Oh! What a Lovely War (1969): Richard Attenborough’s radical roots

The late 1960s were a golden age for radical, anti-authoritarian Leftist cinema, and no wonder when you look at the stature of the directors making such films: Jean-Luc Godard, Costa-Gavras, Glauber Rocha, Richard Attenborough. Wait – Richard Attenborough? Sir Richard Attenborough? Sir Richard Santa Claus Attenborough, Oscar darling of the 1980s, man whose only significant controversy involved lax safety standards at his dinosaur theme park? Yes, as Eureka Masters of Cinema reminds us with their new Blu-Ray, the future director of Gandhi and A Bridge Too Far made his directorial debut with an adaptation of Joan Littlewood’s classic anti-war musical Oh! What a Lovely War, about the avoidable horror of World War I and the generation of terrible, pompous, out-of-touch leaders who made it happen.

Maybe this shouldn’t be so surprising. Gandhi is, after all, an anti-colonialist film – one that’s radically different in both aesthetics and resources to the ones Rocha was making in Brazil and the Congo, but that is nevertheless what it is. And for all Attenborough was an untested director at this point, he was a known quantity as an actor, an actor who specialised in roles less cosy than the ones which typified his later career. He was most famous for his groundbreaking, gritty performance as the teenage hood Pinky in the Boulting brothers’ adaptation of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. One year after he made Oh! What a Lovely War, he’d star in the film adaptation of Loot by Joe Orton, a man second only to Edward Bond as the most controversial playwright of the 1960s.

Attenborough is not present in the cast of Oh! What a Lovely War, making him perhaps the only British actor of his generation who isn’t in there somewhere. The line-up is full of recognisable faces, including a few people who’d go on to be famous some time later; apparently a young Jane Seymour makes her screen debut somewhere in the chorus line. The film is also sprinkled with as many future Dames and Sirs as could be persuaded to appear in something as subversive as this, which obviously means a lot of Redgraves but also John Gielgud, Dirk Bogarde, Maggie Smith and Ralph Richardson. At times, the sheer weight of star cameos is very helpful in allowing the viewer to navigate the infamously overcomplicated politics of World War I. Leadership of the British troops passes from Laurence Olivier to John Mills, while the early diplomatic arguments are a bit easier to follow when they’re between American President Frank Forsyth and French President Ian Holm.

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All well and good, but what’s it about? Here’s where the film hits a snag. Joan Littlewood’s original play was developed with her Theatre Workshop group; it does not, strictly speaking, have an author, nor does it really have a plot. Littlewood’s abhorrence of war was such that she even resisted the idea of putting on an anti-war play, so it’s no wonder the stage Oh! What a Lovely War doesn’t follow the conventional lost-innocence narrative of a standard anti-war drama. It is not Testament of Youth, nor is it Full Metal Jacket; it is a revue show of authentic World War I songs, ranging from the cynical to the heartbreakingly naive, played out in front of statistics revealing the nightmarish loss of life that ensued.

Attenborough and his uncredited screenwriter Len Deighton keep the episodic structure, juiced by the parade of star cameos: Maggie Smith’s propagandist showgirl sings the recruitment song ‘We Don’t Want to Lose You, But We Think You Ought to Go’, the soldiers mock John Mills’s Field Marshal Haig with ‘They Were Only Playing Leapfrog’. Littlewood hated the fact that Attenborough and Deighton had inserted battle scenes at all; her original production had the cast in commedia dell’arte outfits, discussing the war but never attempting to show it. Despite her misgivings, the scenes set in the trenches are the nearest the film gets to the acrid bile of the great works of art about World War I. For once, the mixture of songs and real-world horror packs an actual punch, a punch that’s only felt elsewhere in a stinging scene where churchgoers are assured that all world religions approve of this war, even waiving the sabbath for soldiers to work on. There is a bit in Robert Graves’s World War I memoir Goodbye to All That where the author, shellshocked and traumatised from his experiences on the front line, goes home and reads a letter to a newspaper in which a housewife exhorts her fellow women to breed more in order to replace the boys killed in the war. The church scene did remind me of that passage, and its implicit point that the home front can be rendered more insane by war than even the most psychologically damaged veteran.

For me Goodbye to All That is still the great literary work about World War I, in part because from its title down it’s written by a man who simply doesn’t care to please anyone any more. Littlewood’s play, by contrast, occasioned a comment from Princess Margaret that its truths “should have been said long ago”. Is such a remark from such an audience member a sign of an anti-establishment play’s ultimate success, or ultimate failure? Even with Attenborough ignoring Littlewood’s prohibition on military uniforms, we’re still nowhere near the fury found in classic treatments of World War I by Graves, or Otto Dix, or Abel Gance. But Attenborough and Deighton invent their own chilling symbology: the seaside-resort setting that frames the action, so close to the shooting-gallery staging of Stephen Sondheim’s later satirical musical Assassins, the detail of poppies being handed to characters who are about to die. The film’s ultimate mood is less angry and more sorrowful, culminating in a gutwrenching final crane shot from ace cinematographer Gerry Turpin.

Indeed, the film looks fantastic throughout – it’s easy to see why first-time director Attenborough was quickly trusted to make all manner of epics. It’s worth buying this disc, despite my misgivings about the film, for the sheer craft of it, as well as its well-stocked cupboard of knockout cameos such as Vanessa Redgrave’s fiery Sylvia Pankhurst. The extras display the extent to which Eureka have taken the film seriously, including not just an archival commentary from the late Attenborough but a new one from British cinema historians Melanie Williams and Lawrence Napper, a three-part documentary and a fascinating interview with film historian Simon Brown about World War I on-screen, which takes the representation of this conflict right up to Sam Mendes’s 1917.

GRAHAM’S ARCHIVE – OH! WHAT A LOVELY WAR