Cheap The Charge of the Light Brigade (DVD) (Tony Richardson) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of The Charge of the Light Brigade

The costumes are just unbelievable. There are literally thousands of actors and extras in the movie, all in historically correct livery. The battle scenes alone are worth the price of the DVD. I marveled at the attention of detail and huge spectacle displayed on the screen.

On the other hand, movie is a bit heavy handed in its treatment of the politics of the period. For example, there are several sections where the action switches to animated sequences. These segments both explain some of the overall political situation while providing a simplistic, but biting satire of the whole colonial British ambition.

The attitudes and behavior of the British Officer corps and upper class in general are savagely treated. Scene after scene depicts British upper class stupidity. From the officer who insists on finishing his soft boiled egg instead of leading his troops at a critical point in battle to Lord Cardigan's kinky one night stand with a junior officer's wife on the eve of the battle, the movie goes to great length to destroy the credibility of the British officer class. With such petty buffoons running the show, it's hard to imagine how the British built such a vast and wealthy empire.

A Good Try and All That
As an historical documentary this film suberbly recreates the atmosphere of a mid-19th Century British Cavalry regiment at home in the UK (only in the last third of the film does the scene shift to the Crimea). As a movie, however, it fails to engage the casual viewer, who will undoubtedly prefer the ahistorical 1937 US version, for the simple reason that the latter tells a story while the former tries to give a history lesson. There is little here to stimulate the emotions and interest of non-historians; even the few action sequences, staged in a very accurate manner and with great attention to detail, are murky and uncompelling.

For the historical buff, the film does have spot-on characterizations of Lord Cardigan and Lord Raglan, and it does an admirable job of actually depicting what the Battle of Alma looked like. But the animated 19th Century political cartoons, a good idea in theory, actually disrupt the gritty realism of the rest of the movie, and give an anachronistic Monty Python overtone to the whole film. It makes you wonder if perhaps these sequences were added in post-production, in an attempt to give some unifying clarity to the string of disjointed episodes that mark the real-life scenes of the movie.

The DVD edition of this film is "bare-bones"; the case contains only the disc, no printed material, and there are no special features worth mentioning.

Terrible
Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad...

They should have negative star ratings for movies like this.

If the British were such baffoons as this pictures makes them out to be, how did they have such an empire. Man, the rest of the world must have been filled with idiots.