Yesterday's Enemy

On the Burma front in the Second World War, a British patrol cut off behind Japanese lines takes a small village. To find out what the documents he has captured mean, the commanding officer wants one of the villagers made to talk, and has two civilians shot to get it. The war correspondent attached to the unit and the padre object. Not long afterwards the Japanese retake the position and the same calculation runs in the opposite direction. The film's force comes from that symmetry: the same justification, the same hardness, only the uniform changes. Val Guest stages no heroism and does not settle the argument on either side; the officer's defence and the objection to it both stand to the end. The Hammer production was shot entirely on stages, and the studio jungle sharpens the sense of enclosure. Stanley Baker plays an officer who is not asking to be liked.