Duffy shrutted about wearing a permanent cheeky grin, a big muscular guy given to putting shit on everyone. He was the classic school bully who had not yet noticed that he had left the playground and, given the behaviour of some officers, maybe that wasn’t so surprising.
    “...twenty...”
    “Too slow, Duffy. Five more for good measure!”
    “...Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three...”
    You could tell who amongst us was less disciplined by the development of their biceps, and the hardness of their stomach muscles. Mine had never been so impressive before or since.
    “...twenty-five...”
    “Duffy, don’t you know you aren’t allowed to lie down. Twenty press-ups, count ‘em loud!”

Now James Clavell is a case of a writer being considerably more interesting than his books, although the books aren’t entirely without merit. Raised in Australia, formally educated in England, captured by the Japanese in Java and in 1952, he went to the United States with a film script under his arm and got someone to produce it. It was called Far Alert—no  one I know has seen it, not even Halliwell. Then, in 1958, he wrote that unforgettable and amazingly bad cult film The Fly and the okay ripping yarn Watusi. Next he wrote, directed, produced Five Gates to Hell, another fascinatingly rotten film of how the Vietcong (in 1959) kidnap seven nurses who shoot their way out of trouble, and Walk Like a Dragon, a strange Chinatown Western. To his credit, he wrote the adaptations of The Great Escape and To Sir with Love, amongst others.
    Following these weirdly ambivalent achievements, he wrote a novel of prison camp life (which he knew well) called King Rat which was very good. A Yankee conman becomes the richest man in the camp and lords it over his British compatriots until liberation turns the tables on him. As a exercise in just exactly how much smarter, and less ethical Yanks are than Poms, it is unsurpassed. Brian Forbes made it into a pretty good film, although only because he kept Clavell away from all parts of the production. Corporal George Seagal runs rings around an outstanding bunch of British actors, including James Fox, John Mills, Denholm Elliot, Tom Courtney and John Standing, in every way except, of course, acting.
    It is to be noted that the four outstanding POW movies, this one, Bridge on the River Kwai, Von Ryan’s Express and The Great Escape, all felt the need to put Americans in unnecessary dominant roles. Which, of course, in the true situations, they were anything but. This obsession was truly beginning to show signs of insecurity, which of course is exactly what it is. It happened because producers truly  believed that Americans would not watch a British film unless it had an American hero. After all, who saved who in WWII?
    Clavell limped off to give substance to his Asian fixation by becoming a resident of Hong Kong and writing a series of thick potboilers using Hong Kong and Japanese history as a basis. Thunderingly powerful and dreadfully boring, I gave up halfway through Tai Pan, and the TV mini-series made from the others suggest they were no better. Curious fellow...