Memorial Day Cinema: P.O.W. Movies

Taken together, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and The Great Escape (1963) represent the axis around which all other World War II prisoner-of-war movies revolve, ranking 95 and 114, respectively, on IMDb.

Bridge, a seven-Oscar winner, including Best Picture, centers on a group of prisoners who elect to show their Japanese captors the unbreakable spirit of the British people by building a train bridge. Similarly, in The Great Escape, P.O.W.s play havoc with their captors by trying to crack the boundaries of an escape-proof camp for repeat offenders.

These movies inspired other films like Von Ryan’s Express (1965), The Wooden Horse (1950), and Stalag 17 (1952), which focus more on the capers of the escapes themselves. With refuge so tantalizingly close—the Swiss border, the North and Baltic Seas—sanctuary is almost at hand.

In Great Escape, Steve McQueen only has to jump one more barbed wire fence in his motorcycle to find Swiss freedom; James Garner and Donald Pleasance need only a few more gallons of petrol to fly into Switzerland. Tunnel kings Charles Bronson and John Leyton found a boat in a North Sea harbor.

In the Pacific theater, however, there’s nowhere for prisoners to go. Generally, the Japanese gave their prisoners so little food that hunger was on the minds of prisoners more than escape. This dismal reality is reflected in two other, significant Japanese P.O.W. films: King Rat (1965) and Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983).

Among the fascinating aspects of King Rat is the near complete absence of the Japanese. No guards (until the last half-hour), no commandant. Escape is not a consideration. There's no room for heroism or a “bridge” project. The society of P.O.W.s wallows in schemes and paranoia.

George Segal plays Corporal King, an ex-gangster from Chicago, who lives in relative luxury compared to everyone else. His position in the camp most resembles that of William Holden’s character in Stalag 17. He’s envied and hated, and for the most part, he’s untouchable. Segal has no plan to escape the camp; nor, it appears, has he made contingency plans for its liberation. Tom Courtney, who tries to control black market dealings in the camp, makes Segal’s subordination his personal project, like Guinness’ bridge.

Where the Americans in Stalag 17 had to worry about a mole, the British in King Rat use the leverage of food distribution as power over the prisoners. But by unbalancing the scales, cheating prisoners of grain and selling it on the side, they risk a death sentence. King Rat uses the American and British presence to criticize the English social-military structure of the British, culminating in Corporal King's plan to cultivate the meatiest rats and sell them to the British officers.

Food insecurity is also a theme in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, which graphically displays how the Japanese P.O.W. camps centered on the systematic starvation of their prisoners. Japanese rock star Ryuchi Sakamoto plays a commandant who believes the British prisoners are weak and without honor because they surrendered instead of committing suicide. Where the other films take as given the disconnect between the two cultures, Merry Christmas makes it the overriding concern of the film.

Much of the conflict subsequently centers on Colonel Lawrence (Tom Conti) who speaks Japanese and believes he understand the Japanese way of thinking. His commander, Hicksley (Jack Thompson), feels Conti’s too close with the Japanese, and a Japanese guard, Hara (Takeshi Kitano), routinely toys with Conti, switching from friendly to savage with little provocation. When Jack Celliers (David Bowie) enters the camp, the Commandant believes he has found a like-minded soldier, unsuspecting of the deeper impact Celliers will have on everyone, but especially Sakamoto.

Many actors in P.O.W. films tended to overlap as well: William Holden appears in both Bridge and Stalag 17; James Donaldson appears in Bridge, Great Escape, and King Rat. James Clavell, who wrote the script for The Great Escape, is the author of the novel King Rat as well as it screen adaptation. Clavell, best known for his epic works Tai-pan and Shogun, has also directed several films, including To Sir, With Love (1967) and The Last Valley (1971); he also wrote the screenplay for The Fly (1958).

Not surprisingly, other P.O.W. camp films are the products of men who spent most of the war in one. J.G. Ballard wrote the memoir Empire of the Sun (filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1987), detailing his experiences as a boy in a camp outside Shanghai.

Ballard has written several classic postmodern tales, Crash (filmed by David Cronenberg) and The Atrocity Exhibition, a notorious book of stories that publisher Nelson Doubleday destroyed before its release. South African novelist and philosopher Lauren van der Post, another veteran of a Japanese camp wrote The Sower and the Seed, which became the film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, as well as an acclaimed short memoir, The Night of the New Moon, which dealt with his last months as a prisoner.

Collingswood resident Bob Castle is an author, teacher, film critic, and playwright. In town, he is also the founder of the Collingswood Movie Club, which meets monthly in the public library for film showings and discussion.

Castle's writing has appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal, Film Comment, and The Film Journal. His plays have been performed during the Philadelphia New Play Festival, the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and at the the Gone in 60 Seconds and "In a New York Minute" festivals.