King Rat is a 1965 American war film written and directed by Bryan Forbes and starring George Segal and James Fox.

One of only a handful of Americans amongst the British and Australian inmates, he thrives through his conniving and black market enterprises, while others, nearly all of higher rank, struggle to survive sickness and starvation while trying to retain their civilized standards.

Then Grey has to deal with an unrelated dilemma when he accidentally discovers that the high-ranking officer in charge of the meagre food rations has been stealing.

King manages to squelch a premature attempt by resentful underling First Sergeant Max to reassert his rank and authority, but that only delays the inevitable.

Weaver, a lone British paratrooper appears from seemingly nowhere, walks up to the prison gates and fires a revolver in the air; the guards surrender.

Grey remarks that it was "our lot (the British working class) that threw Churchill out," and declares, "We'll be running things from now on," indicating that the end of the war marks the beginning of a new political order.

Forbes called Clavell's novel "stunning" but said Faced with the task of condensing its 400 pages into screenplay form, I stripped away those portions of the novel I did not wholeheartedly admire (mostly the introduction of native girls which, though possibly authentic, belonged to the realm of Dorothy Lamour) and posed one single question: how did men survive under such conditions?

He and Woolf arranged it that "in return for employing every resident British actor in Hollywood on the SAG list, we were allowed to import a quota from England."

"[2] Forbes said Columbia's suggestions for the title role included Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum, James Garner, and Burt Lancaster, but he felt these would "have made nonsense for Clavell's novel" and he insisted on George Segal.

I was being paid to create something I passionately believed in with the absolute minimum of interference and the maximum loyalty and co-operation of studio, cast and crew alike.

It was a hard, physical film to make, not without its moments of despair and indeed desperation, but at the end of the sixty-two shooting days I was so affected I could scarcely talk for fear of breaking down.

Now it has become a cult film on the university campuses, but in 1965 when it was first shown Vietnam was still a clean war, and the American mass audiences were unlikely to take kindly to such a cynical view of human behaviour.