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"A crack at immortality," a depravity of recruitment. The two-part structure builds to a slapstick apocalypse, before that it's a barracks comedy complete with stuffed-shirt higher-up fulsomely humiliated. (That he's played by sensitive dove Robert Ryan is integral to the pervasive jocular cruelties.) Vietnam by way of WWII, thus the OSS major (Lee Marvin) tasked with a suicide mission and "the most twisted and antisocial bunch of psychopathic deformities ever." Out of jail and into the Army camp, a lateral move for prisoners desperate for escape. Laconic ex-officer (Charles Bronson) and giggling zealot (Telly Savalas) play opposite extremes amid lumpen "deadheads," the wolfish misfit (John Cassavetes) and the gangling goofball (Donald Sutherland) are fellow apostles, the last supper caps the training. "The all-American hero, laughing in the face of death." Robert Aldrich's purposeful degradation of Attack for the current era, a mighty piss on the very notion of military valor. The war effort is a criminal enterprise, hoodlums get the job done, even the general (Ernest Borgnine) chuckles in appreciation of their dirty tricks. Authority and anarchism, a matter of uniforms. "Kill every officer in sight." "Ours or theirs?" The raid on the fortified Nazi chalet supplies the reliable thrill of slobs crashing a fancy party, all fun until the maniac plunges his bayonet into a terrified fräulein's torso. The sports metaphor introduced as an abstraction during the baseball word-association test is made explosively flesh with Jim Brown's football-grenade run, with its evocation of the Holocaust and napalm bombing. (The Longest Yard is Aldrich's thematic culmination.) "Ready for the turkey shoot?" Peckinpah soon enough takes up the exaltation of plug-ugly character actors, and there's Eastwood's analytical take in Heartbreak Ridge. With Richard Jaeckel, George Kennedy, Ralph Meeker, Robert Webber, Trini Lopez, Clint Walker, Tom Busby, and Ben Carruthers.
--- Fernando F. Croce |