The Observer
June 16, 2002
By Sue Arnold

All I remember of David Hemmings playing Captain Nolan in the 1968 film The Charge of the Light Brigade is that when it was released he was in the middle of a divorce. Would Hemmings, I wonder, and the film have made more of an impression if John Osborne had written the screenplay?

He did. For reasons we'll probably never know, it wasn't used - which, if you heard last week's play based on the Osborne version, was as bad a mistake in movie terms as Ronald Reagan declining the lead in Casablanca. The Charge of the Light Brigade was vintage Osborne - powerful, ironic, savage, memorable, with a cast to match: Joseph Fiennes as Captain Nolan, Charles Dance as Lord Cardigan, Alec McCowen as Lord Raglan. If I were a film producer, I would cut my losses and transfer it from FM to the big screen like a shot. What losses? you wonder: surely anything that radio does Hollywood can do better? Now that's where you're wrong. You'd certainly get the spectacle of the valiant 600 galloping into the jaws of hell, blasted on all sides by Russian guns, at your local Odeon, but you wouldn't get the intimacy as we did with John Osborne himself as the narrator. That's what made it special. We had the drama of battle contrasted with the still centre of the working playwright.

Osborne, played by Michael Feast, lights another cigarette, pours himself another drink (in real life, Osborne, like Lord Cardigan, only drank champagne) and muses on his stage directions thus: 'Interior day: the regimental stables, long high and beautiful almost like a chapel, quiet except for the sounds of horses breathing and rustling straw. Nolan makes his way down the aisle of beautiful mounts. He stops in front of his own and puts his head against her...'

On second thoughts, who needs the film? I'd better give you a taste of Osborne's screenplay: 'Four things greater than all things are, women and horses and power and war. That is our story but no one would have known it at the beginning.'