From "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1968), dir. Tony Richardson.

Soldiers from the 11th Hussars strut with ceremony through an immiserated working-class neighborhood in Victorian London. The merry bandsmen and well-kempt cavalrymen -- dressed in their clean regimentals -- seek to fill the ranks with new recruits from the lowest rungs of English society. The silver-tongued recruiting sergeant woos destitute and cast-aside men with promises of glory, adventure, admiration, fame, fortune, and good company should they choose to enlist in the 11th Regiment of Hussars. He fills his promises with romantic exaggeration to make more appealing the harshness, difficulty, and indignity which would no doubt attend these men upon taking the shilling, and throughout their life in the service.

The sorrowful conditions of the neighborhood from which the rank and file of the 11th Hussars is drawn is juxtaposed with a previous scene in which gentry and aristocratic officers from the regiment fete and gather round to inspect Lord Raglan's prim cavalrymen, all with enthusiastic upper-class pomp.


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