Dir: Bryan Forbes | Cast: Tom Courtney, George Segal, James Fox, Denholm Elliott | Uk Adventure thriller
Based on James Clavell’s bestseller, and described by its director as “A watershed in my professional life”, ‘King Rat’ marked Bryan Forbes’ first Hollywood production; and was one of the very few in which – for obvious reasons – Nanette Newman didn’t appear.
Although filmed in California with Oscar-nominated photography by veteran Hollywood cameramen Burnett Guffey – with a spare but atmospheric score by John Barry which marked his first use of a cimbalon – Forbes assembled a largely British cast, some whom like John Mills evoked the heroic war films of the forties & fifties, while James Fox and Tom Courtney represented the scepticism of the sixties; with Denholm Elliott straddling both.
The film inevitably failed to capture the rawness and profanity of Clavell’s novel – although it contains a simultaneously appalling yet exhilarating scene where the assembled POWs overcome their initial distaste and ravenously tuck into a cooked dog – and retains the moment when Fox rails against the God that presided over this Hell on Earth as “a sadistic maniac!”.
Critics complained that the cast were insufficiently emaciated; but Forbes himself later recalled that John Standing in particular dieted to the point that he fainted from malnutrition. @RichardChatten
NOW ON DIGITAL PLATFORMS