Yesterday's Enemy was a BBC television play by Peter R Newman. It was inspired on a war crime perpetrated by a British army captain in Burma in 1942.
This is the Hammer remake. It retains Gordon Jackson who appeared in the original play. It is a low budget film. The jungle setting very much looks like a film studio and seems uninspired.
In fact I had little expectation of this film in the first few opening minutes. I just looked like a typical jungle war film with the angry young men of the late 1950s. Something a bit like The long and the short and the tall.
What it turns out to be is a stark morality play about ethics of warfare, The Geneva convention and fighting for the greater good.
It has sense of rawness which you felt would had been controversial at the time of its release.
Captain Langford (Stanley Baker) leads his lost patrol in the Burmese jungle as they retreat from the Japanese. They come upon a small village which they take from the Japanese. Langford is interested in man who attempts to flee who he thinks might know about a map with strange markings they have found on a high ranking dead officer.
Langford all sorts of threats and intimidation tactics which become more severe. The padre and the journalist attached with the patrol protest at his brutal methods. Langford has none of it, he even plans to move on with his patrol and leave the injured men behind as they would slow him down.
At the end he guns down two innocent villagers in order to make the detained man talk. He also has him killed in due course.
Eventually the group are later overwhelmed by the Japanese. They are now interrogated by Major Yamazaki who speaks good English. He is very courteous but his menace is more indirect compared to Langford but just as brutal. In short the Major adopt similar methods to get answers about their missing high ranking officer.
There is no doubt that this is a provocative film showing the cruelty of British officers. Yet Baker gives such a stoic performance, his Captain Langford despite his shortcomings and brutality is just the kind of man who could lead the able men in his patrol to safety.
