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A Monte Hellman film from the very beginning, the camera tracks alongside American servicemen in the Philippines before lingering on the face of a bemused young local. "Are you suggesting that we hold her as a hostage?" "No. Just cut her tongue out." The lieutenant (Jimmie Rodgers) can't get used to killing, his opposite is the sergeant with a Hobbesian outlook (John Hackett), "a cynic." The translator (Jack Nicholson) is a hepcat at low tide, a wry quip at the ready as the trio find themselves surrounded by villagers. "Are they our friends, or are we their prisoners?" The mission at hand is to storm the Japanese-occupied hamlet, where children rounded up to be executed pass the time with a cheery song because they're bored. "War and understanding seldom mix," snaps the guerrilla leader (Conrad Maga). (He keeps Tolstoy, Nietzsche and Thomas Aquinas on his bookshelf next to a rifle.) The jungle shot by Hellman like Death's waiting room, thrifty and bottomless like a segment from Rossellini's Paisà. Skirmishes are sketched in abruptly darting long shots capped with a down-angle on the town square strewn with casualties, panning movements are reserved for a makeshift bar as perversely dismal as one of Ulmer's nightclubs. "I don't know what I'm supposed to feel." "I don't even know if I feel like feeling anything." Torturers, pirates, a certain kinship with Kubrick's Fear and Desire. The folly of heroism boils down to a radio seized from an enemy compound: "As a man, I think it's stupid. As a soldier... what can I do?" The cavalry arrives via stock footage, an intrusion of the macro into the micro rectified by the closing tableau of depleted survivors by a scrawny stream. With Annabelle Huggins, Johnny Monteiro, and Joe Sison. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |