THE HILL (1965)

With all those battle-hardened vets to tap into, the ‘50s & ‘60s were, in quantity if not in quality, a Golden Age for WWII themed Prisoner-of-War pics.  This one, a particularly brutal example of the form, comes with a twist since both prisoners & guards are Brits.  It flips a lot of P.O.W. tropes toward traditional prison melodrama* since no one’s planning an escape; no Geneva Convention Rules to flout; no Red Cross packages withheld at Christmas.  If only director Sidney Lumet, working hard to move past his tv-trained limitations thru attention-calling stylistics (jump cuts, distorting lenses, showy angles) realized what a load of genre clichés he’s been given: laissez-faire prison chief; sadistic top-sergeant pushing  his charges to the breaking point; a loyal second secretly plotting to takeover; pathetic, ineffectual ‘Doc’; that decent fellow running the abutting prison block.  Convicts similarly standard issue: unbreakable hero; faithful Black cell-mate; self-denying married sissy-boy; fat squealer; the tough guy who folds.  Everything but a jute mill.  In its place, a Myth of Sisyphus punishment built by the prisoners/for the prisoners, a hill of sand to run up & down with full packs on until you drop.  Nothing inherently wrong with this, but Lumet plays as if he’d just discovered the nihilistic existential deep-dish inanity-of-war.  Powerhouse acting from Sean Connery, Harry Andrews, Ian Bannen, Michael Redgrave, Ossie Davis, just too much of it.  And where’s the implied firing squad tag-ending.  Shot & removed?

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Classic prison drama BRUTE FORCE/’47 has Burt Lancaster in the Sean Connery spot and clearly shows where this comes from. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/brute-force-1947.html   OR: One of the best, unfairly forgotten WWII P.O.W. pics out the same year, KING RAT/’65 with Bryan Forbes directing George Segal, Tom Courtenay, James Fox & Denholm Elliot.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  R.S. Allen, who wrote the (unproduced?) play this was taken from, spent the year writing episodes for WWII themed P.O.W. sit-com HOGAN’S HEROES.  Yikes!