There's a complicated relationship with Ivor Novello, the great Welsh actor. And he's living, I guess we can say fairly, a kind of subterfuge of gay life in the arts and the show world of London. SIMON: You depict Sassoon, of course, after the war. If you don't believe it in the first two minutes, you go home 'cause you won't go on that journey. You go on that journey, and you have to believe it within the first two minutes.
And indeed, music and film has to be used judiciously 'cause I think of all the art forms, cinema is closest to music. And that's how it has to be used, I think, poetry. You never forget it once it touches a part of you. It sounds like that inspires you even now.ĭAVIES: Yes, it does 'cause poetry really is like music. One of the many pleasures of your film is, in fact, Sassoon's poetry. They are listening to this not-quite-new audacity as though it were by someone dead like Brahms. And it's just the most wonderful, wonderful English - and in the gallery, cargoed to capacity, no tremors bode eruptions and alarms. But of course, Britain was much too civilized and polite to be uproarious.īut he describes that entire concert and the entire people in that concert. The previous year's had been premiered in Paris, and it caused an uproar. And I chose a piece by Sassoon called "Concept Interpretation," which is the first performance in 1914 of "The Rite Of Spring" in England. I mean, when I went to audition at drama school - in those days, you had to do a piece of Shakespeare and a piece of your own choice. But the war turned him into a great poet. SIMON: This great poet, Siegfried Sassoon, threw his war medals into the Mersey River - an acclaimed poet who was at war with war and, to a degree, himself as well?ĭAVIES: Yes, I think very much that.
SIMON: That's Jack Lowden as Siegfried Sassoon in Terence Davies' new film "Benediction." And Terence Davies, the acclaimed writer and director of many films, including "The House Of Mirth," joins us now. Rivers) There can be an easement of pain. Too much has been destroyed.ĭANIELS: (As Dr. LOWDEN: (As Siegfried Sassoon) Too many have died. JACK LOWDEN: (As Siegfried Sassoon) What I feel cannot be talked away or soothed into silence. He wasn't court martialed but sent to a country hospital for treatment for his shell shock by doctors. He wrote his commanders a letter to say so. Sassoon added up all the good men he'd seen lose their lives and decided he could no longer support war. But while on convalescence from the front, Lt. He was also a British gentleman who excelled at cricket and poetry. Siegfried Sassoon was a model British officer decorated for his daring and valor in the trenches of World War I, hailed by the soldiers he commanded as Mad Jack for his audacious nighttime raids.