ianlouisiana Desperate to find some cause to hitch his waggon to,Guy Crouchback, introverted,middle - class,Catholic,is a man determined to find honour and redemption in war.To assist him in this effort he commits himself whole - heartedly to the Halberdiers,an obscure but "superior" British regiment which after years of idleness suddenly finds itself confronted with the realities of modern warfare. Actually proving a rather good and popular officer,he fights a losing battle against the tide of cynicism,opportunism and political in - fighting,corruption,self - aggrandisement and general rottenness from his contemporaries,a victim of their jibes,their genial or sometimes not so genial contempt and condescension. Bloodied,appalled and bruised by what one of his colleagues calls "the whirligig of war",he gets the chance to "do the decent thing" by marrying his ex - wife,Virginia, who is pregnant by an odious fellow - officer,thus,by proxy,continuing the Crouchback line which dates back to mediaeval times. When Virginia Crouchback is killed in an air raid,Guy comes home and sees "his" son for the first time. Awkwardly,clumsily,he says to the boy,"I'm your father" as the camera cranes up and we leave the two of them to a hopefully happier future. Adapting Waugh's marvellous trilogy of war novels for television was no mean task,and leaving aside any petty intellectual snobbery from old school Waugh admirers who might baulk at his masterpiece being sliced up and presented as popular entertainment no matter how well done,it must be said "Sword of Honour" is something of a triumph. Mr D.Craig is quite excellent as Guy and conveys well the gradual change in his character as his wartime experiences have an increasing effect on him. Mr L.Phillips - a man whom I would normally walk a mile to avoid on the screen - is sensitive and moving as his elderly father,a man unshakable in his beliefs and quietly indomitable in his courage.Miss M.Dodds as the flighty Virginia gives the best performance,displaying the easy charm existing in a total moral vacuum but somehow fatally attractive. The production values are high,the battle scenes well above par for a TV production and,in line with the original,the TV adaptation takes on a very bleak aspect towards the end. By giving legitimacy to Virginia's son,Guy redeems himself in a way that he signally failed to do in combat. Channel 4 is to be congratulated.

z28rikard I might sound blunt here but this is a movie recommended to watch only if intoxicated with illegal substances. Otherwise you will either fall asleep or look for a victim to get rid of your frustration. A typical "a'la Stephen King" failure trying to make a movie out of a book. it's like when you listen to a CD book and the narrator is trying very hard to get the listeners attention with a poor try in narrating acting. What did the actors think when they read the script or did they just read the book and trust that the director could get this on the screen by magic.Don't waste your time on this one.

mike rice Guy Crouchback has a problem. He believes in war as a great cause, but finds World War Two itself, wanting.This two part film based on Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honor is not the first rate production Brideshead Revisited was, but it captures some of Waugh's dismay with World War Two.It is surprising Waugh found so much fault. Wars since have never come close to matching the sheer resolution that went into winning the great war that surpassed in every way the "Great War" that had preceded it.The film is fairly commercial but captures many of the story points of Sword of Honor. As an antiwar film though, it doesn't even come close to matching Catch 22, the great American war novel turned movie that Mike Nichols directed in 1969. Catch 22 the movie was considered a failure. So what to make of this one? Its a failure too, an even bigger one. But for those interested in Waugh, it is a gateway to one of his lesser known books. I've been reading Waugh for years but never heard much about this one. Seeing this movie has firmed my resolve to get an Amazon Reseller paperback if possible- my sister bought Kite Runner for 33 cents!- and see what the novel was about.

Alice Liddel 'Sword of Honour' can be seen as an update of the Boultings' 'Pilgrim's Progress' - an anachronistic idealist fights in World War Two for reasons of chivalric honour, only to see the world overrun by liars, cheats, murderers, cowards and lunatics; where decency is pointless, even dangerous. William Boyd's restructuring of Waugh's war trilogy is a miracle of adaptation - his leavening of verbal humour with slapstick; his capturing of Waugh's elliptical tone; his creation of haunting visual patterns acting as counterpoint to the horrific satire that is the war. There is one haunting sequence amid so much disintegration, the false bomb warning during Virginia's post-natal party, that magically hints at forces beyond man's self-defeating endeavour, while also rescuing a character Waugh was rather hard on. In the moral sense.