Cavalry - On Film

On Film

Some small sense of the noise and power of a cavalry charge can be gained from the 1970 film Waterloo, which featured some 2000 cavalrymen, some of them cossacks. It included detailed displays of the horsemanship required to manage animal and weapons in large numbers at the gallop (unlike the real battle of Waterloo, where deep mud significantly slowed the horses). The Gary Cooper movie They Came to Cordura contains an excellent scene of a cavalry regiment deploying from march to battleline formation. A smaller-scale cavalry charge can be seen in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003); although the finished scene has substantial computer-generated imagery, raw footage and reactions of the riders are shown in the Extended Version DVD Appendices.

Other films that show cavalry actions include:

• The Charge of the Light Brigade, about the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War
• 40,000 Horsemen, about the Australian Light Horse during the Sinai and Palestine campaign of World War I
• The Lighthorsemen, about the Battle of Beersheba, 1917
• War Horse, about the British cavalry in Europe during World War I
• Hubal, about the last months (September 1939 - April 1940) of Poland's first World War II guerilla, Major Henryk Dobrzanski, "Hubal"