This was one of the late-night films on last night's TV and having seen it I was wondering if there were some pretty dodgy reviews on IMDb.com. Although there were some fairly gritty scenes I could not 'escape' the feeling that years of internment in a Japanese POW camp had left many of the prisoners in remarkably good shape, thrown into sharp relief when the viewer was confronted by a dysentery case on board the vessel taking the prisoners to Japan, who looked rather more like one would ordinarily have expected the rest to have looked.
The production and acting were workmanlike enough for an at-heart TV movie and passed the time, but little more than that. However, it was only at the very end (at risk of spoilers!) that I had one of those 'they must have run out of film or something' moments which often is a pointer of a pretty below-average movie.
That said it did raise some moral dilemmas that would have happened in reality, so it wasn't quite 'dreadful', even though it ran quite close to it.
The production and acting were workmanlike enough for an at-heart TV movie and passed the time, but little more than that. However, it was only at the very end (at risk of spoilers!) that I had one of those 'they must have run out of film or something' moments which often is a pointer of a pretty below-average movie.
That said it did raise some moral dilemmas that would have happened in reality, so it wasn't quite 'dreadful', even though it ran quite close to it.