Attack

Robert Aldrich likes a jagged image, his preamble sketches a pillbox raid with staccato bursts of grass and fire, then a dissolve from a fallen helmet to a loudspeaker blasting big-band music. "Don't go dramatic on me, dogface!" Europe ca. 1944, under the Battle of the Bulge's shadow awaits an American battalion, "a bit shaky." Introduced as a pair of gloved hands squirming while soldiers are wiped out, the craven captain (Eddie Albert) is a judge's son guarded by the colonel (Lee Marvin) with eyes on the political prize. (His counterpart is Peter van Eyck's platinum-haired Nazi officer, "the same in every army.") Brass incompetence leaves fields of dead grunts, all the platoon leader (Jack Palance) needs is one more foul-up from above for his cathartic rupture: "By all that's holy, I'll come back and take this grenade and shove it down your throat and pull the pin!" The war within the war, a raging position set in a bombed-out French village but analyzed from the vantage point between Korea and Vietnam. Sometimes the weight of a demented world feels like a Panzer inching closer until it crushes you, Aldrich's existentialism is blunt and ferocious like that. Buddy Ebsen's note of paternal exhaustion, the sardonic truculence of Robert Strauss setting up Les Carabiniers, all shades of anguish for men trapped in gutted sets encircled by darkness. (Albert's "gutless wonder" contributes his own crack-up aria: "You can't live, you can't die... I didn't ask for this!") Mangled and delirious, Palance staggers into the climactic confrontation and exits on a grubby stretcher, his granite grimace frozen for the Guernica effect. In a corroded system, mutiny becomes an act of sanity while a moral decision amounts to insubordination. The Dirty Dozen is a purposefully degraded adjustment disguised as a lip-smacking blockbuster. With William Smithers, Richard Jaeckel, Jon Shepodd, Jimmy Goodwin, and Strother Martin. In black and white.