Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Losey & Bogarde's worthy follow-up to The Servant, June 17, 2006
The year prior to making King & Country, director Joseph Losey and actor Dirk Bogarde had made their break-through film The Servant and scored a major critical success, becoming one of the leading actor-director teams of the English-language art-house circuit of the 1960s. King & Country was their follow-up, and it was a worthy one. The film concerns a private (Tom Courtenay) who deserts and is court-martialed during WWI. Bogarde plays the officer who defends him -- reluctantly at first, more sympathetically as he gets to know the private and the stressful battle conditions that led to his desertion.
As an anti-war film, King & Country holds few surprises, but that's not the point. Losey had worked with the great dramatist Bertolt Brecht, who believed that the content of a story mattered less than the way you told it. That logic is on display here. Losey is primarily concerned with criticizing the bureaucratic nature of military thinking and with exploring the dynamic contrasts between the upper-class officers and working-class enlisted men, each of whom understand duty and fate in very different ways. The movie is deliberately paced, but the running time is quite short, and the performances of the ensemble cast are uniformly excellent. Losey also avoids inadvertantly glorifying war, as so many otherwise sincere anti-war films do when they give us the vicarious thrill of battle by aestheticizing military conflict (like Kubrick's Paths of Glory) or when they give us solace in the male cameraderie of soldiers (like Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front). In that regard, King & Country is one of the more successful anti-war films because we never want to be with these characters even though we do sympathize with them.
VCI's DVD is pleasing but flawed. The print is very clean and in the correct 1.66:1 aspect ratio. Unfortunately, VCI used a short-cut by simply porting over the British transfer (which was released on DVD by British Home Entertainment, I believe). The drawback is that British TVs use the PAL system, whereas American TVs use NTSC. As a result, VCI's DVD runs a little too fast and exhibits "ghosting" (a slight blurriness during panning shots). The print is good enough and the movie is static enough that it isn't distracting on regular tube TVs. It's just a shame that VCI didn't pay for a better transfer.
I also sympathize with Robert's review below: There is indeed no subtitle option on this DVD. That's unfortunate because the combination of various British accents with the poor recording equipment of the British film industry of the 1950s and 1960s means that making out what's being said can be difficult. (I lived in Britain for a time, where I got used to some of the accents, but even I had to concentrate very hard.) Finally, VCI has not anamorphically enhanced this film, which means it won't fill up a widescreen TV. That doesn't bother me with films in 1.66:1. Apparently, many labels have difficulty making that aspect ratio anamorphic.
In sum, this is a thoughtful movie that deserves wider appreciation. It serves as one of the more accessible of Losey's "difficult" films, and the DVD is worth purchasing, especially since you can regularly find it for under $10 now.
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16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a very powerful anti-war film, June 29, 1999
The horrors of real war experienced by soldiers are vividly explored in this excellent movie. There are few, if any, neutral scenes as the film shows typical conditions that fightingmen go through. And, Courtenay's performance as a normal person in uniform is credible and compelling.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"KIng and Country" won British "best picture" and Courtenay, November 20, 2008
"best actor" at the Venice Film Festival that year--both well-deserved honors. Courtenay's cockney and young, fair face with his sometimes affect-less eyes (which I attribute not to stupidity, but to shell-shock: how many stupid men respond "I don't know" to every question of motive put to them?) and Bogarde's crisp, precise English, his dark, expressive eyes, often belying the lack of expression in his face--are perfect foils for each other.
If this is a sound stage--it's the wettest one I ever saw! It rains almost constantly, everyone gets muddy, there are no glass windows, the corrugated metal roof is torn, and everyone is constantly tramping through the mud.
There IS an extra fillup for us pacifists: the trial, which showed signs of turning on a point of military law, resolves itself on a point of military expediency of surpassing idiocy--we will execute this man because the men need a boost to their morale. WHO is stupid around here?
Besides the drama unfolding before us, we get to witness the court marshal of a rat, who has bitten the ear of a sleeping enlisted man (encouraged by his wakeful comrades). He is confined in some sort of metal container with wire over one end, as his prosecuting atourney asks him questions, rapping on the metal container with a metal rod...eventually he begins to squeak. He is duly executed with rocks.
Courtenay vomits up the Eucharist.
As the firing squad is given the order to shoot, we are stationed directly behind one of its members, and we see his gun moving off target (I think this was common practice, perhaps even ordered by officers, that almost all of the men aimed badly, only one or two aiming well, so that all did not have to feel guilty....
Good God, what a glorious thing is war!
When Bogarde is told why his defense of the private failed, he looks in the mirror and recites a bit of Carroll nonsense:
There's a porpoise close behind me
And he's treading on my tail.
Nonsense?
5 stars.
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