Fires on the Plain (1959) on Netflix
On Leyte, Private Tamura has tuberculosis, and his cut-off Japanese company sees him as a useless burden. He is ordered to kill himself by grenade unless a field hospital takes him in.
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- IMDb7.9/105,973 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
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Plot summary
By late 1944 the Imperial Japanese Army on Leyte has been cut off from support and supplies, and Allied forces are taking the island. Private Tamura has tuberculosis, and his company, reduced to roughly platoon strength, regards him as a burden it cannot keep. He is told to use a grenade on himself if a nearby field hospital will not readmit him. One soldier, sympathetic to him, hands over several yams from the company's meager stores. Smoke rises in the distance as he travels toward the hospital. There he is scolded for coming back and sent away, and outside he joins other men who have also been turned away.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Fires on the Plain (1959)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The shoot was delayed two months when star Eiji Funakoshi fainted on set; his wife told director Kon Ichikawa that he had barely eaten in the two months he was given to prepare.
- To make the soldiers look realistic, Kon Ichikawa had the actors fed little and barred from brushing their teeth or cutting their nails, with doctors constantly on set.
- The studio Daiei greenlit Fires on the Plain thinking it was an action movie; Kon Ichikawa insisted on shooting in black and white, and Daiei agreed only after a month of arguing.
- Kon Ichikawa and his wife, screenwriter Natto Wada, decided the narrator Tamura would never eat human flesh, because that would take him past the "ultimate low"; in the film he cannot, as his teeth are falling out.
- Mickey Curtis got his part because Kon Ichikawa had heard he was very thin, fitting characters who had eaten very little; Curtis doubted he was a good actor, but Ichikawa told him to act naturally.
SPOILER
Ichikawa changed the novel's ending: the book leaves the narrator alive in a hospital, but the film ends with Tamura walking, hands raised, into gunfire, and London critics complained about the change.
