The Virgin Soldiers (1969)

The Virgin Soldiers is a 1969 British war comedy-drama film directed by John Dexter and starring Lynn Redgrave, Hywel Bennett, Nigel Davenport, Nigel Patrick and Rachel Kempson. It is set in 1950, during the Malayan Emergency, and is based on the 1966 novel of the same name by Leslie Thomas.

In the film's 1977 sequel, Stand Up, Virgin Soldiers Nigel Davenport repeated his role as Sgt Driscoll.

Premise

Private Brigg is a soldier sent to Singapore during the Malayan Emergency along with a squad of naïve new recruits. There he falls for Phillipa Raskin, the daughter of the regimental sergeant major.

Cast

Lynn Redgrave as Phillipa Raskin

Hywel Bennett as Pte Brigg

Nigel Davenport as Sgt Driscoll

Nigel Patrick as R.S.M. Raskin

Rachel Kempson as Mrs. Raskin

Jack Shepherd as Sgt Wellbeloved

Michael Gwynn as Col Bromley-Pickering

Tsai Chin as Juicy Lucy

Christopher Timothy as Cpl Brook

Don Hawkins as Tasker

Geoffrey Hughes as Lantry

Roy Holder as Fenwick

Riggs O'Hara as Sinclair

Gregory Phillips as Foster

Peter Kelly as Sandy Jacobs

Mark Nicholl as Cutler

Alan Shatsman as Longley

Jonty Miller as Forsyth

Jolyon Jackley as Cpl Gravy Browning

Wayne Sleep as Villiers

Robert Bridges as Sgt Fred Organ

James Cosmo as Waller

Graham Crowden as medical officer

Dudley Jones as doctor

Matthew Guinness as Major Cusper

Naranjan Singh as sikh

F Yew as 'Hallelujah'

Brenda Bruce as nursing sister (uncredited)

Warren Clarke as soldier (uncredited)

Barbara Keogh as WRAC (uncredited)

James Marcus as soldier (uncredited)

Jeremy Roughton as soldier (uncredited)

A young and uncredited David Bowie appears briefly as a soldier escorted out from behind a bar.

Production

Film rights to the novel were bought by Carl Foreman, who had a production unit at Columbia. Foreman was busy making Mackenna's Gold so he assigned the job of producing to Ned Sherrin, with Leslie Gilliatt as co producer. Leslie Thomas wrote the first script but Sherrin felt it did not do justice to the novel so Joseph McGrath was hired. This version was not well received so John Hopkins wrote a new draft. Ian Le Frenais was called in to do some additional work. Filming took place in 1968.

Reception

Box office

The Virgin Soldiers was the 17th-most-popular film at the UK box office in 1969. However it performed poorly in the US.

Critical

The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "The Virgin Soldiers remains firmly rooted in the tradition of British Forces Comedy. The jokes, which make up most of the script, revolve round the obvious bawdy themes of service life, and the sexual encounters are presented in what is almost a Carry On fashion ... All this is made even more surprising by the occasional lapses into a tone of portentous seriousness. ... It may be unreasonable to expect of John Hopkins (scripting from an adaptation, with 'additional dialogue' to boot) that his screenplay should have attained the same level of prickly intensity which is present in so much of his television work, but one hardly anticipated that he would turn out something as utterly conventional as this. There are some lively performances, especially from Lynn Redgrave, and the atmosphere seems authentic enough; but overall it is difficult not to feel that The Virgin Soldiers is really nothing more than a kind of monstrous mating of [1956] and The Family Way [1966 ]with a bit of The Long and the Short and the Tall (1961) thrown in for foul measure."

Producer Ned Sherrin later established his own company, called Virgin Films.

References

External links

The Virgin Soldiers at IMDb

The Virgin Soldiers at TCMDB

The Virgin Soldiers film review at New York Times

The Virgin Soldiers film review at Variety