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.

If laudable for nothing else, this film simply has to be praised for the risks it takes with theme and visual motif. Val is an obvious accumulation of racist prejudices and propaganda. His skin (a snakeskin jacket) is different from everyone else in town. He exudes sexuality, telling us his body temperature is a few degrees above normal. The words ‘beautiful’ and ‘handsome’ are hurled at Val like racial epithets.