|
"Somewhere on the Danube," a distillation of callous free enterprise and scapegoating mobs. In the Nazi POW camp, a barrack of American sergeants plus one Kraut spy, a terrarium of suspicion and slapstick. The anti-social operator (William Holden) deals in cigarettes and makes book on the fate of fellow prisoners tunneling under barbed-wire, the fugitives' corpses are displayed in the mud during next morning's roll call. "Always hustling, always scrounging," the literal rat race of the microcosm of mugs. Barracks chief (Richard Erdman), security specialist (Peter Graves), bellicose muscle (Neville Brand), hairy vaudevillians (Robert Strauss, Harvey Lembeck). The guard (Sig Ruman) rolls with their japing, the kommandant (Otto Preminger) prefers a pose of elegant cruelty. "Sprechen Sie Deutsches? Then droppen Sie dead!" Not a safe Broadway adaptation, but a bristly Billy Wilder worldview that builds on elements from Five Graves to Cairo and A Foreign Affair. The cynic's position in the earnest group, suspicion gets him pummeled in a scene remembered by Kubrick in Full Metal Jacket, seeing the light for him means figuring out the true culprit. (An electric bulb's knotted cord and a hollow chess piece comprise the image.) Santy Claus comes in the form of a Geneva inspector, men make do with each other at the Christmas dance until one joker's improvised drag triggers another's Betty Grable kink (cf. La Grande illusion). The saboteur in the water tower, Preminger from socks to boots for a heel-clicking Berlin call, the shell-shocked silent witness with broken ocarina. "How do you expect to win the war with an army of clowns?" "We sort of hope you'd laugh yourselves to death." The road ahead leads to The Bridge on the River Kwai on one side, MASH on the other. With Don Taylor, Peter Baldwin, Michael Moore, Robinson Stone, Robert Shawley, William Pierson, Gil Stratton, and Edmund Trzcinski. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |