Fires on the Plain

I don’t remember why I picked this movie to see in the festival. It was a while ago, and there’s been a lot of stimulation this past week. This is my last film of the festival. I don’t remember picking this movie.

But as I start watching it, I remember that I had heard the title, Fires on the Plain, the book. I came across it when I was looking up when the last Japanese soldier came out of the jungle after WWII, the guys who hid out for twenty years, never admitting the war was over. Amazing the answers that are at our fingertips on the internet these days. The question had occurred to me when I was reading Neptune's Inferno, James D. Hornfisher’s book on the naval battles of Guadalcanal. It was either that or watching Gilligan’s Island reruns.

Did you know they had the same problem in Europe? In 1939 the Nazis invaded Poland, partitioning it with the Soviets. Starting then, over the next six years, the Poles built up what became the biggest underground army in Europe, over a million men, to liberate their country from the Nazis. Sadly, after the war, they didn’t end up liberated at all, we (that’s FDR and Churchill) sold them out to the Soviets to try to buy some peace. The Soviets didn’t want this underground army of troublemakers running around in their version of Poland any more than the Nazis did, and went about imprisoning, executing, and generally being mean to them, so not all of the underground army’s members thought that the postwar demob was anything like a good thing. The last of the members of Poland’s Armia Krajowa was flushed out of the undergrowth only in 1963, almost twenty years after the war.  They were called the "Cursed Soldiers."

Anyway, I learned that the last Japanese soldier also came out of the jungle finally in the 1960s. At some point in that research, I remember I heard mention of the novel Fires on the Plain, and I thought this might be the story of living in the jungle for twenty years after the war.

But it wasn’t.  I must have misremembered. It’s the story of the final days of the war. The Japanese soldiers are exhausted and filthy and starving-—a single uncooked yam is regarded as a day’s rations. Those yams become a major plot factor in this film. Along with great spouting gobbets of bright red blood. Arcing slow-motion streams of blood, and a cloudy spray of exploding blood, and torrents of blood running down faces and bodies. What with the stress, and the organizational confusion, and having been denied his daily yam more often than not, our hero is losing it pretty heavily for a good portion of the movie, though he does manage to lose it with rubuous cinematic flair. This is more like Apocalypse Now than the Cuban hairdresser movie, except in this movie he’s got nowhere to go, there’s no destination, no goal, even hallucinatory, though he does adopt a negative goal of "not eating human flesh" as one of his motivating principles over the second half of the movie. The yams are a nostalgically half-remembered dream from the good old days by then, instead we’re shown the variety of ways to not eat human flesh.

Post Scriptum: Now that I'm back home and able to do some research, as opposed to making airy generalizations, I find that the movie is based on the novel by Shohei Ooka, who was actually there.  And this is the second film realization of the novel--the first is a classic from 1959 (with a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes!?!). 

Comments

[haynes-linda@att.net]

okay Kevin,

you have convinced me... this is one that I will definitely skip.

However the movie that you thought it was going to be, the one about the last Japaneses solider coming out of the jungle after World War Two, in the 1960's, well..This movie, does sound interesting.
And it makes me think of the DVD Documentary Story of Ishi the last survivor of the Yahi Tribe, which I have just picked up from the library, and looking forward to watching after reading the last couple of Carl Nolte Pieces in the Chronicle about Ishi's incredible story.
but back to your review, and I will tell you that even your reviews panning a film are interesting to read in a number of different directions

Linda