WORLD WAR POWs II Movie Review

World War II: Prisoners of War on Screen

The POW situation turns the war film inside out. One basic tenant of the genre is that the sides are fairly evenly matched—either one could win. Even if it is a David vs. Goliath mismatch, we know that David has a chance. That's a key element of the story's dramatic tension. In the POW film, though, one side is essentially powerless, stripped of its weapons, and so is forced to find new tactics. Usually, that means escape, but not always. And because the rules are so fundamentally changed, filmmakers are forced to be more creative. The results are some of the more off beat, and often popular, war films.

Director Fred Zinnemann made his debut in 1944 with The Seventh Cross, a semi-noir tale set in 1936 and describing an escape from a concentration camp. The protagonist, played by Spencer Tracy, has been locked up for unspecified political reasons, and so the horrors of the Holocaust are only alluded to. Zinnemann sacrifices some suspense when he shifts his focus to ordinary Germans, two played by Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, and their mixed reactions to Nazi rule. It makes for unusually thoughtful propaganda.

After the war, many POW films were based on fact. Three Came Home, from 1950, is an adaptation of Agnes Newton Keith's fine autobiographical book. It revolves around the relationship that develops between a writer (Claudette Colbert) and the Japanese colonel (Sessue Hayakawa), who is a fan of her work and the commandant in charge of the prison camps where she and her family are held. Again, the film refuses to cast the enemy as a one-dimensional villain. The two sides are too close, almost intimate, for that.

The events described in Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (see review and sidebar) would be impossible to believe if they weren't true. Bresson uses them as the basis of an exploration of isolation, both physical and spiritual. This fine, austere film is virtually unknown in this country and deserves a larger audience.

Prison camps are the setting for two of the biggest boxoffice hits of the 1950s. Billy Wilder's dated Stalag 17 won an Academy Award for its star William Holden. A few years later, Holden co-starred with Alec Guinness and Sessue Hayakawa in David Lean's phenomenal Bridge on the River Kwai, one of the most honored and profitable films to come out of World War II.

Novelist James Clavell, who was a prisoner of the Japanese for three years in Singapore, is largely responsible for two of the best POW films of the 1960s. He co-wrote and produced The Great Escape, arguably the best adventure film of the decade, and he adapted his autobiographical novel, King Rat, for director Bryan Forbes. Though this one has never achieved the popularity of The Great Escape, it is a more accurate portrait of day-to-day life in a camp, and a terrifically entertaining film in its own right.

Frank Sinatra fares well, essentially playing himself, in the escapist fluff of Von Ryan's Express. David Bowie attempts a more serious character study in Nagisa Oshima's dreamlike Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. Oshima returns to the relationship between the captive, Bowie as an iron-willed commando, and the captor, played by Japanese pop star Ryuichi Sakamoto.

In the 1980s and '90s, the POW film goes back to its factual roots with Steven Spielberg's version of science-fiction writer J.G. Ballard's autobiographical Empire of the Sun. It's curiously cold, not nearly as successful as Spielberg's other work in the genre. Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road takes an ensemble cast through some of the same fact-based territory that Agnes Newton Keith explored in a story of women imprisoned by the Japanese. Part of the basis is the poetry of Margaret Dryburgh. Though the film is not as well known as some of the others in this group, its sense of place is as strong as any, and it does what the best do—it gives the viewer just a taste, a hint, an idea of what the real experience of being a prisoner must be like, and that's all that most of us would ever want to experience.