LORD OF THE FLIES @ 60

A grainy photo montage of  life and ritual at a rich English public school. Images of cold war armaments trickle in until they overtake the others. Finally we see a jet drifting beside an island in the Pacific. Ralph, still in school uniform, wakes in the jungle and soon meets Piggy who makes the immediate mistake of revealing that tease name so that every character and audience member forgets the real name he gave seconds before. More kids come out of the jungle and they are joined by a choir, still in their cassocks, marching like cadets along the beach and singing a Kyrie. Their leader is Jack whose cheerful aggression puts him in a race for the overall leadership. The vote, when taken, has the non choral kids clearly wary of Jack's enthusiasm for power and results in the moderate Ralph taking command.

Quickly, the group is dispatched to get bearings, gather firewood and scout for food. Soon they have a bonfire and victuals and are perfect proof of what the U.K. was still promoting as the spirit of the Empire. But William Golding's source novel had other ideas. He wanted to write a more realistic version of The Coral Island where a similar group of castaway kids reinvent civilisation through religion. With the horrors of World War II all too fresh, Golding could not let such a fantasy pass without comment and he wrote one of the definitive what-ifs about the fragility of civilisation. The new Cold War carried a promise of mass annihilation at the hands of paranoid superpowers. If that happened, Albert Einstein mused, the next war would be fought with sticks and stones. Lord of the Flies is that in microcosm.

Theatrical wunderkind Peter Brook had the stuff of Lord of the Flies in his genes. He took to the ritual of order and its breakdown through pursuit of personal power organically. When the parliamentary way of life is pricked beyond effectuality by Jack's persistent subversions, the face paint and spears come out as though they had always been there. Brooks kept his mostly untrained cast of children speak in spare improvisation which has an unnervingly realistic effect. Jack's jingoistic lines about being English and able to do anything quite rapidly degenerate into "Kill the pig!" and the chant is taken up like a "sieg heil" by everyone who can scream it. Except for Ralph and Piggy and the more vulnerable who end up fleeing ahead of the mob.

As all that happens we have plenty of time to contemplate the influence of religion and how it can be appropriated for mass control well beyond its tenets. The beastie (really a parachute attached to a dead pilot) is shown as a credible horror by Brooks, billowing over the edge of a cliff as the boys look on. Its use as a control instrument is quickly found by Jack and slots into the paranoia he needs his tribe to feel. It's Piggy who discovers the truth of it but he is long beyond credibility by the power and Ralph is soon to follow. Brooks insists that this be shown happening in available light by day and a night so black it needs the violence of torchlight. For every awkwardly stumbled line of the improvising kids or stray glances at the heart of the lens, there is so much atmosphere on screen that jungle or beach it increasingly feels breathless and claustrophobic.

Lord of the Flies remains a potent statement. It is an adaptation that feels as finely wrought as the novel it is drawn from. Golding's prose is sunlit and easily mistaken for naïve. See also Brooks's insistent naturalism. Both seduce and neither bears the misconstruction for long as we witness in horror. And if we do see this one again we should have questions for ourselves that we allow self avowed nazis to parade with their saluting arms straightened and their faces wrapped in masks alongside bizarre crowds with the freedom to roar about their lack of freedom. If a parachute can be turned into a monster by those who will not accept it as a parachute despite evidence then a public health issue can be mangled into a political one. And so it went. It's a pity we don't have prime time movies on tv anymore because we could have done with a screening of this once a week for the past three years.