George Segal died recently, so I decided to watch Bryan Forbes's Academy Award-nominated adaptation of James Clavell's "King Rat", in which Segal played a POW in a Japanese camp in Malaya (now Singapore).
In addition to Segal's strong performance as the protagonist, the movie looks at the harsh conditions in the POW camp; it's a safe bet that the treatment of the prisoners there flouted the Geneva Conventions. As the movie notes at the beginning, this is not a story of escape, but of survival. And believe me, when things are this rough, you'll do just about anything to survive!
I'd wager that World War II is the most focused-on topic in cinema, whether in the US, UK, Germany, Russia or Japan. Even so, I still recommend this movie. It's one of the grittiest looks at life in a POW camp. The rest of the cast includes Tom Courtenay (Pasha in "Doctor Zhivago"), James Fox (Mr. Salt in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory"), Denholm Elliott (Marcus Brody in the Indiana Jones movies), Leonard Rossiter (Smyslov in "2001: A Space Odyssey") and Joe Turkel (Lloyd in "The Shining").
In addition to Segal's strong performance as the protagonist, the movie looks at the harsh conditions in the POW camp; it's a safe bet that the treatment of the prisoners there flouted the Geneva Conventions. As the movie notes at the beginning, this is not a story of escape, but of survival. And believe me, when things are this rough, you'll do just about anything to survive!
I'd wager that World War II is the most focused-on topic in cinema, whether in the US, UK, Germany, Russia or Japan. Even so, I still recommend this movie. It's one of the grittiest looks at life in a POW camp. The rest of the cast includes Tom Courtenay (Pasha in "Doctor Zhivago"), James Fox (Mr. Salt in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory"), Denholm Elliott (Marcus Brody in the Indiana Jones movies), Leonard Rossiter (Smyslov in "2001: A Space Odyssey") and Joe Turkel (Lloyd in "The Shining").