the audience applauded

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Absolutely the worst movie.

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

I remember that when this film was released it raised a lot of controversy amongst the soldiers that fought in the Far East.They were upset at their representation as an undisciplined rabble and at the proposition that they would kill an unarmed prisoner of war.There are a number of factors that prevent this becoming a great film.Firstly there is the obvious artificially of the jungle.Those in TV's It ain't half hot look more realistic.Secondly there is the shear theatricality of the performances.Not the usual stiff upper lip type of film.It has all the characters shouting at each other at the top of their voices.The Maps didn't need radio detection.Thirdly there is the performance of Laurence Harvey determined to make sure that everyone knows who is the star of the film.Shame that Peter O Toole didn't get to reprise his stage roll.I was unable to see this on its release as it was an X certificate and I couldn't pass for 16.Difficult to believe this now.

I haven't watched this film for a long time and, having just seen it on BBC2 TV, I felt that it hasn't aged well. Perhaps it was better as a stage play? Ubercommando in his review summed it up well: "I just don't believe in characters who, under such pressure to escape, would just bicker at each other when the enemy is just around the corner... Some characters don't want to shoot the Japanese prisoner because it will make too much noise and alert the enemy, but that doesn't stop them from yelling at the top of their voices!"The only characters I felt any sympathy for were Private Smith (who seemed the most sensible of the squad) and the Japanese prisoner. Sergeant Mitchem had an impossible task, with a hostile corporal and the intractable Pte Bamforth, but he didn't come over as a likable character. As for the others, I several times thought "what a bunch of losers".Of course, all this was what (probably) we were expected to feel, but other films portraying a small, disparate group of men up against it have done so far better.Enough has already been written about Laurence Harvey, who was mis-cast. OK, the character may have been a brash, street-wise London wide boy before he joined the army, but his sympathy for the prisoner did not convince.

The Long and the Short and the Tall is perhaps the most human film I've ever seen. It's meant to be a war film set in the Burmese Jungle, although with absolutely no contour to the ground, and the movie backgrounds all-in-all resembling Kew Gardens or a Rousseau painting, a rather less exotic location must be surmised. With absolutely minimal amounts of fighting you could mislead people by even referring to it as a war movie.The movie follows a platoon of stupid and weak men, I do not for one moment mean that in the sense that they are decadent or immoral, but they struggle for understanding and willpower; I wouldn't have been surprised to see the radio operator ask the Sergeant for a blanky. The Sergeant is a clearly incompetent man, who once got busted down a stripe for losing his patrol, as if it were something easily lost. I stress though that he's not a lazy man, and these two things are often conflated in the movies. The Dream Factory tends to suggest that human limits are to be found only at the limits of our imagination, however most people are profoundly challenged to just get by in life, strive as they might.The 'jock' lance corporal Macleish is a dumb, proud, and self-righteous man, but not in the normal sense of the word, he's not vainglorious at all, he's simply so stupid that he interprets the world via a small and therefore secure moral framework. When he preaches to his leaders about the Geneva Convention, he's not doing it out of some sort of profound understanding, but merely because the Geneva Convention is a rule, and he finds rules easy to grope his way in the dark with.The only one in the bunch who appears to have half a brain says at one point that, "I just do as I'm told". This reminds me of a scene in Mad Max where a guy says to the Toecutter, "Anything you say", to which the Toecutter replies, "Anything...I...say, what a wonderful philosophy you have".These severely challenged men have a moral decision to take, will they manage to do the right thing? Or will they blindly concentrate on the insignia on each other's uniforms? What I like about this film is that we are mostly like that, severely challenged, and I think it's incredibly rare that this is ever acknowledged at the cinema.

Having read the Willis Hall play with the school. I watched this film and saw that it was like watching the actual characters arguing. This shows how the different characters react to a war situation and this makes the combat scene at the end deeply moving because we get to know the characters as individuals as well as stereotypes. First class drama