Rowan Atkinson - The best site on the Internet for Mr Bean! Rowan Atkinson - The best site on the Internet for Mr Bean! Rowan Atkinson - The best site on the Internet for Mr Bean!
 Search
 Advanced SearchView Cart   Checkout   
 Location:  Home » DVD » War » Oh! What a Lovely War: The Special Collector's EditionJanuary 8, 2009  
Categories
Books
DVD
VHS
Music
Animated Bean
New DVD Releases
* Digital Picture Frames
table width=100% cellspacing=0 cellpadding=3 border=0 tr td bgcolor=#FFFFFFdiv class=titlefont color=#333333More Info /font/div/td /tr tr td bgcolor=#FFFFFFtable cellspacing=0 cellpadding=2 border=0 tr valign=top td style=font-size: smaller; class=title#149;/td td style=font-size: smaller; class=titlea href=/uk/news.phpNews/a/td /tr tr valign=top td style=font-size: smaller; class=title#149;/td td style=font-size: smaller; class=titlea href=/uk/biography.phpBiography/a/td /tr tr valign=top td style=font-size: smaller; class=title#149;/td td style=font-size: smaller; class=titlea href=/uk/roles.phpRoles/a/td /tr tr valign=top td style=font-size: smaller; class=title#149;/td td style=font-size: smaller; class=titlea href=/uk/interviews.phpInterviews/a/td /tr tr valign=top td style=font-size: smaller; class=title#149;/td td style=font-size: smaller; class=titlea href=/uk/photogallery.phpPhotos/a/td /tr tr valign=top td style=font-size: smaller; class=title#149;/td td style=font-size: smaller; class=titlea href=http://rowanatkinson.org/videos/index.php?option=com_frontpageItemid=1Videos/a/td /tr tr valign=top td style=font-size: smaller; class=title#149;/td td style=font-size: smaller; class=titlea href=/uk/links.phpLinks/a/td /tr tr valign=top td style=font-size: smaller; class=title#149;/td td style=font-size: smaller; class=titlea href=/uk/contactus.phpContact Us /a/td /tr /table/td /tr /table
script type=text/javascript!-- google_ad_client = pub-7120633133907657; google_ad_width = 728; google_ad_height = 90; google_ad_format = 728x90_as; google_ad_type = text; google_ad_channel =5636112618; google_color_border = FFFFFF; google_color_bg = FFFFFF; google_color_link = 6A8BCC; google_color_text = 000000; google_color_url = 626262; //--/script script type=text/javascript src=http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js /scriptbrbr
Oh! What a Lovely War: The Special Collector's Edition
Oh! What a Lovely War: The Special Collector's Edition
enlarge
Director: Richard Attenborough
Actors: Wendy Allnutt, Colin Farrell, Corin Redgrave, Maurice Roeves, Malcolm Mcfee
Studio: Paramount Home Entertainment (UK)
Category: DVD

List Price: £15.99
Buy New: £2.47
You Save: £13.52 (85%)
Buy New/Used from £2.47

Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars(2 reviews)
Sales Rank: 629

Format: Colour, Pal, Subtitled, Widescreen
Language: English (Original Language)
Rating: Parental Guidance
Media: DVD
Running Time: 138 minutes
Number Of Items: 1
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.4 x 0.6

EAN: 5014437925831
ASIN: B000NJLQHY

Release Date: January 23, 2007
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours

Similar Items:

  • "Oh What a Lovely War" (Modern Plays)
  • All Quiet On The Western Front [1930]
  • Blackadder 4 - Blackadder Goes Forth [1989]
  • Doctor Strangelove (Collectors Edition) [1963]
  • All Quiet On The Western Front [1979]

Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.co.uk Review
It's a product of its Vietnam era just as surely as Robert Altman's IM*A*S*H/I, and like that film IOh! What a Lovely War/I is ostensibly about a different war. Based on a celebrated anti-war stage piece produced by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop, the film chronicles the various madnesses of the First World War. Along with vignettes involving the members of the fictional Smith family, the movie lands its punches with a two-pronged attack: by using the songs of the war, mostly patriotic; and by using the real-life words of various figures from WWI. You can see how this would have fit a stylised stage show; in the more literal, realistic realm of film, it mostly comes across as heavy-handed pretentiousness. Richard Attenborough, who would later explore the lives of Gandhi and Chaplin, first made his way to the director's chair here, and he enlisted a staggering who's who of his fellow British actors for roles in the large ensemble: Olivier, Gielgud, and Richardson among them. John Mills plays the most bull-headed of the generals, blithely measuring out yards of territory gained by the thousands of casualties involved. The songs are a historically fascinating lot, mostly given an ironic or sinister treatment in this incarnation, as jolly patriotic tunes that mask the utter carnage at the front. Among the high points is Maggie Smith singing (well, declaiming) an ode to recruitment, promising war as a grand adventure. The blending of arch content with Attenborough's realistic staging of trench warfare just doesn't take, but what does hit home are the actual quotes and the statistics of killing; World War I set a bloody standard for sheer, blind slaughter. I--Robert Horton/I


Customer Reviews:

4 out of 5 stars Colin Farrell???   January 6, 2009
  0 out of 1 found this review helpful

Great movie but why is Colin Farrell listed as being in it? He wasn't born til 1976 years after it was released.


5 out of 5 stars You'll never see a better war film   November 11, 2008
  33 out of 33 found this review helpful

I'm bemused by the tendency to assert that this film is a veiled Vietnam film, "ostensibly" about another war, as this Amazon review puts it. It IS about another war, one that was far more important to the nation where it was written and filmed, and in which the father of writer and director Charles Chilton was killed. Anyway, I watched it as a First World War film, and that is how it has always seemed to me: it comments on all other wars, implicitly, of course.br /br /It's silly to compare or measure this against most other war films, because it is so unlike any other, but it stands out as a dramatic, cinematic, narrative gem. A serious musical about the horrors of war: sounds as likely as a serious musical about living in Nazi Germany. Oh, wait...someone did that too. Cabaret must owe quite a bit to this film, not least in the "tomorrow belongs to me" scene, although they wrote their songs from scratch for Cabaret.br /br /The songs here are real, some the official versions from popular music hall, and some the unofficial versions sung by the troops, with considerably darker lyrics (though they omitted the rudest of the unofficial lyrics). The humour is black and dry as a tomb, and you don't quite know whether to laugh or wince in a lot of places (just do both). But the real beauty of the film is in the settings, which are sparse, only partly realistic, and sometimes subject to extraordinary changes. The most impressive are slow 360 degree pans, during which everything changes behind the camera's back, so that when you get back the character you started with, they are in a completely different situation. These and other rapid scene shifts are part of whole film's unreal, nightmarish quality that matches the subject matter perfectly. br /br /If you haven't seen it, make sure you do. If you saw it long ago and dimly remember it and wonder if it was as good as you remember (or maybe better than you thought), I'd say yes, and you should refresh your acquaintance. This seems an almost absurdly cheap price for it.

br
script type=text/javascript!-- google_ad_client = pub-7120633133907657; google_ad_width = 728; google_ad_height = 90; google_ad_format = 728x90_as; google_ad_type = text; google_ad_channel =5636112618; google_color_border = FFFFFF; google_color_bg = FFFFFF; google_color_link = 6A8BCC; google_color_text = 000000; google_color_url = 626262; //--/script script type=text/javascript src=http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js /scriptbrbr
©2006 - 2009 RowanAtkinson.org . All rights reserved. In association with Amazon.com