Oh, What a Lovely 1917
1917, directed by Sam Mendez, starring Dean Charles-Chapman and George McKay, is in my list of my favorite films of all time. And for good reason! I remember when I saw it for the first time in 2019. It was my sophomore year of college, and it was back when I lived in New York City. It was cool and rainy that evening, but I made a habit of going to the AMC to take advantage of their $5 ticket deal every Tuesday so that I could experience the cinema. I loved going to the theater by myself. I was especially excited that evening simply because I could not wait to see 1917. I knew going in that it was a World War I film, and earlier that year I had performed in a mainstage show at Marymount called Oh, What a Lovely War!- if it weren’t for what I learned about the first world war in that show I don’t think I would have the understanding and appreciation for the detail and care that went into the making of 1917 as the horrific historical masterpiece that it is.
1917’s story is relatively simple. Two brave companions, Lance Corporals Blake (Charles-Chapman) and Schofield (Mckay) partake on an almost impossible quest, with 1,600+ souls doomed to a horrible grisly fate if they fail. One of those souls is the brother of Blake, which is why Blake’s been selected in the first place. Oh, and did I mention it’s World War 1- one of the most brutal and unforgiving wars that this world has ever seen? Trench warfare, modern gunnery, literal hell on Earth?
I decided to do this re-watching of 1917 paired with a watch of the 1960’s film of Oh, What a Lovely War! to get a bird’s eye view of the horrors of World War One from varying perspectives. 1917 has a very literal take- the film is shot in an almost continuous manner, grounded in the reality of the situation. Lovely War is exactly the opposite- its take on the war is more conceptual than anything, that the ‘war game’ is for clowns. Both are two sides of the same coin- World War I was a war fought by children, and resulted in the endless destruction of millions upon millions of lives for, well, nothing. It was a war wrought with blunders, and the massacres resulting from those blunders left scars on the landscape of Europe that are still visible today.
“Brother Bertie went away
To do his bit the other day
With a smile on his lips
and his Lieutenant's pips
upon his shoulder bright and gay
As the train moved out he said,
'Remember me to all the birds.'
And he wagg'd his paw
and went away to war
Shouting out these pathetic words:
Goodbye-ee, goodbye-ee,
Wipe the tear, baby dear, from your eye-ee,
Tho' it's hard to part I know,
I'll be tickled to death to go.
Don't cry-ee, dont sigh-ee,
there's a silver lining in the sky-ee,
Bonsoir, old thing, cheer-i-o, chin, chin,
Nap-poo, toodle-oo, Goodbye-ee.”
Schofield and Blake make their way down the trenches to meet General Erinmore (Colin Firth) and receive the orders to call off the next morning’s attack at the front, led by Colonel Mackenzie (Benedict Cumberbatch). They are to cross No Man’s Land. The significance of the fear in their eyes as they cross out of the trenches is very well placed. No Man’s Land was hell- bodies decaying everywhere, unable to be given proper burial. Half decayed men and horses. Flies. barbed wire that if you fell into, you’d get tangled, strangled, or pierced to death. You’d find men hanging on it, having gotten stuck and died. Mendez and his team don’t shy away from putting these grisly practical effects in, and it really illustrates to an unknowing audience- “Oh. This isn’t some war film where the heroes survive and we win the war and there aren’t any bodies or ptsd or myopic fantasies about battles. This is real, this is serious.” Slip into the wrong puddle and you’d lose your entire leg to trench foot and decay. (Sometimes the puttees that the soldiers wore literally held the decaying flesh of their legs together. Isn’t that awful?)
“If you want the old battalion, we know where they are,
They're hanging on the old barbed wire,
We've seen them, we've seen them,
Hanging on the old barbed wire,
We've seen them, we've seen them,
Hanging on the old barbed wire.”
And, what makes the expanse of bodies worse, is that most of them were indeed children. You had to be 18 to sign up, but that didn’t stop a lot of 14/15 year olds from lying to have a crack at defending their country. It was not a kind war. No armor, no glory, or bulletproof vests. We see the reality of machine warfare on the unprepared- after crossing through booby-trapped German trenches (which were a lot better constructed than the British ones tbh) all it takes is one stray bullet to catch and kill Blake. “Write to my mum for me.”
Schofield’s response was incredibly accurate as well. He had a job to do, and needed to see that job done. He states, “It doesn’t do to dwell on it.” which is how most men responded to the horrors they’d seen. What else could he do but keep moving forward? When the war ended, most men refused to talk about it. It simply wasn’t discussed.
“And when they ask us, how dangerous it was,
Oh, we'll never tell them, no, we'll never tell them:
We spent our pay in some cafe,
And fought wild women night and day,
'Twas the cushiest job we ever had.”
The war did sneak itself into a few major literary works that you may recognize. If you’ve ever read J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings you’d know that he himself fought at the Somme. Frodo Baggins perfectly exemplifies the way the soldiers came back from that war- not a soul back in Hobbiton knew what Frodo had done. Not a single one cared that he carried the root of a great evil across the world and cast it into the fire. No one thought any more of him even after everything he suffered and went through. No one paid him any kind words about the friends he had lost along the way. Frodo never completely healed from his journey to Mordor, and neither did the soldiers. Frodo would forever carry the pain of the Morgul blade that he took at Weathertop till the day he would die. No one leaves a war whole and well.
“I want to go home, I want to go home,
I don't want to go in the trenches no more,
Where whizzbangs and shrapnel they whistle and roar.
Take me over the sea, where the alleyman can't get at me;
Oh my, I don't want to die, I want to go home.”
Schofield is knocked unconscious, and when he awakes he makes a run for it through enemy territory, with only flames and flares to light his way. The cinematography in that scene is INSANE. Schofield jumps into the river and nearly drowns, but is able to hang onto some bloated bodies floating in the water. Bodies all wearing different uniforms, but dead nonetheless. No time to clean up the dead! No time to mourn or cry! It’s the morning of the attack, and now the audience is counting down the minutes to Mackenzie’s attack on the front. The tension builds during the ballad “I am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger”- the camera focuses on each child’s face, and the audience is filled with the grim prospect that these boys will all soon be dead. If not in this pointless battle, then the next.
Schofield narrowly gets the message to Colonel Mackenzie after the first wave is sent over, and tells Blake’s brother (Richard Madden) the news of Blake’s passing. Blake passes out at the foot of a tree. “Hope is a dangerous thing.” I feel like the true tragedy of the film is leaving with the knowledge that this was just 48 hours. The war lasted for four years. Every single day was just like this one. It’s hard to imagine death on that scale, and I think that Sam Mendez does a stellar job at showing the horrors behind the history of 1917.
