REACH FOR GLORY (1962)

William Golding’s LORD OF THE FLIES meets Ferenc Molnár’s THE PAUL STREET BOYS in this Little League anti-war cautionary tale.* Eager for battle, but too young to enlist, a gang of displaced schoolboys, sent for safety from the big city to a coastal town, play out turf battles in a mock war until real tragedy strikes. A workable idea, but Philip Leacock’s film starts on the wrong foot (and stays there) as our brutish boys take to their bikes on a metaphorical ‘fox hunt,’ chasing a cat right over a cliff. This action entirely unconvincing, but then the rest of the film is equally pre-deterministic, chucking believability overboard to score easy pacifist points. Nicely cast though, with a rough amateur edge to most of the teenage sociopaths giving the film whatever verisimilitude it has, even as action/character/plot fail to add up. No one in town notices something’s amiss? And just where are these maladjusted delinquents living? Disappointing.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: *Peter Brook’s lumpy film of LORD OF THE FLIES/’63 once held a stellar rep, but Frank Borzage’s NO GREATER GLORY/’34, his version of Molnár’s THE PAUL STREET BOYS, remains a heartbreaking war allegory.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/02/no-greater-glory-1934.html