God knows I love this movie and pine for the day it comes out on DVD. If you like it, try the book. The movie is very faithful to it, but the book gives some more insight into the characters that helps explain how they are. Like McGrath's reasons for being in prison, or Bartlett's background, or the competetion between the RSM and Williams. Very good, and just makes the movie that much better.
shareThe novel is by Ray Rigby who if I'm not mistaken wrote the script for the very first episode of the Avengers. In the book Williams decides to leave off Stevens, but too late of course.
Rigby later wrote a novel called Jacksons War, but I can't admit to ever having read it.
Incidentally I'm assuming The Hill is based on personal experience, but can anyone verify whether the punishment of the hill actually existed?
Supernatural perhaps, baloney perhaps not
Garp 26: "I'm assuming The Hill is based on personal experience, but can anyone verify whether the punishment of the hill actually existed? "
A soldiers website reckons the original camp, containing 'hill', was in Heliopolis, Cairo.
The film rings true on so many levels, it had to come from personal experience.
Read that Rigby based it on his own experience in WW2 glasshouses.Wrote sequel,Hill of Sand,in the early 80s-should definitely be filmed.
shareExcept the ending is much different. I think Lumet was trying for shock.
shareIs this movie based upon a play or on a novel? It is not clear from what has been written here.
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It was definately a novel. Whether anyone ever made it into a play is unknown to me.
The Hill was originally a play written by Ray Rigby & co-written by R.S. Allen. Rigby actually was in a detention camp twice during WWII serving as a private in the British Army. Both the play & screenplay were written in 1965. Though the play was fiction Rigby drew on his real life experiences in “The Glasshouse”…British Military slag for a Military Detention Centre. The first British Military prisons were established in 1844. The term Glasshouse originated at the military prison at Aldershot, which had a glazed roof. Over time, the nickname came to be applied to all British Army prisons. Today, the British Army has only one remaining prison, the Military Corrective Training Centre at Colchester. It has a special unit for convicts who are being transferred to HM Prison Service (civilian prisons to anyone outside the UK reading this) to serve their sentences.
“Get your hair cut you horrible little specimen”
There's something in the credits about it being adapted from a play. You can see that it is a bit 'stagey' in certain places and most of the action could probably take place in the one cell if carefully done. That's why there's reported speech like 'have you seen our hill?' 'Yes I noticed it on the way in' etc.
It's also very similar to a novel called 'The Glasshouse' set in a British military prison in Austria just after WW2, but I can't remember the author's name.
Always nice to hear when a movie is very true to its source material (if the source material is good to begin with of course). I'm not much of a reader (I know how dumb that sounds - I mean that I prefer to watch movies in my spare time) and once I really pick it up there are probably a couple of 100 I'll want to read before this one, but who knows, one day ;-)
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