The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936)
Directed by Michael Curtiz
In 1853, as the British and Russian empires compete to gain and maintain their place in the dreadful Great Game of political intrigues and alliances whose greatest prize is the domination of India and the border territories, Major Geoffrey Vickers must endure several betrayals and misfortunes before he can achieve his revenge at the Balaclava Heights, on October 25, 1854, the most glorious day of the Crimean War.
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What critics compared The Charge of the Light Brigade to
The climactic cavalry charge is good, but not as good as Michael Curtiz’s 1936 The Charge of the Light Brigade (and before we’re inundated with emails, I am not defending Curtiz’s indefensible use of the “running W” trip wires which were used to engineer the horse falls and resulted in the destruction of scores of horses).
This, in turn, raises questions about film history’s accounts of people going too far to get the shot: Michael Curtiz used tripwires to topple horses, killing over 25 of them to capture a sequence in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936); William Friedkin put Linda Blair through hell to get the performance he wanted in The Exorcist (1973); Werner Herzog went mad trying to tame a Peruvian jungle to shoot Fitzcarraldo (1982).
With Flynn having seen success in WB's "Captain Blood," "The Charge of the Light Brigade," and "The Adventures of Robin Hood," RKO looked for a comparable star and found not one but three in Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., the son of the silent-screen star.