Lord Of The Flies

A bleak rebuke to the Rousseauvian notion of the noble savage, 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 thirty-odd British schoolboys out of a war zone crashes on an island, all of 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 civiliation 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 here given a particularly disturbing twist in being enacted by children. Brooks shot an enormous amount of footage, a documentary-style ratio of 60-1, and used non-professional actors to achieve a raw, visceral realism. The film, which features a jauntily ironic score by Raymond Leppard, succeeds completely in suggesting the chilling malignity that may lurk beneath the blandest exterior.