Joseph Losey (1964)
At the start of King and Country (which is shot in black and white by Denys Coop), the camera moves slowly across the stone figures of soldiers on a war memorial. There are photographs of the Great War (from the Imperial War Museum collection); and the voice of Tom Courtenay, who will play a major role in the drama that follows, reads A E Housman’s lines:
‘Here dead we lie
Because we did not choose
To live and shame the land
From which we sprung.
Life, to be sure,
Is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is,
And we were young.’
These images and words are very powerful: all that detracts from their power is the awareness that King and Country is directed by Joseph Losey, who, whenever he has an important socio-political message to convey on screen, can be relied upon to convey it with arty overemphasis. King and Country – adapted from a stage play by John Wilson (which was based on a 1955 novel, Return to the Wood, by James Lansdale Hobson) – dramatises the court-martial of Arthur Hamp, a British army private, accused of desertion. Hamp (Courtenay), who, in civilian life, worked as a cobbler in Islington, volunteered at the outbreak of war; by the time of Passchendaele, in late 1917, Hamp is the sole survivor of the company of which he was originally part. As he explains to Captain Hargreaves (Dirk Bogarde), the officer who will be defending him, Hamp suddenly realised that he couldn’t stand soldiering any longer; he walked away from his colleagues with the idea of carrying on walking all the way back to London. The defence offered by Hargreaves in the trial is, in effect, one of diminished responsibility. Hamp is found guilty, nevertheless, and sentenced to death by firing squad.
At eighty-eight minutes, King and Country is concise and the two lead actors make it absorbing but nothing matches the grave eloquence of the prologue. Unless the stage play has been fundamentally reworked, much of the polemical crudeness of the writing is an inheritance rather than the invention of the screenwriter Evan Jones although this crudeness may have appealed to Losey. Within a few seconds of the start of the first long dialogue between Hamp and Hargreaves, the director is inserting momentary images of Hamp’s London background: these either are sentimental or supply sledgehammer irony. (For example: Hamp explains to Hargreaves that his wife has gone off with another man; Losey cuts to the man, supposedly Hamp’s friend, who sits smugly in bed with a verse from holy scripture embroidered on the wall hanging behind him.) This exchange between Hargreaves and Hamp, like most of what follows, is predictably one-sided: the young soldier’s simplicity and honesty unintentionally but persistently discomforts the more sophisticated officer, breaking down the latter’s initial snooty impatience. Once into the court martial proceedings, it’s Hargreaves who has all the good lines against the opposition – the canny but uneasy presiding colonel (Peter Copley), a bellicose, blustering medical officer (Leo McKern) – even though the result of the trial is a foregone conclusion. While this is going on, Hamp’s fellow soldiers try to entertain themselves in the foul trenches by conducting a trial of one of the plentiful rats and carrying out the death penalty on one of the poor creatures. The juxtaposition is nothing if not obvious. When Hamp is eventually executed, the firing squad is so incompetent they fail to finish him off; the remorseful but responsible Hargreaves steps in to do the job.
King and Country is tough to watch, partly because of the intrinsically upsetting subject matter but partly too because of the way the thing is done: the film is, in artistic terms, easy to see through and to dismiss; its subject deserves better. It’s hard, though, to see how the two main parts could be better played. Tom Courtenay, more theatrical than Dirk Bogarde, shows a lot of skill and invention as Hamp: Courtenay’s especially good at suggesting someone whose emotional alertness is much greater than his intellect. Bogarde embodies the morally divided Hargreaves perfectly – almost too perfectly: his casting, at this distance in time, seems obvious. The essential qualities of Bogarde’s screen persona have, in combination, a curious effect: exuding intelligence, he carries in his face and his bearing the burden of British officer class guilt; but he also suggests that Hargreaves may be sexually attracted to Hamp. (And, when Hamp’s mates get hold of alcohol and get themselves and the condemned man drunk on the eve of his execution, the physical and emotional intimacy is on the cusp between the homosocial and the homosexual.) Except for Barry Justice, odd but arresting as the conscience-stricken officer who offers legal advice to the court-martial judges, the characterisations are as obvious as the script expects them to be although Peter Copley and James Villiers (as the officer prosecuting Hamp) both give decent performances. The hopeless role of the army padre is hopelessly played by Vivian Matalon. According to a piece that David Thomson wrote for Sight and Sound in June 2014 about the cinema of World War I, the conditions for filming King and Country were all too real for the cast and crew. Yet Losey’s direction turns the mud and the rain into part of the overly deliberate aesthetic design.
2 August 2014
