"Shoot straight you bastards! Don't make a mess of it!"

I'm a bit late on this, but following his death at the age of 79 I wanted to post something about Edward Woodward.

Edgar Wright (who directed him in Hot Fuzz) has a very warm tribute to him here (with a follow up featuring contributions from Joe Dante and Peter Jackson here) and Simon Pegg's memories of working with him on the same film can be seen here.

Most obituaries seem to have focussed on his TV career - fair enough; he was in two huge TV series across three decades, and most people will recognise him from one of those, but his film career should not be overlooked.

Those obituaries that do mention his film career have concentrated on his role as Sgt. Howie in the classic (I'll omit the ubiquitous "cult" from its description - when a film has been remade it surely enters the mainstream) The Wicker Man. A wonderfully crazy British film, no doubt, but if I had to pick my favourite film of his, I'd plump for the 1980 Australian film Breaker Morant. I'm glad to see Simon Pegg mentioned it in his tribute.

A military courtroom drama, based on a true story and set during the Boer War, Woodward plays the title character, a poet and one of three Australian soldiers on trial for shooting prisoners. You get the feeling Aaron Sorkin, writer of A Few Good Men saw it a few times before he wrote the play that film is based on.

It was a film I'd read about (it gets a mention in Andy McNab's Bravo Two Zero, for example), and wanted to see it but hadn't seen until, in a happy coincidence, it popped up on TV on my birthday in 2002.

Scapegoats in a war the British Empire want to end, the men are hamstrung in their defence from the start, and the way the men take their inevitable fate is choking in its stoicism. If you haven't seen it, I don't want to spoil it, but I recall an interview with Woodward a few years ago where he said that he and Bryan Brown, playing his colleague Lt. Peter Handcock, had improvised a moment right before the end, only to find out that is what the real Morant and Handcock had done at the same point.

Fans of his character in The Wicker Man, the pious Police Sargeant Howie, will be interested to note that in this film Woodward exclaims (in a sly dig at the outcome of the trial) "I'm a pagan." The best line, however, is (save for Woodward reading one of Morant's poems in voiceover) the final one of the film, which you can find in the title to this post.

The DVD is available on Amazon for less than a fiver. I can think of worse ways to spend an evening as the nights draw in.