Lord Of The Flies (1963) Watching this again, we couldn't help thinking of one of the funniest lines from Ira Levin's hit play and movie "Deathtrap"........
In that film, a jealous playwright played by Michael Caine reads a brilliant new thriller play sent to him by a young novice writer. Asked by his wife if the play's really that good, Caine sourly replies, "It's so good, even a gifted director couldn't hurt it."
You'd think that line would hold true for any director who took on the task of bringing William Golding's classic 1954 novel to the screen.
The book gripped readers around the world.......in its story of British schoolboys (implied as post nuclear war survivors) marooned on a tropical island with no adults to supervise or care for them. After first resourcefully organizing themselves into a civilized mini-community, they descend into primal, almost prehistoric savagery resulting in the brutal murders of two of their own.
9 years after the book's publication in 1954, the first attempt at a film adaptation fell to no less than the acclaimed, brilliant stage director Peter Brook, also the director, for many years, of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
And this gifted director hurt it badly. Instead of a potentially powerful, riveting piece of cinema, Brook's wrong-headed direction reduced the film to an oddball curio........and quickly forgotten.
(We'll only mention in passing the 2nd film version from 1990.....so terrible that everyone forgot about it before it was even released)
Brook's big brainstorm was to cast the film not with actors, but with real, non professional children........and let then improvise their lines.
Bad, bad idea.
The results are painful, weird and borderline unwatchable. The kids slowly announce their dialogue as if they're trying to learn English as a second language. (.....and that's exactly what the obvious re-recording of all the spoken lines makes it sound like.)
And if the film wasn't already ruined enough by Brook's creative conceit and his non-direction of the kids, the filmmaking itself is ragged, cheap and clumsy in execution. The pace lags, the scenes lack any forward momentum and the useless music score blurts out sporadically with drumbeats, then goes silent for long stretches.
This resulting mess of a movie ended up relegated to a few art house cinemas before promptly disappearing into obscurity as a random footnote in film history......which is probably what it deserved.
We can only wonder out loud if maybe one day, some up and coming filmmaker will take another crack at what many people consider one of the best novels of all time, forever capturing the imaginations of school students assigned to read it in class......and grownups as well.
Hopefully it won't fall into the hands of a director who's lauded as "gifted"....God forbid.
For now, stick with the book. Neither of the existing film versions come anywhere close to doing it justice........and this 1963 oddity never rises about 1 star (*).
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