The Charge of the Light Brigade

The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) is a Hollywood adventure epic you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Michael Curtiz with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland — made six years before the same director gave the world Casablanca.

The story moves from the northwest frontier of British India to the battlefields of the Crimea. Major Geoffrey Vickers befriends a local rajah; that rajah later engineers a massacre that destroys the garrison Vickers was sent to protect. Years pass. When the Crimean War brings both men within reach of each other, Vickers bends the rules of command to settle the score — leading six hundred cavalry against Russian cannon at Balaclava, October 1854.

Curtiz stages the final charge as pure spectacle. The production was not careful with its horses: several died during filming, and Warner Bros. faced criticism for it that lasted decades. The history is freely rewritten, but Flynn in the saddle is the kind of thing Hollywood built studios for. Stream The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) on iFILM.