's unreal, nightmarish quality that matches the subject matter perfectly.

If you haven't seen it, make sure you do. If you saw it long ago and dimly remember it and wonder if it was as good as you remember (or maybe better than you thought), I'd say yes, and you should refresh your acquaintance. This seems an almost absurdly cheap price for it.

Perhaps Richard Attenborough's Finest Film
It is particularly difficult to categorise this film. Yes, it's a film about war, the pity of war, the pity war distils, but it manages to avoid the vainglory and the heroic thrill that almost always categorises war movies. Even the impulse to anger at the waste of war, and the stupidity of humankind is effectively suppressed in the representation of pity that is poetically evolved here. The film doesn't even fit well into the `musicals' category, as it uses music, in the form of songs popular during WWI as tokens of the irrepressibility of the human spirit, rather than for their musical essence. Many showings on TV are edited for length, reducing its impact, but this is the real deal. It even passes muster in its history of the complex inevitability of the war and of its mindless waste of life. And it does this using a densely glowing aurora of famous acting stars: Redgrave, Gielgud, Richardson, Olivier, Hawkins, More. It's funny and it's heartbreakingly sad at the same time, and it's beautifully photographed, with a final scene that brings tears to many eyes. This film is to movies what Wilfred Owen is to Poetry. It speaks for itself.

'Heavy-handed pretentiousness'
Many of you who have not seen this film may be aware of its ending shot of the white crosses of a WW1 graveyard on the South Downs. The scene is not only moving & powerful but cinematically unique, with apparently 16,000 graves appearing in the final shot - a poignant testament to a devastating war.

Sadly, the rest of the film does not live up to this and is instead filled with a sloppy mix of surrealism, songs & dialogue from the original play.

The surreal/ dadaist overtones make the film weak by ceaselessly attempting to fudge the idea of a seaside fairground with the war (which doesn't work). The wackiness also gets in the way of the plot, favouring 'pretentious' scenes such as a merry-go-round of real cavalry rather than scenes which move the plot along or contribute a worthwhile point.

Songs, fortunately, are a comprehensive & faithful selection, being as they are all from the time-period. However, all too often, these songs swamp out the dialogue or meaning of a scene so that the film just becomes like watching a DVD of 'Adam Ant' videos (interesting, but not connected together by a storyline).

Lastly, there is the dialogue. The play (which I have participated in a version of) is held together fairly loosely by a set of newspaper boys/ announcers who keep the audience in tune with the plot, whilst allowing scenes with an interesting twist on events (rather like Monty Python).
However, this film dispenses with both this and much of the dialogue & structure, meaning that the film becomes a confusing mess. As I can recall, only the beginning 'States of Europe' & the 'Pacifist' scene held together & all the others were lost in the mire of poor plotting.

So, I hate to say it, but the only things worth getting out of this film are the ending scene & the soundtrack. Besides that, I'm afraid the rest of the film is a jumbled-up mish-mash of ideas with little coherence.
The good news is that Attenborough did better both before & after (e.g. Brighton Rock & Gandhi), and there are many other, finer war-comedies (e.g. Dr Strangelove).
Unfortunately there are few other enduring films about WW1. However, if you want to see this one done well, I suggest going to see a stage performance of it or buying the book. It may be costly, but there are reasons OWALW is still popular...