As a minimum, worth seeing for the superb moment when Nettleby (Mason) and Cardew (Gielgud) discuss the printing of pamphlets.
Gielgud's role as the protester, and the various reactions to him, including from the customers in the local hostelry, are perfectly scripted and acted - and strangely moving. It is one of the film's multiple narrative threads.
There are no points for seeing that the shooting party prefigures the global conflict to come. Nor is it really the case that the setting of the film is in some transitional world between a vanishing bucolic idyll and our modern age. The relationship between violence and civil behaviour that the film explores were as well known to the Victorians as to us. The Great War revealed nothing new about man's inhumanity. The only extra element, which the film darkly hints at, is the scale and consequences of the violence which modernity is capable of inflicting.
Gielgud's role as the protester, and the various reactions to him, including from the customers in the local hostelry, are perfectly scripted and acted - and strangely moving. It is one of the film's multiple narrative threads.
There are no points for seeing that the shooting party prefigures the global conflict to come. Nor is it really the case that the setting of the film is in some transitional world between a vanishing bucolic idyll and our modern age. The relationship between violence and civil behaviour that the film explores were as well known to the Victorians as to us. The Great War revealed nothing new about man's inhumanity. The only extra element, which the film darkly hints at, is the scale and consequences of the violence which modernity is capable of inflicting.