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Between Aldrich's The Angry Hills and The Dirty Dozen, a suicide mission in the Balkans. Criminals into warriors ca. 1943, the British officer (Stewart Granger) surveys the quintet of sprung scoundrels before him: The cultured underworld mastermind (Raf Vallone), the IRA explosions specialist (Mickey Rooney), the pompadoured forger (Edd Byrnes), the dandified "master of disguise" (William Campbell), and the assassin for hire (Henry Silva). The goal is to rescue an Italian captain from a Nazi fortress in Dubrovnik, the men sneak into town after hours (fog and water tanks are all that's needed to evoke a midnight naval skirmish) and are received by the partisans. "We' ve come to free it. And who will free it from us? And who will free us from ourselves?" ponders Vallone, quietly chuckling at the smuggled existentialism. (Later, to a German kommandant: "Those uniforms made our decisions. We are both prisoners.") Roger Corman in Yugoslavia with a nervy guerrilla approximation of an action blockbuster, naturally the flirtation with the mainstream is structured as a tale of infiltration (cf. Welles' The Stranger). One plan foiled in the crypt tunnel, in connection to the Poe pictures ("Get used to it. That's the smell of eternity"), another one pieced together amid interrogations and tortures. At the center is Silva's taciturn slayer, an unsettling gentle touch of lethal fingertips that quite literally snuffs out a budding romance with the local young widow (Spela Rozin). Shootouts on rooftops overlooking seaside vistas, a large-scale battlefield on rocky mountains culminating with Rooney merrily chucking a grenade down a Nazi pill-box. Sacrifice of the Angel of Death, turning of the tide. Rossellini's Il Generale Della Rovere for the coda, closing on the exhausted fighter with no taste for "lost causes." With Helmo Kindermann, Enzo Fiermonte, and Peter Coe.
--- Fernando F. Croce |