The Hill
Short description
Set during the Second World War, The Hill takes place in a British military prison camp in the North African desert. The stockade is run with deliberate cruelty, and its centrepiece is a heap of sand the prisoners are forced to climb and descend under the blazing sun, again and again, as punishment rather than training. A group of newly arrived convicts, among them a sergeant-major reduced in rank for striking an officer, falls under the control of a sadistic sergeant and a hardened regime. Tensions build both between the men and their guards and among the prisoners themselves, whose backgrounds and offences differ sharply.
Sidney Lumet directed the film, the fourth of twenty-six features he made and the one that followed The Pawnbroker, with Ray Rigby writing the screenplay and Kenneth Hyman producing. Sean Connery stars as Joe Roberts, appearing alongside Harry Andrews, Ian Bannen, Alfred Lynch, Ossie Davis and Roy Kinnear. Made by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer with Seven Arts Productions, it runs 123 minutes.
On IMDb the film holds 7.8 out of 10 from around 16,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.5 out of 10 from 263 votes. A critics' rating of 8.1 out of 10 from eight reviews places it slightly above those audience scores. Its modest budget of 3 million dollars and the durable attention it still receives suggest a film whose reputation has outlasted its original release.
What's left behind the scenes
- The temperature rarely dropped below 46 degrees Celsius, and despite 2,000 gallons of clean water brought in for the film crew and cast, almost everyone contracted dysentery during filming.
- Sidney Lumet's film (1924-2011) was not a commercial success, but Sean Connery considered his work in it to be pivotal, because it was during filming with Lumet that he established himself as a dramatic actor, and proved he was capable of much more than appearing in Bond films.
- Director Sidney Lumet used wide-angle lenses with focal lengths of 24, 21, and 18mm. He specifically sought distortion on the faces, which was visible even in close-ups.
- Filming began on September 14, 1964, in Spain, which prevented Sean Connery from attending the premiere of Guy Hamilton's (1922-2016) 'Goldfinger' (1964), the filming of which had recently been completed and in which Connery starred.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
