Sword of Honour

This is a splendid effort by all concerned, especially given the time constraint of about 200 minutes. As well as men and women are still marching off to war to save Western civilization, the movie has a contemporary message. The brevity of the movie, given that it tells a story, originally told in three novels goes against it. So much plot and many characters have been left out seriously compromising Waugh's comic vision. Waugh's original novels contain very amusing dialogue and much of the novels are just dialogue, the writer creating character out of what people say. Although the script used snippets of Waugh's dialogue,there is lots and lots unused. However, the script writers and all the people involved in the production did a masterful job of salvaging something of Waugh's original story. The other major flaw is in the casting of Daniel Craig as Guy Crouchback. Craig does not have the aristocratic presence to play Guy. His features, stature,and movement suggest a working class hero; he is great for contemporary characters where class is not an issue. But Waugh's works are all about class and Daniel Craigdoes not look the part of an aristocrat. He would be fine as a Lawrencian hero, Birket in Women in Love, for example. The rest of the casting is more or less spot on with some splendid choices of actors for Guy's father, Virginia, Ivor Claire, Ritchie-Hook,and Trimmer and everybody else. The book is both so much more outrageously funny and profound about life than the movie. Read the book but enjoy the movie,too; the chaps who made the film have obviously put on a good show in difficult circumstances. I am now going to reread the book for the umpteenth time. The movie inspires that.

I was unaware of this film adaptation of Waugh's trilogy until today's showing on British freeview TV, and missing the first half hour, also missed the chance to record it to DVD. Drat. Until I saw it. Very pretty production by Channel 4 TV and Talkback, made some 8 years back, before Daniel Craig became a superstar.

I've read and reread a lot of Waugh but believed Sword of Honour to be an inexplicably stolid, inaccessibly unreadable work, so big, so long, so dull. Brideshead was the beginning of the end, the trilogy was the end writ large.

Until I found the BBC radio adaptation from 1974, over 11 hours rather than this film's 4. After a few hours I began to see the early Waugh wrapped inside the less obviously satirical wrappings, his humour and gravity. The genius, in short.

They don't make them like Waugh any more, nor do they make the people; the 1974 recording was made in time to catch many authentic sounding voices from the era, and some very fine acting. A gem which I recommend to any Waugh fans.

This film seems to be, probably, a rather adroit shot at a script which condenses a huge tome to a few hours, but the vowels are comprehensive school, Craig is hopelessly wrong, and there are but a few flashes of sharp observation and very little wit. But the audio version is available on the internet, and of course the pictures are better.

'Sword of Honour' can be seen as an update of the Boultings' 'Pilgrim's Progress' - an anachronistic idealist fights in World War Two for reasons of chivalric honour, only to see the world overrun by liars, cheats, murderers, cowards and lunatics; where decency is pointless, even dangerous.

William Boyd's restructuring of Waugh's war trilogy is a miracle of adaptation - his leavening of verbal humour with slapstick; his capturing of Waugh's elliptical tone; his creation of haunting visual patterns acting as counterpoint to the horrific satire that is the war. There is one haunting sequence amid so much disintegration, the false bomb warning during Virginia's post-natal party, that magically hints at forces beyond man's self-defeating endeavour, while also rescuing a character Waugh was rather hard on. In the moral sense.

My only real gripe is about the Sten gun used by Crouchback during the Crete campaign...they werent issued yet....historically, it would have been a Thompson.

Just watched this with my better half on DVD. I had read the books before, she hadn't.

I was positively surprised that the writers did not change much of Waugh's novels for dramatic condensation; they just omitted lots of peripheral characters and events of minor meaning to the overall plot.

The main characters are well cast and the acting is excellent. In contrast to some other reviewers, I am convinced that Daniel Craig is the perfect fit for his appearing neutral in the crucial point of class. Guy does not represent a specific class in the novels either: He's too catholic and too old for being a "chap" among the officers, he is too introverted and serious to succeed in society, and too rich and educated and considering to be a role model for the ordinary men. No, he remains an outsider to all worlds - which gives him the best position for observing and documenting all the others.

My better half liked the acting and thought the film gave her two good evenings of entertainment. Yet she was confused with the abrupt changes of locations and times (I had no problems with that with all the background knowledge of the novels and the dozens of Wikipedia pages I consulted to understand the novel's story while reading it).

I can understand her: If you are not really into WWII (and even more: if you are non-British), you really get lost if those sandy rocks now represent mock Crete in Scotland, Egypt or real Crete and what the heck were the British doing in Greece anyway? I don't think it was a good choice to split the story in two parts, while the book is made of three. The story lacks a stringent climactic structure anyway (life seldomly follows the rules scriptwriters have set for entertaining plots), and stopping in the midst of volume 2 does not really make things better. Maybe a 3 or 4 part miniseries with a run-time of 7 or 8 hours total would have been more fitting with the Crete and Yugoslavia episodes deserving a full leg of attention.

What I missed was the mentioning of Stalin. In the novel, two of Stalin's moves are main triggers for Guy's decisions: The Hitler-Stalin-pact of '39 convinces Guy to go back to England, join the army and fight the forces of evil. Germany's invasion of the USSR in '41 causes Stalin to change sides which makes Guy doubt his cause. The co-operation of the Allies with Stalin's Soviet Untion forms the quintessence of his conviction of the overall senselessness of his efforts. I can see that it is hard to make this fit into a movie version, but not to mention it at all? I also missed Stalin's sword mentioned although it is the name-giver to Waugh's trilogy.

What became clear to me after watching it is that the material is still well suited for movie or series adaptations. So, Netflix, Amazon - anyone?