The 'ol whizbang

Oh! What a Lovely War substitutes for a cowardly current-day Hollywood

By Dennis Harvey

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Given that the phrase another Vietnam (with or without fucking in the middle) probably passes through lips somewhere every .0000398 seconds at present, it might be a good moment to ponder differences between war-themed movies from the 1960s and today.

Admittedly, the Vietnam War had been going on for a while by the time significant mainstream movieland responses emerged. Among them were John Wayne's notorious The Green Berets, the morally ambiguous Patton, and myriad antiwar diatribes, of which Catch-22, MASH, Little Big Man, Joe, and Soldier Blue were just the tip — the popular hits — of an artistic iceberg. Many of these movies were set during earlier wars, but everyone knew which war they were really talking about.

Unfortunately, the ticket-buying youth who once made Billy Jack their hero currently don't answer to a zeitgeist lightning rod any more political than Spider-Man. Still, the Iraq war is an unpopular war, yes? Excluding documentaries, foreign films, and anything else that wouldn't qualify as "Hollywood," the answer so far is hay-ell no. Jarhead and, a few years back, Three Kings made carefully neutral or confused statements placed at comfortable Gulf War arm's length. Team America thumbed its nose at a warmongering White House — and look where that got it. Meanwhile the slick Turkish hit Valley of the Wolves: Iraq has been worse-than-Hitler vilified throughout the West for negatively stereotyping occupying forces — just as we've stereotyped evil terrorist Ay-rabs in umpteen cheesy action flicks. And Michael Winterbottom's docudrama The Road to Guantanamo, which won the Silver Bear in Berlin last month, is being treated like leprosy by skittish US distributors.

All the weirder, then, to take a rare look back at 1969's Oh! What a Lovely War, which plays at the Rafael Film Center this week in a pristine archival print. This wasn't exactly a Hollywood movie; though bankrolled by Paramount's multimillion-dollar Yankee smackers, it was made by practically the entire British film industry. Still, it's an epic fantasia (based on an early '60s London stage piece) about the uselessness of war; in this case, World War I, which is depicted via — to quote the film's subtitle — "Songs, Battles, and a Few Jokes." The songs are ones soldiers actually sang at the time, from familiars like "Over Here" and "A Long Way to Tipperary" to such endearingly forgotten melodic grumbles as "Hush! Here Comes a Whizbang."

Oh! came out the same year as the similarly punctuated Hello, Dolly!, and in some unfortunate ways, they're not different enough. Every time a group opens its collective mouth, the same "rousing" professional-chorus sound comes out. The production is handsome and vast, yet impersonal. In his first directorial effort, Richard Attenborough (Gandhi, Cry Freedom) is already a bland prestige craftsman.

Conceptually, though, the two films are poles apart. Where Hello, Dolly! is elephantine fluff, Oh! conscripts its galaxy of British stars (including Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, and several Redgraves) into perhaps the first major feel-bad musical. It's a fascinating, if not entirely successful, gambit. Crosscutting between pompous, upper-class twits and the poor grunts their tactical decisions will needlessly doom, piling song upon song, just barely tipping its hat toward a narrative arc, the episodic film trades sustained momentum and involvement for spectacle. But it does have striking bits: music-hall headliner Maggie Smith seducing young men into signing up; Tommies and Gerries reaching across the trenches to raise a Christmas toast (a real-life incident also dramatized in the current Joyeux Noël); the desolate final shot: an endless expanse of cross-marked grave sites filling the Panavision screen.

Today's CGI could make that last image even bigger — but would it be traitorous to do so? More important, can George Clooney sing and dance? *

OH! WHAT A LOVELY WAR

Opens Fri/24

Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center

1118 Fourth St., San Rafael

www.cafilm.org