Tags : Cinelogue

The prisoners of this film are on the same side as the prison administration; they are British soldiers deemed unsuitable for combat and sent behind the lines to be corrected. The treatment they receive by their own countrymen, by the officer-guards who are themselves in need of corrective drilling and the corrupt administrators who have quotas to fill is hypocritical, cruel and holds a mirror up to the whole war machine and its absurdities. In World War II, fighting was a perfunctory vocation. In The Hill, it’s all a business, a bureaucratic hill in the middle of the desert.