A Foreign Field

10/5/2025

I remember watching this when it first aired on the BBC and finding it a remarkably poignant drama stolen by the lively Jeanne Moreau. Watching it again forty years later, I still found it to be a simple yet still powerful story of wartime loyalties, friendships and necessities. “Cyril” (Leo McKern) is travelling to Normandy with his friend “Amos” (Sir Alec Guinness), upon whom he clearly depends. Their arrival sees him almost immediately immersed in a battle with visiting American veteran “Waldo” (John Randolph) who is there with his daughter “Beverly” (Geraldine Chaplin) and her henpecked husband “Ralph” (Edward Herrmann), and who shares his desire to reconnect with a lady they, unwittingly, both “knew” at the time. Both men have done well for themselves, and so with the Brit in his Roll