Cathardincu Surprisingly incoherent and boring

MoPoshy Absolutely brilliant

Gurlyndrobb While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Benas Mcloughlin Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

timsmith37 Very surprising that this has such a low IMDb rating. I suspect that has less to do with the quality of the film than with viewers prejudices and preconceptions.Based on Peter Nichols real life experiences it is It Ain't Half Hot Mum meets Virgin Soldiers, only much more nuanced than the one and more subversive than the other. Imagine an episode of IAHHM where Windsor Davies and Michael Knowles are running guns, Donald Hewlett has got religion, Melvyn Hayes is talented, Don Estelle has coupled up with Ken MacDonald, John Clegg is aggressively heterosexual, Stuart McGugan is a serial shagger, and Dino Shafeek is female and seduces Christopher Mitchell.The casting of Cleese as the uptight officer is problematic, and perhaps puts the tone off kilter, but he plays the role straight (other than the surreal and cathartic scene at the end where he joins the performers to launch into his silly walks).Patrick Pearson is effective as the young recruit, and Joe Melia, David Bamber, Bruce Payne and Simon Jones all hold their own (difficult to avoid double entendres with this review). Michael Elphick is also excellent as the tough sergeant while Nicola Pagett's Indian accent lapsing deliberately into Welsh resolves some of the criticism that might otherwise be levelled for playing blackface. The film though belongs to Dennis Quilley, the queen of the jungle.

JohnHowardReid One the one hand, this is a peculiar blend of farce, satire, anti- establishment jokes, musical high-jinks, exaggerated character studies and ridiculously camp impersonations, with – on the other hand – romance, tragedy, realism, death and mutilation. Nevertheless, the sexual innuendo rippling through every second phrase to the point of monotony certainly gives a pointer to the overall movie's intended audiences. It would certainly take a genius to form a cohesive film from such disparate elements, but director Michael Blakemore certainly gives it a good college try. His devices include on-location filming, incorporating old newsreel footage, fading in from black-and-white to color and vice versa, and using dissolves, split screen and other mechanical devices. But it doesn't work – basically because the players won't let it work! Just about everyone in the cast has a Victor McLaglen complex and tries to out- act, out-play and out camera-hog everyone else! Worst offender is prolific TV actor Denis Quilley who made only nine or ten films, but John Cleese gives him a good run for his money. Oddly, both Quilley and Cleese are effective at times, showing how the film could have been improved if they had toned their acting down a bit.Another problem is that the musical pastiches are supposed be second-rate, and this is how they are actually played – with enthusiasm, but also with a degree of amateurishness which is sometimes endearing (e.g. the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers pastiche; the Flanagan and Allan skit), sometimes just amateurish (particularly the skits performed by Denis Quilley). The Carmen Miranda and Marlene Dietrich take-offs are particularly inept.Technical credits are highly competent but the film is less effective than the sum of its parts. The finale in which everything is left up in the air is particularly unsatisfactory. Maybe this would work okay on the stage where the disparate elements could be separated by the rise and fall of the curtain. Unfortunately, neither the screenwriter nor the director have been able to come up with a similar solution to the movie.

jerbar2004 I have seen this film about 4 or 5 times now and it gets better each time I see it. The acting is better than superb, and the plot line is well told. The colour and just the good fun of the film is a joy. When you think of the difficultly of what these "boys" had to do you must wonder in orr at how good they were. To say that this film is a gay film is just silly, everyone can enjoy it. You get a feel for all the people and when the action gets going (and you will know what I mean when you see the film) it is quiet a shock to the sytem. British flaking at its very best. I could watch this film many times and never get fed up with it.

Allen Blank After reading a bunch of negative reviews of this film I thought I should post my own. This is a comedy-drama, based on a theatrical play/ It is funny, sad, and serious, sometimes all at once. It has made up it's mind what type of film it's trying to be. It's about a theatrical unit doing a touring variety show in the Malayisan jungle at the very end on WWII.It's also about a commanding officer who had missed the war and is now trying to get his taste of the war by using this unit he's in command of to fight some kind of enemy. It's also about an unscruplous sargent who is using this unit to arm the rebel soldiers and make some money on it. It's also about a poor eurasian woman who is pregnant by this sargent and has to trick another soldier to get an abortion to lose the baby.The film does this by using humor which is something I do in my everyday life to get thru a trying day, and what's wrong with that. The one character that holds the film together is the non-military head of the acting troupe, Terry Dennis (Denis Quiley, in a award callibar performance). Terry who changes all male names to female including "Jessica Christ", and has a heart for everyone in the troupe is the glue that holds this film together. He is not a stereotype performance but a flesh and blood character. John Cleese is the colonel Blimpish officer in charge of the troupe, who doesn't really understand theatrical types, nor does he want to. Cleese is fine in the role, so is the rest of the cast including Nicola Pagget as the eurasian woman and the always wonderful Simon Jones as Eric Young-Love. Jones created his part in the original stage production, and later on played the Cleese part in a production Off-Broadway here in New York with Jim Dale as Terry Dennis. Denis Quiley and Joe Melia also created their parts in the original Royal Shakespeare production of the play.Don't listen to the negative reviews, try this for yourselves, I think you'll like it. You may, like me, shed a tear or two before it's over, and then laugh so hard you'll fall out of your seat during the end credits.