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. 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 Nigel Davenport repeated his role as Sgt Driscoll.
Contents
Premise
Private 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
Lynn Redgrave as Phillipa Raskin
Hywel Bennett as Pte Brigg
Nigel Davenport as Sgt Driscoll
Nigel Patrick as R.S.M. Raskin
Rachel Kempson as Mrs. Raskin
Jack Shepherd as Sgt Wellbeloved
Michael Gwynn as Col Bromley-Pickering
Tsai Chin as Juicy Lucy
Christopher Timothy as Cpl Brook
Don Hawkins as Tasker
Geoffrey Hughes as Lantry
Roy Holder as Fenwick
Riggs O'Hara as Sinclair
Gregory Phillips as Foster
Peter Kelly as Sandy Jacobs
Mark Nicholl as Cutler
Alan Shatsman as Longley
Jonty Miller as Forsyth
Jolyon Jackley as Cpl Gravy Browning
Wayne Sleep as Villiers
Robert Bridges as Sgt Fred Organ
James Cosmo as Waller
Graham Crowden as medical officer
Dudley Jones as doctor
Matthew Guinness as Major Cusper
Naranjan Singh as sikh
F Yew as 'Hallelujah'
Brenda Bruce as nursing sister (uncredited)
Warren Clarke as soldier (uncredited)
Barbara Keogh as WRAC (uncredited)
James Marcus as soldier (uncredited)
Jeremy Roughton as soldier (uncredited)
A young and uncredited David Bowie appears briefly as a soldier escorted out from behind a bar.
Production
Film rights to the novel were bought by Carl Foreman, who had a production unit at Columbia. Foreman was busy making Mackenna's Gold so he assigned the job of producing to Ned Sherrin, with Leslie Gilliatt as co producer. Leslie Thomas wrote the first script but Sherrin felt it did not do justice to the novel so Joseph McGrath was hired. This version was not well received so John Hopkins wrote a new draft. Ian Le Frenais was called in to do some additional work. Filming took place in 1968.
Reception
Box office
The Virgin Soldiers was the 17th-most-popular film at the UK box office in 1969. However it performed poorly in the US.
Critical
The 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."
Producer Ned Sherrin later established his own company, called Virgin Films.