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Lord of Flies (1963) |
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Home: You are here: VHS : Lord of Flies (1963) |
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Lord of Flies (1963)  Rating: Rating:  - Plain, Underbudgeted, Overrated 'Classic'I had heard so much about this being the definitive version, about it being 'better than the book' and so on, so when I got to seeing it, I was surprised by how awful it was. In this under-budgeted version, the movie opens with a series of still photos of the crash, then we're presented with a child in the jungle. Hunting or death scenes are directed so poorly, they may have been better off with still photos. While most agree this is a more faithful version, it's also cut things like the insane conversation with the pig, and what is here just doesn't work anyway. The only young actor who excels is the kid playing Piggy, most of the other young actors seem too self-aware and are coasting on makeup. You're better off re-reading the book because you can imagine anything better than this. There's no sense of true moral abandon, or of their hopes dwindling over a long period of time. It's pedestrian. The definitive LORD of the Flies has not been made as a film. You should also remember that there are no remakes, because the material wasn't originally a film. I'll leave you with some snippets of reviews by critics before it was decided that this was a masterpiece. ("Semiprofessional . . . crude and unconvincing" - Halliwell; "Patched together" - Kauffmann). Rating:  - A pretty good adaptation of the bookI have just finished watching this on T.C.M. and I can say that this movie is very close to the novel. I still kind of like the book better though. My guess is, the reason this film is in black and white is because of a budget shortage, and there is some book material missing. Other than that, this was a definite classic, and who says old movies are not good anymore. Rating:  - Excellent, durable version of the Novel. Better than remake.`Lord of the Flies' has been made into a movie at least twice since the William Golding novel of the same name became a cult classic / must read volume for high school and college students in the late 1950s. The first version, which follows the novel very closely, was done in black and white by the noted director, Peter Brook in 1963. The second version was done in color by Harry Hook and released in 1990. Like many remakes in the same language, one immediately wonders why bother, as the original Brook version is more than gripping enough to convey the message of the novel. To highlight the differences between the two versions, let me outline the story shared by the two versions. The scene is set when an airplane carrying school children crashes in the South Pacific, of the coast of a remote tropical island. Approximately 30 of the children, ages 6 to 13 make it to shore and gather on the beach to work out how they are to survive and assume that since they are far removed from their original destination and the island is small and uninhabited, there is a good chance it will take a long time, if ever, for grown-ups to find and rescue them. The first two principle characters are Ralph, one of the two or three oldest boys who we meet first, in the company of an intelligent, bespectacled, slightly overweight boy of the same age known as `Piggy'. The third main character is Jack, about as old and as fit as Ralph. Three minor named characters are Simon, who is prone to fainting and `seeing things' and Sam and Eric, a pair of twins. An early vote sets up Ralph as the leader, with a few rules establishing a conch shell found by Ralph and Piggy in the first reel as the symbol of the right to speak to the gathering of boys. Jack immediately assumes the responsibility as leader of a `gang' (later to become a `tribe') of hunters who will also take responsibility for maintaining a signal fire which Ralph succeeds in lighting by using Piggy's eyeglass lens as a means of concentrating sunlight on a clump of tinder. Jack's gang gets involved too much in hunting and allows the signal fire to go out just as an aircraft flies near the island. Soon, a story evolves about the presence of a monster on the island. This creates the pretext for Jack to split off from the group with his tribe and create a camp at a more defensible location. As this larger group becomes more and more primitive, they raid Ralph's camp and steal Piggy's specs since it is the only means they have for starting fires. To placate the monster, the head of a killed wild pig is cut from its carcass and stood on the top of a pole near the suspected monster's lair as an offering to the monster. After a few days, Simon observes this pig's head and its very large collection of flies feasting on the festering flesh and imagines he hears the pigs head speak to him, hence, the source of the title. Simon is then killed when the hunters mistake him in the night for the monster. When Ralph and Piggy walk to Jack's camp to recover Piggy's specs, Piggy is killed by another `accident' when Jack's tribe members pry a large boulder loose that falls on Piggy. Ralph and Jack fight, Ralph is driven off, and the whole tribe sets fire to the jungle to flush out Ralph and, presumably, kill him. Both stories end as Ralph runs to the beach to find himself at the feet of a very professionally uniformed member of his country's elite armed services. Hook spices up the dialogue by making the boys much more hip with lots of swear words and references to contemporary popular shows such as Alf and Miss Piggy of the Muppets. Unfortunately, Hook loses the two most important elements of the whole story. In the beginning of the novel and, subtly, in the beginning of Brook's film, we see that the world is once more at war and the boys from several different schools are on a plane to Australia to find relative safety from the coming (nuclear?) conflict. Hook shows nothing of this, giving us simply a group of boys from the same military academy on a trip to goodness knows where. This totally looses the whole allegorical sense of the story where the conflict between the boys mirrors the war in the world at large, especially the sense of the last scene where the world (island) is destroyed by the conflict (fire). The second major oversight in Hook's rendition is that there is never enough attention given to the significance of the pig's head, Simon's vision, and the sense of `The Lord of the Flies'. A less important point is that the origin of the monster myth is different in the two movies. Brook's film follows the book and has it be a misinterpretation of a billowing parachute from a fallen, dead pilot. Hook creates the myth out of the spasms of the downed plane's delirious pilot as he finds refuge in a cave and is rediscovered by Simon who believes he is a monster. Both movies do a credible job of depicting the fall of nominally civilized boys into savagery and myth. The combat between Ralph and Jack near the end is straight out of Frazier's `The Golden Bough' on the myth of killing the king. Unfortunately, Hook's version seems as eviscerated as the pig carcass, as all the great allegorical of the original story are totally lost. And, as minimal as they were, I even think the boys' performances in Brook's version are better done, as their initial innocence in the face of this loss of civilization makes their transformation all the more interesting. Brook's version is highly recommended. Rating: - I liked the book more...The movie was not as good as the book plain and simple and some of the scenes were choppy. Not to mention the acting was pretty bad (i.e Piggy meets ralph in the beginning of the film). and the didn't do the scene where simon talk to the pigs head. And compared to the book it was somewhat boring, so save yourself time and go read the book, but if for some reason you need to know the basic story line, I guess you can watch the movies, but I restate the movie is inferior to the book. |
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