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No man is an island, yet it takes just two to start a war. A William Hodges vista establishes John Boorman's acute pictorial sense, intensified with a series of cuts revealing Toshiro Mifune sitting cross-legged by the beachfront, impassive before the crashing waves. A descending vertical pan finds Lee Marvin muttering amidst the exposed roots of a mighty tree, and there you have the combatants in their verdant battleground. The American pilot and the Japanese captain in tattered uniforms, representing flags until survival turns hostile one-upmanship into grudging comradeship. War distilled to the utmost, East and West scrambling to sabotage each other in hostile terrain, "win some, lose some." The pacifist metaphor is mere scaffolding for a tremendously visceral touch somewhere between Anthony Mann and Werner Herzog: Alive to every natural texture, the Panavision widescreen feasts on the matted bamboo surrounding Mifune's makeshift palisade, the cobalt sky darkened through the charred branches of a bonfire, the sound Marvin's canteen makes as it dips into his foe's water still. (Buñuel in Mexico filming Defoe is a distinct precedent.) No less vital is the interplay of the actors, both sly physical comics, both perfectly attuned to the absurd farce of castaways taking turns taking each other prisoner. "Watchman, what of the night?" The truce endures aboard a sun-baked raft, then dissolves between cups of sake and Life magazine pages at the bombed-out compound. An exploration of silent-film storytelling (cf. Kubrick's Dawn of Man that same year), the essence of Boorman's metaphysical-elemental conflicts, practically a rough draft for the arduous mastery of Deliverance. Roeg and Weir take plenty of notes, Frankenheimer in The Fourth War updates the parable. Cinematography by Conrad Hall.
--- Fernando F. Croce |