Look here, future American presidents: Even Italian war exploitation movies are telling you that war is bad.
Antonio Margheriti and Dardano Sacchetti probably saw Apocalypse Now a few times before making The Last Hunter. The basic rhythm of both films has quite a few similarities and both films are not telling us that war (in this case the Vietnam war) is hell, but that war is madness.
Of course, the Italian film does this in a much cheaper way (I am sure I must have heard parts of the music one or two times before) as well as with much more dubious motives.
Captain Henry Morris (David Warbeck, displaying just the right amount of cynicism) is ordered to destroy a highly effective Northern Vietnamese propaganda radio station. On his way there he meets a lot of mad or half-mad people, hooks up with the war journalist Jane Foster (Tisa Farrow, looking terribly under the weather), enters an American outpost commanded by John Steiner, who amuses himself with playing recorded gunshots and explosions as his beloved music, shoots a lot of people, is tortured etc etc. Also, there are lots of explosions (many of which you can meet again in later Margheriti films. I can't blame the man - they are nice explosions.).
What makes the film surprisingly effective as a variation on its rather surrealist predecessor is Margheriti's assured direction. As I might have said about him before, the man knew how to use a meager budget to produce a rather expensive looking film.
I'm always fascinated by the way Margheriti can get away with the depiction of as much nastiness and depravity in his films as other Italian directors without looking like a cynical madman. The trick lies in the humanity of his gaze, I think. The camera may linger on many things a lot longer than one should be comfortable with, yet Margheriti often uses this to give the victims of violence at least a basic human dignity. In this sense, his films feel like a humanist counterpart to the nihilism of Ruggero Deodato or Umberto Lenzi.
His merry gang of constant collaborators helps a lot with humanizing the film, too. The script doesn't care for the kind of psychological depth that pleases the jury at Cannes, but still gives the actors enough to work with to create a certain amount of human depth. People like Warbeck, Farrow, Steiner and Pigozzi (aka Alan Collins) are able enough actors to make the best of what they get when in the hands of a director who cares at least somewhat about their performances.
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