Word: changi
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...also tried hard to persuade Singapore not to carry out the executions of the marines. The Singapore government, however, stuck to its decision, pointing out that the act of sabotage had resulted in the deaths of three persons. And so, in a cold, misty dawn at Singapore's Changi Prison last month, the two were hanged...
...survival in a Japanese prison camp is made of stronger stuff. While retaining the scenario form of James Clavell's 1962 novel, Writer-Director Bryan Forbes (Seance on a Wet Afternoon) often goes Clavell one better in the harsh words and harsher images that synthesize the horrors of Changi, an isolated compound near Singapore where 10,000 inmates struggle against starvation, disease and despair...
...pick of Rat's litter is Corporal King, a cunning G.I. thimblerigger whose genius for survival turns Changi into a thieves' market. Get yours, reasons the King, and despite rigid camp rules against trading, he gets his: watches, rings, or the shirt off another prisoner's back-anything he can buy low and sell high through corrupt Japanese guards who have connections in Singapore's black market. While senior officers mope around in rags, King wears spruce khaki laundered by hired flunkies. Those who serve him may hate him, but they seldom die of malnutrition...
Such stomach-turning reality never seems mere sensationalism, for Forbes says all there is to say about a fly-infested pesthole where honor gives way to hunger, where blatant homosexualism can be shrugged off but snitching a handful of rice is a capital offense. The unfortunates of Changi face their greatest agony after V-J day, when a solitary British paratrooper strides up to the prison gate and liberates them. Is he real? The prisoners stare blankly, then retreat in panic, suddenly jolted into the awareness that the horror of what they have become looms between them and the world...