Instead the film is totally preoccupied with the valour, courage and determination of the British soldiers, who are led by Colonel Lambert (André Morell). White and Val Guest makes no attempt to humanise the Japanese, they are merely devices of subjugation and domination. This includes a horrible scene in which a plea for more bandages is rewarded with the bloody and tatty bandages of the man shot at the start of the film. Some audiences may have problems with the depiction of the Japanese, who are unremittingly cruel and sadistic. The indignities visited upon the diplomat Beattie (Walter Fitzgerald) illustrate a desire on the Japanese part to reduce figures of respect and authority to animals. The Japanese are coldly logical in the manner in which they deal out punishments, but this cool logic is sometimes betrayed by a need to mock and humiliate. He is despatched with the wave of a hand in a cruelly economical fashion in front of the watching prisoners. The film sets its stall out instantly with an opening sequence which sees an under nourished man digging what turns out to be his own grave. It gives the film a sense of immediacy and a brightness which indicates the brutal toll of a blazing sun. He is a filmmaker who worked particularly well with black and white, and much of the resonance and reality of this film is evoked through the beautiful monochrome cinematography of Jack Asher. Unlike Terence Fisher, Guest was able to leap easily from genre to genre, but for me Guest is at his best when dealing with gritty and realistic material. Val Guest is a director who has received sparse attention from scholars, but in the 1950’s he directed and wrote many films for Hammer.
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