. . . to literal hot dog. KING RAT is a gastronomical smörgåsbord of WWII P.O.W. fare, from bugs to yolks. A sense of dread pervades KING RAT for most of its two and a quarter hour running time, even though the camp's Japanese captors rarely are on-screen. A sizable cemetery is shown for prisoners who've previously been executed, starved to death, or died from disease, but only a few fatalities are implied during the final months of the war covered by this story. There are no killings on-camera. Essentially, KING RAT is a "chick flick" for men, as the entire show focuses on the emotional relationships that develop between men under duress. No females appear anywhere, unless you count hens and rats. KING RAT is "fair and balanced," as Fox News likes to say, since none of the Japanese atrocities covered by such films as THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI are depicted here. KING RAT is NOT John Wayne's type of war movie. It's more like THE WOLF OF WALL STREET, without the nude girls, profanity, and booze.

Lawrence Kohlberg wrote a controversial and much discussed paper about the stages of moral development at the U. of Chicago in 1958. Kohlberg asserted that moral development ranged from conditioned obedience and fear of punishment through self-interest, conformity, authority for the sake of maintenance of social order, and consciously made social contracts, to awareness of universal ethical principles. While still subject to argument, a number of psychometric tests have been adapted or specifically developed to test the accuracy of Kohlberg's notions. To this day, his ideas strongly influence measures of anti-social, sociopathic and sadomasochistic thought and behavior in criminal justice and other endeavors. Take a look at it on, say, Wikipedia, and then watch "King Rat" closely to see where the various major characters fall on the scale. Further, one can utilize "KR" as an illustration of socialized, acculturated, "normalized," and belief-bound -- vs. chillingly empirical, anti-socialized, anti-ac-CULT-urated, ab-normalized, observation-driven -- appraisal of events. The former may well be "just" and "fair," but relatively ineffective when it comes down to survival... and the latter may be "ruthless" and "vicious," but relatively effective therefor. "KR" demands one climb out of the box of "delivered truth" based on authoritarian in-struct-ion to "get it." In modern neuropsychological parlance (see, for example, Iain McGilchrist), it requires that one pretty much abandon the rules and regulations of the brain's verbal- symbolic-skewed left hemisphere for the open-mindedness of spatial- sensory-skewed right. Even though the 1950s had been a watershed decade for existentialism and the 1960s a decade of wider distribution therefor, "King Rat" was =far= ahead of its time in the English-speaking world. But if one could have seen it in the Russian-speaking one (not possible during the Cold War, after all), anyone who'd read Dostoyevsky and Chekov -- let alone lived in a gulag -- would have sussed it immediately. RG, Psy.D., "The 12 StEPs of Experiential Processing," online.

I can count on one hand the number of movies I have seen where I can say the movies is just as good as the book, and King Rat is one of them. This is one of those lost or forgotten movie gems it seems not a lot of people have heard about, yet when they see it are blown away by the story line and the awesome acting that takes place in this film. If you want to know what it's like to waste away in a Japanese prisoner of war camp during World War II, you need not look any further than this film.George Segal plays the king, an American POW who is hustling to not only stay alive, but to even prosper given the situation. He's admired and hated by just about everyone in the camp.

Enjoyed this film and the feel of it although it does weave the typical British touch of ugly American into it. "Bloody Yank capitalist, I dare say!"Fox, Mills and the rest do a great job playing themselves really, but Segal does a great job playing a character that could/would be despised. The American collaborating with the enemy and using the poor British soldiers to his own end.(laughs)However, this is a good film and the characters, most of them, are well developed, so we're with them too.Overall, I enjoyed it.