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From the director of Excalibur and Deliverance comes this "gripping" (Leonard Maltin)adventure about two wartime enemies trapped alone on a desert island. Academy AwardÂ(r) winner* Lee Marvin (The Dirty Dozen) and Toshiro Mifune (The Seven Samurai) deliver "striking and well-etched performances" (LA Herald-Examiner) in this searing psychological drama that packs "plenty of action and excitement" (Motion Picture Herald)! From the instant they meet, a marooned American soldier (Marvin) and his Japanese counterpart (Mifune) have the same objective: killing each other. But it soon becomes apparent tha
From the director of Excalibur and Deliverance comes this "gripping" (Leonard Maltin)adventure about two wartime enemies trapped alone on a desert island. Academy AwardÂ(r) winner* Lee Marvin (The Dirty Dozen) and Toshiro Mifune (The Seven Samurai) deliver "striking and well-etched performances" (LA Herald-Examiner) in this searing psychological drama that packs "plenty of action and excitement" (Motion Picture Herald)! From the instant they meet, a marooned American soldier (Marvin) and his Japanese counterpart (Mifune) have the same objective: killing each other. But it soon becomes apparent that the only way they will survive isby forging an uneasy truce and cooperating with each other. Can they rise above the hatred that divides them long enough to stay alive?
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Lone Japanese soldier Toshiro Mifune diligently scans the ocean from his island lookout as he must have thousands of times before, but this time he spies an abandoned life raft resting on a rocky bluff. Within minutes he's face to face with American sea-wreck survivor Lee Marvin and the two begin an elaborate game of cat and mouse. Director John Boorman presents this two-man war as a deadly game between a pair of overgrown children, who finally tire of it (as kids will) and settle into tolerated co-existence and then even something resembling a friendship. With impressionistic strokes, Boorman paints a lush tropical paradise in colors you can drink from the screen, capturing the texture of their experience as refracted through the cinema: the look of the island as seen through the haze of smoke, the sound of a sudden rainstorm as it hushes the island in a calming roar, the timelessness of life outside of civilization. The story seems almost secondary, an allegorical drama that comes alive in the excellent performances by Marvin and Mifune (who soon enough converse despite their complete inability to understand each other's language) and the visceral immediacy of Boorman's gorgeous widescreen images. Hell in the Pacific is not a tale told as much as a film experienced. --Sean Axmaker
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Manufacturer: MGM (Video & DVD)
Release date: 25 May 2004
Number of discs: 1
EAN: 9780792860501 UPC: 027616905819
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