Fires on the Plain

In the Philippines in 1945 the Japanese army has come apart. Tamura, a private with tuberculosis, is sent back by his unit, refused by the hospital, and left between the two on the plain with a few potatoes. What follows is not an army but scattered starving men and what they can do to each other. Kon Ichikawa adapted Shohei Ooka's novel and neither skirts cannibalism by implication nor turns it into spectacle; what the phrase monkey meat means becomes clear slowly. Eiji Funakoshi lost a great deal of weight for the part and his health failed during the shoot. The fires on the horizon look like the one sign of hope, and they are not that either. Who it is for: anyone who wants to see anti-war cinema at its harshest. Who it is not for: viewers who must avoid starvation, corpses and cannibalism.