Lord of the Flies (1963 film)

Lord of the Flies is a 1963 British drama film based on William Golding's novel of the same name about 30 schoolboys who are marooned on an island where the behaviour of the majority degenerates into savagery. It was written and directed by Peter Brook and produced by Lewis M. Allen. The film was in production for much of 1961, though the film did not premiere until 1963, and was not released in the United Kingdom until 1964. Golding himself supported the film. 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.

For the novel, see Lord of the Flies. For the 1990 film, see Lord of the Flies (1990 film). For other uses, see Lord of the Flies (disambiguation).

Lord of the Flies
Theatrical release poster
Directed byPeter Brook
Produced byLewis M. Allen
Written byPeter Brook
Based onLord of the Flies
by William Golding
Starring
Music byRaymond Leppard
CinematographyTom Hollyman
Edited by
  • Peter Brook
  • Gerald Feil
  • Jean-Claude Lubtchansky
Production
company
  • Lord of the Flies Company
  • Allen-Hodgdon Productions
  • Two Arts
Distributed by
Release date
  • 12 May 1963 (1963-05-12) (Cannes)
  • 23 July 1964 (1964-07-23) (United Kingdom)
Running time
92 minutes
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
Budget$250,000 (£80,000)[1]

The novel was adapted into a movie for a second time in 1990; the 1963 film is generally considered more faithful to the novel than the 1990 adaptation.

Plot

A group of schoolboys are evacuated from England following the outbreak of an unidentified war. Their aircraft is shot down by briefly-glimpsed fighter planes and ditches near a remote island.

The main character, Ralph, is seen walking through a tropical forest. He meets an intelligent and chubby boy with glasses, who reveals his school nickname was Piggy, but asks that Ralph not repeat that. The two go to the beach where they find a conch shell, which Ralph blows to rally the other survivors. As they emerge from the jungle, it becomes clear that no adults have escaped the crash. Singing is then heard and a small column of school choir boys, wearing dark cloaks and hats and led by a boy named Jack Merridew, walk towards Ralph and Piggy.

The boys decide to appoint a chief. The vote goes to Ralph, not Jack. Initially, Ralph is able to steer the boys (all of whom are aged between about six and fourteen) towards a reasonably civilised and co-operative society. They meet in regular assemblies during which the conch is passed around, signifying which boy may speak. The choir boys make wooden spears, creating the appearance that they are warriors within the group. Crucially, Jack has a knife, capable of killing an animal.

The boys build shelters and start a signal fire using Piggy's spectacles. With no rescue in sight, the increasingly authoritarian and violence-prone Jack starts hunting and eventually finds a pig. Meanwhile, the fire, for which he and his "hunters" are responsible, goes out, losing the boys' chance of being spotted from a passing aeroplane. Piggy chastises Jack, and Jack strikes him in retaliation, knocking his glasses off, and breaking one lens. Ralph is furious with Jack. Soon some of the boys begin to talk of a beast that comes from the water. Jack, obsessed with this imagined threat, leaves the group to start a new tribe, one without rules, where the boys play and hunt all day. Soon, more follow until only a few, including Piggy, are left with Ralph.

Events reach a crisis when a boy named Simon finds a sow's head impaled on a stick, left by Jack as an offering to the Beast. He becomes hypnotised by the head, which has flies swarming all around it. Simon goes to what he believes to be the nest of the Beast and finds a dead pilot under a hanging parachute. Simon runs to Jack's camp to tell them the truth, only to be killed in the darkness by the frenzied boys who mistake him for the Beast. Piggy defends the group's actions with a series of rationalisations and denials. The hunters raid the old group's camp and steal Piggy's glasses. Ralph goes to talk to the new group using the still-present power of the conch to get their attention. However, when Piggy takes the conch, they are not silent (as their rules require) but instead jeer. Roger, the cruel torturer and executioner of the tribe, pushes a boulder off a cliff which falls on Piggy, killing him and crushing the conch. Piggy's body falls into the ocean and gets washed away.

Ralph hides in the jungle. Jack and his hunters set fires to smoke him out, and Ralph staggers across the smoke-covered island. Stumbling onto the beach, Ralph falls at the feet of a naval officer who stares in shock at the painted and spear-carrying savages that the boys have become, before turning to his accompanying landing party. One of the youngest boys tries to tell the officer his name, but cannot remember it. The last scene shows Ralph sobbing as flames spread across the island.

Cast
  • James Aubrey as Ralph
  • Tom Chapin as Jack
  • Hugh Edwards as Piggy
  • Roger Elwin as Roger
  • Tom Gaman as Simon
  • David Surtees as Sam
  • Simon Surtees as Eric
  • Nicholas Hammond as Robert
  • Roger Allan as Piers
  • Kent Fletcher as Percival
  • Richard Horne as Lance
  • Timothy Horne as Leslie
  • Andrew Horne as Matthew
  • Peter Davy as Peter
  • David Brujes as Donald
  • Christopher Harris as Bill
  • Alan Heaps as Neville
  • Jonathan Heaps as Howard
  • Burnes Hollyman as Douglas
  • Peter Ksiezopolski as Francis
  • Anthony Mcall-Judson as Maurice
  • Malcolm Rodker as Harold
  • David St. Clair as George
  • Rene Sanfiorenzo Jr. as Charles
  • Jeremy Scuse as Rowland
  • John Stableford as Digby
  • Nicholas Valkenburg as Rupert
  • Patrick Valkenburg as Robin
  • Edward Valencia as Frederick
  • David Walsh as Percy
  • John Walsh as Michael
  • Jeremy Willis as Henry
  • Erik Jordan as Head Clapper Boy

Theme

As with Golding's book, the pessimistic theme of the film is that fear, hate and violence are inherent in the human condition – even when innocent children are placed in seemingly idyllic isolation. The realisation of this is seen as being the cause of Ralph's distress in the closing shots.[2]

Charles Silver, Curator in the Department of Film at MoMA, wrote that the film is "about anarchy and how that thin veneer we wear of what we refer to as “civilization” is threatened by the attractive clarion call of bestiality and its accompanying hatred".[3]

Production

Filming

The parents of those chosen are reported to have been provided copies of the novel, from which a commentary had been physically removed; those pages included describing the culmination of the hunt of a wild sow as an "Œdipal wedding night". Brook noted that "time was short; we were lent the children by unexpectedly eager parents just for the duration of the summer holidays".[4]

The film was shot entirely in Puerto Rico at Aguadilla, El Yunque and on the island of Vieques.[5] The boys in the cast were all non-professional, had mostly not read the book, and actual scripting was minimal; scenes were filmed by explaining them to the boys, who then acted them out, with some of the dialogue improvised.[3][6] Life magazine journalist Robert Wallace visited them there and observed one of them amusing himself by feeding live lizards into the blades of a rotating fan. Wallace commented: "One could almost hear William Golding, 4,000 miles away in England, chuckling into his beard."[6]

The 60 hours of film from the 1961 shoot was edited down to 4 hours, according to editor Gerald Feil. This was further edited down to a 100-minute feature that was shown at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival (9 to 22 May), but the cuts necessitated that new audio transitions and some dialog changes be dubbed into the film more than a year after shooting. The voice of James Aubrey, who played Ralph, had dropped three octaves and was electronically manipulated to better approximate his earlier voice, but it is still significantly different. Tom Chapin, who played Jack, had lost his English accent and another boy's voice was used to dub his parts. The U.S. distributor insisted the film be further edited to 90 minutes, so one fire scene and scenes developing the character of Ralph were cut.

In 1996, Peter Brook organised a reunion for the cast members for a documentary film called Time Flies. Brook was "curious to know what the years had done to his cast, and what effect the isolated months of filming had had on their lives".[7] Although none seemed damaged by their time working on the film, Simon Surtees, one of a pair of twin brothers who played Sam and Eric, "put his finger unerringly on the ethical dilemma. The problem is that most of us are not trained artists, so I now believe Peter 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, put us on the island, then cast us back to live our lives as if nothing would ever change."[7]

Tom Gaman, who played Simon in Brook's film, remembered that "although I didn't think much about it at the time, in hindsight my death scene scares me. It was night, the spears--those wooden stakes--were quite real. We were excited, brandishing flaming sticks around a bonfire on the beach in a real storm. I really did emerge from the bushes into the center of a raging crowd, screamed in terror, was stabbed by boys with sharpened sticks, and staggered to the water".[8]

Song

The song, heard throughout the film, of the boys singing is Kyrie Eleison which, translated from Greek, means "Lord, have mercy". It is an expression used in a prayer of the Christian liturgy.

Reception

Critical response

The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported that 91% of critics have given the film a positive review based on 22 reviews, with an average rating of 8.19/10.[9] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 67 out of 100 based on 9 critic reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[10]

PopMatters journalist J.C. Maçek III wrote "The true surprise in Lord of the Flies is how little these child actors actually feel like 'child actors'. With few exceptions, the acting rarely seems to be forced or flat. This practiced, well-honed craft aids Brook’s vision of a fly on the wall approach that pulls the viewer into each scene."[11]

Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times that "the picture made from it by the writer-director Peter Brook is a curiously flat and fragmentary visualization of the original. It is loosely and jerkily constructed, in its first and middle phases, at least, and it has a strangely perfunctory, almost listless flow of narrative in most of its scenes".[12]

Accolades

Peter Brook was nominated for the Golden Palm at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival.[13]

The film was named one of the Top Ten Films of the year in 1963 by the National Board of Review.[14]

Home media

The Criterion Collection released it on DVD and Blu-ray Disc in America and Canada. In 2000 Janus Films also released the DVD in the UK.

See also
  • Survival film, about the film genre, with a list of related films

References
  1. De la Mare, Richard; Hatton, Maurice (29 November 1962). "Peter Brook film director". The Guardian. p. 6.
  2. Robert Wallace, Life Magazine 25 October 1963
  3. Silver, Charles (12 November 2013). "Peter Brook's Lord of the Flies". MoMA. Retrieved 6 June 2016.
  4. Brook, Peter (1998). Threads of time : a memoir (Paperback. ed.). London: Methuen Drama. p. 129. ISBN 0413733009.
  5. Carrasquilo, José (2016). "When Lord of the Flies Came to Vieques". Vieques Insider. Retrieved 21 April 2019.
  6. Michael, Brooke. "Lord of the Flies (1963)". www.screenonline.org.uk. Retrieved 20 July 2015.
  7. Hollindale, Peter. "A History of Savages". www.tes.co.uk. Archived from the original on 12 March 2016. Retrieved 20 July 2015.
  8. Gaman, Tom. "Flies". www.forestdata.com. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 20 July 2015.
  9. "Lord of the Flies (1963)". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 10 March 2020.
  10. "Lord of the Flies (1963) Reviews". Metacritic. Retrieved 10 March 2020.
  11. Maçek III, J.C. (6 September 2013). "Have Mercy: 'Lord of the Flies'". PopMatters.
  12. Crowther, Bosley. "Lord of the Flies (1963) Screen: Agitating Fable of Wild Boys:Savagery Is Depicted in 'Lord of the Flies'". www.nytimes.com. Retrieved 20 July 2015.
  13. "Festival de Cannes: Lord of the Flies". festival-cannes.com. Retrieved 27 February 2009.
  14. "1963 Award Winners". Nationalboardofreview.org. Retrieved 20 July 2015.
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