Teringer An Exercise In Nonsense

PiraBit if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Jenni Devyn Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Leofwine_draca YESTERDAY'S ENEMY is a gruff, nihilistic WW2 picture from Hammer Films, directed by the ubiquitous Val Guest and actually one of his best movies. It's a low budget, set-bound production set in the sweaty jungles, where a small squad of British soldiers face off against unknown numbers of Japanese troops. Much of the action is limited to a small ethnic village where the hard-edged Stanley Baker and his men hole up to take stock of their situation. Hammer shot a variety of war pictures throughout the 1950s but this is one of their most interesting: it has no sentimentality whatsoever, instead painting a picture of hard men pushed to increasingly harder and desperate actions. Don't expect action or exciting music or thrills and spills: this is as dark as it gets, with no forgiveness, just death and destruction. An excellent ensemble cast prove up to the material, and what follows is a thoroughly satisfying anti-war picture.

zst zee War for all those that do not glorify it is true hell. This movie is a document to the above statement; it feels like you are watching a play in a jungle the acting is superb the story tackles moral questions that nowadays dont seem to concern anybodyth about the hypocrisy and the utter futility of war, the fact that the action scenes are very old fashioned makes no difference to the superior quality of this production a must see for all those that want a first hand view into this hypocrisy and futility

SimonJack "Yesterday's Enemy" is a gritty film about a small British force in World War II Burma. It is also a film about the horrors of war, including unconventional actions. My high rating of this film is for the excellent acting jobs by all the cast. The quality of the film and its "feel" of a studio set in the jungle scenes detracts somewhat. This is a type of story that should be told. The one criticism I have is that the film seems to condone what takes place. It conveys the message that, while war is hell, sometimes things like this may be necessary. The chaplain and the news correspondent rightly protest the captain's plan to kill two innocent natives as a means to get a suspected collaborator to talk. Why did the captain not shoot the suspect in the arm or leg instead? The threat and proof of personal injury are very convincing to people, and wounds can be treated. But the killing of two innocent villagers appears nothing more than mindless barbarism. If anything, it would tell the suspect that he needn't worry. His captors don't want to hurt him. So where is his "incentive" to talk? Only after the British shoot the two natives, and the captain says that he is next, does the suspect agree to talk. But had he been shot in the arm or leg, might he not have gotten the message right away? And thereby, the captain would not have killed two innocent men. No doubt, direct and intentional killing of innocent civilians took place in WWII, and in other wars. But there never can be a justifiable reason for such killing. We know of the atrocities of the Japanese against the Chinese people in December, 1937. Some 300,000 people were murdered and tens of thousands raped and brutalized in the rape of Nanking. We know of the inhumane treatment of military and civilians in many Japanese prison camps of WW II. We know of the Nazi holocaust that killed six million Jews; and of the Nazi brutality and killing of many thousands more. Hitler intended to kill civilians when he bombed London as a way to defeat Britain. We know of the Soviet massacre of 22,000 Polish prisoners – mostly civilians – in the Katyn Forest in April, 1940. In the past century, there were other horrors of war against the unarmed. Most people over 55 will remember the My Lai Massacre of March 16, 1968. U.S. soldiers slaughtered 350 to 500 innocent women, children, babies and elderly in one village in South Vietnam. During World War II, Allied bombers killed many civilians when they hit industrial plants and war supply targets. Navy ship guns surely killed civilians when they pounded islands in the Pacific. While such killing is part of the horrors of war, it often cannot be avoided and is not carried out for the sake of killing the innocent. The U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end WW II, but we will never forget the horrors of the hundreds of thousands of innocent people killed or injured for life. Many veterans suffer trauma from their experiences in war, most often from the killing of other people, whether directly or inadvertently (as in bombing or shelling enemy sites). In a cause of justice that is foisted upon men in war, there is a big difference between direct killing of enemy combatants and all other killing and treatment. The mark of civilization is the humane treatment of civilians, prisoners, the wounded and defeated. It is never right directly and intentionally to kill innocent civilians, or to mistreat or kill prisoners of war. That is the difference between civilized and uncivilized people. To the extent that countries and armies have carried out such atrocities as these and others, we show that we are uncivilized. To the extent that we abhor such actions and strive to live with civility toward others, we may yet save our humanity. It is only by civility that mankind is able to survive and coexist in the world.

Tryavna I firmly believe that, if Val Guest had been born in the United States, his films would be better known and more widely celebrated than they currently are. His maverick career path and idiosyncratic style align him with American counterparts, like Nick Ray and Sam Fuller, who become darlings of the auteur-driven critics of the 1960s and 70s. (As it was, American critics typically did not take the British film industry very seriously, except for Hitchcock, Lean, and other directors who "went international," until American film directors like Martin Scorsese brought folks like Michael Powell to the critics' attention.) In particular, Guest's career path (journalist to writer to director), occasionally brutal stories, and downright weird directorial choices remind me a great deal of Fuller. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Guest screened "Steel Helmet" before shooting "Yesterday's Enemy," for instance. Today, Guest is probably best known among aficionados of Hammer Studios, where Guest worked regularly from the mid-1950s until the early-1970s, or among lovers of such campy movies as "Casino Royale" and "Expresso Bongo.""Yesterday's Enemy" was made for Hammer and came in the middle of what I think was Guest's best years, 1955-63. Virtually every film he made during that period is excellent, and "Yesterday's Enemy" is one of the best. As other reviewers have pointed out, it's a tough World War II film set in Burma and (in a daring move for the time) without any musical soundtrack. Fans of British cinema are in for a treat because of a cast of familiar faces: Stanley Baker, Leo McKern, Guy Rolfe, etc. Baker is especially good as the single-minded officer who's willing to sacrifice ANYBODY'S life to achieve his objectives, but it's Guest's film all the way. Although most of the film was clearly shot inside a studio, Guest uses this to his advantage to capture the claustrophobia and disorientation of jungle fighting. There are also some wonderful long tracking-shots during the action sequences that are extremely impressive in wide-screen.One of the other reviewers has suggested that this film illustrates the brutality of the Japanese and justifies the use of the atomic bomb on them. I'm not going to comment on the vaguely racist implications of his review, but (s)he clearly misunderstood the movie. In fact, Guest takes pains to demonstrate just how much Baker and his Japanese counterpart have in common; their decisions mirror each other, and the Burmese woman explicitly equates the British and Japanese. In other words, "Yesterday's Enemy" is ultimately an anti-war film, not an anti-Japanese diatribe. Everyone is brutalized by war.The only negative thing I can say about this movie is the one gripe that I always have with Guest's dramatic films: the intensity of the interpersonal conflicts among his various characters. In a lot of his films, every single character seems to be going through his/her own existential crisis at the same time and lets off steam by verbally attacking everyone in sight, and this sometimes comes across as melodramatic. In "Yesterday's Enemy," for instance, it's hard to believe that this army unit is still capable of functioning if the officers are constantly at each other's throats. But this was clearly Guest's decision, so it's a minor quibble.