Best movie of this year hands down!

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

This WWII prison camp drama set in the steaming Burmese jungle is a metaphor for the horrors of World War II and features what is easily George Segal's best dramatic performance, an even better one by James Fox, and lean, taut direction from Bryan Forbes. It also offers many insights on the British class system and takes a very grimly pessimistic view of the human condition. There is some humor but it is darkly sardonic and somewhat sadistic in nature. Segal's con artist extrodinaire Sergeant King is the dark side of Segeant Bilko and he employs bitter cynicism as opposed to the wisecracking humor of Phil Silvers. It is based on a novel by James Clavell, and is a better film, if not more entertaining, than the author's "The Great Escape," which was released a couple of years prior to "Rat." With the exception of Segal, the British cast members greatly outshine their American counterparts. Tom Courtenay, the always wonderful Denholm Elliott, John Mills, Gerald Sim, Leonard Rossiter, and Alan Webb all contribute memorable characterizations, but by far the best is James Donald as the compassionate, humane camp doctor, practically reprising his role of eight years earlier in "Bridge on the Rver Kwai' also set in a Burmese prison camp.

. . . to literal hot dog. KING RAT is a gastronomical smörgåsbord of WWII P.O.W. fare, from bugs to yolks. A sense of dread pervades KING RAT for most of its two and a quarter hour running time, even though the camp's Japanese captors rarely are on-screen. A sizable cemetery is shown for prisoners who've previously been executed, starved to death, or died from disease, but only a few fatalities are implied during the final months of the war covered by this story. There are no killings on-camera. Essentially, KING RAT is a "chick flick" for men, as the entire show focuses on the emotional relationships that develop between men under duress. No females appear anywhere, unless you count hens and rats. KING RAT is "fair and balanced," as Fox News likes to say, since none of the Japanese atrocities covered by such films as THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI are depicted here. KING RAT is NOT John Wayne's type of war movie. It's more like THE WOLF OF WALL STREET, without the nude girls, profanity, and booze.

Lawrence Kohlberg wrote a controversial and much discussed paper about the stages of moral development at the U. of Chicago in 1958. Kohlberg asserted that moral development ranged from conditioned obedience and fear of punishment through self-interest, conformity, authority for the sake of maintenance of social order, and consciously made social contracts, to awareness of universal ethical principles. While still subject to argument, a number of psychometric tests have been adapted or specifically developed to test the accuracy of Kohlberg's notions. To this day, his ideas strongly influence measures of anti-social, sociopathic and sadomasochistic thought and behavior in criminal justice and other endeavors. Take a look at it on, say, Wikipedia, and then watch "King Rat" closely to see where the various major characters fall on the scale. Further, one can utilize "KR" as an illustration of socialized, acculturated, "normalized," and belief-bound -- vs. chillingly empirical, anti-socialized, anti-ac-CULT-urated, ab-normalized, observation-driven -- appraisal of events. The former may well be "just" and "fair," but relatively ineffective when it comes down to survival... and the latter may be "ruthless" and "vicious," but relatively effective therefor. "KR" demands one climb out of the box of "delivered truth" based on authoritarian in-struct-ion to "get it." In modern neuropsychological parlance (see, for example, Iain McGilchrist), it requires that one pretty much abandon the rules and regulations of the brain's verbal- symbolic-skewed left hemisphere for the open-mindedness of spatial- sensory-skewed right. Even though the 1950s had been a watershed decade for existentialism and the 1960s a decade of wider distribution therefor, "King Rat" was =far= ahead of its time in the English-speaking world. But if one could have seen it in the Russian-speaking one (not possible during the Cold War, after all), anyone who'd read Dostoyevsky and Chekov -- let alone lived in a gulag -- would have sussed it immediately. RG, Psy.D., "The 12 StEPs of Experiential Processing," online.

I saw this movie when I was 10 years old or so when it was first released in '65 or '66. I remember George Segal's clean, well-fed and dressed performance in a role that, as an mid-boomer American, I resented in the looong (134 min.) black and white movie. Except for vague memories re the eggs, watch and of course, the rat victuals, all else blur with the passage of time. As I usually avoid TV's pan/scan, edited for content and time version of movies, I haven't seen it since. I read Cleavall's novel probably 20+ years later as a battered ppbk. Now, twenty years still later, the two have merged in my noodle-based, imperfect, personal RAM/ROM storage system. So I have it coming from Netflix this week and look forward to seeing which memories were from which source.In the meantime, here's a poser for you fans of the written word: I seem to recall early in the novel, a character remarked while swatting at an omnipresent fly using a plant fiber or hair swishing swatter, that he didn't try to kill the fly, he wanted to injure it could share the suffering of the prisoners did while the ants devoured it.Also in the novel, someone advised that to avoid dysentery, when defecating, use your left hand to wipe because you used your right hand to eat with.But then again, there may have been an Arabic source for this little truism.