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King and Country

Screening on Film
Directed by Joseph Losey.
With Dirk Bogarde, Tom Courtenay, Leo McKern.
UK, 1964, 35mm, black & white, 86 min.

Private Arthur Hamp (Courtenay), frustrated with three long years of trench warfare and shell-shocked after a particularly brutal attack, elects to walk home to England from the front.  He is subsequently court-martialed; his assigned defender, Captain Hargreaves (Bogarde), slowly begins to understand the helplessness of Hamp and other enlisted men.  Losey's characteristically subtle touches play on the "roles" assigned by the British class system (the film is a stage adaptation), employing a mildly Brechtian emphasis on theatrical artifice and reflexivity.

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