Softwing Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

Ketrivie It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Patience Watson One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

tieman64 "The Long and the Short and the Tall" is a 1961 war drama by director Leslie Norman. Dated and plodding, the film watches as a platoon of British soldiers apprehend a Japanese scout during WW2's Malayan Campaign. The platoon then wrestle over questions of ethics. Some soldiers abuse the prisoner, some want him executed, whilst others rush to his defence. Laurence Harvey, who plays a gruff private, becomes the platoon's voice of conscience."Long" was once renowned for its foul language and gritty tone, but such things are passé today. The film's "do unto others as you'd have them do unto you" plot ends with a handful of British soldiers captured by the Japanesese, a "shocking" twist which is meant to jolt us into contemplation. This, unfortunately, has little to do with contemporary warfare. Today the shoe is never on the other foot, and it's no longer an issue of populaces failing to "empathise with the enemy", but rather, something far more toxic; the ability of men to rationalise war as something just, necessary and humane, the apathy of populaces, the designed distortion of history and the ability of leaders to remain at a state of perpetual war yet hide such conflicts from prying eyes. The philosophical questions "Long" poses have little bearing upon either modern warfare or WW2 itself. The film costars Richard Harris.4/10 – Slow and unconvincing. See "The Burmese Harp".

writers_reign It's difficult to believe that as late as the sixties they were still unable to 'mix' a soundtrack effectively. The way each line of dialogue is crystal clear and redolent of sound-stage 'atmos' verges on the amateur and this is compounded by the real 'jungle' noises which are kept right down to a minimum. And that's before the so-called acting kicks in and let's face it with two of the most 'wooden' actors who ever graduated from the Forestry Commission - Richard Todd and Laurence Harvey - in leading roles it has to be downhill from square one. I didn't see the play upon which the film is based but the fact that only one member, the Japanese prisoner, made it to the screen should tell us something. As if auditioning for the title Mr. Mahogany were not sufficient Laurence Harvey throws in an execrable accent that makes Dick Van Dyke seem polished. This is one of those films which feature a group of actors who contrive to give the impression that they are working in several different films. I'm really sorry I wasted my time on this merde.

oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx The Long and the Short and the Tall is perhaps the most human film I've ever seen. It's meant to be a war film set in the Burmese Jungle, although with absolutely no contour to the ground, and the movie backgrounds all-in-all resembling Kew Gardens or a Rousseau painting, a rather less exotic location must be surmised. With absolutely minimal amounts of fighting you could mislead people by even referring to it as a war movie.The movie follows a platoon of stupid and weak men, I do not for one moment mean that in the sense that they are decadent or immoral, but they struggle for understanding and willpower; I wouldn't have been surprised to see the radio operator ask the Sergeant for a blanky. The Sergeant is a clearly incompetent man, who once got busted down a stripe for losing his patrol, as if it were something easily lost. I stress though that he's not a lazy man, and these two things are often conflated in the movies. The Dream Factory tends to suggest that human limits are to be found only at the limits of our imagination, however most people are profoundly challenged to just get by in life, strive as they might.The 'jock' lance corporal Macleish is a dumb, proud, and self-righteous man, but not in the normal sense of the word, he's not vainglorious at all, he's simply so stupid that he interprets the world via a small and therefore secure moral framework. When he preaches to his leaders about the Geneva Convention, he's not doing it out of some sort of profound understanding, but merely because the Geneva Convention is a rule, and he finds rules easy to grope his way in the dark with.The only one in the bunch who appears to have half a brain says at one point that, "I just do as I'm told". This reminds me of a scene in Mad Max where a guy says to the Toecutter, "Anything you say", to which the Toecutter replies, "Anything...I...say, what a wonderful philosophy you have".These severely challenged men have a moral decision to take, will they manage to do the right thing? Or will they blindly concentrate on the insignia on each other's uniforms? What I like about this film is that we are mostly like that, severely challenged, and I think it's incredibly rare that this is ever acknowledged at the cinema.

WERZELG Having read the Willis Hall play with the school. I watched this film and saw that it was like watching the actual characters arguing. This shows how the different characters react to a war situation and this makes the combat scene at the end deeply moving because we get to know the characters as individuals as well as stereotypes. First class drama