#43: BROOK, Peter: Lord Of The Flies (1963)
BROOK, Peter (United Kingdom)
Lord Of The Flies [1963]
Spine #43
DVD
Commentary
By director Brook, producer Lewis Allen, director of photography Hollyman, and cameraman/editor Gerald Feil.
Really splendid commentary. The four are recording separately, and mixed together, with someone intoning their names before each segment. All multi-voiced commentaries should do this; it’s really nice to know who’s talking ...
Production scrapbook, home movies, and outtakes
Theatrical trailer
Extras Rating (0-40):
Lord Of The Flies [1963]
Spine #43
DVD
Lord of the Flies is famed theater director Peter Brook's daring translation of William Golding's brilliant novel. The story of 30 English schoolboys stranded on an uncharted island at the start of the "next" war, Lord of the Flies is a seminal film of the New American Cinema and a fascinating anti-Hollywood experiment in location filmmaking. As the cast relived Golding's frightening fable, Brook found the cinematic "evidence" of the author's terrifying thesis: there is a beast in us all.
90 minutes
Black & White
Black & White
Monaural
1:33:1 aspect ratio
Criterion Release 1999
Director/Writer
From the novel by William Golding.
Peter Brook was 38 when he directed Lord of the Flies.
The Film
The Film
In the right hands, boiling down 60 hours of film to 90 minutes can result in something this good. A risky proposition, Brook trusted his source material and the young actors enough to pull it off.
Tom Hollyman’s camera and Raymond Leppard’s score are equally responsible for the film’s success. The latter takes the Kyrie Eleison which Jack (Tom Chapin, only IMDb credit)’s choir sings and makes it into an essential leitmotif for the entire soundtrack. Even with solo timpani, it wonderfully tracks with the movements and activities of those older boys.
Hollyman captures the boys in great long shots (the opening scene when we see Ralph [James Aubrey]. and Piggy [Hugh Edwards, only IMDb credit] joined by other boys from a great distance) and tracks the tension with close, moving shots — like the finish, when Ralph is escaping the mob …
Amazingly, he had never picked up a motion picture camera before setting off on this adventure!
**
Body count: 2 young boys and 2 pigs.
Film Rating (0-60):
The Booklet
Six-page wraparound with an excerpt from The Shifting Point by Brook.
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The ExtrasThe Booklet
Six-page wraparound with an excerpt from The Shifting Point by Brook.
“All I wanted was a small sum of money, no script; just kids, a camera, and a beach.”
Commentary
By director Brook, producer Lewis Allen, director of photography Hollyman, and cameraman/editor Gerald Feil.
Really splendid commentary. The four are recording separately, and mixed together, with someone intoning their names before each segment. All multi-voiced commentaries should do this; it’s really nice to know who’s talking ...
Excerpts 1
From the novel, read by author Golding.
A separate audio track, this is a fascinating extra … Golding intersperses his personal comments in between the reading of his text …
Excerpts 2
Excerpts 2
From Feil’s 1972 documentary, The Empty Space, showing Brook’s methods for creating theater.
Deleted scene
With a reading by Golding and commentary.
Jack and Ralph are lying down on the beach, arguing like an old married couple …
JACK: “We need meat!”
RALPH: “We need shelters!”
JACK: “Are you accusing me of …”
RALPH: “All I’m saying is … don’t you want to rescued? All you can talk about is ‘pig, pig, pig.’”
JACK: “We want meat!
RALPH: “And I work all day with nothing but Simon, and you come home and you don’t even notice the shelters.”
JACK: “I work too!”
RALPH: “You like your work! You enjoy yourself hunting”
Production scrapbook, home movies, and outtakes
Great extra material …
Theatrical trailer
With commentary by Gerald Feil:
“That New York show print was made by the lab one day before the opening. It was delivered to the cinema, and there was no projectionist — so we couldn’t possibly screen it the day before the opening. The audience came into the cinema and the show was starting; I suddenly had a very uneasy feeling, so I started unrolling the reels of film that were not already on the projector, and I noticed that on the very last reel of the film, the soundtrack had been printed backwards — that the beginning of the sound was at the end of the reel, and that the end of the sound was at the beginning of the reel …
With an emergency call to the laboratory, with less than an hour-and-a-half to go, I said you must find a way to make a new print of that last reel and get it over here to the theater on the other side of town, in time … I was told first that it was impossible … I got the president of the lab on the phone; I explained the situation and I said, can you imagine what embarrassment it will be for us all if the sound’s backwards?
They actually managed to make a new print — it was rushed over by police escort — put on the projector just before the moment when the previous reel ran out, and nobody knew!”
Extras Rating (0-40):
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