Richard Attenborough’s directorial debut, Oh! What a Lovely War, is right in my cinematic sweet spot. Highly theatrical, with a touch of the absurd and Brechtian distancing techniques, the film sets major events of World War I within a boardwalk-style amusement park. The carnivalesque atmosphere highlights the grotesqueries of nationalism and wartime propaganda, and the ways in which world leaders causally throw away the lives of their people like they’re playing a game is horrifying. The film is filled with musical numbers, actual songs sung by soldiers during the war that parody patriotic numbers, hymns, or barroom melody. The ghastly lyrics provide a sharp counterpoint to the jaunty melodies and heightens the sense of the soldiers’ mortality. As intellectual and heady as the film may seem, the final sequence is overwhelmingly sad as we’re forced to reckon with all of the lives lost in this and every war.
