The Rack

Captain Edward Hall comes home after years in a prison camp in Korea. Under pressure in the camp he said what the enemy wanted said. Now he faces a military court on a charge of collaboration. The hearing opens up not only what he did but where a person's capacity to hold out actually ends. His father is an officer too, and struggles to understand his son. Arnold Laven's film is adapted from a television play by Rod Serling, with a screenplay by Stewart Stern. It is one of Paul Newman's early works. Walter Pidgeon plays the father and Lee Marvin one of the witnesses. The telling gives no easy answer: it neither declares heroism nor treats the charge as entirely without foundation.