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A sluggishly-paced tale of four World War One soldiers (a group of grunts that includes poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen), who meet in a Scottish hospice in 1917 and recall their wet, soggy, shell-shocked time in the trenches. The film's ultimate triumph is MacKinnon's (Small Faces, Trojan Eddie) insistence on portraying the effects of conflict on the psyche instead of wallowing in national pride and pompous machismo. Not only that, but he gets inside the characters, exploring the relationships between doctors and patients, men and women.
Unfortunately, Wilby's Sassoon and Bunce's Owen are irritatingly over-emphasised, making it difficult to take their poetic mutterings and tales of battle seriously. It's doubtful that you'll remember this film a year from now, but it's definitely worth checking out as a war picture that's brave enough to focus on the people and their feelings rather than the hardware, explosions and inexplicable, bullet-dodging escapes.
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