The Purple Plain (1954)

Directed by Robert Parrish; produced by John Bryan

Squadron Leader Bill Forrester (Gregory Peck), an RAF pilot serving against the Japanese in Burma, seems to have a death wish. Taking risks, even with the lives of others, he is apathetic about his actions when questioned about them. After the station medical officer (Bernard Lee) takes him to a local village, Forrester meets Anna (Win Min Than), a young woman who gives him something to live for - which will be needed in the deadly days ahead of him.

Few films with Gregory Peck as their lead will be bad. A true Hollywood star, he’s an actor whose mere presence can improve a motion picture. Despite Peck’s screen power, though, The Purple Plain does not really succeed as a film.

The acting is not at fault. Peck delivers a solid performance, refusing to make his character entirely likeable at first. Forrester’s unconcern with his own fate endangers others, and his natural charm excuses his actions only so far. The actor creates a character that is three dimensional. The other players do well; Than’s talent is not strong but capable.

The direction is also quite good. Parrish, a former child-actor (he had a part in City Lights), was behind the camera on a number of smaller films of quality, and worked in the editing department on still more. The latter half of this film, when three men are lost in the arid forests, is involving.

The trouble with The Purple Plain is the story. Despite coming from a novel by H. E. Bates, the plot doesn’t seem really all one. Perhaps it is a matter of the different parts of the story not needing each other. The romance between Forrester and Anna may be seen as redemptive for the former, and may give impetus to his drive to survive when he crash-lands in the wilderness, but the feeling given by the performances and script is that Forrester fights to live because that is his real personality, rather than because he now has someone to whom to return. Though the relationship between the pilot and the woman is central to the story, it does not seem necessary to it. It’s as if the author had begun one tale and finished another, though they use the same characters.

The screenplay is good, as might be expected from Eric Ambler, though how much of Bates’s novel was kept, I can’t say, and, considering the writer, is not among his best. The characters of Forrester and Blore (Maurice Denham) are well delineated; there is an effective juxtaposition between the latter, whose repeated declarations of having something to live for don’t keep him from despair, and the former, who apparently wants to die. Their adversarial relationship is more interesting than is Forrester’s romance with Anna, and I don’t think that was the writers’ intentions.

While much of The Purple Plain is commendable, its parts are more enjoyable than the whole, some of which - those sections the makers no doubt considered the heart of the film - could very well have been left out.