234 MIDNIGHT CLEAR, A
a prisoner of the Allies. In En glish, Hara explains that his execution for war
crimes is scheduled for the next day. Lawrence reveals that Yonoi passed along
Celliers’ hair and asked that Lawrence place it in a shrine in his home village in
Japan. Hara shares memories about Celliers and Yonoi, and it is confirmed that
Yonoi was killed before the end of the war.Reception
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence premiered at the 36th Cannes Film Festival on 11
May 1983 and won a Palme D’Or nomination for Ôshima. Ryuichi Sakamoto sub-
sequently won a BAFTA Award for Best Score. The film also garnered a number
Japa nese film nominations and awards but was not successful at the box office.
Reviews were mixed. Roger Ebert gave the movie a tepid two and a half stars out
of four, opining that it was “even stranger than it was intended to be” (Ebert, 1983).
Janet Maslin found the movie “sometimes tense and surprising, sometimes merely
bizarre... an intriguing if inconsistent effort” (Maslin, 1983). Laurens van der Post
gave the film high marks, calling it “a great and deeply moving film.” Not widely
seen outside of Japan, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence remains a favorite with cult-
ists. In the astute words of one reviewer, “Merry Christmas is not the story of the
West’s civilizing influence on the East, but rather of individuals reaching past the
flotsam of repression common to all socie ties and daring to touch the human being
buried beneath” (Erdman, 2010).Real History Versus Reel History
Laurens van der Post supposedly based his POW fiction on his real- life experi-
ences during World War II, so certainly many aspects of prison camp life as depicted
in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence have a respectable degree of authenticity. Mal-
nutrition, pervasive sickness, back- breaking work, the brutality of the Japa nese
toward their prisoners of war— all these things are well documented elsewhere.
Other than Col. Lawrence, who is clearly based on the author himself, there is no
way of knowing whether the principal characters correspond to actual persons who
van der Post knew during his captivity. Given van der Post’s well- documented pen-
chant for creative storytelling to serve didactic purposes (or his own agenda), it
seems likely that much of the film’s narrative, which closely follows his fiction, is
fanciful. Certainly viewers will recognize parallels to David Lean’s The Bridge on the
River Kwai, especially the vexed character and personality of prison camp comman-
dant Yonoi, who bears considerable resemblance to Kwai’s Col. Saito, played by Ses-
sue Hayakawa.Midnight Clear, A (1992)
Synopsis
Based on the eponymous novel by William Wharton, A Midnight Clear is an Amer-
ican war drama set toward the end of World War II in Eu rope. Adapted and directed
by Keith Gordon, the movie stars an ensemble cast: Ethan Hawke, Gary Sinise,