The King’s Men

Subscribe

What happens if you combine the First World War with an action-adventure film?

This month we watch the 2021 film The King’s Man and discuss its portrayal of an alternative vision of the war. Along the way we explore John Buchan novels, the absence of key historical events, and wonder about whatever happened to Wilfred Owen.

References

 
John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915)
John Buchan, Greenmantle (1916)
John Buchan, Mr Standfast (1919)
John Buchan, The Three Hostages (1924)
 
Alfred Hitchcock, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935)
Patrick Barlow, The Thirty-Nine Steps (2005)
James Hawes, The Thirty-Nine Steps (2008)
 
‘Sapper’ [H. C. McNeil], Bulldog Drummond (1920)
 
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Final Problem (1893)
 
37 Days (2014), OWALP episode 16 
 
Blackadder, ‘Goodbyeee’ (1989)
 
James Joll, The Origins of the First World War (1984)
 
Wilfred Owen, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ (first published 1920)
 
Abel Gance, J’accuse (1919)
 
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975)
 
Lewis Millstone, All Quiet on the Western Front (1931)
 
Otto Dix, Der Krieg (1924)
 
Sam Mendes, 1917 (2019), OWALP episode 14 
 
Jessica Meyer, ‘Peaky Blinders and the Ubiquity of Poetry‘, 30/10/2013
 
Ben Schott, Jeeves and the King of Clubs (2018)
 
Sarah Moss, Night Waking (2011)
 
George Tomkyns Chesney, The Battle of Dorking (1871)
 
George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman (1969)
 
Brian Fee and John Lasseter, Cars (2006)
 
A. E. W. Mason, The Four Feathers (1902)
 
EA Dice Battlefield 1 (2016)

Other episodes

War Hospital

What happens when you turn a First World War medical process into a computer game?

The Grizzled

What happens when you turn the French experience of the war into a cooperative game?

Women at War

What happens when you set a telenovela in First World War France?