Attenborough’s Oh! What a Lovely War keeps the essential anti-war satire originally envisioned by Charles Chiltern and Joan Littlewood. New and effective, however, is the film’s final sequence, which begins as a picnic on the grass and ends with a panoramic view of four women meandering through a military cemetery, white crosses on a field of green, credit for which is probably Len Deighton’s, who wrote the screenplay. The concept turns the picnic topsy-turvy. It’s a hard-hearted person who is not stunned as the narrative shifts from ordinary pleasure to profound death.
Though it is November, three generations of women Smith family, dressed in summery white, sit picnicking in the grass studded with red poppies, have finished their food, and now drink tea poured from a thermos into teacups with saucers. Now they sit thoughtfully about the Armistice and the war. All their men are dead except for Jack; they don’t know hs dead yet. As his wife and daughter pause to pick poppies, Smith passes by on his way to meet his dead comrades. Neither observes the other. Only his mother, sitting alone, senses her dead son’s presence. She scowls as if to say, “I know he is dead.” When Jack Smith’s daughter asks what her daddy did during the war, there is no answer.
Beyond their ken, the Smiths cannot hear the dead soldiers singing, “And, when they ask us, how dangerous it was, / Oh, we’ll never tell them, no, we’ll never tell them.” As all but the grandmother meander through the grass, the camera pulls back to reveal that they have been picnicking in a military cemetery. The field is filled with thousands of white crosses. As the scene fades, the soldiers’ chorus sings louder, “Oh, we’ll never tell them.”
See Joan Littlewood, Charles Chilton, and Gerry Raffles. Oh, What Lovely War. London: Methuen, 1969. 2000; Richard Attenborough. Oh! What a Lovely War (2000). The screenplay by Len Deighton is based on the play by Joan Littlewood, Charles Chilton, and Gerry Raffles (1969).
*The title is taken from John P. Long and Maurice Scott’s song “Oh! It’s a Lovely War” (1917).