User Reviews

This is one of the most anti-traditional war movies about was I have seen. Instead of the typical films that stress glory and perhaps super-human characters (like John Wayne), this film is the exact opposite--stressing the de-humanization that ALSO happens in war. The story concerns the Japanese who are stranded in the Phillipines after the US returned in late 1944-early 1945. By the time the movie begins, the Japanese have clearly been beaten but because of the insane logic of Bushido, they cannot allow themselves to consider surrender. At one of many poignant moments, the lead character is told at the beginning of the film to report to the hospital since he isn't capable of fighting due to his TB. The problem is that the hospital won't accept him, so his commander tells him to once again go to the hospital--and if they won't accept him he should blow himself up with a grenade! Well, this happens just in the first five minutes of the movie--a lot worse things befall this soldier and the few stragglers because they won't surrender yet they are starving. Plus, there is a case in the movie where a soldier DOES try to surrender but is gunned down. This happened a lot later in the war because so often the surrendering Japanese soldiers booby-trapped themselves to blow up when they came near. In addition, the film shows the most vivid depiction of starvation and the accompanying madness of any film I have seen. In addition, cannibalism, cowardice and betrayal all accompany this very gritty, realistic and depressingly realistic film. You simply couldn't have made a better film of this type. Horrible but great because it IS war--not a sanitized Hollywood version of war.

"Nobi" or "Fires On the Plain" is a film that is so excellent on so many levels, that not enough good things can be said about it. My only regret is that I was not able to see this 1959 film sooner.

Being something of a film purist, I tend to look at films for their artistic merits based upon dialog, acting, photography and even the efforts to remain true to the period in terms of costume. Ultimately, I want to know if the film is "truthful" enough in revealing the human condition to make me think without oppressing me with what the director wants me to think.

"Fires on the Plain" is a great film because it crafts a portrait filled with realistic human reactions to the dying fires of a great historical catastrophe.

Ichikawa's film is a condemnation of war on all levels -- as any good war film should be. War is horrifying, bloody, destructive. It is also murderous on the psyche. However, what is fundamental about "Fires on the Plain" is its unapologetic look at the Japanese soldiers. It shows them slowly collapsing under the weight of superior American firepower and their nation's inability to wage a war of its own making. A fatalistic code encouraging death before surrender is at the heart of this madness.

I was astonished to see such an honest and brutally close look at the bitter fruits of Japan's military misadventure made just 14 years after the end of what the Japanese call the "Great Pacific War." Ichikawa, reveals what the Germans called the "war life," the plight of the common soldier.

Ichikawa's film is interesting, since even today Japan is having a hard time fully coming to terms with its wartime fanaticism, its subjugation of conquered peoples, the racism of its war against the Chinese and war crimes which included cannibalism by soldiers and officers practiced not only against one another, but against Allied prisoners of war.

Ichikawa produces a stark representation of the victimization of soldiers by a confluence of bad political decisions and cultural pressures.

This stark examination is skillfully done by portraying the doomed soldiers as human beings who exhibit, at various times, fear, brilliantly laconic humor, dialog enriched by its sparseness, and a plot whose complexity is belied by the grim, wilderness setting.

Ichikawa's portrait is a ragged and painful tapestry of defeated men. The tubercular Tamura, played as a woebegone and gentle soul by Eiji Funakoshi, is a good soldier who can't abandon his humanity, though he is as frightened and lost as his comrades. Before he departs for a hospital that will reject him as too healthy, Tamura is given a hand grenade by a superior who, recognizing the hopelessness of their situation, advises Tamura to kill himself.

Why Tamura's hopelessly ill-supplied and militarily incapable unit was not ordered to surrender at the start of the film is telling. Ichikawa makes it plain that the war is over and everyone is merely waiting to die. As Tamura leaves his unit for his hopeless search for physical and spiritual salvation, he sees his comrades pointlessly digging an air raid shelter. They appear like corpses looking up from their own mass grave.

We later watch as the overworked hospital's medical staff abandons the dying patients to an all-consuming American artillery barrage. The pathetic patients, who crawl from their huts in a vain attempt to survive, appear like pathetic, serpentine creatures dragging themselves from an omnipotent force. You know they won't survive.

Ichikawa makes it plain that the only thing worse than a defeated army is one that has lost its honor by abandoning its humanity and its comrades. As Tamura staggers through the jungles of Leyte we encounter the noble, the dying and the exploitive. Cannibalism rears its ugly head as soldiers begin to eat one another rather than surrender to American "corned beef."

When the men do talk of surrender, the propaganda of how Americans kills prisoners is countered by a worldly-wise soldier who reveals that the approaching Americans feed and care for prisoners of war because they, unlike the Japanese, respect brave soldiers who are forced to give up.

It is the Japanese who intend to die fighting for the Emperor long after resistance has lost all meaning. Those willing to fight to the death will be killed. It is the calculus of war.

After shooting a murderous and cannibalistic comrade, whom he earlier offered his own body to as food, the fatalistic Tamura's careless surrender also seems to be an intentional form of suicide. His death is a lonely image. Was Ichikawa trying to tell us of the internal conflict of the ordinary soldier who wants to live, but who is still trapped by his nation's suicidal cultural codes?

If someone watches this film carefully, he or she will see that absolutism and fanaticism is the enemy. The Americans are portrayed as a technologically advanced people willing to employ that technology in the form of inexorable military power -- a lesson that transformed Japanese postwar society. Ichikawa's film isn't so shallow that it indicts America. Ichikawa indicts the sedimentary layers of Japan's destructive policies that created the war and then to continue it when all was lost.

Ichikawa does not mention the nuclear weapons dropped upon Nagasaki and Hiroshima. He doesn't have to. The slow-motion destruction of the Imperial Japanese Army in the Philippines reveals the seeds of Japan's immolation.

The main achievement of this film is that though racially unipolar, the film still manages to carve out a tableaux of war portrayals that leave a lasting identification with whoever may view it, and whoever was present at this time. Though good films may have the ability of universalizing their subjects, which is often a hard thing to do; great films have the ability of universalizing their unipolar subjects, which is what this film does.

Instead of carving a context of unity, the film depicts the Japanese in the sick finality of the Phillipines war-front in February, 1945, making signs for pacifism or war, but rather making signs of the feelings, death, destruction, victory and sickness of war with the bloody hands of the defeated. Far different, and superior, to films such as Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, both which needed a satirical methodology of trivializing and depersonalizing the American troupes, and using all races as one struggle, which is fine, yet not as grand as a film that uses one race and view, which would look fascist if created in America, to convey the horror of war and show what it is really like.

The only way the main character makes it through this movie to the end, is by being sick, thence inedible; hence through this character, through his sickness, his saving face, we see the end of WWII in the Phillipines in February of 1945, and the way in which the Americans, Japanese and Phillipinians came together in bloody acts of warfare where you live to die.

The film is patently influenced by a neorealist way of filmic portrayal, which is original and beneficial to a viewer, whether then or now, for the neorealist techniques it employs conveys all the horrors of war in pictorial form, whether a showcase for pacifism or 'militaristic responsibility'. Like Germania Anno Zero, by Roberto Rossellini, a story emerges from the environment and the conditions associated with it.

The film's opening, with the two-way discussion between the two Japanese soldiers, prefigures and reechoes the events. Through this opening we feel that the struggle is human against human, and human with human; it shows that they relied on each other to face the enemy in the past battles, but now, in this opening, or 'pivot' of the experiences of the Japanese in the Phillipines, new information is relayed to the main character Tamura, giving a presentiment of a cannibal reliance on one another if they wish to survive.

The jungle is gritty, wet and thick, and the sky is not infrequently cloudy and pouring. We wade with the stragglers though puddles and marshes, as sick as the land around them. Nameless cadavers are strewn everywhere. Every now and then one can not tell if they are bodies, rocks or corn. Apparently there is no difference here, all is dead and sick. All is dying. All they have lest to feed upon are rare monkeys and dead bodies of fallen comrades and/or nameless enemies.

Often Tamura meets a fallen other near death. Though crushed in spirit, and crushing his, some offer up their bodies for him to eat, but he refuses; he still, like Hiroshi Kawaguchi as Nishi in Giants and Toys, will not droop into the death of dignity and Japanese morals; for this is all he really has to hold up for his survival, a dignity of self. Hence, when Nagamatsu is dissecting a soldier for consumption, he shoots him because of it. Tamura may be used to the killing, but to the sickness of killing and pillaging he can't decipher. He is neither a good man or a bad man. He wishes to survive, but will not go the extra mile beyond simple straight-war-killing. His self belonged dead on the battlefield, he isn't happy here to wade and wipe the weak for his survival.

The sickness he carrys he sees everywhere, in everyone; and sadly he lacks the ethical rationale of thinking either thinking entirely about others, since he can't give up his body for them since of his contagious malady, or thinking entirely about himself, since he sees the sickness in everyone, though still killing them even if they do no harm. Seen in his attack on the two Philippians's in the hut. He can't see anyone. No one can see anyone. The only see an aversion from malady and an adversion to health, the heart of survival instincts.

Often, an arm appears pointing to the left of the screen, towards what must be hope, for there, in that far Thule lies their freedom. Yet it is blocked by American soldiers, leaving the Japanese stragglers to slowly die in this disconsolate dirt. Even a church tower appears, reflecting the light off an unseen sun. But on closer inspection crows flutter wildly about it; religion too is an air of poison.

Nobi, the Japanese title of the film, gives more evidence to the themes, or feelings of the film: the servitude to fate, the heaviness of existence under leaders and lives controlled by others. Its proper Anglophone translation has a subject of heavy debate among historians, as non-Koreans translate it as "slave" and "slavery", while many Koreans argue that nobi was not a slave system, but a servant class system that does not meet the criteria for slavery. A way to typically to escape wrenching poverty. This improves upon the war theme, and symbolism of soldiery.

Isn't it important at the time period to ask ourselves what the purpose is of what will become our won history? Should we be comfortable of letting it unroll without conscious effort for change? Is it not who we are fighting, that age old history question, but rather why are we fighting? Fires on the Plain is with Eiji Funakoshi, Osamu Takizawa, and Mickey Curtis; based on a novel by Shohei Ooka. In Japanese with subtitles.

My first Ichikawa in many years, and the first of his war films that I've seen, this was gripping and brutal from the very get-go. In the very first scene, nominal hero Tamura is told that he can't continue on with his unit, to which he has returned from the hospital. He apparently has TB – but he is not sick enough for the hospital to take him given the quantity of war-wounded they have. But his old unit won't take him back either; his CO gives him a grenade, and tells him that if he feels truly hopeless to blow himself up…it's the honorable thing to do.

The Phillipines, 1945, and the situation really does seem hopeless, for PFC Tamura and everyone else. Nobi is an odyssey through hell, or rather hells – denuded forests, dead rocky plains, and the dead and dying Japanese soldiers hoping just for an end, through peace or death. Ichikawa's film is photographed in stunning B&W scope which serves to highlight both the desolation felt by Tamura and those he meets on his journey towards his doom, and to show how truly small and naked they all are amidst the immensity of the mountains and the forests….this small affair of humans will end soon, the earth seems to be saying, but I will survive and barely notice it.

Tamura travels back towards the hospital, but is (not surprisingly) rejected there, and spends the rest of the film trying to stay alive, stay human, and get out of danger. He doesn't manage to do very well on any account, slowly starving and eventually committing some fairly repellent acts. Eventually he hooks up with two other desperate men who have lost, or survived their units, and have resorted to cannibalism…and in his weakened state facing other armed men, finds that the only way to live is to break with everything that he believes in.

Ichikawa's film is as brutal, uncompromising and intense as any war film I've seen. There are moments of humor and tenderness, but they are fleeting and don't stick in the memory such as the scene with the man on the mountaintop who practically begs Tamura to eat his flesh…the recurring black-comic bit with Tamura exchanging his ragged shoes for the better leathers of a fallen comrade….the degradations that humans will endure to survive….the truth that this is any war, all wars, all mankind as long as we continue thus. A masterpiece that I probably won't watch again for a long, long time. Watched via the beautiful Criterion Collection DVD.

In the last months of the Pacific War Private Tamura of the Japanese Imperial Army is told to report to hospital . If the hospital refuses him a bed he is to commit suicide . He arrives at hospital and told that walking wounded aren't considered casualties and will not be treated . As he plans his next move the hospital comes under bombardment

As soon as I saw the opening sequence of this movie I was instantly reminded of the classic Japanese trilogy THE HUMAN CONDITION which was released at the same time . Both films centre around a Japanese soldier who finds himself a member of a beaten army caught in both the unforgiving wilderness and in circumstances they have no control over . As you might expect from a Japanese film from this period it's beautifully framed and has breath taking cinematography and on a visual level comes lose to the old cliché that " once seen never ever forgotten but like THE HUMAN CONDITION there is a considerable problem with the story telling and like Kaji in that trilogy one has a problem believing in Tamura as a real person though for slightly different reasons

It is noticeable that even commentators who have praised the film on this page have pointed out something and that is the rather clumsy exposition the film constantly uses . Tamura's platoon leader gives Tamura a long winded explanation on what has happened in the events leading up the opening scene even though Tamura would be fully aware of all this . We get scenes of someone lying dead and someone feels the need to point out that they're even though it's obvious to the audience and not only does Tamura feel the need to point out that someone is dead he also exclaims " Japanese soldiers " to himself when he sees some Japanese soldiers .Some movies suffer from not following the rule " show don't tell " but this film feels the need to show and tell both at the same time . Not to be too ungenerous a lot of war films at this time also suffered from this most especially the British film DUNKIRK where each and every character spouts real life events in the same manner as a history professor would

If you stop to think about it , and believe me you don't need to think too hard about it , would there be any need for Tamura to be sent to hospital ? After all his platoon are prepared to fight to the last man and the Americans aren't too far away so why bother sending him to the hospital if he's expected to die very soon ? This is a clumsy plot device to set up an excuse for Tamura to carry the story through to its conclusion . Tamura doesn't really come across as a human being , more as a literary device to be caught up in brutal and harrowing situations . Make no mistake this is sometimes a brutal and genuinely harrowing film and despite being wonderfully shot and containing impressive technical merits it's perhaps a bit too contrived and implausible to be called a true classic of World cinema.

This film is a knockout, Fires on the plain referred to is, (the burning off at the end of harvest time) A happy memory for Tamura, He relives this in his mind many time's,and at the end of this bleak film, Like a man dying of thirst, he believe's he is home and this last illusion is all he has left. Billy Wilder's The Big Carnival (Ace in the hole) is the only film (that comes to mind)that is as bleak as this little masterpiece by Kon Ichikawa. While I think the whole film is brilliant Two scenes that come to mind are when a platoon of Japanese soldiers trying to escape (Crawling on there belly's)are ambushed by Americans and massacred,True Horror, And as an American soldier and a pretty Philippine Girl soldier are having a cigarette on the side on the road, she smiles as she flits with the yank,then her face Changes to rage as she see's two Japanese soldiers trying to surrrender, she grabs a gun and kills them with joy, The American soldier attempts to stop her but has no chance , to me this speaks volumes at the atrocity's committed by the Japanese in the Philippines, all in all a great film if you have the stomach for it.

The title is a reference to the destruction of the remnants of a harvest, like rice husks, by farmers who burn them creating fires on the plains. This is a bleak tale of the destruction of the Japanese soldier.

The story is set in the closing days of the Philippines campaign as a soldier with TB who returns from a hospital because since he can walk, they have no room for him. His superior officers don't want him around since he's really too sick to work or fight. Abused by his officer he's sent back to the hospital with orders to either be admitted or kill himself. They still won't take him and he's soon left to wander across the war ravaged landscape trying to find help or a place to stay or even just food. Its a bleak journey with no hope in sight and only death and man's inhumanity to man at every turn.

Billed as a harrowing journey into the dark heart of man and war this is also a very funny movie. This isn't to say its not horrifying, it is at times, but its also darkly comic. How could it not be? Here is a film where madness and insanity run rampant, people are constantly trying to hustle tobacco leaves for food, trying to get even a slightly better pair of shoes, trying to remain a Japanese soldier in the face of absurdity by marching constantly but never getting anywhere and you can't help but laugh. To be sure things go darker as it becomes clear that cannibalism maybe, literally and figuratively, the only way to survive, but at the same time there is something uncomfortably funny about the human comedy.

Hailed as a great anti-war film its stark photographic style makes clear the insanity of war even as it dazzles our eye with its beauty. Here we see landscapes full of bodies that include the soldier and the civilian. set amid fields forests and trees that would otherwise be, and to some extent still are, quite beautiful. Its a jarring sensation.

What intriguing is that I read that this is based on a novel about the redemptive power of Christianity. The director removed all over the religious references to hope and salvation and instead used it as to show that life stinks, war stinks worse and that there is, ultimately no hope.

Intellectually I admire the film, emotionally I don't. Part of it is a strident downbeat score which, for me over accentuates what we are seeing on the screen. Its almost gilding the lily since the imagery is so strong it doesn't really need to have the music force you into feeling one way or another.

Is it a great film, thats for you to decide. For certain its unlike any other war film, bloody, horrific and real in ways that big budgeted films claim to be but never are. This is not for those adverse to blood and gore since its here in spades.

Definitely worth a look.

The film subtly takes digs at the American enemy, who would later occupy the Japanese homeland. It portrays the Americans as unable to stop Filipino guerilla retribution on the Japanese soldiers who try to surrender, for often they are gunned down by the native soldiers who are in league with the Americans. For this and other matters, some critics have labeled the film as either propagandistic, in its not portraying the barbarisms the Japanese inflicted upon the Philippines, or slyly subversive in its approach to the American conduct of the war. After all, we also see the results of American barbarity- the bombing of an army hospital. Also, the Japanese title of the film, Nobi, means a caste system of servitude or slavery in ancient Korea, and it spins the film in another direction- that not only are the Japanese soldiers defeated and worn out by the war against the Americans, but they are mere pawns or puppets to the ruling class of their own country.

In the end, after some black humor involving getting heckled by dead soldiers, going through several pairs of successively worse worn boots, eventually going barefoot, and avoiding getting knifed by Yasuda, who takes Tamura's grenade, he joins up with Nagamatsu, who ambushes and kills his mentor/tormentor. As Nagamatsu starts butchering Yasuda to eat, Tamura gets the gun his comrade left behind, and shoots him dead, in a last moment of what one might call decency. Some critics interpret this as a last show of decency by Tamura, yet, in that moment, like all things in war, there is no real way to ascribe motives, for we have seen Tamura shoot a Filipina dead for no good reason, which should have- by all civilized measure, been the end of his 'decency.' Thus, I see his refusal to cannibalize more of a death wish than a life affirming gesture. Having slain Nagamatsu, Tamura then sees the smoke that has risen over the plains throughout the film- the fires on the plain that are grain husks the Filipinos burn. As he approaches them, though, he is gunned down, presumably dead.

The DVD, put out by The Criterion Collection, lacks a film commentary, which is most disappointing, since many of the new releases by the company, since it switched over to the new semi-circle C logo, also lack a commentary. Is the vaunted Criterion starting to skimp on its DVD releases? That would be a shame, for they are often an excellent supplement to enhance an understanding of the film as art, but also as history, in cases as this. The film itself looks quite good, in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, and does include a video introduction by Japanese film scholar Donald Richie. Unfortunately, like many of Richie's comments and analyses of film on other DVDs, this one is rather generic. A bit more interesting is an interview segment with the still living director, as well as Mickey Curtis, who played the cannibalistic Nagamatsu, who talks of the rigors of the film, as well as his fame as a 1950s Japanese teenybopper singer. The film has Criterion's often difficult to read white subtitles- always a downer on a black and white film, and the lack of an English language dubbed track is annoying, for it would have really helped this film. The DVD insert has an OK essay by film critic Chuck Stephens.

All in all, Fires On the Plain is an excellent film that, while lacking the technical panache of a Kurosawa film, and the narrative laser of an Ozu film, is one of the best war (or anti-war) films ever made, for it takes a conceit as simple as that found in Lord Of The Flies, and overlays it upon the tapestry of the greatest conflict in human history, for the losers of that war are also stuck on an island and in charge of their own small 'civilization.' It also, interestingly, gives a glimmer into what might have been on the minds of those fabled Japanese soldiers found stuck on Pacific atolls decades after the war's end. These and many other reasons enumerated and not, make the film, if not a must see, then certainly a film one is better for having seen.