User Reviews

When I first saw this movie in early 1960, I was almost literally bowled over. The film ran as the bottom half of an anonymous double-bill, so I had nothing more than routine expectations. What I got instead was unlike any war movie I had seen. Like most of the post- war generation, I was reared on WWII flag-wavers and Cold War platitudes about that conflict. Not that these were necessarily deceptive. But compared to the complexities of this film, their conventional assumptions about god and country were made plain. It struck me then and still does that this is the least compromised of war films from that pre-Vietnam era.

One key feature is the film's depiction of the logic of war. Both sides, the British and the Japanese, apply it ruthlessly. That logic is a results-oriented morality. Essentially, it holds that whatever action best promotes the winning of the war is the correct action, whether or not it violates traditional rules of morality. Thus, the British captain (Baker) executes the two innocent villagers in order to extract strategic information from an unwilling informer. It makes no difference that the Burmese natives are innocent villagers and that traditional morality absolutely forbids the taking of innocent lives. Baker does it because as he says the information can save countless more lives that would otherwise be lost. Thus the logic turns out to be a kind of utilitarian head-count—better to lose a few lives, even if innocent, than lose a thousand that maybe aren't.

Now, the depiction here strikes me as exactly the kind of logic that gets applied all the time in theatres of operation regardless of the participants. As the movie points out, we tolerate "collateral damage" in bombing campaigns even when it predictably victimizes the innocent. Perhaps we tolerate these because the victims are not seen or personalized. The film draws its power from personalizing the two victims and the agonized reaction of the villagers. The Japanese, in turn, are not exempt from the same logic, executing two non-combatants, the padre and the journalist, to further the aims of their side.

If the film is anti-war-- and I think it is, though not obviously so (contrast with Paths of Glory (1958)—it's because this ruthless logic makes sense given the methods and aims of warfare in general. Thus the only way of not being overtaken by battlefield reasoning is by avoiding war altogether. Baker's resolute captain is both chilling and commanding because, once at war, he realistically accepts the logic as the cost of winning. Moreover, by showing that both sides employ the same ruthless logic, neither side is portrayed as being morally superior to the other. Thus, if one side claims to be morally superior, that advantage must lie outside the battlefield. For on the field of battle, the logic of winning, as I believe the movie shows, simply overwhelms peacetime conventions.

One other distinctive feature is the presence of the tubby journalist (McKern). He presents a subtle counterpoint to Baker and the padre. He's a reluctant skeptic, unable to believe in either the claims of religion (note he doesn't participate in the group prayer) or the sacrifice Baker is demanding of them. Nonetheless, the screenplay places his skepticism on an equal footing with two pillars of British society, religion and the military. To me that was a particularly bold move for its time. But it is also a provocative one showing that the filmmakers were not about to take an easy or comforting way out. Considering director Val Guest's remarks (IMDB) about refusing to pander to audiences, I guess that's not surprising.

Something should be said about the ending that does in fact pay tribute to the sacrifices made by the British military to the war. The sentiments, however, appear rather ironic when judged by McKern's earlier remarks on the inadequacy of such tributes when compared to the lives lost. Whatever the filmmakers' intent, I take the ending as a challenge to audiences to make those sentiments more than mere words. How that's to be done remains, of course, the challenge.

All in all, the movie's distinction lies in its realistic refusal to simply find new ways to repeat the patriotic war clichés of its time. It's fair to say, I think, that no American studio would have dared produce such a provocative screenplay at the height of the Cold War. And that's not just because of the film's daring themes. The movie is also an extremely non-commercial product, with both an unrelenting grimness to think about and an unsurpassed ugliness to look at. That infernal jungle remains a b&w creation from heck, almost sucking the air out of both what's on-screen and off. But then, that seems appropriate. No wonder it was the bottom-half of an anonymous double bill in America's commercial-minded theatres.

Anyway, I expect in this post-Vietnam era, the movie has lost much of its initial impact since that long ago day when I was lucky enough to wander in and be forced to confront real life complexities. Nonetheless, the challenges the screenplay poses remain perhaps more pressing now than ever, regardless of how one may choose to respond. I'm glad TMC revived this obscure little gem and ran it at a popular hour. Perhaps someone in programming recognized its grim uncompromising excellence. I'm also glad to share the movie's lasting value with others thanks to the virtues of the internet.

YESTERDAY'S ENEMY is a gruff, nihilistic WW2 picture from Hammer Films, directed by the ubiquitous Val Guest and actually one of his best movies. It's a low budget, set-bound production set in the sweaty jungles, where a small squad of British soldiers face off against unknown numbers of Japanese troops. Much of the action is limited to a small ethnic village where the hard-edged Stanley Baker and his men hole up to take stock of their situation. Hammer shot a variety of war pictures throughout the 1950s but this is one of their most interesting: it has no sentimentality whatsoever, instead painting a picture of hard men pushed to increasingly harder and desperate actions. Don't expect action or exciting music or thrills and spills: this is as dark as it gets, with no forgiveness, just death and destruction. An excellent ensemble cast prove up to the material, and what follows is a thoroughly satisfying anti-war picture.

Copyright 1959 by Hammer Films. Released by Columbia Pictures. New York opening: 3 September 1959. U.S. release: November 1959. U.K. trade show: June 1959. Australian release: 27 November 1959. 95 minutes. Australian release length: 8,581 feet. 99 minutes.

SYNOPSIS: Burma in World War 2. The remnants of a British brigade make their way through the jungle to a native village, occupied by the Japanese. After a brief skirmish, the enemy is routed and a native informer taken prisoner. When the man refuses to talk, the brigade's commanding officer (Stanley Baker) orders two innocent Burmese natives shot down in cold blood.

COMMENT: "Yesterday's Enemy" starts off in a deceptively familiar fashion, lulling the audience into the belief that we are in for yet another routine war-time jungle patrol film. Certainly, all the customary ingredients are here and the script often takes time out for the customary platitudes and philosophical questionings.

But where "Yesterday's Enemy" differs from its colleagues is in its violence and ruthlessness, its sense of futility and hopelessness, abetted by realistic playing (admittedly, Guy Rolfe and Leo McKern are none too convincing, but the others, particularly Baker, Jackson and Ahn, are excellent), atmospheric sets and photography (hard to believe the film was lensed entirely in the studio) and Guest's occasionally inventive direction.

This film was made right in the middle of a period when cinematic interest in the Far East war was at its height.The big film of 1958 was The Bridge On The River Kwai.Also that year Guest directed for Hammer The Camp On Blood Island.In 1960 the film of the successful play The Long and The Short And The Tall was released.I recall that there was a storm of protest from veterans of the Burma campaign,as they claimed that civilians were not killed and mistreated.Baker gives a powerful performance as an officer under pressure.He was on his way up to stardom.The same year he would star in another Guest film,Hell Is a City,this time starring as an unconventional detective. One does have the suspicion that this film was made rather on the coattails of Kwai and The Long and the Short and The Tall.Elements from the plot of that film are in this film.Furthermore in both films the platoon ends up being killed by the Japanese.Although now released on video this film is pretty much unknown.Despite a clearly limited budget this film is effective at evoking the jungle and the tough decisions that Baker has to make and not least the ironical situation he finds himself in.

"Yesterday's Enemy" was set during the Burma Campaign in WW2 and it doesn't have a lot of company.

The hard-fought war in Burma went from abject defeat of the British to abject defeat of the Japanese. During the 1950s British cinema produced plenty of movies about the war in Europe, but just a handful set in Malaya or Burma, and they were mostly fictional; there is no equivalent of "The Dam Busters" or "Sink the Bismark".

The Far East "collection" either depicts the British being defeated as in "Yesterday's Enemy" or on the Burma Thailand Railway showing what happened after they were defeated.

In "Yesterday's Enemy", a British unit commanded by Captain Langford (Stanley Baker), after being cut off during the retreat in Burma, wipes out a Japanese unit in a native village.

Langford discovers secret Japanese orders and employs brutal methods in interrogating a Burmese spy, much to the chagrin of army chaplain (Guy Rolfe) and war correspondent, Max (Leo McKern). Eventually the British are captured and a Japanese officer uses the same brutal interrogation tactics on Langford and his men.

The whole thing was filmed in a studio. It must have been hard to buy a palm or a fern within a hundred miles of the Hammer studios after they loaded up that set. However a studio may have been fine for Dracula's crypt, but looks artificial for this outing. As for the tactics, even the newest recruit would know that the matted grass wall of a hut would be dubious protection against bullets.

But the battle isn't the thing in "Yesterday's Enemy" because it seems writer, Peter Newman, had something to say in 1958 beyond anti-war sentiments.

The chaplain and the correspondent debate the actions of the captain ad infinitum. But in equating the brutality of the British with the Japanese the film hands the Japanese the moral high ground. Finally a Japanese officer expresses what the author and the filmmakers seemed to have felt about the injustices of the British Empire and dissatisfaction with the establishment.

In a way, "Yesterdays Enemy" is related to Britain's Kitchen Sink Dramas of the late 50s and early 60s. Anger was in the air and like Burton in "Look Back in Anger" or Laurence Harvey in "Room at the Top", Stanley could do angry with the best of them.

It's a cleverly written story of morality in war time. Stanley Baker is the authoritarian Army captain of one of those lost patrols in Burma during the war, thirty-odd raggedy men, some wounded, slogging through the swamps. As war correspondent Leo McKern puts it, "I don't know where the enemy is and I don't know where our troops are." They stumble across a tiny Burmese village occupied by the Japanese. There is a brisk fire fight and the village is taken. Baker finds what appears to be an important map on a dead enemy colonel but he doesn't know what the lines and symbols mean. He's convinced that one of the villagers can interpret the map but when the prisoner refuses to talk Baker has two innocent villagers executed, just to show he means business. The villager reveals all. The map is the plan of a Japanese attack. So, having gotten the information he wanted, Baker has the prisoner killed.

Baker tries various ways of getting the information to his command but the radio doesn't work and the messengers he sends out are ambushed and killed. The Japanese retake the village and kill all but a handful of British soldiers. The Japanese major, Philip Ahn, is a civilized man but he wants to know if the British have discovered the plans for the Japanese attack. Ahn threatens to execute the remaining prisoners if Baker doesn't give up the information he wants. Baker sacrifices his own life, hoping to save those of his remaining men, but the men are shot and killed anyway.

It's obviously a thought-provoking movie in a middle-brow kind of way. There's nothing particularly subtle about it. It's all spelled out for us. Is it worth the possible sacrifice of thousands of fellow soldiers in order to save the lives of a few? It's like Captain Queeg going crazy in the middle of the typhoon. Do you violate every law you've promised to respect in order to save the ship? What a conundrum, and it's all dumped in Stanley Baker's authoritarian lap.

The British, of course, have signed the Geneva Conventions, which forbids the killing of innocent people or of prisoners of war. Japan never signed the Geneva Conventions but in 1942 agreed to abide by its terms. In this instance, both Baker and Ahn reject the Conventions and opt instead for moral nihilism -- the idea that there are no fixed moral rules, and that the only norm is expediency. When Baker makes a vain attempt to reach the radio and dies, Ahn looks down at the body, nods, and says, "That's exactly what I would have done." The story was a TV movie before it was made into a feature, and it shows. It could easily have been a stage play. There's no real sense of movement. The village, the jungle surrounding it, and the swamp, are all studio bound. The backdrop has palm trees painted on it. The ground is sometimes covered with machine-generated fog. There is never any wind, so smoke rises vertically. Shooting a war movie on a set isn't necessarily the kiss of death. Some combat scenes have been fairly good on sound stages, as "Bataan" was. And I think the most gripping scene of combat I've ever watched on film was in John Garfield's "The Pride of the Marines", shot at Warners.

But this movie is truly static. And the make up department was unimaginative. Everyone is bearded and shabby, their clothing soaked through with sweat, and their faces and bodies seem covered with what appears to be dirty grease. The photography is so dark that it's hard to tell night from day. The difficulties in shooting on a sound stage can be overcome to some extent but here they're not. Everyone involved, from the director to the production design just shrugged and gave up. It's the equivalent of the captured Baker telling Major Ahn, "Okay, I'll tell you whatever you want to know -- the hell with it."

On the surface this is just another war film set in the Far East involving the Occidental fighting the Oriental . The fact that it was produced by Hammer Films probably isn't a great omen either but before watching I came on to the trivia of this site to find to Stanley Baker regarded it as one of his best films . It also has the distinction of being written by Peter R Newman who wrote the 1964 DOCTOR WHO story The Sensorites who also wrote YESTERDAY'S ENEMY originally as a television play for the BBC . This film , the teleplay and his contribution for DOCTOR WHO are his only writing credits . He gave up his career as a writer and worked as a hotel porter till his death in an accident in 1975

This is a slightly different take on the war is hell theme . Baker plays Captain Langford who is leading a patrol of men cut off behind Japanese lines in the Burmese jungle . What becomes very clear long before the halfway point in the movie is that things aren't going to work out nicely for Langford's section . This is a bit more than simple heroic brave white soldiers overcoming the Japs and surviving towards a happy ending

What sets it apart from its peers in the 1950s war genre is how it blurs the lines between good and bad . Of course since 1959 when this film was released we have seen a glut of films such as APOCALYPSE NOW and PLATOON where the morality of carrying out certain acts in war are heavily questioned as being for the greater good but this would be a relatively new concept in the war genre . What's the difference between native villagers being shot by the British or the Japanese ? Is there one ? What's the difference between killing civilians being shot by soldiers on the ground or by pilots up the sky ? Is there one ? It's left to the audience to answer these questions in their own minds

Where the film falls down slightly is when Langford and his surviving men become prisoners of the Japanese . It's a little bit too convenient and obvious that the events seen in the latter half of the film perfectly mirror those seen in the earlier half and where the tables are now turned 360 degrees , not enough to ruin the film but the first half where Langford has to take practical steps which may or may not be war crimes in that era is probably better than the second half . As Baker pointed out at the time the lack of budget where it's obvious that it's filmed on a sound stage also gives the movie a slightly cheap feel

One last point while watching this film in 2013 that needs pointing out is the background of the Second World War . What would be viewed as murder or breaking the rules of war today were somewhat more flexible back then . Rightly if Langford committed some of the acts in a village in Afghanistan today he would face a charge of murder but probably not so back in 1942 in a Burmese village . That said the whole point of the film wants to put the audience in the combat boots of Langford and this is does admirably

I firmly believe that, if Val Guest had been born in the United States, his films would be better known and more widely celebrated than they currently are. His maverick career path and idiosyncratic style align him with American counterparts, like Nick Ray and Sam Fuller, who become darlings of the auteur-driven critics of the 1960s and 70s. (As it was, American critics typically did not take the British film industry very seriously, except for Hitchcock, Lean, and other directors who "went international," until American film directors like Martin Scorsese brought folks like Michael Powell to the critics' attention.) In particular, Guest's career path (journalist to writer to director), occasionally brutal stories, and downright weird directorial choices remind me a great deal of Fuller. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Guest screened "Steel Helmet" before shooting "Yesterday's Enemy," for instance. Today, Guest is probably best known among aficionados of Hammer Studios, where Guest worked regularly from the mid-1950s until the early-1970s, or among lovers of such campy movies as "Casino Royale" and "Expresso Bongo."

"Yesterday's Enemy" was made for Hammer and came in the middle of what I think was Guest's best years, 1955-63. Virtually every film he made during that period is excellent, and "Yesterday's Enemy" is one of the best. As other reviewers have pointed out, it's a tough World War II film set in Burma and (in a daring move for the time) without any musical soundtrack. Fans of British cinema are in for a treat because of a cast of familiar faces: Stanley Baker, Leo McKern, Guy Rolfe, etc. Baker is especially good as the single-minded officer who's willing to sacrifice ANYBODY'S life to achieve his objectives, but it's Guest's film all the way. Although most of the film was clearly shot inside a studio, Guest uses this to his advantage to capture the claustrophobia and disorientation of jungle fighting. There are also some wonderful long tracking-shots during the action sequences that are extremely impressive in wide-screen.

One of the other reviewers has suggested that this film illustrates the brutality of the Japanese and justifies the use of the atomic bomb on them. I'm not going to comment on the vaguely racist implications of his review, but (s)he clearly misunderstood the movie. In fact, Guest takes pains to demonstrate just how much Baker and his Japanese counterpart have in common; their decisions mirror each other, and the Burmese woman explicitly equates the British and Japanese. In other words, "Yesterday's Enemy" is ultimately an anti-war film, not an anti-Japanese diatribe. Everyone is brutalized by war.

The only negative thing I can say about this movie is the one gripe that I always have with Guest's dramatic films: the intensity of the interpersonal conflicts among his various characters. In a lot of his films, every single character seems to be going through his/her own existential crisis at the same time and lets off steam by verbally attacking everyone in sight, and this sometimes comes across as melodramatic. In "Yesterday's Enemy," for instance, it's hard to believe that this army unit is still capable of functioning if the officers are constantly at each other's throats. But this was clearly Guest's decision, so it's a minor quibble.

This is war at its very worst, and it's difficult to imagine any nastier situation. A small unit is surrounded by any number of Japanese in the Burmese jungle and search desperately for a way out. The only way seems to shoot their way out, which fails a number of times. But they find a small village, where they manage to rout a small Japanese unit with a high officer on top, who is killed but leaves behind some important information by an unintelligible map, which they try to decipher by the help of the one man in the village who knows English but by most controversial means of extortion by making him witness executions. It's war, there are no rules and anything is allowed, and as Albert Lieven said in a previously reveiwed film ("Conspiracy of Hearts" 1960), "If there was any reason in an army at all, it would never make war." Here they make war and suffer the consequences.

The film is impressingly well made, the dialog is on top all the way, and the fateful story gives much reason for afterthought. This is the hopeless way in which all wars work, and if you are in it you just can't escape it but have to get through until the end. Stanley Baker, Gordon Jackson, Leo McKern, Guy Rolfe and others are all perfect in their acting, - but it certainly will take some time before you wish to see this film over again. Its unforgettable experience will haunt you.