Oh! What A Lovely War

Richard Attenborough's directorial debut is a sprawling, highly stylized musical satire of WWI featuring some of Britain's very finest actors--Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave, John Mills, Jack Hawkins, Ian Holm, and Vanessa Redgrave among them. After an opening that finds Europe's heads of state choosing up sides when Archduke Franz Ferdinand is killed during a royal photo session, OH, WHAT A LOVELY WAR traces WWI through a series of surreal set pieces, alternating between the front lines in France and the English homefront, where generals and diplomats conduct a distant war that is actually waged by the young and poor. In particular, the film ...