KING RAT
A film review by Shane R. Burridge
Copyright 1996 Shane R. Burridge
(1965) 133m.
Even those who don't like war movies are bound to enjoy George Segal's assured performance as Corporal King in this adaptation of James Clavell's novel. Events take place in a Japanese-run POW camp in Singapore towards the close of WWII. Refreshingly, this film is not about escape, or attempted escape - as the prologue states, it is a story of existence within the camp itself. Opportunistic King enlists the services of British prisoner Peter Marlowe (James Fox) after learning that he can speak Malay. A bond forms between the two, though its worth is not revealed until the film's end, when we see their friendship more as a natural countermeasure against the unwelcome attention of Lt. Grey (Tom Courtenay), the camp's provost marshal. Grey is a strictly by-the-book one-man law enforcement operation who divides his time between maintaining order in the camp and staking out King's money-making scams, waiting to pounce on him at the first opportunity. He rightly believes in his own integrity but fails to recognize the same quality in the other, less disciplined, inmates of the camp. Grey can't see that each POW has their own way of dealing with their situation, or that his is to try to create reason out of chaos.
The camp struggles within a frail system of law and order: everyone demands justice, revenge, compensation, a deal. The Japanese seem just as caught up in the power game as everyone else - control becomes a shuffle of reports, reprimands, and reprisals. In this environment, a hustler like King is sure to thrive, just as any resourceful rat would. While the film refers to prisons within the prison (Grey's jail, the cages beneath the American barracks, the cell they "hire" to get some privacy), it is the prison within themselves that confines the men most. It seems obvious in the case of the repressed provost marshal, the careworn, numbed surgeon, and the diversionary denial that several prisoners indulge in, but King is perhaps the most trapped of all. "Before this," he says of the war, "everybody had it made except me". For him, the end of the war is a more pressing concern than it's continuation: he believes that the Japanese will kill all their prisoners before surrendering; Grey has vowed to get even with him when the war is over; and a liberating soldier intimates an investigation into his activities after the evacuation. King will no longer be king.
Subject matter sounds depressing, but KING RAT is actually quite funny in places (particularly the sequences about a makeshift school lesson and a secret dinner held for King's friends) and the dialog crackles whenever Grey is at odds with King or Marlowe. Courtney and Fox couldn't be better in their roles. Performances are first-rate all round, from John Mills and Denholm Elliott right down to bit parts like Leonard Rossiter. John Barry wrote the elegaic score; Bryan Forbes directed from his own screenplay.
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