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The Trench
The picture below is a publicity shot for
the recently released movie The Trench, showing the writer/director
William Boyd sitting among his cast. I haven't had a chance to see the film yet, but I
thought I'd let you read what the Guardian's reviewer Peter Bradshaw thought of it.
Review by Peter Bradshaw
from The Guardian, Friday September 17, 1999
For his cinema debut, the novelist William Boyd
has made a decent, and honourable stab at a film about life on the front line in the Great
War, just before the Battle of the Somme: The Trench - which he has written and directed.
There is plenty to admire in it: the acting is all first-rate, crowned by a terrific
performance from Daniel Craig as Sergeant Winter, alternately bullying and fretting over
his men and, just before the battle, nervously eating strawberry jam straight from the jar
like a little boy.
But the action takes place purely in the trench,
which gives it the air of a stage set, like RC Sherriff's Journey's End,
populated by blithering officers, stroppy cockneys, cheerful Micks, surly Jocks, cliches
of every sort. (It's a rather clean, dry trench, incidentally: very different from
contemporary descriptions of filthy hell-holes teeming with rats, and with limbs from
incompetently disposed of bodies sticking out of the trench walls.) There's nothing new or
surprising in The Trench, nothing we didn't know already.
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You now have a chance to make up your own mind about this movie by
purchasing
it from Amazon.co.uk
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