the role of Oddball a "magnificent anachronism"

Rating: Null/10 (11 December 2000)

...to steal a line from the movie Patton. (It's something a German intelligence officer says about Patton, in case you're wondering.)
Whenever I think about this movie, Oddball the tank-platoon commander is one of the first two things that come to mind (along with probably the world's last operable Tiger I tank doing its thing).
Finding a traveling band of nonconformist weirdos that also happens to be a tank platoon stretches credibility beyond its breaking point -- to a useful end. As everyone else here has noted, Oddball's very presence in a WW II story is bizarrely out of its own time. But that's probably for a purpose: The anachronism provides the appropriate note of unreality to the whole of the film, preventing it from being merely a black comedy about war and lending it a timelessness and universality. We're looking not merely at a story about WW II; we're seeing a parable about Vietnam (the era in which this movie was made) and about war, greed, and stupidity in general.

Including an anachronistic character may well have been studio-exec sop to contemporary marketing tastes, and an idea that's too stupid and crazy to work on paper, but it works beautifully on film.
But why? The key is Donald Sutherland, one of the busiest yet most underrated actors of our time. He took an impossible and pivotal role and made it work -- and work well. Every moment he's on the screen, he seems to relish the very strangeness of ur-hippiedom. I've seen this movie easily a dozen times since it was in the theater in my childhood, and each time I've watched with mingled glee and amazement as Sutherland does his thing so effortlessly.