Three Films Make A Post: War. It's A Dying Business.

Nightshot (2018): This French POV horror piece directed by Hugo König concerns the misadventures of an urban exploration streamer played by Nathalie Couturier, and her camera dude when they do a nightly visit to a creepy old sanatorium and asylum with a history of dubious experiments on its patients. The film does try to stand out from the dozens of other POV sanatorium indies by taking on a one take gimmick. Which also shows an admirable willingness from the filmmakers to put extra work, given that the choreography needed to pull something like that off is considerable.

Unfortunately, the one take/one shot business doesn’t really achieve much for the film; on paper, it’s “more realistic” for what is supposed to be a live stream but in practice, there’s little here that makes much of a difference between this and other POV sanatorium movies, so things never get terribly exciting. To be fair, there are couple of pretty clever shocks, and the practical (and live) effects are certainly fun to behold.

Sleepwalk (1986): This is the tale of a woman whose life is slowly being made weirder thanks to an ancient Chinese manuscript she is translating for a dubious Chinese doctor (whose henchmen is a young Tony Todd). In tone and style, Sara Driver’s movie is a very typical piece of mid-80s New York independent filmmaking, so expect a sense of the surreal, good taste in music, and a lot of beautiful shots of dirty city streets, as well as a floating and meandering plot carried by actors – in this case it’s mostly Suzanne Fletcher doing the work – who love making strange, deadpan acting decisions.

Too Late the Hero (1970): A few years of a wonderfully idiosyncratic career after The Dirty Dozen, director Robert Aldrich returned to the men on a mission style of war movie. Where some viewers – not me, mind you - read the brutal finale of the earlier movie as pure action movie glorification of violence, really nobody will be able to interpret this war movie that way. Too emotionally brutal is Aldrich’s portrayal of a group of soldiers (including Michaela Caine, Cliff Robertson as the mandatory American, Ian Bannen and Denholm Elliott) to get confused about the film’s anti-war stance here. Apart from being honest and bitter about the way war compromises all human ethics, this is very much a meditation on fear, the concept of Cowardice, and the sometimes necessary irrationality of heroism committed by cowardly men.

It’s not a film that judges cowardice and fear like certain old-school war movies would have, but seems more interested in understanding what these words actually mean, and how different the breaking points of different men are.

In short: The Dirty Dozen (1967)

Two months or so before D-Day. Deeply impolitic Major Reisman (Lee Marvin) is given the mission to quickly turn a dozen men convicted to death or decades of hard labour into a small commando unit that will parachute behind enemy lines on the day of the Allied invasion and attack a castle full of high-ranking Wehrmacht officers on R&R. All in exchange for the possibility of a commuted sentence. Reisman’s men (among them characters played by Charles Bronson, Jim Brown, John Cassavetes, Telly Savalas, Donald Sutherland and Clint Walker) range from the unlucky over the socially maladjusted, to guys who shouldn’t be in any army even at wartime, and the downright homicidally maniacal, so he has his work cut out for him turning them into some kind of team.

Because that and the suicide mission just aren’t enough to fill two and a half hours of movie, Reisman also has to cope with the obstructionism of the excellently named Colonel Everett Dasher Breed (Robert Ryan).

Given how many Italian, Japanese, and other movies I’ve seen that operate on this film’s basic plot - though they are usually an hour shorter and more focussed on the climactic mission - it’s a bit of a surprise I have only now come around to watching Robert Aldrich’s original “men of dubious moral fibre on a suicide mission” film. Well, it does make a degree of sense to keep something good for last.

And say what you want about The Dirty Dozen, it’s impossible not to at least call it a good film. I’d even go with excellent, but then I have a weakness for quite this well-developed machismo.
The cast is of course brilliant, and they turn what could be a bunch of boring clichés into a lively crew of misfits whose interactions are generally a joy to watch, even in the handful of moments when the film goes off for a bit of unfunny humour (of a sort that is certainly not improved by the score just barely avoiding slide whistles after each joke). These are the only moments in the film that do feel like filler, otherwise this two and a half hour movie feels much shorter, and rather more personal than epic.

Among the film’s other pleasures are a deep disregard for authority and generals not played by Ernest Borgnine, a cynical view on war as well the self-consciousness to know that the mission the audience wants their heroes to fulfil is indeed brutal and rather horrible. Aldrich does manage to make us root for the characters without pretending the things they heroically do are in itself heroic or all of them are particularly nice people.

Which is pretty much the holy grail of action movies and films about cool violence, a having its cake and eating it too that shouldn’t work at all but does so rather brilliantly. It’s a film that tells a war adventure story without wanting to lie too much about what a war adventure actually entails.