The story opens with Tamura, a Japanese soldier based in the Philippines, being reprimanded for having left the hospital and returned to his unit’s camp. The doctors at the hospital would not treat him because he only has tuberculosis, and they are running out of resources to treat the more seriously sick and injured, not to mention running out of food to feed themselves. The Japanese army has no more use for him exactly because he does have tuberculosis, and they are in the process of being defeated and are facing starvation, surrender, or death by other wartime means. So begins his journey and our education on the events leading to the physical and psychological breakdowns he and others suffer in war, and the resiliency of the human spirit:

First, there is treachery. On the way back to the hospital, Tamura comes upon the home of a Filipino, and after being invited in for food, the native tells Tamura to wait while he goes to get more potatoes. In fact, the native runs off with the intention of getting help in capturing Tamura.

Then there is generosity. Finally back at the hospital, Tamura shares his crumbs of food with the even more destitute ragtag group of rejects encamped near the huts that make up the hospital.

Then there is horror. Tamura sees first-hand the gruesomeness of war when the hospital and many of its inhabitants are bombed to literal bits. (This is only one of many examples of the horrors of war in this movie.)

Also, there is guilt. After coming across an abandoned village, and then fighting off a wild, probably rabid dog that would have eaten him alive, I’m sure, Tamura’s rummagings are interrupted by another couple who have come to scavenge. He ends up confronting the couple and then shooting the woman dead when she starts screaming. The other man runs off, and Tamura, showing the signs of mental deterioration, pushes the woman’s body out of the way of the stash of salt that they were after. On his way out of the village, with a knapsack full of mineral, he looks at his gun and, with deliberate repentance, throws it into the river.

There is cosmic irony. After meeting back up with other Japanese soldiers, who are trying to make it to a certain location for possible evacuation, he is forced to carry another gun.

There is the triumph of right over wrong (with a wrong). When Tamura finally sees the truth first-hand (no pun intended) that two of his fellow soldiers have been eating human flesh to stay alive, he shoots and kills the last one standing. (It is also a comic irony that when he unknowingly tries to eat a piece of “monkey meat,” several of his teeth fall out, along with the piece of meat, which he then cannot eat.)

There is self-preservation. Although many of the actions taken by the characters in this story are motivated purely by survival instinct, the sequence of boot exchanges is to me most memorable. While on the march in the pouring rain to the evacuation location, a soldier comes upon a pair of boots left in the mud. He takes off his worse-for-wear pair and exchanges them for the ones he’s found and continues on. The camera stays on the fresh pair of castoffs, and a second later, another solider comes upon them. He exchanges his worser-for-wear pair and continues on. Eventually Tamura comes upon the boots that are left and holds them up one by one, so that we can see they are completely soleless (a fitting metaphor). He calmly removes what is left of his own boots and continues on barefooted. In a later scene, another soldier sits down and dies in front of Tamura, who within moments removes and puts on the dead solder’s good boots, thereby regaining his sole/soul. It is not long afterward that:

There is hope. In the final scene, Tamura decides to walk directly toward one of the fires on the plain, instead of running from it as he has the previous fires, thinking that they were the terror to avoid. His intention to surrender to the farmers, who are burning their corn husks, is an act of hopefulness that he will finally be able to escape from the true terrors that have surrounded him as he avoided the fires. And he meets with success.

The director deservedly won the Tokyo Blue Ribbon award for this 1959 film. The performances he elicited from the actors were stellar. The use of lighting, both artificial and natural, was brilliant. The choreography of the army of ant-men swarming across the road, crawling left-knee/right-knee together as one, was literally poetry in motion. (A horrible poem, but poetry nevertheless.) And how the filmmakers created the true color of blood red in a black-and-white movie is genuine cinematic magic. (Gruesome magic, but magic nevertheless.)

Some day, when I am steeled enough inside, I will watch this movie again, the same as I will again someday watch Schindler’s List. Both movies should be required viewing for high school students. The images from Fires on the Plain will not soon be forgotten, and hopefully neither will its lessons.

PS: Jason and Matt, you both crack me up, which is something I never would have thought possible in a review of (imho) a heavy war movie. Thank you both for your humor. It is most refreshing!

Okay, films like “Fires” are hard to categorize. Are they dramas? Are they comedies? Are they “dramadies?” (shudder) In this case I really don’t know. “Fires” never really reaches the absurdity of the football game in “M*A*S*H” but it has its moments – boy does it have its moments.

The film starts out with our hero (?) Tamura getting ripped a new one by his squad leader. Seems Tamura has TB and when he went to the hospital for help the hospital sent him back to his unit. This is all explained in some excruciating expository dialogue. Whenever, though, the focus is on Tamura he looks bored, stoned, stupid as a rock. Is it getting through his thick head? Doesn’t he understand he’s putting everyone at risk?

Within five minutes he’s told to return to the hospital and, if they don’t accept him, to use a hand-grenade and blow himself up.

What the film turns into then is a “road movie” (of sorts) where we follow Tamura back to the hospital to get well.

As he travels back to the hospital he meets other soldiers. When he returns to the hospital he is once again kicked out but instead of returning, or blowing himself up, he hangs out with a bunch of other squatters who are not sick enough to be in the hospital but sick enough to be slowly starving to death when they can’t find yams. Oh, there’s lots of yams in this film. The film is filled with yams.

When the hospital gets bombed (with some cheesy effects, I might add) the squatters go running. Everyone meets up and are told to head to a city for help and evacuation.

Tamura, though, clueless as he is wanders off on his own and ends up in small town.

Now, up to this point, the film has been a pretty tame depiction of war. Yes, the hospital gets blown up and there are people who are dead from the results but we don’t linger on them.

In the town, though, Tamura encounters a dog which he quickly kills in brutal fashion. He also finds the many bones of dead Japanese soldiers. When a young Philippine couple runs into the town for a little R & R (i.e. sex) he follows them for a little look-see.

The girl, though, is after some hidden salt and when she sees Tamura and starts screaming he quickly kills her (I don’t recall what happens to her boyfriend).

Tamura takes the salt and then promptly dumps his gun in the water. Is he ashamed at what he has done? Is he even affected by the two (or three) deaths and the dead soldiers? I don’t really know as his face is, pretty much, a blank slate.

Reuniting with a few other soldiers he had encountered before, Tamura now has gold (salt) to share and he and the group start heading towards the town for evacuation.

Finally meeting up with a large group, they all decide to wait until night fall before they cross a road where American soldiers drive.

At night they all cross only to be met by tanks that rip them to shreds (in beautiful blood-soaking black and white).

Tamura, who stayed behind for some reason (maybe Jason explains it), continues on his way as best as he can. Meeting up with a couple of the squatters from the hospital. Seems they’re dealing in tobacco and monkey meat (though we never actually see the monkey).

Throughout all this, we have some voice-over narration by Tamura, and we see these plumes of smoke on the plains.

In the end, in hopes of getting some food (yams?) or some shelter or something, Tamura is killed.

Fin!

WHAT I LIKED:

Well, golly…like I said before, this film is hard to categorize. Some of it is hilarious. Some of it is brutal. Tamura’s resemblance to Gilligan doesn’t help and his acting style (or non acting style) puts me in an awkward position to actually know WHAT he wants. He wanders aimlessly around the Philippine islands of 1945 and, well, so does the story.

Oh, back to what I liked. I actually liked his performance. The scenery (albeit in B&W) is breathtaking (this was the first film of the collection I watched on my big screen).

If this film is a statement on the brutality and stupidity of war, there are a couple moments that I particularly liked. One is a scene where a pair of boots have been left in a mud puddle, one soldier comes along and takes off his worn pair of boots for this pair. Another soldier picks up his cast offs and replaces his boots with those, leaving completely worthless boots for Tamura to pick up. He chooses, instead, to go barefoot.

Another moment I liked was when in his travels Tamura comes across a man face down in a puddle dead as yesterday. He makes a comment to the man and the man inexplicably lifts his head up, makes a comment (I think) and then puts his head back down in the puddle to die.

There were some moments like that – that I really enjoyed in a poetic sort of way.

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE:

This is a tough one. There wasn’t a lot I actually liked about the film, but there wasn’t a lot that I really didn’t like either.

The film was surprisingly brutal (for 1958) and the language used (lots of subtitled “F” words) was also quite frank for the year.

BOTTOM LINE:

Interesting. Worth seeing just to see it.

Side note: In the opening credits there is listed someone by the name of “Mickey Curtis” – there are only a couple American Actors in the film and their lines go by so quickly I can’t imagine that one of them was “Mickey Curtis” – so I assume that one of the Japanese actors changed his name to the all American sounding “Mickey Curtis.”