Abstract
The Guns of Loos (Sinclair Hill, 1928, henceforth Loos) is set against the backdrop of the eponymous battle of 1915, as two soldiers, John Grimlaw (Henry Victor) and Clive (Donald Macardle), find their mental and physical fortitude tested on the battlefield. Public and private spheres meet and compete as both men are also fighting to win the affection of Diana (Madeleine Carroll in her screen debut), a Red Cross nurse in England. All this is juxtaposed against the growing tension of a workers’ dispute at Grimlaw’s Steel Works, which now operates as a munitions factory. This chapter explores the ways in which the film’s complex iconography addresses the mythic home/front divide, particularly through the duality of its protagonists, and issues of history, remembrance and modernity as the audiences of 1928 were invited to recall the events of 1915.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Vera Brittain, diary entry for 4 February 1916, in Alan Bishop (ed.), Chronicle of Youth: Vera Brittain’s War Diary 1913–1917 (London: Book Club Associates, 1981), p. 314.
Richard Van Emden and Steve Humphries, All Quiet on the Home Front: An Oral History of Life in Britain during the First World War (London: Headline, 2004), p. 228.
Edith Nepean, ‘A Stoll Triumph’ (’Round the British Studios’), Picture Show, 26 November 1927, 21.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (London: Penguin, 1969; trans. R. J. Hollingdale), p. 43.
Pat Barker references this condition in her Regeneration trilogy: see The Eye in the Door (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 134.
Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties (1938), pp. 75–6, quoted in Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 110.
Edith Nepean, ‘Round the British Studios’, Picture Show, 26 November 1927, 21.
Christine Gledhill, Reframing British Cinema 1918–1928: Between Restraint and Passion (London: BFI, 2003), p. 15.
See Michael Williams, Ivor Novello: Screen Idol (London: BFI, 2003); ‘The Songs Everyone is Singing’, Picture Show, 29 April 1922, 18.
‘Home Fires’ was, incidentally, adopted by the Unionist Party in the General Election of 1923, as it campaigned for the preservation of British wages against cheaper overseas labour. See Sandy Wilson, Ivor (London: Michael Joseph, 1975), p. 27.
See Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2011 Michael Williams
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Williams, M. (2011). ‘Fire, Blood and Steel’: Memory and Spectacle in The Guns of Loos (Sinclair Hill, 1928). In: Hammond, M., Williams, M. (eds) British Silent Cinema and the Great War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230321663_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230321663_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-33237-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-32166-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)