The Purple Plain (1954) might be Gregory Peck's least-known great film. Finally available on DVD courtesy of MGM Home Entertainment, this forgotten gem remains haunting and lyrical thanks to a sensitive, well-modulated story (really a character study) and deeply affecting visuals.

It's the tale of a Canadian fighter pilot named Bill Forrester (Gregory Peck) assigned to an RAF company in Burma near the end of WWII. Forrester is mentally unstable. His wife died in the London blitz, and devastated by the loss, he has lost his will to live. He suffers nightmares flashing back to the blitz and seems to have gone "round the bend," as other characters like to put it. He cares not a whit about being sent on dangerous missions and in fact behaves recklessly, taking chances in the air in vain attempts to be killed. "I wanted to die, but I got medals instead," he says. Eventually, a beautiful young Burmese woman, Anna (Win Min Than), seems able to understand his tortured psyche, and in a tender yet restrained love scene Forrester finds himself able at last to open up to someone. Then he is sent on a mission with two men and is forced to crash-land in the middle of the Japanese-occupied wilderness. With one man wounded and the other acting argumentative, Forrester's struggle is now to escape the jungle alive and get back to Anna.

The Purple Plain, then, is a story of survival in a very large sense of the term, for underlying Forrester's attempt to survive his predicament is his newly-found desire to survive, period. This is an inherently moving aspect of Eric Ambler's script (based on a novel by former RAF pilot H.E. Bates), but Robert Parrish's direction makes it even more powerful. He shows visually how Forrester's disturbed emotional state is gradually healed by both Anna and the sense of Buddhist spirituality all around him. The landscape, the Buddhist culture, and the love of a woman all act as catalysts for Peck's wounded soul to come out of its hard shell. Peck plays it beautifully. It's hard to think of another actor who could have pulled off such an inner performance. Peck has many shots in which he simply stares into space, thinking, feeling or reacting, yet we are always aware of what those thoughts and feelings must be. It helps, of course, that Peck automatically brings to the screen a star persona of nobility and sensitivity, but this is still an incredibly difficult kind of performance to make so seamless and believable.

Gregory Peck made The Purple Plain while he was abroad shooting a handful of movies in the early 1950s. He was working out of the country because Congress had recently passed a law allowing Americans who worked overseas for 17 out of 18 months to be exempt from income tax over the period. The law was designed to encourage oil workers to work in remote locations, but Hollywood quickly took advantage of it. Many top stars went to Europe to shoot movies. Peck made Roman Holiday (1953), The Million Pound Note (1953) and The Purple Plain, among others.

When Parrish sent him the script, Peck liked it immediately and said he would do it on two conditions: that the film be shot in Southeast Asia and that the Burmese girl be played by an actual Burmese actress. Parrish found a good location in Burma, but the political instability there made insurers unwilling to cover Gregory Peck. Eventually Parrish discovered a Burmese colony in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) which did the trick. David Lean would later shoot The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) in the same location.

To find the Burmese actress, Parrish and his producer went to Rangoon and tested dozens of hopefuls before finding the radiantly beautiful Win Min Than, whose name in English means "Bright a Million Times." They flew her to London for further screen tests, during which Parrish noticed that she had a habit of shaking her head from side to side when speaking. As she was unable to keep her head still, for close-ups Parrish resorted to strapping a special brace to the back of her neck. It was outfitted with two sharp nails that would touch her head behind her ears unless she held still. It worked, and ironically one reviewer even commented on Than's "talent of stillness."

Parrish later recounted in his memoir how he came up with the film's dramatic opening sequence in which Peck suffers from a nightmare. Parrish and Peck were sharing a tent on location, and one night, very late, Parrish awoke to the sound of Peck screaming. Peck went running out of the tent (which collapsed in his wake) and toward the snake-laden jungle. Parrish gave chase and tackled him. "Some kind of nightmare, I guess," explained Peck sheepishly. The next morning, Parrish realized that this would make a good opening for the movie, and it certainly did. It's beautifully economical because it establishes at once Forrester's mental state, his background, and his current narrative situation - and all through images, not words. The film's final sequence is even more economical and touching, and was later echoed by Martin Scorsese in the last shot of his Bringing Out the Dead (1999).

MGM offers zero frills with this disc aside from some language and subtitle options. However, the print is gorgeous, with rich muted Technicolor and barely any scratches throughout.

Note of interest: The broad emotional elements of The Purple Plain bear a striking resemblance to John Boorman's sorely underrated (and unavailable on DVD) Beyond Rangoon (1995), in which Patricia Arquette plays a woman who has lost her family and her will to live -- until she finds herself fighting to escape the jungle in military-controlled 1980s Burma.

For more information about The Purple Plain, visit MGM Home Entertainment. To order The Purple Plain, go to TCM Shopping.

by Jeremy Arnold