There’s an extra, unexpected shiver of contemporary relevance and horror in this rerelease of Joseph Losey’s brutal expressionist drama from 1964. Tom Courtenay plays the pinch-faced, talkative but also somehow inscrutable Private Hamp, who is court-martialled for desertion in 1917 having “gone for a walk” away from the guns at Passchendaele.
Dirk Bogarde’s suave, sorrowing Capt Charles Hargreaves is assigned the task of defending Private Hamp – suppressing his distaste for Hamp, of course, like all the officer class, and trying not to think about the inevitability of his execution – and he boldly asks the court to consider Hamp’s “mental health”. The presiding colonel, played by Peter Copley, erupts with contempt at this modern-sounding phrase. “Do you mean the prisoner is a lunatic?” The answer is of course no. The idea of struggling with your mental health has a real significance for us now, although the defendant himself is utterly unaware of the issue and is quite incapable even of attempting to capitalise on it.
