Jan. 9, 1965 - That isn’t a mountain those men are climbing over. It is “The Hill,” a British aphorism for the army jail in the new film of that name which Sidney Lumet has just finished directing in Spain. They call it “The Hill” because that central feature of rock and sand was the very real symbol of punishment in the World War II stockade situated in the middle of the North African desert during 1944.
In the roles of the prisoners, Sean Connery, Ossie Davis, and Jack Watson are seen mounting it at the double, equipped with full field packs in a temperature of 115 degrees — an occupation that keeps them busy when they aren’t digging holes and filling them up again or sweeping up the sand with toothbrushes.
These true-life incidents are recreated in the original screenplay by Ray Rigby, a T.V. writer whose film experience is nil but whose record in the British Army includes, he admits, one or two stretches in such limited confinements.
When Kenneth Hyman, the Seven Arts producer, bought Rigby’s unwieldy script, he had it done over by “professionals,” only to discover that Lumet preferred the original version. After a few days with the writer and the ruthless excision of some 100 pages of excess raw material, the live-wire American director was ready to go to Almería and build a hill.
Aided by his expert cameraman, Oswald Morris, Lumet sought to reproduce visually the rough-grained, almost documentary quality he considered the subject’s strongest asset.
“There really isn’t a lot of story,” he explained. “It’s all character — a group of men, prisoners and jailers alike, driven by the same motive force — fear.” Lumet is convinced that this will be the picture to make Sean Connery, better known in his James Bond persona, accepted as not only a world star but an important actor.
“I said before we started, ‘I’m going to make brutal demands of you, physically and emotionally,’ and he knew I’m not a director who has too much respect for ‘stars’ as such. The result is beyond my hopes. He is real and tough and not at all smooth or nice. In a way, he’s a ‘heavy,’ but the real heavy is the Army.”
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