Sam battles Julius to a draw

Rating: 8/10 (18 October 2007)

This is a flawed film. There are a few occasions when the sweeping grandeur gives way to a mere reading of lines. And the accents are all over the place, which of course is the price we all pay for having James Coburn, James Mason and David Warner as the most sympathetic Nazi soldiers since Leni Riefenstahl. But the payoff is a movie that seems to reflect an insider's knowledge of how men actually behave when at war. Sure it's also working on an overtly allegorical level - but the allegory is about class, not race much less 'freedom' or something: Coburn's weary pro soldier and Maximillian Schell's aristocratic Prussian general have Hitler surrounded with their mutual disdain, leaving you to ponder all the chaotic lives papered over by the theatre of fascist discipline. Most of the time, it's just about your dream scenario of what would happen if Sam Peckinpah were to direct a script by Julius Epstein. These are two brilliant but flawed artists slugging it out in the rectangular ring, a man of action meeting a man of intellect, and while the attenuated sentimentality they share does peek through in their respective ways, on balance it's just thrilling. The medical leave sequence is as brilliantly conceived and edited as the explosion that puts us there, and the double-amputee soldier who offers the general a foot to shake is worthy of Lewis Milestone. The battle scenes, it should go without saying, take you there.