Lord of the Flies (1963) on Netflix
NR19631h 32mAdventureDramaThriller
A plane ditches near an island, leaving British schoolboys with no adults. Ralph blows a conch to rally the survivors, and the boys pick him as their leader rather than Jack Merridew.
- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb6.8/1022,277 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes92%
Trailer
Plot summary
A plane goes down in the ocean, and the British schoolboys aboard come ashore on an island with no adults. Ralph meets a chubby, bespectacled boy whose school nickname is Piggy, then finds a conch seashell and blows it to call the other survivors. Singing announces a column of choirboys in dark cloaks and hats, led by Jack Merridew. The boys, ranging from about six to fourteen, hold a vote for a leader, and Ralph wins it over Jack. Ralph, Jack and a choirboy named Simon explore the island and find wild pigs. The boys build shelters and a signal fire lit with Piggy's spectacles, while Jack's choirboys make wooden spears. Jack has a knife and starts hunting. The fire he is responsible for goes out, costing the boys a chance of being spotted by a passing aeroplane.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Lord of the Flies (1963)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The boys in the cast were all non-professional and actual scripting was minimal: scenes were filmed by explaining them to the boys, who then acted them out with most of the dialogue improvised, which is why the movie has no screenplay credit.
- The parents of the boys cast in the film were reported to have been given copies of the novel with a commentary physically removed, including the pages describing the culmination of the hunt of a wild sow as an "Oedipal wedding night".
- Life magazine journalist Robert Wallace visited the cast in Puerto Rico and watched one of them amuse himself by feeding live lizards into the blades of a rotating fan, remarking that William Golding could almost be heard chuckling 4,000 miles away in England.
- James Aubrey, who played Ralph, had a voice that had dropped three octaves and was electronically manipulated to approximate his earlier one, while Tom Chapin, who played Jack, had lost his English accent and another boy's voice was used to dub his parts.
- Simon Surtees, one of the twin brothers who played Sam and Eric, said Brook "runs the risk of abandoning us to our fate, just as he did in 1961, when he plucked us from our schools and our homes".
- When Kenneth Tynan was a script editor for Ealing Studios he commissioned a script of Lord of the Flies from Nigel Kneale, but Ealing Studios closed in 1959 before it could be produced.
SPOILER
Tom Gaman, who played Simon, said that in hindsight his death scene scares him: it was night, in a real storm, the spears were quite real wooden stakes, and he was stabbed by boys with sharpened sticks before staggering to the water.
