Sight and Sound - 12/01/2002
"...Brook's vérité approach allows the full force of Golding's allegory to assert itself..."
Uncut - 09/01/2007 4 stars out of 5 -- "[R]endered oddly, devastatingly convincing here....This looks starker, stranger and better than ever."
Ultimate DVD - 08/01/2007 5 stars out of 5 -- "Superb....A role model for successful novel adaptations."
Sight and Sound - 03/01/2008
"[T]he film had a roughness and authenticity that a polished Hollywood version would surely have lacked."
Description by OLDIES.com:
Lord Of The Flies is famed theater director Peter Brook's daring translation of William Golding's brilliant novel. The story of 30 English schoolboys stranded on an uncharted island at the start of the "next" war, Lord Of The Flies is a seminal film of the New American Cinema and a fascinating anti-Hollywood experiment in location filmmaking. As the cast relived Golding's frightening fable, Brook found the cinematic "evidence" of the author's terrifying thesis: there is a beast in us all.
Product Description:
Director Peter Brook's faithful adaptation of William Golding's 1954 novel stars James Aubrey and Tom Chapin as antagonists Ralph and Jack, respectively. When a plane carrying 30-odd British schoolboys out of a war zone crashes on an island, all the adults are killed. The boys organize for survival, naming Ralph as their chief, in charge of providing fire and shelter. Jack is designated to lead a group of boys to hunt the wild pigs that roam the island. Almost inevitably, as time passes, the two boys, representatives of civilization and savagery, begin a deadly struggle for dominance. The frequently invoked image of life as a "war of all against all," in which civility is merely another weapon in the battle to gain one's ends, is given a particularly disturbing twist because it is enacted by children. Brooks shot an enormous amount of footage, a documentary style ratio of 60:1, and used nonprofessional actors to achieve a raw, visceral realism. With a jauntily ironic score by Raymond Leppard, the film succeeds completely in suggesting the chilling malignity that can lurk beneath a bland exterior.
Plot Keywords:
Adventure |
Children |
Classic |
Coming Of Age |
Disturbing |
Essential Cinema |
Recommended |
Stranded / Castaway
Production Notes:
Theatrical Release: August 13, 1963.
One of the first films to be shot using a hand-held camera and zoom telephoto camera lens.
The film was shot on Vieques, an island off the coast of Puerto Rico that was used by the U.S. Navy as a controversial training facility for over 60 years.
In 1996, BBC director Richard Dale produced a 50-minute reunion documentary called TIME FLIES, in which the now-adult cast members revisited the island 35 years after filming.
Film Collectors & Archivists: Alpha Video is actively looking for rare and
unusual pre-1943 motion pictures, in good condition, from Monogram, PRC,
Tiffany, Chesterfield, and other independent studios for release on DVD. We
are also interested in TV shows from the early 1950s. Share your passion
for films with a large audience.
Let us know what you have.
Based on 
