SYNOPSIS
Having begun his career as an actor celebrated for his performances in the likes of Brighton Rock, The Great Escape and Séance on a Wet Afternoon, Richard Attenborough made his directorial debut in 1969 with Oh! What a Lovely War, a satirical history of World War I told through the British music hall tradition.
Adapted from Joan Littlewood’s 1963 stage musical of the same name (itself a reworking of Charles Chilton’s 1961 radio play The Long Long Trail), Oh! What a Lovely War restages the events of the Great War. As the film traces the progression of the conflict from the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 to the Armistice of November 1918, it intertwines the fortunes of the everyman Smith family with performances of popular wartime music, from the recruitment song “I’ll Make a Man of You” to the airmen’s anthem “The Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-ling-a-ling.”
Featuring a who’s who of British acting talent from Dirk Bogarde to Michael Redgrave and Maggie Smith, Attenborough’s first film as director earned him a raft of BAFTA nominations and set him on the path to making A Bridge Too Far, Gandhi and Chaplin. The Masters of Cinema Series is honoured to present Oh! What a Lovely War on Blu-ray for the first time anywhere in the world.
SPECIAL FEATURES
Limited edition O-card slipcase featuring original poster artwork [2000 copies]
Limited edition booklet featuring new writing on Oh! What a Lovely War by Andy Dougan, author of The Actors’ Director: Richard Attenborough Behind the Camera [2000 copies]
1080p HD presentation from a restoration by Paramount Pictures
Original English mono audio
Optional English subtitles (SDH)
New audio commentary with British cinema scholars Melanie Williams and Lawrence Napper
Archival audio commentary with director Richard Attenborough
Your Country Needs You – new interview with film historian Simon Brown on depictions of World War I in British cinema, from The Battle of the Somme to 1917
Extensive making-of documentary presented in three parts: “Welcome to World War I,” “The Smith Family Album” and “Keep the Home Fires Burning”
domino harvey wrote: Tue May 27, 2014 1:24 amOh! What a Lovely War (Richard Attenborough 1969) An odd film, wherein Britain's involvement in the first world war is reenacted via vignettes staged on a boardwalk carnival (though like Olivier's Henry V, the high-concept is eventually fleshed out with more conventional bits as it goes on), with the action often intercut with musical numbers derived from actual songs of the period. It's an audacious concept, and Attenborough initially exhibits a strong visual wit to bolster audience confidence it can be pulled off. But like the war itself, this thing just keeps going and going and doesn't turn out to have much else to offer other than the one clever conceptual idea repeated over and over to diminishing results. At eighty minutes or so, this might have been an interesting experiment, but at two and a half hours, it's just too much. I was impressed with the final shot, though not enough to forget I'd been counting down the clock for a while leading up to it.
This ridiculously overlong film of World War One scenes and songs contains one of Maggie Smith’s finest screen moments.
She portrays a music hall star in a rather sinister recruiting scene, belting out a raucously sexy number about catering to the armed services. She displays all her customary casual glamour and blinding charisma, stalking about the stage with loose-limbed elegance. No wonder the impressionable young men in the audience are drawn into her clutches and passed swiftly into the arms of the recruiting sergeant.
The film also has a delightfully unexpected number from Jean-Pierre Cassel, taking time away from Renoir, Chabrol and Bunuel to do a jaunty dance number about Belgium’s wartime collapse.
BluRay should be an ideal medium to experience this film (if it’s properly chapterised - on the songs), allowing viewers to jump to the effective moments and skip the characteristic Attenborough plod plod plodding.
Last edited by ethel on Sat Apr 11, 2026 6:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
It was a much better experience on stage, and I still have a vinyl of its original production that my father bequeathed to me.
Attenborough was indeed responsible for many interminable, hopelessly uneven films. I saw Chaplin again recently and was astonished by how paint-by-numbers and lifeless it is, and it has a time jump edit so cornball in execution that I thought a xylophone would appear on the soundtrack
beamish14 wrote: Sat Apr 11, 2026 6:53 am
Attenborough was indeed responsible for many interminable, hopelessly uneven films. I saw Chaplin again recently and was astonished by how paint-by-numbers and lifeless it is, and it has a time jump edit so cornball in execution that I thought a xylophone would appear on the soundtrack
I'm forever thinking about Young Winston as the prime example of giving grand budgets and grand subjects to someone who manages to overlook the point. The film does a lot right in many departments - scale, atmosphere, casting - but completely leaves out what it was like to be Winston Churchill. The whole thing is external and uninvolved, to a baffling degree.
