King Rat

I notice that King Rat is coming back on the TCM schedule this afternoon at 3:00 PM (for some reason, I thought it was on tomorrow), so I hastily watched it last night to do a full-length post on it.

The time is early 1945 in the Changi POW camp in Malaya, which at the time was still held by Japan. Obviously, we know that the war is going to be over in a few months, but there's no way anybody in the movie could have known that. The Japanese are stereotypically harsh in their treatment of the prisoners, leading to all sorts of illnesses and near-starvation. The men have to survive any way they know how.

For American Corporal King (George Segal), that means becoming a hustler in the business sense, running all sorts of schemes to make money and influence and use that with the camp guards in exchange for the goods necessary to survive. Other people raise chickens (where they get the feed from is left unmentioned), and one guy even has a dog. Meanwhile, since Malaya had been a British colony before the Japanese invasion, much of the camp's population is either British or Australian. Much like the Alec Guinness character in Bridge on the River Kwai, they try to keep stiff British discipline, under provost (roughly a chief of military police) Grey (Tom Courtenay).

The two sides come into constant conflict along with a bunch of other smaller conflicts; King is able to win British soldier Marlowe (James Fox) to his side as Marlowe can speak Malay and translate. But Marlowe suffers an accident that leaves him with a gangrenous arm and dangerous surgery that might kill him.

King Rat is an interesting movie with good performances, although I have to admit I found myself not giving it quite as high a rating as many of the IMDb reviewers give it. Not that it's a bad movie by any means; it's more that I felt it dragged at times and that there was a whole lot of nothing going on at certain points. I also felt the main conflict wasn't resolved all that well.

Still, King Rat is definitely worth a watch. It's sadly out of print on DVD, although for those who can do streaming it's currently on Amazon streaming.