War Horse: Crying shame of a film that falls at the first It's the same in France while the war rages. A wise old peasant, who unfortunately bears a close resemblance to the shop-lifting chef Antony Worrall Thompson, manages to pick strawberries and grapes at the same time (not impossible, but unlikely, I think, in that agricultural era). You can tell he is French because of his gesticulation, twinkling age-old wisdom, and persistent French accent when speaking, as he always does, even to his family, English. He has a heart of gold, too, and a beautiful grand-daughter, who rides astride in her dress and bare legs, something which, in real life, is unbearably uncomfortable. This is where the lack of characterisation is unforgivable. In Michael Morpurgo's original book - itself an oddly flat work - the story is told by Joey the warhorse himself. Perhaps wisely, Spielberg does not attempt this device on the screen. But the result is that the film focuses neither on the men nor the horses, but sort of nowhere. Joey and his big black friend Topthorn have no development at all, except Joey's physical maturation from foal to handsome red bay beast with four white socks. They are like Rolf Harris's Two Little Boys, only on four legs, and over more than two hours rather than a pleasant, musical three minutes. We are told from the first that Joey is an absolutely amazing horse, a fact demonstrated by his prodigious ploughing. He is so amazing that he has nothing to prove or learn in the whole rest of the film. There is no interesting information about horses at all, except things not to be believed, such as that Joey can jump over a tank. Hopes rise briefly early on, when Albert puts Joey at a stone wall. Joey refuses and pitches Albert right over it. For a moment of wild exultation, one thinks that the two are going to get on badly, even that Albert might break his neck. When Joey gets to war, he acquits himself with honour in a cavalry charge, has a horrible time pulling artillery for the Germans, loses Topthorn in weepy circumstances, and then gallops wildly along and between the trenches. The mighty beast is caught in the barbed wire of No Man's Land. His plight brings out the underlying humanity of German and British alike. It was at this point that I really hated the film, because I realised I was crying. Spielberg had done nothing to establish Joey's bona fides or personality, yet, by the simple act of spending lots of dollars getting a good-looking horse tied up in barbed wire, he had turned on the audience's waterworks with the cold calculation of an official from the Environment Agency. Just as mothers are programmed to coo at babies, so are most people, particularly most British people, to weep at suffering horses. Through my tears, I hated myself, but I hated Spielberg more. The end is even more sick-making, what with Albert being blind (but not really of course, because this is for children), and Antony Worrall Thompson behaving with warm Gallic humanity and the whole thing ending up in a gold-red sunset like a Western. It reminded me of a film I saw as a boy called Run Wild, Run Free, a vehicle for young Mark Lester (who had become everyone's darling in the title role in Oliver!). He was a boy on Dartmoor who couldn't speak. I suppose he was autistic, but the word wasn't used much then. He rescues a pony from a bog and, in that loving struggle, finds his voice. The film was contemptible in its false offer of hope about autism, manipulative, sentimental. I wept then, too. The thing is, the use of horses in the First World War is a genuinely interesting subject. A drama that looked at war from a horsey point of view would have given a different moral dimension to the endlessly told tale of the trenches. In the novel, Rudi, a young German soldier, strokes Topthorn and says, "Does he not personify all that men try to be and never can be?" In the book - and even more in the film - this point is asserted, but never proved.