Boredom 2020-style

One of the biggest worries for people in the UK and other developed countries in the current situation is boredom. We have so many types of entertainment at our disposal, and yet the one thing everyone wants to do at the moment is to go outside. Forget the convenience of online ordering; we want to go to the shops. We can make a cup of coffee at home but it's much more appealing to go out to a coffee shop with friends and spend an hour chatting. We can easily phone our relatives, but we would rather see them face to face. This gives me some optimism for the future of the human race. Perhaps, in the future, we will come to appreciate the natural world and the joys of physical contact more than we ever did.

Siegfried Sassoon talks about boredom sometimes in his memoirs. Very much an outdoor man in his youth, he realised on arriving at the Western Front what other soldiers also mentioned - the boredom of being in the trenches, alternating as it did with short periods of extreme danger and horror. Officers were obliged to invent monotonous tasks to keep their men occupied - filling sandbags, cleaning out the latrines, etc. It was critical to keep up their morale. I like this quote from the letters of Max Staniforth (1893-1985), who wrote:

The only way to be here is to be philosophical. We have evolved a philosophy accordingly. What do you think of it?
If you are a soldier, you are either:
(1) at home or (2) at the Front.
If (1), you needn’t worry.
If (2), you are either (1) out of the danger zone or (2) in it.
If (1), you needn’t worry.
If (2), you are either (1) not hit, or (2) hit.
If (1), you needn’t worry.
If (2) you are either (1) trivial or (2) dangerous.
If (1), you needn’t worry.
If (2), you either (1) live or (2) die.
If you live, you needn’t worry: and – If you die, YOU CAN’T WORRY!!
So why worry?

When we think about how much worse off we could be, we inevitably feel guilty about complaining of boredom, but I feel sure it won't take long for us to forget. In years to come, we'll be telling our children about the time we had to stay indoors for a few weeks and how hard it was. And they won't understand...

The First World War at the Movies

Have you seen it yet? Of course, I'm talking about 1917, the film that was widely tipped to win Best Picture at the 2020 Oscars, but didn't. I've read that there are over a hundred films about the First World War - well, pardon me, but it feels like a lot more than that, and it seems to me that there has been a spate of films on the subject in the aftermath of the centenary commemorations, which is odd. Admittedly, it does take a long time to come up with the idea of a film, get the finance and then do the work. Perhaps some producers and writers only thought of it in 2014 and ran out of time before their projects came to fruition.

Despite the plethora of films about the Great War that have been made since 1914, there are many that we never get the opportunity to see. Silent films, for a start, never appear on television and it would be nice to get the chance to find out whether any of them were any good. For example, Wikipedia tells me that British film star Madeleine Carroll (best known for her later role in The 39 Steps opposite Robert Donat) made her first screen appearance in 1928's The Guns of Loos, the plot of which involves a blind veteran who "returns home to run his family's industrial empire".

Believe it or not, music hall star Vesta Tilley, already in her fifties, appeared in a 1916 film called The Girl Who Loves a Soldier, as a nurse who disguises herself as a man in order to carry out a dangerous mission on behalf of her beloved. In the same year, an Australian film, The Joan of Arc of Loos, offered an alternative angle on the events of the previous year, focusing on a French girl who is inspired to wade into battle against the aggressors, eventually being awarded a medal for her heroism. The strangest thing about the film is that it is based on a real-life incident.

The most interesting prospect, for us, is the new film, currently or about to be "in the making", called Benediction, which features Siegfried Sassoon as its central character. It's not due to hit our screens until 2021, so I can't tell you much about it. I've seen it described as a "biopic", but my impression is that it's mainly about Sassoon's wartime activities and specifically about his protest of 1917. Jack Lowden, who plays Sassoon, is Scottish and ginger-haired, but after all he's an actor so one assumes he can effectively convey an impression of a real person who looked nothing like him. I gather that another Scottish actor, Peter Capaldi, has been selected to play the older Sassoon, which will be equally interesting. Let's face it, it can't be any further from the truth than the bearded version played by John Hurt on TV in 2016.

Sassoon has of course been depicted on screen previously, notably by James Wilby in Gillies MacKinnon's Regeneration. Although Whitby was blond, a fact that the film's makers made no attempt to disguise, he certainly had an air of Sassoon about him, and of course one must bear in mind that the film was adapted from Pat Barker's novel, which had its own interpretation of the man and his personality. The relatively unknown actors Stevan Rimkus (The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles) and Morgan Watkins (The Pity of War) are among those who have played the young Sassoon on television, plus of course Michael Jayston in the 1970 TV play Mad Jack, about which I posted last September.

Noting that the new James Bond film's release date has just been postponed because of the coronavirus outbreak, it's possible that the filming of Benediction will also be delayed, especially if there is difficulty raising the necessary funds. (I have no inside knowledge on this, but we do hope to be able to fill you in on further details as time goes on.) How will Sassoon be portrayed in this latest screen version of his life, and, more importantly, will the significance of his life be recognised as it deserves? Time alone will tell.