I’ve been watching old films out of our library’s collection. I’ve wanted to see King Rat for years. It’s based on James Clavell’s first novel. Oddly enough, although Clavell was himself a screenwriter, he didn’t write the screenplay for this. It’s an excellent film, with an impressive cast.
What strikes me as weird about this film abiout a WWII Japanese prison camp is that it has so manty people who had appeared in or would later appear in other prison camp films::
1.) Although it starred a young George Segal, originally they wanted Steve McQueen, who starred in The Great Escape
2.) Speaking of which, it had James Donald as a doctor. In The Great Escape he was Group Captain Ramsey, the Chiedf British Officer.
3.) It had John Mills, who’d played Pat Reid in The Colditz Story (Reid was the one who wrote the true story of the Colditz escapes)
4.) At the end, we have Richard Dawson, Corporal Newkirk from Hogan’s Heros
5.) Tom Courtney gets a big part as Lt. Grey. He’s better known as Pasha/Strelnikov from Dr. Zhivago, which doesn’t have a POW camp,. but he also played Russian prisoner Ivan Denisovich in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.