To Stay Alive

King Rat pumps new energy into the seemingly endless cycle of World War II film dramas, most of which are committed to tight-lipped heroics and epic battle scenes. This brutal,-unforgettable essay on the morality of survival in a Japanese prison camp is made of stronger stuff. While retaining the scenario form of James Clavell's 1962 novel, Writer-Director Bryan Forbes (Seance on a Wet Afternoon) often goes Clavell one better in the harsh words and harsher images that synthesize the horrors of Changi, an isolated compound near Singapore where 10,000 inmates struggle against starvation, disease and despair.

The pick of Rat's litter is Corporal King, a cunning G.I. thimblerigger whose genius for survival turns Changi into a thieves' market. Get yours, reasons the King, and despite rigid camp rules against trading, he gets his: watches, rings, or the shirt off another prisoner's back--anything he can buy low and sell high through corrupt Japanese guards who have connections in Singapore's black market. While senior officers mope around in rags, King wears spruce khaki laundered by hired flunkies. Those who serve him may hate him, but they seldom die of malnutrition; and King measures out his hoarded foodstuffs so shrewdly that the odor of two pan-fried eggs can provoke a moral crisis. Actor George Segal makes King a thoroughgoing conman--all smiles and treachery, eyes darting at every man he meets, ferreting out the Achilles' heel in order to slap a price tag on it.

Though colonels and captains crowd the King's payroll, his prized possession is R.A.F. Flight Lieut. Marlowe, played with smashing impact by James Fox (the corrupted young aristocrat of The Servant). Marlowe becomes an apostle of King's anything-for-a-buck philosophy because it works miracles for him, tested as it is under circumstances in which his family's long heritage of

British military tradition seems useless. Opposed to both men is the camp provost (Tom Courtenay), a working-class martinet who brandishes the rule book on behalf of justice and fair play, though his real battle is against anyone superior to himself by instinct or birth.

Director Forbes occasionally indulges in fashionable camera trickery, such as freezing the action into a still shot at a critical moment, but King Rat scarcely needs that kind of help. There is sizzling intrigue in a diamond-peddling deal, corrosive humor in King's plan to breed rats and peddle their flesh as small jungle deer, a local delicacy ("For the luxury trade," he chortles, "brass only--majors and up!"). The film's most blistering episode concerns an anguished soldier's pet dog, condemned to death for killing a chicken. Later, the King invites his cronies to a stew dinner, prods the disgusted men into gulping down their consciences along with the pup.

Such stomach-turning reality never seems mere sensationalism, for Forbes says all there is to say about a fly-infested pesthole where honor gives way to hunger, where blatant homosexualism can be shrugged off but snitching a handful of rice is a capital offense. The unfortunates of Changi face their greatest agony after V-J day, when a solitary British paratrooper strides up to the prison gate and liberates them. Is he real? The prisoners stare blankly, then retreat in panic, suddenly jolted into the awareness that the horror of what they have become looms between them and the world for which they have survived. King Rat preaches no moral, but it succeeds at unearthing the big tough questions that make a moviegoer think for himself.

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