Bedazzled, Billy Budd, In Which We Serve, & Days of Glory

Bedazzled was amazingly better than the remake with Brendan Fraser and Elizabeth Hurley. Somehow, huh? Dudley Moore and Peter Cook were quite enjoyable, but Eleanor Bron (for whom I have a soft spot due to Help! and Yo La Tengo's Tom Courtenay) just looked like she was wearing far too much makeup. Still, one of the better 60s British comedies. Raquel Welch with a terrible southern accent was weird.

Billy Budd is Terence Stamp's first film, a Peter Ustinov guided adaptation of the Melville novel about good vs. evil on a British Navy ship in 1797. Stamp is good, Robert Ryan is evil, and Ustinov the captain whose need to follow the rules leads to the conflict between good and evil. Stamp is, of course, amazing, and Ryan is as well, but all props go to Ustinov for putting the film together in the first place, writing, directing, producing, and starring in it.

In Which We Serve is a Noel Coward-David Lean co-directed film about a British ship that sinks in the Mediterranean in 1942, and it includes flashbacks about how the soldiers got to where they were. It's the first film directed by Noel Coward or David Lean (who actually did most of the directing), has Richard Attenborough in his first role, and is about how awesome the British Navy is. Weird sort of counterpoint to Billy Budd.

Days of Glory was way too long, and was more about how North Africans are actual people. Maybe other people needed that lesson, but it's not something for which I needed two hours of drumming into my head. Of course, the French needed it, due to their inability to give proper military pensions to the North African soldiers. One thing that really bothered me was Jamel Debbouze (married to Mélissa Theuriau), who is unable to use his right hand, is portrayed as a normal soldier. Were the French so hard up for soldiers that they'd put a one-armed soldier on the front lines? I understand that he's a French-born Moroccan, and a famous movie actor, but he also basically has one arm. Just go for someone who could conceivably be a soldier, please. Also, they ignored the Marocchinate, the rape of French women by the North African soldiers in Italy. Seriously, just gloss over that. Good for you France, for coming to grips with your past... Oh, I mean, not coming to grips with your past. Sigh, humans suck.