Ichikawa's grim vision of war as a hellish terrain is perhaps bearable only in being exquisitely filmed poetry. Pauline Kael wrote, "If Dostoevsky had been a filmmaker telling his Grand Inquisitor story with a camera, it might have been much like this great visual demonstration that men are not brothers." Fires on the Plain portrays the demoralized Japanese forces at the close of the war who eventually turned to cannibalism in their determination to survive. Tamura (Eiji Funakoshi), one of the stragglers among the disintegrating Japanese army on Leyte in the Philippines, has been witness to a great many degradations-theft, murder-and a participant in some. But in one sense he is a man apart: already doomed by tuberculosis, he is not possessed of the same desperate will to live that seems to be turning his fellow soldiers into a new species. Tamura retains a proud, sad memory of what it was to be human; bonfires glowing in the distance are for him fires of hope until, as he approaches, his last illusions are dispelled. (JB)