Sword of Honour (2001 film)

Sword of Honour is a 2001 British television film directed by Bill Anderson and starring Daniel Craig. Scripted by William Boyd, it is based on the Sword of Honour trilogy of novels by Evelyn Waugh,^[1][2] which loosely parallel Waugh's own experiences in the Second World War.

Sword of Honour
Based on	Sword of Honour by Evelyn Waugh
Written by	William Boyd
Directed by	Bill Anderson
Starring	Daniel Craig Megan Dodds Katrin Cartlidge
Music by	Nina Humphreys
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Original language	English
Production
Producer	Gillian McNeill
Running time	3 hrs 11 mins
Original release
Release	2001 (2001)

Reception

Commenting in The Daily Telegraph, its Defence Editor, John Keegan, said: "To reduce Waugh's enormous text to a short television treatment presented William Boyd with a daunting challenge. He has met it magnificently... Boyd's compressions improve Waugh's plot. At the literary level, therefore, Boyd passes all the tests. The failure is at the directorial level. Bill Anderson has either simply not grasped or has flinched from depicting how utterly different the Britain of 1939–45 is from Tony Blair's. His lack of grasp or nerve has affected his actors – though some of them may also be guilty of not having immersed themselves in the books, inexcusably, since Waugh is the most readable of novelists. As a result, characters appear either as caricatures or as pale approximations of Waughian realities".^[2]

Filming locations

Edinburgh was one of the locations for filming.^[3]