Cartoon Empires

The program notes for Tony Richardson’s new version of The Charge of the Light Brigade explain that “four previous productions of this epic and disastrous chapter of British history have entertained audiences in their own way, but, from the historians’ point of view, they have all been totally inaccurate.”

That’s pretty damned inaccurate; did they really manage to get everything wrong? No matter, don’t despair: “Who better then to right this state of affairs than Tony Richardson?” ask his publicists after describing him as “a seeker after realism and truth.” How does he meet this new challenge that others have botched in the past? Easy. “By simply telling the truth, Richardson has been able to show the disaster for what it really was. With the facade of pomp and pageantry ripped away, we are left with the fascinating story of the real charge of the Light Brigade.”

But what we are really left with is a full-color caricature version of history, a debunking job with all the subtlety of collegiate lampoon, and, ironically, a muddled ending that leaves the viewer in complete confusion about what in fact happened, and who was responsible for sending the Brigade charging into the wrong valley.

The definitive comment on the charge itself was delivered by a French military observer who said “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.” One might aptly paraphrase that comment to say of Richardson’s film, “It’s magnificent, but it’s not a movie.” Magnificence is there all right, in dazzling color photography of the re-created splendor of the upper-class life of Victorian England — a wedding on a lush green manor lawn, a champagne party of celebration, an elegant formal ball. These scenes are like a series of animated paintings of the period, bringing to life the healthiest, most applecheeked, fine-boned Anglo-Saxon maids and lads you have ever seen, splendidly outfitted and set against beautiful backgrounds rich with rolling meadows, limpid streams, and stately houses. Faithful to his code of “realism and truth,” however, Richardson cuts from these idyllic landscapes to the squalor of lowerclass London, and contrasts the cramped quarters of the troops with the splendor of the officers’ table. It is the most self-conscious sort of social consciousness, like one of those New York Post exposes with italicized paragraphs describing the despair of the ghetto.

The Charge of the Light Brigade

directed by Tony Richardson (United Artists)

Great Catherine

directed by Gordon Flemyng (Warner Brothers-Seven Arts)

Yellow Submarine

directed by George Dunning (United Artists)

Vanessa Redgrave is radiant as a young bride, but her unconvincing love story trails off into nothing at all, and is totally irrelevant to the plot and certainly to “historical accuracy.” David Flemmings as the young Captain Nolan is more dashing than an Olympic sprinter; John Gielgud plays Lord Raglan, commander of the British forces, as a befuddled boob who wouldn’t know when to come in out of the rain, much less how to transport an army to the Crimea; Trevor Howard makes Lord Cardigan, the Light Brigade commander, a one-dimensional cardboard caricature of a snob martinet. No matter how inept and wrongheaded these men may have really been, the caricatures of them in the movie are so overdone as to be unbelievable, and unsuited for any style except farce; Richardson might as well have gone all the way and armed the Light Brigade with banana cream pies to hurl at the enemy. But the movie jumps from farce to forced realism, and after the addled, low-comedy deliberations of the commanders, we get a battle scene of great “realistic” blood and gore, reeking with the profound and original message that War is Hell.

The film is interspersed with political cartoons done in the style of the period, with standard symbols of the Great Powers of the day moving into animation to illustrate the general political background of the conflict. Actually, the whole movie, though unintentionally, is one long cartoon, but one that is confusingly inconsistent in style, as if frames from “Li’l Abner” were mixed in with “Prince Valiant.” The grand pretensions about “truth and realism” seem mainly to be based on the naïve notion that any debunking of historical legend is a form of “honesty.”

Debunking can be fine, and fun, too, when done with a sharp and intelligent style, but in this effort Mr. Richardson does it with all the grace and discrimination of a naughty boy wielding a sledgehammer.

There is thankfully no evidence that Peter O’Toole had any pretensions of portraying the “truth” about another nineteenth-century empire in his production of Great Catherine (based on a one-act play by Shaw), but the movie shares some of the same boring attitudes toward dealing with history as does the Light Brigade: it is condescending, campy, farcical, and presented on a spectacle scale that fails to cover up the general silliness of the whole thing. Peter O’Toole is the English un-hero who bumbles into the court of Catherine as a handsome young captain, creating a classic cartoon figure of the stage Englishman — stuffy, inhibited, rigid, and as terrified as a silly schoolboy by the Empress’ attempts to seduce him.

Part of what must have been intended as the humor of the situation was O’Toole’s cliché Englishman set against the cliché Russian of Zero Mostel playing Potemkin like a roaring-drunk funny-paper version of the Father Karamazov. The one saving grace of the film is Jeanne Moreau as Catherine, for she brings real wit and style to the part of the bored and horny Empress. As in Jules and Jim, she knows how to be feminine and funny, bitchy and shrewd, all in a way that is believable.

Some critic recently complained that Miss Moreau looked old and haggard in The Bride Wore Black, and if that is true, then she certainly revived for the role of Catherine, for she is as unconventionally striking and uniquely sexy as ever. She never was anything so bland as “pretty,” but she was and still is a real dish of a woman.

While their middle-aged countrymen are hung up on trying to put down nineteenth-century empires, the Beatles are delighting in the new international empire they have created for themselves and the world — an empire of the imagination, lit with bright colors, filled with original, memorable music, and inhabited by such now familiar characters (more familiar than any characters created in conventional contemporary fiction) as Sergeant Pepper, Eleanor Rigby, the Nowhere Man, and Lady Madonna. They have succeeded in putting at least a part of that empire on film in a beautifully animated cartoon odyssey called Yellow Submarine. It is a colorful fantasy starring cartoon representations of John, Paul, Ringo, and George, conquering with their music the evil “Blue Meanies,” after a casual, comic odyssey through psychedelic seas and times. The relaxed, wry “story” provides an excuse for presenting some of the favorite Beatle songs in animated color, with some spectacularly beautiful results, especially with “When I’m 64” and “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” The “design” of the film is attributed to Heinz Edelman, and the cartoon animation is superior to anything of Disney’s in both imagination and execution. The Beatles’ presentation of their own empire in the form of cartoon is far more funny, fascinating, and generally entertaining than the historical empires portrayed in the other two movies. Instead of going back to Crimea or Catherine’s Russia, it’s a lot more fun to go forward in the Yellow Submarine.