Half a league, half a league, half a league onward… Half a league, half a league.
Half a league onward,
All in the Valley of Death
Rode the six hundred ..."
In Russia, it was forgotten immediately after the shameful defeat and try not to remember until now. There is little to see and read about this topic. From fresh to read all the volumes of Sergey Chennik, from fresh to see? hmm, nothing. I had to look from the old one. There are two films about the attack of the Light Brigade of the same name, 1936 (not yet seen) and our subject of review in 1968.
In Anglo-Saxon history and culture, the quintessence of the Crimean War is the legendary attack of the Light Brigade. A very controversial event, frankly disastrous from a military point of view (the ratio of losses and the result obtained), meaningless from the point of view of ... mm ... yes from any point of view, but cleverly "deployed" by the British purely in the direction of bravery and soldierly feat. The film is dedicated to him.
The film has the charm of an "old movie." Excellent film, beautiful voices (see, of course, you need only in the original), excellent "getting" actors in the images, "old school" presentation of film material, the lack of special effects, a lot of details. As the author of the previous review correctly noted, there are several cartoon inserts in the film, I personally did not catch the irony in them, on the contrary, I reviewed them all several times and stayed from them in complete pleasure, damn, they are delightfully racist, militaristic and not politically correct! The British Empire is shown as a beacon of peace, overshadowing the whole world with its wisdom, technical progress and high morality; neighboring nations naturally crowd near the English throne and catch the commands of Britain; the French are depicted as cowardly roosters hiding behind the back of an English lion; several chic scenes with the beating by the British in the form of bulldogs-Russia in the form of a bear with a broken nose. It is lazy to Google the history of these inserts, whether it was sarcasm, a response to the Russian aggression against Hungary in 1956 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, but they set the vector of the film narrative. Actually, no matter how twisted, but these cartoons are historically correct, at that time the British Empire, indeed, was country No. 1, and the Russian Empire was nothing more than a feudal Asian country, vegetating under the rule of Emperor Nicholas 1, so that the result of the war, however bitter for us, but not surprising, because “white people have sailed and taught themselves to think of themselves Papuans.”
From the very beginning, I decided to watch the film purely from the point of view of a lover of military history, here I really liked the show of army life, mores, conditions and conventions of the existence of a military man in the Victorian period. I cannot judge the correctness of the reflection of all the details, the correctness of the ammunition or the insignia, but on the amateur’s view everything is very worthy. The British army looks convincing, only sometimes the prop changed natural bear hats for synthetic ones. The French clearly show cardboard crafts instead of real kivers. The Russian army is not reflected correctly - instead of overcoats, all wear cloaks, in the final scene the Russian gunmen have such crowns of Lower Egypt on their heads, they are not overcoats, but hell knows what, and they are given the command of "fire" (such is not in the Russian army at all), followed by "pi" (it is for rifle fire), instead of "fire" (for artillery). The Russian cavalry is portrayed horribly, error on error.
The reflection of the battles in Alma is not at all true, Balaklava's own Valley of Death is depicted very close to the original.
The main drawback of the film is the historical unreliability of repelling the attack. The Light Brigade disaster was caused not by aristocratic squabbles or Lord Raglan not getting enough sleep, but by systemic errors in Victorian Britain and, by extension, the army. In the film, on the contrary, it is shown that all the problems were only due to the drowsiness of Lord Cardigan and the temporary clouding of the mind of Captain Nolan, who did not understand the disposition and order of Lord Raglan. Second, the drama of the attack itself is portrayed in a way that only a person who knows the subject can understand. Watching the movie, you don’t feel the situation that Lucan and Cardigan were in when they got this order, you don’t see it. The way the attack was shot is not impressive. Generally speaking, the charge of the cavalry is the quintessence of war (at least war before the tank period), a terrible, monstrously powerful and beautiful moment. It was necessary to remove it with long plans, from a height (as shown by the attack of the cavalry in the historical farce "Kingdom of Heaven"), along the formation of the Brigade, but this required other film capabilities (although All Quiet on the Western Front was filmed by the operator in 1930 revolutionary!), there are many close plans, the fight for the Russian battery of crumpled and not shown (and in fact the British very effectively "mowed" the battery and scattered around themselves Russian units, in many ways superior to the British in number). The ending of the film is not quite clear, or it is an anti-militarist film, but then why all the jingo-patriotics, or it is a film that glorifies war, but then it must be a lubric with “heroes on horseback”, and here it is shown that horses and heroes were mowed during the attack. The only explanation is a film about personalities, they say, here were the following personalities involved in this historical event.
Should we watch? war lovers, history-yes. In the collection? for a great amateur.
