Since its debut, Sheriff’s play has been praised for its precise, flavorful realism and avoidance of cliches and rhetoric. Unlike many literary and cinematic treatments that would come later, it’s neither staunchly “patriotic” nor polemically “anti-war.” Leaving aside the war’s political causes (aside from one character’s statement that it should never have happened), it focuses squarely on the certain individuals and their ways of dealing with a situation of impending catastrophe.
Simon Reade’s script for the film preserves the play’s virtues while opening its action outward in appropriate and judicious ways: While most of the drama remains in the bunkers of the British forces, when the soldiers leap out of the trenches onto the battlefield, we see that, too.
The tale takes place in the spring of 1918 near St. Quentin, France. The war has already dragged out for nearly four years, with millions killed; it will grind on for more than a half-year longer, snuffing out countless lives as it does. There is, in other words, nothing either strategically or historically significant about the episode we witness; it’s just another horror in a seemingly endless succession of them.
The film escorts us into the battle zone following fresh-faced teenaged Second Lieutenant Raleigh (Asa Butterfield), who could have done his service in a safer place but instead has gone to some trouble to get assigned to the command of Captain Stanhope (Sam Claflin). Before the war, Stanhope was a senior boy at Raleigh’s school and enamored of his sister; the three spent holidays happily wandering England’s countryside, the younger man recalls.
The early scene where Raleigh encounters Stanhope for the first time in the unit’s underground HQ is one of the film’s most memorable. Instead of the warm welcome he expected from his admired older pal, Raleigh finds a changed man. Though respected by his soldiers, Stanhope is a stiff and troubled officer and hardcore alcoholic. Naturally he doesn’t like Raleigh seeing him like this, and fears the reports he might send his sister.
Stanhope (the role that launched Olivier) is the pivotal figure in this drama. The other main character, gentlemanly, bookish Lieutenant Osborne (Paul Bettany), has joined the unit just recently but seems to have already formed a solid bond with Stanhope, who obviously needs his steadying, sane friendship.
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