Oh! What a Lovely War

Oh! What a Lovely War repeats the satirical forms already exhausted in Richard Lester's How I Won the War and Tony Richardson's The Charge of the Light Brigade.

It is an elaborately staged tableau, a dazzling use of the camera to achieve essentially theatrical effects. And judged on that basis, Richard Attenborough has given us a breathtaking evening.

The huge potential of this all-star vehicle was mainly squandered through a lack of subtlety or irony.

…It’s fast, often funny and always entertaining as a musical, and as a record of the thoughts of the many who sacrificed their lives for the cause, it’s still one of the greatest anti-war films ever…