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The Virgin Soldiers (film)
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.[1] 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[2] Nigel Davenport repeated his role as Sgt Driscoll. PremisePrivate 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
A young and uncredited David Bowie appears briefly as a soldier escorted out from behind a bar. ReceptionBox officeThe Virgin Soldiers was the 17th-most-popular film at the UK box office in 1969.[3] CriticalThe 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."[4] References
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