Conduct Unbecoming

A British cavalry regiment in India, 1878. The widow of one of the regiment's legendary officers is attacked one night, and the man accused is a newly arrived subaltern. Rather than take it to a court, the army decides to settle it internally, in an unofficial trial by fellow officers. The film is not interested in who committed the crime. It is interested in an institution's reflex to protect its reputation: what actually happened is the regiment's second concern, the first being that the scandal not leak. The trial is a theatre built for that purpose. The form is entirely interior: the officers' mess, corridors, an interrogation room. It comes from the stage and does not hide it. The source is Barry England's play. Michael Anderson directed. The cast is drawn from the heavyweights of British cinema: Michael York, Richard Attenborough, Trevor Howard, Stacy Keach, Christopher Plummer and Susannah York. Who it is for: viewers who like courtroom drama and stories of the colonial British army. Who it is not for: anyone expecting movement. The film is almost all talk and never questions its colonial setting.