Pages

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

The Railway Man

Ronald Searle's wartime sketches of his POW experience  feature in the new film 'The Railway Man' - based on Eric Lomax's account of his time on the Thai-Burma 'Death Railway'.  Directed by Jonathan Teplitzky and written by Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the film depicts scenes  of camp internment and jungle clearing straight out of Searle's sketches.  In one scene Nicole Kidman playing Lomax's wife picks up a copy of Searle's 'To the Kwai and Back' and flicks through the pages.






(Thanks to Tony Rosenast & Uli Meyer)


"An article by John Connell in Strand Magazine for October 1947 dealing with a subject Searle was sadly well able to illustrate - he himself had been a Japanese POW in the Second World War. This shows the scene in a camp hospital."
From Mike Ashworth's Flickr set


2 comments:

Uli Meyer said...

While I was watching the film I kept waiting for a scene showing an artist drawing in the camp.

Matt Jones said...

Me too! They missed a trick there, although I thought several scenes and characters were inspired directly by the drawings inc. the lead actors' spectacles which looked just like Searle's self-portrait plus some of the Japanese guards and rock-breaking scenes. Was the book even published at the time the film is set?