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Breaker Morant on TV any time soon?

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  • 20-05-2004 11:32am
    #1
    Hairy Homer
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,018 ✭✭✭


    No. Please don't move me. This is more of a politics post than a TV one, honest.

    Maybe some people here remember a great Australian film from the early 1980s called Breaker Morant. (More sadly, perhaps a lot of people don't)

    It's based on the true story of a pair of Australian soldiers serving in a specialist anti-terrorist unit of the British Army during the Boer War who had been given strict instructions as to what to do to Boer Guerillas when they were captured:

    No prisoners - immediate summary execution - no exceptions.

    This all went swimmingly until peace negotiations were in full sway and then a correct attitude to illegal activities, including those of the British Army, had to be adopted. Morant (played by Edward Woodward) and another of his colleagues were charged with murder and after a tense court room drama during which their lawyer tried convincingly to plead that they were only doing what they had been told to do, they were found guilty and executed.

    Some of the quotes that I remember (haven't seen it for a long time) would resonate today. 'It's a new type of war for a new century.' (It was set in 1901)
    'We caught and killed them under Rule 303' (shoot the bastards) etc etc

    Thing is, we're meant to sympathise with the Aussies, who were, let's face it, a bunch of murdering cut throats, and to loath the hypocritical top brass who put them up to it in the first place.

    Wonder if any TV station will have the balls to put it on any time soon.
    Wonder if Lyndie England has seen it. :-)


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