2 - “What Beauty Is There, What Anguish”: King and Country

Summary

The origin of King and Country was an actual incident in World War I involving a young enlisted man who was executed for desertion. To this material Losey brings a keen social conscience and continuing commitment to expose hypocrisy and injustice, particularly when they are institutionalized. He also reveals a humane understanding of the personal dilemmas (emotional as well as moral and intellectual) of characters suddenly faced with circumstances in which only the most painful choices are possible. To be sure, as in such “message” films as The Lawless, The Criminal, and Time Without Pity before it, elements of melodrama are evident in King and Country. They are subsumed, however, by Losey's fusion of moral issues and particularized characterizations; abstractions of honor and duty are pitted against the reality of human aspirations, perceptions, and failures. Losey remarked to Tom Milne, “I set out to make a picture which, while set in World War I in a very specific and classically limited way, was to my thinking not a war picture” (1968, 124). As he told Ciment, “The picture is the personal relationship between that officer and that poor private deserter. … So that when that pistol, that coup de grace, has to be fired at the end, in a sense Hargreaves [the officer] is ending his own life as well as the boy's” (1985, 245). Losey's conception of King and Country as a personal drama going beyond an argument or protest is especially significant when one considers the appalling background against which the film is set.