The Long and the Short and the Tall is perhaps the most human film I've ever seen. It's meant to be a war film set in the Burmese Jungle, although with absolutely no contour to the ground, and the movie backgrounds all-in-all resembling Kew Gardens or a Rousseau painting, a rather less exotic location must be surmised. With absolutely minimal amounts of fighting you could mislead people by even referring to it as a war movie.
The movie follows a platoon of stupid and weak men, I do not for one moment mean that in the sense that they are decadent or immoral, but they struggle for understanding and willpower; I wouldn't have been surprised to see the radio operator ask the Sergeant for a blanky. The Sergeant is a clearly incompetent man, who once got busted down a stripe for losing his patrol, as if it were something easily lost. I stress though that he's not a lazy man, and these two things are often conflated in the movies. The Dream Factory tends to suggest that human limits are to be found only at the limits of our imagination, however most people are profoundly challenged to just get by in life, strive as they might.
The 'jock' lance corporal Macleish is a dumb, proud, and self-righteous man, but not in the normal sense of the word, he's not vainglorious at all, he's simply so stupid that he interprets the world via a small and therefore secure moral framework. When he preaches to his leaders about the Geneva Convention, he's not doing it out of some sort of profound understanding, but merely because the Geneva Convention is a rule, and he finds rules easy to grope his way in the dark with.
The only one in the bunch who appears to have half a brain says at one point that, "I just do as I'm told". This reminds me of a scene in Mad Max where a guy says to the Toecutter, "Anything you say", to which the Toecutter replies, "Anything...I...say, what a wonderful philosophy you have".
These severely challenged men have a moral decision to take, will they manage to do the right thing? Or will they blindly concentrate on the insignia on each other's uniforms? What I like about this film is that we are mostly like that, severely challenged, and I think it's incredibly rare that this is ever acknowledged at the cinema.
The movie follows a platoon of stupid and weak men, I do not for one moment mean that in the sense that they are decadent or immoral, but they struggle for understanding and willpower; I wouldn't have been surprised to see the radio operator ask the Sergeant for a blanky. The Sergeant is a clearly incompetent man, who once got busted down a stripe for losing his patrol, as if it were something easily lost. I stress though that he's not a lazy man, and these two things are often conflated in the movies. The Dream Factory tends to suggest that human limits are to be found only at the limits of our imagination, however most people are profoundly challenged to just get by in life, strive as they might.
The 'jock' lance corporal Macleish is a dumb, proud, and self-righteous man, but not in the normal sense of the word, he's not vainglorious at all, he's simply so stupid that he interprets the world via a small and therefore secure moral framework. When he preaches to his leaders about the Geneva Convention, he's not doing it out of some sort of profound understanding, but merely because the Geneva Convention is a rule, and he finds rules easy to grope his way in the dark with.
The only one in the bunch who appears to have half a brain says at one point that, "I just do as I'm told". This reminds me of a scene in Mad Max where a guy says to the Toecutter, "Anything you say", to which the Toecutter replies, "Anything...I...say, what a wonderful philosophy you have".
These severely challenged men have a moral decision to take, will they manage to do the right thing? Or will they blindly concentrate on the insignia on each other's uniforms? What I like about this film is that we are mostly like that, severely challenged, and I think it's incredibly rare that this is ever acknowledged at the cinema.