Sword Sword honour 9 of 9 people found the

							Sword/honour.9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
        And Yet It Moves, April 20, 2009
By
Stephanie DePue


This review is from: Sword of Honour (DVD)
"Sword of Honour,"is a British television serial, a World War II costume historical drama
that was a 2001 TalkBack production for Britain's adventurous BBC Channel 4. The
DVD box set runs approximately 193 minutes, and includes an Evelyn Waugh biography.

The series stars Daniel Craig, before he became the sixth actor to portray that dashing
undercover agent, Bond, James Bond. It's based on the wartime trilogy of novels that
goes by the same name, (which consists of Men at Arms (1952);Officers and Gentlemen
(1955); and Unconditional Surrender: The Conclusion of Men at Arms and Officers and
Gentlemen (1961)); by the noted British satirical/comic author Evelyn Waugh. A cursory
reading of any biographical material on the well-known, best-selling Waugh (Brideshead
Revisited), serves to illustrate that it closely follows the author's own World War II
experiences.

Craig (Quantum of Solace,Defiance), plays 35-year old, wealthy Englishman Guy
Crouchback, who comes back from Italy to England at the beginning of the war,
determined to get in on it, though he is too old for most wartime purposes. As a good
Catholic, one among the heavily-populated gallery of such that Waugh created,
Crouchback seeks moral redemption in a "good war" after a nasty divorce that echoes
Waugh's own first. But Crouchback won't find his good war: from first to last, his war is
populated by alcoholics, cheats, cowards and crazy men, again, apparently, closely
mirroring Waugh's actual wartime experience. Megan Dodds (Love in a Cold Climate)
plays Crouchback's tempting ex-wife Virginia, who comes back into his life, first
taunting him for his religious rigidity, then relying upon it. A highly distinguished cast of
supporting actors is headed by Richard Coyle (Coupling - The Complete Seasons 1-4);
and Leslie Phillips (Love on a Branch Line.) The acting is uniformly excellent, and Craig
is outstanding. The story moves reasonably fast, and is full of incidents, and interesting
characters.

The producers have certainly filmed Waugh's downbeat story with an open hand. In
addition to its notable cast, there's lots of location shooting, in the various uncomfortable
places that war can take you. Lots of what certainly appear to me to be accurate for the
period vehicles, clothes, interiors, and war toys, big and small. There are shocking
juxtapositions: Waugh was noted for that. A trussed-up wounded general, being fork
lifted aboard ship, tells Crouchback that his wounded, hospitalized friend Apthorpe has
killed himself by sucking down, overnight, the bottle of whisky Crouchback had brought
him with the best of intentions. The war is not a good war for many of the people it
touches, including, later, some of the displaced Jewish refugees adrift in Communist
Croatia. (This particular incident not only echoes the timetable of Waugh's War; it forms
the basis of one of his best short stories, "Compassion," in his The Complete Short
Stories . We've got to assume there's lived experience behind it.)

Seems many reviewers are not happy with the unhappy tenor of the story, but that's
Waugh's outlook. He once said, "Fortune is the least capricious of deities, and arranges
things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be very happy for very long."
Nevertheless, as that famous Italian scientist Galileo once said, "eppur si muove." And
yet it moves. "Sword" moves in two senses: the story does offer lots of action and
incident; and either Waugh or the scriptwriters have managed to come up with a
reasonably hopeful ending to it. Despite the cruelty of war to Crouchback, his friends,
lovers and acquaintances, there still is a future.