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A wartime drama set in Changi, the Singapore camp where the Japanese kept allied prisoners of war after they overran the island during World War 2. The characters seem to be stereotypes, and the true horror of the conditions hardly comes across, with only the central twenty minutes or so of the film offering any believable situation. At 134 minutes, the film runs far too long.
In the book on which the film was based, there is a transsexual character very clearly described, but this is not portrayed in the film. The book describes the camp conditions in vivid reality.
The film is based on a novel by James Clavell, and it contains several detailed scenes about a beautiful male to female transsexual, who plays female roles in the camp theatricals.
The book was written in 1964 and of course deals with events, and attitudes, of the 1940's, before the concept of transsexuality was generally understood. The author obviously takes his characters from his life experiences; King Rat was his first novel; Clavell was in Changi himself, and he has the interest in local culture and language that is depicted in Peter Marlowe, one of the main characters in the story. The novel is pretty much autobiographical, and we can be certain that the transsexual "Sean" really existed. A transcript of the relevant passages is given in a pdf file in the link below -- 106kB.
Warning: this is not a happy story for Sean, and you should not read this if you don't feel robust.
HF March 2005
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