Tuesday 10 August 2010

Charge of the Light Brigade (1936)

Believe it or not we haven't had this movie on this blog before. This is a Spanish dub but visually it's the best on Youtube I can find. If you've never seen this movie before beware - it's not really much in there about the Crimean War - it's mostly set in India and curiously doesn't really have any Russians in it other than this bit, but that's Hollywood for you. Maybe this should be seen as a 'They Died with their Boots On' fancy dress version, or some sort of alternate reality where Hollywood covers British military subjects, but it's hard not to like this sequence, even taking into account the dozens of horses killed by the trip wire system which has caused this film to be a bit neglected in recent years. Does anyone know of any Russian movies about the Crimea? It seems strange given their penchant for historical movies that there hasn't been any.

1 comment:

  1. I had a taped "colorized" version from Ted Turner's 1980s experiment in colorization that nobody asked for. I think the next week the extras from this movie went back to shooting American Indians. The Sepoy Mutiny was turned around and events from that event were used for the India sequences with Loyal Sepoys fighting the evil "Suristanies."

    All in all the Charge sequence does have the basic kits of the lancers, hussars, and dragoons.

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