The Queen's Guards

The Queen's Guards (1961)

Captains John Fellows and Henry Wynne-Walton finish their Army training at Sandhurst Military Academy and are sent to the Middle-East. John is to lead a parachute battalion while Henry is put in charge of a platoon of armoured cars of the Household Cavalry. John is constantly being told by his father, an ex-Guards officer that he is not as good as his brother who was killed during the war.

Date of release
1961-10-17
TMDB
5.2 / 10 (5)
Runtime
1h 49m
Genres
Drama
Director
Michael Powell

Casting

Interesting facts

The Queen's Guards is a 1961 British military drama film directed by Michael Powell from a script by Simon Harcourt-Smith and Roger Milner. It stars Daniel Massey, Raymond Massey, Robert Stephens, and Ursula Jeans.

Production

Powell says the film was based on the idea of a friend of his, Simon Harcourt-Smith, who was inspired watching the Household Cavalry outside Buckingham Palace. His basic idea was to encapsulate the story of a British military family with the ceremony of Trooping the Colour, where the climax would be the arrival of the Queen to take the salute. Powell was enthusiastic: "I'm a sucker for stories about the services," he said.

He sold the story to 20th Century Fox and the Queen gave her permission to film the Trooping of the Colour. Roger Milner wrote a script. Powell liked Milner, but said he was "more a sketch artist than a full blown dramatist" and "our collaboration was uneasy." He later said the film was "a broken backed feature when it should have been a family saga and an epic of military glory... We shouldn't have tried to compete with AEW Mason."

Powell formed Imperial Films with Sydney Streeter to make the film.

Though released as "A CinemaScope Picture" with a CinemaScope credit at the beginning of the film, The Queen's Guards was filmed in Technirama. 35mm Technirama release prints were compatible with CinemaScope release prints.

The intention of the film appears to have been to promote the Guards regiment in some way. Powell was given access to the Guards' barracks and to their training areas on Salisbury Plain, and in March 1960 he and several crew members were invited by the War Office to accompany the Guards on a NATO exercise in Libya.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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