So this is another AFI movie that we put off watching forever, because all we knew about it was a) that it’s about a WW2 POW camp, and b) Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball, Starkweather homicide, children of thalidomide.

Obviously both of those things make it sound extremely unpleasant. The movie is from 1957, which is old-timey enough that I wasn’t sure whether it would be a rah-rah-America POW movie or a grim traumatic thing about the horrors of POW camps, but either way, ughhhh.

But so here’s the thing: It’s neither! It is, in fact, a satiric dark comedy about war, more in the mold of Dr. Strangelove or Three Kings, and it’s actually good.

The movie starts off in a Japanese POW camp in Thailand, with the arrival of a newly-captured British company. They come in all jaunty, whistling that song about Hitler’s balls, and it’s clear that their commanding officer (Alec Guinness) is Maximally British, and wants to do everything by the book. Literally, he has a bound copy of the Geneva Conventions with him, and is happy to lend it to the Japanese commanding officer if he’d like to perhaps review the text to confirm the British guy’s statements.

The movie follows two main protagonists here: Guinness, of course, and William Holden, an American POW who gets together with two British soldiers to plan an escape. I don’t want to spoil the movie for you here, but the basic tenor of it is that both of these two start off looking straightforwardly heroic — Guinness taking a bold stand on principle at great personal risk, and Holden making a daring, dangerous escape that he’s lucky to survive — and then the movie begins to undermine that, as events continue. By the end of the movie, everything has ramped up to full lunacy, and the events are over-the-top satirical, but the process of getting there was slow and gradual.

One of the traps that I still fall into, despite knowing better, is thinking that stuff from certain time periods must be simplistic and obvious, that a WW2 movie from the ’50s couldn’t possibly be cynical and darkly comedic and critical of the Americans and British. But people are people, and even in the most censored, conformist time periods, good art finds a way. So maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised; but then, it’s not like the rest of the war movies on this AFI list have been worth a damn, so maybe I can be forgiven for assuming this was more like that.

As to the question of whether this belongs on the list… I was leaning toward “no” at first, on the basis that it was a good movie, but didn’t feel essential. But the more I think about it, it’s clear that the AFI people really really really want a bunch of war movies on their list for some reason, and this is a better one than most. In fact… this might actually be my pick as the war movie to keep, if we were to cut it down to one. Get rid of MAS*H and The Deer Hunter and Platoon before this for sure. Apocalypse Now and Saving Private Ryan are both doing very different things, but aren’t obviously more worthy of being on the list than this. So I guess, somewhat to my surprise, I end up saying that yeah, this one does belong on the list after all.