国王与国家 / King and Country (1964)

　　1964英国剧情战争片《国王与国家》由约瑟夫·罗西导演，德克·博加德主演，影片讲述的是：
The last time Britain was a major force in world cinema was in the 1960s a documentary of a few years back on the subject was entitled Hollywood UK This was the era of the Kitchen Sink social realism angry young men above all the theatrical And yet ironically the best British films of the decade were made by two Americans Richard Lester and Joseph Losey who largely stayed clear of the periods more typical subject matter which like all attempts at greater realism now seems curiously archaic
King and Country though seems to be the Losey film that tries to belong to its era Like Look Back in Anger and A Taste of Honey it is based on a play and often seems cumbersomely theatrical Like Loneliness of the long distance runner its hero is an exploited reluctantly transgressive working class lad played by Tom Courtenay Like the admittedly brilliant Charge of the Light Brigade it is a horrified nearfarcical though humourless look at the horrors of war most particularly its gaping class injustices
Private Hamp is a young volunteer soldier at Pachendaele having served three years at the front who is courtmartialled for desertion Increasingly terrorised by the inhuman pointlessness of trench warfare the speedy grisly violent deaths of his comrades and the medieval ratinfested conditions of his trench he claims to have emerged dazed from one gruesome attack and decided to walk home to England He is defended by the archetypal British officer Captain Hargreaves who professes disdain for the mans cowardice but must do his duty He attempts to spin a defence on the grounds of madness but the uppercrust officers have heard it all before
This is a very nice duly horrifying liberalhandwringing middleclass play It panders to all the cliches of the Great War the disgraceful workingclass massacre while the officers sup whiskey Haig figured in some charmingly obvious symbolism Hargreaves throwing a dying cigarette in the mud Hamp hysterically playing blind mans buff
The sets are picturesquely grim medieval a modern inferno as these men lie trapped in a neverending subterranean labyrinth lit by hellish fires with rats for company and the constant sound of shells and gunfire reminding them of the outside world
The play in a very middleclass way is not really about the working class at all Hamp is more of a symbol an essence lying in the dark desolately playing his harmonica a note of humanity in a score of inhumanity He doesnt develop as a character The play is really about Hargreaves his realisation of the shabby inadequacy of notions like duty He develops This realisation sends him to drink tastier than dying Like his prole subordinates he falls in the mud just as Hamp is said to have done he even says to his superior We are all murderers
This is all very effective if not much of a development of RC Sherriffs creaky Journeys End filmed by James Whale in 1930 Its earnestness and verbosity may seem a little stilted in the age of Paths of Glory and Dr Strangelove we may feel that Blackadder goes forth is a truer representation of the Great War But what I have described is not the film Losey has made He is too sophisticated and canny an intellectual for that
The film opens with a lingering pan over one of those monumental War memorials you see all over Britain and presumably Europe as if to say Losey is going to question the received ideas of this statue the human cost But what hes really questioning is this play and its woeful inadequacy to represent the manifold complexities of the War
This is Brechtian filmmaking at its most subtle We are constantly made aware of the artifice of the film the theatrical the stilted dialogue is spoken with deliberate stiffness theatrical rituals are emphasised the initial interrogation the court scene where actors literally tread the boards enunciating the predictable speeches the mirrorplay put on by the hysterical soldiers and the rats the religious ceremony the horrible farce of the execution Proscenium arches are made prominent audiences observe events
This is a play that would seek to contain humanise explain the Great War This is a hopeless task as Loseys provisional apparatus explains real photographs of harrowing detritus fading from the screen as if even these are not enough to convey the War never mind a wellmade bourgeois play Loseys vision may be apocalyptic it questions the possibility of representation at all the various tags of poetry quoted make no impact on hard men men who rattled them off when young the Shakespearean duality of noble drama commented on by low comedy effects no transcendence no greater insight
Loseys camerawork and composition repeatedly breaks our involvement with the drama any wish we might have for manly sentimentality in one remarkable scene an officer takes an Aubrey Beardsley book from the cameraman This idea of the theatrical evidently mirrors the rigid class roles played by the main characters Hamps father and grandfather were cobblers too presumably Hargreaves were always Sandhurst cadets Losey also takes a sideswipe at the kitchen sink project by using its tools history has borne him out