My Boy Jack
Tags: anti war, storytelling, flashback

Plot synopsis:
=== Act One ===
My Boy Jack begins comically, with 15-year-old Jack Kipling trying on a pair of pince-nez. He is unable to see well without correction, but his father, Rudyard Kipling, wants him to wear the pince-nez to take his vision exam; it will make Jack's vision troubles look less serious. Jack fails the test, however; he cannot read the eye chart, without the pince-nez, from farther away than about a metre.
Jack, at home again, talks with Elsie, his sister. He explains that he wants to leave in order to get away from "this house and everything", and Elsie becomes angry with Jack — not because he wants to leave her, but because he could be killed at war. Kipling comes into the room, and Elsie hides behind a chair. Kipling then tells Jack that he will get Jack into the army, somehow. After Kipling leaves, Elsie emerges, furious.
The act ends with Jack leading his men into battle. In the theatre, there is then an interval.
=== Act Two ===
This part of My Boy Jack deals with the Kipling family receiving the news of Jack being declared Missing In Action. During an argument with Carrie, Kipling reveals his guilt and responsibility helping Jack enlist in the army. Elsie reveals that Jack went to war, not out of patriotism, but to get away from his family, particularly to escape the shadow of Kipling's fame.
There is then a flashback to a time when Jack was only seven, showing Jack and Elsie with their father.
=== Act Three ===
It is now 1924, and Elsie is marrying George Bambridge. Her parents, though still missing Jack, are beginning to move on; they are happy for Elsie. Kipling has been interviewing soldiers from Jack's regiment of Irish Guards. One of them who served under Jack recalls his last moments. Jack had been leading a charge against the German trenches, continuing the attack while the other soldiers dropped off in fear. Jack was killed by machine gun fire just as he reached enemy lines. Kipling received some bittersweet solace in knowing that his son died heroically.
The play then jumps forward nine years, to 1933. It has been twenty years since My Boy Jack first began, in 1913. There are rumours of war, again, and Kipling wonders why the Great War was even fought. What was the point of his son's death, if there will just be another war?
My Boy Jack ends with Kipling reciting his poem, My Boy Jack.

Review: Excellent cast, beautifully shot and well scripted TV movie about the Kipling family at the start of the First World War. Premiered in the UK on Remembrance Day (11/11) this poignant tale has Daniel Radcliffe in the title role, showing once again (after his on stage appearance in Equus) that there's more to this young actor than the caricature that Harry Potter has become.
His clipped and stilted performance completely captured what it must have been like to be the put upon son of a successful, middle-class author in late Edwardian England.David Haig plays Rudyard Kipling (there's a remarkable resemblance) who many will remember from previous UK TV series 'Thin Blue Line' and 'Soldier Soldier' as well as the massively successful 'Four Weddings and a Funeral'.
Haig also wrote the original play and screenplay so the resulting TV movie must be pretty much what he wanted.The supporting players, Kim Catterill as Rudyard's American wife, and Martin McCann as the Irish Guardsman who goes to war with young John to name two, give excellent, measured performances which compliment the two lead roles, giving the whole production a rounded, glossy finish.This is superb TV catch it if you can (but don't forget the hankies!).
My Boy Jack is a made for TV movie starring Daniel Radcliffe as Rudyard Kipling's son Jack as a teenager preparing for "The Great war" (WW1).
Masterpieces are rare, but every so often a film such as this comes along and delivers.The story is of the son of the famous writer Rudyard Kipling during the first world war.
Jingosim is the main subject of this story and Rudyard Kipling transformational arc on his views of sending his son to war.Despite this being made for TV its at a standard that puts many blockbusters to shame, The screenplay is impeccable and the performances astounding.
Daniel Radcliffe, unfortunately, did not play a totally convincing role as Jack, the son, but since he was much younger and far less experienced in the world of serious acting I think he was simply out performed.The main character of the film was Rudyard Kipling and everything you feel is aimed at his loss and guilt for pushing his son to do something where he was destined to underachieve in, due to his "disability" (poor eyesight).
I have been viewing Masterpiece Theatre for many years and I have trouble thinking of one episode that surpasses the excellence of this production.The main actors all give great performances in this story of how Rudyard Kipling, poet laureate and a member of an important government war committee, persuaded the authorities to enlist his son Jack despite failing two health examinations because of his poor eyesight.
Then cutaway to the Kipling home in pastoral English setting...the contrast is vivid.Kipling's wife (Kim Cattrall) and daughter (Carey Mulligan)are extremely upset at the prospect of John "Jack" Kipling going off to war.
Martin McCann, who plays the soldier Bowe who saw the younger Kipling die in battle, gives an extraordinary performance when he visits the Kipling estate to tell the story of Jack's death.A very noteworthy scene takes place at the end of the movie when Kipling visits George V, the reigning monarch, and a personal friend.
However, whether or not this meeting happened, it is an interesting side-bar to the movie, with the King and his poet laureate sharing their grief.I have always been interested in the story of Jack Kipling from the time I read a newspaper article about how a Canadian who worked for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission was able to locate the burial plot of Jack Kipling towards the end of the 20th century, many decades after he died.
As a Kipling fan from the age of 8, 50 years and more ago now, I was knocked out by "My Boy Jack." David Haig, as writer and actor, is beyond brilliance, and though I found Daniel Radcliffe a bit stiff and modern, he too was excellent.Kim Cattrall: surprisingly good.
Much of it is because of the fine acting by Daniel Ratcliffe (as Jack), Carey Mulligan, Kim Cattrall (as his American mother) and David Haig as Rudyard Kipling.
while the plot is very "dear" to me in its subject matter, i got distracted by David Haig awesome performance as the father and Kim Cattrall( i would have never took her as a serious actress on the washed-up commercial "sex and the city")as a very NATURAL mother.in my opinion the movie's punch line is actually delivered by Carey Mulligan as jack's sister...i do not feel like writing much at the moment; in short, this feature gives the vibe, and plays as a periodical drama (the cars are a bit too "advanced" for 1910's years), plays accordingly, yet it cultivates the viewer's attention and his/her own thoughts and ideological views on God,king,country and Family.it is a movie for mature viewing , yet any ages would find something "sweet" about it; guaranteed.yes is true; while "made for TV", this production beats down most "blockbusters" of our time.
nothing commercial to be found here, which is GREAT; only exceptional acting allowed!(Daniel Radcliffe is the only one that does not seem in sync at times, but that comes out OK since he is suppose to be "naive".also he is actually a secondary character, at face value, as far as the plot goes.)i only give 9 stars because the way that King George, played by Julian Wadham, is portrayed and which goes against the features "principles".
If the point of Brian Kirk's television film, adapted by David Haig from his stage play and starring Haig as the writer Rudyard Kipling, was to show just how much of a horse's ass Kipling actually was and just how awful it is to send young men, some merely boys, out to fight a war, any war, then it succeeded in spades.
While we were certainly there to weep at the loss of Jack, Kipling's son, drummed into the army by his father's jingoism, as well as the hundreds of thousands of others who died in The Great War, I think we were also meant to applaud their bravery, if not their foolishness, then and now.
As his sacrificial son, Jack, that sprogget Daniel Radcliffe, (he isn't very tall, is he?), finally shook off the mantle of Harry Potter with a marvelously nuanced study of a boy forced into manhood before his time.
His second may be this role as a young officer commissioned to fight and risk his life in the Great War. This part allowed Radcliffe to spread his acting wings and prove he has a range and ability that goes beyond Hogwarts.
As the title character of a period piece, Radcliffe plays Jack Kipling, a young man caught up in the fervor that swept British youth at the outbreak of the "war to end all wars".
The army at first rejects him because of his eyesight, but his father, the immortal Rudyard Kipling, played with equal fervor by David Haig, pulls certain strings to get his son into basic training and eventually the western front.
But his wife, played brilliantly by Kim Cattrall, and their daughter, played with beautiful subtlety by Carey Mulligan, are devastated by their attitude about Jack's entering the war.In a particularly fine sequence of scenes, when Radcliffe leaves his family to enter basic training, he seems like a boy about to go to school for the first time.
The film then moves between the home of the Kiplings in a beautiful manor in rural England and the devastating world of trench warfare on the western front.A fine film all around, and again, a breath of fresh air for the likes of Radcliffe who has proved that he can play parts quite removed from fantasy.
David HAIG looks remarkably like Rudyard Kipling and gives a very strong performance, energetic and somewhat eccentric and overbearing at times, but always with a firm grip on his characterization of the man who did all he could to help his son enter the military during World War I.All the other performances are valid enough and DANIEL RADCLIFFE does a decent job as Kipling's eighteen year-old son, Jack, whose bad eyesight makes him a bit risky for serving in the military.
Thereafter, the conflict in the household comes to a core, with both Kipling's wife and daughter opposing the decision that Kipling made to push his son into service.The battle scenes are well staged, but unlike others who say there is no Harry Potter in Radcliffe's performance, I beg to differ.
His famous writer father Rudyard Kipling (David Haig) is a war hawk.
For instance, we're very clear that Rudyard Kipling is pro-war but we don't know if that philosophical stance changes through the course of the film.This is the sort of picture that makes me want to look up the facts in history books.
Her British accent is impressive, but she slipped on the words "pond" and "daughter" in the scene where she questions a soldier."My Boy Jack" will not be the best anti-war film, but it has good productions and is certain watchable..
I was very impressed, an excellent and highly sensitive production that documents the famous author Rudyard Kipling's efforts to gain his heavily short sighted son John (Jack) Kipling an officer's commission in the armed forces.I was impressed by the acting on all accounts, particularly David Haig, and his and Kim Catrell's interaction as husband and wife is notably natural and moving.
I'm not a fan of the Harry Potter films and in all honesty don't know to much about Daniel but after watching this moving film I have to say I was very impressed with young Daniel's acting.As someone else said ,the last 30 minutes of the film were very sad .David Haig also gave a great performance as Jack's father Rudyard Kipling ,as you watched ,it was heart breaking seeing him pushing his boy through the medicals with his poor sight knowing that Jack would be killed.
This is the sort of thing the BBC used to make but now its left to ITV to make real drama.The battle scenes are very realistic ,as the men await the order to go over the top ,the fear and terror they feel is highlighted brilliantly without much speech .A fantastic film which shows the horror of war better than most..
"My Boy Jack" is the second film that successfully portrays Kipling as a character - Huston's "The Man Who Would Be King" being the first.
Whereas Huston's film was a great allegory of the British Raj or empire-making in general, "My Boy Jack" relates the writer's personal tragedy at the death of his only son who died at Loos in 1915, and in what was called "the Great War" back in the days when no one knew that a greater still was shortly to come.
The film is more than brilliantly acted by scriptwriter David Haig (Kipling), Kim Cattrall (Carrie Kipling), Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter graduated from Hogsworth to play Jack) and Carey Mulligan (Elsie Kipling), but it sets out to paint a slightly hindsighty and overly pacifist picture of what actually occurred.
David Haig's screenplay shows us a family at war with each other, with the boy almost pressurized by his father to join the army (after he fails the Navy examination), and it shows Carrie and Elsie openly blaming Kipling for Jack's death in scenes that are more reminiscent of a modern day soap opera than a portrait of the clear-sighted Kipling and his staunch and ever-supportive American wife.There is a faint odor of post-Vietnam pacifism over the entire film, although never too explicit and always clashing with the stark realities of WWI that are also duly included: that Britain simply could not allow Germany and Austria to run rampant across Europe.
The film lets George V find the body of the prince, still warm, which he counts a blessing  this forms a heartrending contrast to Kipling who never recovered the body of his son at all, but there is yet another contrast in the deaths of the two sons when Kipling quotes his poem "My Boy Jack" that closes the film, indicating his small comfort found in the fact that John Kipling gave his life to a worthy cause in an ultimately inevitable war: "Then hold your head up all the more, this tide and every tide; because he was the son you bore and gave to that wind blowing and that tide.".
David Haig wrote My Boy Jack as a play in 1997 and portrayed Rudyard Kipling on stage and again in this television film.
The story of Jack Kipling tells of one of the millions of sons who have died at war, all equally important to those who loved them and far less important to those who view them as expendable.
My field of history is generally limited to the Mediaeval era or before, and I rarely do the war movies.That said, this film caught my attention from the effervescant Carrie Mulligan (Elsie) and Daniel Radcliffe, along with the fabulous David Haig (Kipling) and Kim Cattrall (Caroline).
I love a film that is done right.The casting is fantastic -- not a shred of Harry Potter in Dan Radcliffe's portrayal of the title character Jack.I understand this flick is coming to the USA in April.
You really do feel like you've just been watching the story of your own best friend or brother as they have lost Their Boy Jack.That is the film's greatest strength -- the fact that you feel like you are there, you feel like you are Elsie, Rudyard and Caroline Kipling and have just lost your own Jack -- and that, I believe, is precisely the point that David Haig was going for.
My Boy Jack, the title taken from Kipling's poem of the same name, tells the story of Rudyard Kipling and his role as vehement propagandist for England's entrance into WWI, and Rudyard Kipling as the father who wants his son to live up to his ideals of the patriotic Englishman.The show belongs to Haig, who not only wrote the play, but bears an uncanny resemblance to Rudyard.
But for my money, Radcliff, Haig and the rest of the actors, and the editors, did about as good a job showing poor Jack's final moments as any war movie death scene I have witnessed.
I would advise getting this its a great bit of film to commend various heroes in the war.It's a deeply moving story and i think Daniel Radcliffe did a great job- considering it was a completely different role hes done before.
The rest of the film deals with the efforts of Kipling and his American wife Carrie to find out what has happened to their son and their grief as they gradually come to accept that he will not be returning from the war.
Haig certainly bears a close resemblance to the real Kipling, and although his tone of voice and testy manner occasionally reminded me a bit too much of John Cleese's Basil Fawlty, it was overall a moving performance, especially in the later scenes when the ardent jingoist gives way to the anguished father, haunted not only by grief but also by guilt at the part he played in obtaining his son a commission.
The film does not, but ends when Kipling and Carrie track down one of Jack's platoon who tells them how their son died.
As said, it is an excellent film in all respects: acting, especially by David Haig as Rudyard Kipling, who also wrote the screenplay equally impressively.
Daniel Radcliffe (John 'Jack' Kipling) is more than Harry Potter and shows his acting chops here, as do Kim Cattrall (Caroline Kipling), Carey Mulligan (Elsie 'Bird' Kipling) and Martin McCann (Bowe of the Irish Guard), who relates the details of what happened to Jack.
I am a big fan of Kipling's works as well as a fan of Daniel Radcliffe & was very impressed with the acting of David Haig, Kim Cattrall, & Dan Radcliffe.
There are no ladies knitting back home in the capitals of Europe, but "My Boy Jack" does a topnotch job of portraying the horrors of World War I by focusing on one particular drawing room in England as Rudyard Kipling, his wife and daughter await word of the fate of son Jack, "missing, presumed wounded," in his first battle one day past his eighteenth birthday.Familiar with David Haig only as the bumbling Detective Inspector Grim in the British comedy series, "The Thin Blue Line," I had no idea he could act so dramatically, let alone write so moving a piece as this.
The story mainly concerns his only son, 17-year-old John/Jack (Daniel Radcliffe, in a good break away from Harry Potter) who is ambitious and determined to get into the army.
a wonderful biopic of the Great War. David Haig wrote and starred as Rudyard Kipling in 'My Boy Jack', a drama about the brief life of John Kipling, who went to war despite his appalling eyesight and died in the trenches as a teenager.Jack is played by Daniel Radcliffe, who carried all the baggage of being better known as Harry Potter - however his performance is understated, moving, and well crafted.
He also has a resemblance to Haig which makes it all the more convincing that they are father and son.The real revelation of this drama though is the casting of Kim Cattrall, Sex and the City's Samantha Jones, as Jack's mother - she is brilliant and this film proves she really can act.The film presents the realities of war without sentiment, and also does justice to the reputation and work of Kipling.
My Boy Jack is a TV film about Jack Kipling centered in the first world war.
Rudyard Kipling's son Jack goes to war in 1914..
All of it is fact-based and, considering Haig's participation, likely to be very close to what actually happened.Daniel Radcliffe (of Harry Potter fame) was about 18 during filming and he plays the son, Jack Kipling, who was 17, about to turn 18.